define or resist: your sign’s undone
on symbolic debris, pop music, and Jenny Hval
This essay was partly sparked by the lead-up to Jenny Hval’s new album, Iris Silver Mist, released yesterday. Weeks after discovering her music courtesy of my friend, Brett, in my early twenties, I came across an interview in which she described herself as a pop artist.
I can’t find that particular interview, but in a 2016 interview with NYLON following her album Blood Bitch, she stated:
“If you see pop music as a product, as finished songs, my music is something very different. But if you see it as an artistic discipline, an exploratory process of sound-making—that’s how I like to think about it.”
She delves into her perspective on pop music and its influence on her work throughout this interview here as well:
Hearing her say it permanently altered my perception of music, pop music, and the artist in a deeply and personally meaningful way.
I have a Prince tattoo on my left calf and a Kendrick Lamar tattoo on my right. I like to think I walk with the power of pop music. This essay explores, among other things far beyond myself, what I might mean by that.
In my last post, an announcement about the total restructure of my business and work at large, I cited one of the reasons for the sweeping changes being that it creates more space for me to reconnect with my original dream which was to make music.
Jenny Hval, perhaps more than any other artist I admire, gave me a glittering permission slip that day. I think it’s finally time I cash in on it.
When someone begins to gain a sense of who they are and what they truly want to do, often their recoginition of it arrives first as sign. A title: artist, musician, healer, writer, etc.
Some immediately grab hold of the sign, seeking to embody it as fast and as fully as they possible can. Treating it as a goal, a role to be claimed or performed, and ultimately externally validated. Others hesitate, resisting what feels like a kind of trap, a cramp-stamp, or a premature conclusion because they fear being boxed in, labeled, or (gasp) misunderstood.
Both reactions operate outside the bounds of reality–
and stem from a misguided relationship to signs shaped by a hyper-fixation on the physical plane, a semiotic worldview where a sign is either a tool of performance or a symbol of constraint. In the physical, the sign is external, objectified, and socially regulated.
Baudrillard’s era of simulacra has long been upon us but it belongs here now: signs no longer point to anything real. They endlessly reference each other in an empty loop. The sign becomes a kind of mask, a floating, talking head severed from its original impulse. Baudrillard, unrecognized for the prophet he was, stated that modern individuals are alienated from the origin of signs and thus from truth itself.
In the spiritual world, a sign is personal (not social), alive (not fixed) and recursive (it continues to change you as you move toward and through it). In other words, does not exist as sign nor signifier but merely is what it signifies. Meaning is therefore, inherent, not constructed. A rose, for example, is not a symbol of love but love made visible through the language of form.
Higher knowledge, as described by Steiner across various texts most namely in Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, is something that emerges not through external symbols but through living inner experience. A ‘true sign’, then, does not seek to define you. It seeks to undo you. To initiate you into a deeper form of coherence, a relationship, into a living work with and within your own essence.
Let’s take a somewhat loaded example: pop star.
Culturally, ‘pop star’ comes with a slew of connotations: glamour, artifice, vanity, excess, commercial appeal. Spiritually, it’s often dismissed as frivolous, even antithetical to depth. But let it be known:
The sign pop star, like all signs, exists simultaneously on the physical and spiritual plane. In the physical plane, it's a socially constructed identity attached to fame, vogue conceptions of beauty, mass consumption, and hyper-performance.
But in the spiritual plane, the sign has no obligation to resemble its cultural counterpart. The spiritual counterpart, of ‘pop star’ is unknowable unless you’ve cultivated the faculties to perceive spiritual reality directly.
If not, the true origin or life of that sign in the spiritual world is inaccessible, yet still active. By law, someone who is genuinely called to that path, someone who takes on the sign pop star, may in fact be aligning with a force whose spiritual function is profound, or rare, even highly sacred even though they themselves might not realize it.
The cultural sign is a kind of shadow. The spiritual sign, by contrast, is alive, could carry a function like, say, mass energetic calibration through glamour or public ecstasy.
The bottom line: the sign pop star, like artist, mother, janitor, comedian, has a counterpart in the spiritual world. All signs, therefore all roles are inherently spiritual. Not because we have the ability to intellectualize them into symbols of meaning, but because they originate in the spiritual world.
To recognize this is to begin to break the hierarchy of value between roles. It’s not that some signs are inherently “high” and others are “low”, it’s simply that most people never learn to perceive what any of them really are.
To say “I am an artist” in light of reality is not to claim a role, nor strive towards it, in truth it is to surrender to a force. The sign is not a fixed identity. It is a dynamic threshold that reshapes you if you allow it.
When we mistake the sign for the thing itself, we enter into great tension with it. This tension can span lifetimes, and can be torturous if not reconciled. We either reach for it in hunger (to prove, to belong), or keep it at arm’s length (to avoid being trapped). Both are attempts to control the sign, rather than enter it. Both are not based in reality.
In reality, a sign is not meant to be explained or possessed. It is meant to be followed, known, regarded, living. It reorganizes your life not through meaning, but through motion. Steiner differentiates dead thinking (intellectual, fixed) from “living thinking”, which is participatory, transformative. Thought becomes participation. Signs don’t describe you, they transform you. You become what you know.
Or, you have the option to.
However, most modern consciousness treats reality as object instead of relation. The living nature of the sign requires moral intuition: direct inner experience of truth that guides action, arising from an individual's highest capacity for spiritual perception and creativity, not external rules, but freely generating right action from one’s own inner connection to truth, and inner activity.
I explore “living thinking” in depth in a five-week program I hosted last summer, a cozy, low-pressure class on etheric strength training for creatives called etherkraft. The lecture replays (not the studio portions) were recorded. If you'd like free access to those recordings, just reach out.
The real task, then, is not to find the right sign or reject the wrong one.
The task is to let the sign do its living work.
This is the foundation of my applied methodology, appropiately named Living Work.
It’s not personal work, creative development, or spiritual direction in the traditional sense, though it combines all three. It’s a structure for working with the real in real time, especially the signs, names, and roles that surface when you’re ready to move beyond conceptual understanding.
In Living Work, we don’t treat the sign as merely an identity to claim or reject. We treat it as an active force that requires absolutely individualized attention and precise response.
I appear to those who recognize that what’s calling them isn’t a career path or an aesthetic, but a configuration of their life that is finally founded on truth.
As of now, there is no waitlist, but availability is limited and I’m nearing full client capacity. You can apply here.