A Narrative In Several Parts (pt. II)

Clown - Doug Nox

When you hear sweet syncopation

And the music softly moans

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

When it gets too hot for comfort

And you can't get ice cream cones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around your bones

- T'Ain't No Sin

She said, don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop.  She said, oh god oh god.  She said, oh yes oh yes oh yes.  She said, don’t stop, oh god, oh yes.  She sings this devil’s chorus and oh no, oh god, I won’t stop.  All lovers perform the black mass; it is a secret ritual the body remembers with something down deep in the meat of us that is unlocked with prolonged eye contact.  Useless words cast off, lips mashed together we breathe each other’s breath, we taste each other’s water, we excite each other to greater frenzies.  Old Frimost knew the secret, that the furies were always just there beneath the skin hidden in the meat waiting just waiting to tear apart your Apollonian mores.  Christ was hardly the first mask worn to lead the Horribles in their triumph.  That thorny crown painting his face with the red mask of Mezzetino while he dragged his gallows through town.  Damn right he fucked that hooker, I mean just look at the signs.  Dude led the Night Circus through Jerusalem wearing the red mask.  She said, fuck .. god .. fuck.

Way back, before Mr. Lucky ran the night roads through the eastern Provinces he made acrobats and prostitutes at the back country crossroads of the old country.  Harlequin and Columbine, Mezzetino and Pantaloon.  In the beginning the circus and the brothel were intertwined inextricably with the fortune-tellers and story-tellers of Europe.  Columbine wore no mask (or top most usually) and engaged directly with the audience, be it on the cobblestone streets or in the marble halls of Kings and it was the audience who excited the performers into blasphemy.  Unlike contemporary media the audience was an innate part of every story, every performance of the commedie dell’arte and it was the job of Harlequin to drawn them into in the narrative and Columbine to hold them there.  It is not possible to casually incorporate the old mummer and mystery plays of the commedie dell’arte into contemporary western ceremonialism because they were largely unscripted and that says a lot about how far we have gotten from our roots.  All the sex and wonder gone right out of the thing.  Well, your thing anyway. 

Yet the connection is overt.  Janus Bifrons, the very ancient two-faced god of liminal spaces was widely used as an emblem for the early troupes and alongside Frimost (Dionysius Brimos) lord of the pimps is one of the few Greco-Roman deities to earn the dubious honour of being enshrined within the demonic catalogues of the rogue exorcists and pious inquisitors  of the Catholic Empire.  And if Mr. Lucky could ever be said to belong to anything it would be the liminal space so it should come as no surprise that old Janus and Brimos were ultimately counted among his cadre.  I don’t know as much as some about the old Greco-Roman stuff mind you but I figure there is a learning curve before me if the city beneath the city is all pillars and courtyards.  I am not yet done though with the limitless shanties, there are symbols here I have yet to grasp and I will stay with this first part of the dream until I have unmade them into something that works.  Fuck god I won’t stop oh yes oh yes.  You don’t listen to the stories they tell you, the gods are an untrustworthy lot and they’ll have you frothing at the mouth at Yonge and Dundas if you let them.  Yet, there is sometimes small treasures to be had rooting through their things when their backs are turned.  The current rash of demonolaters and Satanists don’t seem to have grasped that it is not the details of the story but the syntax and grammar used to tell it.

For days now the incense has burned for Harlequin and the Burlesque, several empty bottles tossed aside emptied of their spirits.  I can feel them gathering loosely behind me, the Dead of Winter, my striking party.  All Whiskey-Jacks and Tommy-Knockers, come to see this crusty phooka beat his big stick against the walls of the clapboard shanties and demand more cheap whiskey for the dead.  A Clown before a crowd of Horribles and behind his silent mask.  When I have them good and red-faced I shall lead them up the mountain and then you’ll be right for it. 

Oh yes oh yes oh yes, she said, oh god don’t stop. 

And oh no oh god I won't stop.

A Narrative In Several Parts

Harlequin - Doug Nox

There's blood upon the bridal wreath

The bridal wreath, the bridal wreath

The Devil shows his shiny teeth

His shiny teeth, his shiny teeth, all shiny teeth

Now take a seat there by the door

He'll leave you on the killing floor

He's gonna set the clouds on fire

They're burning there forever more

- Chase the Clouds, verse 1

That first black breath we take all full up with lust and drugs is the beginning of the end.  This is the secret truth of the deal at the cross roads.  Death is the beginning and not the end.  True autonomy is hidden here, is the occulted relevance of the cross roads deal.  The only choice you will ever really get to make is what you will suffer for, is how you will submit, is to whom you shall bargain your soul.  Surrender is the only victory to be had for a sorcerer, a real one anyway.

Counter-intuitive I guess.  We are collectively drawn to magic because of a sense of the greater universe, the realization of our fleeting smallness in the timelessness of existence.  We seek control over our destinies when in fact there is no destiny.  It is a profound vanity to believe the universe has a plan for you because it does not.  You are the manifestation of a natural biological imperative, you are an accidental masterpiece of evolution and when creation is done with you it will portion you out at the molecular level in service of something greater and more profound.  There is no pure state of being; enlightenment was the Buddha’s mischievous talk.  The black ink of my tattoos, the poisons in my blood, none of it worse for me than breathing in the living death of my existence.

I have been set to a pilgrimage and I am unsure of where it is taking me.  In my dreams I have come back to the Nails of my youth but Qemetiel is no longer a purity of burning fields.  Now I see a ramshackle of shanties hobbled together along the banks of anti-freeze rivers, darkly haunted by inhabitants without a connection to their Other.  Beneath that endless expanse of poverty and suffering is a temple city much older than the Old Victorian that used to inhabit that space, still the colours of rust and sunset yellows but now Corinthian and Ionic pillars hold up its iron sky. 

I have wandered since December, from luxury condo to luxury condo in the ever-increasing number of sky-scrappers in Toronto.  A blur of swimming pools and hot tubs and impossible vista’s, staring out over the urban sprawl of Canada’s largest city from its center point downtown.  Cut free of the whole of an old incarnation, the woman I have loved the whole of my adult life clings to my hand, my fat cock, we are two people but one demon.  What new forms will have us?  We orbit the core of this city like a satellite picking up escape velocity. 

Qemetiel is an endless shanty town and the crowd of impoverished gods huddle about their oil drum fires, rubbing their hands together and telling stories of their lives before the fall.  Mostly lies I suspect.  I tuned up my 12-string guitar so that I could sing along with the howling winds buffeting the austere heights of the Neptune Tower on Queens Quay.  The Invisibles love the lyrical purity of a lonely musician.  I gave up the first part of my soul for all the world's magic, the second to sing like the devil himself, the third to fuck like a satyr.  Worth every penny.  Of the four mortal parts, I got one left to bargain with.  As for the three immortal parts, well they were never really mine to sell.  So I am making my way to that Black Buddha to strike my final bargain, across the endless shanties and anti-freeze rivers.  Through the poverty of your Gods, their oil-drum fires and tall tales, past the dark silhouettes of the Ha’wiyah who praise the Tetragrammaton while they jerk off to clockwork hookers and sacrifice their children in pursuit of self-deification. 

Just a crusty sorcerer with a bit of soul to sell and a knack for the hard bargain.  It is has been more than a decade since I last undertook the ordeal of the Pilgrimage and I am the wiser for them.  I will burn incense before the mask of Harlequin and let the God-who-is-Not fill it up.  I will spill blood and semen and cheap whiskey upon an altar for the Circus-Burlesque because that is what your religion is to me.  A cock-tease and a wondrous spectacle.  I will sing songs with the four winds until the Tower falls down in its joyous destruction.

And this time, I will write the whole damned thing down.

Chasing Pidgins

or A Brief Return to the Shores of Fitzrovia

A.O. Spare.  I am just going to come right out and say it, I think this dude is a bit over-rated.  Not in a dismissive sort of way, just that we don’t really examine his work with a critical eye.  Given the last hundred years or so of Eclectic, Discordian and Chaos magic we can say with some authority that the whole alphabet of desire thing only kind of works if it is isolated from the rest of Spare’s praxis.  In reality Spare spent a lot more time on his theory of Atavistic Resurgence, which was the product of his automatic drawing and writing.  Essentially, a sort of spiritual reduction of Darwinian Evolution in which all stages of the evolution of the human animal found some hidden expression within the unconscious.  Originally, Spare claimed he developed the alphabet of desire as a result of studying hieroglyphics in Egypt during his war service but no one mentions that anymore because it was in reality a big fucking lie, no one is perfect right.  He most likely didn’t refuse Hitler a portrait either.  It was the Second World War, peeps be crazy.

I like Spare, don’t get me wrong but there is a sort of depressing linearity to Darwinian models.  It’s never a this and that scenario, it’s always either/or.  To Spare the unconscious was moar primal moar sexual moar powerz, it was the phenomenon of animal consciousness always fully utilizing its physical form.  This was the popular conception at the time, that the ego was some sort of wizard-retarding engram that had to be permanently excised so that you could release the true potential of your inner Thetan.  This whole period in British occulture owes Nietzsche and his pet ubermensche a great deal.  Spare was highly critical of emerging psychological models that invalidated the static system of consciousness that gave rise to Nietzsche and his supermen, like those of Freud and Jung, which cast his perception of himself as the Steppenwolf as a bit of childish whimsy.

Still, there is the implication of the Consciousness Pidgin Gordon and I have been pontificating around.  He has his little pseudo-hieroglyphs which he meditated (read: jizzed) on and a regular praxis of engaging with automatic functions of consciousness through art. 

Enter King Mob.  “The “hypersigil” or “supersigil” develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama, and plot. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent.”  (Grant Morrison, Pop Magic, The Book Of Lies.)   Let it be known that I am quoting Morrison not because he is the preeminent voice on the subject but rather because he is the loudest.  I think statements like ‘extended through the fourth dimension’ sound like a lot of cock-talk.  Essentially, the elements of psycho-drama usually expressed through the vehicle of ceremonial ritual are re-introduced.

We can reinforce this understanding by travelling a bit farther back than the comicbook sorcerors of the 80’s to William Burroughs and Brion Gyson and the ‘Cut-Up’ technique.  The Cut-Up first appears as a bit of Dadaist method.  Gyson ‘rediscovered’ the technique after laying out newspaper on a tabletop to protect it while he used a razor to cutup lines of text for a collage he was working on.  As he worked away he noticed that the new juxtapositions created between the now highly randomized lines and layers of text began to emerge as lucid, meaningful prose, he and Burroughs found great meaning in this.  The result of that first collaborative exploration was the book Minutes to Go.  You can read an essay by Burroughs on the concept here.

Stay with me here.  Gordon is doing this as well.  Social media as it currently works over the internet functions along those lines we have just illuminated.  It is a seemingly random stream of personally relevant information that reveals the narrative or your life without your intending it to.  You cut it up, that photo is flattering, you feel sad and want arbitrary well wishes from strangers, dick pics, twitter links to the contemporary events in which you see your own world view reflected back at you.  It is a meta-narrative that you generate out of seeming errata.

When that cloud of sigils on the bizarro mirror anchors itself into that meta-narrative, that pretty thoroughly fits our classic definition of a hypersigil and perhaps effectuates the whole thing more gracefully than old King Mob ever could have.  Gordon is not a fiction, he is not using a fiction to facilitate his schooling desire and so his hypersigil is never derailed by that air of fabrication that haunts both Mob and Morrison.  Burroughs and Gyson believed that the narrative was innate, that we as a species imply it even when it isn’t there, that ‘narrative’ was one of those automatic functions of consciousness.  The bizarro Gordon that looks out from that bizarro mirror all ensconced in sorcerous doodles is the wizard of Runesoup who exists solely on Royal flotillas, or drinking in ancient Fitzrovia.  When the British drought of 2012 was broken we were left with only two possible explanations.  I know because I read them on Runesoup, firstly that Gordon the wizard of Runesoup was the greatest western wizard in ages (that was the first possibility and frankly the most obvious) and second was the fact that everyone was wrong and there was never in fact going to be a drought (all of western science was wrong [EDIT:  @spidercircus "All of western science" is an ambitious description for 3 chicken littles in the MetOffice. ] ).  Gordon goes on to argue a retrocausal action based on the second explanation but none of us are convinced are we, even that makes so much sense it accidentally reinforces the first explanation.  Even the science done by the wizard of Runesoup is more sensible and pragmatic than everyone else’s.

“The hypersigil is a dynamic miniature model of the magician’s universe, a hologram, microcosm, or “voodoo doll” which can be manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of “real” life.”  That’s our benevolent King Mob from Pop Magic again.  I am finishing on that quote because I like how “real” life is in quotations.  I am real, so are you.  When Gordon posted his drought-breaking enchantment the sorcerous potential of that work was no longer limited to what he himself could envision but rather it found a new horizon in what we collectively envisioned or most reasonably some interplay between the two.  The world as it exists perceived by me (or you) is just as ‘real’ as the one you perceive and the dialogue between the two is an arbitrary cut-up upon which we impose narrative significance. 

I think the pitfalls of obsession and delusion like those which plagued Morrison at times regarding his self-association to an overly simplified cartoon or Spare’s Atavistic Resurgence (which would be better known as ‘Anthropomorphize All Da Tings’) can be readily circumvented by just not imposing a fabricated narrative on the hypersigil, by not insisting on an unreality.  I think Gordon did in fact break the drought (as crusty hillbilly this kind of juju is par for the course and I don’t personally find it difficult to conceive of the wizard of Runesoup changing the weather,) because he imposed no ‘unreality’ on his hypersigil.  There was no disconnect between what I thought Gordon capable of and those ritual actions he intended to take all along. 

That’s my theory anyway.