A Brief and Terrible Intermission

Pantaloon - Doug Nox

Oh blood and bone and clocks and trains

My coat will keep you from the rain

Alas our love is all in vain

The briar and the rose

I will not wait, I cannot thread

The tenor of the things you've said

My love is true and we must wed

The briar and the rose

I don't know how, I don't know why

I never meant to make you cry

My love is blind and so I chose

The briar and the rose

- the Briar and the Rose

Occasionally, if you want to call yourself a sorcerer and not a ‘student of magic’ you have to let it all hang out there.  And I don’t mean endless cascades of words you found in books and your opinions on them, though that certainly isn’t the worst thing you could do.  I mean you have to give up the safety of convention and see how far your juju can carry you.  You have to test the model of the world you have unconsciously constructed in that meat machine against the chaos of the world as it is.  I miss the heady days of dangerous magic and dangerous magicians.  Crowley with his drug use and experimental sex.  Parsons with his polyamoury and crazy science.  Burroughs with his renegade philosophy and blatant homosexuality.  When the mad cabalist Charlie Jones returned to Canada after his falling out with Crowley he stripped naked and ran around the airport until he was arrested for indecent exposure, all to get the ‘UK out his system’.  Spare, even P. B. Randolph all have possessed what can only be described as idea’s which were a clear and present danger to the status quo.  They were fucking rock stars.

If some aspect of your sorcerous model exists solely to validate that false construct then it will break against the world as it is.  I call this ‘finding the handle’.  After many years of mercenarial work I can safely say that I have been burned a lot, certainly more than the average student of magic, devout Wiccan or pious neophyte.  As my old friend Mr. VI told me when I complained about it in the early years, “you can’t spend all day wandering around a battlefield and then complain when you get shot.”  The sheer volume of burns and nails flying about porn valley at any given moment is pretty ridiculous.  I think that has to be one of the most heavily ensorcelled pieces of real estate in the world and perhaps history.  A great many of those nixes just roll right off because they are really meant for me at all, they are meant for someone’s idea of me.  A burn meant to punish me for being the devil incarnate will not be terribly effective because I am not actually the devil incarnate (a devil perhaps but certainly not the devil).  Much more problematic are burns getting slung without any personal malice (the ‘it’s just business’ burn) or my own work getting efficiently cycled back to me (I call this ‘going Frankenstein’).

Besides an enthusiastic and regimented cleansing and clearing routine the best way I learned to keep the fallout from becoming unbearable was to become largely indestructible.  Also known as, learning some esoteric Buddhism.  I am not talking shallow appropriation here either; I would like to emphasize here how little good a stature of Buddha will do on your altar.  If there is a deity (wrong word for a Buddha but if you are thinking a statue on your altar is the way to go, it’s how you are thinking about it) that cares less about the fact that you are getting burned I don’t know what it would be.  I mean the spiritual mechanics at work under the hood.  Especially, the ideas of ‘attachment’ and the ‘poisons’.  Namely, that as conscious beings we place an undue amount of significance and emotional validity on particular by-products of our sensory organs.  The notion that time and space are inherently illusory, insofar as we perceive them with our eye’s and ear’s and hand’s and what-not is obviously logical, western philosophers have been riding that meal ticket for centuries but it breaks down on the rocks of personal experience.  We get attached, to pleasure, to fear, to love and through these attachments we accrue karma because we are invested in an illusion.  Karma is the scrunched up newspaper to the bonfire of any magical working.  So being ‘indestructible’ in a magical sense is to be without attachment.  Without the accumulation of karma the burn can’t ‘find a handle’.

The key here however, is realizing that being impervious to the fallout does not equate to feeling no pain.  It is embracing the pain, the sense of loss, inhabiting it and allowing it to pass through you.  In this way the karma is cleansed and a more meaningful perspective is achieved.  Sometimes of the ways you yourself have contributed to your problems, sometimes that the thing which you feared was not the end of the world, sometimes that the catharsis of grief and loss is the way to beauty.  The black Buddha-sage Dharmaraja is a refuge in times of turmoil like that, during the Ordeals and Pilgrimages of our sort, wandering peregrine about the hellscapes gathering his devotee’s from among the devils and fox spirits.  I count myself among that number, no less a child of the nail because of it, perhaps in a sense more truly a child always a child because of it.  In this sense, an effective burn is a gift of the Buddha’s that reveals to us some hitherto secret accumulation of karma.

Crowley and Burroughs and the others I mentioned at the outset, they didn’t just come into this world capable of seeing through the veil of social convention and morality.  For most of them in fact, it was quite the opposite.  They obtained to a perspective beyond the social norm because of a willingness to examine the fallout of the illusions that hold those conventions in place and evaluate their true value in their own lives.  Among the figures of the Burlesque, normative social mores are embodied by Pantaloon or as we have come to call him, ‘the Idiot’.  In the old plays he embodies the limitations of the status quo, of class and income disparity, of honor and obligation, of sexual roles and dynamics.  He always represents the obstacle which must be surmounted by the lovers to achieve union but he is not so easily defeated.  He is always both sides of the coin of conventional morality.  The old Pastor demanding pious chastity while lecherously lusting after Columbine, the old Father demanding familial piety while he defies the wishes of his son or daughter.  Regardless of the story, it is his presence that necessitates the involvement of the devil Harlequin, only a trickster can negotiate the self-validating dualisms of the cultural norm because as a liminal figure he can observe them from beyond their borders as a complete thing which can be objectified and manipulated.

Honoring the Idiot is a tricksy business because he/she is always both ends of a dualism.  Every honorific is simultaneously an insult, every gift he might bestow simultaneously a curse.  At the most basic and profound levels the spirit which fills this mask is akin to Azathoth, mad beyond reason.  It cannot be contained in a narrative arc because it defies grammar and syntax, remakes them over and over into endless cascades of meaning.  I had contemplated writing this entire piece without any grammatical structure whatsoever but decided in the end that would be a bit too hipster douche bag of me.  There is a real value in this figure and it serves nothing to cloud it with clever misdirection.  That is a bag of tricks best left to Harlequin.  The Idiot is best honored in the absence of pomp and circumstance, in the acceptance of the good with the bad, the sad with the happy, the gain with the loss, his presence is automatic in action in which we challenge the comfort of our cultural norms or the safety of the status quo.  The spirit that fills that mask is the spirit of the world and he can only embrace it by giving ourselves over to it.  To be manhandled and molested and challenged in our preconceived notions.  To love bravely, most importantly that, to love bravely in the face of loss and grief knowing that one’s heart cannot break before it has been filled to bursting.

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.