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#1: The Philip K Nixon Experience
Very Soon Forever More The Way to Be
Will Be Attatched Forever Matched Through What U See - maJiK(video, 2003) OhGr
On Febuary 23rd of 2006 I completed work on The Drowning Street Memo,
and I released it into the mediasphere the following day. This release
is a full digital album, with track information and album art, and is
designed to work most efficiently within windows media player. It is my
intention that these tracks represent the most available Philip K Nixon
tracks, as they form the materials out of which I have hopefully
constructed a weapon. This weapon works to destroy conditioning.
To
understand why I believe this construct is important, I'm going to need
to get into some depth. I've dug into my files and bookshelves and
pulled together the sources listed at the end of this article to help
me articulate what has been until now mostly a metalinguistic
experience. Working with collage and cut-ups does something seriously
uncouth to the analytical brain. Coming down from this neurolinguistic
high required serious grounding, and reading through what others have
said has proved to be an excellent form of psychic reintegration. The
references listed below are by no means exhaustive, and are instead
limited to the materials I had on hand that I feel are the most
important to the overall concepts I utilized. Deeper layers of
information themselves can be culled from the bibliographies of the
cited books, and a few searches online will uncover vast pools of
information on both William S. Burroughs and Brion Gyson, without whom
cut-up culture simply wouldn't exist in the form it has taken.(1)
The
album itself can be downloaded in it's entirety and unzipped into your
music folder if you wish to follow along this article with it's
attendant soundtrack, as it were.
Philip-K-Nixon-The_DrOwning_Street_Memo
So
why did I bother? At the outset, back in 2003 when the world was
younger, I read a number of things both online and off which began to
trigger questions. I like using random overlays on media outlets to
sort of divine the essence of a particular day, and from doing this
over a period of time I began to feel there was an undertone of
discordant energy that needed expression. I'd read some of the classic
writings on esoterrorism, and had devised a media strategy based on
Hakim Bey's The Obelisk (probably a misguided effort, but here I am
anyway). Douglas Rushkoff's book Coercion is the most important book I
read in 1999, and without it I'd be nowhere, lost in a bankrupt
worldview. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, and in it I
found this.
"The study and practice of influence through
music has become so advanced, in fact, that today's programmers argue
not about how to achieve certain effects but about which effects they
wish to create. As one psychologist explained the strategy,
Most
people's perception is that time flies when you're having fun... [but]
if you like the music and concentrate on it, time passes more slowly.
Music you dislike makes time contract. Fast music makes your perception
of time increase. The dilemma for the retailer is, do they want people
to like the place or to feel that time is going quickly?
"For
traditional Muzak to work, we are not supposed to be consciously aware
that it is playing. As Muzak vice president Bruce Funkhouser put it,
"If your head goes up to the ceiling, we've blown it.""
(Coercion: Why We Listen To What They Say - 1999, Douglas Rushkoff, pp. 98-99)
If
that isn't a standard to set oneself against, I don't know what is. The
first time I was reading these lines I was listening to a lot of
Pigface, Atari Teenage Riot, and Sonic Youth, to put this into
perspective. By the time I reached this:
"As if to
rewrite history, many Internet experts and journalists developed a
mythology that the Internet was developed not by university researchers
but by the United States military. A widely circulated article by
cyberpunk author and Global Business Network member Bruce Sterling
implied that the Internet was just an extension of the Defense
Department's effort to maintain a communications infrastructure in the
event of a nuclear war. Although the true history of the Internet, and
the military's rather indirect contribution, were later recounted in
Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon's 1997 book Where Wizards Stay Up Late,
the damage had been done. The Internet would forever be associated with
the Cold War arms race, and it's communitarian roots could be
discounted more easily."
(Coercion p. 266)
I
didn't know that. Did you know that? This book pushed me off into a
whole new set of concerns. Media is a shared space now. With the advent
of the internet we have a new critter. The nativity is the mash-up of
culture live. If this thing gets much older, the internet will learn to
crawl. Since killing it now is pretty much impossible, we better learn
to prepare for a new consciousness to arise, one fed entirely on our
lives and the data those lives generate. In part, leaving traces in
this internet of anykind automatically wires you up to the awareness of
this.. shit, I don't know, it's pretty much the biggest fucking
egregore out there. We should probably be worshipping it.
It
really is a big fucking internet. Most of us gravitate to the familiar
as Rushkoff mentions. We grow community around the familiar, and out in
the wilds of the internet exist strange and unusual websites we will
never see. People are putting up so much information, most of it
trivial, but all of it unique, that the only apprehension of the
totality of the internet's topology would have to occur from the thing
as a whole. A super-organism grown conscious of its parts. Would it be
intelligent? Ray Kurzweil says in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near,
"Information is not knowledge... intelligence selectively destroys
information to create knowledge." We have to assume that this
superorganism wouldn't go about selectively censoring its disparate
parts. Kurzweil also points out that a neuron isn't self-aware,
something hopefully readily apparent.
"Extensive
research is going into designing swarm intelligence. Swarm intelligence
describes the way that complex behaviors can arise from large numbers
of individual agents, each following relatively simple rules. Swarms of
insects are often able to devise intelligent solutions to complex
problems, such as designing the architecture of a colony, despite the
fact that no single member of the swarm possesses the requisite skills.
"DARPA
announced in 2003 that a battalion of 120 military robots (built by
I-Robot, a company cofounded by robotic pioneer Rodney Brooks) was to
be fitted with swarm-intelligence software to enable it to mimic the
organized behavior of insects. As robotic systems become physically
smaller and larger in number, the principles of self-organizing swarm
intelligence will play an increasingly important role."
(The Singularity is Near - 2005, Ray Kurzweil, p. 333)
This
leads me to think that if the internet did become a conscious entity,
it may become so based purely on a chaotic self-assembling autonomous
level, reflecting only the collective unconscious of the human race. A
giant fucking mirror, Atu VI, The Lovers in the tarot. It is this vast
and as yet unmanifest superconscious organism within which we are
destined as a race to interface with in the coming century, a neural
net we subconsciously constructed like a colony built by ants.(2) I
don't put a lot of stock into random numerology but this particular
page number jumps out at me. A case could be made that Chronozon is
simply the energy of an emergent entelechy, or rather, the overarching
consciousness that is embodied only through the principles of
emergence. Chronozon is the intelligence of the swarm, and can be
dissipated into its disparate elements. Chronozon then may be the lord
of egregores, of group minds, of zeitgeists. The meta-egregore, the
foundry in which new group minds are minted.
Even if this
supposition treads too far afield, it does provide some entry into the
idea of egregores. It would be trivial to say that an egregore is
simply a meme. It is a meme carrier, just like humans are, except it
does not require a physical presence. Most specifically, I was
concerned with three egregore types during the last few years, those
being corporate, government, and religious egregores. Religious
egregores are the most readily apparent as it is usually the religion's
task to spread the egregore's mindshare by any means necessary. These
egregores are usually the deity or deities of the religion, along with
whatever embodiement of evil that deity may oppose. (That's overly
simplistic, not to mention trite, but I've got a lot of ground to cover
and I know you're smart enough to stay with me here.) The physical
accretions of the egregore then are the temples, structures, and
iconography made manifest by and at the commission of the religion's
followers. Governmental egregores are more perverse, more recent, and
tend to be geographically bound. The United States is more or less run
by Uncle Sam and the Goddess Columbia, when viewed from this mental
attitude. The last is the corporate egregore, the youngest of all
egregores, coming into its own in the United States in a federal court
in 1886, when justices decreed corporations to be legal persons in
their own rights, "as they represent the property of natural persons
and acts on their behalf" as Paco Xander Nathan put it.
"I
could go on about the political and legal fallout of 118 U.S. 394...
but you can read about that elsewhere. Something strange happened in
1886 -- something so pivotal that rejected a century of major events in
US history which had contested the corporate form, and projected ahead
into a century of governmental drift until almost no human collective
could, through government alone, contradict these new and different
beings.
"Setting differences aside for a moment, consider how might
a biologist describe this new species? As luck would have it, some
legal theorists who analyze corporate law actually have applied
techniques borrowed from biology. Gunther Teubner, in particular, built
on work by social theorist Niklaus Luhmann to apply autopoiesis
-- a biological theory used to describe how a system self-organizes. Dr
Luhmann suggested that a group of persons tends to exhibit a 'group
individual' or zeitgeist, which then perpetuates on behalf of
that group, to an extent. Dr Teubner also examined how some corporate
law develops for no observable reason other than to perpetuate more
corporate law (and by the way, he's quite a fan of 118 U.S. 394)... in
short, observing the zeitgeist at work.
"Luhmann's 'group
individual' corresponds closely to the 'legal person' defined for a
corporation. Either notion provides a clear example of what is
esoterically described as evocation, or in other words, the process of summoning a spirit."
(The Corporate Body: Liber 118 U.S. 394 - Signum #11 2001, Paco Xander Nathan)
In
Nathan's article "Chasing Egregores," we are provided with the aspects
of cabbalistic magical analysis of the essence of a corporation:
"The
yod represents the 'metaphysical essence' of the operation, i.e. what
the alchemist is attempting to accomplish. In this case, the benefit of
the shareholders would plug in here just fine.
"The first hé
represents a 'preparation of the surroundings'. The collective
intellectual property which mediates the corporation, i.e., the sigil
composed of a logo and trademark, is probably an excellent thing to
employ for this. A corporate charter fits well, too.
"The vau
represents a 'good body of disciples grouped around the master'. If
that does not sound like a Board of Directors, then I am ready to turn
in my black robe. This quality may also extend down into the
exectutives, employees, interns, and consultants -- envision a basic
organizational chart.
"The second hé represents a 'sound society of
followers'. This is an optimal place to link customers, the public, and
mass media in general into the chain of belief."
(Chasing Egregores - Scarlet Letter V.6.1 2001, Paco Xander Nathan)
The
above article in it's entirety will provide the curious with excellent
references on building and assaulting corporate egregores, culled from
the author's study of religious egregores and their historical
manifestations in magical literature. Fellow Key23'er LVX23 tackled
this topic recently in a number of articles and related workings, and
his ideas went a long way toward solidifying my own intent in these
tracks.(3) His essay provided me with a lot to think about in a few
short paragraphs:
"Magickal assaults can use these
techniques to invoke the egregore, but what do you do once you're
there? The fundamental assumption within the corporation is that stuff
is important. That goods & services are necessary to human survival
and happiness. Conversely, the most terrifying reality of the
corporation is that it is impermanent. It's always struggling against
market factors, shareholders, and fickle customers; employee negligence
& stupidity; corporate watchdogs and bold journalists. Strike with
the inner peace of impermanence. Strike with the relentless change of
time, who brings down all attempts at order. Strike with hawk-headed
gods and egyptian queens. Strike with the legends and myths of
humanity, rich with depth and meaning and integrity. Amidst the
backdrop of history, the corporation is a fleeting moment. Show it this
truth. Plant seeds of aetheric chaos....
"But what of the dark
forces, the archons of war and exploitation? Are magickal assaults on
such entities viable? Safe? Bechtel, Halliburton, the Carlysle Group -
these are the real powers stalking the planet. These shadowy egregores
prefer to keep as low of a profile as possible. You'll not find any
corporate sigils lying around like keys to the vault. An effective
angle uses good 'ol guerilla journalism. Get the word out. When the
profiteering and lies become public knowledge, the dark egregore is
exposed and weakens. It can no longer function unfettered. How many
people knew what Halliburton was 5 years ago? Now the egregore is under
assault. Draw them out of the shadows, then attack with the light."
(The Corporation as Magickal Entity - 2004?, LVX23)
It
was this that led me to arrange a magical action directed not at the
egregores themselves, but at those points of maximum media blackout
that demanded to be exposed. Magical gonzo meta-journalism. I'd written
the essay "Magical Assault on Corporations" and in doing so discovered
a very glaring gap - my hypothesis only accounted for those
corporations which were publicly traded.(4) Chris' suggestion made me
rethink my approach so I could target private corporations and
religious figures without actually targeting them, something I found
manifestly difficult when I first attempted a direct hex on a political
figure in 1999:
"Prolonged obsessive religious activity
will, for the ordinary man, create a minor aetheric thought form that
he may call his god. This effect is partly transferable and explains
the difficulty of attacking popular public figures. It is noticeable
that when such a figure falls from favor and is stripped of the
protective thoughts of his fellows, then sickness and death often
follow quickly."
(Psychonaut - 1987, Peter J. Carroll)
Even
worse, with the advent of the Patriot Act, I found myself wondering
just what would be made of my actions. We've got trademark laws and
workplace laws that trump free speech. Kids are getting capped for
speaking their minds, and goddess help you if you were islamic in the
days immediately following 9/11. I went from openly promoting
esoterrorism to secretly practicing it in the span of about four hours
after reading Barbara Fisher's article in New Witch #4:
"The
stated intent of the USA PATRIOT Act is to streamline the ability for
federal law enforcement agencies to share information with each other,
as well as with local and state police departments, in order to more
effectively track down terrorists. However, civil libertarians on both
Left and the Right have been disturbed by some of the implications of
many of the provisions of the over three-hundred page law.
"Some of
these provisions are of special interest to protestors and members of
activist organizations. Of particular import is the broader definition of domestic terrorism.
The Patriot Act states that "the term, 'domestic terrorism' means
activities that -- (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a
violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State,
(B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian
population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a
government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping, and (C)
occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United
States.
"This definition is disturbingly broad. If a peace protestor
or activist group engages in anything that could even remotely be
construed as violent, a danger to human life, or unlawful property
damage, not only could they find themselves being arrested but, instead
of being charged with destruction of property or civil disobedience,
they could concievably be held indefinitely under suspicion of being a
'domestic terrorist'."
(Are You a Terrorist? - New Witch #4 summer 2003, Barbara Fisher)
And
so I decided about the only way I could influence change from where I
was positioned was to create downloadable audio sculpture unlistenable
by anyone except those who were supposed to hear it.(5) My stated
intention was no longer to directly attack these entities magically,
but to feed them with toxins and spread the collective awareness of
their existence. I chose to aim for the secret lodges manipulating the
government egregore, the religious figure manipulating the christian
egregore, and a few private corporations untargetable in my previous
paradigm of action. This also required me to think a lot about what a
ritual actually was:
".. for a ritual is something in
its own right. It is not just something you do, or words you say, or
the place you choose to perform in. It may involve putting earth on a
mound or a sacrifice on a shrine, making offerings to spirits or
dedications at an altar, swearing an oath or walking bare-foot over
red-hot coals. The elements in themselves are unimportant because they
are not peculiar to the ritual. It is the whole of the procedure that
matters. And it does really matter. If everything is right, the parts
of the ritual fuse together into a whole which bears no resemblance to
any of the components. It becomes a mechanism for folding the
abstraction of our reality back into flux where anything and everything
can happen."
(Gifts of Unknown Things - 1976, Lyall Watson)
One
of the reasons I chose audio is the ease with which audio files can be
distributed. And, thanks to the piracy culture engendered by Napster,
.mp3s have become a familiar format for media, somewhat democratizing
the music industry. Thus, the mp3s I produce could function within the
same sphere of activity as high profile musicians, becoming "seeds of
aetheric chaos."
It's important to mention that I didn't know
anything about music when I started, and it was only through living
with musicians for a number of years that I was able to create anything
at all. I'm still profoundly amazed at some of the stuff I was able to
make by the end of the project, and in some sense this project manifest
through me of its own accord. The Burroughs influence was from direct
interaction with his ghost in a dream and through poltergeist activity
in the house where I was living, at the time a few blocks from
Burroughs home estate and on the bank of the WIlliam S. Burroughs
creek. Cut-ups were a conscious decision, in the light of this psychic
environment.
"The system of control within words, the
definition virus, the need for certainty, can all be broken through
cut-ups, through collages, even through writing that has no specific
goal, but is tangential, intuitive, going where the mind wills. The
goal is not to be controlled, or even to control, though certainly as
I've said above, awareness of patterns can lead to more control..."
"Burroughs
did a lot of experiments with tapes, cutting up sound, and a lot of
musicians carry on that tradition. For Burroughs, it was a magical
operation. Perhaps for some of the musicians this is also the case:
'Further if all we imagine to be reality is equivalent to a recording,
then we become empowered to edit, re-arrange, re-contextualize and
re-project by cutting-up and re-assembling our own reality and
potentially, the reality of others. If this is true and effective, then
a magical act is taking place' (Book of Lies: The Disinformation guide
to Magick and the Occult, - 2003, Genesis P-orridge, pp 110-111). Granted, this is just a paradigm.."
(Space/Time Magic - 2005, Taylor Ellwood pp 90-92)
I
found myself constructing rituals using audio and eventually frequency
manipulation, with the intent that playback feeds back through time to
the point of ritual empowering the audio sigil. Using what little I
understood of music theory, I sought to wreak enough havok in the
listener to align their consciousness with the act of creation. I don't
really know if I came anywhere close until I started working directly
with brain wave generators, as in theory the clips from movies and
cartoons only carry semantic weight with those listeners who have
already seen or heard the originating media. But the frequencies do
work, and work quite effectively, in producing brain change aligned to
those ritual tracks which incorporate the sounds.
"This
doesn't happen just because of an emotional reaction. There are
physiological reactions to sound, and these reactions trigger a change
in consciousness and possibly health. Sound, after all, is vibration,
and at the most fundamental level we are made up of specific
vibrations, sound if you will, or so contemporary physicists suggest:
"According to string theory, the elementary ingredients of the universe are not
point particles. Rather, they are tiny, one-dimensional filaments
somewhat like infinitely thin rubber bands, vibrating to and fro. But
don't let the name fool you: Unlike an ordinary piece of string, which
itself is composed of molecules and atoms, the strings of string theory
are purported to lie deeply within the heart of matter. The theory
proposes that they are ultramicroscopic ingredients making up
the particles out of which atoms themselves are made [Italics are the
author's]." (The Elegant Universe - 1999, Briane Greene, p 136
"Disrupt
the vibration and everything falls apart. But there are also ways of
healing with sound, such as with healers who use the sounds of
resonating crystal bowls as a means of attuning a person's energy, or
vibration, as the case may be."
(Space/Time Magic p. 106)
I
intended that these tracks uploaded into the internet would help heal
the internet itself - heal it in that information wants to be freely
accessible at all points, and that bottlenecks and classifications and
disinformation represent unhealthy cells in the
internet-as-superorganism. These tracks are vibrating at an abstract
layer constantly, simply by being accessible online. But the internet
is still two steps removed from where the real action is, which is in
the human brain. Maybe by 2020 we'll have notebooks under a thousand
dollars with all the operating capacity as the human brain, but for
right now us meat-heads have the most powerful quantum computers on the
planet in our skulls and we didn't even have to purchase them. So these
high-frequency-laden tracks attempted to capitalize on that. Back to
Taylor Ellwood's excellent book:
"To understand this
further, let's consider what music can do to your physiology. The sound
of music operates on frequencies, and specific frequencies will trigger
neurological changes in the transmitters of the brain:
"Each
brain center generates impulses at a certain frequency based on the
predominant neurotransmitters it secrets, in other words, the brains
internal communication system (the language) is based on frequencies.
Presumably, when we send waves of external energy at, say, 10hz,
certain cells in the lower brain stem will respond because they
normally fire within that particular frequency range; as a result,
specific mood-altering chemicals associated with that region will be
released." (TAGC - Teste Tones liner notes)
"As you can
see it's literally possible to get high off music. The electrochemicals
that are stimulated help to create an altered state of mind."
(Space/Time Magic p 109)
So
these tracks have a co-creational affect that those more aware of their
own inner alchemy will be more effective at resonating with the ritual
action embedded within the tracks, but will prove effective with any
listener.(6) Hopefully not only will you find these tracks useful in
your own work, but you'll be able to incorporate (heh) these ideas into
your own magical work. Art is magic, and artistic expression is one of
the most powerful ways a magician can influence hir immediate
environment. I have immense respect for the work of musicians, and I
don't intend to compare my work with that of those who have mastered
their art form. As I've stated before, This Is Not Music.
The track list of The Drowning Street Memo, with attendant commentary:
01
Memo: (2005) The sheer volume of samples in this track makes cataloguing these samples
almost impossible. This track, along with a number of others, would not
have been possible if it weren't for the huge database of news audio
Mystery X provided. Opening with a Scientology reference from South
Park, this track rapidly descends into sheer chaotic noise. From
randomly sampling news audio dealing with the immediate post-911
environment I was able to create a soundscape onto which I layered a
series of noises designed to awaken and cut through the collective
media trance which allowed the Downing Street Memos on Iraq's nuclear
capability to slide unnoticed amidst the furour over the 9/11 attacks.
02
MonarCo: (2004) Using samples from the Crown of Peace media release
from the Rev. Moon, audio from Bubba Ho-tep, George W. Bush, and a
C-Span Booknotes author Dan Briody, I tried to create what I hoped
would be an audiosigil charged to reveal any and all illegal activities
undertaken by the administration and the Rev. Moon's Unification Church.
03
Under Ground Lair: (2006) Samples from Marcel DuChamp speaking on the
topic of ready-mades and George W. Bush with a bullhorn at ground-zero
spliced with a commentary discussing overpopulation.
04 Under
Lying Source: (2006) This track ties together Richard M Nixon and
Philip K Dick, and functions as the invocation of 'Philip K Nixon.' The
music was developed, and a loop of Jason Louv saying "There might be a
single underlying source for multiple religions" functioned as the
framework upon which I summoned the cut-up, and this track represents
the foundation for meditative consciousness when I work with this
album. (1)
05 00014h1D1CK: (2003) This is the first track I
developed from a very long interview with Philip K Dick I'd run across
online. It is included here as a meditation tool and because it is in a
sense self-referential, in that the content of the track is a comment
on the totality of the project. I use this several times, because I
suspect self-reference may be a key to self-awareness, and works to
empower the overall energy of this working.
06 Braid Washen
Mines: (2005) A number of samples here, from the cartoon Sealab 2021,
George Noori & guest on Coast2Coast speaking on free-energy,
Timothy Leary speaking on software and gnosis, Ben Mack and Howard
Bloom are in there refering to marketing, Alex Jones pops in speaking
on the prison planet slave state, and I used electronic brain wave
generator software to entrain the brain to a state of magical awareness
in preparation for the next track.
07 Drowning Street Memo:
(2005) Arguably the most important of the tracks in this working, this
is the track I built the album sequence around. From the soundscape the
voice of R. U. Sirius rises, and I sampled him and pulled him out of
the background because he's fucking R. U. Sirius. As for the rest of
the samples, there are so many news audio sources used in this track I
am unable to catalogue, let alone remember all of them, although they
are for the most part present in the first track as well. This track
aims more at the disinformation built up in the mediasphere during the
build-up to the Iraq war.
08 Quite Quiet: (2004) This track is
intended to make you think. Sadly I don't remember where I got the
audio sample. Honestly, I only vaguely remember mixing this track, but
it certainly voices my own confusion on how little reaction there has
been to the reports that the intelligence community has been hijacked
by religious interests.
09 1lbeReal: (2003) My favorite track. I
discovered that N.W.A.'s 911 is a Joke track made a wonderful loop if
played backwards: '911 is a Joke' becomes 'Why's it no one knows.' The
bulk of the rest of the track comes from the movie trailer for Michael
Moore's 'Farenheit 911,' and my intention was that this track act to
increase the audience for what I'd expected to be a groundbreaking
documentary.
10 Appropriations CommittE: (2006) The most obvious
and notable samples on this track came from DJ Food's Raiding the
Twentieth Century track, itself a mish-mash of countless tracks. A
secondary loop draws attention to one of the most untalked about topics
regarding the post-911 environment. This track also acts as a
commentary on the project itself, continuing the theme of
self-reference introduced in the third track.
11 MonarCo (We Are
Fucked Mix): (2005) More with the Reverend, this one following ideas
popularized in the appendix of The Ticket That Exploded by William S
Burroughs. The closing sample is taken from E. L. Doctorow's "The
Unfeeling President"
12 Liberal By Comparison: (2005) More
samples from E. L. Doctorow introduce this track, with computerized
text-2-speech closing it out.
13 Tinfoil Hat: (2003) This was
a very early track conceptually. I was working with using samples from
Return to Oz, Lunatics, and The Fifth Element, this track succeeds
despite my lack of experience with the software. I include it because
of the idea of poisening culture with its own emissions, a theme I
return to in the fifteenth track.
14 Horselover Fat Explains:
(2004) I returned to the Philip K Dick interview to compile a more
complete exploration, and this track was the result. The music itself
comes from out-takes to the Unquiet Mind project, and was re-applied in
different configurations to provide a landscape for Dick's voice. This
track was intentionally created, rather than randomly assembled, so it
could be used to explain what the Philip K Nixon project had become by
this point, and functions as something of a statement of intent.
15
Infected Nativity: (2005) A certain amount of toungue-in-cheek went
into this track, and for a long time I didn't know whether or not I'd
release it.(8) South Park, InuYasha, and Sealab 2021, overlayed with
Noam Chomsky, Trent Reznor, and Charles Bukowski, with a touch of
Resident Evil: Apocalypse provide the bulk of the samples. This track
is designed to help further the toxic energy for the final two tracks.
16
The Drowning Street Memo Remix: (2006) Again, the sheer volume of
tracks and the way in which they were presented makes cataloguing these
samples impossible, as is previously mentioned. This track brings back
energy from Nixon's withdrawal of troops, mixes it into the hurricane
controversy, and maintains the emphasis on the conspiracy theorist from
the Washington Journal clip.
17 MonarCo (Blue Moon Mix):
(2004) The work of Restoration, as the Reverend Moon describes it, is
one of a fundamentalist monarchy driven by market interests. Such a
society will arise if the current trends continue, if for no other
reason than blind adherence to a group illusion is an underlying
principle that achieves social dominance during the decay of a
superorganism. The theme, wake up you're under a theocorporate monarchy, is concluded, and the message to the world is "You don't want this to happen."
Footnotes:
(1)
And a special thanks to Greylodge.org, without whom I would not have
had access to both audio and audience. Their (unwitting) contribution
to Philip K Nixon was equivalent to the contributions of Mystery X, and
I couldn't have done it without either of them.
(2) - Quorum
sensing in bacteria and the attendant phase transitions in the
bacteria's behavior are another area of research that seem to imply
that what appears to be conscious action can manifest at even the most
microscopic level.
(3) - His excellent piece in Generation Hex
will provide any activist with a thorough understanding of how such a
working can be achieved, and indeed the whole of that book cannot be
more highly recommended from this reviewer's viewpoint.
(4) - On
the other hand, having a read-out daily of the influence a magickal
ritual is doing is a lot easier than keeping a magickal journal.
(5)
- I guess this would be about as close as I'd get to admitting in the
presence of divinity, this belief in random spontaneous organization.
(6)
- These later tracks were designed with this theory in mind, although I
was operating with an as-yet-unverbalized hypothesis similar to this
prior to recieving Teriel's book.
(7) - From here on in, I'm
pretty much tranced out. The first three tracks act to present the
targets of focus, while the rest of the album either repeats those
targets in new iterations or provides support for maintaining the
trance achieved in this track.
(8) - Still, if I think about all
that could have been, this track reflects a profound ray of hope for
our future. (Fred Durst is no longer Vice President of Interscope, and
that alone is cause for rejoicing.)
References--Books:
Bloom, Howard. (1995) The Lucifer Principle. New York, NY. Atlantic Monthly Press
Carroll, Peter J. (1987) Liber Null & Psychonaut. York Beach, ME. Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
Ellwood, Taylor (2005) Space/Time Magic. Stafford, England. Immanion Press
Kurzweil, Ray. (2005) The SIngularity is Near. London, England. Viking Penguin
Louv, Jason. (Ed.). (2006) Generation Hex. In Chris Arkenberg's My Lovewar With Fox News (pp. 203-217). New York, NY. The Disinformation Company LTD
Rushkoff, Douglas. (1999) Coercion: Why We Listen To What They Say. New York, NY. Riverhead Books
Watson, Lyall. (1976) Gifts of Unknown Things. New York, NY. Simon & Schuster
References--Web:
Anonymous, et. al. "Egregore," Wikipedia, Febuary 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
Arkenberg, Chris. "The Corporation as Magickal Entity," LVX23, August 2004, http://www.lvx23.com/words2.html
Nathan, Paco Xander. "Chasing Egregores," The Scarlet Letter, March 2001, http://www.scarletwoman.org/scarletletter/v6n1/v6n1_egregors.html
Sullivan, John. "Sun Myung Moon Crowned Messiah By Congressman," Johnsullivan.com, May 5th, 2004, http://www.jonsullivan.com/DiaryDetail.php?pg=1337&%2338;mat=ddef
References--Other:
Fisher, Barbara. (Summer 2003) "Are You A Terrorist?" New Witch: Not Your Mother's Broomstick. #4. Point Arena, CA, BBI Media Inc.
Nathan, Paco Xander. (2001) "The Corporate Body: Liber 118 U.S. 394" Signum #11, Signum Press
OhGr (2003) "maJiK" Director: William Morrison. Process Media Labs. available on Sunny Psyop, Spitfire Records/Eagle Rock Entertainment
-------=======-------
#2 Be What You Are
When I stated to a friend that Douglas Rushkoff's book Coercion: Why We
Listen to What They Say was the most influential treatise on black
magic published in the last ten years, I was only half joking. Our
individual worldviews are dangling on the puppet strings of the media's
news releases; created in the wake of a thousand persuaders, each
striving desperately to sell us their view of reality. I'm doing the
same thing, promoting a worldview less centralized, more empowering to
the individual, but without overlooking the importance and influence of
superorganisms and group collectives. Because I have less influence
than the media conglomerates, my worldview which I am trying to pass on
to you is not as dominate as the collective cultural worldview produced
on Madison Avenue.
I do not want to start this off with the statement that all marketing
is bad, or that all corporations are out to eat you. Good marketing
tells you what you didn't know about a product that you may very well
be interested in, and the product itself should deliver on the promises
implicit in the advertisment. If it doesn't, don't buy any more shit
from that company. We can dig back through history and make the
assumption that this is precisely why the Sears catalogue was the
powerhouse merchandiser of the turn of the century. But that is far
from the standard operations of government and religious advertising,
and even product awareness and marketing have shifted dramatically from
honest product information once a standard in advertisments. I for one
would welcome a return to such standards.
Instead, today we are enmeshed in a matrix of media messages the bulk
of which rely upon persuasion techniques refined by years of market
pressure and behavioral psychology.
"To influence us, they disable our capacity to make reasoned judgements
and appeal to deeper, perhaps unresolved, and certainly unrelated
issues. By understanding the unconscious processes we use to make our
choices of what to buy, where to eat, whom to respect, and how to feel,
clever influence professionals can sidestep our critical faculties and
compel us to act however they please. We are disconnected from our own
further disempowerment. The less we are satisfied by our decisions, the
more easily manipulated we become.
"To restore our own ability to act wilfully, we must accept that we are
the ones actively submitting to the influence of others. We are
influenced because, on some level, we want to be."
(Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say - 1999, Douglas Rushkoff, p. 19)
This influence is by no means restricted to advertising. In fact,
advertising in the traditional sense comprises a much less serious
threat to our unconscious than the whole of mass communications. What
is presented isn't an advertisment for a product, but an entire
worldview composed of what can be considered self-censoring corporate
culture. And we are complicit in the spread of the mediocre psychic
environment we now find ourselves.
Our responsibility is to embrace that which does a better job of
explaining reality and discard that which obfuscates. We need to become
conscious of our true selves to do this, which means discarding the
personas long enough to comprehend how our persona influences our
perceptions.
"... by unconsciously accepting mass communications, we are adopting
alien thought patterns. These thought patterns have an agenda, thought
patterns that triggered a buzz-whir effect in our brains so that
presented with certain situations, we have a knee-jerk reaction that
although it feels like a free formed 'logical' action, was actually
implanted in our brains."
(Twisp, Ben Mack, p. 39)
How does this work? In part because of how the brain operates:
"Remember that when the human nervous system unscrambles a
scrambled message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas
which just occurred to him... Anyone can be made to hear voices with
scrambling techniques... To carry it further you can use recordings of
voices known to him."
(The Electronic Revolution, 1967, William S. Burroughs)
Taking this a step further, when a person normally hears or believes he hears voices from within:
"... it is regarded either as undiluted nonsense or as the voice of
God. It does not seem to occur to any one that there might be something
valuable in between." (Four Archetypes, Carl G. Jung)
This is one of the tricks in the bag of a audio sculpture/remix artist.
Devising incredibly small bits of information that come from an overall
pattern, then re-arranging the bits of information in an engaging way
provides a structure from which the brain re-assembles the message.
Three things become one. Repetition drives memorization. Especially
when we are running on robot, when we aren't fully home, which appears
to be the normal level of operation for most of us.
"... people are seldom at home, always somewhere else, always 'absent.'
Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement. And the
simple reason for it is: FEAR.
"As we see whenever a war breaks out, the fear of war is overcome the
moment one is really in it. If war were really as terrible as people
imagine it to be it would have been wiped out long ago. To make war is
as natural for human beings as to make love. Love can make cowards of
men just as much as the fear of war. But once desperately in love a man
will commit any crime and not only feel justified, but feel good about
it. It is the order of things.
"The wisest men are those who speak of illusion: MAYA. Illusion is the
antidote to fear. In harness they render life absurdly illogical."
(The Wisdom of the Heart - 1941, Henry V. Miller, p. 96)
The influence of FEAR on American politics is so obvious in the wake of
the events surrounding 9/11 that I hardly need bother providing
examples. Instead, let's take a quick look at how illusion is used to
assuage this fear.
"The good storyteller slowly and consistently builds our anxiety... As
the level of tension increases, we are drawn deeper into the
storyteller's spell. The worse it gets, the more dependent we are on
the storyteller for a way out. It's all worth the pain though, because
eventually the conflict will be resolved and the audience will be
released into delightful catharsis.
"Because the audience is willing to accept any reasonable escape from
their own state of unbearable tension, the storyteller has the power to
concoct whatever solution he wishes. And embedded in that solution can
be an agenda. The more intense an audience's level of anxiety, the more
preposterous a release it will accept."
(Coercion, p. 201)
Religion has for thousands of years stood as the illusionary antidote
to the fear of death. Political displays in the wake of terrorist
attacks are designed to produce their own illusionary antidote. The
illusions presented to us by way of centralized mass media are built
out of political polls, coporate tie-ins, and market pressures.
These illusions frame the political discourse and dictate the political
discourse. We build our questions about reality from the illusions
presented to us. Those presenting the illusions who are cognizant of
this effect are crafting media designed to raise questions for us to
ask, and a context in which the answers put them in the best possible
light. The smart public relations consultant knows that the truth will
find its way into print, so they must create a media environment that
spins truth to their advantage.
Marvel has published a number of comics that deal with this new media
landscape. I really enjoyed 'Supreme Power': Written to bring
superheroes into a realist setting, it explores the effect of the
trully alien on a superorganism. Michael J. Straczynski's storyline is
a realists portrayal of the effects of superpowered individuals in an
amoral world. Public opinion and image motivate the heroes and their
handlers more than villians, and the superheroes thamselves are
portrayed as prisoners of their public persona. Truth is less important
than the context within which it is presented.
"Which is why it's better if the kid says that himself, rather than us
saying it. But we can't do that until we can unveil him, and that means
narrowing down the uniform options. The president only wants to see
three choices."
(Supreme Power V.1 #3, 2003, Michael J Straczynski)
This kind of positioning of truth is not limited to fictional
abstractions occurring in comics; rather, comics are finally getting
around to reflecting just how skewed our mediated reality has become.
Another series, Ocean written by Warren Ellis and drawn up at the hands
of Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, and colored by Randy Mayor, illustrates
just how out of control corporate culture could become with the
next-generation of technology. We need to take these stories to heart,
and really examine what it means to be an individual within nested
packs of competing superorganisms.
"Advertising and market research is an ongoing experiment on public perceptions."
(Twisp, 1997, Ben Mack, p. 185)
"Like salesmen, public-relations specialists seek to mirror the
conscious and unconscious concerns of their targets in order to change
their perception of reality. Just as a car dealer sizes up his walk-in
clientele, researchers working for governments, public-relations firms,
and corporations expend a great deal of effort sizing up their
constituencies on a regular basis. Once they understand our belief
system and, more important, where the irrationality and emotional
triggers lie in those beliefs, they can work to move us in a different
direction. 'Closing the sale' in these cases might mean gaining public
support for a war, changing an industry's reputation as a polluter, or
simply restoring voter's trust in a president who has lied to them."
(Coercion, p. 151)
Because they are reliant on these tools to discern our beliefs, there
is at least one way you can actively influence the influencers. Ben
Mack explains:
"'If you are asked a market research question, it is best to answer in
such a way that if everybody answered the way you do, the world would
be a better place.'
"I think we should vote like this too. I see research as a way of
tallying social agreement. I don't think we should vote in politics for
what suits us best. I think we should vote for what we think will make
the world a better place. I think this value needs to be taught in
school in order to make democracy work."
(Twisp, p. 183)
Let's use a more concrete example... Hacking the Grocery Story
Here's the story you are sold: By using a grocery card that tracks
personal buying patterns, you recieve in-store coupons without having
to clip them. You've become a grocery store member.
"D'you want out 'superadvantage' nice plastic card?
"No! No! No! It's only a cheap, dirty trick to gather all possible data
on your comportament without ever having to raise a finger. They'll
know how much and when and where you
drink/shit/eat/love/cry/wash/sleep/etc. and stuff their databases for
free (notice how the 'discounts' are lilliputian in comparison with
what they steal you through the abovementioned tricks... did you know
that 35% of the fridge products you buy will go directly from fridge to
dustbin? That's the real average, duh)."
(Supermarket Enslavement Techniques, 1997, "Let's crack the slave-masters!" +Orc)
We are complicit in generating the media environment within which we
are ensconced. Carrying our grocery member card, we have suddenly
become attuned to those tags attatched to the grocery store shelves
which advertise (miniscule) discounts for using the member card.
"Advertising is best when it catches somebody's attention as opposed to
ramming a meme down somebody's mind" (Twisp, p. 185) The grocery store
has triggered feedback through association, and can structure itself
around these repetative series of associations as time passes. Over
time,
"This designer consumption would amount to a nearly hermetic feedback
loop between each consumer and his marketers--a form of pacing and
leading where the customer's taste is mirrored and then slowly led
toward progressively more extreme manifestations of itself. It is a
recipe for technologically induced obsessive-compulsive behavior, as
our desires are repeatedly amplified and then fed back to us. The
one-to-one future differs from the marketing we're subjected to today
only in its speed and specificity."
(Coercion, p. 289)
If that sounds paranoid, think about this:
"RFID tags are being placed on the bottom of grocery carts
in various supermarkets in the States. These tags emit a signal every
five seconds that is received by receptors installed at various
locations throughout the store. Once collected, the signals are used to
chart the position of the grocery cart and record its route through the
entire store...
"This new tracking data is a significant addition to shopping data
stolen from consumers through the introduction of scanner technology,
which specifically details every item purchased, its price, the name
and address of the buyer and whether a coupon was used."
(Tracking the Patterns of Supermarket Shoppers, 2005, "Let's crack the slave-masters!" +fravia)
Since we cannot stop this, we shouldn't fear it. Otherwise it becomes
another point of leverage for further manipulation. Instead we need to
understand that it is going on and seek to turn it to our advantage.
"Everyone is wearing a fiction suit."
(Brain Sinews, John Harrigan)
I have only my own experience upon which to formulate my worldview.
When I was born I was brought into a world built up out of expectations
and traditions dictated by religious and cultural mores. My obsession
with occult and esoteric studies comes as a direct result of my
upbringing as an adoptee. Knowing this does little to disuade me from
persuing my interests, but instead acts as a grounding from which a
certain perspective is achieved. Each of us is complicit in hir own
experience, and though most accept this complicity I sought to define
its borders. It has been my experience that mapping out an abstraction
is something begun by way of intention, but is accomplished through
mental distractions. Hopefully I'll be able to impart some information
that will help others appreciate their own capabilities.
The worldview I was raised within demanded more from me than I was
willing to accept, and over time I learned this was not the only
available reality tunnel through which to experience reality.
"I recognized the psychiatrist and the minister as keepers
of the establishment's perceived truths -- one representing mental
health, the other moral certitude. They were accomplices in keeping the
adoptee aborted from the consciousness of his clan. They saw him not as
the returned lost baby but as the returned dead, who seek vengeance."
(The Journey of the Adopted Self, 1994, Betty Jean Lifton)
I am an adoptee. This label came in place of my original birth
certificate, and along with it in its place I received a legal fiction:
a birth certificate doctored up a few months after I was born. This
certificate is a lie accepted as truth in the eyes of the law. Deep
meditation on this topic has served to uproot elements deeply repressed
in my own unconscious, as well as strengthen my own internal imaginal
landscape.
"Natural children, who have parents, siblings, and other
blood-related relatives, are grounded in a reality from which they can
spin their images. But adoptees do not feel grounded or connected by
any such reality. Much of their imagery is not centered on the adoptive
family in which they live as if they belong, but rather in fantasy and
imagination. They have a sense that their very perceptions are
decieving them. They have lost the abiliity to distinguish between what
is real and what is supposed to be real."
(The Journey of the Adopted Self)
I expect an arguement could be made at my expense that these very
essays are proof that my ability to distinguish between real and
supposedly real has been damaged in some way. Using magical
consciousness to combat mass communications and the attendant agenda
may at first appear to be quixotic, but I wouldn't bother writing this
if I hadn't already had some success.
So to continue, I first had to evaluate my preconceptions and repressed
emotions. As much as possible, I had to remove myself from social
expectations and prejudices regarding the mask of 'adoptee.'
"... being separated from their birthmothers and handed
over to strangers in the adoption process is the only trauma where the
victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful..."
(The Primal Wound, 1993, Nancy Verrier)
I didn't know if I was grateful. I couldn't simply allow myself to be
grateful without understanding the situation surrounding my birth,
especially after multiple viewings of the film 'The Truman Show.' I had
to awaken the trauma buried in my unconscious mind and release it
instead of allowing it to continue manifesting. As Lifton puts it in
her book, "The adoptee's goal is to illuminate the dark unconscious of
the self and make it whole." While I agree with Betty Jean Lifton's
statement, I firmly believe that should be everyone's goal, not just
that of the adoptee. Adoptees may even have a head-start on the rest of
you, in that they have something of a roadmap for this kind of work.
"Adoptees must weave a new self-narrative out of the fragments of what
was, what might have been, and what is. This means they must integrate
thair two selves: the regressed baby who was abandoned and the adult
the baby has become.
"They must make the artificial self real, and allow the forbidden self
to come out of hiding. They must integrate what is authentic in these
two selves, and balance the power between them. It is during this
period that the adoptee feels most vulnerable, because neither self is
in charge...
"They must accept that they cannot be fully the birth parent's child
any more than they could be fully the adoptive parents' child. They
must claim their own child, become their own person, and belong to
themselves."
(The Journey of the Adopted Self)
In essence, I had to assemble as much narrative out of my own
experience, what information I could garner on the experiences
surrounding my birth, and come to terms with that which I may very well
never know. Out of this, I wove a narrative through which I gave birth
to myself. I can't provide details of the day-to-day transformations in
consciousness, nor the various outbursts of madness and
self-destruction such a process entails. I had to peel away the layers
of my persona and uncover the truth hidden within, and the operation
shook me to the very core. Nor is this process complete. I have been
engaged in this work for a long while now, and even this article is a
step further along the path.
"The personality, a mask of convenience, becomes stuck to the face. Eye
becomes clouded by 'I.' The human spirit becomes a trivial mess of
petty identifications. The most cherished principles are the greatest
lies. 'I think therefore I am.' But what is 'I?' The more you think,
the more the I closes. Thinking, 'I am asleep'; my I is blinded. The
intellect is a sword, and its use is to prevent identification with any
particular phenomenon encountered. The most powerful minds cling to the
fewest fixed principles. The only clear view is from atop a mountain of
your dead selves."
(Liber Null, 1987, Peter J. Carroll, p. 48)
To return to comics briefly, the aforementioned series by Ellis and
Sprouse, Ocean, presented a brilliant metaphor for posession of an
individual by a persona in their examination of the futuristic Doors
Corporation. Individuals are reprogrammed to conform to corporate
interests, sacrificing their autonomy to the greater manifestation of
the corporation itself. Instead of wearing the unifrom, the employee
becomes the uniform.
"I am not prepared to lay down any hard and fast line of demarcation
between possession and paranoia. Possession can be formulated as
identity of the ego-personality with a complex.
"A common instance of this is identity with the persona, which is the
individual's system of adaption to, or the manner he assumes in dealing
with, the world. Every calling or profession, for example, has its own
characteristic persona... One could say, with a little exaggeration,
that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself
as well as others think one is."
(Four Archetypes, 1959, Carl G. Jung)
A more benevolent form of this is implicit in the idea of evocation,
retooled as the expression 'fiction suit,' introduced by Grant Morrison
in his The Invisibles series.
"Some people prefer to use 'fiction suit' to indicate
something deeper than a mere 'persona' or 'mask' - more like a conduit
for a different internal character to come to life, a 'suit' worn by a
specific personality, which may or may not jibe with the 'wearer's'
meatspace (or 'real') persona. This outlook can be useful for those
involved with certain magickal or psychological experiments, or for
those who just need very badly to cut loose for a while."
(Fiction Suits, 2004, Barbelith Egregore)
Fiction suits begin as an abstraction, and are fleshed out through
conscious decisions. Experiencing events from within such an
abstraction helps one evaluate a variety of reality tunnels. The
experience can range froma simple expirament in daydreaming to a full
alteration of even the most basic and involuntary manerisms. Complete
emersion in a different personality may complicate long-standing
relationships, because the bulk of human interaction is built up from
masks speaking to masks. Changing your mask for a different one changes
the types of interactions you will have. Even more, you will not be
able to predict the full expression of any given fiction suit. It is
only through experience that you can understand how the experience
itself will manifest.
"A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has
become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of
conscious experience."
(Four Archetypes)
Mucking about with fiction suits is more or less a practice run for the
great work on the plate of any serious magician. Look at this quote
found in Ray Kurzweil's latest work: "The most important thing is this:
To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could
become," Charles Dubois. This becoming is illustrated most profoundly
in the tarot card The Hanged Man, and its attendant themes of
sacrificing the self to the self to achieve a state of cosmic
self-awareness.
"... sacrifice, in the final analysis, is a wrong idea...
"Redemption
is a bad word; it implies debt. For every star possesses boundless
wealth; the only proper way to deal with the ignorant is to bring them
to the knowledge of thier starry heritage."
(ATU XII, The Book of Thoth, 1944, Aleistar Crowley)
Becoming aware of your true nature is essential. As Peter Carroll says,
a person can't be said to have a personality until they own the keys to
their own personality. We are bound on all sides by influences coercing
and binding us to a cultural reality. Generating original ideas is only
possible once we know who we are within this context. Sadly, it doesn't
happen in a brilliant flash. For most of us, it doesn't even happen in
a short nine day ritual as in the myth of Odin.
"The operation of obtaining the knowledge and conversation is usually a
lengthy one." As Peter j. Carroll says. Those familiar with the Sacred
Magic of Abramelin know just how extreme this process can become. He
goes on:
"The magician is attempting a progressive metamorphosis, a
complete overhaul of his entire existence. Yet he has to seek the
blueprint for his reborn self as he goes along... In beginning the
great work of obtaining the knowledge and conversation, the magician
vows, 'to interpret every manifestation of existence as a direct
message from the infinite Chaos to himself personally.'
"To do this is to enter the magical world view in its totality. He
takes complete responsibility for his present incarnation and must
consider every experience, thing, or piece of information which assails
him from any source, as a reflection of the way he is conducting his
existence."
(Liber Null, p. 49)
Taken at face value, this may seem to be an advertisers wet dream. The
reality is that this kind of acceptance from the stage of the true self
turns all of mass media into a profound spectacle, a theater which
provides the magician with the tools for transcendance. We are marketed
to on the strength of our personas. Once we realize we can remove these
masks, suddenly the entire game shifts. Even better, it's now our move.
"How many lies, can people take
How many emotions, can people fake
All there is is time
Be what you are, don't fucking care"
("Time, Death, and Wastefulness [in dub]", Godflesh)
References --Books:
Carroll, Peter J. (1987) Liber Null and Psychonaut. Boston, MA: Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
Crowley, Aleistar. (1944) The Book of Thoth. Standford, CT: U.S. Games Systems, INC
Jung, Carl G. (1959) Four Archetypes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Kurzweil, Ray. (2005) The SIngularity is Near. London, England. Viking Penguin
Lifton, Betty Jean. (1994) Journey of the Adopted Self. New York, NY:BasicBooks
Mack, Ben, (1997) Twisp. privately circulated text
Miller, Henry V., (1941) The Wisdom of the Heart. New York, NY: New Directions Books
Rushkoff, Douglas, (1999) Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say. New York, NY: Riverhead Books
Verrier, Nancy Newton. (1993) The Primal Wound. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, Inc.
References --Web:
Barbelith (2004) Fiction Suits, http://www.barbelith.com/faq/index.php/Fiction_Suits
Burroughs, William S. (1967?) The Electronic Revolution, http://realitystudio.org/texts/electronic_revolution/
Harrigan, John (2005) "Brain Sinews" Foolish People, http://www.foolishpeople.com/foolishpeople/2005/08/brain_sinews.html
+Orc, et. al. (1997-2005) "Let's crack the slave-masters!" Reality
Cracking Section of Fravia.org
http://searchlores.org/realicra/slaves.htm
References --Other:
Godflesh. (1997) "Time, Death, and Wastefulness [In Dub]" from Love and Hate In Dub.
Supreme Power V.1 #3. (Dec. 2003) Straczynski, Frank, Sibal. New York, NY: Marvel Comics
The Truman Show (1998) Directed by Peter Weir; Screenplay by Andrew Niccol
Ocean #1-6. (2004-05) Ellis, Warren and Sprouse, Chris. La Jolla, CA: WildStorm/DC Comics
-------=======-------
#3: The Singularity Is Ultraculture (Destroy 2000 Years of Culture or, The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades)
My review of The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil:
This book was something of a catalyst; it prompted these articles,
and it should be widely available for sale in every conceivable
alternative outlet. In fact, this and A New Kind of Science by Stephen
Wolfram would make a good pair. Ideas seem to flow smoothly between the
two, and a number of issues Wolfram addresses in his text are analyzed
by Kurtzweil, providing a commentary for those out there who have no
idea what this math is all about (like me) and who are only able to
operate intuitively from the text. I don't have enough initials after
my name to be an adequete reviewer of either of these books, hence this
"grafitti on the walls of the invisible college's ivory tower" themas
for these articles.
So buy it. It'll blow your mind. Now on with the rest of the article..
Think forward! All things considered, the future is always more
important than the past. Keep your life interesting, because there's a
chance that reality might just switch off.
"Another existential risk that Bostrom and others have
identified is that we're actually living in a simulation and the
simulation will be shut down. It might appear that there's not a lot we
could do to influence this. However, since we're the subject of the
simulation, we do have the opportunity to shape what happens inside of
it. The best way we could avoid being shut down would be to be
interesting to the observers of the simulation. Assuming that someone
is actually paying attention to the simulation, it's a fair assumption
that it's less likely to be turned off when it's compelling that
otherwise...
"Our living in such a universe (created by another civilization) can be
considered a simulation scenario. Perhaps this other civilization is
running an evolutionary algorithm on our universe (that is, the
evolution we're witnessing) to create an explosion of knowledge from a
technological Singularity. If that is true, then the civilization
watching our universe might shut down the simulation if it appeared
that a knowledge Singularity had gone awry and it did not look like it
was going to occur."
(The Singularity is Near, p. 405)
So reading this book might just be vital to keeping the universe from being turned off.. i.e: "The Universe is an Alien Virus."
I've heard it said that the universe is language.(1) Not that they say
'which' language, just that it 'is' language. I happen to think it's
probably in latin. At least here, in this particular culture. Anything
in latin automatically seems, though it may be meaningless, to have a
kind of weight. It has a heaviness to it, a kind of cultural gravity.
(2)
Over time I came to the understanding that any kind of audio, music,
all of communication is a kind of language. There are bacteria that
talk to each other with chemical molecules. Ants and cats use
pheremones. The idea of language itself is higly memetic, because it is
conveyed within a communication, therefore the idea is implicit in the
medium. It gets better though.
The universe is language - and according to Burroughs language is an alien virus. So... the universe is an alien virus.
This is a fine example of nonsense that holds a secret.
More often than not it is my belief that the entire universe consists
of mind-like entities in a state of perpetual telepathic communication
with each other. Latent omniscience seems to be a logical extension of
the Jungian collective unconscious, the idea being that each of us,
below the level of consciousness, is all the time in touch with a much
wider range of information than we could ever be consciously aware.
Were we aware consciously that we were a part of this great harmony,
the integrity of our individual personalities would be compromised.
However, even if it isn't yet, this may be where we end up. Honestly, I
had to read this a few times before it made my brain melt. If you grasp
what Kurzweil's saying, and understand he migth be right, the following
paragraphs will melt your freaking skull:
"In chapter 2 I showed how we progressed from 10-_5 to 10_8
cps{computations per second-Ed.} per thousand dollars during the
twentieth century. Based on a continuation of the smooth, doubly
exponential growth that we saw in the twentieth century, I projected
that we would achieve about 10_60 cps per thousand dollars by 2100. If
we estimate a modest trillion dollars devoted to computation, that's a
total of about 10_69 cps by the end of this century. This can be
achieved with the matter and energy in our solar system.
"To get to around 10_90 cps requires expanding through the rest of the
universe. Continuing the double-exponential growth curve shows that we
can saturate the universe with our intelligence well before the end of
the twenty-second century, ~provided that~ we are not limited by the
speed of light. Even if the up-to-thirty additional powers of ten
suggested by the holographic-universe theory are borne out, we still
reach saturation by the end of the twenty-second century."
(The Singularity Is Near, p. 365-6)
Well, that certainly puts overcrowding into perspective. Saturating the
entire universe with a conscious network of information? It could be
done with any number of means. A few modifications and bactabots might
beat nanobots onto the open market.
"Quorum sensing is the ability of bacteria to communicate
and coordinate behavior via signaling molecules... depending on their
number. For example, opportunistic bacteria, such as Pseudomonas
aeruginosa can grow within a host without harming it, until they reach
a certain concentration. Then they become aggressive, their numbers
sufficient to overcome the host's immune system and form a biofilm,
leading to a disease."
(Quorum Sensing, 2006, wikipedia.org)
If we can construct and modify bacteria at will, we have computational
devices. The border between biological and digital is irrelevant. We
can eventually turn bad yoghurt into a supercomputer. And we can get
smaller still: Quantum dots, DNA computing, virtual reality using
foglets. And larger, building supercomputers in giant rings around the
sun, or utilizing black holes as computers, analyzing Hawking radiation
for data output from the equations. If all of this is theoretically
possible, then proposing that the universe is filled with vast pools of
living, conscious information becomes no longer an article of faith,
but an empirical truth. We are sculpting the akashic records into
multi-user terminals and the next real hurdle is universal
communication.
The sensory apparatus we carry with us into every situation is subject
to decay. Our only link to the objective is tenuous at best, and
steadily deteriorating.
This has led to a constant scrutiny by academic researchers, convinced
that at some point they or their protege or their colleagues will
someday uncover a secret of life extension and enhancement that would
reverse this entropic trend.
They call themselves extropians, or transumanists, futants,
singulatarians,or futurists, but their goals remain the same:
Transformation of the mortal human to the immortal transhuman.
Even more important than their objectives though are their social
circles. These are freethinkers whose ideology is not constrained by
moral obligations. There is no moralism inherent in transhumanism -
instead there is an ambiguous ethical stance based primarily on
enlightened self-interest.
And the best way to get there, to achieve the singularity is to get the
message out there and to achieve some sort of dialogue about the
future. Even things as far off the radar as enhanced-animal rights:
Grant Morrison hit the nail on the head with WE3, and I can't wait to
see that shit on a movie screen. He's not the only author out there who
is bringing these fringe issues into cultural dialogue, but he's very
high profile right now because his work in comics is reaching an
incredible number of people each month.
In fact, a number of the technologies explored in detail in Ray
Kurzweil's book are illustrated in the works of comic book authors. In
Grant Morrison's Superman run these technologies are impacting the
cultural background. He even put the X-Men up against nanosentinels.
Foglets were first introduced to me in the pages of Transmetropolitan,
and in fact transhumanism themes are scattered all over Warren Ellis'
fiction. Nanotechnology is playing increasingly important roles in
plot-lines of mainstream comics. We are being provided with hints about
our future from the most unlikely corners just like Philip K Dick
intimated in his journals and novels. Nonlinear thinking creates new
networks, and these networks have a very real effect in the overall
production of knowledge.
DC is doing a stellar job presenting the implicit fear and destroying
it with illusion. The O.M.A.C. or One Man Army Corps story that began
with the death of Blue Beetle, involves a secret spy installation
developed by Batman and controlled by an Artificial Intelligence, that
has infected millions of humans with nanobots. Using these devices, the
AI is able to instantly call up an army of metahumans given incredible
powers by these microscopic devices flowing through their cells. Greg
Rucka, a Wonder Woman veteran writer, pened these storylines, and he
aptly illustrates both political and scientific criticisms within the
confines of that most unliterary of forms, the superhero comic. There
is something going on here, it is a cultural shift, and it is beginning
in the fringes. The ghettos. Art isn't fine anymore.. fine art has lost
its soul, and it is up to the fringe to do the shamanic thing and
retrieve it before all of culture (especially in america) shallows
itself into the grave.
Comics help get in where pure symbols can't go. Sub-symbolic sets are
communicated through the non-textual clues. Comics are high-speed
seepage from the collective cultural construct to the staging area for
the subconscious. I ain't even fucking kidding. Let me stop a moment
and quote a lengthy passage from Philip K Dick's book VALIS, because
quite frankly it addresses memetics as the foundation of religion in a
very interesting way:
"Fat trembled.
"'Yes,' Dr. Stone said. 'The Logos would be living information, capable of replicating.'
"'Replicating not through information,' Fat said, 'in information, but
as information. This is what Jesus meant when he spoke elliptically of
the 'mustard seed' which, he said, 'would grow into a tree large enough
for birds to roost in'.'
"'There is no mustard tree,' Dr. Stone agreed. 'So Jesus could not have
meant that literally. That fits with the so-called 'secrecy' theme of
Mark; that he didn't want outsiders to know the truth. And you know?'
"'Jesus foresaw not only his own death but that of all--' Fat
hesitated. 'Homoplasmates. That's a human being to which the plasmate
has crossbonded. Interspecies symbiosis. As living information the
plasmate travels up the optic nerve of a human host to the pineal body.
It uses the human brain as a female host--'
"Dr Stone grunted and squeezed himself violently.
"'--in which to replicate itself into its active form,' Fat said. 'The
Hermetic alchemists knew of it in theory from ancient texts but could
not duplicate it, since they could not locate the dormant buried
plasmate.'"
(VALIS, 1981, Philip K Dick p.52)
Comics transcend written text. The sketch of Wonder Woman, or Batman,
or whatever underwear pervert you choose, thier existence is obvious
even if you don't have the capacity to understand the english in the
text balloons. They are showed in situations identifiable based on
visual elements as much as by the accompanying text. They exist as
entities of information, with a medium complex enough to generate an
environment where they can change and grow.
Meanwhile, a dictionary is the hypertext of everything written in the
language it comprises. (3) In Bill Whitcomb's book The Magician's
Companion he says "When you symbolize something, you impose the deep
structure of the symbol system used on the way you perceive the thing
symbolized." Just simply naming somthing isn't enough to grasp the
essence of a spirit, at least not in english. Bill Whitcomb goes on to
state that "Any Pattern of Sufficient complexity will act intelligent
when treated as an entity."
Language is an incredibly complex and adaptable entity, and the greater
context of language when including all those triggers which convey
information are included gives a profound multi-layered experience in
which we are all awash. This overall context can never be fully
controlled with today's technology, but that will not be the case a few
years from now. What kind of strange new manifestations are we going to
encounter when we gain complete and utter control of the experiences an
individual can have? I'm going to flat out tell you I want to go to
this school. Check this shit out, this is where it really gets fucking
great:
"A recent experiment at the University of California at San
Diego's Institute for Nonlinear Science demonstrates the potential for
electronic neurons to precisely emulate biological ones... They
connected artificial neurons with real neurons from spiny lobsters in a
single network, and their hybrid biological-nonbiological network
performed in the same way (that is, chaotic interplay followed by a
stable emergent pattern) and with the same type of results as an
all-biological net of neurons. Essentially, the biological neurons
accepted their electronic peers...."
(The Singularity is Near, 2005, Ray Kurzweil, p.173)
I can't imagine how thrilled they were at the Institute for Nonlinear
Science when they accomplished this, but it's just the tip of the
iceberg, really. We're on the goddamned threshold and immortality is in
our grasp (so long as we don't live in missouri). People are hungry for
revelatory experience, and if it is relevant to their life all the
better. Transendance is not only a real possibility it is inevitable:
We will evolve, we haven't stopped, and it's getting faster all the
time.
You see, servers are the neurons of the internet's brain. Servers
aren't conscious, neither are neurons. You don't get altered by the
loss of a neuron here or there. Neurons in themselves are not sentient.
But you are, and the internet is the perfect environment in which a
digital consciousness can merge. William Gibson's Neuromancer outlines
the emergence of Wintermute, easily the most iconic of literary AI. He
explores the concept of metabiological entities further in other books,
as have numerous other authors (4)
"a century of developments in physics has taught us that
information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes.
Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton
University, is to regard the physical world as made of information,
with energy and matter as incidentals."
(Information in the Holographic Universe, Scientific American, August
2003, Jacob D. Bekenstein)
Of course, this is only one cosmological paradigm, but this model helps
propose certain triggers by which we can circumvent the internal censor
in order to recieve information from this vast universal pool of
information.
Ray Kurzweil quotes Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert in a subsection of
the book entitled Modeling Regions of the Brain as follows:
"Most probably the human brain is, in the main, comprised
of large numbers of relatively small distributed systems, arranged by
embryology into a complex society that is controlled in part (but only
in part) by serial, symbolic systems that are added later. But the
subsymbolic systems that do most of the work from underneath must, by
their very character, block all the other parts of the brain from
knowing much about how they work. And this, itself, could help explain
how people do so many things yet have such incomplete ideas on how
those things are actually done."
(Quote from 'Perceptrons' by Minsky and Papert, via R. Kurzweil)
Sub-symbolic sets must act upon symbols, and it is through the use of
these symbols over time and observing the energy that accretes and
modifies the symbol that we begin to see what is going on under the
layers of consciousness.
In fact, there is some evidence to show that the brain is always a step
ahead of the conscious mind, and the conscious mind is only there to
act as apologist for the actions and impulses generated in a
pre-conscious staging area. More from The Singularity is Near:
"Work by physiology professor Benjamin Libet at the
University of California at Davis shows that neural activity to
initiate an action actually occurs about a third of a second before the
brain has made the decision to take the action. The implication,
according to Libet, is that the decision is really an illusion, that
'consciousness is out of the loop.' The cognitive scientist and
philosopher Daniel Dennett describes the phenomenon as follows:'The
action is originally precipitated in some part of the brain, and off
fly the signals to the muscles, pausing en route to tell you, the
conscious agent, what is going on (but like all good officials letting
you, the bumbling president, maintain the illusion that you started it
all.)'"
(The Singularity is Near, p. 191)
This is another of many moments in reading the text that I had to read
aloud to anyone nearby. More work along these lines has been done by
Semir Zeki in articles nearly too dense for me to penetrate, but whose
implications (if I'm interpreting them properly) are somewhat
unsettling. Reality, and our illusion of free-will, is entirely up for
grabs, and for the most part the only thing doing any grabbing is our
collective unconscious. So, lest we all become little Id babies,
painting the walls of the black iron prison with our shit, lets try to
figure out what to do with this new understanding.
To begin with, it makes meditation and martial arts look a lot more
scientific. We do before we be, to make a phrase of it. To me this is
the difference between saying "I am a writer" and saying "I write."
Action before thought - if you wait to think through it you are
handicapping yourself. Carrying this understanding at all times keeps
the mind from getting too high an opinion of itself.
It also goes a long way towards providing a framework to understand
just what kind of topology the Global Consciousness Project out of
Stanford Research Institute is mapping. I believe that time is not
linear. Time is a topology intimately linked with space, and our
experience in time is projected to us through preconscious filters as
linear. It's probably more puddle-like. We drop into a time-space where
a certain number of things are going to happen, but the order is
somewhat unknown. Each event causes a ripple, and the more important
the event - ie the more conscious entities affected by it, the bigger
the ripple. We are the consciousnesses making the water molecules of
each time puddle.(5)
Looking over the results published at the Global Consciousness Project,
it is readily apparent that large-scale group meditations and massive
losses of life both disturb the fabric of randomness, as measured by
random number generators. It's not disputable, and the more random
number generators added to the research don't fuzz out the results,
they actually provide greater resolution. This is profound. I can't
tell you what it means, I can only aspire to adapt intuitively to this
awareness. Even more disturbing to a materialist worldview, these
results begin before the event, sometimes as much as by fifteen
minutes, according to the published results.(6)
We are poised on an entirely new reality, an Aeon defined by quantum
events, radical change, and incredible achievments. Magic has as much a
responsibility as science in this new Aeon, and the implications will
destroy the conventions of religions and political structures. Economic
theory will have to be altered. Lifestyles will change. Our ideas of
beauty, of humanity, and of reality will evolve. And consciousness will
become the roadmap for nanoengineering projects. Comic books right now
provide the most accessible vision of the coming world, and I for one
couldn't be more excited.
Footnotes:
(1) "In the beginning was the word...", or McKenna's "language is partially the key here/machine elves"
(2) J. K. Rowling uses this cultural quirk to good effect in the Harry potter series.
(3) Some of us have access to Websters, others to the OED.
(4) Charles deLint's Spirit in the Wires is a particular favorite of mine in this sub-genre of fiction.
(5) And I assure you, I typed most of that with a straight face.
(6) http://noosphere.princeton.edu/results.html
references - Books:
Dick, Philip K. (1981) VALIS. New York, NY. Bantam Books
Kurzweil, Ray. (2005) The SIngularity is Near. London, England. Viking Penguin
Whitcomb, Bill. (1997) The Magicians Companion. St. Paul, MN. Llewellyn Publications
references - Other:
Current Results, Empirical Normalization, http://noosphere.princeton.edu/results
The OMAC Project #1-6 (2005) Rucka, Greg and Saiz, Jesus. New York, NY: DC Comics
TRANSMETROPOLITAN Back on the Street (1998) Ellis, Warren and Robertson, Darick. New York, NY: Vertigo/DC Comics
Quorum Sensing, Wikipedia.org, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing
What is Quorum Sensing? http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/quorum/whatmain.htm
Jacob D. Bekenstein, "Information in the Holographic Universe:
Theoretical Results about Black Holes Suggest That the Universe Could
Be Like A Gigantic Hologram," Scientific American 289.2 (August 2003):
58-65,
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000AF072-4891-1F0A-97AE80A84189EEDF
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#4 Ideas With Teeth
Before I even get underway, I want to explore a term that has been bumping around in my head for several years. That term is "Hyperglyphic," and my decision to start thinking about this word can be traced in origin to Grant Morrison refering to The Invisibles as a hypersigil. He even incorporates a sigil in the letters column of The Invisibles, V.1 No.16 for the stated purpose of doubling the number of people who buy The Invisibles, and the sigil was fired into the collective unconscious by an untold number of individuals on Nov. 23rd, 1995.
While this might have been the very first consciously initiated mass magickal marketing, it also provided me with a lot of food for thought about the way that comics themselves operate.
A glyph is a symbol that conveys information non-verbally. Pictographs, geometric shapes, and even shades of color can all convey meaning without resorting to specific languages. A hyperglyphic work incorporates many such glyphic emblems into a cohesive whole, and allows for information to be spread no matter what native language a reader may read and speak. It allows ideas to transcend language by their very construction. Currently, only comics seem to have embraced the possibilities this kind of static media, but the use of such symbolizing of information is one of the incredibly powerful tools in the magus' toolbox.
I've called this article "Ideas with Teeth" in allusion to the Hebrew letter Shin. I wrote extensively about Egregores in MG#1, and made reference Paco Xander Nathan's article Chasing Egregores in which he explores the kabbalistic formula used to generate egregores through ritual magic. In that article I was concerned with institutional egregores, in this article I am focusing on characters and groups that can become egregores. This is what Nathan wrote:
"... the shin must be inserted between the first he and the vau. Since this represent's a 'decoy,' i.e., a kind of inversion of stated purpose, it would appear to serve as a reflex mechanism for self-preservation. That seems reminiscent of the dialectic of sublation, particularly if the inversion concerns pumping stereotypical corporate spin into the media." (Chasing Egregores, Paco Xander Nathan)
Let's take a moment to understand what this does. The dialectic of sublation in a magical process allows the ritual entity to contain within itself its own negation. The dynamic tention of this allows for manifestation of energy. The definition of sublate means to negate an element in a dialectic process but still preserve it as a partial element in a synthesis. To place this within a viral context, Shin not only empowers the egregore, it also acts as an innoculation against conflicting entities within the ideosphere.
I know, I'm getting pretty out there in my linguistic manipulations. So far I've thrown the words hyperglyph, hypersigil, and ideosphere out there and I haven't even started to quote from any comics. But before we get into the structural theory and the various examples, let's look at some of the ways other people have approached these concepts.
Aleister Crowley, in his introduction to his translation of the Tao Teh King, described the situation thusly:
"Nothing exists except as a relation with other similarly postulated ideas. Nothing can be known in itself but only as one of the participants in a series of events. Reality is therefore in the motion, not in the thing moved. We cannot apprehend anything except as one postulated element of an observed impression of change."
(Aleister Crowley, Liber 157: Tao Teh King, 1975)
Alan Moore, no stranger to the theories of Aleister Crowley, brought this concept into a discussion he had with BBC journalist Scott Thill:
"Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I've found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as someting that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they've referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature.
"I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don't know because I can't imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I'm not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we've evolved from."
(Alan Moore and Scott Thill, "The Man Who Invented The Future," July 22,2004)
To bring this back to the topic at hand, a year earlier Alan Moore was interviewed by Locus regarding League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
"The more I've thought about this, it occurs to me that as long as there's been a world we have been creating an imaginary counterpart to that world with different places, different people, different history, and to some degree that phantom world of the imagination has co-existed with our own. All of us, at various points in our lives, have found ourselves spending more time on that imaginary planet than we have upon our own world. We may well find in the later stages of our life that there are places from that imaginary world that we remember more vividly than actual physical locations we have visited. We may find that fictional characters, the inhabitants of that world, are more familiar, more dear to us, more memorable than a lot of the real flesh and blood people who may have been our acquaintances.
"There is obviously something important in this. If we did not have some kind of biological or cultural need to create these imaginary spaces and these imaginary beings. I really don't think nature would have given us the capacity to do it. Nature doesn't generally provide a lot of things that are purely there for decoration or entertainment. Most things have to do with the quite stark issues of survival, and I've got no reason to suppose the human capacity for art and fiction and imagination is not in that category."
(Alan Moore and Mark Askwith, "In League with Alan Moore," July 2003)
In reading Alan Moore'sbody of work, it becomes evident that these ideas have been floating around his head for quite a while. An interchange between Abby and Able in The Saga of the Swamp Thing #33, originally published in February 1985, penned by Alan Moore and drawn by Ron Randall, reads as follows:
"Abby: A bracelet?
"Able: Bracelet? Oh, no! No, it just looks like a bracelet. It's really a story, a special circular story that goes round and round...
"Abby: But what does it have to do with me?
"Able: Ahhhh! Now that's the secret! You're not an ordinary woman, you know. Some strange stories have intruded upon your life lately...
"Abby: Stories? Everything that's happened to me has been real...
"Able: Oh please. It was just a figure of speech. Don't take offence. You see, in a way, everything is made of stories."
(Alan Moore, The Saga of the Swamp Thing #33)
Promethea stands out as one of the best explorations of the Western Esoteric Tradition, packing more information per page than most books on the occult contain in an entire chapter. Alan Moore returns to this very thesis in issue #15 of Promethea, presenting it as a dialogue between two of Promethea's avatars, Sophie and Barbara, and the god Hermes:
"Hermes: It's all a story, isn't it? It's all fiction, all language... It can change like quicksilver.
"Sophie: But... this isn't fiction. This is our real life.
"Hermes: Ha Ha! Real life. Now that's a fiction for you! What's it made from? Memories? Impressions? A sequence of pictures, a scattering of half-recalled words... Dis-jointed hieroglyphic comic strips, unwinding in our recollection... Language. To perceive form... even the form or shape of your own lives... you must dress it in language. Language is the stuff of form. Mathematics, for example, is a language. Consider the forms it produces...
"Barbara: So... everything's made of language? We're made of language? Even you?
"Hermes: Oh, especially me! How could humans perceive gods... abstract essences... without clothing them in imagery, stories, pictures... ...or picture-stories, for that matter.
"Sophie: Picture-stories?
"Hermes: Oh, you know: heiroglyphics. Vase paintings. Whatever did you think I meant? Besides, what could be more appropriate than for a language-god to manifest through the original pictographic form of language?
"Sophie: Uhh... so like, what are you saying?
"Hermes: What am I saying? I'm saying some fictions might have a real god hiding beneath the surface of the page. I'm saying some fictions might be alive... ...that's what I'm saying."
(Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III, "Mercury Rising" Promethea #15)
With this as an introduction, let's step away from Alan Moore's work for a moment and start to examine the mechanics behind generating a living fiction. Don't worry, we'll come back to Alan Moore before this is all over, but first I want to bring this back under the aegis of magical theory by way of Hakim Bey's examination of the renaissance magi's understanding of emblems:
"The Renaissance magi (especially Athanasius Kircher) believed that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were purely platonic (—in this, they followed Plotinus and lamblichus)—that is, that each image was an ideal form, and that their deployment could not only indicate meaning but also create and project it. Thus the hieroglyphs were seen as an ideal amalgam of text and image—an emblematic form of writing. Now when Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone, it was discovered that hieroglyphs were already used quasi-alphabetically (on the model of 'picture foot = phoneme p'), although there were also cases where single images or imageclusters represented the objects depicted as words. This discovery relegated the unsuccessful translation attempts of the old magi to complete oblivion. Their theories are now only mentioned in passing as examples of 'false' hermetic science and bad Egyptology. But as Couliano noted, these discarded theories have great secret heuristic power, because they describe empirically some of the ways in which text, image, and mind interact. Once the neo-platonic metaphysics and crude magical fantasies have been discarded, hieroglyphic theory can be used to understand the mode of operation of text/image complexes—that is, emblems.
"The emblem books were Renaissance experiments in the 'projective semiotics' of hieroglyph-theory. Allegorical pictures accompanied by texts (often one text in prose and one in poetry)—and in a few cases even by music (the great Atalanta Fugiens of Michael Maier, for example)—were collected in sequences, published as books, and intended for the magical edification of readers. The 'morals' of the emblems were thus conveyed on more than one level at once. Each emblem was simultaneously:
"a) a picture accompanied by words;
"b) a picture 'translated' from words. That is, the pictures' real values are not purely formal but also allegorical, so that Hercules stands for 'strength', Cupid for 'desire', and the emblem itself can be read as a 'sentence' composed of these 'words';
" c) a hieroglyphic 'coding' in which certain images not only represent words but also 'express the essence' of those words, and project them in a 'magical' manner, whether or not the reader is consciously aware of this process.
"Our working hypothesis is that the world's image of itself not only defines its possibilities but also its limits. The world's representation of itself to itself (its 'macrocosmic' image) is no more and no less than the self's 'microcosmic' image of itself 'writ large' so to speak, on the level or mentalité and the imaginaire. This is part of our 'secularized' hermetic theory; it explains, for instance, why emblems have influences on multiple levels of cognition."
(Hakim Bey, "The Obelisk" 1997)
This "false hermetic science" is the ancient foundation on which Grant Morrison's aforementioned hypersigilic work rests. The Invisibles egregore buries itself deep into your psyche, and becomes activated on different levels in response to external stimuli. I wish I could just show you this in person, but if you've made it this far into the article I'm sure you are starting to understand something of the lineage of the comics industry. Now let's look at my theories regarding the use of comics as an engine for creating and maintaining egregores.
I have identified a few primary points by which characters become unhinged from their narrative enough to collect free belief and engender themeselves in the collective unconsciousness.
* different artists and writers providing source energy
* multiple forms of media presences (video games, movies, cartoons, tv shows, books, rpg's)
* characters based on ancient mythologies reinvented for today (Marvel's Thor, for example.)
* same character, different situation &/or universe (for the most extreme example, check out Amazon, a cross between Wonder Woman and Storm)
These are spontaneous methods. A consciously designed comic book character seems to come to a level approaching that of a servitor on it's own quite simply. Two characters that come to mind immediately for me are Dogwith, created and written by Daniel Schaffer, and Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose, written and produced by Jim Balent and Holly Golightly. Tarot seems to have achieved egregore-hood through the magical work of her fans without the use of non-narrative situations, and will remain an exception that proves the rule, as it were. (1) Dogwitch, while still being a servitor, does have a sigil associated with her character for summmoning purposes.
Violet Grimm, aka Dogwitch, is one of my personal favorite "post-neo-pagans" out there in comic form, and the approach to Tarot in issue #10 is both innovative and funny. Reading all 18 issues left me feeling vindicated in my worldview, while slightly dirty around the edges (kinda like reading The Filth.) But on to the other new godforms out there...
Dawn, the creation of Joe Lindsner, is also verging on godform, in part because he has gone to such lengths to present her story against numerous different contexts. I believe that there is something pure in a creation maintained by an individual, but when numerous authors and artists get a chance to explore different facets of a character, the real energy seems to crackle forth. Dogwitch is by far the least acknowledged of these three, and there's plenty more out there that fill these specific requirements for individual creations come to life through comics.
Comics creators are aware of these ideas. In Astro City Vol. 2 Issue #13 the character Loony Leo is brought to life through consensus belief, and goes on to live an existence maintained by the source material present in culture from which he was generated. Astro City, while appearing somewhat sporadically throughout its run, has consistently good writing, amazing covers by Alex Ross, and deals with superheroes as secondary to the social structure in which they exist. Still, in part because it is published by an independant, the characters don't become trully resonate as an egregore, but instead remain fictional devices.
More mainstream comics titles go through the hands of countless writers and artists during their run. Most of the most popular titles, The X-Men, The New Avengers, The JLA, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Amazing Spiderman and Superman, for starters, have been written and drawn by so many people that the characters themselves are now products of a vast network of minds. This seems to immdiately fulfill the requirements of at least one part of the egregore equation. My favorite DC character, John Constantine, no longer has anyone willing to take credit for his creation. In essence, at least as far as creator rights go, he has appeared of his own accord.
Marvel, hands down, has done the best job of creating a universe against which its superheroes can interact. Mutants are cooler than Meta-humans. The storylines interlock better, and the overall tone seems more consistent. That said, DC does a better job with magic. Let's back up from these sweeping generalizations and take a look at Earth 616, the designation given to Marvel Universe main continuity by Alan Moore in the Mad Jim Jaspers storyline of Captain Britain. Later, in eXiles currently, or during the Day of Apocalypse sequence of events, characters are ripped from universe to universe, encountering radically different social and political structures. Mini-series are spawned tracking the exploits of characters across these alternate realities before placing the characters back in a state of grace.
It is a function of dismooring a character from a narrative that leads them to begin to act autonomously in the ideosphere. Dismooring a character from a narrative means that the character appears outside of its original fictional context. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was built upon this premise, taking characters from historical fiction and blending their backgrounds into a new meta-narrative.(2) The various Earths of DC Comics before "Crisis on Infinite Earths" in the late Eighties brought them back togther through the process of a singleton (find wiki link), an entity that only existed in one universe. In Marvel Comics, the M'Kraan Crystal functions as the singleton, the nexus of all possible existences.
I'm not positive, but the first appearance of this crystal seems to be related to the original Pheonix saga. It becomes an item of primary importance during The Age of Apocalypse, and in Vol.1 No.3 of Gambit and the X-Ternals, May '95, it is described as follows:
"...the inside of the M'Kraan crystal-- the neutron sun-- is a nexus point between all matter and all anti-matter! That means all matter and all anti-matter -- crossing over to every single different reality in existence! Think of the M'Kraan like a doorway... It's necessary to always keep that door closed, not just in one reality, but in all of them. If that door were to have been left open... let's say in the world you know as 'real'... -- then the draft would eventually reach other realities and worlds, affecting the people which live in them.(3)"
(Salvador Larroca and Al Milgrom, Gambit and the X-Ternals V.1 #3)
This crystal forms something of the headquarters for The eXiles, one of the titles to arise from the ashes of The Age of Apocalypse cycle. In this title, the M'Kraan is shown to be somewhat "infested" with insect-like machine-intelligences, manipulating the "Superheroes(tm)" from thier place in a hyperdimensional construct that allows them access to all possible universes.(4) In the introduction to part four of the "Timebreakers" story arc of The eXiles, the interior of the M'Kraan crystal is described:
"After teammates SASQUATCH and BEAK mysteriously vanish, the Exiles grow fed up with the way the TIMEBROKER has been treating them. They travel to the extra-dimensional source of their missions to finally confront the Timebroker. What they find is the PANOPTICHRON. a strange crystalline observatory overlooking every timeline and alternate reality in the Multiverse. Operating this outpost is a contingent of insect-like alien scientists. The Timebroker, it turns out, is not a real person at all, but an illusion the aliens project to communicate with the Exiles and their more ruthless sister-team, WEAPON X."
(Tony Bedard and Mizuki Sakakibara, "Timebreakers Conclusion" The eXiles #65)
Those familiar with the writings of Terrance McKenna will find strange resonances with his description of trans-dimensional machine-elves and the insectoid scientists operating an observatory outside space and time. The story told through issues 61-65 explain how the teams have been performing operations to re-establish the stability of an untold umber of parallel universes accidentally damaged by these scientists early expiraments. For our purposes, Issue #65 serves as an important illustration of a character taken from his standard narrative and recast in a new situation, helping to define the character apart from his basic narrative; namely the character Hyperion.
Hyperion from three separate universes ends up confronting himselves in this place outside space and time. Hyperion is a Marvel character that closely resembles DC's character Superman, an archetypal character at this point who has manifested in countless ways since his first appearance.(5) Presenting three different Hyperions from three different parallel universes, non of which appear to be the normal continuity from which Hyperion was originally presented, provides a fine example of one of the points necessary for this kind of "spontaneous egregoreship" I'm describing. An earlier example of an archetype coming to life briefly through a variety of publishers is the oft-forgot critter Howard the Duck. After a series of conflicts, the creator, Steve Gerber, re-created Howard as Destroyer Duck for Eclipse Comics, with the proceeds from that comic going to his lawsuit against Marvel to regain the rights to Howard. He failed, but not before Howard even showed up, albeit surrepitously, in DC's run of Swamp Thing as the unlikely Pog.
DC, in the pages of Sandman and Wonder Woman most glaringly, but throughout a number of other titles as well, has used the concepts of deities as characters. This re-infusing of creative energy in mythic archetypes provides a very direct line of imagination for communicating with these energies. I understand Neil Gaiman will be authoring a series called The Eternals, which I suspect will also explore this approach. Certainly the character Thor has been a Marvel Comics staple character for a few score years now. Re-animating myth in this way is a kind of slow invokation, one who's consequences may not even be felt until the entire narrative has come full circle - an extended ritual working of which even those engaged in the ritual actions are not fully aware.
I've been circuling around the topic of space-time magic in comics without actually coming right out and addressing it specifically. I would not have begun this series of articles without access to the ideas in Space-Time Magic by Taylor Ellwood, and this article in particular represents an inquiry into the ideas he tackles in several chapters of that book. I'd like to quote a passage here, that helped me set the tone for this article when I set out to initially write it:
"Another approach to retroactive workings is to use comics as a tool. I've foung ideas that can be adapted and used for space/time magic in a lot of Alan Moore's works, particularly in Watchmen. The concept Moore uses does not need to have the format of a comic to be useful, but reading the comic and seeing how the author manipulates space/time via this medium is a very non-linear experience. Part of what creates that experience is the way you physically read comics. Your eyes might range from panel to panel in an orderly left to right manner only some of the time. Some of the comic panels might be arranged for a different kind of reading, in that your gaze has to move around the page in a non-linear way in order to read the story. I find that each comic panel represents a specific moment. You can go back and forth from moment to moment, with each moment coming alive at the time it needs to exist. Because panels are used as the medium for reading, space and time occur together... So the reader experiences nonlinear reality through each panel, which is another reason the technique works so well."
(Space/Time Magic - 2005, Taylor Ellwood, p.62-63)
This use of imagery as a portal into a specific moment throughout a character's existence has never been done as eloquently as in Rick Veitch's story "Greyshirt" that appears in Tomorrow Stories #2, published by America's Best Comics. 48 Panels across eight pages present not simply a story, but a narrative that comes from an equation like the gemetria squares of the planets that produce the same number no matter which way you do the math. A magic square, but of story, rather than number. Certainly this use of comic creation has been used elsewhere (Promethea's travels through the Tree of Life use this technique) but the way in which Rick Veitch tackles this problem remains a singular moment in the history of comics. And while you're at it, check out The One.
Footnotes:
(1) I love what Jim Balent has done with Tarot, and I was excited enough when it first came out to write him and Holly - my letter is published back in issue #4, and my cat appears in the letter column of #7 on the back of a friend.
(2) I understand that Lost Girls, another Alan Moore comic, works along similar lines.
(3) This isn't just comic book science, I've read at least one article proposing the possibility that parallel universes may collide. (article)
(4) Although it should be noted that they are not able to see into universe 616 during the events of the House of M, further re-inforcing the incredible strength of the Scarlet Witch.
(5) It would be a daunting task to say the least to attempt to catalogue all the ways the archetype Superman represents has re-manifest through publishing houses other than DC, but I definately want to recommend the comics Invincible. Another side of Superman's archetype can be seen in The Pro, released by Image comics as a one-shot, and written by Garth Ennis with pencils and lettering by Amanda Conner and inks by Jimmy Palmiotti.*
*(Go on. Read The Pro. You know you want to...)
References - Web
Nathan, Paco Xander. "Chasing Egregores," The Scarlet Letter, March 2001, http://www.scarletwoman.org/scarletletter/v6n1/v6n1_egregores.html
Moore, Alan and Thill, Scott. "The Man Who Invented The Future," Salon.com July 22,2004
http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2004/07/22/moore/index.html
Bey, Hakim. "The Obelisk," 1997
http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/obelisk.htm
Aleister Crowley, Liber 157: Tao Teh King, 1975
http://deoxy.org/taowley.htm
References - Comics
Dogwitch #10, 14 Sirius Entertainment, LLC. Unadilla, NY
EXILES #62-65 Marvel Comics NY,NY
Gambit and the X-Ternals V.1 No.3 Marvel Comics NY,NY
Promethea #15 America's Best Comics, LLC
The Invisibles, V.1 No.16 DC/Vertigo. NY, NY
The Saga of the Swamp Thing #32, #33 DC (reprinted as Essential Vertigo: Swamp Thing #13, #14, Dec. 97)
Tomorrow Stories, #2 ABC/Wildstorm La Jolle, CA
Amazon, #1 Amalgam Comics NY,NY
References - Other
Ellwood, Taylor (2005) Space/Time Magic. Stafford, England. Immanion Press
Moore, Alan and Askwith, Mark. "In League with Alan Moore," LOCUS Vol. 51 No.1, July 2003
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