Ripe as Fuck

Resurrect Dead, Doug Nox

This book.  Changed everything, most things, perhaps nothing.  Nothing is the most profound thing you can change, I think, change nothing and everything falls right into place.  If Pomba Gira is the fig tree then Exu is the fruit of it, low hanging and ripe as fuck.  In the corner where the candles burn, where the resins sizzle on the charcoals, where my book and my old .45 lay an old pocket watch now lives, threaded on the silver chain upon which old Gede’s grinning skull is hung.  That watch changed everything, perhaps nothing.  An old preacher left his children weeping in a hallway, left them forever, a passage that will go almost entirely unnoticed by the world at large but was marked for those few by an old pocket watch, a pair of boots, a handsome coat and an elegant old fishing pole.  I was the watch, that old pocket watch that somehow weighed the weight of the world.  I hung on that chain like daybreak.

I wrote once that the dead were a crowd of boko that gathered about the child of the west.  It felt that way, untethered as we are from our past, a hundred thousand ghetto-born not knowing the names of even their parents every day.  All you had to do was listen to them and they could teach you the secrets, any secrets, they came from all over and died here without names.  That old watch had a name though; a full name and a secret one and I knew them both.  It was the watch that changed the mandala of sigils we lay out in cascarilla and the fine pink sugar left when you evaporate good rum on the floor beneath the book, the gun, the burning candles and smoking resins. 

The whole of the universe as I understand it is on that floor, you can change my mind, you can make me feel things, you can haunt my dreams but to have moved a single grain of sugar on that floor is to have moved the worlds themselves.  At least, that is what has happened to me and it was Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold’s book "Exu & the Quimbanda of Night and Fire" which illuminated that new shape.  I am full of gratitude, a word which falls short of the feeling I think, that a resource such as this existed for me when it did.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about when I sat down to do this.  I am certainly not telling any of you fuckers the details of my blood-secrets.  The book is a nexus of feelings and personal relevance’s and sudden understandings for me, to which my ramblings about watches and sugar bear witness.  You should read it I think though, while it could be that it is my own sympathies talking here, I think this particular work (especially in concert with Pomba Gira) is his most powerful.  It feels to me like there is something of the man caught up in the work.  I know how it works, these devil’s bargains.  He made you bleed for it I bet, made you bleed all over it. 

Don’t be mad, but I am glad for it.  Makes the whole thing fucking amazing, closes the loop.  A book of devil’s bargains written as a devil’s bargain.

Untethered as we are, we do destruction and chaos like nobody else and to love in the midst of all that, to pursue your desire through that carnage is to love purely, I think.  That book is a crowd of devils doing what they love, doing what they do best.  It is a visceral experience for the reader to be jostled about in that number.  There will be a familiar face in that crowd for many of us in the untamed America’s, I’ll wager.  Some hustler or whore who had only dark seeds, who sowed them anyway and reaped their weight in gold. 

There is lots of lists and background research into parallels in old world necromancy and animism and ritual references.  I was pretty excited about that when I first read through the book last winter but all of that collapsed into a singularity, a watch and a devil and an untethered spirit.  Now that singularity is all I got, which I imagine is how it should be.  Obviously, I am not going to wax the scholar, too much emotion in this business already to even attempt it but I will point out that the scholarly meat of the text in no way isolates or alienates the reader.  Rather it stands as a testament to our disparate beginnings; for they are the reason the world’s legacy currently blossoms within the Creoles of the New World. 

Untethered we may be, loving like furies and demons amidst the wreckage of the old world but loving nonetheless.  That is the secret of the world and its legacy, the simple part that most usually escapes the scholars and their books of god algebra.  Death does not truly separate lovers of any kind; it enshrines them like the dark gods they are.

So this is my offering of thanks Nicholaj and it is heartfelt because the sacrifice at the center of this book was your sacrifice and it moved the worlds. 

http://www.scarletimprint.com/pombagira.htm

http://www.scarletimprint.com/exu.html

http://www.starrycave.com/

Chasing Pidgins

or A Brief Return to the Shores of Fitzrovia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s my theory anyway.  

Drinking in Fitzrovia

or Hands like Two Balloons

I was discussing Gordon’s most recent blog post with him over my coffee this morning, it’s a thought provoking read for those of you humble enough to always be looking to improve the efficacy of your practice.  Currently, we don’t talk much about the practice of compiling and utilizing alpha-numeric sigils but ten thousand years ago in 1992 it was a hotly debated form of magical technique.  It was hotly debated because it is a volatile methodology which is notorious for its spectacularly mixed results.  Often for newcomers they simply failed to work and when they did work it would often be in counter-productive ways.  Nonetheless, A.O. Spare style sigils (comprised of statements of magical intent) were a corner stone of IOT influenced chaos magic.

The idea traditionally being, that the subconscious is where the magic happens.  That efficiently communicating your desire to your unconscious mind is essentially dictating it to the universe.  The problem then arises (and is nicely fleshed out in the military research referenced in Gordon’s post) that alphabets and numerals are conscious affectations.  The unconscious can’t read and it doesn’t do math.  It works in metaphor and symbolism.  Spare (and later Carroll who formulated the IOT’s methodologies) theoretically circumvented this problem by taking the letters which comprised their magical statement of intent [I will work at the Porn Shop] and then created an abstract symbol out of them.  A sensible solution if a bit overly simplistic, some event was construed to ‘blank’ the conscious mind like orgasm or whatever and that was the bare bones of your ritual.

The problem, as the military classifies it, is ‘frontloading’.  To return to my earlier illustration, the individual would then lay there masturbating and staring at their sigil while thinking about all the awesome free porn they are about to get.  Then the next day the porn shop calls and says they don’t need you right now but will totally think of you if a position opens and you find a bunch of free porn in the recycling outside.  The problem being that your imagination, expectations and desires are all more impactful on your unconscious than your cute little abstract reduction.  The most commonly held solution to this problem was to be painfully exact in your intent and to blank the mind of desire and expectation.  The second problem was undirected manifestation, [I will obtain an additional $5000] because I am short on my taxes.  The next day the individual is permanently injured in a forklift accident and his employers settle with him for $5000.  This was often circumvented through the vehicle of statements of intent that read like Lady GaGa’s record contract; essentially chaos magic was crossing over into Faustian bargain territory.  A great deal of discussion arose around how unconscious desire very closely mirrors the old demonic grimoire stuff when put to some sorcerous purpose.  The Discordian experiments with the Goetia and Abramelin I discussed in this blog entry had their roots in these parallels.  The popularity of the Temple of Set among military psy-ops in the 80’s would suggest that parallel wasn’t lost on federal researchers either.

Ten thousand years ago when the interweb was the exclusive vehicle of the scientific intelligencia, used primarily to brainstorm assured mutual destruction scenarios as opposed to the akashic library of cat memes it is contemporarily.  I digress.

I think Gordon defeated these complications in two ways.  Firstly, ‘the Shoaling Technique’, (that link is a good jumping off point but he has several blog posts illuminating his thoughts on the technique) which he devised as a solution to those problems.  It is an elegant and simple solution that is predicated upon the associative function of the unconscious as opposed to at odds with it, almost as though he is teaching the unconscious the languages of consciousness through the vehicle of sympathy and association.  Secondly, he got real real high that one time (or ten) and saw past the two dimensions of time (also his hands were like two balloons) and that he couldn’t get his house key into the door lock because all divisions are in fact illusory (and also his hands were like two balloons).  Almost as though, he set about teaching the conscious the languages of the unconscious.  I think that the exploration of entheogens and the effective shoaling of sigils are distinct but codependent.  That the sigil among the shoal of sigils isn’t really an abstraction anymore but now a meaningful descriptive in a kind of pidgin language arising out of the interplay between the conscious and unconscious functions of the mind.

Thirty years of cognitive research and neuroscience has illustrated the naivety in reducing the phenomenon of consciousness into dualisms.  All of that interlocking machinery is always running, powering our little vessel about space/time.

I also suggested that there was an interesting validation of astrology as an oracular medium based on that whole observer/observed relationship that came to define the military research Gordon had highlighted in his blog.  I suggested that perhaps he had an oracle that could work on a more macrocosmic scale than the Tarot deck, to which he responded; ‘you’ll pry my cards from my cold dead hands’ and then called me a dirty ape and said he was leaving to go ‘get drunk in Fitzrovia’ which I think means travelling back in time?  I don’t know.  European wizards are so weird sometimes.

That got me to wondering though whether you could formulate a statement of intent out of tarot cards.  They are sort of like a shoal of encapsulated intentions.  They imply many but not innumerable possible dynamics.  They are also a sort of pidgin language.  The inclusion of a playing card in a hoodoo trick is not as common as it used to be but the practice is not unheard of and a great deal has been written within the western esoteric traditions about Tarot magic.  I think however that the pips from a contemporary playing card deck are much more loaded symbolisms.  Those hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds have so much more social relevance; they are routinely used to imply the mechanics of fate/chance/luck/cunning/daring/sex appeal in contemporary western media.  Has since the 1940’s.  I got to wondering what would happen if Gordon jammed a 3 of Hearts into the corner of his bizarro mirror, what about a 6 of diamonds?

Mostly these days, if I want to formulate a magical intent, I make a talisman of some sort.  Smells and textures and the work with my hands, the search for its components all seem to me the most efficient form of communication between the clumsy functions of my mind and existence.  When I want to listen to existence, like Gordon I turn cards (and/or cast Lots).  So I think I shall attempt to compose a pidgin of my own out of those components and see if that doesn’t turn a trick for me.  Really, go read those links.

Last Words

I have seen my dad in person less than a handful of times over the course of my adult life.  He was a hedge priest in the truest sense of the term though he’d have ripped you a new one for implying his service to the almighty was anything other than the gold imperial standard.  He was born in 1942 in a little rural city in Southern Ontario called Belleville.  Somewhere among 11 children.  He didn’t talk about his family, I don’t actually know if he was an older brother or a younger one.  I don’t know if it even matters when you’re 1 out of 11.  I know they grew up poor in a rough part of town and that alcoholism was a dark pall that hung over their lot.  At least half of them were dead by the time I was born and I have never in memory met any of those who remain, if any of them even do.  He was 1 of 11 in every sense.  I don’t even know their names and I suppose now I never will. 

I am being a bit over-dramatic because I am feeling a lot of feelings right now.  I know one of their names, Jack, but I never met the man.  My old man’s name was William, apparently.  I know that Jack was most definitely not a man of the cloth, when my mother talked about him she painted him up like an old gangster though my dad always seemed to see him more as a hustler and a grifter.  William was not the name I knew my old man by, there was this surreal 5 days sandwiched somewhere in the middle of the last three weeks where I had to keep saying that name into an ICU intercom to get the doors to open. 

(intercom) “Who are you here to see?”

(me) “William.”

And then the two extra wide, magnetically locked doors would swing open and admit me into the timeless liminality that is a critical care unit.  Except I totally wasn’t there to see some guy named ‘William’, I would whisper this strangers name and then walk in and see my dad there in that bed with tubing jammed into his every open orifice.  Whose name (as I knew him) was Clifford or most generally just Cliff, if you were wondering. 

When I was still very young we fought over a choice I had made for myself regarding the faith.  It was a terrible argument and we merciless cut each other down with our words.  When I walked away that day I did not look back for a very long time.  Though as the years passed our relationship softened again the chasm of that ideological divide never really dissipated.  The best parts of me I got from my dad.  If I am thought to be handsome it should be known I am his spitting image, if I am thought to be clever it should be known I adopted his razor wits, if I am thought to be good with my hands it is because he taught me genius is useless if it isn’t grounded into nature.  I also got his sense of conviction and so there was always that secret tension there beneath the surface.  An old rural preacher and his apostate son.

When I got the call 3 weeks ago that he had taken a major stroke and might die I rushed to see a man I haven’t seen in many years now.  We talked once a year or so, around all the important things in our lives, about fixing cars and hilariously dangerous contracting gigs, whatever kept the conversation going long enough that we both felt comfortable letting each other know that we still loved each other.  I arrived at the hospital roughly 3 hours after the ‘event’, an arterial obstruction which had cut off circulation to the left side of his brain causing a massive stroke to reach its black fingers into his left hemisphere. He would hold onto lucidity for another 12 hours or so before the swelling of his brain from inflammation would loose his grip on rational thought.  He was still in the hallway of the emergency ward after a long ambulance ride out of the sticks, waiting to be moved to the stroke ward when I got there.  When he looked up at me from that harsh looking mechanical hospital bed a big smile exploded onto the left side of his face, the right twitched a little as his brain tried to figure out how to send the muscles there sensible instructions.  Struggling to mobilize his tongue into action he said to me in a near perfect (though accidental) Elmer Fudd voice, “Ooh, wat bwings yu here?”  And I burst out laughing and told him, “I figured if you were going to go to all this trouble to get me here.”

Another day broke and by the time he had been moved up the stroke ward all of his 5 kids had gathered around him.  The doctor warned us in a quiet voice in the hallway that the swelling would get worse before it got better, that he would get increasingly irrational and delirious.  Then as night fell they told us that visiting hours were over that our emotional tribe had to vacate the premises.  He said the last words he will ever say to me that night when I came in to say good bye.  With tears rolling down his cheeks he grabbed me with his left hand and quite literally dragged me onto his bed and said, “I’m sorry it has been so long.”  Then tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was saying I was sorry too and that I had always loved him with all of my heart.  I don’t remember my words exactly, just holding him there in that bed.

William Cliff was not a wealthy man and when I say ‘not wealthy’ what I mean is dirt fucking poor.  This was to be his 3^rd and last time in a medical facility.  As an old rural preacher he had an inherent mistrust of doctors and hospitals and other bastions of smarty-pantsed know-it-alls.  He was a strong man who had worked physical labor to make his bread the whole of his life.  We collectively as a tribe felt terribly uneasy with the idea of leaving him alone in a hospital while he temporarily lost his mind.  None of us believed one beleaguered night nurse in a busy stroke ward would be capable of subduing this man should he decide he no longer liked his surroundings.  They assured us that after a major stroke of this nature the effort required on his part to even get out of bed should allay our fears.  Needless to say, it did not.  My little brother took the second shift and was the one to return to dad’s room after going to take a leak and found him standing next to his bed with a maniacal look on his face pulling the catheter out of himself.  Very messy.  By the time he had him in his arms and had got the nurse into the room dad’s brain broke under the exertion and he had a grand mal, for a moment everything just turned off.  His eyes went wide and his heart stopped beating.  System reset.

They rushed him into ICU.  Pulling the tubes which were saving his life out of himself was to become a theme over the next few days.  Needless to say, one thing which we can all safely state will not help you recover from a massive stroke is a massive seizure.  The swelling would now be much worse, at its apex he lost the ability to swallow, or attain to either waking or sleeping states of consciousness.  The doctor showed us the CT scans of his brain, the dark grey anemone of dead cells throughout the left hemisphere.  ‘Dead’, not coming back.  That was the doctor’s word for them.  If you are right handed, the left hemisphere of your brain controls motor function on the right side of the body and is home to your speech centers, and emotional and empathetic responses.  The profound aphasia which left him with the ability to understand what was being said to him but unable to convert his own thoughts into spoken words never showed any signs of subsiding.  This mad old man whose living will stated quite emphatically that he was not to be preserved in the event of a medical condition that rendered him unable to take care of himself, ended up with a respirator jammed down his throat, a feeding tube down his nose and a catheter up his dick.  When he came back out of the darkness, not understanding anything anymore, loaded up on drugs he used the last of his considerable strength to fight his treatment.  Left side shackled to the bed he tried to chew off the respirator and somehow managed to Shawshank his feeding tube out 3 times while he was in the ICU.  The 5^th time he got the feeding tube out they couldn’t put it back in anymore. 

The mortal coil he found himself in on the other side of that dark night was simply unacceptable to him.  He refused food as well as the tubes at the end.  He chose his time and place.  He could perceive no victory in fighting nature.  I thought a lot about the Hagakure, that belligerent old samurai writing about how a dignified old man should die.  In his own space, with his family to make sure he falls with his face towards the sun.  I thought about how he taught me to drive and working on cars together, the old piece of shit ’67 Mustang he bought for us to fix up, the junkers that needed work or else we wouldn’t have a car period and that we spent far more time on than we ever did that old ’67.  We clutched each other’s hands with a physical intimacy that was entirely without precedent in the whole of our history, all sense of manly propriety tossed out with a complete disregard.  There could be no more words.  Words are so clumsy anyways, it was better to just hold his hand like that.  For me and my dad words had only ever got in the way.  With the tubes out and the shackles off we just held hands and watched the snow fall.

It’s hard even just to write this part.  He died at a little past 10 in the morning yesterday, while the snow was falling.  Like an old samurai we turned his face toward the sun.

Good-bye dad.  I love you.  

Death All Unexpected

The Light of her Ten Thousand Faces
by Doug Nox

Not long back I had a long conversation about sympathy and death with a couple of wizards,  we talked a lot about how to convey those two intimately entwined concepts to a western audience.  Then a few days later, as the Old Crone passed over into Scorpio I got a lesson in those two things.  The weather took a strange turn, the North Atlantic rose up to challenge New York and a little old expat from Mexico took ill and died unexpectedly.  I don’t think the weather in Canada was ever really doing the old bird any good, it certainly wasn’t the weather in Mexico that ultimately drove her from her mountaintop estate in Huauchinango to the suburbs of Toronto.  She was Vanessa’s grandmother.

I realized that it was compassion which is the plumb line.  Sympathy is the right word but it’s a difficult one for western consciousness to grasp in all its depth and nuance.  Most usually it is real compassion that we lack.  Sympathy, empathy, compassion are lessons taught to us by the Old Crone.  Maybe that sounds strange coming from the author of the Doom Fairy Prophecies but it is the secret of good sympathetic juju, it is the original state of a mind without attachment.  If you truly and deeply love someone, their grief will overwhelm you, you will collapse into it even if you have no personal stake in the loss.  The crucible of grief will melt away all of your will to bring joy into the lives of your loved ones, what you want for them is a thing without meaning in that space.  All of that stuff just evaporates and you are incapable of doing anything except sharing in their grief.   That’s how sympathy works and that’s why it’s Death that reveals its secrets.  When the act of sorcery overwhelms you like that you will be capable of fearsome things, you will do juju like death herself.

No matter how fucked up things get, compassion is your plumb line.  Regardless of how different we might seem we are possessed of a shared fate and the dark currents churning the surface will illuminate this fact over the next couple of years.  This missive is not a Doom Fairy column, my thoughts have yet to coalesce into anything I could confidently call prophetic, they simply won’t stop churning.  I discussed the astrological variables terminating in a two-tiered Internet a while back.  That process begins on December 3rd of this year in Dubai when the International Telecommunications Union gathers for the World Conference on International Telecommunications .  Mark Carney’s move to the Bank of England, the balls-out war starting in the middle east right now, this is the movement of conflict and socio-political lines drawn on maps.  Things I can discuss with the calm detachment of the Doom Fairy because as a crusty old sorcerer I know those things have been a blister on the ass of humanity since the beginning of history, I am conditioned to them as it were, I accept them as a part of the human experience. 

Yet confronted now with the projected aim of the ITU I am deeply horrified, a ‘sender-pays’ Internet under the governance of the international broadcasting agencies.  If you don’t know what that means, it’s how cable and satellite television works right now.  You would have to pay to provide content and that content would have to meet national broadcast standards, this is true of every nation you would wish to connect to.  Unlike SOPA or PIPA this is not an attempt to pass some new censorship or surveillance law, the legal precedents already set by the ITU in the establishment of traditional media greatly empower their case.  This is the loss of perhaps the single greatest technological/social triumph of our generation, the peer-to-peer connectivity of the Internet is the stuff of fantasy novels.  War is terrible but television takes no prisoners.

Prophecy, whether it’s mine or someone else’s must be enacted, it cannot simply be put into motion.  Its actors must play their part to the end, they must hold the narrative together amidst the whirlwind of chance and circumstance.  Chance and circumstance can be fucked with.   I felt I should remind you (over the Internet) because I heard you were a wizard.  All raw from unexpected grief I find I cannot muster the dispassion required for good prophecy, Death came all unexpected and I find myself full of feeling.  This troubled attempt at a global community has sheltered and educated me and I cherish it.  So fuck the ITU.  Fuck.  Them.  I will not prophesy narrative, I will turn the whirlwind.

Prophecies of the Doom Fairy, pt. XII

Truly this moment is the beginning of some dark times.  Scorpio is gaining steam as the astrological marker which will shape the coming winter months.  To be frank, even I am a little surprised at just how thoroughly malevolent the general tendency is.  The political debate in America is now so entirely fucked, so remarkably divorced from the necessities of the times that I don’t even think it matters what happens south of the border.  Either way Netanyahu will force NATO’s hand and regardless of what America does it will be seen to have left Israel to collapse, decay and chaos.

All of this is necessary, the chaos is necessary.  Scorpio has a narrative, a couple actually but the two that will have the spot light upon them will be that of the rending apart of seemingly certain allies and confidants as well as that of new purpose and direction being nursed to life by the forces of untamed chaos and the wild necessity of basic desire.  It’ll be some Lord of the Flies type shit.

When Venus gets in the mix in mid-November we will collectively shed the last of that righteous civility which has marked the last couple of years and get down-right self-serving and that is going to cast some dark clouds over the next year.  As the troubles in N. Africa worsen the flow of shell-shocked, emotionally and physically battered Muslims will stream in ever increasing numbers into Southern Europe and they will bring dogmatically extreme forms of Islam with them (because that will be all they had to take with them out of the middle east and what they credit with their survival).  Places like Spain, Greece and Italy and Southern France, portions of the European Union already feeling the pressure of economic collapse and austerity.  France, hitherto Germany’s ally and support throughout the economic struggles of the Union will collapse under the ongoing pressure of an unstoppable flow of N. African refugees and its own bloated hedonistic self-identity, I wager the cracks will start showing by this time next year if it takes that long.

Needless to say, civil unrest will increase proportionately with austerity compounded by illegal immigration in Southern Europe.  Austerity measures will encourage a nationalist revival, the mechanics of which I discussed a bit in the previous column and that nationalism married as it is to unreasoning deprivation is already turning quickly to fascism and that is a trend I unfortunately see continuing for the next couple of years.  Truly I believe that there is a subtle fascist overtone to the UK’s consolidation of power among its previous colonies.  In the months since my last column Canada has changed the name of its military forces (marking them as an extension of Her Majesties Forces) and more recently combined all of its foreign embassies with those of the UK.  British conservatives are lauding this development as a concretizing of the ‘Anglosphere’, causing Francophone Canadians to cringe everywhere.  The consolidation of the Sovereign Banks of Canada and England will be the final step in that messy business.

Spectral Nazis indeed, except some of them weren’t spectral or even Nazis. Some of them were just pervert fetishists dressed up for a particularly elaborate fetish ball.  That guy in the side-car was hung like a suspension bridge.  When Venus passes through this deep malefica in November that’s what the perceptive will see in all of this.  That really it’s all just costuming for our selfishness, that the world is now too big and inter-connected for an old world problem like nationalistic fascism.  It’s all just costuming for the greatest of Foucault’s mystery plays.  It’s not really a regression to WWII mentalities, it’s Halloween at a gay leather bar.  As it becomes more apparent that there is going to be those who come out on top and those who don’t we will get more callously unconscious in telegraphing our fears and desires onto the world.  All the old symbols and socio-political fascist window dressing are really just adverts for the current collective’s immediate willingness to forcibly make you subject to its own ideologies in increasingly unreasoning attempts to preserve the status quo. 

Keep Calm and Carry On.  Obviously, the answer is to ignorantly continue on as though nothing is happening.  Obviously.

Gerere’s Full and Heavy Heart

FLOR DE MUERTO
by Silvia Ji

All my adult life I have existed outside of initiation.  My right of passage was excommunication; I was cast out into the liminal spaces with the rest of the devils and fallen and wandering ghosts and found that I quite liked that crew.  Understand I am talking a literal and ecclesiastical excommunication here, excommunication with a capital ‘Ex’.  No more family dinners, no friends from childhood, and the whole of the worldview I had been inculcated with since birth smashed to pieces.  Purposefully, hammer of the gods’ style with a straight up old world liturgical excommunication.  I was 16 and it was my punishment for a violent unrepentant youth.  Bad as that sounds, I welcomed it. 

Here, in the West the Ordeal of the Street is the needle and the pipe.  These are the first great temptations and in many ways I was lucky because it was in some sense the needle that got me excommunicated in the first place.  I already knew that was a road to nowhere, a path that turned endlessly back into itself.  It was the way to failure that emptied everything of meaning and that my escape from it was pure unadulterated luck.  A luck not shared by many of those I thought of as friends.  Once they have given themselves over to it they were fucked right and proper.  The lengths they would go to were devoid of meaning.  They were not gangsters or whores or hustlers, they were not the crafty children of Cigana and Gerere, they were empty needles waiting to be filled.  The Kingdom of Malandros teaches compassion because compassion is survival.  The needle and the pipe emptied them of this and the longer it went on the more monstrous they became.  They would thieve from their friends, they would betray their crew, they would surrender to their disease.  This is not life on the Street; it’s not life at all.  They were not children of Cigana, they were the cautionary tale she tells her children.  If the needle and pipe were the markers for the whole of their journey then they were not children of the streets, they failed old Gerere and could claim no lineage.  Whether they lived or died from it we regard them as casualties because that’s what they were.

I hate talking about the needle and pipe.  Literally hate it.  It is a remembrance of casualty, of the old crew/new family that betrayed us, of loss without meaning but the monstrous must be confronted.  The heartless need to be exiled for the good of all, to preserve the crew and keep Cigana’s children well.  Gerere’s compassion is a thing of iron and does not yield to sentiment or romance.  The Nago are not cruel or inhuman, they are unflinching and unafraid in the face of the monstrous.  

The lengths they went to fill their needles had no meaning.  They were not whores, not gangsters, not hustlers.  The lengths they went filled them with hatred not compassion and convinced them that the world was as empty as they were.  Fuck ‘Trainspotting’, they were upright, shambling corpses with no room for a soul and until they could admit that they remained exiles from the Kingdom of the Street.  It wasn’t the whoring and the hustle that left them empty and desperate, it was failing the righteous of Malandros. 

I hate talking about the needle and the pipe.  It fills me up with sadness and I remember friends who wasted away until they looked in the mirror with their piss-yellow eyes and gave up.  They loaded their needles and collapsed their hearts because they thought it was their hearts that had made them weak.  I rage away all full up with despair as the lucky survivors lay claim to some greater insight that the other’s had lacked, when really they had run out of weaker souls than their own to prey on, when it was the strength of some Saint that carried them out when they themselves had given up to the needle or the pipe.  The exiles are not authorities on anything except exile and if the darkness of the Street isn’t velvet to them and all they learned there was how deep and inhuman desperation can run then Cigana never lived in their hearts.

Most of you will not really understand this rant.  We all look the same to you.  What difference the reasons, a whore is a whore right?  For most all gangsters are thieves and all violence is Hollywood.  For most there is no discerning between the unfailing confidence of Cigana’s children and the arrogance of a collapsed heart.  It all looks the same when you are looking down from the university windows at us.  No scholar is equipped to tell one of us from the exiles, no scholar has ever had to draw that circle around a brother to quarantine his disease from the children.  Has wandered dazed about the refuse with eyes full of tears collecting what remained vowing that next time they would try a bit harder, hold out a bit longer before they turned away from the black-purple bruises and the piss-yellow eyes.  You all want it to be ‘Trainspotting’ because then you don’t have to learn to discern one from the other and the answer can remain daily doses of methadone and encouraging us to trot out our sufferings for your next post-modern art show, the exiles turning on their family and blaspheming Malandros is so very cutting-edge.  Bring out your dead.  The street teaches compassion because compassion is survival.  It is never the heart that makes us weak and we love the darkness because it eats our shame.

Learn discernment.  Learn to tell Cigana’s children from the exiles turned away with Gerere’s full and heavy heart.  Or we will stop listening and we will stop sharing.