So, I finished a book the other week. Not so unusual, except that it was one that I wrote myself, in response to a very clever fellow askling me to tell a story. I’ve pimped it enough for now – indeed it’s not actually finished, because it’s sat with the publisher ready to be edited. Now, you might be thinking, why don’t I shut up until it’s ready? The answer to that is that, in fact, this has nothing to do with the publishing process, and everything to do with the writing process.

Now, I don’t know if the book is actually any good, and I know that it’s full of typographical errors, and the odd missing word; the speed at which you think is often rarely matched by your fingers, and even the fastest typist will often get carried away. So, given that, what’s the initial maneuvering for?

Let me put it another way:

The final manuscript comes in at just over 100,000 words, and I have no idea what it is. Honestly, it’s like the thing came to life on its own, and as I wrote the last page – which incidentally, returns you to the first page, because I’m clever like that – I realised that it was an impenetrable thing.

A bloody slab of something that requires participation and in return exerts an odd influence on you. I say this because in the latter stages I spent 18 days, 8 hrs a day hammering out words. One after the other, again and again, and do you know what that does when you do it day after day?

It. Rewires. Your. Brain.

Even uncle Aristotle knew that, despite being a bugger for the bottle:

(I was considering including the full Bruce sketch but I thought Gordon might kick me.)

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

I could point you to all kinds of evidence on neuroplasticity, or pretty MRI pictures, and I could equally spout some bollocks about expert-hood taking 10,000 hours to achieve. Yes, I could do that, and I’m not going to, because if you are really interested, then you’ll look it up yourself – and if you’re not, I’m wasting my time typing them all out. It’s a bit like summoning witnesses to prove a case, and honestly I’m not interested in that, and nor, I think, are you.

Instead, I’d ask you to picture this:

A chap with long tangled hair and a prodigious beard glares at the monitor, swigging coffee and gulping it down so fast that it might be bruising his gullet. Hunched over the keyboard, he hammers away, hearing the voice in his head conjure up emotions and experience; crazed juxtapositions and frenzied metaphors serve as door into recalling and recombining of sensation and experience.

You see, you can’t expect to have an effect, unless you are affected. It’s not simply about stringing words together, and indeed anyone who tells you that is lying. Think of the last time you spoke to someone more than in passing, of how the conversation takes you through a range of thoughts, and how the other other person’s responses shape what you’re saying and the emotions you’re feeling.

Imagine summoning them up, before you put them on the page – imagine going first – never expecting anyone to feel something you’re not capable of feeling yourself, because that’s what you’re trying to do – you’re trying to share with the other person, with your audience, with your co-conspirator.

Of course, you can never be sure how they’re going to react, can you? They might have had a bad night’s sleep, be annoyed at their partner, or perhaps have something so awesome on their minds that they’re only listening for long enough so that they can get a word in edgewise.

Such things are pretty much beyond your knowledge; the complex interactions and circumstances are just that – complex. So all you can do is fire them up and cast them into the void. Which, in a way is a bit like sigils – you fire ‘em and then you forget. Except a lot of people have a problem with the forgetting, and understandably so.

After all, if you’re going to use magic, it’s probably either to get you that extra edge, or because you’re hitting a wall and want to bring out the big guns, right?

So you’re invested, quite obviously, and sometimes that investment can get in the way – your striving for a particular outcome can screw things up, narrow your perception and mean you miss precisely the opportunities you need to achieve your goals. One of the ways around this is the practice that Gordon refers to as shoaling where you break down your goals to maximise their potential probability. It’s a bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if its done – eventually something will stick.

It’s a useful technique, and one that I’ve used before, especially when applied with the other kind of work – the laser-focused statement of intent.

One thing writing this book has taught me is that, on a long term project like this your emotional relationship to it shifts. You can love it one moment, and hate it the next, and it doesn’t matter because if you’re doing it right, you can’t not work on it. It literally becomes an habituated obsession.

You bcome literally obsessed, fudamentally occupied and beseiged by the idea, by the project, and here’s where this sort of thing gets deeply interesting.

Because you’re suddenly not doing it for any goal except itself. I was asked to tell a story, but soon enough that was not the goal – I wasn’t telling it for my audience. I wasn’t even telling it because I liked it – indeed I often hated it. It was, at points, the vilest most disgusting piece of excrement ever to be produced by a human mind.

Understand, this is not a metaphor. There were days when I felt literally sick as I sat down to work on this monstrosity, but I did it anyway, because I couldn’t avoid it. I’d been doing it so long that thinking thoughts which were not connected to it became impossible. It was in me like an invader.

Like a disease.

It became the ground of my existence, this story, until it was telling me what to write, and there were loops and whorls and repetitions and oddnesses galore; until at last I began to realise that this stream of conciousness was revealing the oblique, the hidden thing behind and beneath it – as if the words were but doors to something incomprehensible, like 100,000 fingers pointing at the moon in the zen koan.

I mention this because the project becomes a thing in-and-of-itself. It doesn’t matter if it’s succesful or not, doesn’t mater if it gets you fame and fortune or leaves you penniless in a ditch. It’s simply is – an event in  space and time. It doesn’t matter if those goals are even possible, because the goal is irrelevant. You’re not doing it for a goal.

You are doing it because your doing-of-it is an inevitability.

It is habit squared; you do not have anything other than it. Or as Spare puts it:

Does not matter – need not be

The result does not matter, and need not be in any particular form. Think of how many times your emotions shift, and how they influence your actions – think how easily your thoughts are capable of carried like tumbleweed from one thing to another. Many schools of esotericsm require the development of so-called ‘thought-control’  to create a disciplined focus, yet I’d argue it’s a misleading misnomer.

If the idea is to silence the mental chatter, then people are often taught to squelch it – yet in writing a book that originates in that stream of chatter, I’ve found that it’s far better to let the chatter proceed unresisted, because eventually its underlying structure is revealed. Or to put it another way, our inner storyteller spouts a load of shite but if you do not react to it, it eventually starts producing gold.

Without external stimuli, things smooth out – the emotions and worries, the loves and the hate of it rise and fall, and all that matters is the writing itself. Is it any wonder perhaps, that Spare’s major written work is The Book Of Pleasure (Self-Love)?

There is no-one involved but the Self – it pays no attention to external stimuli, is heedless of possibility, or probability.

Bringing this out of the realm of high concept, consider the idea that probability manipulation is by its very nature, referential to an external source – that of reality. Circumstances may change, and due to the sheer complexity of the universe, what’s possible may change from moment to moment.

The only thing that is inevitable is the impossible. Black Swan events are events with near-impossible qualities which are rationalised in hindsight as probable. The mob-spectacle of perception known as reality tries to rationalise them afterwards – to provide causal links, to render them stable, rather than feral events.

Think back to that image of the frenzied writer, posessed and obsessed by a story. It does not give a monkeys for ‘reality’ – the book, once produced, does not change in reference to stimuli. It is, in the McLuhan sense, a colder medium.

Just like a sigil, it is itself – and the whole point of scrambling the statement of intent in modern chaos magic is to obliterate meaning, to render the sigil into an occult glyph, an unintelligible thing. The sigil doesn’t give (another anamalistic metaphor)’s for your goals. It does its job, as best it can given the environment.

There’s a problem, I think, in casting magical work into the realm of probability – but that’s not to say one shouldn’t take advantage of it when it benefits you. No, instead, perhaps you should instead acknowledge that what you are seeking to do is impossible, and that you’re deliberately attempting to induce events which reality will almost instantaneously attempt to co-opt with its ration-al-isation.

Do what you do, and be cold about it. Be obsessed by it, not for what it can do for you, but what it is. Get into the habit of being impossible

Ladies and Gentlemen -

Cold Albion has been quiet, and quiet for a reason. I am having a book published, and frankly, I’m busy writing the bloody thing. Closer to the time, look for exclusive content here and pop over to Modern Mythology to see explorations of themes linked to the book!

Have a gander, and please do spread it around!

Be Seeing You.

_______________________

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – LONDON 5TH SEPTEMBER 2011

Weaponized is proud to announce the publication of ‘The Ravens Head’ a powerful new book by author Craig VI Slee.

Once upon a time, the first story was told – somewhere deep within the fields of memory, a vision was transmitted from one person to another. Once upon a time, a tale touched you and changed your world. It transported you somewhere else and left its fingerprints upon your life, and then when others saw the marks, you told of how they came to be. Over time, you wrapped yourself in stories, tattooing them upon the skin of your existence to make sense of all that happened. When others offered you stories, you took them gladly and spliced them with your own, until you could no longer discover where yours ended and theirs began.

Who exactly is it that tells your tale, guides the monologue and direct your actions? How much of your world is actually your own, and how much of it is painted scenery put there in the years before you were born? What is actually wallpaper over Plato’s cave walls, put there to soothe humankind and conceal the bare, unyielding rock?

What happens when you boil it all down and you are left with ash, ground down to the bone and struggling under the weight of loss and incomprehension?

Welcome then, to The Ravens’ Head.

A story about stories, about the search for the language of the birds, the tongue of the Angels – it chronicles the life and work of a man engaging in the oldest quest. The quest to become more human than human, and recover his nature from the mob-spectacle known as “reality.”

The Ravens’ Head is part travelogue, part mythic narrative and part journey inward into the depths of consciousness itself. Written by a figure steeped in mythic landscapes and tales, it presents a unique take on life and the notions of disability and impairment.

Focusing on the inescapable notions of physicality and sensation, it examines the conventions of power and control – revealing them to be nothing but stories and charms to ease the discomfort of life in an indifferent universe.

A furious exploration of the connections between poetry and communication – between stories, myth and magic, it serves as a gateway into the world behind the wallpaper; through the metaphors of ancient myth and personal experience, it opens doors for the reader to examine their own life and partake in a glorious phantasmagoria of inspired creation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
CRAIG ‘VI’ SLEE or MR. VI if you’re feeling formal, lives in the North of England in a place charmingly nicknamed ‘Hanging Town’. Crazed spastic: poet, storyteller and philosopher, he embraces a peculiar life of furious seizure.

Gripped by the ecstatic awe and dread known by the ancients as wôdh, he makes deals with the grandfathers of ravens and counts the Furious Host as blood brothers. He sits at crossroads in the middle of the night and knows the scent of blood and frost as well as he does mead and woodsmoke.

He’s more than a little bit dead. He drinks dark ale and smoky whisky and can send you places by the power of his voice. The waters of the dream-sea flow in his veins and pain is the herald and gateway of his vision.

He made a deal with the Devil in the grounds of a thousand year-old church, giving up his soul for skill with words. Or he conjured up the Headless One and ignited the immortal fire, and he walks without walking, striding through your dreams and over the graves of giants.

At least, these are some of the stories they tell of him. He has a beard and a hat, and if you asked about them and called him a sorcerer, he couldn’t possibly comment. But he does like cats, which is nice.

ABOUT WEAPONIZED:
Weaponized publishes experimental forms of fiction, prose and art that offer new ways to experience stories and myth. They are passionately committed to finding unique narrative hybrids that challenge, engage, inform and inspire readers.

The imprint was founded by FoolishPeople, FoolishPeople create film, theatre, music and books and curate and engineer immersive experiences that have the power to raise the numinous within the spectator. FoolishPeople are currently shooting ’Strange Factories’ in Prague, a ground breaking immersive film that will be toured and presented within an immersive event created by FoolishPeople that explores the early history of cinema and film via the touring traditions of Phantasmagoria and theatric arcana.

Since its launch in August 2010 Weaponized has published FoolishPeople scripts ‘Cirxus’ and ‘Dead Language’ by John Harrigan, ‘The Sparky Show’ by Xanadu Xero and ‘Forum’ by Richard Webb and ‘Citizen Y’ written by John Harrigan and James Curcio and ‘The End of the Word As We Know It’ by Wes Unruh.

‘The Ravens Head’ is published by Weaponized in February 2012.

Artwork by P. Emerson Williams

PRESS CONTACT For further information please email press@weaponized.net

Now listen, or as they say:

Hwaet!

We are passing through corridors of stone; routes of labyrinthine complexity filled with hollow, echoing ghosts – phantasmal strains and thin snatches of half-remembered speech. Perhaps there should be dust, and maybe, in the darkest corners, the compressed and most unseen crevices, there is.

But even a place like this must conform to certain biological processes – for there to be dust, there must be human skin to flake and to float, in the air that is so awfully still. And there hasn’t been a human presence here for an extraordinarily long time.

This is not simply a poetic way of describing a blog that’s been quiet for the past six months or so, while I’ve been busy doing other things. Nor is it distinctly evocative of a particular milieu – no grandiose visions of primordial places,  with hidden treasure glinting in subterranean splendour, all unseen by the eye of mortal man. No slumbering warriors lie in wait; an army of metaphor does not listen for the clarion call to reach its ears, rising with an inhuman swiftness; it is not charging into battle to engage in the struggle which we laughably call communication.

No. Because this is Cold Albion, and like all cold things, it exists at a remarkably low-energy state.

We have all met people before, and we have interacted with them – every look you give, every glance you receive, engages the neurology of those you contact, as well as your own. You carry representations of things, linkages and patterns, and all these are arrangements of energy.

When you see your loved ones, certain arrangements and patterns fire up. A great deal of the time, if you compared these arrangements -these perceptions – with a kind of nebulous ‘actuality’ you’d find pretty major discrepancies.

This is because it’s less effort than constantly re-analysing things. In short, it’s an evolutionary hack. It uses less energy and  means we can move faster, and do other things with that energy, because, apparently like every other organism on the planet, we are biochemical in nature.

Molecules shift and move, obeying particulate rules and concentration gradients – diffusion and pH – principles and contacts, meetings and transferences via chemical pump; these are the methods which produce the electric surge, and the crackle of lightning that runs along your nerves and the neurotransmitters that carry the messages over the synaptic gap.

Heat the body up too much and the enzymes are denatured, the bio-machines cooked into uselessness. Too much energy and radiation warps your DNA, or burns your flesh and bone. All fire burns, and what’s fire but the fastest thing; the hungry flame that consumes the fuel?

Imagine having that energy within you, the metabolic processes constantly running; proceeding endlessly until your systems begin mutating or degrading, worn by years of replicating ceaselessly while you are  unaware of the lion’s share of it, as you are going about your life. Does it feel like anything familiar, that sense of rushing existence?

…

And in that feeling, maybe we are considering something, you and I. Perhaps we could be considering the implications of the heated meat package that is our corporeal selves.

Because we’ve stood in the cold, haven’t we? It’s a sensation you’ve no doubt had – the heat of yourself bleeding away into the vaster space, spreading out and becoming diffuse. The way the chill is beginning to set in – except of course you’re losing heat, not gaining cold.

It’s not as if the cold is penetrating you, piercing you like a knife. It’s not as if the chill bites with sharp teeth, right before the numbness is beginning to set in, is it? In actual fact it’s the comfort that is leaving, dissolving; becoming threadbare as the body begins attempting the desperate process of  conserving heat, of keeping things moving. Withdrawing to the centre, protecting those vitally important organs, leaving extremities to their fates.

Yet actual facts of biology have little to to do with language and how we go about perceiving. The metaphors are those of disruption and attack, instead of an apparently natural adherence to basic physical-theory.

So what happens when you start considering the fact that energy is finite, that all fires exhaust their fuel eventually? We’ve discussed this before, and it’s fairly implicit in my philosophy and words. As  I say over in my latest essay on  Modern Mythology – Toasters, Bladerunner and Schizophrenia:

We can’t even tell if we’re Replicants. Can’t trust our memories, or our assumptions, or our senses.  All we have is now, this moment, and even that is being filtered by our imagined pasts and futures.

There is no escape; no external environment wherein the processes of change are stilled and all is in perfect repose, perfect balance. So instead, we wander these corridors and halls, chilled by the notion of eventual decay.

Gordon said I should write more, that there had been too much of silence in the corner of the blogosphere we inhabit. He said it, and admitted it was for purely selfish reasons. Since he’s back posting, I’m picking up that gauntlet: I respect such admissions, and that’s why I would like you to begin accepting the chill as we continue on, because in a sense it is somewhat necessary to what I’d like to give you.

Because I want to talk about trolls.

Not your internet trolls – this is not about griefers or 4chan – but the creatures from Scandinavian folklore. The monstrous beings that lurk in dark places and hidden caves, and who become quite literally petrified by sunlight; turned to stone by the dawn.

The heavy and unwieldy media, such as stone, are time binders. Used for writing, they are very cool indeed, and serve to unify the ages – Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media.’

Past, present and future, all emerging, swirling from the stony well of Urðarbrunnr. The woven web of wyrd, reaching back and forth, warp and weft and threads  a-binding; up and down, left and right, ana and kata.

Down at the roots of mountains, back along paths of memory, might you know the music of trolls?  If you’re of a certain age and from the UK, you might recognise it from Alton Towers adverts:

The well known piece, written by Grieg for Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, occurs when the protagonist falls and strikes his head on a rock after chasing three maidens. Three maidens who claim to have got rid of their useless human lovers and are, to put it bluntly, hot for a little…troll-based action.

Peer, being a braggart and womaniser, claims he has enough troll-like stamina to satisfy all three, and so the chase ensues. Knocked unconscious by his amorous quest, he dreams of a green-clad girl who he pursues, eventually realising she is the daughter of the Old Man of the Mountain – specifically the Troll-King of the Dovre mountains. Lured by lust, as they travel to the Hall of the Mountain King, Peer comments on the clothing choice of his would-be shag:

THE GREEN-CLAD ONE

My week-day gown is of gold and silk.

 

PEER

It looks to me liker tow and straws.

 

THE GREEN-CLAD ONE

Ay, there is one thing you must remember:-

this is the Ronde-folk’s use and wont:

all our possessions have twofold form.

When you shall come to my father’s hall,

it well may chance that you’re on the point

of thinking you stand in a dismal moraine.

And here’s where things get interesting – the land of the Trolls seems to require a different way of looking at the world, of perceiving objects, and indeed, like many Otherly spaces, perhaps time itself. For when Peer arrives in that stony hall of the Old Man, far from being torn apart as the troll-courtiers would like, the King asks him a series of questions, questions that seem faintly ridiculous, albeit probably harmless – and the answers are even stranger. Take for example, the exchange that occurs when the Old Man asks what the difference is between humans and troll-kind:

PEER

No difference at all, as it seems to me.

Big trolls would roast you and small trolls would claw you;-

with us it were likewise, if only they dared.

 

THE OLD MAN

True enough; in that and in more we’re alike.

Yet morning is morning, and even is even,

and there is a difference all the same.-

Now let me tell you wherein it lies:

Out yonder, under the shining vault,

among men the saying goes: “Man, be thyself!”

At home here with us, ‘mid the tribe of the trolls,

the saying goes: “Troll, to thyself be-enough!”

Now, Grieg himself wrote of the piece:

“For the Hall of the Mountain King I have written something that so reeks of cowpats, ultra-Norwegianism, and ‘to-thyself-be-enough-ness’ that I can’t bear to hear it, though I hope that the irony will make itself felt.”

So we can see that he felt the piece summed up something negative, brash, and we might even say…trollish. Yet when you look at the Troll King’s remarks, you can perhaps feel a deeper meaning.

 

THE OLD MAN

My son, that “Enough,” that most potent and sundering  word, must be graven upon your escutcheon.

Further trials  await Peer – he is presented with music and dancing which to him is only a cacophony, and feasting which is only offal and gore. As he balks, the trolls  cry out for him to be torn apart, but the Old Man cautions them that he is, after all, only human, with human senses.

The proposed solution is grisly, involving a scratching of the eye and the wearing of blinders to rid Peer of his human perceptual biases. Presented with the notion that his human sense may never return after such an operation, he flees from the hall, giving up on his paramour and returning to the waking world of men.

While a classic mythical narrow escape, here we’re more concerned with the inescapable. Peer’s human perceptions render the world a certain way, and the ambivalence of trollish existence is abhorrent to him. So the question then becomes, from whence did Peer Gynt gain his humanity that it is so easily removable by the Old Man?

There are some that might argue such things are innate, but if so, how is it that his senses would not heal?

It’s that enough which concerns us. If we contrast this with chase of Peer Gynt after his women, then might we look at the trolls as those who are capable of perceiving what is dross and foulness to humans, as things of great joy and beauty?

Imagine if you could modulate your perception in such a way as to gain exactly what was needed from things others could not process or deal with. Not simple contrariness, or even ‘settling for less’, but having different requirements?

Suddenly the claims of the Yogis, the magicians, the Tibetan Masters – they start to appear as something other than mere hyperbole.  If you could change your perception, you could change how you react to things. What was once hostile and fearsome might now be known as a fierce protector or enthralling companion – phobia shifting to fascination, for example.

We are biochemical creatures, as  I’ve said. Our emotions are made manifest by chemical and hormonal shifts in response to stimuli. You swim in a soup of neuro-transmitters, our veins and arteries rage with chemical fury. Born from that amniotic ocean, you are briny seas suffused with lightning – an plethora of complex systems operating in concert to produce ‘your’ existence.

Where does this roaring creature gain its shape? Where does personality come from, its name and sense of self? Do you know where you begin, and where you end?

There’s a dilemma here, because every thing is defined by what it is not. If you are human, there must be something that is not human. For there even to be a ‘you’ as a distict thing, there must also be that which is not-you.

Can you remember where you came from?

Marshall McLuhan wrote of a spectrum of media, from hot to cool. Hot media requires little participation – it is delivered rapidly and possesses its own energy, its own structure and arrangement, which is impressed upon the recipient.  Film, for McLuhan, enhanced the visual sense – the spectacle is pre-delivered, it’s informational content designed to evoke specific reactions and resonances.

“The passive consumer wants packages, but those[...]who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in seeking causes will resort to aphorisms, just because they are incomplete and require participation in depth.” - Marshall McLuhan

How much energy is spent, how much time is used, in the construction of identity? How many packages have you received before a personality emerged, and hence, how much of ‘you’ is a product of environmental shaping? Multi-billion dollar corporations are founded on the presumption that the consumer wants to be kept in-formed – hot off the presses comes the gossip, the news, the celebrity hijinks!

The trolls come from a cold and snowy land – their way is colder, slower. The Old Man’s aphorism is an incompleteness, an indefinite ambivalence that Peer cannot stomach – he’d rather be off chasing hot young wenches!

(Can’t fault him there, actually.)

The cooler media that McLuhan speaks of requires participation – cold media is incomplete and requires interaction to access.

We’ve all been in that situation – you know the one – where we’re presented with someone who we know nothing about, at a party, some sort of social gathering, or a business function. Striking up a conversation often requires more energy from the initiator than the recipient at the beginning. Once both parties are comfortable with the level of communication and interest, communication starts flowing easily and time can just fly by!

Things that exist at low energy states, such as this place, can lie quiet for a long while, and as participation increases, the level of energy increases dramatically because of the incompleteness.

It takes more energy to define, and maintain those definitions, than it does to allow ambivalence and incompleteness. More energy is expended in maintaining the status quo, than is accepting and utilising changing conditions. I’ve touched on the subject more narrowly in this post about the power of absence and architectural decay as regards creativity.

The coldest medium is apparently the environment itself – the mountains so beloved of the Troll King and other natural phenomena. They exist independently of the human sphere, indeed the majority of human culture seems to be about heating them up – defining and making sense of them. Even with modern technology, their contouring – or rather their need to be defined and mapped in the human mind, they generate more energy than a thousand scientists and poets in the silent inscrutability.

They do not require rapid, hot, energy to maintain some notion of integrity, unlike most of the human sphere.

And if cold media requires participation, then the earliest form within that sphere would be storytelling – a shared experience which the audience experiences and co-creates to produce something richer than its constituent parts. What’s more, the art is not lost – many are waking up to this fact, and I’ll even point you to some.

Foolish People are producing an independent film that’s certainly cooler than the films McLuhan knew of. Crowdfunded, “Strange Factories” offers bonuses and artefacts which draw their funders deeper into the world. But rather than just being a simple film, Strange Factories will have a live component, with the characters directly interacting with the audience. You can read more about it in this Wired article.

And if there’s anything of a magical persuasion about cold media, it’s this – a seemingly inert or innocuous word, object or gesture, possessed of low energy or apparent significance, can  achieve a stronger affect than a drug regimen or therapy. It can even kill.

Now, as I said earlier, the coldest medium is the environment, except that’s not true.

The coldest medium is the self, that same roaring creature you were considering earlier. Because it is an indefinite thing. Why else would humanity be so desperate to define and name and package you?  How do you perceive the self? Imagine if you could perceive all those processes, and modulate them.

Imagine what kind of being that would be, perceiving and participating in itself; how very vast and terrible it might be to have the knowing that you were enough, and knowing that you were all you could ever know.

Coldly aware that the rune of your self, risted with your life’s blood, was the only thing that was yours. That your name and everything you were taught – along with half your thoughts – were not actually native to you, but an attempt to confine you, to complete the incomplete, to cook you until you were palatable, and not raw and indigestible.

…

Yes. Welcome back to Cold Albion.

 THE GREEN-CLAD ONE

       My week-day gown is of gold and silk.

  PEER

       It looks to me liker tow and straws.

  THE GREEN-CLAD ONE

       Ay, there is one thing you must remember:-

       this is the Ronde-folk's use and wont:

       all our possessions have twofold form.

       When you shall come to my father's hall,

       it well may chance that you're on the point

       of thinking you stand in a dismal moraine.

 PEER

       No difference at all, as it seems to me.

       Big trolls would roast you and small trolls would claw you;-

       with us it were likewise, if only they dared.

  THE OLD MAN

       True enough; in that and in more we're alike.

       Yet morning is morning, and even is even,

       and there is a difference all the same.-

       Now let me tell you wherein it lies:

       Out yonder, under the shining vault,

       among men the saying goes: "Man, be thyself!"

       At home here with us, 'mid the tribe of the trolls,

       the saying goes: "Troll, to thyself be-enough!"

So I’ve not posted here in a bit and there’s a reason for that. I’ve been getting a few articles under my belt at the Modern Mythology blog. It’s run by the editor of Immanence of Myth, the multi-faceted James Curcio, and he’s assembled quite a pack of extremely smart and erudite folks there.

So if you want to see posts that dig into the guts of the human narratives, I advise you to head over there. We’ve got some lovely surprises coming in the next few months, trust me on that.

And if you’re missing your fix here – don’t worry – I have some blinding content brewing in the back of my fevered brain just for you lot!

Until then…

Be seeing you.

Look at that: it’s beautiful, yes? In fact I invite you to click on the image and enjoy it full size, then come back and read on. I’ll wait while you soak it up and experience a little awe in the face of natural beauty!

…

So:

Such images are all around us, and unfortunately it’s often the case that we don’t notice, because they’re not situated as singular things – they’re part of a rushing continuum of sense experience. But, if they’re divorced from that surging river, framed as frozen moments – as icebergs that are above the surface, they become something that draws you in.

Framed correctly, you can appreciate them as themselves, as a piece of art, as an extra-ordinary impression and experience, or simply a memory. And here’s the thing – how we frame things dictates our behaviour. If we frame an event as a pleasant one, we react differently to it than if we frame it as unpleasant.

It makes sense really, because people are extremely well hard-wired to avoid discomfort, and you’re wired that way because in some immeasurably distant time, an ancestor of yours  responded to dangerous and hostile conditions by simply not being in them if they didn’t have to. Because of this, that ancestor prospered really quite well, lived long and reproduced probably quite a lot, which ultimately culminated in you reading this.

And next time you start to want to avoid do something, instead of getting annoyed or frustrated with yourself, simply take a moment to thank your ancestor for that reflex because without it? You probably wouldn’t be alive to enjoy the  lovely and wonderfully enjoyable things you have planned out anyway.

Which would certainly  be, as they say, a bit of a bugger for reasons you can no doubt imagine.

There’s an argument in the philosophy of aesthetics called the Institutional Theory of Art which can be summed up as follows:

“A work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.” – George Dickie, Aesthetics, An Introduction

Basically, philosophising aside, it suggests that it’s situation and context that makes an object art – which is why objects in an art gallery are art, because people who inhabit the ‘art world’ say that it is of that world. Now, anybody with half a brain can can see the issues with this but that’s not the point. The point is, it illustrates something intriguing about culture, authority, communication and human culture in general.

If an expert in a field declares something to be their field, it’s generally accepted, unless other experts contest the assertion. Media pundits ride the same current – if you can get on television, or in print, you’re elevated above normal mortals. Because you’re Media:you partake of the role of channel of communication.

Media is the plural of medium. Think about that – the middle, the in-between.

The go-between.

Gordon’s written a couple of interesting posts on Exorcism and Summoning Ghosts which play off this nicely. It’s these figures that inhabit both worlds which are given a peculiar power over the human mind. Just as how people like Oprah, Glenn Beck, Martha Stewart – and for the Brits, Stephen Fry and Jeremy Clarkson – wield a strange sort of influence.

People listen to them don’t they? They accept what they say, invite them into their brains, their homes, to speak to them from newspapers, from the tv screens and the web. You let in the ideas spoken of, the words written on the screen, and they slip into your mind and quietly, furiously, replicate.

Everyone does it. You’re doing it now, and as you’re reading, words are intermingling with your subconscious, linking with autonomic processes. Because that’s what language actually does; bridging the gap between two worlds, it utilises shared structures and rapidly, speedily, it bypasses concious perception and definition and uses the vast ocean of experience to keep us on the same page.

The fascinating thing is, it does this almost instantaneously.

The pundits and the Media? They communicate with you, shape the happenings of a global world beyond your office and your living room into something you can comprehend. They’re in the middle, and so they speak a language you can understand, a closer tongue to your own. Now, Gordon’s done precisely that with his post on Summoning Ghosts The Old Fashioned Way. He’s given you modern analogues for ancient processes, and he’s done it in such a way that you look at it and see which subconscious ideas each portion of the rite plays off.

This then, is at the heart of the movement that eventually became known as Chaos Magic. Results-based work stripped right down to basic principles and then rebuilt in a way that is relevant and potent for the here and now. What’s more, I’m pretty damn sure Gordon knows exactly what I mean when I talk about regarding media and influence, being as he’s not…unacquainted with that sphere.

A disclaimer here: I’ve never actually met Gordon, this is just from reading Runesoup so I may be way off.  (That said guv, if I’m ever down south and in the Smoke, and if you’re of a mind to, wouldn’t mind a natter and a drink…or six!).

Whether I’m casting aspersions on our favourite Antipodean Magus or not, it’s obvious that the role of Messenger/Pundit still has potency. And as folks who are interested in the deep roots of these sort of things, it’s fairly certain that the mediator, the hedge-sitter, the in-between, liminal role has always had resonance.

Mercury and Hermes, Woden or Odin, Enoch and Raven.

All these are speakers, communicators, middle-men. The medium and the message. Some argue that the art and the artist are inseparable, and that makes sense doesn’t it? To become a living embodiment of that, to be able to shift your shape, to alter your methodology or jargon as the need arises to develop near-perfect communication?

We can often read words by outline and shape alone, and at the risk of getting repetitive, I’m going to connect this to another of Gordon’s posts – his love letter to Pete Carroll, A Definitive Review of the Octavo, and once more we’ll reach into the arena of Chaos Magic Theory.

And before I do that, I’d like to recount a little tale that arose out of a discussion with a fellow known internationally for his wizardly ways – some folks may recall him being mentioned in an article of Pete’s, for example. It’s a short story, and it’s designed to go straight past your conscious mind and into the fertile soil, so with an apology for sneakily lodging things firmly in your deep mind, I’ll begin…

Once upon a time, when the world was a little quieter, when the cold was crisper in the winter and the summers smelt of warm grass, there was a Master Carpenter. Now this Master Carpenter lived in a small village at the edge of an ancient wildwood, and though he was far from civilisation, word of his craftsmanship had spread far and wide, even to the biggest cities.

So much so in fact, that wealthy merchants would send send messengers on fast horses out into the wilds where the Master Carpenter lived. But those messengers would soon be forced to dismount and walk their mounts along the almost non-existent trails, lest they fall and break an ankle and then die there as food for the wolves that still roamed the lands in those days.

And as ever, when they finally arrived, travel-stained and weary as they were, the Master Carpenter would welcome them to his home. He would stable their horses with his own calloused hands, and pour them a drink from his own still. Invariably, the messengers were terribly confused, for all knew that the Master Carpenter’s work fetched only the highest prices, and yet he dwelt in a small homely house with no sign of the vast riches he must surely have amassed.

They always became even more perplexed when his wife arrived from the kitchen to kiss him lovingly on the cheek and ask them of their home city and the wider world. And  what, I hear you ask, was the source of their perplexity? Why, it was simply this:

The face of the Master Carpenter’s wife matched exactly that of a beautiful princess, a princess of whom it had been said that she was the most beautiful woman in all the land. Larger still was their surprise when dinner was served and they found the exquisitely carven table marked with the royal coat of arms and the table linen bearing the royal seal.

By the end of the dinner, curiosity always won out over politeness, and the resemblance was remarked upon. Always, she would smile graciously while the Master Carpenter watched in amusement. And always, the answer was given that it was not merely  a resemblance, but that in fact she was truly Princess Sophia, daughter to he who held the Oaken Throne.

Curiosity still raging with unspoken questions, silence would then reign. It would reign until Sophia would refill their cups and quietly tell of the day that the King had set forth to find a master craftsman to make the mark of his rule upon that very same throne. For, as all know, the Oaken Throne was immeasurably ancient, hacked from the body of the First Tree in elder days. And all know that each monarch makes his mark upon that timeless wood – generations of kings have turned that black-faced seat into a creation of purest art, layer upon layer.

“And a Master did my father find,” Sophia would always say, with a fond smile towards her husband. For his part, he would shrug modestly, eyes twinkling as she told the tale.

In her honeyed voice she wove their first meeting. She recalled her father’s impatience with the Carpenter who seemed so reluctant to leave his paltry village despite the promise of royal patronage and wealth. She set air to throng with memory of quiet nights with a man so unlike others in the royal court, a man who had never left his home in all his life, or so the locals said.

And so it was that the messengers would learn of her persuasion, which brought her husband to work upon the Oaken Throne in the shining city of her birth. Of how he worked upon that wood, alone and at night in the fabulous hall of the king, whistling a simple tune – the kind children make at play.

Blushing slightly, the lovely princess would confess to watching him work, veiled from his sight by rich tapestries full of scenes of battle and heroism. It was then, she would explain, that she knew she  loved him. For from her hiding place she could see that he glowed brighter than gold in the night as he worked.

“Complete and whole,” she’d say, “Like a river running or the moon gleaming, full to the brim and flowing over with it, so that it made the room even greater, the sight of everything truer and clear.”

Then she would tell them of his return home, and her eventual nocturnal flight from the palace to join him. She spoke fiercely of her resistance to the idea of return, and of how the very wildwood seemed to devour the men her father had sent to bring her back, and how the very Oaken Throne had burned beneath her father until he had consented to do as she wished.

Oftentimes at this point, the messengers would be watching the Master Carpenter warily, lest he curse them with foul sorcery or burn their buttocks as in the tale.

And always the Master Carpenter would chide his wife for scaring the visitors, and explain that he meant no harm to no thing, living or dead, or wood or stone.

“Be that as it may husband mine,” Sophia would say “Harm comes to those who mean you ill, whether by your hand or by what lies in their hearts. It matters not which.”

Once again, silence would reign, until the bravest of the messengers would ask the Master Carpenter how he came by his skill, and who had been his teacher.

At this he would smile, and it was the kind of smile you would find ‘pon the lips of a mischievous boy who has been caught, and is in no way sorry for the trick he has played.

“When I was a boy,” he would say to them, “I was as clumsy as an ox and my fingers stumbled over the wood and stained it with blood, for the tools were always hungry. My father despaired of me ever having any skill at all, for nothing would help. Neither beatings nor kindnesses, guiding hands or simple pieces to practice on helped. It all eluded me. So I took to fleeing into the wildwood and walking amidst the green, fighting imaginary enemies and rescuing Princesses from jealous kings, that sort of thing.”

At this, he would smile widely, full of honest mirth while his wife watched him levelly over the rim of her cup. He would spin more of his wanderings in the wood for a little while, until his listeners began shift uneasily. Then he would pause and tell of the day he met the Hooded Man, there amidst the green.

Tall he was, all cloaked in shadow and dappled sunlight; patchwork leather – some stained brightly, with other portions of more dusky hue – made up his clothes. His face was hidden, as all the stories say.

And in a voice like croaking ravens and rumbling earth he spoke to the boy in the wood:

“Boy, I have need of sure hands and clear sight, will you aid me?”

“I’m no craftsman sir,” the tale-teller would recount. “My father is back a-ways, perhaps he could help?”

“No, boy. I cannot come to those whose minds are fast as iron. Yours, I can see, may bend like a bough in the breeze, or run as quick as deer. To your father I am nothing but a demon of the wood, to be kept back with fire and fence and metal. He will carve me and cut me to fit such a form, and thus I will be naught but that.”

The boy was thoughtful, and there at the table the Master Carpenter would grin at his guests like a cat. After a moment, he always continued:

“But you’re the Hooded Man, just like the stories say.”

“That I am boy, that I am. What do you think lies under my hood?”

“Don’t know. Could be anything, couldn’t it? Maybe that’s the point – to keep people wondering? So they keep telling stories about you?”

At this, the Hooded Man, Lord of all the Wildling Bands, be they Light or Dark, laughed loud and long.

“Perhaps you’re right boy, and perhaps I’ll let you look so you’ll have a story to tell about me, if you’ll help me?”

And agree the Master Carpenter did. For days and days he gathered fallen wood as the Hooded Man bade him, and in the noisy night of the wildwood, he wove and carved with stone and vine he found there, until at last there stood a great lintel strung between two trees as doorposts, and a patchwork of animal-hide hanging over the door-frame.

Though rickety and rude, it seemed to please the Hooded Man beyond measure; the faces the boy had carved in the wood of the lintel seemed to gape and grin with a strange life all their own, the kind of leering, sinister childishness that unnerves the righteous. All bulbous and grotesque, features knobbly and moss-spotted, they looked down upon the boy as he worked, until he finally stopped.

And when he stopped, he said quite gravely, in the fashion of small boys everywhere:

“I think it’s mostly done for now, sir. I could do more, but I might make it look silly, and I don’t want to do that.”

The Hooded Man loomed out of the shadows and prowled around the forest door, poked the hide and scratched at the wood, checking the boy’s work. At length, the darkness beneath the hood seemed to smile somehow, and the tall figure gave a slow nod.

“It’ll do boy. It’ll do.”

“Sir, what is it for?”

“Why, it’s a door. What are doors for but opening and closing?”

“But sir, there’s just the wildwood. It doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Of course it does boy. It’s a door, same as a hood’s a hood. Doors always go somewhere, otherwise there’d be no need for them, would there?”

“No sir, I suppose not.”

“Would you like to see what lies beyond the door you’ve built, boy?”

“Well sir, if it’s all the same to you, may I see your face? I mean I’d like to see if there’s anything on the other side, but you sort of, maybe, promised?”

“Yes, I did indeed sort of, maybe, didn’t I?”

And with one hand the Hooded Man pulled aside the hide that closed the forest door to reveal the lands beyond, while with the other he pulled back his hood…

Now, at this point in the tale the Master Carpenter had his audience on the edge of their seats, desperate to know what he had seen. Yet, without fail, every single time he would shrug minutely, saying only:

“And thus I gained my skill.”

No amount of cajoling or pressing would draw anything more from the Master Carpenter. No offers of bribes, or uttered threats would make him yield. Many were the times the messengers passed the nights sleepless and wondering, while the luckier ones dreamed strange and troubling dreams.

Always without fail, the next morning, there would be a letter of acceptance or rejection of their master’s proposal resting on that fine table, words written in a lovely feminine hand. Their horses would be waiting for them, and the lady of the house would bid them farewell, explaining that the Master Carpenter was a-bed, as he had been working all night.

The bravest or most troubled of the messengers would sometimes pluck up the courage to ask the princess what her husband had seen. But their questions were met with gentle resistance, for she would only say this:

“What the Master Carpenter sees is in the grain of the wood and the heart of all things. It remains with, or without him, yet you can only see it because he does as you ask.”

And so it was that the messengers carried back tales of the Master Carpenter and his wife, back to civilisation. I heard one, and now you have heard one, and so the legend spreads. This is the way of things, is it not?

So, how does the Master Carpenter link to anything? Well, if anything can be said of the Chaos Magic philosophy, it’s that it originated as a practical toolkit. Gordon’s stated that his review is a love letter, and that’s no bad thing. Because it echoes the idea that it’s not actually a rational undertaking. Carroll’s attempt to bring magic into the realm of science is laudable. But for me it’s not laudable because it is pure and clean and Science! which removes us from the dark fog of ignorance.

It is at best, one man’s attempt to make sense of the vast oddness of the universe. Mathematics is about relationships, just as language is. Communication and comprehension increase the richness of experience, and certainly I liked the Apophenion for its implicit (some might say explicit) acknowledgement that there is an human urge to make connections, even where there are none to be made.

No, Carroll’s work is laudable because it is, at is core, the gloriously irrational labour of love which is attempting to have a world that makes sense. So the Octavo, as with much that has arisen out of the original Chaos Magic ethos over the past thirty-odd years, is a fantastic piece of contouring and shaping, albeit one born of an irrational urge.

Making sense of chaos might sound like an oxymoron, but humans have been doing it since the beginning, so Pete Carroll is in good company. If reductionism helps you, so be it. If you take comfort in the idea that everything is accurately intelligible to the human mind, I’m not going to tell you that you are wrong.

What we perceive is defined by the method of perception. The way things appear is contingent on how we re-cognise them -  which is not a typographic error, by the way.

If you like your Chaos with probability scores, then Pete’s weltanschauung is probably more easily inhabited. As a medium he proposes theoretical constants and shapes – takes head-bendy maths and physics and brings it into the world of the occult. For that alone he should be regarded as partaking of the magician role.

Myself, I’m not going to try and explain what truly lies beyond the door-frame. Because in my view, it only relates to the door, and not what it is, in and of itself.

I may tell you some beautiful and terrible lies about it though!

Blatant Whorebaggery below. I’m proud to be part of this, even if I might disagree with some of the other contributors. Because that’s what keeps minds open. Additionally, from February I will be contributing to the ModernMythology.net blog, which I hope my readers might like to comment on and get things really going in the comments section!

______________________

For Immediate Release: London, 17th of January 2011

Weaponized is proud to announce the publication of ‘The Immanence of Myth’, an anthology arranged by James Curcio of Mythos Media. This anthology includes conversations, art and articles with those in the process of creating myth now, from up-and-comers and long-time underground myth-makers to celebrated artists such as Laurie Lipton and David Mack.

It will be published by Weaponized and available in print through major retailers and in Kindle and other eBook formats from July 2011.

About ‘The Immanence of Myth’:

Thinkers such as Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Karl Kerenyi, and many others have helped to popularize an awareness of the psychological significance of archaic myth inside, as well as outside, the ivory tower of academia. However, the vast majority of their work has been focused on understanding and legitimizing the myths of the past.

Yet myth is an immanent, ongoing dialogue, an assemblage that interconnects us all. Joseph Campbell made it a part of his life’s work to emphasize the central importance an understanding of myth plays for the artist, and it is a perspective that arguably has been lost in many corners of the modern art world. This makes this investigation essential for artists (and would-be artists), regardless of their medium.

However, myth’s central importance does not end with art. Our beliefs and ideas about the world determine how we treat the world, how we engage with it and enter into it. Far from being archaic relics of the past, myths will affect the future for all of us. Even if we are unaware of them, they will continue to affect us.

Nearly half of this five-hundred page book was written by James Curcio, a writer and art director with extensive independent media experience. Since getting involved in media production as co-founder of Evolving Media in 2000—the first in many media/arts collectives he helped organize—he has built engaging narratives, utilizing the mediums best suited to the task.

He says, “I am excited to be building a platform for the exploration of the subject of mythology in a modern light, both through the release of this book and the website modernmythology.net, and believe that Weaponized is the perfect partner to bring this to fruition. I hope that this continues to be a springboard for the much-needed discussion of the role that myth plays in all our lives, as well as the creation of new media which builds upon this knowledge.”

John Harrigan of Weaponized says “One of the key reasons FoolishPeople founded the Weaponized imprint was to ensure that important works such as ‘The Immanence of Myth’ are published and made widely available. Now more than ever the subject of Myth is of vital importance to the very nature of humanity and we’re proud to publish this book.”

We must invent our myths—or re-invent them—ourselves. If you haven’t already, take this as a wake-up call to join in and become a myth-maker of the 21st century.

About Weaponized:

Weaponized publishes experimental forms of fiction, prose and art that offer new ways to experience stories and myth. They are passionately committed to finding unique narrative hybrids that challenge, engage, inform and inspire readers.

The imprint was founded by FoolishPeople, a group that has been creating theatre, collaborative events, live art, books, music and film for over fifteen years. FoolishPeople combine mythology, shamanism, drama therapy, strategic forecasting and open source collaboration in the creation of this work.

Since its launch in August 2010 Weaponized has  published FoolishPeople scripts ‘Cirxus’ and ‘Dead Language’ by John Harrigan, ‘The Sparky Show’ by Xanadu Xero and ‘Forum’ by Richard Webb.

Amongst other titles scheduled in 2011 Weaponized will publish ‘Citizen Y’ written by John Harrigan and James Curcio in April.

Starting in February and leading up to the publication of ‘The Immanence of Myth’ in July, James Curcio’s ModernMythology.net and weaponized.net will feature writing and interviews with contributors featured in ‘The Immanence of Myth’.

www.weaponized.net

www.modernmythology.net

PRESS CONTACT

For further information please email

press@weaponized.net

Do you know something? I never had an invisible friend as a child. Not so strange perhaps, except there’s this thing about me. I’m fairly certain that if you have read any of my stuff, you’ll know what that thing is so I’m not going to say exactly what it is yet. Hell, you may even work it out as you read on, on the off-chance you don’t already know, or this is the first time you’ve read my words.

But, as a child, I did as most children did, and played games. I imagined things, played out stories in areas that weren’t necessarily conducive to being a cowboy, a super intelligent android, a barbarian hero, a starship pilot or a being of phenomenal cosmic power.

(Cardboard boxes, behind the sofa, in concrete playgrounds and under the dining room table for example).

The raw power of this always amazes me now, the fact that children can manufacture and incorporate disparate pieces of environment into a coherent whole. The creativity of it is stunning – the effortless conjuring up  of alternate existences for the purposes of exploration, understanding, and above all of these, sheer unadulterated fun.

Of course, adultery, adulteration; all these words have their roots in violation, alteration and corruption. Etymologically they emerge from alter:

alter (v.)

late 14c., “to change (something),” from O.Fr. alterer “change, alter,” from M.L. alterare “to change,” from L. alter “the other (of the two),” from PIE *al- “beyond” + comp. suffix -ter (cf. other). Intransitive sense “to become otherwise” first recorded 1580s. Related: Altered; altering.

An adult world is a complete world. Adulthood is the culmination of development, the completeness, the crystalisation of a full person. This is what is subtly taught in our culture. School trains us to think in terms of ‘work’ and ‘play’. Play is something children do, permitted because you are incomplete. It’s seen as a trial stage, a way of learning before the actual business of life begins.

We even ascribe play to juvenile animals, as practice for hunting or social interactions. It’s a dry run, the testing phase. To play as a child is acceptable, and as we grow older, the time for play becomes smaller, eventually morphing into a ‘break’ from work; a necessary sanctioned interrupt, rather than what it was before.

It’s interesting how things change, isn’t it?  It’s okay to goof off on your break, but not too much because you’re still at work, right? Certain things are Not Safe For Work, and I’m not just talking about porn here, am I? For some people this blog is NSFW – being spotted reading a site like this might range from the totally fine to outing one as alternative and slightly odd, or.at worst, some kind of crazy person or sinister black magician.

Exposure of one’s nature as an alternative sort of person isn’t always the best thing – everybody knows that. From pogroms to social snubbing and mockery, the gauntlet can be a little annoying and frankly unpleasant. Not ‘taking things seriously’ can be levelled as an insult, a criticism or worse.

Have you ever been in a situation when the word ‘immature’ has been used? I’m sure you have, haven’t you?

Because:

You’re not old enough, ready or willing enough to understand what I’m talking about.

Really.

You have yet to reach the level of understanding and advancement that I have, have you? You’ve not gained enough experience to level up.

This is a grownup thing, only discoverable by highly spiritually aware persons…

(Even writing that made me feel dirty, that and want to laugh, by the way).

You get the idea though, don’t you? This is the kind of thing that’s there all the time, the glass ceiling, the pay grade barrier, the security clearance. Sometimes, there is honestly a reason for it – certain information is necessary or maybe specific training. That’s not what we’re referring to though.

No, what we’re talking about and thinking about here, you and I, is the way there’s always another hoop to jump through, some illusionary threshold held up.  Once you cross it, you’ll be OK. You’ll be there, you’ll be accepted.

And to do that, to form yourself correctly, you accept certain things as true. It’s a social reciprocity. We learn it as kids, collaborating with others if we play with them. For the duration of the game, we accept that the cardboard box is the fortressspaceshiphousegaolbedroomspaceofinfinitepossibility.

But to echo the late, great, Bill Hicks:

“It’s just a ride.”

Just a game, and when it’s over we can do something else. Except people forget, don’t they – and they forget because they’ve been trained to look for the next stage in some kind of progression towards…something. Something complete, something ultimate. Something ripe and ready that will answer all your problems.

And you know, that’s how power works.

“Stick with me kid, and you’ll go far.”

Mimic the cool, the successful the wealthy; strive towards some halcyon thing that allows you to entertain the reptile-brain dream of a post-scarcity existence; essentials whenever and wherever you want. Glorious unaging immortality, avoiding the nasty business of flux and struggle and eventual death.

Ah, promises, promises.

Kids know the game ends eventually, because their world is one of eternal incompleteness. That’s fine, because they fill in the gaps with will and imagination. You were a kid once, and you know what it was like. Remember that simple decision to treat something in a particular way, just because you could?

I’m a trained philosopher – undergraduate and postgraduate too, and I’ve studied Aristotle, Plato, and a host of other dead people from various places and times. I’ve even done it with some living people too.

That was fun.

Really fun, playing with the fundamentals of the universe, chopping and changing premises like some manic six-year old who’s found the joy of playing dress-up in their elders’ clothes.

It’s so much fun, I do it all the time. I’m doing it now. That’s what this is. That’s what I’m about, and you’re here with me, playing along.

Are we having fun yet, or do you want to look away, to stop reading because somewhere, there’s an itch in your mind? And that’s part of it, that itch.

The very concept of ‘Is’? Blame Aristotle for most of the roots of thought on Being and Is. That’s a game too, by the way. It’s not even neurologically accurate. If we wanted to be accurate we’d have to say ‘It seems to me.’ every time we use ‘Is.’

What a mouthful. It’s a pity we don’t have a ‘Find and Replace’ mechanism for our thoughts, a Copy ‘N Paste Brain. Or is it?

Austin Spare would talk about the power of ‘as if‘.

Suppose you treat everything as having a goal? Wouldn’t that mean that rambling, labyrinthine posts have a point? And that reminds me of a story.

This is how it goes:

Once upon a time, there was a King and there were some gods. These gods, being much less ineffable than the one that lurks in the back corner of the modern Western mind, liked gifts. We can all get that, right? We’re all aware that we might be more kindly disposed to those who just plain nice to us, yes?

And just as we like gifts to be unequivocally ours, so these gods liked that too. They had certain things they liked humans to do, so that the gifts were marked as theirs. So these marks were obvious to the universe, like a nametag, or a sticky label on the tupperware box which your lunch is in while your store it in the fridge at work.

One of the gods, Poseidon, was rather nice to the King, who happened to be called Minos. In return for being rather nice, there was a great white bull which the god liked very much and put his mark on. Now, this was an extraordinarily handsome specimen of taurean flesh. Snow white it was, and shining like the seafoam; its breath was as fierce as a roaring storm and the sound of its hooves was like the crash and boom of a thousand thunderous breakers

This bull was, in short, the shiznit; it was the zenith, the veritable peak of bovine brilliance, trust me on that. Its flanks gleamed brighter than the moon. It was tasty, tasty, very very tasty, if you catch my drift? Everyone knew it, even King Minos, in fact, especially King Minos. It was the gourmet leftovers in the fridge of life, the ones that somehow smell and look delicious despite being neatly sealed and tidily labelled. Makes your stomach growl so it does, sets the mouth to water like a stream. We’ve all been there, and it’s all the more delicious because you can’t have it, because it’s just beyond your reach, isn’t it?

Sometimes people idly entertain nicking a little bit don’t they – the owner won’t really notice a spoonful gone, that sort of thing. It’s a very human thing to do. King Minos was very human, which is always nice because that means you have someone to identify with in this story, and that always helps. Plus, humans do slightly silly things when we’re enamoured of something – and we’ve all done that.

Now, Minos was a King, and by ancient definition, being a King meant you were a bit larger than life; you turned things up a notch or six. In fact, you might say Minos turned it all the way to eleven in the silliness stakes, because despite that bull being marked, very clearly, in big black capitals as POSEIDON’S BULL  – DO NOT TOUCH: MORTALS THIS MEANS YOU! Minos raided the divine fridge. Not just a spoonful either.

No, Minos pilfered the entire lot for his very own self.

(Many a courtier was plagued by the sound of nonchalant whistling from the royal chamber for days after, let me tell you!)

Having brazenly stolen from a god, well, as I’m sure you’d understand if some uppity git had nicked your gear, King Minos’ name was mud as far as your average divinity was concerned. So much so that Aphrodite, stunning, beautiful, vindictive, vicious Aphrodite – the lovely lady who emerged from the sea-foam, decided to give King Minos a bit of a slap for his temerity on behalf of her oceanic colleague.

So it was that goddess of love did her thing, wove her way over King Minos lady wife – who since you ask, was named Pasiphae. For if Minos so desperately wanted god-stuff in his life, she’d give it to him – and how! Gods you see, though they walked among men, were way beyond what most mortals could handle. They sort of made normal life impossible if you bumped into them. Your average mortal just went pop – mad, dead, cursed, or all of the above and worse, times ten.

Let me tell you, many’s the folks been changed by contact with those things that lie beyond the human world. Divine attention was not necessarily what you wanted. Most kept their head down and made sure they did enough to keep the folks on Olympus pleasantly disinterested. Rare was the individual who stuck their head above the parapet, y’know?

King Minos however? He’d not just stuck his head above the parapet. No, he’d dropped his trousers and hung his naked arse over it for everyone to see. Not, as I’m sure you’re aware, the best thing to do when there’s an inhuman immortal who nurses a grudge looking your way, is it?

So Aphrodite, she caused Pasiphae to find the bull mighty fine, if you know what I mean? If there was anybody around then and there who could make you want a bit of bull in every way you could, and several you couldn’t but were going to try anyway, it was Aphrodite.

But Pasiphae, she wasn’t some empty-headed bimbo. No, she was one smart lady, albeit maddened by divinely inspired lust. She knew there were going to be some anatomical…issues. So she commissioned Daedalus – yes, that Daedalus – to make here a hollow cow she could be inside so that the whole business would be…more interesting.

And Daedalus, more of a mechanical genius than Leonardo Da Vinci plus Archimedes, multiplied by the incomparable Montgomery Scott, does so. It’s a mighty fine cow, for a mighty fine bull, and the inevitable soft focus and seventies soundtrack occurs. In due time, there’s a child, a sprog, some bullspawn.

These days he’s mostly known as the Minotaur, but his name is Asterion and his mother loved him very much, despite the head and the tail of the bull poking from his little bastard rump. Now you may think a bit of adultery is a mild punishment for thieving Minos, but there’s more.

The divine violence wrought on Minos continues, for ickle baby Asterion not only provides a reminder of his wife’s infidelity and rampant zoophilia, the  little star – for Asterion means ‘starry’- possesses some distinctly inhuman appetites. Asterion you see, grew not by normal human methods of nourishment. Mother’s milk did not sustain him, no. He grew and grew and grew, becoming huge and terrible and hungry for human flesh.

Such a thing was really rather unpleasant for Minos, as the hungry beast seemed never to be sated, and if there’s something worse than a bull in a china shop, it’s a monstrous hybrid spawned by divine ire and lust. So Minos, thoroughly sick of his impossible stepson and his violation of human order, called on the supergenius Daedalus, who built a prison for Asterion in the form of a maze – the Labyrinth.

(You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. They have nothing to do with David Bowie or his sock. Or maybe they do…)

Asterion is killed by Theseus after Minos’ daughter helps him through the Labyrinth, but that is another tale, to be sure, one which precedes the flight of Icarus. The events continue on, there is never really and end to storytime. It is endless and shifting, nested, layer upon layer, spooled like a ball of twine given to Theseus by Ariadne.

So lets play in storytime.

Imagine yourself in the Labyrinth; at the centre sits the Minotaur Asterion. In the night of the looping tunnels, the enclosed, claustrophobic spaces, air stirs. The echo of his father’s breath roars past your cheek, warm and stifling.

> N

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> what is a grue?

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

Is the  Minotaur a grue? A monstrous star in the dark? Why put such a bright thing in the mazelike place? Are you fearful or are you an adventurer? What secrets might Asterion hold, his feasting never finished, his hunger never sated, where might the endless tunnels lead?

The Labyrinth holds endless potential in its darkness, just as the blank page or badge conceal possibilities. If the senses are deprived of things to grasp, what then? A half-seen, twilight world, phantasmal and yet absolutely real and totally immersive when experienced. Such is the stuff of dreams, of hopes, of aspirations and of nightmares.

Incomplete and in total flux, Heraclitan in the extreme.

For those of you who have read The Invisibles, there is a reason I go by VI. The elegant turncoat.

“I just met the Secret Chiefs of the Invisible Order. They’re as alien as the space between your bloody fingers and I mean that.”

The space between, the potential multiplicity. What happens if we introduce many gods instead of one, just as an idea, just as play, just as a method of exploration. Play with serious things, like Love and Justice and Honour and Integrity. Especially morality. What if we could imagine that all the gods that were, in a vast company, at a party?

Allah and YHVH discussing literary criticism with Vishnu. Dionysus and Tammuz chewing cornstalks and getting drunk on homebrewed beer? What if, after thousands of years, the Devil picks himself up from his prat-Fall and twirls his Chaplin umbrella? Or Jesus and Astarte nip off into a corner for a spot of tantric sex?

If you don’t exist, then what’s wrong with dying? If nothing is what it seems then a thing can be anything and everything. The flesh and blood of man can embody the entire universe, after all – the incomparable vastness of the All present within the space of a hands-span.

Aristotle gets drunk, and IS shifts into SEEMS TO BE. It’s all bleary and smeared and I LOVE YOU MAN.

Let us experiment rigorously, ruthlessly, for SCIENCE! Let us experience completely and furiously, caught up in the awe and terror of Aphrodite, the rage of the roaring sea  – the hieros gamos – carnal and full of lust.

Experi! Experi! To Try, to Play!

The same word root, the root of being human. And that’s not human is, it’s human-seems-to-me! Come dance in the Harlequinade – turn your coat inside out and stand on your head.

“The Invisibles is an immune program: triggered by the Barbelith buoy when the game crashed and embedded the player.”

Do you know something? I never had an invisible friend as a child.

Would you like to come and play with us? We’ll back in time for tea.

Be seeing you.

It’s been getting a bit nippy up North, I’ll tell you. Though it must be said, the way this country shuts down after a bit of the white stuff is nothing short of ridiculous. Still, each to their own. It’s been a busy few months in the life of Mr. VI – and mine too; this is as close as you will get to a third person reference in this entry, and I suspect you may be grateful. Equally, the gap, the hiatus, the disruption to service, has borne strange fruit.

So that’s all right then, because quite frankly said fruit is rather intoxicating when you have allowed it to reduce to an inspiring liquor. October brought its tide of strangeness and autumnal in-betweeness; November brings a cold beauty and warm hearth to the fore, and I am doubly sure that December will continue to bring winter and Yule fortune.

The photograph above is Furness Abbey. It’s a place I’ve only been to once or twice, but on each occasion I was fascinated.  As you might imagine, ruins are deeply, strangely illuminating things which may shed much light on the subtly hidden processes of the mind and soul.

Imagine wandering through that place in the snow; footfalls and other sounds muffled by crisply packed powder that crunches and gives beneath movements that slowly lead you through the gaps and archways. Fallen walls and red stone are now open to a winter’s sky, everything rounded off . Even the echoes of generations of voices raised in song and prayer are naught but indistinct whispers in your ears.

Just shy of nine centuries – that’s how long this place has held a grip on the mind of man. Four hundred years of faith and devotion, and the same again as ruin. Half its life as a broken, destroyed thing, and still it stands; still it brings pilgrims to drink from the well of its existence. Still they come, drawn by its weight, to walk its halls and cloisters.

And with each passing year, still it conjures. In its presence, the stone possesses a power, a power which reaches out across the centuries. Human ingenuity suffused with inspiration, from an urge to mimic and create awe and glory; a massive undertaking to speak of the service of divinity.

For some, that divinity reaches out as a sense of holiness, and that is a wonderful thing because holiness presents a wholeness which you may use as a reference point – a greater pattern perhaps, or simply the notion of smooth-running nigh endless complexity; an emergent biosphere which has developed its viability ins spite of, and also due to, circumstance.

For others, the very fact that these ruins might be conceived by some kind of sapient intelligence echoes the notion that divinity is a property of both sapience and sentience. Either that fusion creates the notion of divinity, or it is suffused with it -  mankind as microcosmic avatar of the macrocosm; children of the very gods themselves.

Genius itself was originally conceptualized as a tutelary daimon. Inspiration, the act of breathing, is synonymous with the pneuma of the philosophers, the önd of the Norse, the ruach of the Hebrews. How many times have we truly uttered the phrase ‘it took my breath away’ and meant it?

How many times have those words been spoke to evoke the sense of awe and majesty experienced; a moment in time that disrupts the normal rhythm of the perception and existence in our lives, replacing it with a sense of something extra-ordinary?

Boreas runs, the Greek god of the North wind, and as he runs he brings winter and its storms, even to these islands. Islands which are one of the physical gates to the terra incognita of Hyperborea and, by implacably cold esoteric logic to COLD ALBION itself. Beyond the North Wind lies a place of dreamed maybes, once-and-future things; woodsy breath and ancient stones now ruined and serving as mysterious doors in every sense.

Gordon wrote an extremely interesting post a while back that introduces the Maori terms Turangawaewae and Whakapapa. For me, the ancestry that links me to these islands is a thing that goes beyond heredity, genetics and physicality. When all things are possessed of the potential to reach backward  through time, all things  are linked and held in the complexity of wyrd, and the gods themselves meet in counsel around the well of Urðr according to the Eddas.

This deep well nourishes the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree – axis mundi of the Heathen cosmology – and in a mythopoetic worldview where humans have their origins in trees gifted with  divine breath, one can easily see the  idea that it is this wellspring that nourishes a person. Add to this the notion that the World Tree is indeed a tall, one may even say the tallest tree since it supports all of the nine worlds, and suddenly these strange sounding words in a tongue that is alien to many become a little more familiar, don’t they?

It’s from this genealogy, this mythic source buried deep within the very fabric of conciousness and landscape itself, that we find the roots of ourselves, the genius of history – not as an old man, but as an eternally blooming maiden. She is not static, this Norn, this giant-maiden. No, her essence is just that; not merely Past and  gone, left behind on the road to wither and become a crone, but instead ever moving and vital!

As events and circumstances shift, she embraces and encompasses them, weaves them into the fabric with her sisters – the skein of life  shimmers in gleaming flux. And ruins are past things, are they not? By definition, they are incomplete, they have collapsed and become something other than their simple physicality.

They are, in a sense, pieces of negative architecture, an absent space which may be filled and reconfigured by that very same spring, becoming shaped by it and marked by its strange tide-marks and sediments; in that place, the imaginal is summoned and evoked. Unbound from a single purpose, they become gateways to the manifold othernesses, which make up the possibilities and permutations of the secret landscape; markers of hovering on the threshold, where the vast world inside the skull meets the hugeness of the outside…

And I haven’t given you any crunchy blog posts in a while, have a slightly odd story I wrote. Hope you enjoy!

“THE ISLE”

But you, they say, were on Sams Isle,

And drummed for the wights with the Völvas,

Like a wizard (vitki) through the world you passed,

which I thought was an unmanly (ergi) thing to do.

(Lokasenna: 24)

He comes to a place where the roads meet; there in the dead of night, he raises his gaze to the gallows and sees its heavy corpse-fruit swaying in the breeze. The dark is full of strange cries and weird rustling noises; shrieks from creatures not seen abroad by the light of day fill the air; his skin crawls and he pulls the knife from his pocket, slicing open his thumb along the old scar.

It burns like fire for a moment, the edges of the flesh gaping wide and empty for a frozen instant and then the wetness pulses and drips; warmth swiftly stolen by the wind as he marks the design out on his forehead; a spindled wheel with forks and bars which forms the stave-sign – an ægishjálmr – the helm of awe.

Nine breaths later, he feels his face shifting upon the planes of his skull; something old and terrible emerging once again from his features as he steps up and hugs the legs of the hanged man tight to his body. The sharp stench of excrement rises from the dead man’s breeches, mixed with the faint odour of spent seed, sticky and cold now that the final spew is done and the head lolls upon a broken neck.

Ignoring the urge to retch, his bloody hand now seeks the prize; finds it flaccid and shrivelled and so anoints it; paints it scarlet there in the dark and soiled places of death, strokes it like a lover – crooning, croaking runes like a lullaby.

A groan escapes the dead man’s mouth – lips all spittle-flecked and slack around a swollen tongue in a bloated, blackened face. A groan like an old oak creaking in a storm, like the timbers of a ship as she strains against roaring waves and jagged rock; a groan of doom and horrified release.

The prize now hard as iron in his palm, all blood-slick and leaping as a wild horse beneath his fingers; he grips tight and feels sightless eyes upon his face as he works, the grave-gaze chill and inhuman.

“More.” A sepulchral pleading, a doom-laden entreaty. “Give me more…bitch.”

The last word is bitten off in a snarl, a savage jerk of the wrist wrenching at manhood’s root, sending the memory of pain down into the depths to reach this dead thing.

“Please, I beg you. I was not always as you see me, all full of foul wind and rot. Once I was mighty and beautiful, and all the women wished my seed within their furrow. They howled when I took them, she-wolves and hell-cats all.” A death-rattle of laughter then, “If they would not throw open their gates at fine words then I would break them with fist and fury, ’til I could wash myself in their tears.”

“But the dead shed no tears now, for we are far too cold and our souls are all crusted with sea-rime; the rivers are poison and so we may not bathe. Our stench follows us like a cloak, we who are barred even from the halls of Hel, cast out beyond her yard across the plains of misty darkness and writhing serpents. Have you no pity for us – you with your hand so warm and breath so sweet?”

“No pity for me, who was once a man amongst men, who fought and fucked and fed like any other? I who raised my voice in battle-song and sought victory harder than any, I who sired sons and daughters all over the kingdom. I who honoured the gods and gave them the finest things?”

And though the red hand does not cease its work upon the corpse’s prick, the reply comes like a song of steel voiced with the roar of thunder:

“No pity.”

Cunning fills the corpse-voice then, like oil on water, or the whispering of doubt:

“You have the look of him, grim and severe – like a son to his father. I’ll be betting you’ve had your way with better furrows than the grave, just like him. Cut me down; let me stand and we’ll range across the worlds, living and dead, all full of fury. He’d like that, no?”

Silence is the only answer, broken by the wet slap of hand on flesh, moving with inexorable rhythmic purpose.

“Or maybe,” this last in a tone of echoing desperation. “Maybe I’ll tell a tale they sing, out in the wilds where the wind blows raw and the sky goes on forever; where the world is roofed with the skull of a giant?”

“Maybe…”

**

This is the tale they tell of the Old One, amongst the quiet ones and the shrivelled and amongst the shriekers too. This is the tale of how Jalk – the Gelding – came to the womenfolk and danced and sang, how he drummed and called; how the Allfather opened himself as mother opens herself to her child.

For this is one of many ways he learned the secrets of the volvas and the spaewives; how the wisdom taught by the lady of Fólkvangr in distant past set him to wax and grow in endless understanding; how that hidden god, every greedy for the Mysteries, learned women’s ways and wiles.

Thus did Waytamer come to that isle in the North, and first he walked in the guise of mortal flesh and did learn many things from the men of that place. Gifts of war-wisdom he gave in return, woke the thunder in the blood and fettered many a warrior there – freezing their hearts and setting the fury to rise so that they ran as wolf and bear.

A kingly few he marked, mixing blood with god-breath and words born in the cries of eagles and the croakings of the blackest birds – for is it not told by the skalds that there are lords arising from the very loins of the god himself?

Yet those are tales for another time, for the graves of Angatyr and his brothers did not yet lie upon the isle and the berserkers’ deeds were as yet unspoken. Still, even in those distant times the isle was known by all as a hallowed place, full of mighty wights and ancient powers.

So came Jalk across the sea and over land, to sit and spy out the places where men shiver and move hurriedly on. Long he waited in wind and cold, and many were the runes he carved; strange were the words he hurled from his lips into the air like spears. Many were the days he shook, and more still were those in which he was still as stone, until word came to him of a path that led to a secret place.

Along that path he walked, until he came to a high place in the wilderness, and there he waited for night to fall. So it was, as he was biding his time, that he began to see movement below, there in the dusk. Flame and torch sprang up, marking out an enclosure and the wind carried the sound of women’s voices to his ears. Carefully, silently, he moved closer, the encroaching night gathered about him like a cloak, to rest all hidden just beyond the reaches of the light.

Now let me tell you, sweet one, of that which Jalk saw with his eye on Sams’s Isle. Let me tell you of the gathering there; of the wise women that stood proud and unfettered by the fire with their hair unbound, all clothed in brightness – gleaming with amber and fine work – full of power and deep knowledge.

For you have heard and seen tales of seeresses, oh red hand. You have heard of their staff kept close by them and the songs that are sung to call the attention of the wights and sweetly slide free of flesh.

But I ask you, have you seen as Jalk saw? Have you see them pass the rod from hand to hand, raise it to their lips and kiss it, or heard them call their ancient mothers and unborn children to the rite to witness? Have you heard them call out to the earth, to the great and terrible women with the might and power of the greatest of giants?

All this he saw, that and more; unveiled he saw them, gentle one moment, fierce the next. Clothed and naked, young and old, all adored the secret centre. Coarse and refined, lust and chastity both; unleashed – unfettered and free.

There in the dark he watched as they opened themselves to the world, holy and unafraid as it poured into and through them – watched the awe-inspiring embrace of womankind as it enfolded all things without fear or judgement. There he saw them, laughing with troll-wives and giantesses; each volva as mighty as those who the very gods themselves took as wives!

For have you not heard the doom of the worlds, spear-stroker? How One-Eye went to the mound and called upon Her and she spoke of ancient days and those yet to come? She spoke of the giants who gave Her bread before the world was made, and of those mighty giant-maids come from Jotunheim before the gods made men and dwarves.

All these things Jalk knew, had heard from Her in days before men; all this he knew and he saw yet more there. Great wights came up from the earth to feast and put on form; to whisper words and discharge ancient obligations.

Fine were the shapes there in the light, well-wrought was even the oldest hag – years worn like jewels, sunken dugs and sagging flesh gleaming with sacred power. Things monstrous to menfolk walked there, wearing the faces of daughter, wife and mother. Great was the wailing and the air was thick with power all unchained.

Such was the way of things when silence fell and all eyes turned to where Jalk hid – golden gazes and lambent eyes piercing the dark. Fixed there as surely as if a spear had pierced him, so the watcher looked boldly back, meeting each in turn with brazen frankness, though his breath was held.

Many are the names and many the ways of the speargod; he brings death at a word and victory to those he chooses. Yet even he paused there, when all had the ancient blood awoken in their veins, each a terrible fury, as fierce an enemy as a horde of giants.

Until at last, a voice spoke from that great throng:

“No man can come here tonight. All know this, and yet you come. Did you think to feast on us with your eye, to steal our beauty and lock it away in the treasure-chest of memory, to stroke your spear on cold winter nights? Or perhaps you thought to rape, to rut, to plant your seed, to seize and take by force the one that caught your fancy?”

Now had it been I, my sweet guest, this would be true – for rutting was my greatest joy. But even I should have died there screaming, ripped asunder by vengeful hands and butchered like a beast. As it is, I hang here for the same reason. But I am not Jalk.

Nay, not he; for he shook his head and stepped forward, saying: “No, great Lady. My lust is for other things, great though it is. I am no man, for my name is Jalk.”

“Gelding is it?” the voice was arch as he moved slowly onward, until he was surrounded on all sides by witches. “Queer then, are you? If you prefer the company of men, you are in the wrong place entirely!”

Can you imagine, can you hear the laughter of witches all around you, unfettered by law or propriety? It echoed off the landscape like a storm, and many were the hands that reached to grab and test him, but Jalk smiled and inclined his head in acknowledgement.

“Bent and crooked; these both I have been called for many years, and surely will for many hence Lady – just as I have been called treacherous and fickle, and I am sure there are many here who have borne the same!”

At this the laughter ceased abruptly, a murderous silence rising up and enveloping the world. Yet still they held back, as the Lady emerged from the throng. Her hood was furred with catskin, face obscured, and about her waist gleamed amber that seemed to burn in the firelight. It drew the eye to her hips, highlighting her movements, fluid and elegant as they were.

In her arms she cradled the staff – thick as a man’s arm, carved and ridged and trailing bright streamers that shifted faintly in the breeze.

“Is that courage or foolishness I hear Gelding? We have little use for the latter and the former must be of the right kind. Perhaps we should test the truth of your name?”

“Neither courage nor foolishness, Lady. Merely the truth – just as my name.”

Hardly had the words left his mouth when hands began to rip and tear at his clothes. Sharp nails drew blood, voices shouted and laughed as he was roughly stripped to stand naked amidst them. Hungry eyes devoured his form on all sides – taking in the beasts and runes, the battle scars and ritual marks that told their tale upon his hide.

Naked stood he, member drooping and sac shrivelled as the Lady circled, prowling like a cat. Stock-still, waiting; thus he was as the staff struck him from all angles, testing his poise. Three times he was driven to his knees, rising each time to stand with resolute strength until she stood before him, eyes upon him within her hood.

“Are you afraid, Gelding? I have seen many a man unmanned by fear – brave warriors on the field of battle sometimes turn to craven cowards in the bedchamber. We have all seen it.”

“I would be wise to fear Lady. There are many of you and I am alone – I have seen the forbidden and the holy and know you may wish to end me for it. But I am not unmanned by fear, no.”

“Is your name a curse then?” she asked him coolly, slipping off a catskin glove and stretching out a hand to grasp him with firm fingers. “Has some wife wished you ill, some wizard struck your rod with black thunder?”

“No curse Lady, though given by men. No wizard’s spell has stolen my manhood, nor have I abandoned the ways of my grandfathers.”

“What then?” asked she who stroked him, as you stroke my cold cock. “Why do you not leap as a stallion at my touch? Why does the sight of womanhood all unveiled not fill you with desire?”

He smiled then, all crooked and bent, flesh soft in her palm. “I am full of desire Lady, full of hunger and fury – my blood is the blood of bright blue ice and shining moon. But I am old and have no need to spread my seed, an old wolf with many cubs and grey fur.”

“Are you spent then, Gelding?” she asked him mockingly, eyes gleaming from within her hood. “Is your day done, are you an empty thing?”

“As empty as the yawning void where rime met fire, in the days before the worlds my Lady, full of naught all up to the broad brim of my hat and empty eye!” he said with gusto, exultant and amused.

“What need have we then of you? We who have a staff where you bear none.”

“No need at all.” admitted Jalk. “Save that I come in openness and without fear.”

“Why should we feed an old grey wolf who is always hungry? Why should we place the fruits of our labour in your gaping maw, so you may gobble them up, glut-lusty with knowledge?”

“No reason at all, nor need, as I have said. Simply thus:

The eagle’s eye gleams brightest and his voice cries loudest when the wind is beneath his wings.
The horse is at his finest when he runs and and rears with smooth muscle and shining mane.
The serpent is at his wisest when he coils, ready to spring, all venom held in fang.”

“All these things have no master Gelding, and yet by your own name, you have been mastered. Your staff is crooked and cold when another’s would be aflame. What knowing have you of these things?”

“I know much Lady, but I would always and ever know more. Before the question is asked by the spaewives, I would no more. Before their tongues twitch and breath gather, I would know more. In that knowing, and by it, I taste the truth of your words, for all those things have I been. All have known no master, and yet you speak rightly!”

Bright was the eye of the Gelding as he spoke, glinting with sharp merriment. “I have been mastered by he who is High, Just as High, and Third. I have been bound and pierced by the spear of Volsi himself. Aye, Lady, Jalk I am, and made so by Ygg the Terrible One, ridden by his fury until I knew naught else and my flesh turned as if to water!”

Now at these words, shaft-cradler, the Lady gave a great cry and all assembled began to pound the earth as a great wind sprang up and set the flames to roar. In answer came the shriek of an eagle ripped from the throat of a shape than ran like a river and howled like the wind. There, in that place began a terrible thing, there on that dark night.

For there danced the Gelding, twitching and arcing like I when the noose tightened about my neck. Unmanly were his movements, all wild and unrestrained his Art – with spit-frothed lips and rolling eyes did he thunder across that plain as if a horde of maddened horses.

One moment he fell down dead as a corpse, the next he leaped up as a ghastly thing – face black and breath foul, food for the worms as all semblance of manhood left him. A womanly thing it was, or so men would say, as he shivered and shook like a newborn babe, begging a suck from the tit of the Earth itself. There, he sweated like a maiden, crying out in agonized joy as the song of the stars pierced him like spear. There he bled moon-blood like like a lass, spilling out upon the ground, seeping into the places below, filled up with spirit seed until he drowned in that fierce jism.

The took him them, the witches and the volvas and the spaewives and the giant maids. They raised him up as the roots of Yggdrasil clamped about him. Twining about his limbs, the roots of that great tree held him as he gripped that trunk, festooned with a noose of his own bowels, bound there by tendon and sinew as he held the staff – the vast column of the pizzle of that wooden horse the axis of his very existence.

They raised him up to the heights and lowered him to the depths, and in the darkness of the hood he was seidhmadhr – the seidr-man. Charms and spells he spun and wove and wove them well, though men say such weavings be women’s work. Bestla’s son was he – born betwixt the thighs of a giantess, and blood breeds true – this you know, my night-worker.

From shadows he struck his enemies, and with poisoned words and subtle spells he ended great men and tugged upon the threads of wyrd, touching the lives of those not yet dreamt into existence. His fingers ran over the loom of fate, learning the ways of the Norns and seeing the growth of many a fylgia as a child slumbered snug in its mother’s womb.

And when the night was done, when the wights had sunk and returned from whence they came; when the blue dawn hour came and his body ached and his skull felt empty; when his hide felt loose yet shrunken and the shadows rose out of the night, so Jalk remained once more no-man, with a belly full of boiling dreamstuff nourished in the darkness of his bowels, full of power and quiet might.

Upon that isle then, it is said that he learned those ways, and that ever more, upon some silent night beyond the walls of Asgard, a shivering flowing shape would shriek and sing until dawn in that godly place, with the body of the lord of that realm seeming to lie cold and dead upon its earth.

**

“Unmanly then, the lord of Valholl, or so they whisper.” groans the corpse, “Filthy work, filthy as the hand that is my whore. Filthy bitch come greedy for my seed, begging for it with your every breath, your every word. Your features flow like water, run like rivers of fire through my sodden soul.”

In the dark, the gallows creak with the rocking of a dead man’s hips, the rustling of the leaves and the rhythm of frozen breathing. Then, abruptly, a splash of silver gulped greedily down by a shadow.

The sob that echoes forth from the corpse is already fading; the ties of inhuman lust are fraying, the summoning diminishing and bond between bloated flesh and outlaw shade now thinning to nothingness. Upon a plain of bones and writhing serpents a once-man wakens from a half-remembered dream of life to trudge endlessly through the icy wastes of Nifel.

There at the crossroads, a figure pauses to feel the singing in its cold blood with gleaming silver sheen, and then tips a broadbrimmed hat to the dead and to the living before striding silently out into the night, the sorcerer from out of the blue…

Restoring mental health does not mean simply adjusting individuals to the modern world of rapid economic growth. The world is ill, and adapting to an ill environment cannot bring real mental health. Psychiatric treatment requires environmental change and psychiatrists must participate in efforts to change the environment, but that is only half the task. The other half is to help individuals be themselves, not by helping them adapt to an ill environment, but by providing them with the strength to change it. To tranquilize them is not the Way. The explosion of bombs , the burning of napalm, the violent death of our neighbors and relatives, the pressure of time, noise, and pollution, the lonely crowds; these have all been created by the disruptive course of our economic growth. They are all sources of mental illness, and they must be ended.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist peace activist (Emphasis mine)

I’m no psychiatrist, no counsellor, no professional trained brain-shifter. Well, that’s not strictly true – I don’t have qualifications ratified by some external authority, however, I have well over a decade of poking my own head under my belt and also the knowledge that I’ve helped more than a few folks over the years.

I know this because they’ve told me, and it always surprises me. I like that surprise, because it actually tells me that I’m not set in my ways when it comes to talking to folks. Which is great because it means I’m still learning, still adapting, still becoming better at what it it is that I am.

Now, I am by no means perfect; I have my flaws, and many of them are fairly obvious. I’m still working on them though, which is the point, isn’t it? Because if we stop, we’re dead, to put it bluntly – everything moves, everything shifts, flows, changes, eventually decays and is recycled.

Nobody wants to be dead – at worst they just want to die, which is really an exit-strategy against pain and suffering or other pressures, be they internal or external. That’s completely understandable. My cousin took that route, and I won’t fault him for it; it was his choice and despite the fact that it led to a great deal of pain for his family and was, essentially, what broke me and began my descent into the depths.

I won’t fault him, because without that, it would have been far harder to break myself. Instead I shattered and found myself in some pretty dark places, and I learned some terrible things and experienced the nadir of my life to date. Without that, and without the love and support of my friends, I’d never be where I am now.

I wouldn’t be able to grin at death, smile at the grim and mind-numbing and find fuel for my dreams and thoughts in almost anything. I wouldn’t have become the peculiar person you all know and love, or at the very least are oddly fascinated by.

I have the quote at the beginning of this piece emblazoned on my brain, and as I’have already said I’m no psychiatrist, no counsellor, no professional trained brain-shifter – and that’s great because I can put all my effort into the second half of that equation, the section I have emphasized:

The other half is to help individuals be themselves, not by helping them adapt to an ill environment, but by providing them with the strength to change it. To tranquilize them is not the Way.

By now, if you know me at all, you’ll have become aware that I spend my life trying to be myself completely and that I don’t esteem herd behaviour that much. When I catch myself at it, I grow faintly annoyed, because I should know better, and actually do more than 80% of the time.

I’m not big on tranquillization – I dislike numbness and somnambulism and it actually makes me feel a little ill. I was talking to somebody the other day, and she knows who she is, about the numbness and lethargy. I was most impressed and gratified by the notion and demonstration of screaming for stimulants, let me tell you.

Stimulus is important and more than that, it it is vital because it is contact with the world. When I take part in a stimulating experience or conversation, the action it engenders reminds you that things can change and become something else.

It has been said that my writing has an intoxicating edge, and that that is wonderful to me, because it means that when you read it, you can become aware of things – you are stimulated and presented with options and choices that you were previously not aware of.

Yet somehow you could become aware of them, or at the very least you can recall times when you’ve been enlivened and stimulated, can’t you?

Times when you’ve felt so very vital and full of possibility that it feels like you might overflow and break your boundaries, move beyond other people’s image of yourself into something greater. We all have them, and for some they’re distant childhood and for others it’s just yesterday. It doesn’t matter when it happened to you, what matters is that you know what it felt like, doesn’t it?

Amidst that feeling, anything is possible, and that’s the key to it all. Amidst the thrill, the intoxication, the sheer inspiration – which is echoed in the constant everyday action of breathing; the act of inhaling. You are dead if you have expired, and so long as the possibility to inspire and be inspired exists you are alive.

That’s the thing you need to remember and consider at all times – every thing in all the worlds proceeds from that.

Because of that fundamental fact, I can quite honestly tell you that I don’t rightly care that no external body sanctions my actions. Nobody gave me leave to start breathing, did they? You’re supposed to keep breathing until you die, so they say.

Well I didn’t.

I stopped. I tasted death, and I started again. This is, needless to say, not normal, is it? So I’ve been flouting that since day one and there’s no reason to stop now because it’s easier or less painful. Thus, consider me a renegade when it comes to that, and that means I’m not exactly bound by conventional forms of morality.

This is of course beneficial to me, and hence to you, because I can do certain things far more easily than those tied in knots by certain moral qualms. When I communicate with people, everything I say or do arises from the notion that the universe is ambivalent and that the world is a constructed thing -built by people and their ideas.

All it takes it to disrupt the world, the everyday business of life, is to inject something odd, something different, something extra-ordinary into the system. This is easy for me, because I make it my business to find the extra-ordinary, to hunt it down in the wilds of the mundane, to bring its secrets up from where they have lain hidden.

Literally as well as figuratively, I’m an occultist – from Latin. occultus “hidden, concealed, secret,” pp. of occulere “cover over, conceal,” from ob “over” + a verb related to celare “to hide,” from PIE base *kel- (see cell)

So when it comes to people, everything I do is specifically designed to help you do the same, to open the cellar door and descend to find yourself. To give you the wine that intoxicates you, takes you across the threshold to the Otherland; to breathe enough breath into your lungs that you can dive into the depths of the ocean that birthed you.

All these things are metaphors, paths and ways  which can be used to find your own runa, your own Mysteries. When you find them, you will begin to change your world, because you will understand how to do so. This is what I am absolutely certain of, and that’s because I’ve done it, and it has enabled me to do things thought impossible.

Gordon has an interesting post entitled The Doc Brown School of Self-Improvement which you should read, about the dangers of inductive reasoning and gives an interesting method of keeping tabs on your own processes. Because I’m a contrary sod, I’m going to take issue with a possible interpretation of the post, rather than the post itself.

The issue isn’t really the traps of inductive reasoning – in actuality the issue is that the past is not fixed, nor that the future is a plane of possibility. It’s an issue of propulsion here; if one is to project into the future, a kind of physics still applies. To get to this future requires energy, requires fuel – the plutonium for your flux-capacitor which, combined with the speed of 88 mph catapults you elsewhere.

Where does this fuel come from? How exactly does future-you come back? More to the point, how do you go back and tell your past self what they need to know? You’d have to have the fuel in the present to do it. Now, before you get us all in trouble with the counter-terrorism bods in your search for nuclear material, I’d like to invite you to consider another option.

Suppose, just for a moment, that your future, your extrapolation, is completely unnecessary. That in fact, all that exists is you now, that you are newly emergent from the maw of chaos, and that all your past was created to give you an identity to stop your newly formed consciousness from falling apart, or so you’ve been informed/discovered.

Both future and past are manufactured, born of the same stuff. Thought and Memory drink from the same skull – yours.

If that’s the case, if the terminals of your awareness are not fixed, then what of the awareness itself? Might not it be plastic and far more malleable than first thought?  What would you change if anything was allowed and all was tabula rasa?

How might you become a fundamental thing, an axis mundi, the centre of the worlds?

I’m utterly selfish and that’s because I wish to be surrounded by people who have found themselves. I know what one man can do when he embraces his runa and focuses on becoming it in totality – what could a band of such souls do, working together – ask yourselves that!