breakdown: what this is

This is the third reinvention of this blog. The haphazard and desultory history can be seen in the archives, from politics to emotional wanderings to starry-eyed worships of science/magic.

Now, the blog is a magician’s journal. Not an illusionist or dark wizard or anything like that – I’m not nearly so bold. This is an exercise in awareness and attunement, in silliness and the sublime.

Years ago, at my most artistic and fanciful, Grant Morrison offered a few weighty and timely truths. Not to me personally, but through a Disinformation lecture. Real mindblower. For a brief time afterwards I played with sigil magic and the kind of hyper-awareness that comes hand-in-hand. With that, I followed Grant’s instructions, here copied:

Magical consciousness is a particular way of seeing and interacting with the real world. In experience it was what I can only describe as a “head-click”, a feeling of absolute certainty accompanying a perceptual shift which gives real world transactions the numinous, uncanny feeling of dreams. Magical consciousness is a way of experiencing and participating with the local environment in a heightened, significant manner, similar to the effects of some drug trips, Salvador Dali’s “Paranoiac/critical” method, near death experiences, etc. Many apparently precognitive and telepathic latencies become more active during periods of magical consciousness. This is the state in which tea leaves are read, curses are cast, goals are scores,poems are written.

. . .
EXPERIMENT:
. . . go for a walk and interpret everything you see on the way as a message from the Infinite to you. Watch for patterns in the flight of birds. Make oracular sentences from the letters on car number plates. Look at the way buildings move against the skyline. Pay attention to noises on the streets, graffiti sigils, voices cut into rapid, almost subliminal commands and pleas. Listen between the lines. Walk as far and for as long as you feel comfortable in this open state. The more aimless, the more you walk for pleasure of pure experience, the further into magical consciousness you will be immersed. Magical consciousness resembles states of light meditation, “hypnagogic” pre-sleep trance of alpha wave brain activity

He instructs all aspiring magicians to keep a record of their work. This is that.

I walk every day with my dog, so I might as well extend my awareness. In point of fact, part of my reason for getting the pup in the first place was to have a relationship of pure energy and steal a bit of his thresholding. Dogs are liminal, you know. I forgot that along the way. But no more. It isn’t a profound switch to flip. Things become beautiful because of the possibility of their absence, Sartre once wrote. Everything is beautiful and everything is meaningful.

Inevitably, something will strike me as magical.