Clean Up

You cannot control the elements, only release them.

But you may tame them if you speak their language.

Fire only understands directness. You must be forward. Subtlety will get you burned. When playing with fire, it is a power play. Fire understands power. You cannot fake power with fire or it will burn you. You must earn its respect with security of being. You cannot kneel, bow, plead, apologize, or abase yourself in the presence of fire.

Earth only understands material gains. It communicates with objects of value and taste (both good taste and good eats). It will listen patiently and you must be patient with it.

The wind loves to communicate. You need to speak to it like it was your friend. Tell it stories. Ask it interesting questions. The wind is always distracted so don’t expect it to stick around.

Water doesn’t understand words, only movement. Water speaks in the movement of its waves and every move you make will move it away from you.

If you reject them, they will not come back. You must let them inside you. They will howl and burn and stuff you up and make you loose and scatter your thoughts to the four corners.

Tame them. Control yourself.

Give thanks. Start a fire. Plant in the earth. Keep the air clean and fragrant. Keep your water clean.

Ask the universe to solve your problems but remember that fire will solve using force, earth will use bribery. Air is the most seductive communicator. Water will not solve your problems, only reveal them.

Water and fire make steam but water can put fire out or fire evaporate water. Earth gives stability to fire if it does not put it out. Fire turns earth into lava so that it can move. Air ignites fire. Fire puts air in motion.

Earth and water make mud. Earth gives water consistency. Water gives earth fluidity. Earth gives air gravity so that it doesn’t fly out into space but air isn’t meant to touch the ground. Air will give earth castles in the sky.

Air gives water something to think about; water allows air to feel.

The universe is a system like your body. The heart pumps your blood while the brain thinks. What are the organs of the universe? What are the organs of your life? Everything has its function in the universe. Everything has a specific function. Everything has a job to do. Let them do their jobs.

Demons are merely angels who aren’t doing their job.

The most important taskmaster is the one who unifies the universe.

If you are not in full agreement with yourself, the magick will never happen.

Pretend you don’t care. Isn’t that the magician’s job? To play make believe?

Enjoy being absent-minded. Practice it. Savor it. What do you have to lose but your mind? What mind you gain in return?

The subconscious is not a junkyard. It is the closest thing to the library of God where all of your secrets are hidden.

Don’t deny your body.

Cut-ups

I’m sitting in an IHOP with five friends and a baby. I’m crunched in the corner with bad black bean chili when “Walking on Sunshine” plays on the muzak channel. I hate that fucking song. It’s a message from the universe.

My past couple blogs have been more incoherent and random and although I would like to say that was my point, it was more of an aftershock.

To summarize my ramblings for the past couple weeks, life can get un-stochastic sometimes, too formal and rigid, and to preserve our sanity, we need to drift, we need to explore and act in random ways to break the formulas that hold our creativity captive. We should search out new information outside of and beyond our current interests and knowledge to add to our mental real estate to allow ourselves greater flexibility and improvisational skills. I think of it as a colon cleansing of the mind.

I’ve become more hostile to communicating with the universe since destiny always seems to come in riddles (or perhaps lil ole me is incapable of divining the will of the divine). There is an uncertainty in the universe or perhaps in ourselves (or at least myself) that makes actions almost impossible. Knowledge is unknowable. Systems are chaotic. We can never act with true certainty and expose ourselves to risk on a daily basis. The smallest rounding of a fraction can destroy the best laid schemes. The answer then it seems comes in not taking on the future with certainty but rather embracing the uncertainty, moving away from formulaic behavior and learning to improvise. It isn’t about control but rather how we react in uncontrollable circumstances.

To make an artistic flaw and announce today’s blog topic: I will be talking informatively about the cut-up.

A quick background history.

In the 1920’s, surrealist poet Tristan Tzara started a riot while creating a poem from random words he pulled out of a hat.

In 1959, painter Brion Gysin noticed that some accidental slices into the newspaper he had underneath his artwork formed into an interesting arrangement of words. He had created a verbal collage similar to visual collages.

Beat poet William S. Burroughs was influenced by Gysin’s discovery and collaborated with another artist self-named Genesis P-Orridge who worked more with audiovisual media. According to Burroughs, this cut-up technique was a way of altering reality. Using film as a metaphor, if everything is recorded, it can be edited. P-Orridge more specifically wrote:

Everything in life is cut-up. Our senses retrieve infinite chaotic vortices of information, flattening and filtering them to a point that enables commonplace activity to take place within a specific cultural consensus reality. Our brain encodes flux, and builds a mean average picture at any given time. Editing, reduction in intensity and linearity are constantly imposed upon the ineffable to facilitate ease of basic communication and survival. What we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we touch, what we emote, what we utter, are all dulled and smoothed approximations if a far more intense, vibrant and kaleidoscopic ultra-dimensional actuality.

Cognitively, this is true. Because of the vast amounts of information being thrown at the brain through our senses, we are forced to cut out a large degree of information. We ignore so much of reality and since our everyday lives are made up of boring mundane acts, we filter the boring and focus on the interesting.

The hypersigil or fictional representation of a person’s life then gives the writer the possibility of editing his life. Memory is in essence a recording of the past that is skewed by cognition and emotion. Memory can be edited, trauma undone, and the past retroactively recreated. Don’t tell me you’ve never had a significant other tell you “we never had a relationship” even though you know you did?

Burroughs believed that cut-ups also allowed for divination into the future. In an interesting scene from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, the character Ozymandias has a television room made up of dozens of televisions each set to a different channel that changes every 10 seconds. By noticing patterns in the content of the images, Ozymandias is able to predict customer needs for his corporate business. I’ve seen this myself, noticing that every so often for an unknown to me reason, the same actor will appear in multiple movies on different channels at the same time or in a row.

Burroughs also developed a painting technique by setting up spray cans at random distances from a blank canvas and shooting the cans with a shot gun, causing the cans to explode paint on the canvas. Why not just use paint guns, but the idea of random art is clear.

What Burroughs also did was keep a detailed dream diary. Dream resumes are another important aspect of oneself to develop: we spend eight hours a day sleeping. We should use this time to develop ourselves. Keep a resume of things that we have done in our dreams. I like to splice my dreams into my writing. My most powerful hypersigil can from a dream that I worked into a larger work of fiction. Am I the only one who has gotten confused between reality, memory, dreams, and déjà vu, wondering if a certain experience was something that actually happened?

Cut-ups can also be seen as a type of therapy, deconstructing our demons and rearranging them into a more suitable, poetic expressive form.

Automatic drawing and writing are pre-cursors to the cut-up but the key difference is that automatic writing creates from nothing while cut-ups take from pre-packaged content to produce or reveal something new.

Burroughs cites T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as one of the original cut-ups.

Spoetry is the most current rendition of cut-up poetry. The poet takes subject lines from spam and arranges them into poetry. I’ve tried this: it doesn’t work.

In theory, the best art often comes by accident and improvisation. You cannot will spontaneity but you can use a pair of scissors to introduce it. Cut-ups are a technique to introduce improvisation: prepare to improvise.

Cut-Up Poetry begins with your medium of pre-print, usually magazine or newspaper articles. Headlines work best. Famous poems or song lyrics might work or old love letters.

The simplest cut-up begins with a whole page that is cut into four quarters. The magician rearranges the quarters into a new page and then looks at the juxtaposition of words along the borders of the pages.

More detailed, the magician cuts out words and segments of lines at random and then lays them down together. You will need to rearrange them a bit and snip off some parts to make the transition more coherent.

Too much precision cutting out individual words doesn’t work because it is giving too much control to the cutter. Longer phrases combined with shorter phrases using variation in length of the cut-up works best.

Some magicians recommend splicing in your own works to the cut-up mix. A project I am working on currently is a collection of my favorite song lyrics and poems stream together into one long poem. I’ve removed uninteresting lines so that more powerful segments stick out. My next steps will be to splice these lines into my own autobiography, cutting up the lines to see what juxtapositions occur, and writing new poems using snippets of the lyrics and poems.

The act of cutting up, the power and violence of the scissors, is important. Cut-ups introduce a kinesthetic element to language, touching the words.

Cut-ups can be behavioral as well. One can change one’s life by splicing together two common behaviors into one, for example, the book Recipes for Disaster talks about "Public Transportation and Public Speaking" whereby the magician makes public speeches on subways or the bus. Create a list of ordinary things you do every day and then combine two of the activities.

Here are some good or bad cut-up sites and portals. Just to wrap things up, I decided to create some cut-ups using e-mails from between a lover and me spliced with random selections. The results are below according to each of the websites:

Lazarus Corporation: A portal of cut-up and random poetry generators. A little difficult to navigate.

How does than the MULTITUDES
for left brainers respond
to fold on talk
to express that a gun

is never going to have an incredible
chocolate topic of Jesus Christ
Who cares
- your worst politicial sweeteners
are pinheads now

Since I could copy and paste the text, it was easier for me to eliminate any garbage meaning. The next cut-up machine was more difficult but I think more satisfying.

Language is a Virus: A portal of cut-up machines and randomizers. Doesn’t allow you to copy and paste your results. Results tend to be garbage with some interesting juxtapositions.

Drug people
Monkey look
If screwing
Ape Talk
Cherry accounts
My plan
Gun and rope
Before cookies
Needed meditation
military schizophrenic
still knot-tying
I needed irish chocolate
The human price
Comes to never stations
Homo Monkey student
To suit God
Say little to write e-mails
For myself
To write with knot-tying
Think pleasure
My love is mental
Waste myspace
End plans were not balanced
May need breaking up
Solid cherry presence
Mental stations
Mundane craze

I pulled out information mainly in kennings. While writing this, I needed at times to fill in the gaps. Words joined together but not fully and were often separated by filler words that needed to be cut out. Reading this poem, I saw some interesting Freudian slips. What type of relationship do you think this is?

Improvability and Impracticality

Originally the laws of chance and nature were attributed to gods whom we worshiped (and whom magicians still worship). We make sacrifices to probability hoping to gain its favor.

Eventually though people noticed patterns in the behavior of the gods and started working these patterns into scientific theories. We took two steps forward and one step back as scientific progress brought about an opposing idea: if there was no arbitrary god-rule then the universe must be ruled by a universal constant. An understanding of universal laws would allow manipulation of them. If one could simple know all of the information in the universe then one could be God. Kind of like Groundhog’s Day.

Chaos theory peeks its head in: a butterfly flaps its wings in Cairo and Hillary Clinton becomes senator of New York, but the same butterfly flapping its wings didn’t help her win the presidential nomination. The same initial circumstances don’t lead to the same results.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states the knowing the circumstances of the universe is impossible. According to the Uncertainty Principle, subatomic particles can never be accurately measured because observation of these particles influences them away from their natural state. The same goes with social dynamics: only an invisible outsider can observe natural social behavior. There goes our shot at becoming God: we can never know with certainty the universal laws. Bullshit in, Bullshit out.

Even though information is unobservable, quantum mechanics has been able to pinpoint particles in waves, imprecise measurements, not where a particle is but where it statistically is most likely to be. We’re able to know that the particle will be in either X, Y, or Z but not which specific place. But these states are interconnected so knowledge of X allows knowledge of Y and Z.

I remember…uh oh, she’s going to start delivering some boring vagina monologue again. Shut up and let me continue my blog. After Grant Morrison had finished Animal Man, the series was taken over by a writer whose name I don’t remember but should at least give the courtesy of looking up. _______ did an arc which introduced me to the thought experiment now known as Schrödinger's cat. Schrödinger's cat imagines a cat inside an opaque box with a lid on it with a radioactive isotope and a package of poison. One of two events can occur: the isotope decays releasing the poison and killing the cat or nothing happens and the cat is still alive. According to Schrödinger, until we look inside the box, we do not know which event occurred. Metaphysically, both events could have occurred, did occur and exist in a state of superposition (both events simultaneously occurring). Once the box is opened, the superposition dissolves and one event occurs. (I’m superstitious like this whereby if I’m having a bad day, I won’t check my e-mail; the theory is that if there’s a bad e-mail waiting for me on a bad day, the e-mail will transform into a good e-mail if I open it on a good day). Quantum mechanics has even stated that Schrödinger’s cat illustrates the concept of parallel universes: in one universe the cat dies and in another universe the cat doesn’t. (A movie that somewhat illustrates this concept is Sliding Doors which was on a few nights ago).

What happens is there is no universal constant but universals constants. We can measure the universe at a particular time and predict what it will be like at another time but an understanding of one moment in time doesn’t allow an understanding of every moment. The universe exists in constant superposition with probabilities shifting as soon as we observe them. How can we ever travel the road not taken?

To make matters worse, without universal constants, we run the risk of violating laws of conservation which states that information cannot be destroyed. Why not? Doesn’t it come to a natural conclusion that probability should erode the strength of circumstances? Back to the butterfly, why then is it that initial identical circumstances produces drastic results? Information erodes, reducing knowledge of the universal constants. I guess we can call this entropy or even worse, change…

Quantum mechanics has found that microscopic and smaller particles are highly subject to random behavior. In tightly controlled experiments in which all factors are considered and tested for, random outcomes still occur. Definitive outcomes are impossible, only probable outcomes according to statistical evidence. A cop out theory to explain microscopic randomness is the hidden variables theory (or theories) which states that various factors not evident in the procedure are changing the outcome.

British physicist John Bell did research on Hidden Variables and found them not to exist. I’m not a physicist but in my drug-induced paranoias, I’ve always found the divine monkey wrench in the form of an x-factor or unknown piece of information that screws everything up. What this means in scientific terms is that the universe may be ruled by gods.

Randomness does not necessarily disallow predictability. In a series of flips of a coin, the chances of heads will always be 50% with half of the flips yielding heads. Quantum mechanics allows prediction within waves, meaning statistical probability, while wave theory does not allow knowledge of a thing but does allow knowledge of things linked to a thing.

Randomness may simply be superstition and lack of knowledge. An event appears random because the observer does not recognize the pattern.

Philosophically, determinism states that there are no random events, only events so small that the un-attuned eye cannot see them. A good book to read on determinism is issue #4 of Alan Moore’s Watchmen entitled “Watchmaker.” Free will and randomness go hand in hand; determinism prevents free will or the theory might be that the complexity of social conditions makes the determinism unnoticeable – one thing leads to another as the song goes and social interaction is merely a timeline of imperceptible microscopic events. Free will is limited to microscopic events while larger issues are predetermined.

One might argue that a notably chaotic system is actually ordered because there is a sense to the system and the chaos is predictable. Organized chaos is a term often used to describe a messy room where a person knows where everything is but a stranger entering the room sees only a mess.

Chaos theory in itself arose mainly as a way of describing noise in formulaic systems. As Shakespeare wrote, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, and exceptions to the rules, these more things, were soon acknowledged as valid parts and problems within any organized system. Magic could not be ignored.

Yes, we’ve all heard the stories of where chaos theory came from. Originally it was all about predicting the weather. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz used a computer to re-model a weather prediction. The computer when running the simulation rounded the mathematics off to the thousandth when the original numbers extended to the millionth. This small rounding-off created a totally different weather model.

Early chaos theory allowed and incorporated variations, believing that variations were constant influences that required planned over-compensations to balance out variables. Constant and consistent. Mathematician Benoit Mendelbrot, however, noticed that measurements became inconsistent according to the scale in which the measurements were being taken, reducing measurements and consistency to unpredictability.

The famous exceptions are fractals, objects that can be broken down into infinite identical pieces all maintaining the same dimensions, infinity within a finite space.

When looking at probability, it isn’t a factor of one but rather a factor of at least three variables:

1. Environment and outside influences
2. Initial conditions
3. The system in which the “game” is being played

Not every system is chaotic, though. The system in itself needs to be incredibly sensitive to variations from its initiation condition, that is, there are many many ways to go after point A. In some situations, like the alphabet, A is always followed by B, while a standard word can have A followed by 26 variations, the complexity of the system increasing as the word develops. The above example of letters and words however can still be seen as non-chaotic because a chaotic system also needs multiple variables within the system that in themselves are subsystems reacting with other subsystems. Think about the weather: there is no such thing as THE weather but rather atmospheric systems overlapping with each other.

Simplistic systems can be apparently chaotic whereby the initial conditions can deviate from normal responses but the system in itself is not chaotic, only sporadic. This is the noise that chaos theory tries to address: the noise is not the system but a system can be noisy.

Determining the chaos of a system means simply a cross-comparison of the same system over the same distribution of time. In other words, look at the behavior of a tomato plant growing in your garden and then compare its growth to another tomato plant in which conditions are identical. Variations usually mean an error within the system but this error doesn’t stop the system from functioning or produce drastic results. Each tomato plant will develop along a similar route and to a similar result, that is, producing tomatoes in the end, regardless of conditions. The time table in this measurement is important in establishing consistency and subjectivity to initial conditions.

Look for what is chaotic and what is not.

Divination, in particularly, has always relied upon observation of random patterns within nature. In some instances, patterns are noticed in natural objects or events, in others, more elaborate procedures are set up and interpreted. With augury, the flight patterns of birds in their natural behavior is studied free of manmade manipulation. With alectryomancy, however, the magician intervenes more directly with the birds, either scattering feed before them to observe how the birds peck or in some cases burying the bird up to its neck and surrounding it with seed sigils to spell out words in the bird’s pecking behavior.

Randomness is seen as the ultimate fairness or objectivity, free of bias. But random acts of violence or shit happens is rarely seen as fair.

In gathering my thoughts together on probability in magic, the lottery comes to mind. Isn’t magic like a lottery? Magicians scratch off magical tickets in the form of spells or what-not in hopes of achieving some wild fantasy? The thrill of the lottery is rarely in economic gain but more in the indulgence of a short fantasy of winning. Isn’t magic the same, the belief of successfully manipulating the universe?

A good metaphor for probability and randomness and how people should react is gambling. Dice, in particularly, has become the universal scientific metaphor for the mechanism of the universe. “God does not throw dice” Albert Einstein argued: the universe follows rules and is not about a crap shoot. But chaos theory has proven otherwise.

In many cases, playing cards, for example, the randomness of gambling is accompanied by the skill in which the gambler handles the randomness. Many card games are entropic systems; each card that is pulled reduces the cards in the system. This can be detrimental because information is being reduced or it could be beneficial because the complexity of the system is being reduced as cards/information are being eliminated. Card games also require decisions based upon lack of knowledge of other components (the Uncertainty Principle).

The same goes with board games like Risk that use dice to simulate randomness within the rules of the larger game. What role then does randomness have in the overall board game of life (or rather Life, ha ha, fuck you)? Board games involve not just randomness but also strategy, value management, risk management, and diplomacy.

Many casino games, the slot machines especially, seem to rely on chance but are actually rigged. Slot machines are rigged to reinforce gambling behavior. A slot machine that never pays out will soon frustrate the gambler and the gambler will leave (not put any more money into the machine). If the slot machine pays off every so often, the gambler continues to put money into the machine not realizing that the input exceeds the output. (Inconsistent behavior is actually the strongest motivator).

Randomness can be beneficial because it leads to the introduction of new ideas. Evolution is a quick example which relies upon random mutant genes/memes. However, as mentioned in my previous blog posting, creative invention doesn’t often evolve spontaneously but rather spontaneously after formal understanding of the components of a system. Think about all those stars who suddenly became famous. They didn’t suddenly become famous; many had long unimportant careers that went unnoticed until randomness allowed their skills to be noticed. Others may argue that there is no chance and that success is the result of pure skill.

In a universe that is unbound by lack of rules and subject to the whims of the gods, how then can one act? In a universe in which information and knowledge of a system is constantly being eroded and obscured, how can one act with certainty?

Improvisation is a necessity in understanding one’s role in the universal moment. How is one to react at any given moment, in particularly unexpected moments? Is there anyone who hasn’t had a freeze up when confronted with something unexpected? Shouldn’t we work to prevent these freeze ups?

People who learn how to improvise show less anal retentive tendencies. They don’t have to be in control but can go with the flow. One learns to better evaluate and focus on what is going on in real time. Distractions are reduced. Information is processed more quickly. Decisions are made more easily.

Wow, I’ve moved from the scientific to the philosophical and now I might actually get practical:

Improvised Visualization: Find a partner, a group, or do it by yourself. Name a location and then as many items as you can that belong in that location.

Template Tennis: Imagine a conversation (either with a human being, an animal, an imaginary friend, the TV). The other side is providing information that can in some way be categorized. I just had a conversation with a woman about underground music. Your goal becomes to continue the game using the topic as a template. “We’re talking about underground music. What do I know about the topic, what can I add to the topic, or what questions can I ask?” You volley back your topic or question and prepare for the next template (when it changes). Oh, we’re talking about…!

Advance: Eventually a template grows stale and needs something added to it to advance the interaction. Randomness is used to evolve the topic. You’re talking about underground bands and the topic is getting stale: throw in the topic of sports and make a connection between underground bands and sports. Don’t ask the question “what sports does Ted Leo and the Pharmacists play?” but rather make the statement about Avril Lavigne and skateboards; perhaps she should water ski…

Either/Or: You’re given two options. Instead of choosing, take both. In some cases, this may be impossible. Make it possible. “Would you like to stay or leave?” “I’d like to be cloned so I can stay and leave and compare notes with myself later.”

Yes, And?: If asked a question, “no” will stop the conversation. “Yes” will continue it. “Yes, and” means that when asked questions, you answer “yes” and add more information to the initial question. “Do you like underground rock bands?” “Yes, but only if they perform underground like in wine cellars.” Like with Advance, this new information allows the continuation of the idea.

Homeric Epithets: Greek bards had a nifty was of improvising: they used catch phrases inserted into a specific meter. Homer, who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, performed using a hexameter or series of sentences composed of 12 syllables. Whenever he had a brain fart, he would throw in either pre-planned descriptions or use the demands of the meter to introduce new descriptions (“Oh, shit, I need another two syllables; I’d better describe Achilles as gold-haired Achilles!”).

Dozens: An exchange of insults or self-insults. Also known as “Yo Mama.” Insults and self-deprecation are talents that should be developed.

Partiman Tenso: A debate with oneself about a controversial (abortion) or abstract (love) idea presenting two sides of the issue. “Love is a wonderful thing.” “No, it’s not.”

Role-Playing: It’s easier to act and react when you’re not being yourself. Being yourself requires reflection; role-playing someone else, whether it’s your crabby teacher or a knight in shining armor, reduces the performance to black and white caricatures, easy directions.

Appropriation: Take something and turn it into something else. Appropriation might include: appropriation, steal someone else’s idea and use it as the basis for your own work; combines, creating shapes out of unusual objects (paper clip art); intervention, fixing or changing objects because you feel something is wrong with them (Star Wars the Phantom Edit tried to remove Jar Jar Binks; draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa); readymade, taking common place objects and putting them somewhere else where they are out of context or place (like a toilet in the middle of a park) or using them for another use (a bidet drinking fountain) or simply making an unusual combination of objects (a small birdcage containing a thermometer, cuttlebone, and 151 marble cubes resembling sugar cubes).

10 Fingers: Requires a partner. Each person holds up all of their fingers. Your partner asks a yes or no question/statements – “you have a cat", "you have never stolen anything", “you like cheese” – if the asker is incorrect, he puts a finger down. If a question is yes, he can put a finger up if needed. Take turns. First person with no fingers up loses.

3some: Requires a partner. You offer an imaginary object – a slice of cheese – and player number two has to offer a related object – a slice of bread – you finish the set with a third related object – a pickle. Restart the set.

Dissociation: Requires a partner. Start with a word and come up with as many words NOT connected with the word until a connection is made, at which the game re-sets. Example: cat, deodorizer, house, green, grass. Here we restart, because grass is obviously an association with green.

Letter Association (pre): Come up with as many things starting with a chosen letter within a 15 second period.

Letter Association (post): Start with a word and come up with another word that starts with the letter which the previous word ended with. Example: juice, eggplant. Can also be done with celebrity names.

Sing-Song: Requires a partner. Start singing a song that both players know. When you start to fizzle, the other player has to take over with a new song.

The following are some additional suggestions with a change in format. Instead of games, these are more general advices:

Don’t be philosophical: The more you open your life up to open-ended questions that have no real answers or solutions, the more you freeze your response system. The more you expose others to open ended questions, the more you freeze them. Mutual exchange becomes impossible. Ever have a kid keep asking you “why”? Better yet, don’t ask questions at all: make statements.

Give information: When talking with people, give them something to work with, even if they don’t catch on – a talented improviser will catch on.

Listen: Pay attention to what people say and look for opportunities to respond to.

Allow response time: Give your partner a chance to respond to what you say and do. Don’t just jump in and cut them off.

Get lost in the soon, not the now: Many people when interacting get caught in stasis; they focus on the now and end up with nowhere to go. I was in Wal-mart and saw a tattoo on a woman’s neck that read “Leo.” I asked her if the tattoo was her sign and if she had a birthday coming up. She said “yes” to both and we looked at each other confused because the conversation was a dead end. When interacting with people (or whatever), your goal is to always provide and gain information, to make a change in your position. Otherwise the back and forth is really just bouncing a ball off a wall.

In starting this entry, my goal was to examine various aspects and theories that deal with randomness, uncertainty, and probability. My ideas are strung together haphazardly with only a minor attempt to provide coherent transitions. My purpose got lost somewhere between the divine and the practical but I think I’ve been trying to make some commentary on how to develop skills in surviving in a random world. Hopefully in my next blog I can take the information here and develop it into something more workable and formulized.

Random Acts of Silence

I’m going to take a break from sigils for awhile to regroup my perspective on the topic.

For the past little while, I have been doing a study on Pisces. One of the characteristics of Pisces that caught my attention and which I later turned into a magickal routine is the indecisiveness of Pisces. As the last of the signs of the Zodiac, Pisces is the follower, the sidekick (as represented by Ron Weasley in Harry Potter). Pisces is known for its servile disposition, its inability to make decisions, and its tendency for getting lost and confused.

While all of the above may seem like weaknesses, the ability of Pisces to get lost so easily also allows it its mutable, free-flowing, artistic abilities and social nature. Much of the subconscious is raw imagination without any structure and to anal retentive control freak Cancers like myself, Pisces is a hell that I need to visit to break down my own dogmatic way of life.

Part of my inspiration for this blog was from an article titled “Beneath the Pavement, the Beast” by Stephen Grasso, published in the book Generation Hex.

In Grasso’s article, he focuses primarily on Drifting, aka, dérive. In short, Drifting involves taking long walks about the city looking for inspiration in the city landscape and textures. It is similar to magickal consciousness or the paranoiac-critical method in which random details are re-interpreted as meaningful directions, for example, graffiti, billboards, newspaper headlines, overheard conversations, radio announcements, neon signs, etc, are actually messages from the universe (151).

Drifting can be included into any type of activity. I was in a Quick Check and a liquor store today and Drifted through both, looking for snacks in the Quick Check while waiting for my sandwich and looking at the different types of beer in the liquor store. Drifting should involve a quest for new information or re-discovering old information – as I was looking through the brands of beer, I kept thinking, I remember this from college…I increased my beer repertoire along with my knowledge of snacks. Useless information, right? Not really. What are the chances of you someday getting hungry for a snack or asked what type of beer you like…?

Places of power can also be investigated. Grasso indicates that the best areas to begin a Drift are crossroads, the crossroads symbolizing an in-between area (150). Other places might include standing stones, woodlands, rivers, hospitals or other public areas, abandoned buildings, etc (154). He also uses the subways as symbols of a descent into the Underworld (153). For me, all of these are appropriate as are any new area beyond one’s familiarity.

Shamans (yes, the plural of Shaman is Shamans, not shamen) use hallucinatory drugs and visualization techniques to explore the astral realms, but Grasso differentiates Drifting from the typical Shamanic journey: “It is essentially a shamanic journey that takes places physically in real time, as opposed to an internal journey” (150). The magician wanders geographically (rather than psychically) out his or her normal sphere of comfort, awareness, and experience. For example, I once took a three hour drive up to the Catskills and at some point realized that the highway system was no longer familiar to me. In this unknown territory beyond the familiar, the magician enters an Other world.

The Australian Aborigines use a tradition similar to Drifting called the walkabout. Around the age of thirteen, an Aborigine teenager will simply leave and walk about usually for a period of around six months. During this time period, the teenager learns the lay of the land, in particularly the songlines or places of power established by their heroic ancestors and gods. The teenagers uses this time to learn or create a folklore for the land, find his totem or power animals, and develop customs to interact with his people and folklore. An Aborigine learns his or her land to the point of being able to walk it blindly.

Grasso recommends a similar ritual. The magician learns the layout of his surrounding area, learns its culture, its traditions, its power places, and its history (154). The better one knows his or her surroundings, the better one is able to communicate with the power of an area, like knowing a lover so well as to be able to almost read his or her mind. (As a side note, mindreading isn’t always about familiarity but about personality attunement – I’ve had boyfriends who I could send out on a mission to get me something from the vending machine and they’d always come back with the perfect snack because they were in tune with my personality while I’ve known guys who could never get it right no matter how much they thought they knew me).

When Drifting or doing any type of traveling (like just driving) start paying attention to the pathways. If you are walking, notice the stores around town: each of these are exits off the path. If driving, notice the exits, take some of them, get lost so you can find yourself again. What happens to me quite often is I get lost in a familiar area, off the beaten highway; I get back on track by Drifting until I find a familiar highway. The Drift inevitably helps me in the future because I always re-enter the same territory where I got lost. Actually by getting lost somewhere, I return there because I am now familiar with the area. Getting lost helps me find myself.

Knowing the lay of a land helps but the purpose of learning the land should not be about knowing the land in itself but for better improvisation. By learning the land one can create more random behavior. I once played a txt-message scavenger hunt with one of my boyfriends to plan our future dates, giving him idea by idea and asking him to write down where we could find X,Y, and Z. By knowing where to go or where to get it, improvising was easier. We knew right where to go; we knew what was out there. Otherwise reality becomes a blank canvas with nowhere to start. The magician must have options and materials; Drifting is a way of gathering these materials from the environment.

(However, the opposite can also happen: familiarity breeds contempt. Places of power can lose their power like soil that has grown too much fruit. Drifting should start in one area, expand, and develop into new areas, or add new areas while a Drift is being learned.)

Impotence comes from ignorance and inhibition which rely upon each other. If you ask me to spontaneously dance, I would respond with a simple “Fuck you.” I couldn’t improvise a dance routine because I’m not familiar with any type of dance choreography. I could make random moves and look like an idiot but I’m too uptight sometimes to do that. Creativity studies, for example, those done by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, show that creativity does not come from nowhere (was that a double negative?) but rather familiarity with a subject is first required before creative development of an idea can occur. Drifting starts out random to procure new ideas but some purpose must be set: the Drifter must learn and collect and give the Drift better form. Random does not mean without purpose.

Immersing myself in the Pisces personality, I found myself really confused. I would be sitting in the front seat of my boyfriend’s car ready for foreplay and not know what to do. I’d stand in front of a vending machine and not know what I want. I’d be ready for a night on the town and not know what I wanted to do. Indecision is the ultimate out-of-tunement, but I think that indecision comes from too much of an emphasis on logical flow and thought whereby the brain becomes paralyzed by a lack of options rather than moving with the flow. Once the mind releases and the body moves, the answers come more easily. The mind needs to get lost to escape the trap of logos and inhibition.

While drifting, the magician should interact with the environment, asking questions and looking for responses in the landscape, from a neon sign or billboard, for example. Grasso’s article focuses mainly upon divination and communing with spirits but I’m not sure if that is the direction I want to go into. The problem is, what is the difference between the internal and the external shamanic journey? I was driving when I did an experiment; I asked the universe what to do about my psycho ex-boyfriend. The first sign (literally) I saw said “No turns.” WTF does that mean? I was in FYE when I heard a song that was my song with an ex-boyfriend. Notice the ex? So then why aren’t we together anymore? Does the song mean I should be with him or shouldn’t be with him or that I should be careful of obsessively thinking about past relationships…?

I need a freaking pop tart before I write anything more. Y’see, a mind with a definitive goal that believes this goal is definitely attainable acts differently than a mind in doubt. (Pandora is playing one of my favorite songs “Train in Vain” by the Clash). While on my walkabout to find my Pop Tart, I was at ease, calm, meditative, walking in a slow meander. While I took notice of my surrounding, I paid them no attention. Looking for synchronicities and divination almost ensures that none will come. Coming to the vending machine, surprise, the pop tarts were S’mores! I hate S’mores. Suddenly the confusion comes over me: if I can’t get pop tarts, then what? My goal was reset to find out other vending machines, one near the cafeteria where I could possibly pick up something else to eat. Naturally, the cafeteria was closed and the second vending machine had some other type of chocolate pop tart. A new mission to find another vending machine, wandering the hallways down to the lower level. The vending machine found me in a Zen fashion tucked away in the basement. I had no idea that it was there, but no pop tarts. Finally, I said “fuck it, I’ll order pizza and have them deliver it to me at the college.” Of course, no pizza delivery for maybe 20 miles. Finally, I remembered I had a leftover package of Butterfingers several months old melting in my car. Mm, you ever try melted Butterfingers?

A mind in assured pursuit relaxes and strolls while a mind thwarted turns to panic, the indecisive stand at the vending machines not knowing what to do, paralyzed. In the various stages of my walkabout, I was put in paralysis but with each state shock my ability to improvise improved. The end result was no pop tarts but Butterfingers, a hunger for pizza and pop tarts, new desires to fulfill later on and a greater understanding of how to fulfill those desires. I also felt brand new like I just had an enema.

Looking for synchronicities is the surest way of NOT finding them. Messages from the universe tend to pop up sporadically and unexpectedly; that’s what makes them so interesting and scary. I don’t recommend active pareidolia. Instead I recommend white noise while engaged in other activities. For example, when I want to Drift, I usually do it while driving. I have an incredible MP3 collection that consists of roughly 6000 songs. An average MP3 disc can hold about 200 songs. I put together a disc from 200 random songs and then play the disc on shuffle while driving. Instead of driving my normal route when going somewhere, I might take a different route that I know will get me to the same location but which will bring me into new territory. Then I drive. I’m not looking for anything and often synchronicities come unexpectedly. I was Driftin n’ Drivin’ a couple days ago when I noticed a pattern in the songs. “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles finished playing followed by “Fire” by the Ohio Players. Since I’m part fire sign (Leo), I took notice. What does it mean, who knows? The random white noise of the MP3 disc was a conduit for the synchronicity. Normal radio doesn’t work for me because commercial breaks are a statebreak. Satellite radio doesn’t work because it isn’t in tune with my personality – even though my songs were random, they were chosen from MY collection. Pandora plays horrible music most of the time unless you’re into obscure B-sides. I’ve found though that PA systems in supermarkets or malls are the truest ways to receive messages from God.

Grasso recommends certain rituals before and after Drifting. Before Drifting, the magician should ask permission to enter places of power (151). Hmmn, that sounds kind of gay to me. I’m gonna have to think about that one. I understand the notions but I have woodlands areas around one of my properties and I’ve never asked permission from the nature spirits to meditate in the woods. This land is your land and this land is my land. But Grasso also recommends leaving payment behind while Drifting, for example, giving money to panhandlers while in the subway (153). I agree there (but I’ve learned not to give money to beggars while in Amsterdam): appreciation should be shown. What I often do is take spare pennies that I get from change and scatter them into a parking lot.

A gris-gris/hoodoo bag can also be made, using a small pouch to hold interesting items that you find. I’d prefer to also have a hoodoo bag of random behavior, literally pulling ideas out of a bag. To end this blog, here are some ideas that I’ve collected from random websites.

1. Rent and watch a funny movie.
2. Go to the store and read all of the humorous greeting cards.
3. Make greeting cards.
4. Write in your journal.
5. Read.
6. Make a list of 100 random things about yourself. (Books you like, clothes you wear)
7. Write a letter.
8. Write a poem.
9. Take a walk.
10. Go for a drive.
11. Bake cupcakes.
12. Do yoga.
13. Read the newspaper.
14. Write down 25 things that make you happy.
15. Paint.
16. Draw.
17. Work on a puzzle.
18. Make a things to do list.
19. Write down some goals.
20. Go somewhere busy and people-watch.
21. Write down some things you would like to save money for.
22. Crossword puzzles.
23. Word Searches.
24. Write about your dream home.
25. Find things to sell on e-Bay.
26. Answers.Yahoo.Com
27. Make a list of things to google.
28. Cook.
29. Bored.com
30. Write graffiti
31. Stack things
32. Make up or think up words that start with a random letter
33. Paint your windows
34. Tie-dye your sheets
35. Fold your earlobes
36. Read tea leaves
37. Find interesting pebbles
38. Blow bubbles
39. Set up your Christmas tree in April
40. Watch a game show...take notes
41. Make a fire
42. Sing the ABC song backwards
43. String up a room
44. Shred a newspaper
45. Sniff
46. Spell
47. Tie bows in everything
48. Skip
49. Memorize the periodic table
50. Write a book about your previous life
51. Carve you and your significant other's initials in something
52. Take apart a major appliances
53. Solve the population problem
54. Draw Venn diagrams
55. Visit the Architecture building...loudly criticize its design
56. Wallpaper without using wallpaper
57. Take bets on which character in a movie will die first.
58. Shadow puppets
59. Take shopping carts for the express purpose of filling them with odd items
60. Ride those little electronic cars at the front of department stores.
61. Re-dress mannequins as you see fit.
62. Ride a display bicycle through a store
63. Play soccer with a group of friends in a store.
64. Set up a tent in the camping department
65. Test the fishing rods and see what you can catch from other aisles.
66. Two words: Marco Polo.
67. "Re-alphabetize" the CD's.
68. Drag a lounge chair over to the magazines and relax. Go to the food court, buy a drink, and explain that you don't get out much and ask if they can put a little umbrella in it.
69. Name things!
70. The thumb game!
71. Rate passers by
72. Play useless games
73. Open houses
74. Color Easter eggs
75. Gambling
76. Spelunking
77. Wine-tasting
78. Rifle range
79. Frisbee golf
80. Carnival
81. Swing swords at a medieval faire
82. Rock, Paper, Scissors
83. Odd or Even
84. Thumb Wrestling
85. Finger Baseball
86. Matching pennies
87. Go to a CD store and listen to new music (or really old music)
88. Make new Muppets
89. Collect restaurant menus and order a dollar menu smörgåsbord
    
90. Picture booths