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I had been living a shielded life. A boring succession of days that looked like the same. It seemed that there were no new possibilities, that I was stuck somehow, and due to my own fault, 'cos I'm the biggest chicken I know. I have this problem where I *know* what's going on, I see it happening but I cannot *feel* the situation inside me, and so I cannot really act. It's like I was watching someone else's life. Then I decided to change this. To change *me*. And, seeing this as a psychological working as well as a magickal one, I set to change certain characteristics of mine that I thought were blocking my development.
First, I thought of which strong magickal icons I could use as translating protocols between my conscious mind and my unconscious. I'm not well versed in magick but I think I have a hint of what it is about: understanding the Process. Getting into the code of the thing and, when possible, making some tweaks of your own. Most importantly - magick changes *YOU* more than it changes the outside (and by changing *YOU* of course it *also* changes the outside). So, instead of searching for already established rituals and spells, I decided to go chaos instead (or lazy, you decide - which reminds me, feel free to put me down as a deluded fool. I don't claim to have the answers, I'm just reporting from where my headspace is at the moment).
What did I want to accomplish? I wanted to experience life more. That immediately brought to my mind Jorge Luis Borges and the image of the tiger. Borges wrote some pieces about tigers, including this poem:
"THE OTHER TIGER
A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
It wanders through its forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or time to come, only the vivid now)
And makes its way across wild distances
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells
And in the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.
It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel
That under sun or stars or changing moon
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed
The one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.
We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse."
He also once made a famous analogy - and this was what first sparked to my mind - of life's surprises with the image of a *tiger in a library*. That was what I wanted, so I took it and use it. How?
I wrote a song. Its title is the title of this thread, and its lyrics go on about the same subject - Life in all its rapacity and generosity:
QUASARS CALLING
There's a tiger outside
And it's calling my name again
It brings knives under its eyes
And car crashes under its skin
It also brings new sights
If one has the nerve to fight it
It waited countless days and nights
But it won't wait forever
Don't give up on me
Don't give up on me
Don't give up on me
Don't give up on me
Quasars are calling outside
Singing Bb's to me
They say there's no reason to hide
That everything is as it should be
That the traffic ligths down here
And the constellations above
Are the same and always have been
Under the same great uncaring love
Don't give up on me
Don't give up on me
Don't give up on me
Don't give up on me
The "don'give up on me" bit was directed at "life". The "singing Bb's to me" is about the discovery that black holes (yeah, not quasars, but I wanted to use "quasars") are continuosly singing a big, fat, low B-flat tune.
This lyric, like all artistic works, comes mostly from subconscious streams. Certain choices that you can't really explain and so on. Things that maybe will make sense to you years from now. So I thought this was the perfect medium to work with. My own spell, so to say. So I finished the song and it turned outgreat. I figured that a piece of music (which *also* comes God knows where from inside your head) embedded with magickal lyrics would be a great magickal tool.
So I posted Borges' poem and my lyrics in my blog, put up a nice picture of a tiger - the post is here, by the way - and waited to see what else I could do to make the thing work. Of course I would have to play the song, and I played it many times. By the time we played it live for the first time (having rehearsed it only three times) I was already in the middle of the biggest wave of synchronicities I've *ever* experienced. It got ridiculous pretty fast.
See, if the purpose of the magickal working was to experience life's peaks and valleys - as opposed to the tedious plains I was crossing - it meant that some degree of hurting would be involved. Tigers come with claws and teeth. So there was this horrid experience I went through, and which I even posted about here. Then it started. Check the post again, check its date. I finished the song one week or so before that date. And by all means, I'm not saying I'm *responsible* for what happened. What I'm saying is - I was inserted into it, in the right time - isn't this what magick is about? Synchronism?
A friend of mine said that one month or so before september, you'd go to daypop.com, type "tiger" and you'd get most hits referring to a baseball team, I think. Then by the end of the month the news all became about real live tigers ("real live tigers" - does it ring a bell, Barbelith??):
In Iraq, a tiger is killed after biting an US soldier
Roy gets mauled by a tiger
Tiger is found in a Harlem apartment
No link available, but a boy had his arm ripped off by a tiger in Australia.
My friend woke up to hear his car meowing. An orange-stripped kitten had climbed up to the motor and slept there. The day before I was talking to him, telling him of my magickal working and of the synchronicities that were happening. Notice the car's logo?
Then I opened up a computer to find "TIGER" written in a blown up modem.
A cat stopped another friend's car. We were driving to his garage and the feline just stood there for minutes, eyes reflecting the car lights, motionless, not allowing us to move further, until my friend threw something at it and it ran. It was spooky as hell, I tell you.
Of course I got dozens of smaller things going on. They still are happening, but with less intensity.
So I adopted the tiger as my animal, and went live to our last gig this month.
IT WAS THE MOST FUCKING AMAZING GIG EVER.
E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g worked as a dream, people went nuts. It got pretty embarrasing at some point, even.
And I am filled with the suspicion that greater things are awaiting.
Ok, that's it. What do you think of this story? And of using music to perform magick? And, could you share your knowledge about tigers under the magickal view?
Thanks. If there's more about this story that I forgot to tell, I'll add it later. |
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