I think this interview was brilliant, especially the last page. I'm going to quote a good bit of it because i think it's relevant :
"With reference to my interest over the last 10 years in magic, one of the most useful formulas in alchemy, specifically, is "solve et coagula," where "solve" is the act of dissolving something, where we take something apart and study how it works -- what in our modern terms would be called analysis. In a scientific framework, it would be called reductionism. The other part of the formula is "coagula," which is synthesis rather than analysis, holism rather than reductionism, the act of putting something back together in a hopefully improved form. Once you take the watch to pieces and see what was making it run slow, you put it back together and hopefully it works better.
I'd say that we've had an awful lot of "solve" in our culture, but far too little "coagula." There are people who seem daunted by the complexity of our culture to the point that they'll shy away from it rather than try to put those thousands of jigsaw pieces together into some sort of useful, coherent picture. Which is not to say that everybody is like that. You mentioned Thomas Pynchon earlier, and he would be one of my primary inspirations for that worldview. Reading "Gravity's Rainbow" first alerted me to the fact that yes, you could work with this sort of complexity and richness. Pynchon was an authentic 20th century voice adequate to his time; the same with writers like James Joyce and Iain Sinclair."
Writers who have not shied away from the complexities of the world.
"Right, and I've tried to do the same in my work. Connection is very useful; intelligence does not depend on the amount of neurons we have in our brains, it depends on the amount of connections they can make between them. So this suggests that having a multitude of information stored somewhere in your memory is not necessarily a great deal of use; you need to be able to connect this information into some sort of usable palette. I think my work tries to achieve that. It's a reflection of the immense complexity of the times we're living in. I think that complexity is one of the major issues of the 20th and 21st centuries. If you look at our environmental and political problems, what is underlying each is simply the increased complexity of our times. We have much more information, and therefore we are much more complex as individuals and as a society. And that complexity is mounting because our levels of information are mounting."
Information is the 21st century's primary currency, it seems.
"Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I've found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they've referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature.
I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don't know because I can't imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I'm not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we've evolved from."
You're saying we might not be able to recognize human beings of the future that well.
"Yeah, it could be a quantum leap, a sudden, massive and unprecedented leap. Boiling point is a good analogy, because what you have before that stage is water. What you have after it is something that does not behave at all like water; it's a completely different substance altogether. And that's what I see looming for society -- and it's probably necessary, probably inevitable, probably scary. That's my prognosis. I suppose, as an artist, one of the obligations upon my work is to try and prepare people for the more complex world, to try and make it more palatable and accessible to them and not quite so frightening. That would seem to be a worthy goal, illuminating reality."
That's the "coagula" part of the formula. Synthesizing the future.
"Yeah, that's it. If you can find a new synthesis, as I try to do in my work, you can help people find new ways of seeing, thinking and dealing with the times in which they find themselves. That's my intention. Whether or not I've succeeded is up to the readers."
I think this is amazing. The explanation of "solve et coagula", the talk about processing and linking up information reminds me of something that Crowley said that always sticks in my head aswell. He said something like the most important thing to do is to find the connections things have between them, and i think he's echoing this here. I was surprised to see that he believes that we could be approaching some kind of boiling point aswell, and the way he explains it sounds a lot like what some of us are referring to when we talk about 2012 and a possible supercontext or shift in mass consciousness too.
So does anyone agree with what he suggests about so many people today having all of this information but not taking the next step and linking, or finding the links between it all?
I think i agree personally, because i have the idea that one of the biggest problems we have is that as a race, a lot of us tend to pick out the pieces of information that we agree with a lot of the time and then discard most of the rest of it. This also seems to link back to what i've read about the Buddhist idea of discrimination aswell, that people cling and grasp to what they like, and then discard what they don't like, probably without taking a good enough look at the big picture. (and no, i'm not excluding myself from these problems, i'm guilty of this too, obviously.)
So does anyone agree that this one of the main problems that we have? Do people as a whole need to start looking at and linking up a lot of the stored information in their heads? And if so would this be turning knowledge into wisdom collectively?
I think that possibly, in Kabbalistic terms, if we need to heal the sphere Daath, we maybe have to process and link up big chunks of this collective information that we have and that this could be one of the ways that we could heal the broken sphere, if it is actually broken, which it's supposed to be. (I'm not learned well enough in the Kabbalah to say that i know exactly what Daath is.)
So if in this interview Alan is right about this, would this mean that none of the information we have can be called junk? Is there a way that each piece of information can be potentially useful and a possible link to something else? Indras net comes to mind here aswell. And if so, does this mean that we should place a lot more importance on fiction than we actually do?
I also love another thing he said on the last page :
"What I'm trying to do is give a bit of coherence to that complexity, to say that it is possible to think about politics, history, mythology, architecture, murder and the rest of it all at the same time to see how it connects."
So, i guess after all that, if you want to avoid going back through my ranting : Do you see connecting information as one of the most important parts of magick, and if so, do you also think that this could be one of the defining processes that leads to a collective 'boiling point' in the near future? |
