quote:Originally posted by Rev. Jesse:
Is is possible to encode a spell in a book or poem or other work of art? Has anyone else tried it?
Yes, and yes.
I’ve been trying to write songs that have intrinsic magical qualities for a couple of years now (when I say songs, read as lyrics or poetry. No music yet, but when there is I may post some more about how the sound effects the content). The idea was to create a kind of living entity through the song, who interacts and forms a relationship with the reader/listener. The important thing was to distance myself from the creation – not to write dishonestly or dispassionately, but to get to the point at which the umbilical is severed and the new being starts to survive on its own. Coming back to the songbeing after a while away is interesting, as it develops and interacts in new ways.
These experiments were done for a few reasons:
I wanted to be able to channel God into my songwriting. The idea was to remove aspects of myself that weren’t in alignment with Him, in order to hammer the song into a sharper blade. The songs therefore contain elements of prophecy.
To explore hymn/mantra. There are many theories relating to changing yourself and the world around you through language (sigils, hypersigils, NLP, curses, etc. In this application, the hymn/mantra becomes manifest in life through the action of singing. I’ve mainly used this to effect personal change (one of my most successful songs – “ Scalphunter” was about circumcision as a metaphor for worship, warfare and consecration. Needless to say, the song works its way inside your subconscious rewriting attitudes and programming). Saul Williams uses this as an argument against violence, sexism, drugs and crime in rap – the concept that the artists are speaking these memes back into the culture and making them take deeper root.
Have a go at the hypersigil concept. I tried some of this stuff out in a song I wrote last week. Lyrically, it used a lovely technique that Parliament of Fools mentioned offhand in the pub: the technique used in cave painting, in which the artist holds the pigment in their mouths and spits it at their hand held flat against the cave wall. The idea is that it not only leaves a permanent mark, but also merges the hand with the wall, as the paint makes the two indistinguishable. It was theorised that the action enabled the artist’s spirit to make contact with the spirit of the rock. In my song, I adapted this to writing across my hand as it was laid flat against the paper, making contact with the spirit of the piece, the songbeing. I asked God to bless the work, to work within its language as a self-developing prayer, to bring about what I chose to write in future. Kind of like a song to add charge to all my other songs.
To play with the possibilities of language. Most of my songs are an exercise in underwriting, or using precise words, or words that are loaded with connotation and meaning.
I plan to extend some of these ideas into a study of speaking in tongues. I’m fascinated by the idea of heightened language that works in a different dimension to learned languages. That by using tongues you speak the unutterable, and that those who interpret often only download a facet of what is said. As tongues is a spirit language it is possible to directly verbalise paradox and subjects that are normally only possible through a vast volume of utterance. Grant Morrison used an analogy in the Invisibles, “if our words are like circles, theirs are like bubbles” . I take this to be an extension of quantum uncertainty principles as they apply to language. The idea being that it is possible to talk about invisible things in human language by talking around their perimeter until their shape emerges (the circle), but it is infinitely easier in tongues (talking as a sphere fully encapsulates the subject, tracing its three dimensional shape). As people download the tongues back so that it can be reprocessed back into learned language, they only catch a cross-section of the bubble, translating it back into the circle (I also like the analogy because sphere has connotations of completeness, whereas circle immediately makes one think of “talking in circles,” i.e. the problems that occur when trying to verbalise the impossible. This is part of the reason why I chose expressionless as my name – the need to verbalise the impossible, to give shape to the invisible, and feeling as though you are caught without a means of workable communication).
To cut a lot story short on the tongues front (too late!), I thought it would be a wicked idea to sing a song in tongues, then offer an e-mail address or telephone number for an answering system where listeners/readers can leave their interpretation. I’d also like to use treated tongues as part of the music, perhaps in place of more commonly used instrumentation (synths, strings, percussives, etc).
Of course, this is only the tip of a very large iceberg. I’d be fascinated to hear other people’s ideas. |
