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Hi. Since I have posted so many "How do I..?" and "So, what's the deal with..?" threads in this forum, I thought I'd share my most recent bit of beginner-mage success. Well, perhaps my only bit. By which I mean, this was very rewarding for the teensy bit of effort. Armchair mages, please apply. I am not kidding.
Last night, I took another look at Pop Magic on grant-morrison.com. I tried Exercise 1:
quote:As a first exercise in magical consciousness spend five minutes looking at everything around you as if ALL OF IT was trying to tell you something very important. How did that lightbulb come to be here exactly ? Why does the murder victim in the newspaper have the same unusual surname as your father-in-law ? Why did the phone ring, just at that moment and what were you thinking ? What's that waterstain stain on the wall of the building opposite ? How does it make you feel ?
Five minutes of focus during which everything is significant, everything is luminous and heavy with meaning, like the objects seen in dreams.
Go.
Eh. Moderately amusing, nothing incredible. Amusing enough that I decided that since I needed a walk anyway, I'd do Exercise 2:
quote:Next, relax, 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. The noises on the streets, voices cut into rapid, almost subliminal commands and pleas. Listen between the lines. Walk as far and for as long as you feel comfortable. The more aimless, the more you walk for the sake of pure experience, the further into magical consciousness you will be immersed.
I headed down my street trying to ascribe meaning to whatever I saw. On my own initiative, I brought a notebook with me. A couple minutes into the walk, I thought I glimpsed from the corner of my eye someone huddled under a blanket, hiding behind the bushes. When I looked full on, there was no one there, of course. Ordinarily, I would have chuckled and moved on. But I elected to believe in some sort of presence that really was there, and allowed myself to become unnerved and a little frightened. This was Exercise 2 beginning to work.
Less than a minute afterward, I stopped to gape at an honest-to-God sigil scrawled two-feet high on a wall. Not a recognizable tag I misinterpreted at first glance. Not someone's screwed-up numeral 6. I cannot think of anything else it was other than "some weird abstract symbol" (hobo language? beats me). I dutifully recorded it in my notebook, and since everything was supposed to be meaningful, noted that the color of the wall the sigil was on was the official color of magical consciousness.
Other major incidents on that 30-minute stroll included:
- I determined the name of the King of Hollywood. Three similar word beginnings in close proximity (two billboards and a hotel sign making a small triangle in my field of vision) gave me the name of some entity, and passing a honda Civic with REY in the license plate gave me his title, King of the City.
- Picked up two demon names from the sidewalk. The first was written in all caps over an inverted star in the concrete, the second was a small inobtrusive name on the border of a concrete square (and was actually a misreading of "Hugh" for "Hygh", which seemed a good demon name).
- From the license plate "5LND076", began critiquing Lando Calrissian's place in the Star Wars world. I started calling him "the betrayer betrayed"; he screws over Our Heroes, is screwed over by The Empire, and in turn reneges on his deal with The Empire. He won the city he administrates in ESB from someone in a card game, and in Jedi he is first shown in disguise, and later flying someone else's signature ship (the Millennium Falcon) -- does he have his own identity at all? That kept me entertained until whatever the next insight was. You can tell I was pretty into this at this point.
- Being a pragmatic sort, I wasn't on an aimless walk, but on my way to a cafe I like, in case the whole "magical consciousness" thing turned out to be a bust. But by the time I got there, I was a little too into "stare at everything and try to make up meanings" to easily stop. I passed some sort of utility marker symbol on the sidewalk, and ignored it because I was trying to stop. Then passed an identical one, and ignored it too. When I hit the third one, I realized: I wanted to stop, this symbol was presenting itself to me three times, and three is the number of endings (at least in Priest/Minister/Rabbi jokes). So I took that symbol as a graphical equivalent of "So mote it be" or something like that. When it is repeated three times, as a gesture or on paper, it is a quick "this ritual is over" signifier... I figured it wouldn't hurt to do something grounding afterward, too, but it's a way to turn on the lights and blow out the candle. I practiced the symbol until it started to feel like a regular handwritten letter.
All I did was start to invent something for just about everything that struck my eye -- not making words out of every license plate, but letting my eye wander over license plates until a word jumped out, for example. If something jumped out strongly and decisively, I took notes on it. If not, I let it roll around in my head, trying to invent a story for it, while keeping my eyes open. If I found something new to interest me before I had anything, that first thing was discarded, but I did try to genuinely give each thing that leapt to my senses some brain time.
There were more things than I have listed, but I've gone on way too long. One more interesting thing, which took place AFTER the walk, was that I had a burst of angry skepticism -- I was sitting near a woman who was regaling her companion with every hippie concept in the book, from astral planes to past lives to loving too much, in a manner that bugged the hell out of me. Was this a response to my time of unmitigated credulity? Beats me. (At least the overheard conversation got me some potential dialog for the novel in November.)
I don't know what to do with the "information" I received, but it's all recorded for when I figure something out. Regardless, I can't even express how much this one exercise got the ideas of invented meaning across to me in a practical sense. The scene of Dane inventing the magickal word "TOTEP" from Top Of ThE Pops finally makes perfect sense. Try it!
[ 17-10-2001: Message edited by: doubting thomas ] |
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