This thread is a belated response to an argument between 2stepfan and myself many months ago on Gypsy Lantern’s “Why are you here?” thread in which I wondered if one could utilize magic from the act of fantasizing about raping and murdering children. I didn’t really add much to the argument, however, as at that point the question was entirely hypothetical, just a notion I had, a topic that might lead to stimulating conversation. Now, many months after pondering that question, I’d like to present to you my findings. I apologize for the length of this, but I’m really curious as to what other intellectual people think about these issues, and maybe their own personal experiences, as I refuse to believe that I’m the only person who has ever grappled with such thoughts or subject matter. I haven’t posted at the Temple much recently after my bizarre meltdown awhile back, which was just a very strange, paranoid, confusing time in my life. I’m in a little better place now, though, so I’m feeling lucid enough to tackle this issue head on. All I ask is, oh, maybe ten minutes of your time or so to read this in the most neutral way possible (if you have to, pretend that one of your musical/magical/artistic idols wrote it). Some people/friends here who read my live journal on a regular basis may find some of this redundant, and I realize I have done a thread or two here or there about working with one’s dark side, but these past few months have been the most intense I’ve ever dealt with it. Christ, when Grant Morrison wrote “The Filth”, I know he wanted other people to use it to explore their own dark sides, but he probably never thought one person would drag the process out so bloody long!
To be honest, I’ve done very little overtly magical acts in quite some time now. I took down my shrine many months ago and filled the space with philosophical books, ironically, none of which I read (most of them were horribly dull). Before, I had used magic in an effort to better myself and the world around me. Now I was rejecting magic and working towards my own personal self-destruction, rejecting optimism for nihilism, and embracing the worst aspects of humanity. Disappointed by the former, I embraced it’s antithesis, which is a little like a person becoming a Satanist to protest Christianity. Both need each other.
Over the last few months, nearly every book I’ve read has had at least something to do with Nazis (btw, I‘m not an Anti-Semite), serial killers, child molesters, and other such topics (I‘ve also been looking at way too much degrading pornography, but I‘m over that too). Granted, some of these writers/artists are quite skilled, but it’s not the kind of stuff you really want to expose yourself to on a frequent basis. Soon, it quickly became all that mattered, all that seemed important. Everything else seemed… Less. I was constantly looking for the most sadistic, brutal thing I could find, never being fully satisfied. My motivations for doing so were unknown to me. Was I exposing myself to this kind of material to try to access some higher plane of knowledge, achieving some type of transcendence through the aborted rejections of society? Perhaps I thought this way in the beginning, but in hindsight that just seems like a bullshit excuse for indulging in this kind of subject matter. As the months dragged on I realized that any notions I had of viewing this sort of investigation as a magical act was just sheer denial on my part to admit that I enjoyed being down there in the gutter. But even “enjoy” isn’t the right word. There was guilt, too. And disgust towards what I had been exposed to. I yearned for more innocent times, to be free of this knowledge, but like Quimper (the comic book character, not the troll) I had become tainted in some ways. My biggest mistake, however, was in thinking of myself as some sort of horrible, perverted, evil monster. When, really, this was mostly all just mental gymnastics, torture by way of thought. It’s not like I was abusing women or looking at child porn or anything like that. Of course, the mind can imagine things much worse then reality can offer. But a large part of it was just stress and anxiety… so many people in real life, friends and family and coworkers, view me as a regular, laid-back, mild mannered, polite chap, but there was this whole other side, this monstrous aspect of myself, beneath the surface, and the pressure of maintaining my outward appearance had become a burden. Secretly I wanted to be caught and exposed for all the world to see, so I wouldn’t have to pretend to be something I wasn’t. If only I had known that I was never pretending anything at all. In some aspects I AM nice, polite, caring and so forth, and likewise there were more dodgy aspects of my character. The trick is to not get them mixed up, I suppose. Neither side is more “real” then the other. We are what we are in the present.
But I’m rambling again. Forgive me, it’s difficult to condense all these complicated issues I’ve struggled with over the last few months into a few paragraphs. Basically, one of the turning points was when I read Ian Brady’s book “The Gates of Janus”. Ian Brady, as I’m sure you’re well aware, was one half of the notorious Moors Murderers who killed a few teenagers and children in Manchester back in the ‘60s. I really liked Brady’s book a lot, it’s very good… But the key thing that I latched on to was this one part where he says that, having experienced both the fantasy and reality of killing, he came to the conclusion that fantasy was superior, and that with each crime he felt more and more empty, as if he was chasing a holy grail he could never grasp. Everyone tries to fill the void in their lives with something… He tried to do it with blood, and more blood, and oceans and oceans of blood, but in the end, he achieved nothing. The banality of evil and all that. Now a lot of it just seems dull to me. Serial killers, misogyny, and so forth… been there, done that. By overdosing on nihilism I eventually became bored by it. I never really hated women, in the end. Just one who abused me at a vulnerable age. But I’ve addressed this issue in my LJ so I won’t go any further on this topic.
But there was still one more thing. The topic of pedophilia, which has always intrigued me. I’ve never had an outright pedophilic fantasy, but I’d be lying if I said I never found certain scenes in the works of William S. Burroughs or Dennis Cooper to be sexually exciting, and by this I mean the scenes involving adolescent boys. Naturally, these fantasies were disturbing to me, and they’re not really the kind of thing you can talk about casually without looking like a pervert. I tried to just ignore them entirely, but you know how it is… The more you try to ignore something, the more it will obsess you. And this topic obsessed me for a very, very long time. I knew 100% that I would never molest anyone, and I had absolutely zero interest in seeing child porn, as it wasn’t the sex or the genitals or anything like that I found attractive. It was just the archetype, I suppose. Maybe I was a Greek in a former life or something. In fact, I recall flipping through a Julian Schnabel book at Borders a few months back and at the end, for whatever reason there was this photograph he had done of three naked boys, but looking at the picture I felt no sexual excitement of any sorts. So I knew I wasn’t a pedophile. Yet this obsession of mine was leading me into dodgier and dodgier territory. The clincher was one night when I was doing “Google: Images” for pictures of the Beach Boys and I accidentally ended up on a site full of pictures of adolescent boys in speedos. I quickly found out that the site was part of a “boy love” network or something like that. On one hand I was appalled, but on the other it was all very taboo and exciting. I would have reported the site to authorities had it been illegal, but there was no sex or nudity involved and it had been running since 1998, so I figured that if it had been around for that long and you could access it through Google, it was probably legal (hell, you didn‘t even need to pay to get in).
I only went back to the site one more time. Not to look at pictures, but simply to e-mail the person who ran the site, a young closeted gay guy whose blog never seemed to address the issue of the fact he was idolizing boys in a sexual manner. I asked him many questions: What were his feelings on the moral implications of this? Was he concerned about fueling the sexual fantasies of pedophiles with such photos? He got his pictures through other people, but were the boys in the pictures aware of what those photos were being used for? Fuck, were they even aware they were being photographed at all? I really was interested in hearing him defend himself, wondering how he’d rationalize it an intellectual manner. But he never replied back to me, so I guess I’ll never know what his thoughts are on this issue. A shame really… It’s one thing to read a thread on Barbelith about the ethical issues of pedophilia, but here I had a chance to speak to an actual boylover and get their side of the story… But he never replied back, which I thought was kind of cowardish on his part. But really, his defense would probably have been bullshit anyway. But I guess that’s the difference between him and me: Notions of morals, right and wrong, and this just seemed wrong, somehow. I realized that my morbid interests were taking me into areas I didn’t really want to explore any further… I pushed it as far as I could, legally.
So here I am, at the end of this process, burnt out. In some ways, I feel like I’ve wasted these last few months, exploring all this stuff that I thought would lead to some kind of payoff. But maybe it was good to get it all out of my system: exploring this kind of subject matter through writing, music, art and so on, until it just ceased to be new and exciting. Should I really be horrified by what I unearthed inside myself? Have I really done anything evil? To me, evil is like those terrorists who killed all those children in Russia: To them other people were just objects, political statements, and that was enough justification for them to shoot little girls in the back in cold-blood. Today there is so much hate and lack of feeling and also a lack of empathy in the world, and I was letting myself become part of it, corrupted by all the damage I saw around me. In the end, I realized that I did care about the world, did care about not only my family and friends and coworkers but also my online friends and maybe even the human race itself. I was never trying to shock other people: I was exposing myself to things I thought I secretly lusted after, but in reality I actually despised. In doing so, I rediscovered my sympathy, something I thought I had lost in the miasma of cynicism. So I guess now I can say I’ve experienced both end of the extremes, naive optimism and hopeless nihilism. The former leads to inevitable disappointment, the latter to a hole in the soul you can never fill. It appears that the middle path really is the ideal. Granted, I’ll probably always have an attraction towards what most people would consider “dark” or “monstrous”, but I see it doesn’t have to be the be all and end all. To me, Cthulhu is just as beautiful as a happy cat or a sunset, and I guess if you can see beauty in both the dark and the light then the world will appear more beautiful then if you just chose one over the other. God, how trite, forgive me but it’s true. And I suppose knowing how one's enemy thinks is a most useful weapon.
The only question now is, where do I go from here, as a magician? It’s been so long since I’ve practiced, I don’t even know what I’m interested in anymore, though after listening to some Throbbing Gristle live shows recently I’m becoming a little more interested in shamanism. I will tell you this though. Recently I read Umberto Eco’s wonderful “The Name of the Rose”, which is just an incredible book. There’s one scene where the main character confesses to his mentor that he committed a carnal sin by having sex with a girl, but his mentor calmed him down by reminding him that such an experience might, in the end, help him in his quest to be a monk. Having experienced sin first hand, he’d be in a better position to emphasize with the sinner then a monk who had never sinned. So maybe one day something good will come out of this. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to help someone else who struggles with what I struggled through, and I’d be in a better position to sympathize and help them out. Because all this stuff I’ve been dealing with over the last year or so, I truly thought there was no one I could confide to about all this, not even here, but maybe I was mistaken. |
