Preliminary results:
I haven't actually done anything on the Ganesh piece since I last posted on this thread, however I had a related experience last Tuesday. The reason I haven't done any work on it is because I've been caught up with attempting to finish my current thing (mock- Renaissance Madonna and Christ; I know how that sounds but trust me, it's hot). NEway, i arrived at the studio last Tuesday evening, very charged for work, as this Madonna thing had been taking far too long. before starting work I bumped into this Basquiat-alike bloke who works on the floor below, who shared his large skunk reefer with me. i got to my studio feeling quite 'removed', maybe even 'gnostic', having not smoked for a while. I think the fact that i'd had two cups of black coffee was what allowed me to retain my driven feeling and not get lost in the usual marijuana haze of fantasy indecision. I was immediately struck by the totemic aspect of the large wall drawing I'd previously done of Ganesh (the design for the eventual piece), and the idea hit me to bash off some kind of ritual for the completion of the Madonna piece. As this was a spur of the moment thing I had to use whatever I had available, which actually seemed to fit quite nicely, as all the stuff I'm making at the moment uses a bizarre range of found objects which are manipulated until they become something else. So I put on some music ("Teen Age Riot" by Sonic Youth - not only because it's great but because it connects with a particular idea of success I used to have as a teenager, and which I wanted to have associated with this madonna piece), and while the song was playing, stood in front of the Ganesh drawing, made a circle out of some string I had lying around and (standing within the circle) quickly drew a sigil for something along the lines of "I'm going to get this damn thing finished and it's going to be good". Once it was completed, I ate one segment of a satsuma I happened to have with me (the only sweet thing available), having placed the other 9 (how convenient) directly under ganesh's trunk as some kind of offering, and then charged the sigil (my energy was up as I was bouncing around and singing along, the weed gave me the necessary abstraction), which fortuitously happened at exactly the same time as the most powerful lyrics of the song were playing ("It's getting pretty quiet in my city head/ It takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed right now"). Then I burnt the sigil, which had been drawn on the same material as I was using in the Madonna piece (I felt this was important), and spent the last minute of the track watching the flames. then I left the circle and got to work.
And.... a very successful evening's endeavour followed. I'd been getting bogged down with the piece, but made some kind of breakthrough, pulled out a couple of ways of using my materials that hadn't occurred to me before. My sigil looked kind of like a butterfly, and I had this recurring sense of it flitting around while I was working, maintaining the necessary lightness of touch, while ganesh was a motivational force of invention and innovation, always slightly behind me, nudging things along.
Conclusions....? With something like this it's easy to see magic as an intellectual exercise, (as I had sole responsibility for the effectiveness of the sigilisation) which I think at the moment I'm more comfortable with. while doing the ritual I felt like I could have been in some sort of performance art thang, when I looked at the circle/drawing/altar afterwards it could almost have been an installation on the theme "the creative process as a magickal/ritualistic act". I guess that's what I wanted. There was also an aspect of "Well I've done this thing now so i'd better prove myself right or I'll be feeling pretty fucking silly"
But... results are what counts, and I got the piece finished on Tuesday (this week) and I'm very pleased with it.
Any comments, negative, positive or indifferent? |
That's a lovely thought 
