I have to realize that I am not alone, that I have never been “alone”—I may often feel alone, may find myself physically isolate, but I am rarely actually alone unless I make myself or mistake myself alone. I walk with a pantheon of gods and dragons, family and friends, and imaginary friends. Too often I feel alone and make myself alone, forgetting the WTAW, Mabon, Dana, _______, ____, and gods, and even ______ (who, well, seems to respect my mind, my skills, my imagination, and my—well, my opinion, and I respect his endurance, his often reckless courage, his ability at science and his devotion to it, his social consciousness, and his loyalty and eagerness for knowledge).
So, towards that end, I need to imagine, to invoke my pantheons, to remember the chains and links that connect me to the world and others, that empower me and others.
Beyond this, I keep forgetting that relaxation demands, needs work (as paradoxical as that may seem). I forget to relax. I want to dance, to invoke, to yoga, to tai chi—align, to meditate—but stress comes in good portion from fear. A fear of loss, a fear of failure, of lack of time, of ridicule.
[WTAW] Mabon [WTAW] Dana [ansuz] Aesc
Much of this business is in reclaiming the mind and spirit (I suppose my conception mirrors Hegel?) for myself from the world and its pressures.
Chaos—in part, the perception of Chaos—is about opening one self to greater perceptions and potentialities, to the notion of manipulating reality (and self) on those levels, to having not only that power (in its senses of potence, potential, and freedom and action) but also the possession of self—the authority and ability (I know I’m merely restating with synonyms now, grasping after ideas to articulate) to walk through Chaos and shape it. Open the veil to Chaos, and then invoke using, through, and within Chaos—that theatrical action suggests a potency of/for the magic and magician, something closer to Athene and Odin at that point.
At that point, I want to manage my time more efficiently than I have—not to rigid banality, but to my greater liberty and choice.
I have noticed, just last night, a greater sense of presence in my room—I looked inside while the light was on, saw the far wall-hanging (Earth/North), and I sensed a presence. Not an alien or threatening presence, but more a physical and ambient presence as well as a notional something. Maybe the “webs” _______ has always commented on? Maybe my pantheon? I’m not sure, and it was present later when I relax-worked.
I exorcised _____ again, bringing BM and ShF to bear, scouring em apart from eir web & the larger web with ShF’s dagger and stabbing, slicing the bastard. Then I fed the remains to BM again. I think a third time may be smart—perhaps Sunday night?
Today, though, I want to meditate upon Chaos again—my sense last week of Chaos and the undulating WTAW
—actually, that is a way to think about it. The WTAW are alive. I remain curious about the woman I half-saw whispering or muttering to me.
Curiously, in reading Adorno’s writings on aesthetics (and society), I find myself today looking up Hegelian ideas on “spirit,” and what I find is Hegel’s writings on what amounts to potentiality. I want to read more and digest it, but spirit and subject are grounded in the self-mind working to become self-aware and self-reflective and self-purposing and self-developing. (?) Adorno points to art’s role in spirit, in providing a means or medium for self-reflection, to imagine new ways of being & becoming—to constitute itself on its own terms within a shared social space-context.
In that sense, Chaos is less Chaos (it is Chaos, but it is not the random) than something else. There is—Chaos, potentiality, is about action and choice. It’s terrifically, terribly obvious, but apparently I need to have reminders: Chaos means little, potentiality means little without action, choice, actuality. Magic, art, action, striving to make the potential, the potentiality we want into the actual.
Fuck, this almost sounds like business, conservative, motivational BS, but in the end, magic is one way of getting them, of imagining yourself capable of doing so.
Hegel presents the process of potentiality into actuality, of the progress of/towards spirit and freedom, as a “dialectic,” “triadic” structure/process: a positive notion/idea/desire the self posits before being faced with a “negative” limitation or counter. That is, the will and imagination sense negative pressure: time, cost, rivals, etc., circumstances. The dialectic must somehow resolve this contradiction to the desire, the impotentiality to perceived/conceived potentiality, to further the process towards actuality. For Hegel, this negative is necessary, an implicit “positive,” challenges necessary for spirit to grow into self-possession and freedom. The negative is that which keeps the actual only potential, but it is needed to make potentiality perhaps actual. In another sense, the negative represents external contingency that needs addressing, resolving, to make internal will/thought/spirit into actualized, external reality. Negatives, impotentiality push pursuing potentiality into the realm of action. (In this sense, potentiality imagined is notion/concept—a potential outcome we want and imagine, and the negative is that we must act upon or against or with to actualize the notion.)
We have a notion, and that which makes it only a notion is the negative. Notions are potentialities, and they are not actual (or true) yet.