I found myself embarrassed yesterday, while out strolling with D and S, and I got angry—before being “chastised” by S (“Why are you angry?”). But, ultimately, it’s because I’d been embarrassed, or felt embarrassed because of the attention I felt was thrust on me. It also left me feeling sour for most of the stroll.
Otherwise, I fucked around playing a crappy video game rather than what I could have done, and I wound up dreaming of doing—[work] about the game last night, I think. I feel like I should’ve worked on magic or art instead.
The paths I sensed, I feel there’s a sense of the Derridean trace, as I noted, but also a sense of reduced “pressure,” density. All paths are holes that have been made or worn, but these feel like something more—like lower conceptual pressure. Labyrinthine but—
—I find my mind returning to being angry, and my mind wandered into feeling angry at work because of embarrassment and belittling. My mind then wandered further into a whole experiential dream of discussing [work crap with someone at work], and I found myself in that dream, in that experientiality—well lit and bright and clear—and I wound up cursing at how I’d gotten there—and I think, in part, I slid down a path and into a kind of demi-existence. These dreams and daydreams are closer to demi-worlds—I use that term, but what does it mean? Moorcock uses it for the realms where the Animal Lords dwell, and I can see how they’re dreams of and about animals—the dreams horses have, but also what we have accreted about horses—and Elric calls and pulls Magnu, the Dream-Horse, into the “real”—into actual rather than potential—and Magnu is there.
But that term, for the dream and aesthetic field of the world, us, our imagined potentialities, and more, I can see those being “demi-worlds,” constrained zones of potentiality on different topics, things, places, people, etc. They bleed into others, can crossover into each other, and even here—they are the more potential of the Otherworlds, but they’re all parts of the Otherworlds. Each WtaW points to a demi-world or spread of demi-worlds—
—but they’re not actual worlds (and I use actual in the sense of actualized, but demi-worlds are real, if not actual).
The paths I sense are, after a fashion, the dreaming and Otherworldly labyrinths of association that link me into demi-worlds and Otherworlds, and my mind and spirit has roots and easy paths to particular dreams in the Otherworlds. I wonder if this is in part the “web” that AL found and nested in—but I’m seeing it more at the moment as labyrinthine mazes of passages and paths but also as hollows and low-pressure areas, less dense regions—and as I consider, I think about how magic is investing Otherworldly and aesthetic significance into ourselves and scenes and objects and more. This reality is why rite, ritual, and the aesthetic component of magic has to do something to us—has to convince us we’re performing magic—but the systems connects us to intelligences and spirits and beings in the Otherworlds who we should establish relationships with—calling up Goetics via the Lesser Key and its art/theater may convince you to suspend disbelief, but they may, in turn, wonder who the fuck you are. They may try to lead you astray as per their scripting, but treat them with respect and patience and agency, and you might also win them as willing allies. If you can stomach the ambience—and what of their demi-worlds you draw into the actual, and what you move of yourself and the actual into those domains.
Mind you, the actual—Otherworldly—demi-worldly edge may be very artificial, as well—is, I feel, as we convince ourselves we’re the “actual” and not potential or imaginary—but I am imaginary, but the question is how much am I imagining who I am versus allowing others to imagine and shape me. There’s a crossing of self-possession and self-imagined, and waking up from being whatever stock characters we are often to some greater self-awareness and complexity, agency, etc.
The actual then frames our most common and consensual frames of reference, the biggest and easiest root/path/habit we find ourselves moving, living along. The inertia of the dream we inhabit. Don’t get me wrong: everyone is real and imaginary, but the paradigm frames this kind of thinking as nutters—and materialists mistake medium for significance and truth.
I think one of my problems has been lacking the aesthetic practice I kind of want, or my general—hmm, I can say things, say good, poetic things, but I want to perform magic, not just recite or incant magic, and the theatrical aspect moves the art form just saying things to acting, doing, performing because we are eager to collapse those concepts together. At the same time, closet dramas are just closet dramas—public theater moves towards actualization far more than closet drama. (An analysis of GD/Yeatsian magic ritual and closet drama would be interesting and would contrast with AC’s more Wildean sense of public performativity.)
Along those lines, I think I have always been scared, felt scared of being caught/found out, exposed.
(When we’re very young, it’s our parents who discipline and “correct” us, and when we encounter others who use those tones or that disciplinary mode, then we react like we might to parental correction. And we start making everyone else our surrogate parents, even if we also rebel.)
My sense of the paths tells me, though, that I want to look at my own habitual paths, stop using them, and start forging, using others.
Image: public domain curtains!