(no subject)

[haptalaon]

i suppose the appeal of Radio Astercote is the illusion of a second person (without the terror of actual interaction); my memory is poor enough that I become my own witchcraft teacher, inevitably forgetting what I had written last month and encountering it as a stranger. I spend a lot of time on my website-book-notes and worry, sometimes, that it's a substitute for the 'real work' of witchcraft and there's something else I ought to be doing.

But it's the act-of-making-real. I find the magic comes through when you're not looking for it. Active ritual has, historically, been the least mystic doing for me - silent and cold and weird, not just English and self-conscious, but fake-feeling. I suppose the best analogy will be orgasm - there's nothing like seeking to chase it away - it comes by routes indirect and strange.

The true magic is getting lost in life, and it catches you off-guard.

Walking and Reading, of course; but I persuade myself the time spent on my website and notes is a spiritual end in itself. For example - rearranging my image folders having the quality of a mantra, perhaps, or a rosary, the thing I do with my hands and conscious mind while the rest of me goes dreaming.

And so I set myself little goals - design and plan a new page for my playlists, write a little program to automate it, collate my years of notes into a single source, and all the time - seeking, seeking - it's not really about the outcome, but the byways of doing. I fantasise about a time it is 'done' and i will be able to just open up my playlists and commonplace and ritual structure at times-of-year preplanned, but the doing will never be completed because I think this is its most potent form. As much as it feels like a burden and a panic of things unfinished.

I've written before about experiencing internets as a place, and how historic websites in particular would conceptualise their layout as 'the kitchen', 'the garden', and so-forth - skeumorphic mindpalace maps. Building my spiritual life as a website is to make a place where it is, a place I can visit. It is not unlike travels in the near-astral.

Or to lay it out in a book - Said discusses this in Orientalism, the way that Writing A Book is a form of institutional power to make-real the contents of the book, and make it more real than the unrecorded (he's talking about - say - an English Victorian travelogue about mysterious India being 'more real' than India itself, or anything an Indian might say or write about India). I suppose that's anathama to Landweird - unless we stay alive to that fact. That is, reading-and-writing is a process that obscures as much as it reveals, and so can draw our attention to what's missing.

Over time, the magic becomes more real, because it is the only thing I see and speak to.