FoolishPeople

Looking Glass

Occasionally in life you'll stumble across a being who puts everything in perspective. A looking glass in perfect focus.

If you're particularly blessed, it'll happen every few years. For those of you with fortune similar to mine (verging on obsolete) you might just be able wish on it hard enough to manifest it. 

For me, these beings appear when they're most needed; when I'm at my lowest ebb. Just about to give up control of my life, sit back and become the oxygen-stealing, sack of wasted potential I'm expected to be by what commonly passes as society. I'm trying to be careful here, not to sound too much like a foolish girl with a misguided crush for my soul has grown gnarled and hardy in recent years so as not to allow such things to happen. So, for the sake of a little clarity; your looking glass wont always appear in a form you'd be happy to fuck. Though, for the cost of a little extra gnostic(j)ism, they just might.

I detest the use of the word 'Familiar' in this context. Such a lackluster title to give something that's showing you your path, your way through the mire to who you could be, to essentially an Eden of you're own making. Familiar.  'Oh, yes, I thought your face was familiar' or 'That smell is familiar, I must of stood in some shite' are perfectly acceptable uses of the word 'Familiar'. 'I would never have created my own little paradise on earth without my familiar' isn't. 

Looking glasses inspire. Not through preaching, but by creeping under your flesh and opening you up so fully you're flushed through with their lucidity and purity.  An elysian soul-douche, if you will.

Sometimes they're temporary. Most of mine have been. Trick is, I think, to garner everything they're prepared to gift you, suck it up, miss them when they leave, but always grow.

Zen Werewolf Presents: Embued Spaces - Technosigilic Approaches for Hypersaturation of Intent

By summary of way, this article intends to reframe your understanding of literacy before condensing the bulk of the content presented across the body of the document down to four simple steps for deeper exploration.  First off, you'll note the pretentious title.  Before we get started, let me ask you to click this link.  Don't worry, it'll open in an entirely new window, and you won't lose your place here.  I asked you to click the link to distract you from the pretentious title, but that title is likely what lead you to read at least the first three sentences in this paragraph.  What does this mean?

It means that you have made an assumption that these words are leading somewhere, that they are not simply words spat out of a keyword generator.  You are assuming that there is some intention behind these words guiding them toward a revelation, a meaning to be imparted, a technique described, or recipe presented.  That's taking a lot on faith, that's making the assumption that I am both sober and sane enough to present a viable and actionable set of perspectives, beliefs, and anecdotes that can deepen your perception profitably with a scant few electrons and a few moments of your time.

Slapping a website together and getting people to it, let alone convincing them to read it, or engage with it, is a massive investment of time, energy, and emotional baggage.  A few hours perusing most personal web pages, blogs, journals, profiles, and videos reveal a maddening white-noise of self-indulgence, in many ways a vampiric or parasitic manifestation of data fungus, in the terminology of Steven Johnson.  Creating change, real vibrant spectral change on many layers of reality simultaneously, requires one hell of a set-up.  Sculpting existing data fungus while simultaneously initiating noise and vibrations around the semantic web that fungus has accreted around, now that's fucking magic.

Terra:Extremitas- Wes Unruh

Wes Unruh is the current Executive Editor of the blog at Alterati.com. He is producer behind Philip K Nixon, and editor @ large for Aelturnity Audio, as well as co-author of the non-fiction reality hacking guide The Art of Memetics. He was also the creative director behind Unquiet Mind, and is currently working on a graphic novel with Ray Carney, as well as the fiction Memwar based on the sigil shown.

 

Matthew 6:22-23 (Private Translation)

The light of the body is the pineal gland: if therefore thine pineal
gland be united in focus, thy whole body shall be enlightened.  But if
thine pineal gland be divided, thy whole body shall be full of
darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how
great is that darkness!

 
“Approaching Terra:Extremitas I am recognizing how the underlying myth resonates with work I've kept under wraps for over a decade. Portions of this work have moved into visibility, often through the mechanisms of poetry.  The pieces I bring out of hiding now are elements of a larger, multi-media work at the heart of which is the text Memwar.

The first statement of intent was the album TEOTWAWKI composed within the framework of Unquiet Mind and the associated chapbook released privately on 10-23-04, publicly on that Halloween of that year.

Since then I have sought to reflect the fiction by research as performance, using the tools available to reflect back the very elements which are privately being woven into a tapestry of change. Writing as talismantic evocation, weaving sound as collage, and treating the visual iconographic tropes of sigil magick as it's own alphabet, within spheres of emotional gradiance, these are the pieces of meaning I seek deform, transform, or discard as I move forward through the ripples sent back from the singularity that approaches.”

About Terra:Extremitas:

In 2012 there is an apocalyptic event, revelatory and encompassing all fiction.

This event is a singularity, beyond which none have successfully scryed.  For a thousand years we have been looping along a timequake between 1991 and 2001 - on the hundredth iteration we broke free, hurtling toward this white-hot space and time.

Kilgore Trout is chanting '...there's work to be done.  You were sick, now you're better, there's work to be done.  You were sick, now you're better, there's work to be done.  You were sick, now you're better...' Hagbard Celine, Harry Coin, and Howard Campbell face down the Snaggerbum Fnord live on ECW.  Television relects sands of desolation.

Now what? & When?  WHere & Why? These demands grow loud in the void left behind by 'How.' Those Heteroclites whose eye be single and filled with light sing meaning into existence, transform the fabric of matter by speaking with the demons at the atom's core. Spirit reactive as all attain quickness with one weave of the Queen of Fiction.

We who harmonize become louder, a web of we, the feedback cycle of we, the blistering edge of nothing melted and there each lamp of the soul now reflects as a web, and deep below the hair of Indra.

The Great Year ends and begins anew; individuality is both sacrificed and christened.  This mad blood world shakes itself awake after 13,000 years of galactic darkness and we hear it in our cells--dark dreamless pillars stand waiting on new worlds, and each of us becomes attuned as stamped on our souls the mark of our archetype the mythological being to which we are born aches--and even now the harmonizing is taking hold.  The whisper of time with its ripples moving back through the fabric of our own experience leaves a maker's mark on our collective shadows.

Wesunruh.info
philiPKNixon.com
wesunruh.googlepages.com/teotwawki

 

Future Selves And Summers On The Shore

There were fireworks that Fourth of July, bright lights in the night sky of her eyes. She was seventeen to my twenty one, but what’s three months between friends? There wasn’t much about her that wasn’t attractive really, but when she pressed her lips into mine it was the ring through her septum that had my attention; tiny, golden, perfect. She tasted like kine bud, and smelled like summer sweat making love to ripe mangoes. We had met the day before, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d known her for years. I don’t know, maybe it was the way she bit me - right where neck meets collar bone - that jogged the memory.

I was still feral at twelve. We used to meet up near this big rock that sat up above the parking lot of a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom  Hall. The top had a rimmed basin, semi circular bench carved out of stone for us by Mother Nature. We knew everyone those days, so I was kind of surprised to see someone I didn’t recognize sitting there when I arrived. No matter how hard I try I can never quite remember his face. What I actually remember most is the thick rich smell from his cigar. One of those really fat ones, smoked down to nearly a stub. The hood on his black sweatshirt was pulled up over his head, and he was sitting as though he had been waiting for me. He nodded greetings and launched into his story.

One of those perfect summer nights when your drunk is deep and clean, great pot, better company, and the location…He described that town the way musicians talk about their favorite guitar. Picture postcard perfect small town up on the north shore; the way he described it, from the way the docks swayed lazy on the bay to the smell of waffles cones and ice cream floating on the breeze, reminded me of the town my Grandmother lives in.“Sounds like Manchester by the Sea” I blurted out. He smiled like as if at an inside joke. “Yeah, man, you know the place huh?”

He had been introduced to the kid sister of his cousin’s best friend. She was up from Florida for the week. They had hit it off and this did not sit well with her big brother. Understandable, but compounded further by the fact that she was four very formative years younger than my new friend. His cousin attempted to keep a peace, but when the bottle of tequila came out they all learned one of life’s little truths: It’s virtually impossible to stay mad at a man who keeps you in free drinks. Stubbing out his cigar he said, “You know, my cousin asked me to steer clear of her. He was just trying to avoid hurt feelings and broken noses, but if I had listened, I’d have lost out on one of my favorite memories. Remember that kid.”

That was pretty much that. He headed off down the same path I had come up. No doubt it had been a great story but I forgot about the whole incident soon enough; until my twenty first summer anyway. When it all came back I couldn’t help but laugh. “Did I tickle you?” she asked. “No, it’s just that I suddenly remembered why you’re so familiar.” She looked at me, eyes full of questions. I gave her kisses instead of explanations and she seemed ok with that.

Those four days went down just like the story I’d been told nine years earlier. Her brother copped an attitude until we buried hatchets over a bottle of Cuervo. My cousin begged me to lay off just this once, and fortunately I didn’t listen. I drove her to the airport for her flight home to Florida. Saying our good byes she hugged me so tightly that I can still feel her brown arms around my waist. I knew then he had been right, those four days would be one of my all time favorite memories.

Memories are weird things though and I will cop to the fact that I’m still not entirely sure I didn’t just dream that cigar smoking motherfucker who had made sure with a brilliant narrative that I wouldn’t rob either one of us of some of the best nights of our life. I don’t take chances though, so lets just say I’m not a smoker but I carry a cigar; and in those times and spaces where time and space are not so certain I make sure to drop in on my past and keep the light on for my future selves.

Oh…and if you’re interested in just how exactly I do that, keep your eyes on this space.

Oracle Interview with John Harrigan

Over a year ago, John Harrigan met his friend David Blank in the basement of Treadwell's Book Shop, having just completed his thirteen-month residency at the Horse Hospital, where he wrote, directed and performed in the 'Dark Nights of the Soul' Anthology of rituals; a powerful and emotional journey for everyone involved.

The interview, which explores John's approach to magick, weaponized art and society, and also discusses his views on archetypes, retroactive magick and time was published in David's Oracle Occult magazine in Issue 8: Blue Moon 2007.

David has kindly given us a PDF of the interview in its entirety, so is now available for download on FP.com.

Thank you to David once again for transcribing this incredible interview. No-one else could have produced such a close piece which captures the true essence of the Dark Nights Anthology.

You can keep updated on the latest issues of The Oracle Occult Magazine at: www.oracleoccult.com and www.myspace.com/oracleoccultmagazine

"Time becomes this big sheet, this landscape, that you exist within that is not linear and as you go further into that landscape it gets more complicated to explain what you are...Time to me is absolutely non-linear and things are happening now that are effecting my past that don't go through you as a creation, as a person, it's literally happening then and it effects you straight away in the future...We did a lot of work in Dark Nights, in cycle three, with a future-selves working, which is where we take people through a magickal ritual to experience, to meet, themselves in the future and this future self would talk to that person and give set information." John Harrigan, The Oracle Occult Magazine

Download John Harrigan - Oracle Interview.pdf Right Click to save.

Hatch 23: the occult series of 'Lost'

We found this article through Technoccult about retroactive magic threaded through 'Lost'. As you probably know retroactive magic is a an instrument we use widely in our rituals, so its very interesting to see how others perceive and use this:

In “Confirmed Dead” we learn that John would have died when Ben shot him in the back if he’d still had his kidney. This sounds a lot like “retroactive magic.” Retroactive magic is either the most cutting edge arena of modern magical practice or the most self-delusional (or both). According to Edward Wilson: “Retroactivity is the idea that actions taken in the present or the future can affect the past and therefore the affect can proceed the cause… It creates of causation an Ouroborus or Mobius strip.” In other words an occulist can alter the past as well as the future.

FP caught up in Heath Ledger conspiracy theories...

...about his death on site Godlike Productions:

"Here's what I found.  No wonder Heath Ledger couldn't sleep"
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 364972
1/30/2008 4:37 PM

[link to www.foolishpeople.com]

1988 made up for this with the other extreme, the finest Batman story to date, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke. This tour-de-force for the first time examines The Joker’s origins giving, him some pathos, whilst showing some of his most sick crimes to date. The Joker escapes from Arkham and sets up HQ in an abandoned fairground. He breaks into the apartment of Barbara Gordon, daughter of Commissioner Jim Gordon, and Batgirl in her spare time. He breaks her spine and then proceeds to sexually abuse her. Kidnapping her father he takes him back to his lair and forces him onto a ghost train showing him blown up pictures of his own daughter writhing naked in her blood. Whilst this grotesque ride is going on The Joker sings a catchy little number about the joys of insanity.

“When the human race wears a sorry face,
When the bomb hangs overhead.
When your kid turns blue it won’t worry you’
You can smile and nod instead”

This was part of a piece originally written by Richard Freeman for fp.com
and bizarrely turned up amongst various people musing conspiracy theories about Heath Ledger, Numerology, Symbolism, and Channels Closing.

“Entertainment has let us down...It’s actually preventing us from living our lives.”

In the run up to the London Premiere of 'Dead Language' at the ICA next week, John has been involved in a variety of interviews, the most recent being an exclusive interview with Open Magazine's Loma-Ann Bonner:
"There's a layer to art and entertainment now that's stopping us thinking, it's coming between us and common sense."

Next week, FoolishPeople will feature on LBC Radio, with an audio preview of 'Dead Language'. Details to follow...

Untitled page from 'Foundling' - Lili Spain

© Lili Spain 2007

The Story So Far - My First Encounter with the Spirit Parliament

If I ever get out of here this will be my first blog entry in over a year, in case I don’t somebody please make sure the following writings find their way into the hands of a contributor to the SPS website so that the truth regarding my absence and the nature of the Spirit Parliament can make it’s way into the public domain. There’s a list of e-mail contacts on the links page on the site, or there was when I last had internet access.

The last time I contributed to this site we were discussing my experience and speculation regarding the disappearance and fate of fellow investigator and contributor, Rupert Banwen. Though I have not located him, or learnt of how or to what degree the Spirit Parliament were responsible for his disappearance my investigations have led me to make discoveries and experience phenomena that shake the foundations of my perceptions of reality.

I have been to Hell and back. This isn’t a trite metaphor; this is very much literally what has happened. I’ve also met the Spirit Parliament and witnessed the Dark Nights of the Soul spirit carnival.