A Magnet for Possibilities (news)

APA Philosophy Referee Hand Sginals (above)
Rumors that first Dark Matter Particle has been discovered
US finally to settle Native American Trust Lawsuit
What Philosophers Believe
How the iPhone could Reboot Education (which I've already seen with my own eyes at Pitt)
Tom Waits may be up for a role in the Hobbit
David Bowie and the Occult
The Fortsas Bibliohoax
The Milky Way at different Wavelengths
Don't Believe in God? Can't Hold Office in NC
MIT's Mind Machine Project takes AI research to 2.0
Dave Eggers publishes a newspaper
Casual Sex found to not be psychologically dangerous for young people
Henry Miller's Watercolors
Should Earth Scientists take a Hippocratic Oath? (I say yes)
The Mystery of the Magically Braided Horse Manes
Music for Water Bears
100 Best last lines of novels, the first of which and my favorite is from Beckett's The Unnameable:

".... ...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on."

The Way of What is to Come

Monday, listening to M.Pyres, dancing up and down over my copy of Jung's "Red Book" [on his theories of interpretation] finally arriving, though won't have time to dive into it for a couple weeks due to the increasing school work load. But soon.

For the time being here's some links that have been building up in my reader:


Images
From Kris Kuksi's Beast Anthology (above).
Dust Echoes: animated stories from the Australian dreamtime.
The dawn of a new post postmodern era in art.

Words
Viking love (and war) poetry.
Alan Moore's new zine, Dodgem Logic.
A Reader's Manifesto, or why contemporary literature sucks.
Bad sex in fiction award 2009 (NSFW).
The Books that founded D&D.

Faith and Politics
Obama omits reference to God in Thanksgiving speech.
The inherent fail of New Atheism.
Ritual sacrifices in Nepal see 320,000 animals sacrificed.
Switzerland Votes to Ban Minarets
CIA's lost magic manual resurfaces.
The global protest movement, ten years later.

Science
Doctors Recommend Medical Marjiuana for Minors with ADHD.
Humans hear through their skin.
Plants have a social life.
Science is shackled by intellectual property.
Large Hadron Collider sets world record for particle acceleration.
Virgin Galactic's Space-Grazing Aircraft Is Ready for Liftoff.

Where Science Ends and Magic Begins

From biochemist Rupert Sheldrake's response to the skeptical critics, of his book, A New Science of Life [via Daily Grail]:

"Magic is an attempt to control and forecast natural events. Sir James Frazer distinguished two categories. First, sympathetic magic by similarity: like produces like. For example, manipulating a model of something is believed to give power over that which is modelled. Second, magic by contact or contagion: objects that were once joined together retain a mysterious connection when separated, so that a change in one can affect the other.

"Science is also about controlling and forecasting natural events. Much of its power comes from making models of natural processes. Mathematical modelling gives scientists ever more power to predict and control. And many modern technologies depend on a sympathetic resonance between similar patterns of vibration at a distance. A hundred years ago, television would have been magic, and so would mobile telephones.

"Second, in quantum theory, objects that were once joined together retain a connection at a distance when separated, as in magic by contact or contagion. Einstein dismissed quantum non-locality as "spooky action at a distance". But quantum entanglement is real, and is applied technologically in quantum computing.

"Isaac Newton ran into the science/magic problem with gravity. The idea that the moon influenced the tides through empty space sounded like magic, and Newton was embarrassed by his failure to explain what he called the "occult" or hidden force of gravitation. His critics, mainly French, accused him of magical thinking."

As Arthur C. Clarke so brilliantly put it, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I would say that science is just magic repeated often enough that you know how it is works.

From a Notebook that Never Was

From a Notebook that Never Was, by Fernando Pessoa [via 3:AM Magazine]:

"Believing in nothing firmly and therefore accepting as equally valid, in principle (which is as far as they go), all opinions, and considering that a theory is worth only as much as the theorist, an emotion as much as the emotion’s expresser, I could never take seriously the literary dogma that consists in the use of a personality. Personality is a form of belief and, like all belief, impossible for the reasoner.

"It’s a short step from believing in outer truth to believing in inner truth, from accepting a concept of the world as true to accepting a concept of our self as true. I don’t affirm that everything is fluid, since that would be an affirmation, but to our understanding everything is indeed fluid, and the truth, unfolding for us into various truths, disappears, since it cannot be multiple.

* * *

"Thank God for that ironic element in human destinies that makes dreams the mode of thought for the poor in life, even as it makes life the mode of thought—or thought the mode of life—for the poor in dreams.

"But even dreaming channeled through thinking ends up making me weary. At which point I open my eyes from dreaming, go to the window, and transfer my dream to the streets and rooftops. And it’s in my distracted and profound contemplation of so very many roof tiles divided into rooftops, covering the astral contagion of people organized into streets, that my soul becomes truly detached from me, and I don’t think, I don’t dream, I don’t see, I don’t need to. Then I truly contemplate the abstraction of Nature—of Nature, the difference between man and God."

This series of quotes, particularly the line about personality being a belief impossible to the reasoner, seemed an interesting response to a recent and frustrated rant from Black Sun Gazette on the struggle between rationalists and believers. As I keep pointing out, faith is about telling a story to contextualize our experiences, and what kind of story do rational atheists tell to cover the horror and randomness of being movements of particles? Are they even logically allowed to tell such stories?

Mass Link Updates

It's been a while since I've posted a number of links to interesting articles that have caught my eye in my daily journeys through the internets. I often just don't have the time to say something insightful about everything that catches my eye, so the world will just have to speak for itself.

Muthos:
-Interactive Fiction Competition 09
-Submissions wanted for an anthology on The Immanence of Myth
-Fair Use copyright:1 the Estate of James Joyce:0
-Best Fiction of the Millennium so far (and critics vs. readers)
-Most challenged books of 2008 for banned book week
-Exquisite Corpse Adventure
-School of Witchcraft opens in Taiwan
-Nabokov Edits Kafka's Metamorphosis
-Horacio Castellanos Moya's Disgust with the Bolaño Myth
-Dan Brown gets D.C. all Wrong
-More youths write today than ever before
-Post-medium publishing
-Tolkien trained as British Spy

Logos:
-The Psychology of anxiety
-Religious experience linked to the social regions of the brain
-The connection between Schizophrenia and smoking
-Quantum Entanglement now visible to the naked eye
-The Decline of Polymathy and General Knowledge
-Indians find Water on the Moon
-Brain Scans closer to Revealing what we have seen
-the Sun gets its Spots back
-Cities Organized like Human Brains, and as battlesuits for surviving the future
-Earth's oldest living organism cloned

Faith and the Pattern

Over the past year I have been going through an extreme crisis of faith. Due to a number of physical, emotional, and psychic challenges I found myself last winter in a state of disillusionment, that everything I had previously held to be good, desirable, possible, and expected in the world may not have been the case at all, a state close to feeling jaded, except that the crisis is precisely in trying to find some reason to carry on, to still believe: in love, the power of the human spirit, self-growth, god, some point to life as we know it, or at least a deeper understanding. But the closer I looked at any of these things the further they seemed to recede, from view, from understanding, so I was left wondering if they really existed. In centuries of the human quest for the truth and goodness we are still no closer to truth it seems, and people can be as ignorant, violent, and uncaring as they always have been, if not more so, which is rather disheartening to someone who feels they have spent their life searching for and hoping to bring these positive qualities into being. More recently I have summed up my quandary in asking, what is the point of self-growth, of struggling to improve how one is in the world, when the work is hard and there seems to be no real “reward” no incentive from society to do so (though that I take this as a valid question shows at least some will towards growing). How can I spend roughly the same amount of time writing on my novel as watching a TV show, and find the same amount of satisfaction in both? And sometimes more in the casual, indulgent activities, because they are easier? This is baffling to me. I believe that everything is real, even those things we can only imagine, but nevertheless there seems to be a primacy to the everyday, to those things, which when we pick ourselves off the floor or put down our books we still have to deal with, of which we can sigh and say, well maybe this is it. But is it? Ultimately everything is real, but some things are more real than others. Worrying about money or physical pain unfortunately feel to be some of the most real there is.

The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.

But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.

The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.

To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.

I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.

But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.

Literacy Narrative

For my class on Narrative and Technology I was asked to create what's called a literacy narrative, the story of my development as as "content producer/consumer" (to use the parlance of the age, focusing also on how our experiences with media have helped us develop standards of quality. The results were interesting and integrating, somewhat like a statement of intention or a road map, if a bit lengthy and abstract (I am trying to write a novel dealing with some of these similar themes). Thought it was worth posting here:


Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.

When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6^th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.

Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.

I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.

An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.

In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant...”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.

As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7^th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.

Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.

Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.

Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.

Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I'd thought of two decades ago before my father's bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.

Magic Shoes

Contemporary Americans generally do not wear magical amulets, or other specially-endowed articles of clothing, as in other times or cultures, such as the ghost shirts of the Lakota Indians. Certainly there are superstitions, lucky sports caps or underwear for the winning game or date, but clothing as a statement and symbolically intentional affect has declined somewhat in the last several decades. We may still wear suits to work or funerals, jerseys to games, jewelry to dinner, the usual ritual uniforms, but it is just as likely to see someone on the street in merely jeans and a t-shirt (what up till recently was considered underwear), or worse, kids in classrooms wearing sweatpants, what are essentially pajamas, or hats on their heads which at any other time would have signified either a lack of respect or a desire to not be indoors. This isn't to say that clothes no longer signify anything, one only has to look at the inordinate amount of money and attention that is put into the tennis-shoe industry, people buying brand new expensive designer brand sneakers instead of food to live on, people robbing other people for said same sneakers. Also the resurgence of boots, as a casual footwear encountered on a daily basis, but also an aesthetic and symbolic one, laden with connotations of toughness, travel, endurance (often sexualized), etc. The desire once filled by the role of the high heel in the cultural imagination, idealized in the Ruby Slippers Dorothy wore to escape from the childhood fantasy of Oz into sexual adulthood, has been replaced it seems with a new desire for distance-durability or strength, groundedness, or a thick solid place to stand and move from.
I have worn boots for the last 15 years, my first pair being black army boots (of the kind favored in the punk/outcast subculture of the late '90s, though I never owned a pair of Docs), that carried that significance of toughness, integrity (of a military persuasion), etc. For the last four years however I have owned a pair of hand-made, custom-fitted moccasin-style boots from Catskill Mountain Moccasins, of a dark blue-green leather with laced up sides that as long as I take care of will last probably the most of my life. While an expensive purchase, these boots were actually a gift from some friends who had come into some money, and were gifted as something to "help me on my journey/ adventure," which is the spirit I have always tried to wear them in, somewhat like the legendary Seven League Boots, or perhaps more exactly as if they were magic boots from some role-playing game, not quite boots of speed as much as boots of doubled experience, as I have worn them through many situations of extreme, unique, self-changing experience. The significance being that because the boots were a gift and are already unique looking (people call them my elf boots), wearing them is a reminder that when I am in the world it is not just the casual going about the day, but that every day is an adventure, a quest in the sense of a search after deeper questions and significance.

After a couple years and wearing them on a cross-country road trip, my boots were pretty worn down at the heel and needed to be resoled, which I was thankfully able to find someone to do, and then a year later they needed to be resoled again. This was last fall, a time of great personal inner turmoil and questioning, and I took that the soles of the boots were worn through to be indicative of a deeper spiritual uncertainty, as in that my soul was worn through (a not inappropriate homophone, as the ancient Egyptian symbol for the person's steps through life, the ankh, was represented by a sandal-strap). In preparation for this fall semester, in which I am taking a number of philosophy courses and will need, not answers, but a renewed sense of my quest/ions, I thought it made sense to get the boots fixed, with thicker heels, which I did this week and finally picked up today, biking out to Edgewood to get them. Since I was already out and coming through East Liberty, I decided to stop by the Cathedral of Hope, which on Wednesdays sets up their labyrinth for people to walk, which in other years has been an extraordinarily centering and spiritual practice for me and I already felt the need of recently. Labyrinth's the symbol of life's journey, the winding of questions in the neural pathways, long ruminative walks mapped onto the backstreets of the city, and I thought this labyrinth walk was a good time to reconsecrate my boots for the future, putting them on afterward and remembering that, as they are custom-fit, they are more comfortable than anything else I've worn on my feet, and almost begging to walk out into the world again.

Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language

Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language

As the renowned science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously quipped: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is certainly true that advanced technologies, such as the intricate logic boards of computers, may seem magical because we do not know how they work, but as Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, also suggests, “powerful new technologies are magical because they function as magic, opening up novel and protean spaces of possibility within social reality” (180-1).
One of the most important contemporary examples of these magical “spaces of possibility” is cyberspace – a metaphor for the visualization of complex information structures and exchanges endemic to computer networks (191) – which arose from the cyberpunk fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson beginning in the mid-‘80s, when such technologies were descending from the realm of literature and fantasy to the actuality of home computer systems. Perhaps anticipating that the technological spaces they described might seem like magic, these cyberpunk authors employed the terminology of the occult as a metaphor for how computer and information systems work. As we will see, this use of magical terminology is entirely apt, as it not only allowed the conceptualization necessary for the creation of our current information technologies, but also articulated one of the primary concerns of our age: that language – the symbolic exchange of information which magic, computers, and literature have in common – has the power to cause real effects in the real world.

True Names and the Magical Metaphor
The occult theorist Aleister Crowley (though undoubtedly one of the most infamous charlatans of modern history) offers in his Magick in Theory and Practice what is considered the best definition of actual magic: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will… by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object” (xii-i), and gives as an example the publication of a book as a magical way of conveying information to people at a distance. This definition seems contrary to what most people might think of when they hear the term magic, which is either the hocus-pocus of stage magicians or the sword-and-sorcery tropes of fantasy literature and video games. In short we are generally aware of the imagery or the metaphor, but not that magic is primarily a tool (albeit a symbolic one) for getting things done. Erik Davis suggests that by “using language, costumes, gestures, song, and stagecraft, magicians applied techne to the social imagination, actively tweaking the images, desires, and stories that partly structure the collective psyche… which in turn impacted the construction of native reality as a whole” (173).

In his short story True Names – which offered the first fictional representation of that virtual “space of possibility” later called cyberspace (239) – Vernor Vinge uses magical terms drawn explicitly from early computer games in order to describe his information technologies. Cyberspace is called the “Other World” or “Other Plane” and is accessed through “Portals,” hackers are called “warlocks,” and a group or network of hackers is called a “coven” (243-4). The process of navigating through this visualization of information also reads like a fantasy adventure; the hackers have to manipulate symbols, face tests and elementals, and “trade spells and counterspells” (essentially passwords) (254). The story itself critiques and explains this use of jargon and imagery. While the news networks “made it clear there was nothing supernatural about… the Other Plane, that the magical jargon was at best a romantic convenience and at worst obscurantism,” and the world governments refuse “to indulge in the foolish imaginings of fantasy,” the warlock-hackers themselves suggest that “sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols… more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment” (252, 271).

According to Davis in Techgnosis, this metaphor is effective because “the allegorical and hieroglyphic language of magic works well with the fact that the Other Plane exists simultaneously on two levels of reality” (215). Shamans, Gnostics, and other practical magicians have historically manipulated symbolic representations of information about reality (planetary sigils and runes, angelic or demonic gatekeepers, etc.) in order to concretely effect the world around them, similar to the way that hypertext or the icons of the World Wide Web “function as symbols, inscriptions, and operational buttons; they are both a writing and a reality” (201). Computer programming languages are likewise such symbolic representations that can create realities and make things happen. As the warlock programmer Mr. Slippery puts it in True Names: “even a poor writer… can evoke complete internal imagery with a few dozen words of description. The difference now is that the imagery has interactive significance, just as sensations in the real world do” (252). For an example of computer technology demonstrating Crowley’s definition of magic, one only has to look at the AI the Mailman using its hacking skills to nearly blow up the entire planet, a kind of ‘cyber-magic’ terrorism that the United States government currently states is a very real and dangerous threat to national security.

This issue of security and the danger inherent in both magic and information technologies is made clear in the title of Vinge’s True Names. The power of names is an ancient occult concept summed up in the introduction to the story: “the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for… once an enemy… learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful” (241). Vinge himself believed that “the ‘true names’ of fantasy were like object ID numbers in a large database,” somewhat like modern passwords and IP addresses (16). Early computer scientists, such as Timothy C. May, explicitly used the ideas inherent in this metaphor of magical true names when dealing with issues of “anonymous interaction, reputation-based systems, digital pseudonyms, digital signatures, data havens, and public-key encryption” that were necessary to securely transform the fictional cyberspace into the actual Internet of today (35-6). As Davis suggests in Techgnosis, Vinge was eerily prophetic: “over a decade after his story appeared, the federal government and digital librarians became embroiled in similar debates [as those in the story] over encryption standards, privacy, and online security” (217). One of Vinge’s predictions however is yet to play itself out, the issue of controlling and interacting with self-aware computer systems like the Mailman, called Artificial Intelligences.

Neuromancer and the Spirits in the Machine
William Gibson’s Neuromancer brought the term cyberspace, and the idea of virtual “spaces of possibility,” more fully into the public consciousness, while at the same time abandoning many of the obvious magical metaphors of True Names. Unlike Mr. Slippery, who accesses the Other World Portal through “a certain amount of self-denial – or at least self-hypnosis” reminiscent of shamanic trance states (Vinge 250), Gibson’s cyber-cowboy Case “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix,” which is imagined as “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void” (5).

Despite the more technological and even gritty, noir descriptions that permeate the novel, Neuromancer still refers to occult language and concepts when discussing the relationship of man to Artificial Intelligence programs, which are still sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. As the Turing Registry agents warn Case about his dealings with the AI Wintermute, “For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible” (163). Even the AIs’ creators have an uneasy, occult relationship with the beings; Ashpool calls Wintermute “a name… to conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely,” while Lady 3Jane believes the AIs are “ghosts in the corporate cores” (185, 229). The AI Neuromancer itself echoes a prominent magical axiom, “to call up a demon you must learn its name” (243).

Artificial Intelligences act as the traditional dues ex machina, the god or ghost in the machine, patterns of information that act as if they are intelligent and cause real effects in the world. As Erik Davis suggests, this issue of self-aware digital agents raises the same questions that magicians and ritualists encounter when summoning gods, angels, or demons: how do we know that AIs are sentient beings and not just simulations (197)? Many occult manuals, such as Bill Whitcomb’s The Magician’s Companion, warn: “any concepts, forces, or objects which manifest as entities should be treated as real beings;” just because they can be viewed as patterns of energy or objectified aspects of human personality doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous to treat them as only non-living (15). The warlocks in True Names likewise treat the were-robot DON.MAC “as though he were a real person. Usually it was easier to behave that way toward simulators” (Vinge 295). Though it may not be possible to know if spirits or self-aware programs are really sentient or real, Crowley suggests, “it is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow” (Davis 183).

For the time being, Artificial Intelligences still remain on the pages of sci-fi novels (though there are certainly many computer scientists working to make them a reality), but the perils highlighted in Neuromancer of dealing with runaway patterns of information are still applicable to our contemporary world. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick worried that our technological environment is becoming increasingly alive; as Davis points out in Techgnosis: “the Internet has already become home to a variety of autonomous and rather parasitic programs – including viruses, Trojan horses, spiders, worms, smartshoppers, and bots” (187). Just because a computer virus, like the recent Conificker Worm, is only made of ones and zeroes, doesn’t mean it can’t wipe out your entire operating system (unless of course you have the correct magical spells of protection, ie: anti-virus software). It is also worth noting that due to the cryptographic near-anonymity of Internet interactions, it is possible to treat other human computer users as merely patterns of information instead of intelligent beings. The flip side of Neuromancer’s artificially aware entities may be a process of technological de-humanization, such as Case’s divorce from the “meat” in favor of mediated virtual experiences (for us, TV, video games, etc.) that reduce us to being passive nodes or routers in a global network of information exchanges, which seem to have more of a life of their own than we do.

Snow Crash and the Power of the Word
In the world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, “information is power” (379). We can see the beginnings of this concept in True Names, when the warlock Erythrina suggests that hackers “probably understand the System better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power” (Vinge 268). In Snow Crash however, this equation drives every level of society, from the global media network owned by L. Bob Rife, to the hacker Hiro Protagonist’s job selling potentially useful scraps of information to the Central Intelligence Corporation. This is also a world very much like our own (or at least only a few steps ahead), full of advertisements, strip malls, corporate-controlled politics, and a virtual network “space of possibility” called the Metaverse.

In the story, people access the Metaverse through “audiovisual body” software simulations called avatars (33), a term originally indicating the incarnations of Hindu deities, but popularized to such a degree by Stephenson’s novel that it now applies to any representation of a self in a digital world (Davis, 223). Descriptions in Snow Crash of the Metaverse, which is “subject to development,” the construction of “buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality” (23), could easily apply to contemporary virtual realities and MMOs, massively multiplayer online worlds such as Second Life. Even information tools in the novel, like the CIC software Earth, which tracks spatial information of “maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance” (99), are now almost fully realized in programs like Google Earth.

If the techno-socio-economic world portrayed in Snow Crash seems viably realistic, then so to is the novel’s depiction of magic. Stephenson does not rely on fantasy tropes as a metaphor for information technologies, but instead presents magic as a historically researched plot element, modernizing the ancient concept that language – the symbolic exchange of information – causes real effects in the real world. The central conflict in Snow Crash is the resurrection of an ancient Sumerian nam-shub, described as a neurolinguistic virus, essentially “speech with magical force “(197), which Rife wants to use to gain greater control over people’s minds. This concept of language as “both a story and an incantation… a self-fulfilling fiction” is explicated in the novel through several chapters of researched information, and relies on the Sumerian concept of me: linguistic units that functioned as “algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to society” (202, 240).

Stephenson is quick to draw a connection between the concept of me and the functioning of computer technology. He suggests, “The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is a form of speech – the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub,” but also that “the belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature” (197, 256). As Davis points out in Techgnosis, language is perhaps the earliest and most pervasive human technology, and the supernatural or performative power of names haunts the majority of early linguistic cultures and religious traditions (23-5). It is not just a coincidence that we use the same word “spell” to describe both the construction of words and the performance of magic. Contemporary scientific studies echo Stephenson’s position that learning new information forms neurolinguistic pathways in the deep structure of the brain (117); language effectively creates our perception of reality.

As we see in Snow Crash, the issue inherent in such operational or performative language is in who controls its use: “someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visible symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem” (369). In our contemporary world, like in the novel, this is done through advertisements, viral marketing campaigns, the three-ring binders that allow franchises to operate, and any and all media and information technologies. We have even come up with an equivalent to the Sumerian me: memes, a term coined by the scientist Richard Dawkins that refers to a unit of cultural information virally transmitted between people through speech. As Hiro explains in Snow Crash, “we are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head” (373). Information does not have to be self-aware like AIs in order to be dangerous! On a much broader scale, whole social, political, and economic realities can be magically constructed from a single linguistic document. As the Metaverse “is just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere” (23), so to is the United States of America a “space of possibility” constructed from the language of the Declaration of Independence.

One can easily see the problems that arise when we passively relinquish our operational relationship with information to vast media conglomerates and religious or political ideologues like those in Snow Crash, or those in our own world. As Nietzsche expresses it, quoted in one of the articles that prefaces True Names, “The master’s right of naming goes so far that it is accurate to say that language itself is the expression of the power of the masters” (43) On the other hand, those of us fortunate enough to be literate can, like Hiro Protagonist, write our own codes and stories that present equally valid linguistic realities. Vernor Vinge claims that, “up until the personal computer came along, Orwell’s vision [in 1984] of technology as the enabler of tyranny was the mainstream view. But in the 1980s… people with PCs began to realize that computers might bring the end of tyranny” (22). Ultimately, the true magic espoused in the fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson is not merely their envisioning of technological “spaces of possibility,” but their insistence on inhabiting those spaces with neuromancers, literally magicians of the mind, willing to confront the dangers and complexities of informational systems, in a manner that upholds our human freedom to linguistically construct the worlds that are our future.


Works Cited

Crowley, Aleister. “Magick in Theory and Practice.” Dover Publications, Inc. New
York: 1976

Davis, Erik. “Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information.” Three
Rivers Press. New York: 1998

Gibson, William. “Neuromancer.” Ace Books. New York: 1984

Stephenson, Neal. “Snow Crash.” Bantam Books. New York: 2000

Vinge, Vernor. “True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier.” Ed. James
Frankel. Tor Books. New York: 2001

Whitcomb, Bill. “The Magician’s Companion: a Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to
Magical and Religious Symbolism.” Llewellyn Publications. St. Paul: 1993

On koans and rotting dogs

Erik Davis of Techgnosis on Jodorowsky's Spiritual Memoir:

"A friend recently asked me if I though Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain was a “good” movie, and I had to answer that, in the case of this surreal mythopoetic masterwork, the usual good/bad categorization does not apply. The film is truly beyond category; or rather, it is “terribly good.” While the first half of the movie—which was definitively released on DVD within the last year—is perhaps the greatest sustained expression of visionary psychedelic filmmaking ever, I can understand why people also find the exploding frogs repulsive and the mystagoguery redolent with all the erratic indulgence and hierophantic pretension that mark the more wayward domains of Seventies spiritual counterculture. But even that’s as much a plus as a minus, especially if, like me, you believe that the peculiar genius of this era provided mystical and hedonic conundrums that are still worthy of study and exploration.



"So it was with great excitement that I read the recent translation of Jodorowsky’s spiritual autobiography, entitled—hold onto your hats—The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Like his films, it is a puzzling, wonderous, grotesque, and sometimes tedious book, but it does confirm the sense I get from his films that he is not fucking around with the mysteries. In the Sixties and Seventies, Jodorowsky was a serious practitioner of Zen, studying and meditating with a Japanese priest in Mexico City named Ejo Takata. Their koan combat is the most steady thread of this book, a male-buddy-cognitive conversation that forms a counterpoint with the other figures in the book, all of whom are women who offer Jodo various modes of initiation—artistic, sexual, magical, energetic. These women include the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who sounds as wacky brilliant as Dali, and a goat-killing silicone-implanted Mexican actress known as La Tigress."

mapping soul

"Some were looking for spiritual happiness or for some form of unknown power, but I had a practical object. I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of the one history and that the soul’s."

-Yeats, on why he got involved with the occult

In the future Everyone's a Magician

You know you live in a weird, weird world when teachers are fired for accusations of wizardry, and Elvis Presley is found to be a Rosicrucian.

[via No Touch Monkey and Disinfo]

Rewriting Reality

Yesterday I finished my classes for the semester, and despite the gorgeous weather drifting into the stuffy wooden room through the blue stain-glass windows, the students in my short story class were somehow excited to continue discussing the functions of literature. Debating Salman Rushdie's use of both magical realist elements and the English language in his collection "East, West" as a move towards a broader global perspective, one of my classmates asked why is any of this important to talk about, he's just a writer trying to make some money. Just a writer? Both my teacher and I had to bite our tongues, certainly one does not write in order to make money (just ask any aspiring author and many acclaimed ones). Something that we've been discussing all semester, through the writings of Poe, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, and Rushdie, is the way in which literature can present the expectations and conventions both of literature and of life itself back to the reader, reaching for ever larger perspectives on what it means to write, to inhabit a culture, to create reality. While not explicitly addressed in class I have been debating with my classmates over what I see as being one of the most important functions of fiction: that it can create reality, if even at the very least by suggesting new and other ways of being and perceiving the world and ourselves. If there's anything I've gotten out of this semester it is the recognition that writing has the power and responsibility to shape reality.

Of course, this has also meant that I have been entirely exasperated by the current trend in American literature, which for the past fifty years has been dominated by a "quotidian realism," that is, by snarky loosers sarcastically bemoaning the inconsequentiality of their everyday lives while trying to find moments of pale truth in the arms of their ex-wives, addictions, and academic pretensions. The biggest difficulty I see in this approach to literature is that it only confirms what is base and common about real life, while utterly refusing to allow any grander emotions or events room to occur. Personally I think that while art can be a mirror held up to reality, I also agree with Bertolt Brecht that art can be a hammer with which to shape it. My biggest philosophical influences here would be Robert Anton Wilson's quote that "reality is what you can get away with," and the Hashashin mystic Hassan ibn Sabbā's apocryphal assertion that "nothing is true; everything is permitted." While realism may claim to reflect everyday life, we forget that all it does is reflect literary trends and arch/stereotypes. No story is "true" outside of being a story, and consequently, one does not have to be bound by any proscriptions against that which is not typically real or true. Take Borges' work for example, in which fictional worlds ultimately overpower conventional reality, showing that it itself is nothing but a fiction of language.

According to the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliant discussion of the fantastic as a literary genre, the supernatural, or even just the hyper-real and magically real, can function in narratives to express those things that might otherwise be inexpressible, whether cultural taboos or a Daoist ineffability of reality itself. Certainly psychoanalysis has taken the modern place of saying the unsayable, so that one could today write about rather taboo subjects in a realist style, but it still does not address the more imaginative aspects of what might be possible in the world. Not that one has to include magically real elements to do this, but this function of imagination is the place at which myth and folktales function. Italo Calvino suggests the way the earliest storytellers took the elements of life around them, caves, hunting, tigers, reproduction, etc. and recombined them in all possible ways, creating both a boundary on what had been seen and done before, and the possibility of other things that hadn't and either could be desired or feared. In myth, dreams are born, and the ability for culture to advance. This process is still continuing today. The human imagination in stories has more recently created both the internet (Vernor Vinge's "True Names") and the modern totalitarian state (Orwell's "1984"). If these aren't everyday enough examples for you, consider the now ubiquitous and almost bromidic myth of the American Dream. Thousands of people believe that they can raise themselves from rags to riches, and many actually do, precisely because in the late 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. happened to write a particular kind of dime novel in which that was possible. Maybe it was possible before that, but due to his stories it seems to many to be much more possible now. I know that my own life was intimately shaped by reading certain kinds of heroic fiction as a child (what always impressed me about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series was not a desire to actually ride dragons, but the utter integrity of her characters in the face of societal pressure and change). I can only think of the current generation of children, who in reading the "Harry Potter" series may grow up with an increased sense of the possibility of true magic. Who, on the other hand, wants to grow up to be one of the bitter anti-heroes of a tepid realism, who himself is only a a second-order shadow of the much more interesting and articulate underdog, Henry Miller?

This post is of course not meant to be an exhaustive essay on the topic of rewriting reality, it is more along the lines of a tentative aesthetic statement or a whispered call to action. I'll only briefly point people to Grant Morrison's idea of art as a hypersigil, or to Paulo Coelho's idea of the Personal Legend. Why was his book "The Alchemist" on bestseller lists for the past year? Because he is telling people quite simply that they can create and live out their own stories. And if even just one reader believes him, then he has done his job as a writer. Never doubt that you too can be living in the greatest story ever told.

The Art of Inscription

"To write a poem is to attempt a minor magic. The instrument of that magic, language, is mysterious enough. We know noting of its origin. We know only that it divides into diverse lexicons and that each of them comprises an indefinite and changing vocabulary and an undefined number of syntactic possibilities. With those evasive elements I have formed this book."
-Jorge Luis Borges, 1985

Spring Cleaning

I generally dislike posting only links, but right now all my original content is wrapped up in school and in other creative pursuits. Thankfully the end of the semester is soon, and I'll have more time to write some of the curious pieces that have been floating around my head this last month or so. But until then...

Army's New PTSD Treatments: Yoga, Reiki, 'Bioenergy' [via Boingboing]
Where angels no longer fear to tread: science's search for God [via The Daily Grail]
An upcoming lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on ritual and the spectator
The continued battle between atheism and magic and between science and religion
The mythology of eucatastrophe (that sudden turn of events at the end of a story which result in the protagonist’s well-being )
Living Monsters and dead ones from the deep
D&D Character Alignment as a child's introduction to moral philosophy [via Technoccult]
The Fantastic in art and fiction[via Technoccult]
The Art of mazes
R Crumb's 'The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick'
Myth and Science Fiction [via Technoccult]
Art made from Books



And lastly, this video of Korean Shamans from youtube, in order to encourage me to finish writing my paper on the subject for class :

Against Genre

In january I read Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," which was an enjoyable and well-researched tome about two magicians trying to bring magic back to 19th century Britain. While the plot was engaging enough to get me through the roughly thousand pages, the characters weren't terribly original or deep, and when I was done reading it I nodded my head and shelved it in the fantasy section of my library. However, in recent jaunts to the local used bookstores, I've seen copies of this book not in the fant/sci-fi sections, but shelved with the rest of the "literature," which started me really wondering what made that difference. Certainly the ten years worth of research that went into the depiction of the state of English magic in the 19th century pushed this novel a step above your less well thought out hack and slash universe into the realm of historical fiction, but is it possible to write about a theme such as magic in a way that is not immediately branded as "fantasy?" Personally, I considered the Harry Potter series to be more in the Young Adult genre; though magic plays a not inconsiderable role in the plot, the books seemed to be more about the growth and struggles of their teenaged hero. Conversely, I having been working on a short story for my fiction class about a golem hunting down an angel in a modern city, which certainly had fantasy (or at least fantastic) elements for many of my classmates, while I considered it more in the light of urban gothic or modern folktale, and then my teacher asked who exactly would be the intended audience. Presumably people who like reading things that they haven't read before, stories that don't fit into the expected molds and tropes of genre.

This evening I considered my fiction bookshelf, and decided that I was done with genre, shuffling together what had previously been distinct categories of literature, fantasy, horror, sci-fi, children's, etc. These categorical distinctions have been a thorn for some time, as there are just too many books that don't fit into one genre or another, too many sub-sub-genres (magical realism, steam punk), and too many authors who are not content to stay in one mode of writing (George Orwell being the largest frustration of this type for years now, "1984" leans towards sci-fi, but "Down and Out in Paris and London?" Or what to do with Hesse's volume of fairy tales?) I have a similar difficulty with my shelves of poetry, mythology, and philosophy, which I like to keep arranged in a rough chronology. Except that the further back historically you get, these genres all converge towards the same thing: works like the "Bhagavad-Gita" are essentially all three. I feel like the idea of marking off set boundaries on what certain types of literature can or should be ultimately limits the possibilities of the worlds that can be created with language. When it comes down to it, Joyce's "Dubliners" is just as fictional as Tolkien's "The Hobbit." Though one takes place in a world that is at first glance more familiar to us, it was as equally filtered and recreated through the mind of its author. And who's to say that Middle-earth wasn't the more fully thought out, containing the history, customs, and peoples of not just one city but an entire world? Perhaps instead of setting arbitrary boundaries on types of semi-believable realities, a more holistic attitude would be to consider that these are all stories, spanning a spectrum of invented realities from the seemingly mundane to the convincingly fantastic. Which of course leads me to the question of when someone will attempt to write across all of them.

On Transcendence

I have been thinking much lately about what has been a lifelong desire to transcend or escape from what has otherwise felt like a mundane and often painful reality. I have desired true miracles, magical occurences, other realities, even yesterday I was looking at some buildings on campus and thought that if I walked past them I might find myself in another set of places that do not exist except in my dreams. I have longed for this since I was a child, and my twin and I used to walk up and down the beach creating an imaginary mansion between us that we would inhabit whenever life was just too little to hold our attentions. I have always sought the irreal, and all my arts, rebellions, highs (of which there have been many), have just been a part of this desire. And yet I still don't know why. Was there some buried crises or trauma from my childhood thjat forced me to want to escape reality? Was there instead no such crises? Was this just a product of my overactive imagination, precocious reading, social ostracization, and somewhat spiritual upbringing? Am I really just a "recovering Catholic," in that I've sought for all manner of spiritual and liminal experiences because God never showed himself to exist?

I have been equally fascinated with magic from a young age, and have been involved over the years with all manner of ritual and religious behaviors. And though many irreal and seemingly miraculous things have happened in my life, whether by my own actions or not, never has anything occured that has completely surpassed my expectations of what is possible. Even my "meeting with God" in '03 can be attributed to the liminal or shamanic state induced by the San Pedro I had consumed, and thus reduced to chemicals in the brain and the powers of imagination. The clouds did not open up while I was walking down the street and angels step out to greet me. It was only ever the sunset, and the only angel I've met is, despite her immense powers, only all too human. I never woke up from a horrendous nightmare to find myself metamorphosized into an enormous insect. It has instead only been a feeling, a metaphor. I think of my younger brother, supposedly kidbnapped by aliens. Did this really happen? Is it only psychological? Is there any difference between the two if reality is indeed some holographic simulation, as scientists currently theorize? Was I abducted too, and have I just repressed it and continually sought out proof, justification? Instead am I merely jealous that it was not me? I used to take the garbage out, and look up at the orange sky in delirious fear that this time they were actually coming to get me. I did not long for it. And the time I was in Oregon and looked up to see that one point of light doing loops in the sky unlike a star, plane, or satelite before speeding off. I was almost relieved, accepted it, perhaps because it was so far away, so inconsequential to verge on the meaningless and thus not a threat to my reality. And I was also stoned.

Show me a sign! I want to cry out, distraught that this glaring lack of a true miracle or magic really does disprove God, the transcendent, forgetting perhaps the miraculous complexity and improbability of the ultimately real, which has yet to reveal anything more than that. It is these thoughts which occasionally lead me to the question of intentionally going mad, in order to see the spirits that we feel must lurk on the other side of the real, forever taunting us with thir elusive presences. It is the lure of the voices, the visions, the unrectifiable break from the Real. And of course, even that insanity is reducible to a state of mind, as is all perception.

Perhaps we can never quite let ourselves experience, or even just see, that which is beyond our conception of the possible. Perhaps there are miracels walking amongst us all the time, and it is just easier, safer to function, to stick to our patterned realities and not let any of that in. We wouldn't know what we were looking at anyway, and would walk right past, the way I couldn't see those peculiar rose-like mushrooms growing in the forest until a friend had pointed them out to me. And then I saw them everywhere. I want to learn, like Rilke's character Malte, to look, and to look again. I think of all the gods, the faeries, Eliade's hierophanies that filled past ages, and I suspect that these were seen because they were then not beyond what was possible, what was expected. We now just have other things that are possible, that are expected, in which the irreal holds very little socio-cultural value. I could only roughly begin to ask why that is.

For all the looking I've done, for all I've tried to extend my perceptions and conceptions of what is possible, for all the incredible things I've actually seen (and if you'd have only seen what I've seen with these eyes), I am still waiting for something that is yet a hundred percent outside of my expectations. I am still waiting for reality to break open, for the time when I will walk over that hill and find myself in that other place that I can only vaguely go to in my dreams.

Active Dreaming

Among other fantastic images like last night's flying fish, I have been dreaming for the past week about climbing up the endless stairwells of an enormous tower, traveling to space, and trying to find a way to unlock a solitary window at the end of a long hallway. Certainly these symbols, and the often comic ways they are framed, have some relation to things I have been paying attention to in my waking life recently, and if not, could be considered dream signs akin to attempting to turn on a light. However, I am not trying to psychoanalyze myself, or have a lucid dream, but to have an active dream (or as I might jokingly put it, to go on a dream quest), dreaming of symbols and narratives of ascension in order to dream myself to the heaven of my mythological dream world, much the way that last year I used descension narratives to dream myself "to hell and back." This original idea had come after years of studying techniques of dreaming and symbolizing, Campbell's hero's journey monomyth, Géza Róheim's "The Gates of the Dream," James Hillman's "Dream and the Underworld," and some of the classics of epic and mythology wherein a character journey's to the underworld in order to bring back some family member, lost idea, etc... Having dreamt myself to my own personal hell, to face my deepest unconscious fears head on before getting back into school and moving on with my life, I figured it was time to continue the journey in the other direction, especially since the question of gods and spirituality has been a much larger, imminent unknown for so much of my life.

In order to do this, I have been giving my focus to symbolisms that surround such mystical or shamanic ascents (cf. Eliade's writings on the topic in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries and Images and Symbols): climbing ropes, stairs, towers, the cosmic tree, birds (and angels), the spheres of the heavens, rainbows, etc... visualizing these kinds of scenes each night before going to bed, and attending to such images as they might turn up in my waking life. So far I have had a rather stunning success finding myself working my way up through the tower of sleep (always a potent symbol in my dreaming), but I also know that I could get stuck here, that some other image is needed, like a puzzle that needs its key in order to move on. During the early stages of my descension dreaming I found myself similarly confronted with and stuck in scenes reminiscent of the accompanying narrative symbols I was trying to evoke until I finally realized that one of the dream characters was asking me for three coins, much like those given to the ferryman by the dead. Consequently I took three coins with me into the next dream (under my pillow, with other similar dream tools), and was finally able to descend to the depths I had sought. Of course, I'm not quite sure what sort of similar symbol or tool accompanies ascension narratives, perhaps being much less familiar with the literature, but my dreams keep suggesting that music might unlock the window so that I can leap out and fly.

Magic Chords

Taking a break from working on my dream novel, I was trying to catch up on the internet, and decided that I haven't written much under the topics of magic, music, and ritual. These three modalities often go hand in hand, and Dr. Clothey even suggested that it would be interesting for someone to look closer at the intersection of music and religion.

Music and performance in the modern world often take on highly ritual aspects, a charged atmosphere, the priestly musicians encanting powerful rhythms that effect the audience on a deep physiological level. From the reunion of Led Zeppelin a band charged with magical iconography and Crowleyan flair, to a description of watching someone play Guitar Hero as a spiritual experience, people are often caught up in what seems to be the sheer mysticism of music. Certainly rhythms have pervaded ritualizing throughout history, and the act of playing music can seem to transcend time, but it is the effect on the listener that holds the most magic and mystery, whether as a cue for emotional catharsis, ecstatic dancing, social communitas or revolution. Woodstock and the Beatles, punk rock as a determining factor in culture, spilling far beyond the edge of the stage. No one knows quite how the tension caused by the dissonance and resolution of vibrating air molecules can have such profound effects, even to the point of certain chord patterns like the tritone being cast as unholy, and countless stories arising of songs being taught by the devil (from Tartini to Robert Johnson). In my dreams the devil plays the violin, and I am a priest in a rock and roll cathedral.

From my years of experience playing music to packed crowds, I can say that it was always somewhat breathtaking to be able to cast such swaying spells over so many people with just the movement of fingers on a guitar, to see everyone break into song on the chorus and afterwards spill into the streets still singing into the night. Even the act of playing with other people, regardless of an audience, is ritualistic in itself, the way that musicians jamming together will stumble upon a song, and suddenly find themselves transported, carried on waves of sound that seem to come from a much deeper place, where it is not the musicians writing the song, but riding it, the music a great beast writhing to its own rhythm for all eternity that we can just tap into sometimes, like the ancient alchemists debating the harmonic song of the spheres. Talk about a reaffirmation and transcendence of the self, or better yet, sing.

As music guru David Byrne suggests in a discussion of the future of music with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, "You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends," and in his survival guide for emerging artists, "in the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory."

Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science

Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science

"One who grasps [written Hebrew’s] … structure deeply and by the roots, and knows how to keep that [structure] fitted to the fields of knowledge will have a pattern and a rule for the complete discovery of anything that can be known."
–Pico della Mirandola (Copenhaver, Number 41)

Scholars have often seen the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola as the most prominent harbinger of modern culture, especially in his Oration’s espousal of the ‘dignity of man’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 163). Frances Yates suggests that Pico reformulated the position of European man as a Magus, who by acting upon the world through magic and the Cabala could control his destiny with science (Yates 116). While this concept of a new relationship between human will and the world may have aided the Scientific Revolution, through its focus on analysis and technological operations, Renaissance magic and occultism were often viewed as illegitimate by orthodox religion, philosophy, and the growing scientific approach to reality (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 262, 280). Pico’s active interest in magic has led scholars such as Lynn Thorndike to dismiss his influence on science altogether (Copenhaver, Number 26). However, Recent studies by Brian P. Copenhaver may show that Pico della Mirandola’s focus on language and hermeneutic interpretation in the Cabala helped broaden the fields of textual analysis, mathematics, and the precision of scientific languages.

Like most Renaissance philosophers, Pico was interested in history, physics, mathematics, and other ‘natural philosophies’ that formed the basis for the Scientific Revolution, but his research did not exclude the more Humanist concerns of poetry, art, grammar, and ethics that were seen as culturally useful knowledge (Copenhaver and Schmitt 24, 28 and Copenhaver, Number 30). Such diverse learning was a prevalent tool in Renaissance philosophy, and Pico saw this eclecticism as an aspect of man’s freedom, with which he tried to construct a broader sense of truth from diverse texts without adhering to any particular philosophy (Copenhaver and Schmitt 59, 167-8). In 1486, Pico wrote the Oration to introduce his 900 Conclusions (Copenhaver and Schmitt 165-6), which were intended to be a total synthesis of all current knowledge (Yates 94), and empower man to transcend his ontological and moral positions in the world (Copenhaver and Schmitt 166-7). Though the recovery of ancient texts and the study of classical manuscripts was a prime concern of Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33), Pico embraced systems of thought rejected by other Humanists and little known to most European Christians (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171). In his Conclusions, Pico attempted to harmonize Plato and Aristotle with the translations of semi-philosophic religious manuscripts called the Hermetic Corpus, as well as Pythagorean, Orphic, Chaldeaen, and Cabalistic texts that formed the basis of Renaissance ‘natural magic’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 16, 168).

In 1462, Marsilio Ficino translated the Hermetic Corpus for Cosimo Medici, and his On Arranging One’s Life According to the Heavens served as the most influential text on magic theory for several centuries, giving educated Europeans a philosophical basis for their beliefs in magic, astrology, and the occult (Copenhaver and Schmitt 146-7, 159-60). Philosophical and pious Renaissance Magi replaced medieval notions of disreputable and necromantic wizards (Yates 107), and for Ficino, the aim of their natural magic was to put “natural materials in relationship with natural causes” (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 281). The decline of magic as a legitimate concern of natural philosophy was one of the most important features of the Scientific Revolution, but empirical occultism remained a significant source of natural and historical information for Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 290, 280). This magical world-view also expressed the same impulse of “turning towards and operating on the world” essential to the development of the mechanical and mathematical sciences (Copenhaver, Number 263).

After meeting Ficino in the 1480s, Pico hoped to combine Ficino’s natural magic with his own unified theories, in order to overcome philosophical sectarian discord (Copenhaver and Schmitt 174). However, Pico recommended magic much more openly than did his colleague, in the form of a practical Cabala that could tap the higher powers of the cosmos through the invocation of angels and the names of God (Yates 84). Having studied languages in several different universities, Pico learned of Cabala from Elia Del Medigo while in Padua, and later from the Sicilian rabbi Flavius Mithridates, who translated several thousand pages of Cabalistic texts for the young philosopher (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). Cabala is a Jewish mystical tradition, supposedly handed down from Moses as a source of ancient wisdom, and developed in 13th Century Spain in the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah, or “Book of Creation” (Yates 92). For Pico, Cabalism was comparable to the Hermetic Corpus of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus (Yates 84-5). At the core of Cabalistic doctrine are the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Sephiroth, or ‘enumerations,’ the ten names most common to God that were used to create the world (Yates 92). In the Hebrew account of creation, as told in Genesis, God spoke the world into existence. Thus, the Cabalists saw the Hebrew words and letters as containing the creative language of God, and they developed interpretative techniques to understand the nature of the world from the text of the Scriptures (Yates 85, 92).

Of particular interest to Pico’s studies on the Cabala were the 13th century commentaries on Maimonides by Abraham Abulafia. This Spanish mystic developed a technique of combining Hebrew letters in endless permutations, called a ‘revolving alphabet,’ which became a primary source for Pico’s textual analysis (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171-2, and Yates 93). At the suggestion of his translator, Flavius, Pico innovated the Cabala by linguistically deriving the name of Jesus from the names of God, as an encoded Christian secret in the Scriptures (Copenhaver and Schmitt 172). He went so far in his Conclusions as to claim that magic and Cabala could give the most scientific certainty about Christ’s divinity, a statement that the Christian Church found heretical, which prompted their refusal to let Pico print his work (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169, 166). But even in his formal Apology to the Church, published in 1489, Pico still defended his magical use of Cabala, by dividing it into a theoretical or contemplative branch and a practical branch that magically operated on the names of God (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169). Pico called this later Cabala the “practical part of natural knowledge,” classified it as a science that could “make practical the whole of formal metaphysics and of lower theology,” and claimed that no magical operation worked without its use (Copenhaver, Number 34-6, Yates 95, and 91).

According to Copenhaver, the importance of these Cabalistic studies, and Pico’s ultimate insistence on their operative use, relies on the last thesis of his Conclusions: “Just as the true astrology teaches us to read in the book of God, in the same way Cabala teaches us to read in the book of the Law” (Copenhaver, Number 25). Pico was fascinated with the idea that the Universe was a vast and original book that could be interpreted through the magical languages of shape and number (Copenhaver, Number 29-30), in much the same way that the Scriptures could be interpreted through the Hebrew Language. Hermeneutics, the Cabalist method of textual interpretation, had taught Pico that nothing in the Torah lacks meaning, even individual letters contained secrets that could be penetrated through specific techniques (Copenhaver, Number 52, and Copenhaver and Schmitt 172), such as linguistic abbreviation or transposition, called notarikon and temurah (Yates 93). The most complex technique that Pico used in his practical Cabala was gematria, a system in which numerical values are assigned to each Hebrew letter. Through the intricate linguistic arithmetic of gematria, calculations between numbers and words could reveal “the entire organization of the world in terms of word-numbers” (Yates 93 and Copenhaver, Number 41), a revelation that was bound to appeal to Pico’s explicit goal of synthesizing all knowledge.

By recommending such linguistic signs as magically operative over natural substances, Pico had to make a distinction between the shape or figure of letters and their linguistic messages, in order to avoid the charge that his magic communicated with demons (Yates 88-9, and Copenhaver, Number 61, 39). As such, Pico built on medieval theories of signification and supposition, as well as on Thomas Aquinas’s semiotic theories in which Scriptural parts of speech mean something by themselves, outside of their semantic content. Pico suggested that there is a difference between God’s original use of language, which signifies the creation of the world, and the priest or Magi’s repetitious and onomatopoeic language, that does not actually signify anything (Copenhaver, Number 39-40). In his Conclusions, Pico states that any speech is powerful if informed by the speech of God, but Hebrew letters were meaningful in themselves as “characters and figures,” like those used to mark amulets in astrology or alchemy, because their shape revealed the shape of God to medieval Cabalists (Copenhaver, Number 33-4, 37). Characters and figures were in the safe realm of natural action because they shared the powers attributed by Pythagorean philosophers to mathematical entities, and this conjunction between shape, number, and word in Cabalism further articulated a magical arithmetic for Pico (Copenhaver, Number 37, 60, and 34). This mathematical use of language, along with Pico’s focuses on the precision of significant speech and hermeneutic analysis of texts, were themes taken up and expanded by later natural philosophers, such as Giambattisto Vico and Galileo Galilei.

Hermeneutics, as a theory of interpreting linguistic and non-linguistic expressions that might have deeper, non-literal meanings, descended from Greek philosophy through Renaissance Biblical studies, and eventually came to include the study of all classical texts. Vico, in his Scienza Nuova of 1725, argued that thinking is always rooted in a specific cultural context, and that textual interpretation, from poetry to technical vocabularies, must involve historical and cultural studies as well as self-understanding (Ramberg and Gjesdal). These ideas have become essential to modern hermeneutical analysis, and may have resulted from Renaissance Humanists like Pico, who modernized the study of classical manuscripts by improving knowledge of ancient languages and specific cultural-historical settings (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33). Furthermore, as a tool for revealing layers of symbolic meaning, hermeneutics shares with scientific languages the attempt to provide a foundation for meaning through a critical attitude and precise terminology (Rasmussen 22-3). Drawing on his Cabalistic studies in which the phonetics of language were more corporeal than the semantic contents, Pico criticized rhetoric as a superficial obfuscation of truth, and stressed that philosophical language must be a tool of clarity, accuracy, and seriousness (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). In this light, Pico’s Cabalist conclusions may have revealed “new tools for understanding nature as God’s creation,” which scholars such as Ernst Cassirer and Eugenio Garin believed had methodological, ethical, and epistemological consequences for the development of science (Copenhaver, Number 26-7).

In the last years of his life, Pico della Mirandola wrote a refutation of predictive astrology, Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem, an attempt to defend human freedom from astral determinism that became his largest project (Copenhaver and Schmitt 176). Downplaying the magical aspects of astrology that interested Ficino and other natural philosophers, Pico argued that the Cabalistic deciphering of shapes in the Torah could teach astrologers how to more accurately read signs in the stars (Copenhaver, Number 61). Not only did this project defend the human importance of finding meaning in nature, but distinguished mathematical-physical causality from astrological causality, and suggested that phenomena could only be understood through experience; themes that may have foreshadowed the works of Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, and Newton (Copenhaver, Number 25-7).

Galileo also made the claim that the Universe was a book that could be read in a language of characters through mathematics, which may have inspired Descartes’ coordinate geometry, that was also viewed by its critics as a form of magic using shapes as explanation (Copenhaver, Number 29). Though Galileo’s hermeneutics of reading shape into the stars detached Scripture from nature to form a mathematical science, this development from natural philosophy may not have been possible without Pico’s correlation of nature to text in his work with the Cabala (Copenhaver, Number 61-2). By focusing on textual interpretation, the relationship between form, number, and language, and the need for accurate linguistic signification, Pico was able to transform the mystical system of the Cabala into an operative magic, which became a tool for Renaissance natural philosophers to begin exploring their world in a scientific manner.

Bibliography

Copenhaver, B. “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala: The Upright Tsade, the Closed Mem, and the Gaping Jaws of Azazel.” Natural Particulars: Nature and Disciplines in Renaissance Europe. Eds. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999

--- “Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science.” Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Eds. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990

Copenhaver, B. and Schmitt, C. “Renaissance Philosophy.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992

Rasmussen, D. “Symbol and Interpretation.” The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974

Yates, F. “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964

Ramberg, B. and Gjesdal, K. “Hermeneutics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Online. 9 Nov. 2005. Available http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/