I want to embrace the violence
“INTERVIEWER: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.
JOAN DIDION: It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”
I don’t want to be understood, I want to be experienced. I want someone to peel back my skin with their bare hands. I want someone to finger my arteries and make love to my entrails.
I want other people to cut me open like I cut them—
I want to be vivisected.
I want each of my parts weighed—not by a machine, not in digits and dots. Not in units made by man the moment that he thought better of himself. I want Eve before the apple. Before she knew she was naked. Before she knew that Adam was separate. Ex ante mitosis.
I want to be weighed with the instruments given us when we wandered out of the primordial goo; with eyes and ears and hands and noses and teeth.
I want to be felt with the senses that god gave you.
Because every time you put me into words, you split me in two.
When you name something, you cut away parts of it. You separate concept from phenomena. And the moment that you do, your relationship to that entity changes, concretizes. A new meaning gains density—moves from energetic materia into physical matter.
Neuroscientist and armchair historian, Iain McGilchrist understands this to be the function of the left hemisphere of the brain; its job is to take the raw, experiential, gestalt data of the right hemisphere and summarize, structure, and systematize that data so that it is usable and storable.
I love thinking of the human brain like a computer because, in a sense, computer architecture was modeled after our cognition in a facile and highly simplified way.
It was modeled after our understanding of human cognition. Not consciously, but unconsciously. Not intentionally, but intuitively.
The only thing that the computer can’t account for, that AI (or as I like to call it, the reduction machine) has yet to mimic, that even neuroscientists can’t quite wrap their heads around is the esoteric, ambiguous, and labyrinthine right hemisphere.
A caveat: the wyrd and mystical functions of the human brain can’t simply be boiled down to right versus left—they work in concert. And they are both far out as f**k. I could open a whole can of worms about the temporal lobes. But I’m not a neuroscientist and I’m not here to talk to you about neuroscience.
What I’m interested in is the binary relationship we have with language, the way that language both enervates and extinguishes curiosity, language as a Trickster technology…
…and the way human meaning making, the schemas and subroutines that make us functional—that shore up all of the malleable, ineffable, arcane, and illusive contents of our psyches—can be a tool both for transcendence and devolution.
I want to talk about how language can be thought terminating, thought provoking, and downright violent.
“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
― Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean: An Essay Collection [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53308149-let-me-tell-you-what-i-mean]
The thing about writing, speaking, putting things into words, is that you are interpreting a phenomenon. You are pinning the butterfly into the shadow box, casting a light on it, and saying “this is the thing.”
The silent implication, the responsibility that the writer so keenly wriggles their way out of, is that this is the thing as you see it. As it is right now.
It is a fundamental and somewhat philosophical rejection of every other manifestation of The Thing, of The Thing as it is to itself, of The Thing as it is ontologically, teleologically, existentially.
And this is true whether we want it to be or not because words, labels, and identifiers anesthetize the brain.
Imagine having to explain a chair to an alien. Or better yet, some interdimensional spirit who has never inhabited a body. The moment the word, the label, the meaning-making device you apply to an object is removed from your vocabulary, you are forced to come into direct contact with the details of your own experience, with your knowledge of other people’s experience, with your intuitive sense of what might possibly be true about that object, and most erotically, everything that you don’t know and cannot verify.
Without language, we are forced to contend with reality as it is. And that is painful.
Presence is painful. Deep awareness is exhausting. It is energetically intensive and often transcendent—it challenges our subjectivity and, if actively surrendered to, pushes us towards higher states of consciousness. Transcendence itself is energetically expensive because experiences of Divinity have to be processed and integrated intellectually, emotionally, and somatically.
Which illuminates one of the most important functions of language—a resource management tool. A technology of expediency and efficiency.
To try and capture every aspect of The Thing would be an exhaustive use of language as a technology, a colossal waste of one’s energy, and it still would not, could not capture the actual phenomena—The Thing as it is. You are inseparable from your own perspective, no matter how many perspectives you try on.
And language is the practice of perspective.
Language, an extension of the Logos—the higher logic of the anima mundi—is, in my opinion, a lefthand path to spiritual transcendence. It is the Trickster path. Why? Consider the mechanism: If writing, speaking, thinking, mythologizing and poeticizing, is a practice of trying on different perspectives, it is a game of faces and performances.
But eventually the Trickster, the alchemist, the cunning one, comes to realize that his experience, his identity, and therefore his worldview are not fixed. They are all affectations of the universal consciousness, necessary for the channeling of energy into matter on this plane of existence. He has been playing a game within a game within a game.
And while that may be how the technology is built to function, there are many ways to use it. But my favorite way is the way Didion employs it—
I want to embrace the violence.
I want to use language to elucidate and obscure, to play with light and dark, to lure someone into my perspective, and then casually remind them that I’m a liar. Because anyone speaking is a liar. Anyone cutting down the flower and forcing it into the vase is a thief and a murderer and the Plutonian, amoralistic, aesthetically inclined Divinity of the universe is madly in love with them for it.
“Cinema Verite confounds facts and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”
— Werner Herzog
I don’t want to teach everyone; I don’t want to offer tidy little explanations and clarifications for every thought—I don’t want to show my work. I want to speak to the alchemists, the curious skeptics, the lovers of mystery. I want to be the wandering mystic and leave the interpretation up to you.
I don’t want to force my truth on anyone; I want to speak from the masks I try on, the perspectives I put into practice. I want to keep playing the game of faces and document that Self-study here because that is the major thrust of Self magick.¹
I am an artist and a folk philosopher; nothing less and nothing more.
But I am also an opportunist and an irritant. I am a mad scientist and a vaudevillian. I am a lover and a fighter and so many other things that are lovable and contemptible in equal measure. I am a complicated person and one that history will judge just like everyone else screaming into the fiber optic lines that weave us all together on this digital highway. But that, in its own way, will be just a single facet of who I really am.
That’s why Joan Didion’s words about the dream have possessed me, have knit themselves into my ideological framework, have become a form of shorthand when I find myself editing and overexplaining and cutting gashes in my own lip so that the words I most feel moved to say remain locked inside me.
The dream is your reality, your mythos; the one that you’re constantly co-writing with fate. The dream is the world you create and the fantasy that gives structure to your psyche, your experiences, your energy. The dream is that thing you’re trying to spread like a virus. Not because of any agenda, though we often have one, but because you are possessed of something, some energy or entity that is determined to be born—that is moving through your body like a tapeworm regardless of whether it’s good, bad, or ugly and simply because the universe wills it.
If life is a game within a game within a game, that is the game I’m playing.
I want to force people into my dream and lay booby traps for their projections. I want to embrace the Trickster technology of language and storytelling, of splicing up the beauty of the world and warping it into something strangely handsome for all its grotesquerie.
And I want to accept that I will be illegible to most, reprehensible to some, and hopefully eye opening to many.
I want to accept that bargain and I want to leverage it to my advantage in every way possible, just like my no good, violent, thieving ancestors before me. My ethics and my methods will not be theirs, but the spirit will be the same.
I am melting down the family sword and shield, making a pen, a wand, a knife. I am righting the wrongs, winding down patterns, closing loops. I am melting down old stories, but they’re still silver at their core. They still capture the moonlight just the same.
It’s time to embrace what I’m made of.
The Graynbow has been permanently sealed. That part of me remains in my inner council, but is no longer in charge of the proceedings here. It’s time for a new iteration of my Godself [https://fadetogray.substack.com/t/birthing-the-godself] to drive the car.
Welcome to fade to gray.
Footnotes
* Self magick is an approach to Worldbuilding that covers a wide range of archetypal, energetic, narrative, and embodiment technologies and uses the theater of the Self as the primary site of magickal working.
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