I find myself lusting for magic again. I may have mentioned before that my soul is forfeit because I made an ill-considered deal with the devil while walking home from a shift at Pizza Hut in the ’90s: Show me magic is real and you can have my soul. Why make such a foolish deal? Because the world can seem so very dull and pointless.
I can’t tell you why it feels to me like magic would make it interesting and worthwhile. There’s evidence a lot of people out there feel this way, especially those who are able to fool themselves into believing, at least in fits and starts. Probably cultural damage of some kind. It doesn’t really make sense.
Some people have very magical thoughts, like they’re the center of reality, important and big in some way. It isn’t always a good feeling; you see this a lot with paranoia-flavored mental illnesses. Tough to feel OK with life when everybody is out to get you.
I didn’t really want to write about that. I’m just trying to put a finger on this feeling again. The place it’s most relevant to me is in the creation of art. I can’t make myself believe in some cult bullshit or mainstream religion either. I can’t eke a transcendant spiritual feeling out of the things that I do believe, in my heart of hearts. All that stuff just overwhelms in a bad way. But fiction, that’s another thing altogether.
This feeling connects to other thoughts I’ve had in the past, as expressed through blog posts on The Doors, on levitation, on action, on Faust. Is it wrong to want the weirding way? To be a scanner, or if I’m ready to go, to get scanned? I want my will to move the world, just a little bit. Push.
I am reminded now of the Floaters-themed personal ads on my levitation post, and how they should be updated to reflect my current name. Here I go…
Cancer, and my name is Bébé
And I like a lover who gots somethin’ extra in their jayjays
Whether that’s a big belly or a dingly dang dongus
There’s no way you and I can go wrongus
when you
Take my hand, come with me baby, to Love Land.
Let me show you it’s queer and/or gay
Sharin’ your love with Bébé
I want you to Float On… Float with me baby…
Way off topic. The important thing is that y’all tell me how you do it. Projecting your will like Charles Gray in The Devil Rides Out. Stop holding out. Slip me the runes. I can handle it. It’s time.
JUST GIVE ME THE PRIZE!
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couldn’t be a bigger contrast between the posts on ftb this morning, eh? my blog is running on a queue now, rather than my mood of the moment. tho if i was inclined to express something about current events… naw. i only do as much of that as I can stand, which will currently be very little.
I come to it not as a means of expressing power, rather as a search for more. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a door to….? I don’t begin to know it all, so I find no conflict in keeping two feet in reality, while also keeping myself open to recognizing a door, should I ever encounter one.
I take it from that that it’s supposed to be pronounced “bay-bay” rather than “bee-bee”?
That might be the difference between us: I can, and I seem to be more optimistic while you seem to need to make an effort not to be depressed. (Not meant to be taken as a negative value judgment! Just observation.)
Not sure why that would be, though. My ontology is about as secular-rational as they get. But when I see complex self-regulating ecosystems, the creative processes like evolution that seem ubiquitous, the long secular trend toward increasing organization (of nature, on paleontological timescales, and of civilization, on historic timescales), and things like that, I get some comfort from these things. The arc of the universe is long but it bends toward life and variety. Every bird a-twitter, every spring bloom, every couple holding hands is a reminder that there are sparks of joy and beauty everywhere. The Second Law is a double-edged sword. Most people who consider it at all are familiar mainly with the “bad” side of it, but it also makes it easy for the universe to complexify and generate life and variety, and it makes those things very hard to get rid of. Even if sometimes that vexes us, as when we try to stamp out mosquitoes or a plague or a roach infestation or something.
I think some part of you also is open to the wonder in the world or you wouldn’t be making those bird posts every few days. (But where are the white-throated sparrows in your list? The species whose population is 50% transgender?)
wiess – i am extremely well convinced no such door exists, but if we’re both living with the banal world as it appears to be, functionally not much difference in how we do, i suppose.
beks – this got me interested in how le french actually pronounce that, which i hadn’t thought much about. to USian ears, it can sound like bay-bay, or at least beh-beh, but the google translate voice definitely sounds more like bee-bee. for my part, i lean toward the beh-beh and will deploy dubious rhymes as i please.
i wouldn’t say i struggle with depression (because clinically speaking i don’t meet the criteria and don’t usually feel any worse than the situation calls for) but my sense of the world and its possibilities is bleak. i struggle to not make people around me feel worse from running my mouth, hence doomerism policy.
what i meant by transcendant and spiritual has less to do with optimism than a sense of there being something “more” than what is apparent. i know everything is massively more complicated than it appears, but i’m not talking about mRNA and quarks. “significance” may be what i’m getting at. profundity? i could look at a supercentenarian animal like a whale or greenland shark and see time itself having invested the creature with something like importance. there swims a witness to the ages. but no, those are just some animals like me, utterly disposable in the grand scheme and very much disregarded by 99% of humanity as well.
the way i see chaos in things now, the self-regulation of ecosystems seems like a high-speed gyrating flywheel waiting for any random nudge in the wrong direction to explode. nature is about as reassuring to me as the vast unfeeling violence of stars. i wonder if the difference in our feeling stems from me having a greater displeasure at the prospect of my own inevitable death. are you less fearful of Tha Reaper, perchance?
i *may* have heard a white-throated from a treetop in downtown tacoma once, but nothing definitive. i get the impression they’re more common back east. pretty cool birdies tho.
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Not sure it’s that, but maybe that I take a bit of a more holistic perspective. We probably shouldn’t want to leave a legacy. If I do, and you do, and 8 billion others do, and in earlier generations, and in later ones, the universe gets cluttered with legacies and eventually runs out of the space and atoms to make more. Plus, if you’re hugely important, then the world is poorly designed because it has a single point of failure. I’d rather have an enjoyable life, leave things generally at least a bit better than I found them, and that everyone have that chance, than be massively important. Give me a cozy little niche in which to love and be loved, a bit bigger community in which to be validated and liked, and enough safety and autonomy not to have to worry too much or too often.
In the end I think a big chunk of society’s problems comes from the idea that some small subset of people should be important. I think as long as the very concept of a “VIP” exists, we’re not “there yet”, not mature civilization-builders yet …
that’s good thinkin’ right there.