A Very Black Magick - Red Shift
Magick Red Shift
It is unnerving to think that the essence of an amulet involves, in spite of everything, a principle of sleight-of-hand and misdirection. It is as if the circuitry indicated on the talisman were the plan for a contraption, devised to allure or fascinate the energies that the operative seeks to harness—by demoting attention itself to an attitude of entertainment, i.e. that awareness cannot perform the separation whereby it is to be distinguished from the most trivial episodes of psychic thralldom. Such a talisman is one part engineering diagram, one part cartoon. And the mind that aligns itself upon it, regresses accordingly.
What’s wrong with this story. It is just that there is no ostensible audience for such a procedure of fascination / misdirection. This omission is itself suggestive. Think of the magical pneuma, the general medium that serves as vehicle for the conductance of the magical will. The pneuma is collective, and though personally modified, impersonal, and surely without “personality.” The circuitry on the talisman configures the pneumatic substance. What appears to be transmission or, as we say, conductance, in fact conducts nothing but that it also induces its own object, carves out the channel of conveyance, constructs the transport vehicle, composes the message, and, singularly, measures “the signal to noise ratio” pertinent to the operation. For the message itself is far less distinct from the impedance of the signal, its distortion or dispersion than in the transmission of more purposively communicative missives. Here, the message modifies the principle of existence, that otherwise ought to supervene, so that the transitivity presumed for “signal maintenance,” cannot apply. It is this elision of the transitive that is most unnerving.
Unnerving too is the relation between the magical will and the sky-like expanse out of which there percolates, indifferently, a background noise (at whatever temperature, proximity to equilibrium, negentropic gradient, etc.) out of which the message is configured. At the essential cite in the operation the distinction between distinction and its own impossibility cannot be distinguished. Everything depends upon the way the operative disposes the moment at which this essential impossibility imposes itself upon the operation. There is a discontinuous continuum between the most egregious, ultimate steps in the working: how to begin and how to terminate fuse in a manner that, where methodology is most requisite, methodology is also quite impossible. And yet this fusion is in the end (or in the beginning) beside the point. The point itself precedes the oscillation in distinction. Happily, as they say, we all in fact do hold it in its hand.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY
2/34
Blood of the DL
Some sort of fullness in the belly informs the texturing. As if the brain took hold of its own matricial intimacy and allowed itself to bespeak all thoughts at once. At least, it seems that such is the desideratum of the energies released here.
Yet the entities that climb from the tomb of an inessential pixelation survive, for an instant’s thought, say 1/50 of a second.
There is a point when the thing appears. After that a glide, an inquiry of attention. The thing becomes another thing, or else is frozen by the rigidities of the cognitive gaze, extracted and lodged in some database or other, not only off camera, but in Blake’s space “outside of existence” i.e. Albion’s couch, if you know what I mean. As if it were its own name, and in that, provided itself with the “bad” eternity that don’s the mask of identity.
1/50 of a second is an epoch, actually, measured against Planck’s time, say, or any duration spiked down to such a scale—where there are entire elements on the periodical table that have founded their being on far less.
Let the thing be its own name, certainly, and then withdraw. And let the thing withdraw, without an interval between it and its name, the name resolve into its own oblivion. The oblivion of the name, the name’s inversion. For the name is the nothing that covers the intimacy of the real, foisting its atemporal inability to abide, upon the true atemporal abiding of that whose velocity is acidic to any naming. Space. Light. Stone. Your choice of metonym.
Now consider the cone, whose geometry organizes itself as if to focus on the locus where its vertex stands. It is of course imaged in inverse, the vertex—above, the mouth a sort of table where all hidden process delivers its product, but AT the vertex, a small skull wakes up, and its interior comes alive.
Now the skull itself, with its internal structure, black hole eyes, is invariant over several degrees of magnification. At different settings, what might be wavulets are luminous rope-like tubules, whose contents, unimaginable, sustain the only secret left, for the little skull, were it capable of vocal articulation, might haunt us with the cry, “All is Revealed.” All is not revealed. In fact it is precisely “All” that has absconded into its own ascent. All matricial segments or positions have delivered themselves over to the scribulariae through which they precisely refuse to determine themselves. By becoming them. Super-transitory written signs, that is.
The verticality that aligns on the vertex of the cone, or drops perpendicular from it, does not particularly telegraph the entity heads that inhabit it, but rather allow a noise jam of microtubules, worm hairs, strings and foams, and other yet untheorized quantum glyphoids to co-postulate their own spaces, so that the Kings and Presidents of the Central Boulevard are relieved somewhat of their magisterial regimina.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY
Dakpa Tamdin
Red smoke fulfills the ambient. This is a small amulet. Being small, it is a signal from the smallest. If you insist on the scale of it at all, its shrinkage goes to singularity. The information it contains is vectors driving to the limit. But at the limit. It is not about what with some strenuous investments can be seen here. It is about what cannot have—what is about it. It awakens in the cockels of ignominy. It fulgurates in the glory of the gods. In that respect, there is nothing but the tanrtist’s ploy in it. At the moment that discomfiture, great or small, is objectified in the ken, a small room has opened and it is here, not there, where you are. Beyond this you are neither here nor there.
It is thus an amulet against all possible (actual) discomfiture.
Still, Lord Cat-Wolf holds a candle to the Dream-Lord.
Transference is not Transmission.
But Transmisson may occur
in Transference Only.
Thus and only thus:
Obeisance to the Guru.
All take note of this.
Jesus Loves You
Jesus Loves You, and We Do too
Dakini of the Crystal Cross
The Demons that were Left at the Door Last Night
It is a question and a wide open one at that—though open to such densities and thickets of incongruous roilings—whether the tangles of language can appropriately wrangle with the tangles of brujeria—opacities and coilings of a darkly promulgated magical will. For the factor of will factored out of Being descends, in a platonic hierarchy, to and from the darkness of matter itself—and is inextricable and inevadable because said matter, when rendered by language, shares a nature with the highest substances and states.
It is not a laughing matter, though it is possible, by a kind of sudden glancing, if succeeded by an equally sudden glancing away—to find in the two toiling figures that serve as temple columns in this image, a kind of crazed jocularity—the hilarity of the undercosm—the weird conjunction of laughter and horror that can be discovered in Vincent-Price level cinematic thrillers and as parodic moments in the Eleusinian Mysteries themselves. The exhausted initiates cross a magic bridge after the long treck from Athens towards Eleusis. Under the bridge there is a swamp that serves as a portal for the dead as they, on equinoctial wings, rise from their fixities in the underworld; while on the bridge the initiates are assailed by taunting jesters, the fixities of their beings assaulted from two intertwined dimensionalities: immortal ghoulishness and preternatural hilaritas.
Fail to glance away with sufficient celerity, and the jocular figures seem composed of an effusion of tears, a savage intent relieved only by the savagery and releasement of unrelenting grief.
But the beings in the central column—the Middle Pillar—seem clamped and stretched, the all pervasive tedium of the enmity registered in these magical doldrums having gotten the best of the equilibrium that portends relief. It is the place of Kings and Mighty Presidents in kliphotic parody. So much so that it is indiscernible whether structure here mocks substance or, by an inauspicious inverse, substance itself has been ground up into antinomies of structure—the assault upon the door turned to the only transformations yet possible, a dense and alarming invitation to speech. But speech wrangles with image here, not to mention substance, for where the darkness tends to its own extremity, in spite of moral fatigue, or rather quite on account of it, why should we not anticipate, beyond all parody, eversion towards inversion—the inextricable catastrophe of the inalienable? For language alas is formidably imbued with structure but only has substance where it is allowed to stretch beyond itself, entangled with the wicked eructation of a contumacious world. Already demonic, is it any wonder that language, involved in such a wrangle, has no recourse but to spit, and quite indeed nastily, back?
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 23.01.08
The Window & The Void [Hotel San Miguelito, San Miguel de Allende] - for Ezra Thelonious
What sort of writing remains when the null cartouche
erected for the empty monument
witnessed by the tormented hieroglyph
has found its happy Sunday sunlight but for a moment
and the interpenetration of the principles of witness
catapult obliquity so graciously across
the traces of symmetries broken before emanation—
and can we read them?
To read in this case is to retard the little party favor quality to the vignettes seized
from what must have been and is a fulsome fabric
mocking the endeavors of what is called history—
not the inquiry, not the tale, but the body of event itself
dissolving in the intimacy of the experience thereof.
A window imbricates a witness, a witness no doubt a spectacle
but it is only ideology that forces from the spectacle its void
by severing things-seen from facts-of-seeing.
And what is the void into which the void itself has absconded?
or else has the void rescinded from nothing other than its own
excessive contumacious erasure?
The absence in essence of the essence of absence? And that from the beginning.
Try as you might, you will not make out what it is.
Such an itinerary of optical extravaganzas
expresses a certain volatility on the vital plane.
To not be or not to not be begs its own question,
one gesture before so consummate an arrival,
that no whiteness ever would add itself any longer to The Whiteness
but the latter sits refulgent
as the most forthright of renderings.
When the proof text scratches itself across the pinched fold
orthogonal to its own extenuation,
does this not herald the loss of one’s very self in a blink?
No matter how nearly the end approaches,
its moment refuses the anticipation of closure.
Admit this as frustration? Never!
Lest Time
ever finish a poem.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 30.01.08
The Shadows of Deception's Daughter [19.02.08]
Heaven Be Damned, or The Bardo According to "bialy/s"
"Well, while I live, I'll fear / no other thing / So sore as keeping safe / Nerissa's ring"
Bialzebub & His Grandchildren
Two Venom Delivery Devices in the Style of Porceline Miniatures in the Persian Mode [for Jorge David Estrada Ochoa, who made the device on the left]
Dakini of the DL
The face of the woman exchanges with a mask of itself, wrenched strangely on the same body and its pretty neck. As in some split brain optical textbook trick. There are water marks scribbled on a transparent surface, or else incised on space. You are in the parking lot, tasting flakes of red rust, and you cannot see her. Her face refuses to form. Look at her. Look at the face. The Dark Lord cannot see this woman. For him, his own face displaces her face. It looks like there is a world there. But standing outside of the abstract vestibule forbids that.
It looks enough like a world. Transluminal vapors smudge the recording surface, jiggled chromatically to make a pleasant enough pseudo-cosmographic poster, $29.95 at the planetarium. The Dakini is overwhelmed by the rumors of so grandiose a scale. But in the dusts and vapors attenuated and stretched across so many billions of parsecs, innumerable little faces form and deform just before the tricky pixels rise into view. It remains quite true that nobody knows why faces form. The attitude that wants to read the water marks, finds faces.
You look for the face of the
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