Tag: postmodern

Building Character 2 – Staying In Character

(Part 1 is here.)

 

“Why don’t you be like me?

Why don’t you stop and see?

Why don’t you hate who I hate, kill who I kill to be free?”

-The Monkees, Randy Scouse Git

 

Last time, I was talking about how pop-culture aspects are a viable source of inspiration, or even workable as a basis, for one’s personality. I also mentioned that sometimes this can go very wrong indeed.

Here’s an example.

 

Around British SF fandom in the 80s, there was a person who was known (behind her back – fandom, like any group, has its’ cliques and bitching) as Ratwoman. She was called this because of her hobby of keeping rats as pets. Now I’m not going to gainsay that as a hobby – I’ve kept fancy rats myself and found them amiable companions – but she kept (so the story went) over fifty of the buggers and let them run all over her house, with the attendant hygiene issues that implies.

 

Ratwoman was also, like many in the scene, an enthusiastic participant of the occult/pagan fringe of fandom. Her preferred mythos was Pern – the realm of telepathically-bonded dragon-riding heroes in the books of Anne McCaffrey. As you can imagine, Ratwoman getting to meet the author herself was quite an important moment… which she spent explaining exactly to McCaffrey what the books had got wrong about Pern, on the basis that Ratwoman had been there and knew better.

 

I’ve written about Otherkin before, and it’s a position I’ve a lot of sympathy with. I certainly understand from my own experiences the feeling of being so very different from everyone else around you that you really don’t feel, or want to be, human. Around the same time as the Ratwoman story, I was involved with a group of people in fandom who, before the term Otherkin was even coined, identified as being the reincarnation of Tolkienesque elves. (I wasn’t an elf. I had a whole blurry mythos of my own going on at the time, part-Lovecraft, part-Illuminatus. But we got on.) It’s a compelling feeling, that combination of outsider and tribe-member. So I completely get the idea of inhabiting a myth-structure that completely. But at the same time, I can’t help but see just how fucking presumptuous it is to tell the creator of said mythos, “You’re Doing It Wrong”.

 

(Now, if we want to get picky, the possibility that Ratwoman was right has to be mentioned… anyone who’s familiar with Alan Moore’s theory of Ideaspace could raise the possibility that there is a Ur-Pern out there in the imaginal realm, and that some folk could conceivably make contact with it. Or even that Pern, faults and all, truly does physically exist somewhere in deep space and she actually did pick up some telepathic vibe coming from it, or even translated her soul there in some manner. Nonetheless; if nothing else, going up to the person who is pretty sure they actually invented that world with overriding declarations of your version of their reality is, at the very least, impolite and tacky.)

 

I mentioned before that fannish excesses of this type, roleplay in every sense, can provide a useful place to experiment with the tenets of our personalities – and even in the face of such extreme examples as above, I believe that’s a useful and rewarding thing. But a necessary stage of that process is that sometimes, you have to leave the scenario. You have to step away. Or your personality becomes subsumed by the role.

 

It’s a particular problem for occultists. At some level, practicing magic is the assumption that your imagination can directly shape the universe. The problem there is that, if you don’t constantly cross-check what goes on inside your head with what goes on outside it, you’ll fall into the trap of what I call mageitis – spinning exquisite worlds in your mind of which you are the absolute ruler, while  living in your mum’s basement covered in fast-food stains, B.O. and ennui. This is difficult enough for anyone – neurologically, we’re hard-wired to treat metaphor as very close to reality – so unless you work hard at this, the possibility of being swallowed by the fiction is constant.

 

(Somebody once tried to gently question Ratwoman’s view of reality. She responded angrily that the person was so negative that they had “a grey psychic cloud the size of Moscow” over their head. Another danger of mageitis is hyperbole.)

 

Actors have known this for a long time. Examples of the performer being absorbed by the role abound – Jeremy Brett’s tragic battle with the Sherlock Holmes archetype is an especially sad one. The smart performers develop a balance, either a Method-based give-and-take of being completely in character and then fading back to themselves, or (mostly) never forgetting that it’s just acting, luvvy. But when you’re actively trying to build or rebuild your personality around such a basis… what do you do?

 

All personality has a performative aspect to it. Sometimes, all of us feel like the mere act of being ourselves is just too much bloody work. But I can’t help thinking that to just copy an entire personality-type, or character, or mythos from another – be it fact or fiction – is just plain lazy. I suspect a lot of that is an attempt to paper over perceived or actual flaws in one’s personality, bridging a gap between what you are and what you’re told you should be. It’s really easy to just pull on a costume, a fiction-suit, and call it good-enough.

 

Maybe it would have been easier if I’d just done that. But the cracks and flaws, the bits that didn’t fit, were either too big or the wrong shape.

 

And, I was increasingly suspecting, maybe those cracks and flaws actually had a purpose.

 

 

To be concluded…

 

 

Building Character, part 1 – Character Sheet

“…state my assumptions.” – Darren Aronofsky, Pi.

 

All of my writing, from my earliest diary notes to Guttershaman and beyond are, at heart, an attempt to explain & justify my perspective of the world to others in a coherent and hopefully interesting way. That perspective is… hard to explain simply. But here goes, again:

As I’ve noted elsewhere, I was a lower-working-class kid with a weird-shit-inclined mind. The laddish, beer-and-footie culture of my surroundings was not exactly comfortable (or even comprehensible) to someone like me. Lacking a set of positive influences in childhood that were amenable to my… soul I suppose, I had to find my own where I could. I found ’em in books, films, TV – SF/horror, occult and Forteana were the places where I found perspectives that simply weren’t available in my given culture. (It’s fortunate that my parents were not strongly religious…)

In those days – I’m talking the late Sixties/early Seventies – being into this stuff was like a red flag to pretty much every bully in school. I was The Weird Kid. The Odd Boy Who Doesn’t Like Sport. The Target.

Weird Kid survived, left school and home as soon as possible, learned some nasty martial arts, met others like him & continued to construct his personality out of bits from here and there. Eventually, there came a point where I sussed that I was far from being the only person who did so – or, rather, not the only person who would admit it.

(Most of us do it unconsciously, by osmosis – picking up social cues and tells from others. Many simply become mental clones of their parents’ beliefs and attitudes with very little variation – and people like that really don’t understand or condone people like me.)

I had defined my personality, my character, for myself – as it were. But that was just the start of the process. When I began meeting others who’d done pretty much the same, in the SF fan culture, I found my first true friends. (Even messed-up loners need a few friends.) The things that drew us together were Fan things – cons, pubmeets, zine-making… but in the midst of all this was the pleasure of finding the crossover between various factions – how many in the fan community were also into magic or kinky sex or tabletop RPGs. All of those have that roleplay thing in common – its universally found in those realms. We find the bits that work for us & abide by them. We rehearse them in a relatively safe space – be it a gaming table, a BDSM scene or a convention. And both our personality and our spirituality develop out of those rehearsals.

One of the biggest criticisms of this kind of approach to personal spirituality is that it’s ‘pick n mix’. It’s not always – sometimes a movie or music or film or movement really seems to pick us. And the right ones speak to us deep in our souls, like members of the faiths we rejected say their god speaks to them.

The big difference is that, unlike those with a received belief system, we can speak back to those parts of ourselves: game them, field-test them, befriend them; get the various bits to blend into, or share, mindspace. (At best… have them not squabble constantly, at worst. Well, worst this side of either monomania for whichever model you’ve developed… or simple raving psychosis, often followed by fleeing to a fundamentalist belief. Or full-blown multiple-personality disorder…)

The modern world – at what point you start to date that from is a tricky question – is a place where many are actively avoiding the traditions of the past, especially those of their parents, faith and culture. The Postmodern model gives a certain flexibility in doing so. My path to alleged adulthood is one way to do it – there are others.

But why? Why bother with all this? Why not just accept given wisdom, time-tested ways and paths? The reason for not just blindly accepting the Old Ways is that those ways, the Grand Narratives, have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. Unworthy.

(The fact that many not only abide by these institutions but wish to make them more conservative, more hidebound & dogmatic, is sadly clear – and to me, it’s just as clearly a reaction akin to future shock… running away from the complex range of ideas available, wanting to be told a relatively reassuring Single Truth to follow.)

I think every generation produces kids who just don’t fit their immediate culture – my beloved Tribe of the Strange. I was a fairly extreme case, but not as extreme as some. Where else can kids like I was go to find authenticity, when the ‘authentic’ past paths are shown to be fake at worst, riddled with hypocrisy and venal bias at best?

Once you decide your identity will not simply be a copy of your given kin and culture, you have to make it out of what you find. Affinity groups – fandoms, clubs, gangs, even political parties & churches & protest movements. The stories and songs and moments that stir genuine wonder or terror or other such highly educational, imprint-producing emotions. And once they set in and become your personality core, it doesn’t matter if they’re recent, or jigsaw, or even based on the whole cloth of pop culture and cheesy newage – they’re YOU.

Trouble is, once that’s set, you’re just another bundle of dogma – it’s just a different dogma from your dad. And adding in new layers over this – of fashion (or ironic rejection of fashion) or cause, doesn’t actually help the core.

The tools of chaos magic & multimodel approach – the occult version of applied postmodernism – provide some adaptability in this… but also offer traps to get stuck in, like any set of beliefs.

What makes the difference between a person who consciously sets out to explore alternate models of thought, dress, action as self-improvement, and one who draws on all the same sources just for sake of irony or peer-group membership? Attitude. The ironic hipster stance is a shallow thing. The search for ones authentic self through pop culture, SF & horror & comics & movies & games & even new religious paths can be valid.

It can also be utter wankery.

 

More, inevitably, later…

 

 

 

 

Guttershaman – Meanings and Patterns, part 2. The Nature of Reality, and other short subjects

Before I get started, many thanks to those who commented on the series so far. Special thanks to my old mate Gyrus, for pointing out the work of Ramsey Dukes to me. Dukes is one of those writers I never quite got around to reading until recently… and as one of the direct influences on the Chaos current, he’s important. I recommend his book ‘SSOTBME!’ highly – you can download a free copy of it at www.skilluminati.com/docs/RamseyDukes-SSOTBME.pdf . Put it this way – if you’re interested enough in the subject to read what I think, you’ll certainly benefit from reading him.

And a convivial shout-out to those who found their way here from Whitechapel.

Onward!
————-

“What is truth, man? You heard the weirdo…”
Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Earlier, I made the point that there’s a difference between what is (for want of a better word) real and what we can actually describe. This is an idea which many find a little troubling.

It’s not a new idea. Plato’s Cave model is a couple of thousand years old at this point, the acceptance that reality cannot be fully described a basic in Taoism, which is at least twice as old. The modern riff on this usually called Post-Modernism has been around long enough in modern society to become cliché.

I think the reason folk find this notion unsettling has a lot to do with the need for stability. Once you start considering just how much of ‘consensus reality’ is neither that real nor that much of a consensus, things get very unstable, very fast. People work harder to reinforce the boundaries of their version of reality when it is questioned – often falling back into simpler beliefs which they don’t have to think too hard about.

“Just keeping it real”…

Another reaction is, of course, to ridicule the idea. Often when the idea of a subjective element in perceived reality comes up – both in discussing post-modern ideas in general and modern magic in particular – the line of attack most used is “You don’t believe anything is real, right? So why can’t you walk through walls then?”, or similar.

It’s not that we think nothing is real. It’s just that we’re aware that local definitions of reality vary, that the context matters.
If you change language, you change the way you think. Change the way you think, you change which parts of the outside world get filtered. The outside world doesn’t suddenly go away, you just notice different bits of it.

Of course, even that notion of ‘the outside world’ is a blurry one at best. All we can ever know about reality is what we sense – and it’s known both to science and common experience just how easy our senses are to fool. Eyes have blind spots, ears have sound frequencies they can’t hear – and even a small chemical change in the brain (say a few microgrammes of an entheogen like LSD, or a lowering of sugar or oxygen levels) will completely mess up both the filters and the mind receiving the data. Yet knowing this doesn’t change most people’s opinion that what they see and sense is Really Real Reality. But there seems to be something beneath that sense data and filtering. Usually.

For example…
Just because you’re so off your face that the cars whizzing past you on the street look like Technicolor Unicorns doesn’t alter the cold hard fact that all cars continue to be real – as you will soon find out if you step in front of one. Like Philip K Dick said – reality is that which, if you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. But that still leaves a lot to play with – especially if belief itself can actually alter what you sense as being real, what you filter out… and maybe on some level, in a very small way, the underlying reality itself.

That’s the trouble with magic. It’s so much smaller, subtler, than the hype makes it out to be. The myths and fantasy tales about mages walking through walls, levitating mountains and disintegrating enemies bear as much resemblance to what actually happens as cars exploding in movies does to driving down the road. Of course from inside the mages head, what happens can have the same impact mentally as lifting a mountain with their mind… or indeed, being hit by that car.

It helps a lot to have some way to balance solid reality with subjective imagination. Magicians lacking this are often found in mental health facilities. The ones who do come to an understanding of the difference often develop a kind of ‘model agnosticism’, an ability to switch from one description of reality to another, depending on the needs of the moment – but never ignoring all those cars.

One of the most handy mental tools in modern magic is often stated like this – ‘treat the things you encounter as if they are real, not as real’. It’s a key concept in the work of Austin Spare and informs many of the less dogmatic Fortean theorists like Jacques Vallee and Patrick Harpur. There’s a need in magical practice for the mage to immerse themselves in belief – if they don’t believe in what they’re doing, the magic doesn’t work too well – but that all too often leads to slipping into the oh-so-easy mindset that the belief system they’re immersed in is Real. The ‘as if’ rule-of-thumb helps guard against this.
(Crowley’s technique of working intently within a belief system until you get a magical result and then dropping that belief system completely, swapping another one in and repeating the process is also quite instructive. Eventually.)

It’s a lot easier to deal with some of the heavier results of magical working – such as being faced with something that looks, sounds and acts very much like a god/demon/angel/alien – if you can take that one step back and act as if it’s what it looks like, not that it really is that. Though at the same time, it’s a good idea to treat the alleged apparent entity with the same degree of respect as you would if they were Really Real. That’s just polite. And much, much safer than not doing so.

————

I’m very aware that this piece is kind of loose and non-specific. That’s the nature of the beast. I’ll likely waffle on more about this in later posts.

For a longer and better consideration of the subjective nature of perceived reality, you could do a lot worse than reading Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Cosmic Trigger Volume 1’.

(Next on Guttershaman – a quick guide to spellcasting. Thoughts on the misuse of scientific terminology. And maybe some of the things I promised last time.)