 |
 |
|
||||
 |
|
|||||
 |
|
        |
|
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
||||
 |
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
 |
|
|||||
 |
 |
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
||||||
 |
|
|
|
Grant Morrison: Master & Commander Introduction While some people are more familiar with his comics work, Grant is also a musician and has written for film, stage and even video games. But underlying, intersecting and bridging all those mediums is Grant's efforts in the field of Magicks. Developing his own style known as Pop Magic, Grant shows that everyone can do magick. Further details can be seen on Grant's website or by picking up the Book Of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult available from the fine people of the Disinfo Network. Do you find that certain writers or individuals involved with magicks can inspire coincidences in your own life? You can make all sorts of analogies with that idea, that people are simply conductors or that the magicks are viral, etc. The last time I interviewed you I had everything printed out and was editing it on paper at my apartment and around the same time I was re-reading the Kissing Mister Quimper trade and I started to notice how a lot of what you said in the interview mirrored ideas brought forth in that volume. Even now as I interview you again, I've been with a girl who happened to have a scorpion tattooed on the base of her spine. I see magic, as I've mentioned, as a kind of 'special attention' - the magician watches and listens to the world very closely and uses his/her knowledge of the obvious to do things which seem baffling or supernatural to people who have not been trained to be quite as closely observant. Remember that human consciousness - that is EVERYTHING WE CAN THINK ABOUT - occupies a very narrow bandwidth. Of the 11 million bits of information our senses receive from the environment every second, the conscious mind edits out 10,999,984 bits, leaving 'us' with very little to think about and to look at - only 16 bits of information per second, in fact. Let THAT sink in. The world around us is seething and swarming with multitudes of things we refuse to or don't need to process into conscious awareness - hence those troubling 'sub'-conscious tremors and blinks we call feelings, intuitions, hunches, deja vu. There's also a half a second time lag between any given external 'event' and our consciousness becoming aware of it. Everything we see and do is actually happening half a second ago and we've already done it before our mind catches up to our actions and assigns them a meaning in our ongoing self-narrative. 'Conscious awareness' offers only the tiniest of perceptual pinholes on the universe and yet we tend to think we have it all worked out. The truth is that we're scantly aware of what's happening all around us, quite literally, as science has shown. The magician tries to bring a little more of this 'dark' unconscious life into conscious light and thereby learns to 'see' the universe better and to work with its mechanisms, to more profitably enrich his/her own experience and that of others. Magic only seems 'spooky' because it often deals with these normally-veiled areas of awareness. Everything else, all the dress-up, the rings, the secret languages, that's more to do with creating a fashion 'glamor' around oneself than it has to do with magical practise; we're all familiar with the image of the 'magician' or warlock as good Gandalf, or sinister Anton LaVey, with his staff and pentagrams and Eurasia Crafts cloak. But honestly, the more you look closely at the world and the people around you, the more 'magical' it will naturally seem to become and the coincidences will seem to accumulate until you realise it's all a co-incidence, as shocking, unexpected and breath-taking as the best conjuring trick. You soon realise you don't need the pointed hat or the grimoire, although they might help you to get in the mood at the beginning, before you've realised what it is you're actually doing. As you practise more and become more aware of how 'coincidences' work together to make up the world, you'll learn how to 'cause' them to happen and astonish or discomfort people who haven't been taught or don't care to learn how easy it is. Do aboriginal lawmen have to learn the order of the Qabalistic sephiroth in order to accomplish their highly-advanced magic? Do the Tibetan monks of the Dzogchen tradition use Latin, 'angelic' or Hebrew phrases? Of course not, because magic is simply a way of living and it arises spontaneously as a response to our circumstances. Let's all go out today in state of heightened attention and become aware of how many things we all see or hear which connect or 'coincide' directly with ideas discussed in this article. Magic will abound. Everything is literally entangled, it can all be communicated with and affected 'at a distance' because there is no distance, only a simulation of apparent separation which our limited consciousness feeds us second by second at 11 bits. The 'telepathy' which brings people together is no more or less supernatural or unlikely than the 'telepathy' which brings two of your fingers together when you think about it. Patience, participation and constant close observation of what's going on, on the inside and on the outside will soon make you a fine sorcerer, if that's what you want to be. One of the good things about your outline for Pop Magic is that it allows itself to be open to interpretation and experimentation as opposed to the old 'do this, do that' way many come across. For instance, you refer to Invisibles as a hypersigil with each issue being a component of that sigil. Any person could do something similar at home without having to publish seven trades worth of material, a supersigil as it were. We'll take your instructions of turning a desire into a sigil, for instance, something like this:  But we don't stop, we continue, creating another. And another. Until you have as many as you want, then you take those sigils and combine them to create another sigil wherein the supersigil is comprised of one of each of the previous sigils, thus creating something like this.  And I learned this just from reading what you had to say, but then my only concern would be if combining the sigils into one large one would lessen the charge of the individual sigils had you simply charged them on their own. I'm not sure if a sigil becomes more powerful the more complex it becomes or less; you'd have to be careful with the recipe. It's definitely an area to experiment with. Do more and let me know the results. These could be the hydrogen bombs of the sigil age, who knows? The Invisibles style hypersigil, requires a very close personal involvement with and surrender to processes occurring within the text, which sets up a bizarre and wholly 'magical' feedback between the 'real' and 'imaginary' worlds until it becomes impossible to tell them apart. And lastly, perhaps the question I should have asked first, how you doing Grant? Because your fans want to know, how are you doing? Just remember that whatever medium you may be working in, you inspire others and there's not as many people around to do that as they're used to be. I miss my dad and I miss my wee familiars. I'm down to the bare frazzled neuron, bitter, battered, bruised by events and a bit of a moaning old zombie cunt right now but I should be right back to my perky self after [my recent] nice honeymoon in the sun with Kristan. Give me a colourful reality transfusion and I'll be jes' fiiiiiine. Thanks for asking. And thank you for participating in this interview and on behalf of all the PopImage staff, and all the people reading this now, our fondest wishes to you and Kristan. Congratulations.  Introduction
 To comment on this article, contact Co-Editor in Chief Jonathan Ellis at ellis@popimage.com  PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum. E-Mail Us - Send us an e-mail commenting on this article. Grant Morrison.com Crack Comicks.com Industrial Archive - Read past Industrial articles |
