Conjunto #9

[kingtycoon]

Busy and tired - themes of the moment. Paycheck though - so I am able to survive another day. That's the feeling, that I am everywhere and doing everything and that I'm a little low on the resources required. I need MORE. That's the sense right now - of not having enough of all the requisite elements of life. Not enough money (never enough). Not enough love (never enough). Not enough time (usually, I'm alright here). Not enough sleep (never enough). Not enough strength, attention, focus or skill - the big ones, the ones that fall on me to rectify. So skill is earned through practice, attention is gained through concentration, focus is gained through the abolition of distractions and strength flows from all of these. Probably.

I went to run my game yesterday and on the train across the river I was corresponding about magic and practice. So I was thinking about Intention and it's role in the practice of the magician (me) and how I can explain and how it can be understood. Really -the only people I've heard talking persuasively about intention with any real knowledge that meant anything were the Tango instructors. Surprising to no-one I'm very good at Tango.

Just too tall to be doing it often.

So here's intention as it occurs to you on the daily. You're walking down the street and there's a little kid with you. She's just going along because she lacks intention- she's distracted and notices every little bug and every flower on the path around her, she's fixated and gets lost, wanders off the path - or would if you didn't hold her hand and try to keep her on task. You though, you're walking. You're aware of the moment during a footfall. The bottom of your shoe strikes the sidewalk, you feel it as a moment, an instant that you consider briefly as NOW - and then it passes, the other foot falls, there's the swing in your gait - the foot falls and you are again at NOW. Now keeps happening, increments of time - irrelevant if they are heartbeats or seconds or footfalls - NOW - NOW - NOW there's a definite rythym. You are looking forward, you are on this path and you are walking you have a forward motivation- animation in the limbs and you are acutely aware NOW of the mind driving the body, there is a purpose to your going and you are engaged in purpose. You are looking ahead and see a sign, you can't read it but it is on your path, part of the trip you see the sign and are going toward it and it comes into view NOW as your foot strikes the pavement, you are aware of it NOW as it goes past your right shoulder, you are aware NOW that you've passed the sign and it's out of relevance - there's a next milestone and a next, ahead- you are intent on those pieces and there is a NOW and a NOW a cadence of experiences in sequence each of which you are aware of.

And then you get to where you were going. You aren't thinking of where you've been all the steps you've taken. You aren't narrating each moment of your walk down Rocky-River, someone asks - "How'd you get here?" You say: "I just walked from the train station." It's all of a piece - the walk each step, you unbind the steps and sights, the signs and the sequence and relate the whole thing as a scene - a single element. There's this power in you to aim at a thing and to consume all the moments and efforts that lead to that thing - to devise them all into a single episode though it's composed of a billion invisible things and a hundred visible. There's a narration that's spoken this little one-sentence story you tell about it. "I walked from the train station." That describes every step and that says nothing about any of the steps, the detail is lost because there is only one detail that matters. "I am here. This is now." The trance of the sequential is over and now you're into a different type of scene, a new one where intention isn't significant, collaborative or what-have-you, you're reacting and lacking intention you're addressing statements, interacting with others - there's no work here, but there is activity. You may spend hours where you go - at work or at the game or wherever and there's not an intention, so there's no end-point, and so there's no steps taken to achieve it. You are simply doing.



And then you leave, see the thing ahead of you you are aiming at, the words flashing up on the screen a letter at a time - a sentence you concieve and compose so that there is nothing between the thought in your mind and the actuality of the thought composed as words but these steps TYPE-TYPE-TYPE - the words flash up, a sentence is formed, but the sentence existed it only needed to be worked on to be transformed. The place on the path ahead exists, but it takes these steps the sequence of STEP-STEP-STEP to get there. All the undetectable NOW-NOW-NOW that gets you to the place you know to exist but which doesn't exist without effort.

You take your partner in your arms, you feel yourself projected to a place just beyond them, 20 inches through them, you feel yourself in that spot and you are moving into it- Intention. You do not push, shove or drive but wait for your partner to accept and then the intention is joined and you are moving into that spot.

And Astor Piazzolla plays his accordion

Comments

[aslant.livejournal.com]

A handsome picture sir.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

There's just one thing you need for a handsome picture.

[aslant.livejournal.com]

This has got to be a trick question but okay, what?

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

a handsome face.

[daliah.livejournal.com]

thats a handsome picture

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

You know what you need to get a handsome picture?

[daliah.livejournal.com]

What?

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

The lighting in that one bathroom at work.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

A handsome picture.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

No you are

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Over-extending the metaphor to other types of dance is a useful thought experiment.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

Like how?

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Actually, fuck metaphor, dance has been associated with magic from the get go. I'm thinking like-- shamanic dance as intuitive & guided rather than intentional & willful. Free association enlightenment versus demiurgic mindfulness.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

Ah got it. I'm not sure all dances speak to this one aspect though I concede the larger point. Intention's just the piece I'm considering now. There's the ecstatic and the transcendental too, and then you've got the coven/lodge aspect of group dance.

My systems are walking and writing because they evoke the same hyperreal trance state. Painting is similar but different, probably because I'm not quite as good at it.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Sure; I would go with Ginzburg & say that the prevailing element of Western magic-- by which I mean, European, & colonies outward, not really "Western" but close enough-- is that ecstasy. With the tensions between ritual & frenzy, transcendental & immersive. All of which, right, if you went to see Sleep No More-- immersive contact improv dance theater about Macbeth-- you would see a lot of those elements on display. I don't know, I'm not contradicting, but rather saying it is a very robust metaphor. Or actually not even that much of a metaphor. A metafor.

I wonder then about other competing phylogenies, like Being? I feel like Being comes up out of India & across Asia (into Greece?) as a definitive trait? Or I don't know-- I'd maybe go with Being & Nothing as core to my experience, though not from an Eastern or pseduo-Eastern paradigm.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

Ah now Being this I correlate to the Maladhabra chakra - the base of Maslow's hierarchy! I figured this out sort of recently. This relates to ancient peoples fetishizing food security and maybe an outward flowing presentation of possession in search of an inward flowing sense of security.

This is my place and ordered and I am made safe by that ordering. Not to say that is Being, but I think it anticipates the thought of Being - it's the less abstracted sense in which the self is defined by the proximity in which it exerts autonomy. Your being is everything you can touch and your ability to manipulate it. Maybe this is why some animals are not the other- as they are made part and can be controlled, but another person is always the other, because within the sphere of being they exert competing control.

And from there

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

See, I was going to say: I don't buy food security, but I do think the Question of Others is at the heart of it. Not Others, but the question of if there ARE Others...& if there IS Self, or Being at all.

I think you might be on to something though thinking about it; like, food security is an issue beyond sentience, but I think it is reasonable to assert that animals have a Self. & they have a Family. Or I shouldn't say animals, I should say vertebrates; other forms of life I think are organized along different lines. Ants are just the cellular paradigm writ up another level of organization, right? Why bother with Self or Individual. Or fish, which-- I don't know anything about fish psychology-- seem to be almost pure zen, pure robot, with even schools being more like, math & probability, more than organization.

where have you gone

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

It's the nature of this conversation to become digressive and to conflate and involve it with many disciplines. Magic is like Dungeon-Mastering, it's the most interdisciplinary of activities.

But returning to the requisite state to address this conception of a hierarchical sense of being. The Organism has a physiological presence and investment in the realm of mass and space and time - so the organism innately understands its possession but what is that possession?

So you're driving down the street - there's a sign ahead that indicates the Speed Limit is different. Does the speed limit change when you see the sign? When you pass the sign? What is the domain of the sign? What is the domain of the person, everything seen, everything controlled, held, touched? The body is the least expression of possession, the largest is the dominion of the conqueror - but in either and all cases between the domain is dominion, what can be made and expressed as the body and the self. L'état, c'est moi isn't hyperbole in this construction, it's only vanity.

This isn't the sum of all things, this is the temporal reality of a proximate control extending from the fleshy center. You're not wrong to look at the school or the hive or the colony - the cells are colonies that conspire to create identity - weird stochastic emergence - but the lines are strangely drawn - why is the cellular colony of my hand Mine, but the molecular colony of my clothing mine, and consider the transition, the taking - of the cotton from the plant, the wool from the sheep - to make my own things my own. It's this contemplation that leads up the hierarchy of being - out of temporal immediate experience toward planning and interrelationships between other self-possessing colonal organisms.