notes & quotes from winter-spring 2024

02 Aug 2024

Here’s an attempt at putting together all the quotations I amassed this winter and spring from a variety of podcasts and book. Hope I’ll keep doing that. There’s some jewels in there.

January

For The Wild episodes :

• “Myth is a wild way of telling the truth.” -Martin Shaw

• “Belonging is a skill. “ Toko-Pa Turner

• “All kinds of love is just the love of God.” -Fariha Róisín
  • On a related note : “The Pali term for “celibacy” (in striking contrast to our own word) is brahmacariya, meaning to behave, or walk, in a divine or sublime way.” -Mary Talbot in The Joy of No Sex

• “Fermentation is a strategy for food safety, above all else really.” -Sandor Ellix Katlz

• “The book makes me aware of what I need to learn.” -Francesca Lia Block (on writing)

• “Too many poets, not enough soldiers.” -Tyson Yunkaporta * He also shared the idea that new age x liberation promise = neoliberal coopting (individuaism cannot free us)

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Benjamín Labatut arc - Louisiana Channel :

• “Fiction is a tool, it’s a human tool, we have kind of developed to give reality a human shape to understand what is presented to us.”

• “Litterature as a way of life, as a monastic calling” about the defunt poet who teached him how to write without publishing a single poem himself

• Discovering vs inventing, posture in the writing life, and writing with others

• William burroughs : magicians must be in some ways inhumans. it’s a bit the same with writers

• “When you’re not writing a book that is connected to something bigger, you’re not only writing a bad book, you’re hurting us.”

• “Litterature should become more ritualistic.”

• “Litterature as an older crazy sister of science”

• “We cannot survive without mysteries.”

• “A deep search for truth will lead you to uncertainty. It’s like uncertainty is the highest form of wisdom that we can inspire to.”

• “Writings should give you access to the world, but it should also darken it for you so it becomes mysterious again.
• The fact that a citrus tree dies from “overabundance” : on its last year it grows so much fruits its branches break. Such a mesmerizing spectacle to imagine (happening in his book When We Cease to Understand the World)

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February

Podcasts :

• For the intuitives, pt. 2 (The Emerald)
  • “Civilisation is all that is not mysterious.”
  • “Modernity wants witches to burn.”
  • “The charlatan is always the pioneer.’’
  • Question : where does conspiracy theories and folklore meet? is this our new folkore? what is the difference between conspiracy theories and folklore?
• Deep Time Diligence (Emergence Magazine)
  • '’The only proper way to store data is through intergenerational story telling.’’
• On narrative art (Weird Studies)
  • “Plot as cloth line on which you hang landscape”
  • “What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” -Joy William
  • Nick Land says that Hyperstition always call to the Old Ones (Lovecraft expression), aka bring back the old irrational chaotic energy.
  • “We are all 16th century car mechanics.”

Reading :

• From Are fictional dystopias blocking us from better futures? by Micheal Harris
  • Lepore identifies a “radical pessimism” in contemporary dystopian fiction: “Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century… It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one.””
  • “Going back slightly further, we might similarly reference Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay The Imagination of Disaster and its critique that Cold War-related science fiction fantasies help to normalize that which we should never become accustomed to, namely the potential destruction of humanity. Or Dutch historian and sociologist Fred Polak’s argument in his 1973 book The Image of the Future, that our images of the future are nihilistic and full of despair: “[W]e may well ask ourselves if the decline in utopian thinking is not also a decline in social progress itself.””

March

Podcasts :

• “Works of art are machines for destroying ideology.” - Weird Studies, on The Naked Lunch
• “The idea of the nation state is a spell.” - The Death Panel, on Collapse
  • Which made me at the time to ever again want to engage with the state, but then today in august, reading about state programs for work, I feel so annoyed that this machine is not used efficiently and I want to means of the machine

April

Podcasts :

• “Magick is the art of experiencing truth.” -Allan Chapman, quoted in Occult Experiments in the Home

May

Podcasts :

• Against Everyone with Connor Habib
  • On medecine
    • You must not attack directly the illness or, like your enemies, it will simply run elsewhere
    • Monsters are afraid to look upon their own image (applied to medecine)
    • There is a time to heal and a time not to heal
    • Is the future about creating new illness for meaning?
    • “Love the enemies, the enemies are the symptoms”
    • Very fascinative translocative medecine experimenth where they healed animal with their “90 degrees” techniques in a veterinary clinic and the animal stay healed and even healed their owner
    • Cross medecine : if it hurts at the right, heal it with the left, if it hurts at the bottom, heal it from the top
  • On horror
    • “Horror is the art of freedom.”
    • “Everything that makes you feel full freedom also feels terrifying.”
• The Emerald (episode about the moon)
  • “There’s no contradiction between measurements and mysteries.”

Reading :

• Dark Awakenings by Matt Caldin
  • “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” -Eclesiastes 1:18
  • “What is life and sanity depend not on finding the truth but on deliberately cultivating delusions? What if there is indeed a total perspective, but to gain and know it and identify with it is to invite your own deepest disaster?”
  • “I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt.”- Schopenhauer
  • Meditation on foulness in the Theravada text The Book of Protection
  • Reminder to read someday lovecraft essay Supernatural Horror in Literature
  • Ethos anthropoi daimon. A man’s character is his daimon. -Heraclite.
  • The book (turned movie in 1971) The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley about possession from a devil of lust
  • Schlobin’s 3 elements of horror
    • 1-Distorsion of cosmology
    • 2-Dark inversions of signs, symbols, processes and expectations
    • 3-Monster-victim relationship with archetypal devastation of human will
  • In western world, gore horrifies us because we have a tendency to think about owning the body vs being the body, aka it’s a betrayal (see about this Theodor Roszak talks of anti-organic fanaticism in Where the Wasteland Ends)
• Defending Ancient Springs by Kathleen Reine
  • ’‘[…] a revolutionary in the cause of the ‘Kingdom not of this world’», p.59
  • ‘Literature is but a branch of Religion, and always participate in its character: however, in our time, it is the only branch that still shows any greenness; and, as some think, must one day become the main stem.’ p.60 -Carlyle
  • The word ‘‘Juvenilia’ : ‘‘works produced by an author or artist while still young.’’
  • “The chief difference between the metaphors of poetry and the symbols of mysticism is the the latter are woven together into a complete system.” -Yeats, p.73
  • “to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself “ -Blake, p.74

crossbreeding seeds of the imaginal and the imaginary

04 May 2024

I recently started a new substack called A Reader’s Compost Heap, where I honor what I read with ‘‘sensemaking’’ creative essays. I sat down this morning to write a new entry for it when I realized my musings weren’t suited for the compost heap (yet), it was more like seeds that needed to be planted here.

Recently, I read Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman. It was similar to Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm by Stephen Harrod Buhner but without the emphasis on plants, and rather with a focus on literature, language, and epistemology. I noticed that I was already starting to forget my reading even though I enjoyed it. I just love thinkers who are anchored in that same paradigm as I - the animist paradigm, if we may call it like this - and who are so more eloquent about its history than I. But yeah, since it was simply validating what I was already convinced of, my brain didn’t record it as especially novel or worth keeping in mind, which is a shame because there are truly some gems in there. I’m trying to rectify this here by putting those seeds into words. So here are a few quotes/ideas worth planting in the digital garden :

• The old language being inherently poetical, the world perceived poetically because everything was alive vs language being dead nowadays
  • On this, I have sent a request to the inter-university loan system to get my hand on Defending Ancient Springs by Kathleen Raine
• ‘’One man’s vision is another man’s madness.’
• ‘’Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’’
• The imaginary vs the imaginal: the first is fantasy, the second is ‘‘objective psyche’’, another realm in and on itself, where we can namely communicate with other real entities (like plants)
  • which gives a framework for my eternal anger against Harry-Potter-kind-of-fantasy : I think I was always more enthralled by the imaginal where, after all, the real magick happens, and the fact that people would stick with the boring imaginary that only leads to delusion seems almost blasphemous to me
  • which leads me to think to the podcast episode '’Near Enemies of Magick’’ of Occult Experiments in the Home of Duncan Barford, who says that ‘‘Magick is to experience truth’’ (def. by Allan Chapman) and that we can sometimes disguise magick into art to ‘‘hide it in plain sight’’ but people can also use art for deception, in other words, use art to simulate magick but only brings us to illusions, in other words, further from the truth
  • and then to think about the short story ‘‘The Paradoxical Man’’ by Bernardo Esquinga in The Secret Life of Insects with his Lovecraftian atmosphere, where we are following a man that might be a façade for a story who ‘‘created a writer into being’’ to be told
  • but also the words of Benjamin Labatut: ‘Writing should give you access to the world, but it should also darken it for you so it becomes mysterious again.’’ His whole interviews with the Louisana Channel are just pure gold (1)(2).
  • and let’s add the whole concept of Hyperstition, which I have discussed in my last digital garden entry.

Unrelated to this reading, but belonging in the same garden patch:

• The book The Tachekry T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, encyclopedic fabulation to celebrate the weird. Makes me want to linger for a longer time in the realm of ‘‘Fictional non-fiction’’
• The podcast Anomalie, which presents itself like some kind of DnD campaign but for mindfulness. Basically, it’s a serie of guided meditations taking place in the world of Anomalie. I love it because it feels like how doing magick should feel, truly. I can’t help but be transported by the experience everytime. But here I really wonder if we are in a scenario of ‘‘magick hidden in plain sight through art’’ or ‘‘art creating illusions’’ because I have no information about the creators of the project… I feel like it’s more likely to be the second option, but I’ll be appreciative of it all in the meantime and I’ll ponder about the potential of this type of guided meditation for magickal use.

And that’s it for my chaos gardening today!

is it okay to be an accelerationist now? rethinking diversity of tactics

16 Mar 2024

I used to be a firm advocate of diversity of tactics (look at my cute and innocent 2020 entry on it). I’d use this umbrella term to also promote my view that we should be using witchcraft in the Left (since the Right is already doing it anyway…). But the recent episode of Death Panel on collapse made me realize that diversity of tactics might not be the way to go. Again, we cannot vote our way out of fascism. Also, democracy is an illusion. ‘‘The idea of a nation-state is a spell,’’ as it was well said in the say episode.

From the podcast Weird Studies this time, I came accross the idea of Hyperstition, that is a ‘‘magical’’ construction of the mind that makes something conceptual real, the equivalent of the egregor in occult realm. On the episode, it made a very interesting point on how academia was relying on those hyperstitions to exist, and also how intellectuals didn’t put enough work on creating boundaries around their creation like the fellow sorcerers and magicians are doing. With the idea that “the nation-state is a spell”, that is, an hyperstition, it makes me want to divest even more from it. It also gives another flavor to the infamous ‘‘withering of the state” of Marx and Engels…

But of course, it’s not like ‘‘oh I realised the state is a social construct so I just want to magicalthink it away’’. It’s just an added layer of why it sucked in the first place, as if it serves to control (monopoly of violence) and, in its current form, it serves Capital first and foremost. Again, the system is not broken, it is working as it is intended.

And all of this makes me for the first time think that voting isn’t so much harm reduction anymore. I have flashbacks of the electoral campagin after the 2020 Black Lives Matters uprising and how so much organizing energy was wasted around the say campaign… For the first time, I think I might not vote for the lesser evil in the upcoming elections (here in Quebec and Canada).

Is it because I almost want the worst candidate to win so people get angry more quickly, so the society can collaspe sooner? Maybe. That’s why I was wondering if I was turning a bit (more) accelerationist of now… I mean, I know I am not the only one dreaming of collapse to rebuild anew. The collapse is already happening in that very instant anyway. But I still don’t want to fall into the fascist trap of thinking that it’s okay for people to suffer and die in that fantasy, even though, for sure it will happen, as it is happening now… But also, how can I reconciliate the indigenous thinking of Deep Time with this intellectual bourgeois Accelerationist thought? Should I give up thinking about time altogether, like is it a framework not investigating? Probably not.

Divesting from the state also makes me lean more into anarchism. But anarchism always made me feel small, like anarchism grassroot stuff cannot make an international revolution. And I want the whole international solidarity deal. But maybe it’s just a matter of learning how to think differently, to reshape the theory of change in my brain. (Maybe I should look up at The Solutions are Already There : Strategies for Ecologiclal Revolution from Below by Peter Geldeloos)

But in my divesting from my diversity of tactics in its all emcompassing form, I want to focus on :

• Popular education (spirituality + how to work collaboratively)
• Systemic Change
• Collective action

Which means these are out :

• Individual behavior-oriented change (don’t need to be using a reusable straw to be a revolutionary)
• Anything electoral

An you know what I think about violence.

Basically, I just want to empower people and work toward class war. Radicalization anchored in radical empathy. And as framed in the book of Rebecca Solnit Hope in the Dark, people can get together in time of catastrophe and find great joy and empowerment in it.

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s ok to be an accelerationist now, I don’t know if I can (or want) to qualify as one. One thing I know it’s that it feels horrible to see the rise of fascism and people remaining apathic to it. I mean, maybe it’s defeatist of me to feel like we just won’t be able to stop their movement. Genuiely, one of the most urgent and haunting question in my life is how to defeat those fascists. As of now, I don’t have any answer on how to do that efficiently in the short time, no global perspective. Juste a desire to scream : can they fascists fucking fall already?

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Related content :

• surviving and fighting, emergent strategies and buddhism, digital garden entry from jan 2022
• problems bigger than states, digital garden entry from mars 2021
• mental health and how to fight for uncertainty, digital garden entry from sept 2020

work x pleasure activsm

28 Jun 2023

Climare changes oblige, fully luxury automated communism is not on the horizon anymore. It’s not like the old workaholic in me ever truly craved that. But as the desire for work and achievement is often pushed as this simple idea of internalised capitalism, I wanted to try to think about the future of (our relation with) work.

Personnaly, I’m not very good at having fun or at doing nothing. I am definitely considered an overachiever by my people. And I did burned out twice before turning 25. Now, I have put the boundarie to not accept to work any full-time job because I know I am not ready to let go of my 345285 personal projects I have on the side, therefore working full-time will almost systematically lead me toward the burnout route.

At once, I tried to slow down on my political activities. My social life often revolved around organising meetings and in the long run, I thought it was kind of unhealthy. I need to allowed myself to just chill. And I did this, I’m still doing this : allowing myself to chill, and coming back in the ‘’productive field’’ gradually, while keeping in mind my priority of keeping my life in balance.

I don’t know where I heard or read recently that the issue is not about trying to abolish work, but rather reclaiming work. It resonated in me as I am kinda doing that, since my ‘’chilling moment’’ is also a moment where I’m trying to consolidate the foundation of my very own non-profit. If I have to work, I will work in my own term, on something I truly believe in. So I realized I was already in the praxis of reclaiming work.

It lead me then to want to ponder about the theory around this idea of reclaiming work. How can work be pleasurablre and fullfiling? On a more personal level, how can I try to stop with this fear that I am necessarily working from a place of internalised capitalism, making myself feel shame for wanting to be useful and accomplish things?

So, I’m coming to the terms that human nature might actually crave work. Psychologist Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow comes to mind. I also think about the fact that using our hands to do manual works actually is good for the brain.

In my activist circles, we already started this reflexions a few years ago about how can we find (and bring) joy and pleasure in all this unpaid labor of ours. Now, I’m thinking, how can I personnaly bring a change around work in the lineage of pleasure activism? Maybe the issue this whole time wasn’t that I’m ‘’not able to have fun’’. Like I’m able to have fun and I am fun to be around. I make people laugh in meeting, I find ways for things to flow more efficiently, dare I say, more pleasurably.

Because the thing is, there will be just more and more work to do in the following year. In the realm of activism but also in general with the upcoming collapse of everything. How can we create an anticapitalist culture of (fullfiling) work that can not be recuperated by the current ideology? How can work nurture our growth instead of economical growth?

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Related content :

• how to get your shit together in this capitalist hellscape, freebie made for my The Happy Anticapitalist project
• in the mouth of the lion, digital garden entry from sept 2021

occult features of anarchism by erica lagalisse

08 Jan 2023

I like to think of my reading journey as some fantasy quest. Books are paving the way, but along the path I see beautiful fascinating plant-ideas that nourish the whole adventure.

The first book I finished reading this year was the short Occult Features of Anarchism by Erica Lagalisse, which I read in one sitting. The book offers an historical overview of anarchism, putting in the light the occult dimension of it. It suggests :

Modern anarchism has never been purely atheis except in name, and instead develops based on overlapiing syncretic pagan cosmologies that behold the immance of the divine, In fact, utopian socialism, anarchism and Marxism each rely […] on a specific syncretic cosmology that is incipient in the Middle Ages, changing and crystallizing in the Renaissance, and gradually given a scientific maeover throughout the Enlightenment up to the twentieh century. (p.34)

The book also posits firmly this hypothese I’ve been dancing around for a while now (see last digital garden entry) that the discarding of the spiritual/magical is something deeply anchored in oppressive systems, or as Lagalisse put it in relation to anarchism :

It is one thing for anarchists to maintain that they are ‘‘against all forms of domination’’ nominally speaking, yet a decolonized anarchism that properly challenges gendered power requires acknowledging how the secularization of social movements agains the state mirrors the secularization of the modern colonial state itself, which privatizes religion and gender yet continues to embody a specific cosmonoly and patriarcgal arrangement in both structure and ideology. (p.28)

Once again, it was highlighted how an “elite magic” anchored in Western occultism was deemed acceptalbe, but folk and women magic wasn’t. Lagalisse showcased namely how (male) scientists during the Enligthment were working through alchemist traditions in their experiments. She gaves the example of the “magical” Johannes Kepler who received the title of Imperial Mathematician while his mother was imprisoned for witchcraft.

Anyway, that was a very nice read. It was refreshing to learn that communist and anarchists symbols took their origin in witchcraft and secret societies (freemasonry), or again that the anticapitalist May Day has link with pagan celebration. Even more pleasant was it to discover the “spiritual side” of anarchist thinkers, like this Bakhunin quote did a good impression on me :

Let the religion become the basis and reality of your life and your actions, but let it be the pure and single-minded religion of divine reason and divine love… [I]f religion and an inner life appear in us, then we become conscious of our strenght, for we feel that Gos is within us, that same God who creates a new world, a world of absolute freedom and absolute love… that is our aim.

The essay also covers how women and indigenous thinkers are often left out of anarchism history, but it feels as if this section could have been more explored. Conspiracy theories also have their dedicated chapter, as it was actually the starting point of Lagalisse’s investigation into this occult alley, and it was very interesting : it motivated me to go back to my own conspiracy theories studies (see entry fascism and conspiracy theories), and this aspiration to make it part of some kind of left populism in the line of what Chantal Mouffle advocates for, but also in the spirit of Amitav Ghosh’s call to involves religion in the fight for climate justice. Nonetheless, here as well, I thought this section was short and I would have wanted some more.

Nevertheless, it was a very good and interesting read. To the suggestion of the writer, I think I will pursue my own investigation with this following book : Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality by Stanley Jerajaya Tambiah.

Also shoutout to the first digital entry I’ve post on Ravirer on 2020 on mystical anarchism, we’ve gone full circle!