An Accidental Performance Artist

I refuse to remember the dead. And the dead are bored with the whole thing. But you - you go ahead, go on, go on back down into the graveyard, lie down where you think their faces are; talk back to your old bad dreams.

Anne Sexton from A Curse Against Elegies

1.

The Curse of Language

When I was a kid I remember my mum going to have her tarot read and visiting psychic mediums. I used to go with my dad in the car to pick her up afterwards. Usually it was to an address deep in the countryside, down a dark lane. My mother would get into the car, sometimes looking as if she had just been crying, occasionally she'd be happier than I'd ever seen her. 'What happened, What did they say?' My dad would ask. 'Nothing, I cant say, it's private.' My mum would invariably answer.

First things first. The magical is the private world. The occult is the knowledge of how to create it.

In my pre-teen years I used try and  predict the near future by staring up at the clouds on long car journeys. This is called Aeromancy, sometimes Nephomancy. If I saw a hammer shaped cloud I would anticipate something breaking. If I saw a face, I would speculate that I was about to meet an interesting person, or someone that would have a profound affect on my life.

These divinations usually came to fruition. They were basic, wide nets cast over an ever expanding stretch of youth.  I was looking for the correct outcome. But it worked. It is not about the power of the sign, but the knowledge that can be found in the outcome.

Between the ages of 14 – 16 I consulted the spirit board on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. Friends were unsure at first, but were willing to give it a go. Anyone who has tried a spirit board, often referred to as a Ouija board, will have a story to tell. Either it didn't work, it contained nonsensical messages, they were freaked out, but whatever the experience there is a story. My own experiences were profound. So profound in fact that I turned away from occult practices and repressed my experiences of the board with alcohol, recreational drugs, and eventually opiates.  

I wont give a detailed account of what happened during some of these spirit board sessions, but I will say that pictures fell off walls,  and doors were repeatedly opened and closed, locked and unlocked. The glass moved so quickly and violently at times that it was thrown off the table.  Night-time visitations in which I was pulled out of my bed and propelled around the room in a semi-conscious state persisted for almost twenty years.

I documented these events and my eventual spiritual and psychical collapse in the visual poem sequence The Journal of Baal, which was published by Veer in 2016.

Although my occult education persisted after these experiences, it was many years until I worked with a spirit board again. After these experiences I became more interested in the history of the occult, divination, the power of suggestion, shamanism, talismans. Now I realise that I'd gone about things in a back to front manner. Knowledge should always come before practice. The occult can be a dangerous place if you do not, a) know yourself, and b) know your subject.

PS When crows start telling you to kill yourself, you're in to deep.

2.

Science, of course, has explanations for all of this. Divination can be explained by using the fallacy of the Texas Sharp Shooter. A drunk Texan farmer is sat in his yard drinking moonshine and starts firing his gun into the side of one of his barns. Bullets fly all over the place, some of them hit nails, bounce off and kill chickens. None of this gets in the way of the Texans party. The next day he has a hangover like he's been drinking with Old Nick himself. He takes some Aspirin, eats some grits and walks out into the yard. There are bullet holes all over the place, not just in the barn but in the house, the outhouse, the chicken run. The old farmer thinks he'll have some fun. In the areas where the tightest cluster of bullet holes sits he paints a target. He's the sharpest shooter in the state. He fills in the other holes with wood filler and paints them up, only the bullet holes in the centre of the target remain.

We cast our net wide and see what we want to, ignoring the discrepancies.

Surely the fact that there is such a tight cluster of bullet holes in one place should be investigated. We are intrigued by patterns and images that reflect our internal world. This is why visualisation is so important. It doesn't mean the farmer is a sharp shooter. But we might be interested in his motivations to appear as one. Divination isn't an science, it's an art.

The spirit board, and many other practices are often explained as being caused by the ideomotor effect, in which we unconsciously carry out an action, or series of actions. The occult, in all it's forms, as far as I'm concerned, is the unconscious impulse made symbolic, whether individually, or collectively.

Ritual, talismanic, sigil, and implied magic are all forms of meditation designed to enrich a shared collectivised inner world.  

3.

Before the word was the image. The visual representation of events that have yet to happen. Some cave paintings depict human form dressed in animal skins being chased by the tribe. This is the ritual of the hunt. The will of the shaman. Acting out the event before it happens. Willing a certain outcome into existence.

Then the word. The word is the representation of the thing. The word is powerful. It is suggestive. All that is thought or spoken comes into being. The curse of language is our inability to think without it. Magic, or occult practice, teaches us how to break this curse. This is the domain of the ritual, the performance, the mirror, the glass, the tarot, the bones, the image. Occult practice allows us to return to a childish pre-linguistic state, or even to the space in which we were not before we were born. It is a lifelong meditation on the space within as a space without. We can learn to think in images.

Ninety per cent of occult practice is visualisation. The morning and evening meditation, the transference of will, astral projection, the summoning of spirits, sigils.  None of it is possible without it.  The most affective writing, the most affective art, is that which encourages the participant to use their own internal visualisation skills. It could be argued that all writing does this by virtue of being word based, and that visual art cannot do this because it is already a representation of a visualisation, but I believe an art that neither describes, nor represents, but only suggests, can lead participants to develop their own internally visualised worlds.

Dion Fortune said that: 'Any act performed with intention becomes a rite.' But in the context of writing – if only the author knows the intention, the participant will fail to connect with the rite. The work has to be contextualised as such and instruction given to participants in order that they may complete the circuit of creation.

STEPHEN EMMERSON                            

Stephen Emmerson is the author of Family Portraits, Poetry Wholes both published by (If P Then Q), The Journal of Baal (Veer), & Telegraphic Transcription (Stranger Press)

Commissioned by Petty Officer Nadine Nesbitt

Last night I made love to my demons and you watched: dogs with skull heads and fiery tongues, segments of cloth toe-dancing in the Vauxhall skyline, scraps of iron and steel clustered into fetishes and totems, the condescending rope, suspended from your symmetry. I wonder what it’s like, you said, when the audience goes, and you are left there, with the stage and the sulphur.

Last night I made love to my demons and you watched. Your eyes were like knives and forks partaking of the filth. Do you think of me now? You asked, in the core of despair, as you wrestle with the shaded air, your face falls into the semblance of your face. I can feel you now, you said, at the ledges of sanity, as you parted your legs and commenced your own display.

As a teen, I randomly found Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye in my local library and instantly fell in love with his writing - the idea that writing attacks the senses like a nipple bite, first slow sensual and then the teeth grip adding another layer of intensity before the actual bite sending the nerve ending into shock.

The same day I read the book, on the front page of the newspaper, was the horror of Marcus Harvey’s Myra artwork. The whole world seemed tainted and tortured by Bataille’s vision of art as transgression.

Blue of Noon was the second of his novels I read which Dennis Cooper creates a collage about on his own blog. I found about Cooper’s work a few years later. I named my poetry mag after Blue of Noon.

Cooper’s blog -

http://denniscooperblog.com/spotlight-on-georges-bataille-blue-of-noon-1945/

my poetry mag -