Carcosa Bound

The difference between a tool and a weapon is intent – the mind and soul that employs its commission.

I think of this when I sit at a keyboard, for my dayjob, hammering out and sharpening key lines and messages crafted to take on a life of their own, and delivering them through digital channels.

I try to think about this, every time I sit at a keyboard – the input feeder to these engines of attention and distraction. These are a most beautiful tool and, potentially, a most terrible weapon.

Wierd fiction, applied across scale

Sticks and stones will break your bones
But words can bind forever.

We've taken tools initially developed for religion or warfare, and applied them in every aspect of our modern life.

Few have more accurately or succinctly expressed and explored this than comics author and magician Grant Morrison, in his late-90s epic The Invisibles.

The scope of this psychedelic romp – and his magnificent follow-up and Qlippothic bardo, The Filth – utterly blew my mind at time of reading.

Morrison's heroically autobiographical work articulates the sentiment, and provides worked case studies of translation through scale and narrative worlds.

Morrison openly built The Invisibles as a participatory hypersigil – an extended magically charged act of “writing into being” – and I certainly got pulled into its vortex. Since, this has stuck with me.

Using information effectively is a technology, and communication operative, and all of them are as much a science as an art. Public relations and stakeholder engagement is socially-applied cybernetics.

All these disciplines are the mutant grandchildren of Natural Philosophy; the courtly practitioners of this were once called Intelligenciers, after all. I respect this tradition.

What is violence, anyway?

Taking the maximal possible view – it's a form of communication. I read something about this in Slavoj Zizek's book, On Violence, as I was trying to make sense of the world. It was in the introduction, which was about as far as I could get through it.

So, the violence, as a form of communication – sending a message, shaping the context so things proceed a certain way.

Whether enacted directly, physically, kinetically – as on the organisations of a cell, a human body, a village.
The realm of Elemental interactions, for the Agrippaphiliac PlatoBros.

Or on procedural, function level – the spaces in between – in the firing of a synapse, by blocking a sight from view, the metabolism of a food into nutrients, or the collapse of a supply chain.
The Celestial Realm.

Finally, and most esoterically, by symbol – an offensive image, a confronting issue, an entirely, initially abhorrent worldview.
The Super-Celestial – the realm of the Ideals. Of the Gods.

Overcoming pencil-necked geekhood

Theory is Divine – but what can we actually do with this?

There is joy, knowledge, and furious and frenzied potential in the translation – or transgression – across scale.

So, the practice of taking it up a notch. The escalation of apotheosis, or dramatic, Luciferian descent. The Upwards-Downwards Path Heraclitus mentioned in Fragment 61 of his immortal work.

In practice, we see this, as the notable exception to the rule:
The streetkid who becomes the CEO, or the obsessive dreamer who becomes the movie director.
The weekend where you took a risk, things got out of hand, and the most wonderful consequences changed your life in a way you can never undo.

Or – the downwards path, the lightening bolt:
The meteoric iron that falls to earth, and forged into a blade.
The uncle who takes the time to work through the basics of mathematics with you, and you just “get it”.
The chance meeting with an exceptional individual in an unlikely situation, who shows you a way of doing something mundane, that becomes transformative.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Intent makes a tool a weapon.