Liminal Dream Attractor calendar
I’ve just created a Google Calendar to keep track of “cultural weirdness and stimulating events”.
If you’re a Google user, search Public Calendars for “Liminal Dream Attractor” and you’ll be able to subscribe to it. If not, you can find it (along with other useful ways of accessing it like RSS) here on the site.
It’ll be maintained by myself, Mark Pilkington and Stephen Grasso; hopefully we’ll find a good balance of varied events without it getting too cluttered and bewildering. As we’re all based in London, UK, there’ll be a certain geographical bias there, but events from all over the world will be considered. Any suggestions, let me know (bearing in mind there’s no guarantee of inclusion!).
What is the attraction of events? Calendars are cluttered and bewildering as soon as they have anything in them. Ah, how I beam when I flick through my diary and see nothing for weeks. The addiction of attendance. I have forgotten how long now I have stopped. Events. We’re bombarded by events. A need to be doing something. Does it make people bigger and better, cramming their heads full of half-digested ‘knowledge’. Mummy bird feeding baby bird chirruping in the nest. The same arses on the same chairs week in week out listening to the latest clown practicing being an expert. It’s all about networking, I suppose, putting your face about. I should give a talk on how it’s all so fucking boring shouldn’t I?
Joel - 4th April 2008 @ 2:15
I guess different people have their needles stuck in different places ;-)
Gyrus - 4th April 2008 @ 9:55
But seriously, although a lot’s about networking, for me it’s mostly about interacting with people in the real world, not stuck behind the screen or in your own head.
And talks don’t have to be scintillating new discoveries to be valuable. I love books as much as the next geek, but there’s a certain difference in the stimulation your ideas get from someone expressing them in speech. Must be those eons of oral culture under our belts paling next to the relative blip of literacy.
Sure, sometimes nights out don’t prove worth it; but who’s never had a boring night in? Apart from Hugh Hefner?
Gyrus - 4th April 2008 @ 10:05
I suppose I notice more and more that people in esoteric fields just don’t know anything. They don’t put any hours in thinking about things. A social trudge along the surface of things. All you need for a night out is a table with pints on it and entertaining discussion with friends, is it somehow more cohesive to be there under the delusion of learning about the occult?
What I see is people who don’t take the esoteric/occult/hermeticism, whatever you want to call it, seriously enough. And the reason is that they think they are already. They haven’t yet woken up to what’s really involved. Discussion becomes surfacy, centred on chit-chat about stuff none of them knows much about. The feeling of belonging is an illusion, unless backed up by real investigation on one’s own. I just see a lot of dross washed up in rooms above pubs. A lot of people with nothing to say. If anyone who did have something to say ever came along, they wouldn’t understand it, because they don’t have the background.
Joel - 4th April 2008 @ 15:28
I’m hard put to fully disagree. Still, the situation hardly changes for the better if all the people who have something interesting to say stay at home.
Oh, there’ll also be events on the calendar where you can dance if talks get you down :-)
Gyrus - 4th April 2008 @ 16:42
BTW, Jeremy Harte, listed there for next week’s Moot With No Name, happens to be a brilliant folklorist, well worth coming along to.
Gyrus - 4th April 2008 @ 17:44
I think the only people who have something to say are those who keep it to themselves for a very long time, and then gradually lose interest in saying it.
I should say that my comments here and above are nothing to do with Jeremy Harte.
The only talk I have ever retained anything from was at the Warburg Institute, where I learned that in Arabic astronomy there is a constellation called ‘The Two Buttocks’. No, never let me say that something interesting cannot be picked up at talks.
Joel - 4th April 2008 @ 21:26
You make a good point, incidentally, about the importance of orality in comparison with the literal. Most talks, however, are just the literal put into an oral form, so the main difference from reading a book is that you have beer dripping into your lap and are scouting the room for pretty chicks. Let’s not kid ourselves about this ‘oral culture’.
Joel - 4th April 2008 @ 21:43
Yeah, oral culture’s hanging by a thread in some circles. Despite nerves, at the last minute I ditched “just reading” my written stuff at these couple of appearances I’ve done; it just seemed… dishonest? That’s too moral. Boring, really. OK, so I wrote stuff to get things going, but it was spoken before written, written specifically for speaking. And it was always just a ruse—the interesting bit is the discussion, when it’s good, the mutual sharing of ideas. Even if they’re not new in the technical sense, they can get remade.
One of the best public speaking appearances I’ve seen was Howard Marks, in Hove a while ago. He said he thought risk needed to be taken, so he necked loads of shrooms before coming on stage. His risk paid off; he was enthralling, and got perfect punctuation for his speech from a thunderstorm outside. I’m not about to start doing public speaking off my nuts on psychedelics, but… that’s a bit of inspiration.
Gyrus - 4th April 2008 @ 22:41
Well, I don’t mind ‘readings’, where the point is the performance of written words. But then the tacit point is that the writing is supposed to be good, and, if it is good, then it’s interesting to hear how the writer reads it. Such as the way Burroughs read. I love it when there’s an unexpected twang in the words that you didn’t pick up reading on the page, as with Alasdair Gray or James Joyce, particularly the amazing bit Joyce read from Finnegans Wake. I made a trek to a sound archive years ago to hear this, when I was absorbed in FW, but now you can hear it on the web on the Finnegans Wake Society of New York site: http://finneganswake.org/joycereading.shtml
They meet together above a bar to read from Finnegans Wake. That I would find an interesting experience. So, ironically, reading can be true orality, where the sounds of the words and the rhythms of the speech matter. Of course, for a talk on some alternative culture topic it is just the information a lot of the time. I often think: just shut up, give me a handout (which I will bin), your website address, and let’s go and get the drinks in. In other words, these talks I don’t find achieve what they might achieve. Maybe it’s the lack of urgency, maybe it’s just the habitual round of it all.
When ‘The Society’ was around, which was a semi-private ‘little essay club’ (as Lionel Snell described it to me when he invited me along the first time), it was a chance to come into contact with some interesting occultists, and I found it so for a while, though the talks were often dull. The current crop of London moots and talking sticks and whatnot all grew from the seed of ‘The Society’. They still provide, I suppose, a chance to meet occultists for someone just going through that door, and maybe that is their only purpose, but frankly I see these meetings as little more than a posing paradise for faded occultists who have reached their level and aren’t going to progress any more.
People starting out in the occult feel a need to fit in, join, find their soulmates, whatever. So naturally they’re drawn to the surface entrance of the occult: talks. If they find what they’re looking for there, then good luck to them. But over the course of time they’re actually more likely to find a lot of disappointment and hollow words and magical cliques. I don’t think enough is said about this. That these talks give off a miasma of something decaying, qlippothic. The wise person making their way into the occult soon moves through these formations and appearances. Many get stuck. It’s not about going to a talk, it never is in the occult. It’s about looking for ways in. But what many don’t realise is that the best way in is to get out as soon as you’ve seen enough. Otherwise, your teachers are all around you: a bunch of fucking idiots.
Joel - 5th April 2008 @ 1:06
I agree with a lot of that, certainly if you’re talking about the variety of pub “moots” (that word has always made me feel a bit sick) that exist in London. There is something a bit decaying and qlippothic about those events, however I think it’s fair to say that pub based things like talking stick did provide a valuable entrance point into actually meeting other people with similar esoteric interests to me in London, which was really important. Magic stopped being something that existed in the spaces between me, some books, and an emerging practice; and it became something situated in a wider world of other practitioners who already had active and developed practices. I met a few interesting people at these things, who ended up becoming freinds, but at a certain point we all fled those events for reasons more or less identical to the ones you have outlined.
“But what many don’t realise is that the best way in is to get out as soon as you’ve seen enough.”
Spot on, really.
“frankly I see these meetings as little more than a posing paradise for faded occultists who have reached their level and aren’t going to progress any more.”
This as well.
But, I find that I have a very different response when I go to the events that they hold at Treadwells. There is a very different dynamic there. It’s difficult to put my finger on what that is exactly. It doesn’t feel like any of those other London events.
Gypsy Lantern - 10th April 2008 @ 9:54
Great little cal – saw this through Mark on Strange A and will add to my own. Also see blather.net’s (Google)
damien - 15th April 2008 @ 13:48
hmm. sorry – that should have had a link to this: http://www.blather.net/blather/2008/03/blathernets_map_of_the_weird.html – the blather.net ‘Map of the Weird’
damien - 15th April 2008 @ 13:49
Nice map!
Gyrus - 15th April 2008 @ 13:58