"Since all phenomena (or phenomenally appearing things) which arise present no reality in themselves, they are said to be of the noumena (in other words, they are of the Voidness, regarded as the noumenal background or Source of the physical universe of the phenomena). Though not formed into anything, yet they give shape to everything. Thus it is that phenomena and noumena are ever in union, and said to be of one nature. They are, like ice and water, reflection and mirror, two aspects of a single thing."The Seven Books of Wisdom - Tibetan text.
In the case of a mirror, there is a third aspect, the subject/viewer. Mirrors reveal and conceal. Their mystery permanent, their hints at doorways, windows, points of entry, and thresholds just out of reach of our conscious minds. T.I.M.E. The Imaginary Mass Emits. Image. Idea. There can be no separation, scientifically or subjectively. The atavistic face gazes down into a crystal pool. Ice-cold water. Grunts. A hand shatters the image, fear gaunt and haunting passes across, a shadowy cloud, and through all T.I.M.E. that momeant can persist, be reclaimed.
"What is Time, but a variety of one thing?" Austin Osman Spare.
These momeants of T.I.M.E. accumulate, are listed under memory in our modern synapses, are posited as all ways retrievable, amorphous. Nothing is forgotten, all is permitted. In a stinking cave, muttering babies scream and scratch, furs undulate in copulation. In one corner, bright-eyed first marks are daubed on a wall. They are marks to function, marks of place, of T.I.M.E. They are marks to draw results and persist beyond one human lifetime. Instinct has arisen, snake-like, coiling it's SELF into intuition and suggested the very power of suggestion. No-one noted down from a book this PROCESS, it grew from watching the elements, closeness to life-sources, death-forces that modern persons are divorced from. On this damp stone there is a curve, it is land, horizon, ejaculation, movement.
"Magick consists in seeing and willing beyond the next horizon." The Sar.
Mrs. Patterson stares down. Pencilled into existence. It is her as she WAS when she took Austin Osman Spare at 14 years old and initiated him into the art of sexual magick and a power-full system of sorcery (a primal oral tradition preserved through female bloodlines) that she had rediscovered and regenerated through her covert communion across T.I.M.E. with systems and techniques that grew from a most animalistic and pure union of instinct and inherited DNA encryptions. This woman knew, and she taught Spare, how to travel through T.I.M.E., and just how malleable and manipulable a form of energy and matter I.T. was. ( where I.T. = Imaginary Time). She also instructed Spare in techniques that could empower him to remain Present in L-if-E, after an apparent physical death. She was a medium, but her guides were not the "New Age" romantic, and patronising ikons of native peoples and tribes. Not just Indian Chiefs, Pharoahs, Tibetan Rinpoches or aborigines. They were more like the creatures of Clive Barkers "Hellraiser" visions, or the demons in "Evil Dead". They were the deepest, most atavistic and raw representations of the alien that we can experience. Equivalent, if you will, to a seriously hard-core DMT entity confrontation. Mrs. Paterson understood a most particular secret. Her medium was her SELF. She was quite able to travel through mirrors and throughout T.I.M.E.
"Look at me, my face: do you not detect a close resemblance, it is hardly surprising - I look like everybody. You will learn why later. Say it aloud then, or are you afraid now: that I resemble you, that I am your living image. You are standing before a mirror."
Lord Patchogue.
There is a drawing in my possession by Spare, a pencil and gouache, finished in 1928. The main figure is Mrs. Paterson. Coming from behind her head, making a blister in a shimmering green pencilled aura, is a half completed face. It belongs to no-one, everyone. It is her at times, it is cavalier, it is also Austin Osman Spare. This one picture contains all the secrets Spare never wrote down, and his books are thorough, precise, and often opaque. Spare appears in the bottom right-hand corner, represented as he projects he will look as an old man, eyes closed, concentrated, manifesting, it would seem, the other beings in the picture. Remarkably, his projection of an older SELF is uncannily accurate.
"he interest alone was valid, at least, who can
find his path without recourse to the senses.
The five illegitimate senses. By "interest" should be understood the stake, the promise of some comfort, a pleasure, a discovery."
Jaques Rigaut.
What Spare is doing is "tricking" us. All his writings are symbolic, they were never intended to be taken literally, as illustrations, on any level. His writings are primarily journals, decorative encryptions of basic techniques of travel. But they are appendices to the REAL work. This special trick was to convince everybody that his drawings, paintings, and images were symbolic, fantastical, products of his imagination. They are in fact the essence of his sorcery. Like all great sorcerers, he hid his central secret in apparently commonplace medium. What we discover in this key picture is that he is actually kneeling. It is actually a "photographic" record of his prediction of both his own bodily death, and his worship of Mrs. Paterson as the keeper of immortality.
"Lord Patchogue dashes to the mirror to assure himself that he is still there, not really he himself, but his nose, the nose that he saw only a few minutes ago. It is not so much his existence he doubts as that of each of his attributes, and if not of their existence then of their legitimacy."
Lord Patchogue.
Spare made consistent use, for very specifically sex magickal reasons, of late middle-aged prostitutes who would normally be considered "brash" and heavily made-up. Women who could, in his mind, represent Mrs. Paterson at the age she seduced and instructed him, and thus charge more powerfully his sexual magick rituals and Sigils as a result. Just as the sorcerer repeats elements of ritual over and over again, and uses the same magickal tools, incenses, incantations and so on repeatedly to achieve a cumulative effect, so Spare recreated a virtual sorceress to revisit, the precise intersections of T.I.M.E. and Space that she had imprinted in his brain. Through this reputedly sordid, but actually visionary method of sexual magick was able to return at Will to a potent portal, an access point into the matter of T.I.M.E. itself, and then, even deeper, into what we can only call Timelessness, though outside T.I.M.E. might be a more accurate way to articulate the state. These women were close enough to Mrs. Paterson in cosmetic physical appearance and characteristics to be used as a focussing visual key enabling him to be accelerated at the momeant of orgasm, just like a particle accelerator, into direct, inter-dimensional contact with her, and the infinite previous hers that had ever existed. This is more easily understood contemporaneously, now, in a post-DMT experiential environment. In other words, DMT would be a very good equivalent experience of what this catapulting might feel like. However Spare could recreate this at Will, and via WILL TO... over and over agen, with deep lucidity and in a state of sexual intoxication, rather than biochemical intoxication.
A drug free splitting of the atoms of T.I.M.E.!
"Lord Patchogue stands up. He studies his full-length portrait in the mirror. Five senses are not sufficient for his chance companions; once more they shall miss the show; they are no more ready to perceive the presence of mystery than they think of death."
Jaques Rigaut.
When Mrs. Paterson died, he was able to take a particular aspect of her lifesource and literally preserve I.T., still "living" into this, and one or two other, pictures. This is not to be misunderstood as in anyway vampiric. That is not what we're dealing with here. This is a much more deeply fundamental sorcery. Spare is consensually keeping open a portal of connection between the primal interdimensional knowledge and entity that was represented by the physical manifestation within linear T.I.M.E. by Mrs. Paterson's existence on this particular earth, at a partiocular alloted momeant. In the same mysterious way that, if you Will, a mirror can contain all that it faces in what seems an equally "real" world, so Spare's pictures can hold the entirety of the images and entities that he represents in them. They are THERE. The frame is exactly intended to be experienced as, and function as, the edges of a mirror. Although, becuase it is a plastic, more fixed medium, we often cannot see around the inside edges by moving, as we can with a mirror. As we cannot all ways change the amount, and depth of what we see simply by moving, as we can with a mirror. Do not be fooled by mundane physics. There are specific periods when, remarkably, the opposite is true, and these images do indeed become exactly the same as mirrors, representing an entire portal into a parallel omniverse. Further, I would suggest, indeed insist, based upon my own personal experiences, and those of many other colleagues who have acted as controls, and/or guinea pigs in my experiements with these pictures to act as confirmation, or dismissal of the actuality, that these pictures do not just become virtual mirrors. They become living portals that animate, through which entities can travel, accessing our "world" and bidding us into theirs.
" I only murder that I may return." Mary Bell - Child Murderess aged 7.
In the picture, when Mrs. Paterson died, he fixed her in this picture. We see him. He sinks INTO her chest, is absorbed, they rise together, androgenous, genderless both their faces, and all their ages superimposed to create one alien being. One inter-dimensional entity. He has drawn himself dying, conjuring himself into this picture in advance of that event, so that he may all ways return. Like the Cocteau character crossing back and forth through the mirror.
"Art can contradict Science." Austin Osman Spare.
"Art is the truth we have realised of our belief" Austin Osman Spare.
"Do you see those flowers growing on the sides of the abyss whose beauty is so deadly and whose scent is so disturbing? Beware..." de Guatia.
In these sorcerous images, these his purest incantations through Art, Spare uses a graphic skill and technique second to none. Yet his most commonly seen works can appear deliberately fast and loose. The nearest modern parallel would be Salvador Dali, who could suggest perfection and hypereality in a few precisely placed marks and intersections, and through his works worship HIS own personal sorceress Gala. Dali's photoreal technique is accurate in an unearthly way too, and Dali uses delerium and dislocation of the senses to catapult himself, and us, through the parameters of madness and obsession into his personal landscape and environment. Dali occasionally masturbated into his paints, particularly painting the leather strap across Hitler's back, and made good use of the canvass as a virtual mirror viewed from one static position. I would argue that Dali, despite his genius, was a naive, struggling to describe glimpses and fragments of vision, with an ad hoc quasi-magickal perception and aspiration. Dali did not build, though he hungered too, a system as unique, primal, timeless, and fully administered by informed, cumulative, and inter-dimensional arcane knowledge as Spare. Spare KNEW all too well what he was doing, conjuring, and building. A method of physical, and neurological immortality, a means to step outside T.I.M.E. Dali really wanted too, but remained finally, restrained by his inability to travel beyond use of his imagination. For Dali, the mirror was a solid barrier into which he could gaze, but not travel. Spare was the very material of the mirror, the destroyer of it's boundaries, or limitations, and finally usurped every definition or mirrorness creating a virtual portal that accessed all momeants of T.I.M.E. past, present, future, none, in every possible and impossible infinite combination. T.I.M.E. is you see a solid, through which all passes, all is seen from a vantage point. As we lear to move our point of perception, so we act like a lens, or a mirror's surface viewed from above. Light, thought, life, passes through us, expanding outwards. We can place our mirrors anywhere, perceive them from any direction. Thus we are potentially everywhere, in every possible T.I.M.E. and every possible dimension. All travel is possible. We are an amorphous infinite density of matter. The matter is T.I.M.E. I.T. is all a matter of T.I.M.E. T.I.M.E. is malleable and thus both the portal and the means of travel. We can leave, we can return, we can cease to exist. This is the "virtual mirror" of Spare. These are the prophetic portals. But they do not prophecy Art. They prophecy an end to materiality. A disinegration, a dissipation of our corporeality beyond anything so far confessed in the small wooden box of physics.
"The future is in the past, but it is not wholly contained in the present." Hoene-Wronski.
Brion Gysin was another such artist of the future, another such alchemist and sorcerer who used Art to create T.I.M.E. and inter-dimensional travel. He used a different style. More abstract, more directly concerned with encryption, coding and decoding, and with a clear appreciation of post-linguistic magick.
"Rub Out The Word"
he would emphasis. He too was absolutely aware of the implication of his experiements and their functions. Both Gysin and Burroughs accepted as a given that the central power of their works was to trick T.I.M.E. and through another system of cumulative effect, manipulate and navigate mortality and all sources of pre-recorded L-if-E; brain; entity; location and the process of control that locks us out of this inviolate humane right to transcend physicality. Gysin was a practising magickian first and actually described at length to me in Paris his long T.I.M.E. practice of mirror staring, and the incredible melting of consensus reality that resulted for both him, and many others of the Beats. He suggested that there are "hot spots" in cultural engineering, and vehicles of convenience that accelerate the inevitable for those reckless and/or courageous enough to risk all for a possibility of disincarnation, of leaving behind the host physical body forever in a necessary transmutation into otherness, alien being, that must be the only valid goal of any of us if forward motion and discovery are truly our agenda. In traditional Western Occulture this letting go of all preconceptions, all expectations, all value systems, all inherited moral imprints, all concepts of SELF preservation, and all distictions is referred to as "The Abyss".
"See a cliff, jump off." Old TOPI Proverb.
Both Spare and Gysin lived to pursue, and attain, new dimensions. They understood the hunger to pursue successful systems of sorcery, not knowledge. This alone made overt collaboration with magickal groups impossible. Where the need for nostalgic elitism, power implied by academic recall, and self-image measured by the length of one's bookshelf far too often camouflage mere self-agrandisemeant, and the essence of motivation is the servility of others. Gysin incorporated tape-recorders, permutations, projections, trance musics, mathematical formulae. Spare incorporated his own body, sexuality, and dimensional fluidity. Both were prophets of portals of virtuality and developments in quantum neurology that later became possible, and, as egalitarian (to a degree) access to cyberspace and other synthetic worlds expands globally, now become at the very least more likely, I would propose inevitable. The world we appreciate in a mirror. That world where as we get close, appears to be a large, and equally as "real" as this supposedly more physical consensus reality; and the world of Spare, where the frame of the image is arbitrary, where creatures, and perceptual environments are frozen in a precise cryogenic graphic. These worlds are mere precursor of the apparently limitless, and multi-dimensional possibilities heralded by the microchip. This century wills to be remembered eventually as the century during which the cut-up, the splitting of atom by relativity; of mind by psychedelic compounds and of linear thinking by cultural nihilism were the primary themes. Spilling over into social fragmentation, online alienation, and a dataglut that by its very scale, insists on acceleration of response by our brains, and a highly developed perceptual skill of instant, and arbitrary assembly "to see what is really there" as W. S. Burroughs has stated.
"Lord Patchogue and his reflection slowly advance towards each other. They consider each other in silence, they come to a halt, they bow. A great dizziness seizes hold of Lord Patchogue. It was brief, easily done, and magickal: forehead first, he suddenly springs forwards. He strikes the glass, which shatters, but there is no one on the other side."
Jaques Rigaut.
Spare was aware that mystery and magick, in themselves, generate at the very least a morbid fascination, and reaction in humanE persons. He consciously used his books, his twisted Beardsley-esque graphics , his atavistic writings, to attract our interest after his physical death. Not for reasons of ego. I would contend that it was to reactivate his "mind" and re-animate his psyche. Sound far-fetched. Well, personal anecdote, take it or leave I.T.
One of the Spare paintings that I used to own (now in the collection of Chris Stein) was called "The Ids". Every New Years Eve strange things would occur. Most noticeably, the two faces of Spare himself, that faced each other, would re-animate. Many different guests would suddenly gasp and say, did you know that the faces in that painting have "come alive". "They are arguing." None of these observers knew who Spare was, or any of his, or my own, ideas. Eventually I checked and found that Spare died on New Years Eve 1956. A medium called Madame Bruna, also, on a social visit, was shocked and disturbed by the "Mrs. Paterson" image. In fact, it was these repeated witnessings of the faces becoming real, moving, talking, changing, that led to the thoughts in this essay. In the case of the "Mrs. Paterson" picture, nobody felt anything malevolent. Just a powerful experience, of people "trapped in a mirror". "The Ids" however, was different. Something one could only think of as "bad" always happened when it animated. It got so predictable and incontrovertible that I took to putting it in a cupboard, facing the wall for a period before, and after New Years Eve each year. The last phenomenon was particularly odd. Before travelling abroad I arranged for two people to caretake my house in Brighton. I warned them, almost like in a fable like Hansel and Gretel, that they must not touch, move, or hang up the Spare painting "The Ids". Which was in the loft space of the house, facing the wall. I told them it may sound superstitious or stupid, but please trust me on this one. I guess, inevitably, they felt this as a challenge and chose to not only turn the picture facing outwards in the loft, but to spend a night staring at it and sleeping in the same space. Apparently, as they tell it, after an hour or so, the picture seemed to fill the room. Spare argued with himself, as usual. Then a new thing happened. The central face of a one woman (there were three women's faces above Spare's heads) came alive too. The picture seemed to grow into a huge mirror, filling the visual perception of one whole end of the loft. The room seemed to fill with green mist, and then holding her hand out, this woman walked out of the "painting" and came towards them.. In the inanimate painting, the heads are floating in a green field, no bodies. They have heavy make up on. Like the prostitutes Spare favoured for his psycho-sexual sorcery. Both people paniced, and ran from the loft. Locking the door behind them. From that time on, various destructive events affected the house, and them. They had let loose, in classic horror film style, an entity, that WAS malevolent, and with it's own agenda. One of the two people became alcoholic, both had mental breakdowns. By the way, Chris Stein WAS aware of this side of the paintings Astory, when he purchased it.
Spare had been shrewd enough to make ALL his secrets non verbal, and non-linear. Not one explanation of these secrets is contained overtly in his writings. He was, in the best covert cultural traditions, working for his SELF alone. Only the atavistic hintings, and the "Virtual Mirror" drawings and paintings can articulate, and bear witness to, his phenomenal achievements.
"The Universe is a creative PROCESS carried on by man's imagination, an operative power capable of becoming more supple, more animate." Teilhard de Chardin.
What is happening in these certain key pictures? I would propose a few speculations. All ideas have an image. We are originally an heirglyphic species, before the restrictive linguistic and alphabetical systems we use now were adopted. Adopted I might add, purely for reasons of control, and the compression of both vision and potential in all of us. All the materials used to create and fix an image are material. They are formed of patterns of atoms and molecules, charged by certain energies that hold their specific clusters together in some way. Modern psychology also tends to accept that Ideas are material entities, like animals and plants. All mythological ideas, Jung suggests, are ESSENTIALLY REAL, and far older than any philosophy. They originated in primal perceptions, correspondences and experiences. The catalytic element that regenerates a reaction between entitic Ideas and a spectator and that favours parapsychological events, is the presence of an active archetype. In the specific case of Spare's virtual mirror art, this element can be anything from an obvious glyph (condensing and compressing a desire), a non-decorative aesthetic arrangement, or in the most intense "portal" works, an invisible charge of energy which somehow calls the deepest, instictual layers of the psyche into action. The archetype is a borderline phenomenon, an acausal connecting priciple, closest in explanation to deliberately controlled, SELF-conscious synchronicity. When Spare describes in certain of his texts "Self-Love" as, if you will, the engine of his sorcery, I believe he means SELF-CONSCIOUS, yet egoless. When he uses the word CHAOS, which he profoundly championed from the start of the century, he is leaving a key evidentiary clue and amusing himself. Austin Osman Spare's "CHAOS" is both a sugnature, and a signpost into future T.I.M.E. ( ChDVH (CH) = JOY=23) Thus we get CH-A.O.S. Both his name, and his confession of secret sorcery.
" Art is the instinctive application of the knowledge latent in the subconscious" A.O.S.
After Mrs. Paterson died, Spare was waiting to be inside her again. Fused with her sexual-magickal energy. Inside her also, in the sense of two liquids mixing to create a third amalgam. Two cosciousness' as well, the "THIRD MIND" of Brion Gysin. This is not romantic fiction. This is a prediction of some of the inter-dimensional forays that are subscribed to very convincingly by Terence McKenna, and other such botanical voyagers. In this key picture by Spare, what we are really seeing is both his projection into the actual future moment of his own death, and the way Mrs. Paterson looked exactly at the moment of her death overlaid. His aim in all his sorcery was to reunite his spirit and hers, captured within the dimensions of his artworks so that through this PROCESS they could both quite literally, live forever. An interesting twist on the idea of great art making the artist immortal! In this case I mean immortal quite literally. They do still live. Just as our concepts and assumptions about reality, and varieties of perception have been forever revised by the advent of virtual reality, and quantum psychology, so our concepts of linear existence are confounded by the manifestation held in stasis in these virtual mirrors.
Keep in mind all ways the Cocteau "mirrors" the passing through. The "other side" where different rules of physics and continuity apply. We are finally accepting that everything is truly in constant flux, that the malleability of all matter and all constructs is not just theoretical, that T.I.M.E. is equally an energy and matter as flesh, and that projected images and virtual worlds are as valid and vibrant as the basic inherited consensus possibility that we tend to arrive trapped in squealing and pissing from our mother's vaginas. We are witnessing the realisation that everything everyone says is true. That evertything BELIEVED is real. That bodies are mere vehicles for transporting our BRAIN and that mortality is primarily a philosophical control process. Why, my children, even that dear old anarchist construct "The Bible" was assigned the alchemical message more significant than Mr. Robertson might chose to consider.
"Have I not said that faith can move mountains" some old prophet or other!
"The marvellous is not rare, incredulity is stronger than miracles"
J.Rigaut.
Apart from the more dramatic animations already mentioned, many unprompted witnesses have been shocked to see Mrs. Paterson's eyes close, open, cry, her whole head turn. Quite literally a living portrait. Magick makes "dreams" real, makes the impossible possible, focusses the Will to...Throughout occult circles in all ages crystal, water, polished metal, mirrors of all types have been used for oracular purposes. Spare's massive achievement is that he recognised the potential of art, of image, to be the most powerful magickal mirror of all. A window in T.I.M.E. An interface with death. An interdimensional modem. In his art he captures not just an image but a life-force. What seems to happen is that the individuals consciousness' contained within the art remain dormant in this reality until they come into contact with the minds of certain others, or as an intersection with linear T.I.M.E. sets in motion a preprogrammed "software" sequence of interactions. Primal, atavistic "aboriginal" peoples knew this. Sometimes facilitated with botanical catalysts they would invest immense and potentially limitless powers in specific totem images and glyphs or sigils. This use of the image as scrying mirror and as neurological nuclear energy is very different as a function of "art" to the post-patronage, post-craftsperson 20th Century norm of Art, with that horribly big "A". In contemporary elitist art you actually don't get anything much back except aesthetics. You certainly don't get mum-mification and T.I.M.E. travel! But we must never forget that all art grew from sorcery, and from the concealment of gnostic, and alchemical proceedures from those who would be "King". Art was synonymous with, and a direct aspect of Magick. It was functional, and it was dedicated to the processing of immortality, and the opening and preservation of portals. ( By the way, I would argue that "cyberspace, or the PSYCHOSPHERE as I would prefer it was called, is an extension of this perception and function in just the same way and we are just glimpsing the beginnings of the somewhat cack-handed access we've so far realised.)
Anyway...Spare achieved the forgotten. That which vested interests in all status quos considered impossible, even blasphemous; a two way comunication where HIS image reacts to and with the viewer. It has a life of its own. The nearest parallel, a virtual mirror in which you can see another world., one that we cannot touch, the glass remaining solid and frustrating us. What this energy held within his images is doing is transcending the barriers of observed T.I.M.E. so that what we are seeing is a five-dimensional object or image. This form of energy wills to have existed at all times, and wills to exist at all times.
"One cannot traverse the mirror with impunity,it is not possible." J. Rigaut.
An objective (Hah!) and critical survey of the available data would establish that perceptions occur as if in part there were no space, in part no T.I.M.E. Space and T.I.M.E. are not only the most immediate "certainties" for us, they are the most misleading, doomed to be discredited as separate and abstracted states imminently. They are also usually considered empirical certainties too since everything observable is said to happen as though it occured in Space and T.I.M.E. In the face of this overwhelming "certainty" it is understandable that "reason" should have the greatest difficulty in granting validity to the peculiar nature of "delerious" phenomena, or paranormal events. But anyone who does some amount of justice to the
facts
cannot but admit that their apparent space-timelessness is their most essential quality. The fact that we are totally unable to imagine a form of existence without Space or T.I.M.E. by no means proves that such an existence is, in itself, impossible, and, therefore, just as we cannot DRAW from an appearance of space-timelessness, any ABSOLUTE conclusion about a possible space-timeless form of existence, so we are not entitled to conclude from the apparent space-time quality of our perception that there is NO FORM of existence without Space and T.I.M.E. I would imagine though that any of you fortunate enough to have had a particularly enervating moment of psychedelic experience will be more empathetic to the speculative space-timeless state!
"The reverse is just as good as the right side:it is necessary to wait there."
Jaques Rigaut.
Just as "physics" now tends to allow for "limitedness of space", a relativisation, it is beginning with Catastrophe Theory/Fuzzy Geometry/Chaos Maths/and other quantum disciplines to posit a "limitedness" of both T.I.M.E. and Causality. In short, nothing is fixed, "IT'S OFFICIAL!", the possibilities alone are endless ( the banner/slogan of a magazine I founded in 1968 called COPULATORY HADES).
"Conscious looking is a search for verification of the notions that impel the search, and all ways has a circular mirroring element within I.T."Genesis P-Orridge.
In Spares most critical images, it seems a medium has been synthesised whereby the essence that survives death, but is usually beyond our communication, has been transmitted into an object that we are familiar with i.e. a painting or drawing. And we are therefore familiar with trying to interpret or receive information from. Because of the familiarity of the medium of painting, we don't put up paranormal, sceptical, or too many emotional barriers. We expect to try and see what the artist wanted to present, wanted to communicate ( though personally I see little of that in contemporary "deceptual art" as Gysin used to say) If Spare said he was going to capture himself within the frame and canvass, and facilitate immortality, or at least, a very different medium of mortality, demonstrating "life" after apparent death, most observers would switch off, or scream ridicule tinged with an inate fear of the unknowable. There would be an interference with the transmission. Because Spare seduces us by allowing us to dupe our SELF into assuming what we view is an artwork, a picture, when in fact it is a "photograph" of a mirror of an actual, or virtual reality, a mortality software if you will to, because of the self-deception we remain open-minded. This open-mindedness is essential to the functioning of the sorcery at the critical T.I.M.E. intersections that animate I.T. (New Year's Eve for example) and increases the chances that the phenomenon of actual physical changes.
The observer, if fortunate enough, wills to see that which many of us in this rightly post-existentialist age choose not to believe in, or to be heartily sceptical of, namely living, moving, changing images of a post-death entity, or brain-essence. This is all as acutely programmed as any software, except, allah be praised, it's NOT binary, not an either/or programme. Which probably explains Spare's success, as, surprise surprise we DO NOT, never did, live in an either/or universe, and all binary systems are fallacious, serving only to block the righteous evolution and maximising of potential of our species, a species programmed in it's DNA for only one ultimate function, to transcend all need for a physical body, fixed in linear T.I.M.E. and Space. You will see this entity reacting to you, it receives and transmits direct into your conscious five senses. It must also be transmitting directly into your other levels of consciousness too, and your other hypereal senses. Presumably we transmit back to what is there, so what is there wills to change by absorbtion over the years as it reacts to and is triggered by all the various observers. All these factors mingle and mix, and mutate. Mutation, after all being the sincerest form of flattery.
The "soul" (advert for the BRAIN as Dr. Timothy Leary once suggested to me) is generally said to be visible through the eyes, the mirror of the soul. The eyes, jewels of actual brain exposed directly to the outside. The neuro-visual screen of the BRAIN. In the key Spare work centered on Mrs. Paterson and executed in 1928, her eyes are neither open, nor shut, and this is true in many of Spare's virtual mirror works. They are neither rejecting the possibility of seeing a captured "soul", nor openly inviting I.T. This half-open, half-shut limbo suggests responsibility lies with the viewer to choose whether or not to commune with any frisky entities that manifest. In fact, on many occasions an interesting further mutation frequently occurs. The eyes become ALIEN, not disimilar from the classic Schwa portrayal. As if coated with an almost reptilian film of non-human skin. This alien quality seems to be amplified by Spare's technique of painting himself old when he was in fact young, and of course later, painting himself young when he was by then old. Forming an infinite envelope of T.I.M.E. in effect. Spare moves back and forth through T.I.M.E. as he succeeds in presenting us, via the image with the apparently impossible, or miraculous - IMMORTALITY. Sorcery has all ways made effective and functional use of the process of reversal to confound expectation even at the root of the most sacred and central scientific assumptions.
"Lord Patchogue launches himself through the mirror a second time. A crash of splintering glass. Lord Patchogue stands before another mirror, facing Lord Patchogue. On his forehead, the cut is bleeding once again. Lord Patchogue repeats "I am a man trying not to die" And when he passes through the third mirror amidst a noise which is now familiar, he knows that he wills to meet Lord Patchogue whose forehead will be bleeding more heavily in the fourth mirror and who will tell him "I am a man trying not to die".
Jaques Rigaut.
The psyche, in its deepest reaches, seems well able to participate in an existence beyond the web of Space and T.I.M.E. This dimension is often dubbed "eternity", or "infinity" yet it actually seems to behave; if we for the moment take Spare's art as repreentative and more vitally, FUNCTIONAL, and in no way symbolic; as either a one way or two way mirror dependent for it's operation upon a translation of the unconscious, into a communicable image that bonds the actual atomic structures of the graphic image with its driving forces unlocked from the unconscious into a fixed or mobile source of power dependent upon previous viewers, and with more critically, our own individual abilities to interface directly with it.
Accept nothing, assume nothing, all ways look further, be open-eyed as well as open-minded and don't kid your SELF." Genesis P-Orridge.
Keeping the speculation simple for now. If in theory, as all matter is actually vibrating tiny particles with lots of groovy names, it is just possible that we could walk through walls. Then it is also theoretically possible to lock clusters of the same particles and energy into the fabric of an image giving it the ability to move, change, alter and animate its content. The only gap of credibility being first hand experience. We don't usually believe anything until it happens to us. We only really know what we have experienced, belief is rooted in recognition.
Every now and then as I type, you'll not be surprised to know, I wonder if this is going to sound too "out there", "crazed" as you the observer read it. I already know it gets a little opaque, for which my less than humble apologies, and of course it assumes you know what the fuck I am referring to vis a vis the paintings themselves. Oh well, tough. This subject leads us to a bigger "picture" a discussion of the parallels between virtual space, the creation of deities, immortality and the Psychosphere from a Processean perspective that will to arrive on another occasion. But I digress...
Imagination opens to synthesis larger than the sum total of reason. New images reflect more than logical synthesis can produce. There is a radical discontinuity in every truly creative idea or discovery.
"I.T.'s all a matter of T.I.M.E.." Genesis P-Orridge.
Projection direct from image to viewer involves more than the logical mode of thinking. An idea cannot exist separate from an image. For example, the Virgin Mary image embodies the idea of "compassion" perhaps. A Goddess or God is a figurative image of an idea. Images are the root language of social freedom and self expansion as much as words and alphabets are the roots of social control and self limitation. Science attempts to explain the omniverse objectively (yes, even now most of them) therefore it cannot explain "art" or more particularly the unique effects or phenomena Spare generates within "art". This is not a possible function of Science. (To be fair Science is, now, thankfully, beginning to include the point of viewing in its theories to great effect.) Science cannot tell us why Spare's images can alter, why his faces change, eyes open and close, colours vary. Photographs are said to steal "souls" they certainly capture a moment in T.I.M.E. Freeze I.T. So do the images and oracles of "art". For art was originally revelatory, prophetic, functional, shamanic. Fully integrated into every detail and aspect of life.
"He who transcends Time escapes necessity." Austin Osman Spare.
Spare's images capture the PROCESS of creation, the thoughts of the creator, and the memories of the viewer.
(CHANGE THE WAY TO PERCEIVE AND CHANGE ALL MEMORY - G.P-O.)
These memories of the viewer recall past events and feelings that are more compact, briefer than when they took place originally. They are compressed. Memories are Past-T.I.M.E. accessed into Present-T.I.M.E. T.I.M.E. is not however linear, all T.I.M.E. exists similtaneously and points in every direction similtaneously. I.T. is quaquaversal, omnipresent, in fact, all the usual definitions of "GOD" in the Catholic Church. There is really no reason why Spare's paintings and images should not capture T.I.M.E., thought and experience, then recreate and expand it in the viewers mind.
"All nature is a vast reflection of that which is within us, or else we could not know it." Austin Osman Spare.
Subjective experience is no less "real" than objective conjecture. All roads lead to Rome in a mirror to mirror function. This function of mirroring is found in the trance state in a simple direct way. The higher techniques of idea and artist's illusory skills makes effects and phenomena active through the dimensions of Spacelessness and Timelessness in ways normally consigned to the sceptical parking lot of modem existence. T.I.M.E. mirrors T.I.M.E.
"Embrace reality by imagination". Austin Osman Spare.
Years of trying to rationalise inexplicable "experiences" dis-integrate and only the most extreme speculations and constructs of impossibility begin to get close to giving answers that we see and feel. We are "HERE TO GO" as Brion Gysin succinctly stated. But not just here to go into inner and outer space, though that PROCESS is one part and conceptual parcel of the final aspiration. We are here to go OUT of the physical body. To enter the solid pool of T.I.M.E. To be fully integrated into that matter, of T.I.M.E., that connects us with EVERY moment, in every direction, and every parallel or conflicting omniverse that ever was, wills to be, or intends to be. Intention is the key and the PROCESS is the product.
"The Life Force is not blind. We are." Austin Osman Spare.
T.I.M.E must be reassessed as a "SOLID" as a form of "CONSCIOUS-NESS" as the key element in the atomic scale. As the covert energy hidden in the Million and One names of deities. Life is ONLY a brief physical manifestation outside the circles of T.I.M.E. We can re-enter the T.I.M.E. pool, and we can re-manifest. This is exactly the same as entering the virtual wordl of "cyberspace/psychosphere" when you log on. Our appreciation of the implication of logging on must be developed from this deification perspective. Once logged on, we are vulnerable to all the agendas, traumas, neuroses, and brilliances of all other logged on individuals. We have re-entered a pool. No different to the pool of T.I.M.E., or the gene-pool, or "racial memory/DNA" pools. This pool I will to name the "
SPATIAL MEMORY
". Our understanding of time travel, physicality, possibility, and the malleability of T.I.M.E. and existence in a new contrived virtual world is prophecised by Austin Osman Spare, by Brion Gysin, by many artists and creators. This shift in our perception of T.I.M.E. and mortality is going to be the most important arena of discussion and philosophical, cultural engineering in the 21st Century.
"What is death? A great mutation to your next SELF." Austin Osman Spare.
The primary quest in Art, Life, Science, Brain has become a quest for reliable, repeatable methods for inter-dimensional travel and communication. Beyond the body and through the prophetic portals. Einstein, Spare, Gysin, Leary, McKenna and all the other visionary synthesists have contributed to the cumulative effect upon which sorcery is based. We can all play. By being aware of the implication of logging on. By designing conceptual and physical grids within the Psychosphere to facilitate accurate post-physical travel. By shouldering the responsibility we have accessed of "GOD/GODDESS BUILDING" our actions are the PROCESS that leads to the final unity and the vanquishing once and for all of any, any, EITHER/OR paradigms at last. This is the T.I.M.E. which shall end. This is the calendar that ceases to exist. T.I.M.E. and LIFE are not synonymous or fixed. Both are solids and can be shaped to our WILL TO...
"The man trying not to die has propelled himself into the very essence of the mirror; he walks automatically, without curiosity; he manipulates time; he speaks with refraction; he communes with sight itself, without expectation; because he cannot do otherwise. With each step another mirror shatters. Another life is captured. All times intersect in his eyes."
Genesis P-Orridge/Jaques Rigaut.
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE California 1995.
1.To be continued with a follow, detailed explication of the five Process-Eon Spheres of influence and the internal implication for immortality via the "internet" or Psychosphere.
2. For readers wanting to see/read more of Spare's works and ideas we suggest you write to the: TRANSMEDIA FOUND...NATION, P.O.Box 11534,OAKLAND, CA. 94611, USA. for a liist of available materials. |
