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Magic Archetypes: The Art Behind the Science of Conjuring

I am an Attendant of the Borgesian Circulating Depository. Duties: 1. honoring visionary ancients who were centuries or millennia before their time; 2. tilting the game board so as to cast everything in a new light; 3. celebrating allegory and metaphor as scenic shortcuts to wisdom; 4. discovering the macrocosm in the microcosm; 5. measuring non-material forces which nonetheless carry weight (Umberto Eco); 6. tracking extraordinary tempests in mundane teacups; 7. finding mystical analogues to scientific breakthroughs—putting the super into the natural, the other into the worldly, the meta into the physical, the para into the normal, the magical into realism; 8. puzzling over hidden, deeper meaning; 9. carrying the key, even when the lock has been lost; 10. identifying archetypes at play; 11. studying the legend, even when the map is blank; 12. searching through the deepest shadows for the bright light that cast them; 13. delving into the unfathomable in wordless awe of the inexplicable; 15. offering the inscrutable its due scrutiny; 16. endowing branches of Borgesian catacombs; 17. diagramming the sacred syllables in the mumbo jumbo; 18. believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast; 19. building 3D models of M.C. Escher's visual illusions; 20. crafting something out of nothing; 21. designing floor plans for memory palaces; 15. plundering cultural detritus; 16. bringing warmth to fuzzy logic; 17. looking through trompe l'oeil windows; 18. freeing radicals; 19. centering on marginalia; 20. navigating the ocean that roars within the seashell; 21. making the past perfect and the future less tense; 22. seeking a grand unification of hard science, soft science, and ethereal science; 23. resisting the belligerence of ignorance; 24. erecting signs on dotted lines; 25. taking a stand for poetic justice; 26. tracing constellations in the starry-eyed; 27. fighting to cure anhedonia; 28. getting in stitches over how many angels can dance on the point of a needle; 29. exploring intangible powers, from those celebrated by the world's great religions to square roots to the literary tradition (Umberto Eco); 30. directing good brain power to fanciful ends.

"It is the custom here that we go just a little beyond, that we consider each direction with the possibilities of madness and its grand, all-inclusive theatrics, where even minor dreams are worth their weight in gold, when balanced against the darkness out of which they have gestated and taken their cues from the fiercest and loveliest of all the animals." —J. Karl Bogartte

Ask me anything...

February 10, 2013

“Will you take a glass?” The serpents are emblazoned with death, destruction, murder, mischief, madness, brutality, robbery, and blasphemy. From The Working Man’s Friend and Family Instructor, 1833.

2:30pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLN-MydrWzRW

(Notes: 489)