Pint glasses clank together in a bin behind a bar emptied of patrons on a gray evening — the eve of another workweek. Pubs of this sort are all wood, leather, and tweed. Old-timey, tradition-bound. But comfortable all the same. I’ve been reading up on witches these past few days, Alex Mar’s book Witches in America leading me through a brief history featuring figures like Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crowley and groups like the OTO. I’m of mixed mind regarding this history, curious but wary. The power of these traditions seems undeniable — but what are the principles guiding this power, and toward what end?
Saturday June 1, 2019
I sit in a striped deck chair in London’s St. James Park and dissolve into the multilingual surround, replacing sight with sound. This trip has been a humbling experience, a peeling away of old forms in anticipation of something new. Where are the echoing voices that used to speak so readily? Is it wrong of me to feel like I’ve been abandoned and forsaken? I presume this, too, shall pass.
Friday May 31, 2019
These first few days in London have fed me an abundance of inputs — colors, textures, lectures, exhibitions. Here I am in Spa Fields, a small park behind Exmouth Market, struggling to assimilate what I’ve encountered. I attended a wonderful event last night at The Horse Hospital called “Towards a Progressive Magic.” The talks by Amy Hale and Phil Legard spoke directly to my current interest in esotericism and the occult, but a path hasn’t yet revealed itself. What exactly is the issue? What am I searching for? Statues? Pianos? Pigeons? The John Soane House was a blast yesterday afternoon, with its crypt and its post-apocalyptic bird’s-eye view of the Bank of England, as was this morning’s tour of the Globe Theatre and the show I caught this afternoon at the Tate Modern devoted to Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning.
Thursday May 30, 2019
I wake from a series of vivid anxiety dreams and Trump-inspired apocalyptic nightmares. The first reminds me of J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island retold in the style of Angela Carter. A grifter drives her car off an embankment into a stand of trees. Still a bit woozy from her crash, she wanders into an enchanted garden, at the center of which stands the twenty-first-century equivalent of a witch’s cottage. When the grifter learns that the cottage is for sale, she poses as a potential buyer. In a second dream, by far the more frightening of the two, a pair of middle-aged shock jocks wait in a hotel room preparing for a visit from the president. The shock jocks look oddly similar to one another. Picture Sir Richard Branson as a pair of coke-addled stringy-haired Texans. Close-up of a swastika carved into the bun of a McDonald’s cheeseburger. The POV withdraws to reveal my dream-self watching the shock jocks on a monitor, as if they were part of a feed from a surveillance camera. A woman enters the room and with infinite care suggests that I get my plans in order for the time ahead — at which point I wake.
Wednesday May 29, 2019
Sarah and I pause to rest our feet at a burrito bar midafternoon after touring the National Gallery, where we stood transfixed beside Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” and Salvator Rosa’s “Witches at Their Incantations.” Names come tumbling into consciousness, forming pathways for future research: John Michell, Gerald Gardner, Jeff Nuttall, Count Stenbock, Ithell Colquhoun.
Tuesday May 28, 2019
We arrive to the disappointment of a three-story wall-to-wall stained-carpet nightmare of an apartment, diagonal cut-ups stacked atop a windowless basement. What a fucking shithole. Such is the consensus on this first day as we take stock of our surroundings. The sooner we get out of here, the better.
Monday May 27, 2019
Aggro roadways, Trump paraphernalia, landscapes crusted with ill-gotten wealth: up from these like a seagull I rise and take flight. Goodbye America, and good riddance. The mere fact of you bankrupts the world of justice. No theodicy could ever correct your persistence there on the other side of the Atlantic, burning the earth, melting the poles, laying waste to all prior ways of being. Yet here I am, a product of this spoiled history: an American abroad.
Sunday May 26, 2019
How about groaning laundry rooms and animated films that scare little kids? How about blue mermaids with turquoise chains? By following a few simple rules, we can feel at home amid the alchemical symbolism of Arthur Machen’s “The White People.” A librarian from my childhood confides over my shoulder about the limits of her compassion. She refuses to care, she says, for those who come back sunburned after a day at the beach, likening these latter to hungry ones who refuse to eat. I smile and pretend not to differ, even as I ruminate about what it would mean to approach the Tarot as a book, or the fragments of one.
Saturday May 25, 2019
My phantom appetite reopens old wounds as I drive along the south shore of Long Island, a place of radical injustice, like a theme park dedicated to the triumph of Italian Fascism. The planet groans beneath the weight of Blue Lives Matter monster trucks as La Famiglia orders an assembly of scungilli for an air show. How am I to practice zazen amid these sites of trauma?
Friday May 24, 2019
I plug in Walter Wegmuller’s Tarot and float down a canal.
Sarah and her colleague J. are preparing to teach a course about witches this summer. The course includes a screening of Suspiria, and who did J. run into at the Leonora Carrington exhibition this afternoon? None other than one of the stars of the recent Suspiria remake, Tilda Swinton. Let us muse upon this most witchy of synchronicities as geese fly overhead.
Trance-Scripts 