Esoteric speech, says Federico Campagna, is speech among friends. Campagna is a brilliant Sicilian anarchist philosopher. He’s the author of Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. Campagna’s thought explores world-making. We make worlds voluntarily with others, he says. These are anarchist cells. Campagna’s thought draws upon Platonism and Neoplatonism, Heidegger, anarchists like Max Stirner and Colin Ward, mystics like Simone Weil and Henry Corbin, Iranian Islamic philosophers of the 12th century. And somehow Campagna is now himself a Catholic, as he declared on a recent podcast. His next book, slated for publication early next year, is called Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents. By speaking esoterically, we admit other dimensions of reality — parts that can’t be spoken given the language we speak. Descriptive language alone is not enough. Make of speech instead an event, a happening, like multidimensional correspondence chess. Build a device — equal parts database, memex, and volvelle, inspired by Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu.
Tag: Volvelle
Wednesday February 26, 2020
Life appears as stories wrapped in stories, circles wrapped in circles, as on the rotating wheel of a volvelle, by means of which the times they are a-changin’. Sarah and I imagine transforming a fire station into a dream home, as did Robert Creeley and the Ghostbusters.
Wednesday September 4, 2019
Constellations of thought rotate around like the cover of Led Zeppelin III or the wheel of a rotary telephone, an object common to domestic space during the era of my childhood, replaced over time by cellphones. Thinking of the Led Zeppelin album, I kneel beside my unalphabetized, unsystematized wall of vinyl whispering, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
There it is, a psychedelic thing of beauty. “Visual Creations by Zacron,” reads the circular stamp beside the credits on the inner sleeve. I guess this device I’m imagining is a volvelle, a wheel chart featuring concentric circles with pointers. Volvelles were used in medieval Europe to calculate the phases of the sun and moon. “While at the Royal Academy Schools,” I learn, “Zacron produced a rotating book” called One Line and a Box.
Users could ask the book “questions about their interaction with the environment,” as they might using devices like the Tarot or the I Ching. From this earlier work, Zacron derived the idea for the design of Led Zeppelin III. My courses begin to shape up into elaborate nested allegories.
Trance-Scripts 