let's play the game
Imperative
Refused salvation leads to mandated participation.
A realized infection.
The tick(ing)…..I beseech you scratch.
The dream
is turned
-
Inside -
out
on
-
Itself –
Forgotten.
Suffocate.
Osculate.
Refute.
Repute.
It’s not anal if you like it.
Nothing is supposed to fit.
The raw is something to be extracted, not exiled.
All structure is obstruction.
The broken plow saw (not) the worm.
Self is the grounding familiar of distraction.
A dramatic method of dressing up the emptiness
like a paper doll.
No purse is without a bounty.
No dream without a reality.
Space….space…space….space…
So much easier to defeat than time.
Take me to the pages I’m not allowed to read,
And I’ll etch you worlds you could never conceive.
A trip to forget
– not to be –
Forgotten.
Dispelling a dream long rotten.
Let's return to this idea of a story space for a minute here, as that is what our lives are to us. People are addicted to stories, as evidenced by the ubiquitous screen staring back into each one's face - a t.v., a phone, a computer, a movie theatre.
Even the religious books are for the most part only understood as stories of people, and which for the most part place the believer into some overarching tale of good and evil and give (dubious) models for behavior. Actors and actresses are well-paid for their ability to call forth emotional states in themselves and thus evoke in the audience empathetic strains.
People need stories because they want to feel, because their own story is not grand, or interesting enough - they want to escape into some other life. Countries and peoples also have their own histories that dictate the meaning of being a part of that group and where it is headed. Histories may as well be fiction, or rather maybe they function analogously to fiction - they are after all, merely high stories.
And that brings us back to the idea of a story space, first at the level of an individual, generally starting by being born into a family and having little control but gradually asserting oneself and shaping one's identity in relation to the others, fleshing out the role to be played in that family story. Growing older, more choices open up, and the choices which influence which space we end up in are predominantly based on the people with whom we associate, and the terms of that association.
The world opens up via interpersonal relationships, doing things and going places - talking in one sense or another, building a role, building yourself. Trajectories in social space, story space as I prefer to call it, are primarily dictated by conversations the ability to chit chat or work, fit, oneself into the story that another lives in, has written for their self.
That this is done with words, seems to be a further indication of just how much our existence takes place not in anything like physical reality, but in something more like a book and a space of words. In the beginning were the words, and the words were the world and were the Gods and Devils. And the roles were built into the book first audibly with sounds and their psychological correlative emotions they call forth and then tied, consolidated to and into external sensation forms.
Larger series, congeries, of sounds then structure larger ideas or stories as countries and peoples. In fact, all ideas are stories and have emotional / moral content, even if these are subtle and hidden..
"Who teaches us to be normal when we're one of a kind?"
- from Legion
“If you’re not the hero of your own novel, then what kind of novel is it? You need to do some heavy editing”
- Terence McKenna
“you know what the definition of a hero is? Someone who gets other people killed”
- from Serenity
legba lodge: a critical appraisal
(excerpts from a text by P. Phosphorous)
“The finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie”
- Theodor W. Adorno
And when have these intrepid explorers of the darker reaches of consciousness and Being ever completed a text?
Indeed, from the beginning of their published output (which, we note, has always been publicly available for free online, surely the present and future of publishing, and moreover essentially under copyleft), this obscure while yet not obscurantist group has sought, to paraphrase Nietzsche, to say more in a paragraph than others say in a whole book. Thus do they leave their work open-ended and open to interpretation, further development and even improvement by their readers.
Thus shunning fortune and fame, apparently the fashionable modus operandi for occultists the world over, they have sought only to contribute creatively and productively to the esoteric conversation.
Bucking the trend of quantity over quality and in the firm belief that creative inspiration (in the originary sense of the breathing of thoughts shining brightly like moving light(s) in a direct transmission from the very spirits) cannot be rushed, they have pushed forward in spite of the potential costs to their senses and sanity, like some esoteric version of Hunter S. Thompson on one of his more intensive & poignant trips through the modern mind-scape.
*
In light of these aforementioned efforts to set up their texts as just one side of a conversation with their readers, and out of respect for them, we will not attempt to summarize or outline the ideas presented in the legba lodge opus, but will simply outline a few of the more notable salient recurring themes of these inspiring texts.
Perhaps one of the most significant of these, certainly to the close reader, is their emphasis on the classical zen technique of 'first thought, best thought', i.e. a de-emphasis on over-editing and over-analysis of their own concepts & the expression thereof; a trust and confidence in intuitive responses to reality.
As if to underscore this point, one of the group's published editions, namely LL Whatev, seems to consist entirely of automatic writing(s). In our view, this is merely the most obvious example of how that zen methodology (or emphatic lack of methodology, vide supra) asks the reader to, in turn, respond by attuning to their own unconscious impressions and deep memories, certainly an under-emphasized but nonetheless critical aspect of our everyday lived experience.
The concept of the hero is as old as humanity itself, although it has been elevated to a new and central significance in the contemporary cultural milieu, what with the proliferation of superhero stories and critical, revisionist (out-)takes in all modern media.
For their part, the masked (wo)men of legba lodge have addressed this theme head-on, subtly questioning just what it means to be a real hero while pointing out that we are all, by definition, the heroes of our own narratives in that we are literally at their center.
Alluding to Joseph Campbell's thesis that we should not take this challenge lightly, the group repeatedly refer to their own personal "heroes' journey's" while noting that this experience cannot, by definition, be generalized except in the sense of certain markers of progress along the path of initiation, which, ever changing, has ever been a central and noble objective of the human experience.
Another significant, albeit potentially controversial, thematic thread running through these publications has been the repeated reference to confidence tricks and other parallel modes of deceit. While it is all too facile to over-simplify and subsequently judge or criticize such positions, it is important to keep in mind, in this respect, that profound quote by post-modern innovator and literary genius William S. Burroughs, specifically "to speak is to lie — to live is to collaborate".
In other words, the view of these esoteric experimentationalists can be summarized by saying that if any attempt to reduce the infinity of lived experience to mere words, pictures, or any expression, for that matter, is fundamentally reductionist, then we might as well have fun with it. We, for our part, certainly don't doubt that they do!
