Chris Mahon, Author at The Occult Triangle Lab

January 27, 2015

Ultima Thule

Have you ever heard of Ultima Thule? It was supposed to be an island up in the farthest, coldest reaches of the world, but because cartography back in the Age of Exploration was a lot of alcohol and making shit up, “Ultima Thule” eventually became a name for any place that was unchartable, unreachable. Sea exploration was special that way—there was a sense that, maybe, the world had no borders at all, and things just kept going. Mapping the ocean was mapping the boundaries of everything, and if you Ultima Thule Map read histories of voyages to the poles, like Shackleton’s trips to the Antarctic, you learn that the closer you get to the edges of the world, the more surreal and terrifying things get.

A great example is sea ice: out near the Arctic, there’s something called ‘the Devil’s symphony,” the weird combination of crashes, whines, whistling, screeches and wobbles that the sea ice makes when its warped and compressed. There’s nothing in the world that sounds like it. There’s the aurora borealis out at the far latitudes, too, and the midnight sun and months of darkness. This is the stuff of legends. I was fascinated by the idea of an island out there, where the world stopped making sense. H.P. Lovecraft was enamored with the Antarctic as a kid, and his story “At the Mountains of Madness” is as much about wonder and insanity as it is about exploration.

One of the classes I took in college was Art of the Book. In it, you learned to make books like they did in the old days: with an awl, a bone folder, a handful of picas, and some hard liquor. We had a real Gutenberg printing press and a Bi Sheng press, the latter of which predates Gutenberg’s design by a couple hundred years. We also had drawers and drawers and drawers and drawers of tiny, metallic type, which we had to assemble into words by hand, then keep between metal slats, called slugs. God help you if you pancaked a drawer of type, ie dropped one butter-side down.

One of the first projects I did in Art of the Book, and one the proto-projects of the Occult Triangle Lab, was a postcard from Ultima Thule. I sketched out some thumbnails and settled on two designs: the island and the aurora, with the words FARTHER NORTH THAN NORTH—ULTIMA THULE. I set the type, inked it, and pressed it on our proofing roller, then cut a stencil out from plastic with a hotpoint gun. The final design looked like this:

I ended up writing a story called The Voyage of the Sin-Edad, a short fantasy piece about a wizard and a group of sailors heading into the far north to find an island like Thule. That story inspired the next set of projects in Art of the Book: artifacts from the voyage. These included a hard-bound, water-soaked captain’s log ( I actually let the thing soak in a sink full of water), a Japanese stab-bound book of poetry carried by one of the characters, and a small, folded, triangular map that showed the drift of icebergs and the Sin-Edad’s course (the small pocketbook sketch at the top of the post is an early draft of the map).

These were the proto-projects, the incunabula of the Occult Triangle Lab, but they were based in the same veins that the Lab would eventually draw from: myth, origami, and storytelling. People in my Art of the Book class really enjoyed the artifacts and the story behind them, so I decided that I should make more. In time, Art of the Book became the catalyst for the Lab.

What made the Ultima Thule projects so interesting, I think, was the image of people treading into a world that was a lot older and vaster than humans. Last year, archaeologists found the remains of the HMS Erebus, one of the ships that belonged to the lost Franklin Expedition to the Arctic. Ever since the first corpses were found in a rowboat on the coast of King William Island, people have been trying to piece together what happened to the sailors. Some have been uncovered scattered across the ice, their bones carrying massive amounts of lead, and mounds of stones containing messages from the sailors, recording the dates that they abandoned their ships in the ice, were discovered in 1859. The Inuits have stories about them, saying that they watched the crew die as they walked, and that they had found skeletons with all the flesh sawed off, evidence of cannibalism. As far as anyone can tell, every member of the expedition died out there on the edge of the world.

Click the circular button below to Share.

January 4, 2015

Immortality Seal and Oroboro Matrix

A sketch of an immortality seal. Notes from Volume VII.

The Oroboro Matrix and assorted notes, including the OROBORO eye logo. Notes from Volume V.

Click the circular button below to Share.

January 3, 2015

Anatman

One of the products of the Occult Triangle Lab. The pyramid is named ANATMAN, which is a Buddhist term that means “no-self” or “no-soul.”

Click the circular button below to Share.

December 28, 2014July 3, 2016

Welcome to the Lab.

“Chris Mahon’s Occult Triangle Lab” started as a joke. It was meant to be an umbrella term for all the bizarre, elaborate pieces of metaphysics, geometry, and philosophy I would come up with while writing fantasy during college. I didn’t leave my room much in college–I stayed up late at my desk, drinking vast amounts of milk alone, reading about the architecture of human veins and meta-patterns in Pascal’s triangle.

When I came up with something good after all my reading and sketching, I would get really excited and write up a six-page document explaining the whole idea (with phrases like “motherfucking entropic heat death”) and post it to my friends with the heading “New, from Chris Mahon’s Occult Triangle Lab.” All of it tied into my fantasy world and my stories.

Dispatches from the Lab dealt with practical things, like magical aeronautics, as well as terrifying, abstract things, like maps of the soul, as seen through Zen Buddhism and fractal geometry. While working on material in the Lab, I learned three things: that everything feeds into everything else, that the world is a frightening and wonderful place, and that, when you dig deep enough, triangles lie at the heart of everything.

My library is stacked with books on mythology, philosophy, chemistry, and Terry Pratchett. My desk is covered with pieces of origami, sketches, essays and story drafts. People seem equal parts entertained and confused by it all, so I thought I could make a good blog out of it.

This is that blog.

Sketches and notes from the Occult Triangle Lab

Click the circular button below to Share.

February 4, 2014

Bathtubs

Before I tell you about the Occult Triangle Lab, I want to tell you about bathtubs. When I was a kid, I would go to the Longview Public Library, where they had three or four of these big, oversized bathtubs with carpeting on the inside of them. You could grab your book, climb inside the bathtub and start reading. Shit was bonkers. It was like the library was making batches of bathtub kid gin. But the gin was stories.

Stephen Gammell drawing from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark There was a tub near one standalone shelf, which was dedicated to FOLKLORE AND LEGENDS. That was my tub. A lot of Native American story collections, a lot of big fairy tale picture books. But the books that got me were Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I read those books over and over, burning the illustrations of Stephen Gammell deep into my unconscious, which is high on the APA’s list of predispositions for becoming a serial murderer later in life. Then I realized that I could tell these stories to other kids when I went to YCAMP.

YCAMP was a summer day camp run by the YMCA, but it was sort of like ‘Nam. You got up early, you packed up all your gear, you sat with your gear against a long brick wall, you hauled your gear onto a transport, and you spent your day wandering around in the brush. The hikes were the best part. Hikes were spent in hour-long conversations, or telling every joke you knew. I knew the trails and routes as well as the counselors, so I usually walked at the rear of the group to make sure no one got behind. That’s where my storytelling began.

A big part of telling a scary story is lulling the listeners into a trance with long descriptions of normal, ordinary tasks, like cleaning a window, then building up the suspense little by little. Tension is your gravy, and you’ve got to learn to pour that gravy. But back then, it was also a lot of improv: since my memory was never perfect, and the audience I was speaking to was never the same, every telling was different. Sometimes I had to add pieces to entice kids who weren’t spooked, or make up something to cover for a forgotten scene. Sometimes I was caught with an audience who had heard all of my stories, and I had to make up a new one on the spot. For a long time, I had four core stories (with others slipping in and out of circulation): Springheel Jack, The Foot of the Bed, Harold, and my magnum opus, the long, difficult tour-de-force: The Wendigo.

Word must have gotten around, because I started getting requests. I usually ate lunch in the wide expanse of dirt near the camp, under a big birch tree, and kids started wandering out there, asking to hear The Wendigo. There was never any campfires at YCAMP to tell stories around, or even night, for that matter. Every day, it was burning hot, bright and dry. But I Stephen Gammell drawing from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark tale, Wendigo remember standing in the shade of that big birch tree, surrounded by two semi-circles of kids who had forgotten about the heat. I would tell them about the tracks in the snow, the black pines, the silence and the cold, and the wind blowing through those big, black trees. Lying under a cot in a hunting lodge, one man would hear the roof lift off the eaves and see the big white claws of the Wendigo lift his friends out one by one, until he was alone. Then the roof would come back down, and the wind would blow away into the trees.

There’s nothing like that electric silence, right after the story ends. Nothing like it.

Only after I took my first writing course in college did I learn the term “vivid and continuous dream” to describe what stories do to people, how they immerse you in another world with concrete details and a certain rhythm. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark made me want to be a writer, but it’s a different experience to be a storyteller with a live audience—the story feels alive, you feel alive, and everyone is breathing the same magic. The best audiences are always kids—they haven’t built up that patina of practiced cynicism toward the world and everything in it.

YCAMP wasn’t one of those wacky-happy-fun-songs-and-s’mores outdoor cults where you’re there for a full two months, sleeping in cabins. It was a day camp, and we didn’t have that kind of saccharine, Stockholm syndrome bullshit. But we did have a sense of history–a lot of the same kids showed up every year, and they all carried memories of the way camp used to be, what had changed, and who was gone now. I went there for seven years, and I saw it decline like Rome. The canoe-tipping in the river stopped, the fishing banks were abandoned, and the hiking trails changed. The worst part was when a veteran camper never showed up for the new year. It meant they had moved on, and there was an unspoken bitterness that they had left everyone else behind. Then came days when I realized that I was on my way out, too. But before those days came, before I started building up that patina of practiced cynicism toward the world, I would go out at lunch and sit under a big birch tree in the middle of the arid, burning expanse of dirt near the camp and tell Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

It was around the time that I stopped fitting in the bathtubs at the library that I stopped going back.

Click the circular button below to Share.