Writing Archives - Page 6 of 6 - The Occult Triangle Lab

March 1, 2015

The Making of Anatman, Part 2: The Qliphoth

Now we come to the real, meaty occultism that everyone’s looking for in their origami pyramids: Kabbalah. But, as J.R.R Tolkien found out when trying to research the Eddas, there’s a problem with learning about ancient mythology and the occult: the materials that have become the “official” accounts of both Kabbalah and Norse myths are usually heavily altered by later authors or totally made up for the purpose of gaining profit, cultists, and loose women. It’s this cross-millennial game of Telephone (more “Forgery and Revision”) that created the New Age movement, including Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabbalah.

So to understand the nuances of Kabbalah, you’d better be a Hebrew scholar with a doctorate in it. I’m not a Hebrew scholar, and I definitely don’t have a degree in medieval esotericism. I chose a much more practical, business-minded college degree (English). So I’m not an authority on the Sephiroth, I just play with its ideas.

That being said, Neon Genesis: Evangelion was a pretty fucking great account of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Shaving it down to its most basic ideas, Kabbalah is a primarily Jewish philosophy that proposes a hidden, or “esoteric,” symmetry in the Universe based around Ein Sof, which is the embodiment of God, Creation, Truth, and Infinity. The practice of Kabbalah is meant to help practitioners learn to reconcile themselves with Ein Sof and learn the truth of their connection to all of creation. The concept of Ein Sof as Infinity was especially fitting for ANATMAN, since it brings together truth, the universe, and the metaphysical (and mathematical) concept of infinity, which, as I’ve talked about before, all seem to overlap in the search for enlightenment. Another fitting concept of Ein Sof is Kether, or unity and oneness. Ein Sof unites everything in itself: humanity, the universe, and God. There are no fundamental divisions between things, and the only thing that keeps you from recognizing this is ignorance, deception, and unholiness. Compare this to Part 1 and the description of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism:

“Enlightenment is embracing your own annihilation, because the truth is that “you” do not exist. “You” is no-self, no-soul. You are Void, because you are the universe, and the universe is Void. There are no divisions anywhere, no up or down, no day or night, and no division between life and death.”

No divisions, just unity. You and the universe. Kether in Kabbalah, like the Void in Zen Buddhism, can be thought of as a coin, with oneness and self-annihilation as different faces. Now, the recurring problem: enlightenment means the disappearance of all your desires, pleasures, fears and the person you call yourself. “You” have to die. Death is necessary for enlightenment. You either choose to die spiritually in enlightenment and reconcile yourself with eternity to be reborn, or you choose to die physically and succumb to time, old age, and constant change.

In Kabbalah, there is the Sephiroth, the Tree of Life and Knowledge, which is the ten-part route to Ein Sof, with Malkuth, or earthly existence, existing on the lowest branch of the Sephiroth. You can ascend the Tree or sit in Malkuth forever. In Buddhism, you would be thrown into the Wheel of Samsara again after death and be reincarnated, repeating life and death forever.

But what if there was another way, another path? A crack in the whole system of life and death, enlightenment and the universe? Anyone who found a way to escape the rules and unity of the universe would exist outside all rules and order. There would be a place outside of eternity.

And this is where the Qliphoth, the Kabbalah Tree of Death, comes in.

THE QLIPHOTH

There exists an antithesis to the Sephiroth, and it’s called the Qliphoth. The Qliphoth is the universal structure by which the Truth of Ein Sof is perverted, twisted, and otherwise hidden. Each of the ten points of the Qliphoth represent the antithesis of its correlating sephirot in the Sephiroth, and two of the highest levels of the Qliphoth are Thamiel and Chaigdel, which oppose Kether and Chokmah, respectively. Thamiel represents division instead of unity, and Chokmah represents emptiness when there should be fullness, especially in the universal life-force.

(Take note of these two ideas, Chaigdel and Chokmah–they’re going to show up later, in fractal geometry, no less.)

The Qliphoth offers an alternative to the conscious choice of enlightenment and the unconscious choice of ignorance, at least in my conception of it. By choosing to follow the Qliphoth, you can place yourself at an infinite distance from Truth, God, and Eternity, and this is different from being unenlightened. You choose to be the antithesis of the Universe rather than the embodiment of it. This is the greatest perversion of enlightenment: knowing the nature of yourself and the universe, and rejecting your place in the grand unity of it all.

What kind of life would that be? If you’re not part of the grand scheme of creation, are you a creation unto yourself? A closed circuit? If you’re beyond creation and destruction, how can you exist? If you’re beyond life and death, what kind of power can sustain you?

There is a name that sums up this kind of existence: Ouroboros, or the snake that eats itself.

Next up in Part 2: Oroboro and Fractals.

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February 22, 2015

The Making of ANATMAN, Part 1: Eternity and Zen

When I was taking Art of the Book, we learned that there are things called ‘artist books.’ Artist books use their format and shape to tell a story, along with the words themselves. That fascinated me. I wanted to do something like that. I began sketching out the idea for an origami artist book in my notes. This project would become “ANATMAN,” a blend of trigonometry, origami, Buddhism, Kabbalah, alchemy, and letterpress printing.

ANATMAN was the culmination of years of reading and thinking, and in many ways it’s a manifesto for the Occult Triangle Lab, despite only containing 16 words. It contains some of the ideas that have haunted and inspired me since I was a kid, along with the ideas I was beginning to develop in college. To explain the making of ANATMAN, you have to know where it began.

Eternity, Infinity, and Enlightenment

In Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, there’s a machine called The Total Perspective Vortex. It’s universally recognized as the most horrible torture device in existence. It does one thing:

“When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there’s a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, ‘You are here.'”

That stuck with me.

In Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett, there’s a creature called a hiver. It’s an incorporeal mass of sight, smell, hearing, and a thousand other senses, and it rolls through the world incorporating more beings into itself. There’s no way to see it, and no way to kill it. The main character, Tiffany Aching, spends the book trying to find a way to beat it, or run from it, but she meets it in the end, and lets it into her mind. When she does, she realizes that the hiver can sense everything around it with perfect clarity, and can’t stop. This is what it says:

“‘Do you know what it feels like to be aware of every star, every blade of grass? Yes. You do. You call it ‘opening your eyes again.’ But you do it for a moment. We have done it for eternity. No sleep, no rest, just endless… endless experience, endless awareness. Of everything. All the time. How we envy you, envy you! Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless deeps of space! [ …] You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!'”

And that stuck with me, too.

I remember looking out the window of my college dorm room at the sun rising. I’d stayed awake all night, working on a paper. It was so cold in the room that I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes, I hadn’t eaten anything, and I hadn’t changed my clothes for two days. I got up from my chair and stood in front of the window, listening to the quiet and watching the light creep over the buildings. It occurred to me that days and nights don’t build walls between you and the past—whether the sun is up or not, there is one continuous hour that stretches out forever, uniting the entire thread of your life. There’s a feeling of disappearing as you realize that you’re stretched from horizon to horizon, from birth to death, and that your life is carried out second by second. This is the same feeling I got when Mr. Powell taught us about Zeno’s Paradox all those years ago: the feeling that eternity is lurking in every nook and cranny, tearing at the seams of my mind. An hour can be an eternity, and standing at that cold window at 5 AM, I understood what hell could feel like.

It seems like the human soul unravels when it’s faced with eternity, and that’s what makes enlightenment so frightening and fascinating: to reconcile with the universe, you have to embrace eternity, the universe, everything, but that risks being destroyed under the sheer immensity of it all. So what kind of person backs away from that, gets so frightened that they put themselves an infinite distance away from enlightenment? How do you live with the ticking clock of death and the weight of eternity?

Zen Buddhism

Zen heavily influenced the project and my thinking about eternity and enlightenment, because Buddhism has a unique answer to the question of how do deal with the self.

Buddhist monks frighten and fascinate me, as I’ve mentioned before, but Zen most of all. Zen monks may ask you who you are. You might say you are a writer, a leader, a woman, a daughter, but they will shake their heads and say “A writer writes, a leader leads, and there are many women and daughters. Who are you when you are not writing or leading? Are you everyone’s daughter?” These are the absurd, silly questions that give Buddhist monks their reputation for being harmless, smiling, wrinkly, bald men. Zen monks are the same people who came up with the famous “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?”

What most people don’t know is that that question, about the clapping, is a koan, a phrase occult triangle lab mu symbol that monks are supposed to meditate on. How can one hand clap? It is impossible. You’re supposed to give an answer. But you can’t answer. There is no answer, because the question itself is wrong. The lesson, if you can arrive at it through meditation, is that questions can be wrong, not just answers. This idea is called mu. And just like the question of one hand clapping, the question “Who are you?” is equally wrong, because everything you conceive of as “you” is wrong.

This is where Buddhism stop seeming so happy and benevolent.

“You” are an illusion, a pile of hungers screaming to get fed, wrapped in a bundle that’s held together by nothing. Enlightenment is embracing your own annihilation, because the truth is that “you” do not exist. “You” is no-self, no-soul. You are Void, because you are the universe, and the universe is Void. There are no divisions anywhere, no up or down, no day or night, and no division between life and death. When you understand this, and embrace your annihilation, you will understand no-self, which is translated as anatman.

The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering. Impermanence is the only constant. It is called annica. It means that nothing lasts forever, that there is no state of being that can last for an eternity. The desperation for something enduring, whether it’s a sense of self or happiness, is what causes suffering. The search for a way out, a way to become eternal, that is the ultimate path to suffering, because you can never attain it. Trying to become eternal, or immortal, is the farthest distance one can get from enlightenment.

i spent a lot of time reading about Zen, and I thought “What kind of person would choose that path, the one that leads away from enlightenment and annihilation, toward desperation and eternity? What kind of fear or insanity would that take?”

These are the thoughts that went into ANATMAN.

Next up in Part 2: Oroboro and the Qliphoth.

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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.

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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

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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.

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