“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.
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