Magic is Afoot: Alan Moore on the Arts and the Occult

I attached an older interview with Alan Moore below (originally to test the reblog function but it looked ugly, now I made a post). It’s a fascinating read. It’s one of the cases where you can be open minded, but not so much that your brain falls out. It’s about art, magic, the occult and about words and partially about the things I wrote about from my point of view in the in the Scarlet Letter series.

As author Daniel Pinchbeck pointed out in Arthur’s debut issue last fall, magic is afoot in the world. It doesn’t matter whether you think of magic a potent metaphor, as a notion of reality to be taken literally, or a willed self-delusion by goggly losers and New Age housewives. It doesn’t matter. Magic is here, right now, as a cultural force (Harry Potter, Buffy, Sabrina, Lord of the Rings, the Jedi, and of course, Black Sabbath) , as a part of our daily rhetoric, and perhaps, if you’re so inclined, as something truly perceivable, in the same way that love and suffering are real yet unquantifiable–experienced by all yet unaccounted for by the dogma of strict materialism that most of us First Worlders say we “believe“ in. Magic is here. — Jay Babcock, Arthur Magazine

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MAGIC IS AFOOT: A Conversation with ALAN MOORE about the Arts and the Occult

The Magic of Meaning

Get yourself a tea, and some biscuits. You happened upon Scarlet Letters, Part II. Given the time that has passed, it’s only loosely connected to the previous entry and will montage again a lot of interesting things, you’ll see… It turned out pretty big and perhaps compensates for the long wait.

Part of the fun of writing is that I have to look closer into my own thoughts and order them  – a little – in ways that are hopefully intelligible to other humans. I was searching for some way to convey that humans inhabit two different “realms” with a continuum of intermediary states between them. To sidestep unintentional connotations I will simply call them Out There™ and In Here™. 

Out There™

The realm on one end of the continuum is the physical reality “out there”, which is entirely unknowable und indescribable to us and which seems to be some sort of fuzzy field. I could as well claim it was populated by machine elves singing intertwined rainbows into existence. We have no idea how it is like. Then again it is not entirely arbitrary, we know for sure what it isn’t. It is not made of cheese, for example. And there we are in the middle of the problem: this reality “out there” is so far outside of our senses that it it is really not a cozy place where we dwell on. Conciousness altering substances or meditation may change perception by shaking our biochemistry up a little, but we do not come closer to it, as we still rely on our senses and faculties that interpret the information.