Taking questions, if you have them.

[wolven7]

Ask me anything you want to know about my thoughts on Anything.

Extra points for clearly articulated questions about magic.

(Don't worry; I have a plan.)

Comments

[anarchette.livejournal.com]

Are limericks considered magic? Also, how do you feel about said limericks, and do you happen to have any you'd like to share?

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I think that all magic's linguistic
But to leave that would be too simplistic
So here is this poem
It's not La Vie Bohème
But its paradoxes may be solipsistic.

[cailement.livejournal.com]

You make me smile :)

[ben-templesmith.livejournal.com]

Why do the commentators on the talking head shows in the US yell instead of speak as normal people do? We invented the mic some time ago after all.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I think they honestly believe that if they yell loud enough, people will think they're obviously so invested in their... frankly, most likely idiotic positions.

Sean Hannity? Fucking moron. But what does he do? He yells so loudly, and says the same thing so often, that people-- others who might, themselves, NOT be morons, given half a chance-- find it easier to simply not think, and listen to his dumb ass.

But you know that. Cause you're not a fucking moron. You, sir, are pretty fucking intelligent. When YOU yell, you have a clearly thought out point, and your argument makes sense.

And we appreciate that.

[ben-templesmith.livejournal.com]

AWESUMO ANSWER MR WOLVEN THANKYOU VERY MUCH! I THINK I CAN GET USED TO THIS YELLING THING! YEAAAH!

[wolven.livejournal.com]

OH GOD MY EARS!

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

I've heard magic described as a means to use your will to effect change in the world. Isn't that a description of any conscious human action?

yrs--
--Ben

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree with that, with a few caveats: Intent, Awe, Symbols, Signs, psychological states, and universal correspondences must all be taken into account, in some way.

I would say that it is a matter of intent, directed action, in those cases, rather than otherwise; either the intent of the practitioner, or of the initial magician, in the case of pre-made spells and works.

But yes, I would personally be willing to say that magic is every day life, from a different perspective, and seek to live my life that way; to bring my will to bear in as many ways as possible.

[mendori.livejournal.com]

Which interpretation do you prefer: that folktales are always based in some real happening, misunderstood or actually truthful; or that they express some psychological stress of the people at the time of telling, and serve as catharsis.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

You know I don't so cleanly distinguish between those things. I think that most of the events probably happened, but that many of those happenings might have been precipitated or generated in the minds or stress patterns of the individuals or groups.

[mendori.livejournal.com]

A reply question. How accurate do you think retellings of stories stay for 1000+ years without written accounts?

[wolven.livejournal.com]

It depends on the tradition, and the importance placed on getting it Exactly Right, and not in Whispers, but in full spoken words.

[pir8m1k3y.livejournal.com]

OK, here's the question that been gnawing my brain lately...

It's the accepted view that the 20th Century started after World War I. The end of Imperialism, etc etc.

So: Is it the 21st Century yet?

If so, what marked it?
And if not, what are our metrics for knowing when it has begun?

Bonus Magick question: 2012 - is anything going to happen/change?

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Yes, and it was officially marked, here: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml

When we achieved the ability to fully monitor and map our gross physical constituents, we set upon the path to 21st century Post-/Transhumanism. So, in that regard, at least, we are in the 21st century.

I think we can apply that to everything else, but we're doing it slowly... Maybe too slowly.

As for 2012, I don't want to sound to "New Age" "Paradigm Shift" whatever, but I think that when enough people put their minds to something, certain events begin to resolve themselves. Maybe it's because there's some magical consciousness shift, at that point, or maybe it's because with the unconscious attentions of a large enough collective, our expectations begin to colour our actions, and we start trending things in a certain direction, without necessarily realising it, or maybe it's because time traveling space gods are going to come back and free us all, or maybe it's the Great Ghost Dance, finally working, or maybe all of these are the same thing, on some level.

But people are more conscious, are more collectively aware of the nebulous 2012 mythos than any other millenial event, in history. It has a time-table, a concrete date, and people have been thinking, talking, writing, and working about it, for many many years, now.

All of which is to say that i will be very surprised if we don't see Something, that year.

[pir8m1k3y.livejournal.com]

* I'm very much down with it being a Post-Human Century, obviously...

and thusly: bespoke rather than mass-produced, bottom-up rather the top-down, distributed rather than centralized, asymmetric rather than symmetric.. all in all Post-Industrial

which, on reflection makes the *mass-adoption* of the Internet, Social Networks, Mobile Phones, 9/11 and of course the Human Genome project key milestones.. just need Fabricators perhaps, and we're post-industrial for sure.

i just wish 9/11 wasn't our French Revolution.. I live in hope we'll have something soon that surpasses that.

* I love the idea of 2012, as self-fulfilling prophesy / strange-attractor.
Dare we get as excited about it, as some were in fear of 2000?


* Bonus, Bonus Question: China and Democracy: will the two ever meet and does it matter?!

All indications are that:

rapid urbanization/wealth escalation
+ education
+ one-child-policy
= a generation that is
i) unrecognizable and alien to their parents
ii) uninterested in free speech and the rest of the stuff the West's holds so dear

Are they going sideways, or, as i suspect, flat-out leap-frogging us into some new political state, sadly not post-scarcity, but post-something. It's that or they are just exhausted by the past ~100 years of tumult, that they'd just rather forget Politics and get stuff done for a while.

* ok, that's hella rambling and i'm not sure i'm joining all the dots, sorry. been flu-stricken for days and my brains still coming back online. thanks for giving me some space to think out-loud!
(and don't ask how long i've been staring at teh screen, crafting this)

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I think that we need to start thinking about China in a completely different way, because they've come to a point where Capitalism and Democracy do not have to go hand in hand, let alone making out in the middle of the street as they do, in the majority of the West.

If we are to approach China, we have to recognise the new forces at work in the market, the social consciousness, and the government. The latter of which is tearing itself apart, in turmoil, trying to accommodate filial piety, along with other Confucian ethics, and Communist social policy. This effectively makes the State the Parent, and pushes all family and interpersonal relations below that.

Combine that with a culture of competitive effacement and strict adherence to form in all things, and you have a brittle, tense truce between warring sections of the cultural mind.

If we don't figure out how to get China to allow itself to become something new, to metamorphosis into something beautiful, it'll become something pretty terrible, instead.

Just my thoughts.

[pir8m1k3y.livejournal.com]

Agreed. China shouldn't be pushed to follow the same model as the West at all, and I don't think they'd listen anyway. It's going to be extremely interesting to watch how they continue to develop, especially if, well you know Peak Oil, the possible collapse of the US Economy etc etc.

I love the idea of a totally different political model taking centre-stage; imagine having China, India and say Brazil and of course the EU, maybe running the UN, while the US re-builds itself.

And China's forming all the right alliances to continue to thrive. Their presence in Africa is particularly interesting; did you catch the news/rumor of Chinese police being on the ground in Zimbabwe? Fascinating.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I know all about that. That's where a lot of their money is coming from, right now, and where they're getting a Lot of their infrastructure practice.

And the idea of the US rebuilding itself gives a little bit of hope for something self-aware, self-conscious in the best of ways.

[cailement.livejournal.com]

Which world is better to live in? The one where I saw a dragon flying through the air? A dragon that was golden and green, who had 2 sets of wings all around it's head and a long serpentine tail that was it's body. That's eyes (multiple sets of them) flashed at me as we drove past. Or the one where in all likelihood it was just a bird with a long piece of sugarcane frond in it's mouth? Personally, I'm leaning towards the dragon one, but that might just be because I Want To Believe, and I saw it for only a moment, but it's image seared into my brain so completely that it makes me wonder if I just imagined it or it was calling to me.

Or, you know, there is the distinct possibility that I, or indeed all of us, are just plain crazy. That's always a possibility as well . . .

[raidingparty.livejournal.com]

I'm mad, you're mad... we're all mad, here. -CD

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Well, which world do you need to live in, Right Now?

Both?

There you go, then. They're not that different. Just don't fall off the tightrope, and you should be fine ;)

[prosewitch.livejournal.com]

Dude, I totally wanted to answer the question on folktales, as it is my field, after all (but outside of folkloristics and anthropology, there's unfortunately a lot of terminological confusion, so I would've had to start with a question "what do you mean by folktales? are you actually talking about legends or myths" followed by my discipline's definitions of these things, so it would've become a rather cumbersome discussion).

Okay, my question to you is: do you believe in universals? Take, for instance, sympathetic magic, comprised of the law of similarity (like attracts like) and the law of contact (once in contact, things continue to exert an influence on each other), which can be utilized separately or together. These principles have been documented in many belief systems around the world, but are they actually universal? Is that something we scholars would have to prove, or take on faith? Does it even matter?

[mendori.livejournal.com]

If you're definitions get in the way of answering a question, its time to reconsider them for being too arcane. I meant ALL of it: from the stories we tell our kids to get them to shut up with the Why questions, to the Great Myths, to the ones we inherit from our geographic ancestors, to the more recently created ones (two to three generations), to the every day stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. They're all folktales as I see them.

[prosewitch.livejournal.com]

The definitions aren't meant to get in the way of answering a question, they're meant to clarify what the question is asking. What you're talking about are folk narratives, a broader category that encompasses many genres of folklore stories. And I think you're right, that all stories people tell are connected, that they all have meaning and relevance.

The reason we folklorists like to shove texts into a genre classification system--which I totally admit is not perfect--is that by looking at stories that are similar in structure, content, and function, we can access local, contingent meanings. In some societies folktales (defined as fictional, formulaic narratives) are used for teaching and educating children, whereas in others, they're bawdy entertainment... to lump them all into the same over-generalized group is to deny cultural difference, to deny historical and paradigmatic changes, so say it doesn't really matter whether a story is told in one context or another.

I'm not trying to be horrendously contentious here, but rather point out that there are reasons why it's useful for social scientists to analyze the particular rather than the general--it's through understanding the expressive culture of a small community, or how texts of one genre cohere into making narrative sense within a certain worldview, that we are able to gain insight into the general, into the larger questions such as Why Stories Matter.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

"A Folklorist and an Anthropologist walk into a bar, in Hell..."

[wolven.livejournal.com]

"An Anthropologist and a Folklorist walk into a bar, in Hell..."

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I believe in probabilistic contextual universals, in that there are certain things that, if a certain context or confluence of ideas and situations present themselves, will most likely be found there. Cultures which have a belief in magic are more likely to have beliefs in sympathetic and contagious magic.

These aren't causal statements, so much as they are statements of correspondence and correlation, meaning the events occur together, but there's not necessarily a causal link between them. I think that if you look at a number of cultures, US American included, you will find some beliefs resembling sympathy and contagion, even if we don't necessarily acknowledge them as such.

Universal? I don't know. But is their likelihood of appearance increased, with the presence of certain situational factors? Absolutely.

[raidingparty.livejournal.com]

This is off of a picture my stepmother has (probably paraphrased):
I used to wait for signs. Then one night in my dreams an angel wearing purple sweatpants walked up to me and said, "It's all right. You can start any time now." I asked, "Is this a sign?" She laughed and I woke up. Now I see signs all the time, but if there's no laughter I know they're not for me.

So, my question is, what... is my quest? (I'll leave the name, favorite color, and air speed velocity of a coconut-laden swallow until later.) This can generalize out to any number of realms; home, love, work, etc. I really don't know how or where to look. I've gotten the edges of an answer a few times, but I have a hard time sticking to it. I read Free Will Astrology, and promptly forget the message until next week.

I guess a stronger question would be, "How do I find, recognize, retain, and use wisdom?" I know, intelligence is derived of self-determined goals, but I'm just plain overwhelmed with choices.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

My advice is the same: make tentative investigations of each option, because you don't know what it will look like, from the internal perspective.

Orchards don't look like orchards until you stand at the right angle. You may simply need to change you point of view.

[raidingparty.livejournal.com]

RrrRr. So very many options. I know you aren't suggesting "All of the above" so much as "as many as feasible" (unless you have a time-void space you'd like to loan me), but the OC nature wants to hold onto all possibilities.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Then you need to learn to access all of the alternate world possible selves of you.

[raidingparty.livejournal.com]

... see, that's one of those answers that at first look goes headtrip, and at second look goes, "Why didn't we always do it this way?" That's... that's it.

Currently looking at methods of mind expansion. Sans paranoia, of course, I already make up enough monsters without help.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Neo-Shamanic meditation. Give it a shot.