Magic is hard, this month...

[wolven7]

I''m having a hard time doing any magic, this week. The ability to focus and drive myself forward in will and action, and to drag the world with me seems like moving and dragging the above through a thick river of dark molasses.

When I brought this up, Michelle Bellanger noted that destructive work is easy at the moment. To which unknownbinaries responded that we should be thinking in terms of controlled demolitions.

Think about shaped charges, creating a specific size and type of hole in the thing you're looking to damage. That hole can then be filled with something, to change the structure's composition, strength, resiliency, or you can just open up the space, and turn a cozy little brweakfast nook into a combo kitchen/dinette; that shit is up to you. The point is a controlled blast to create a particularly-shaped negative space.

Destruction, demolition, deconstruction, understanding, reconstrction-by-the-universe. Create a Me-Shaped hole in the parts of the world that have the things I need, which fill the That-Thing-Shaped Hole in me.

"I know what you need. This will really work: In ancient times, if you were sick, they'd make you bleed. Oh, honey, i know it hurts."

Spoilers for the Doctor Who season finale can be skipped but they are useful for thinking about magic, right now, because the Doctor put words into Amy Pond's head, jumping around in time, as a spell through time, space, memory, reality, relying on the very thing which destroyed him. The exploding TARDIS latched onto Amy Pond as the crack in her bedroom wall, because she's familiar, because she lived in the TARDIS, because the Doctor thought that she was a very strange anomaly, because there was a crack in her wall made of two kinds of time and space meeting where they shouldn't, and it had eaten her parents, because it was slowly destroying her life, making her strange, calling the Doctor to her, to Allow Him To Stop The Tardis From Exploding And Also Save Himself From The Inside Of The Crack.

It goes like this.

He did this with words, you see. With his own absence, and her memory of things that never were, of a hole in reality that needed to be filled, through a temporal roundabout with four key words and three key people all at the right place and the right time. An explosion that created a hole to save a structure and which allowed the hole to be patched and repaired.

Stop skipping.

This is what needs to be done. Key words, phrases, places, times. Controlled demolitions of the things that Do Not Work, to make space for something better, more stable, more structurally sound. To make space for me, and to make space within my life for what I need.

Now hand me that C4 and that Thermite. Metaphorically speaking.

Comments

[mrvi.livejournal.com]

I agree totally and in fact I would add that the Doctor himself says it as he's sat by Amy's bed:

"We are all stories."

I'm absolutely sure you've picked up on the repetition of the motif of memory in the series.

"If you can remember it..."

So the issue is not whether something is real or not, but whether you can remember it. Memory is time permeable. After all, precognition is simply remembering the future...isn't it? That's how that whole episode works:

"Remember to put the sonic in her top pocket..."

Did you ever see Jim Henson's 'The Storyteller'? (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Storyteller)

"When people told themselves their past with stories, explained their
present with stories, foretold the future with stories, the best place
by the fire was kept for the storyteller."

The Doctor tells Amy the story of her life, gives her a future and a past, casts himself as a myth.

"Silly old Doctor. Silly old man, who stole a magic box. Did I ever tell you I stole it, well, borrowed it?"

This is canon, this what the Doctor did. Moffat connects his tale to the very root of the 40 years of this show. In the same way, the Doctor tells her where he comes from, the beginning of him, so Amy has an anchor.

All the way through, the Raggedy Doctor has been Amy's Imaginary Friend. He himself finishes the spell by identifying himself as such as he emerges from the TARDIS, and that's the bit when it hits Rory.

"How could we forget the Doctor?"

The Raggedy Doctor, the Girl who Waited, and the Boy who Waited 2000 years for Her.

These are names, oblique references, both descriptors and implicators - they are kennings and heiti which draw on the deep associations, the habits of being human and their reflexes, producing a power that the Doctor doesn't hold, but nevertheless wields and thus is seen to hold. How else does he face down countless enemies while weaponless?

The Oncoming Storm, the greatest, most terrible weapon and warrior ever to have existed. This is what the Pandorica was built to contain - Him. He never uses guns, and exhibits disdain for weapons, yet is the greatest warrior.

Consider how that works. Go on...I dare you. Let it obsess you, then start to become aware of how the Doctor does that in every episode.

The phenomenology of absence is such that absence ensures creation. Da'ath - in Promethea, courtesy of Austin Osman Spare:

Of this I know nothing. Of this, nothing may be said." - Austin Osman Spare, pg 16

"This is the Tower of the Adepts, the Black Brothers, and it is at Daath. No light is here emitted." - Austin Osman Spare, pg. 16

"The three heads of God were sundered from existence. Who shall say that this was accident? And likewise, who shall say that accidents be not but arabesques within some wider figure? Of this nothing is known." - Austin Osman Spare, pg 17

"Like its shattered plant or its unseen color, Daath is that knowledge, knowable only by its absence. It is the neither-neither. It is that knowledge here pursued by the black brother in the Tower of the Adepts. No light is here emitted. Fare you well sisters." - Austin Osman Spare, pg 17

Rewatch that last episode again. See how River Song makes a Dalek beg for mercy? Understand that she's not just killing one of the most implacable monsters in the universe - monsters whose only emotion is a xenophobic genocidal hatred of all non-Dalek life - she's making it beg.

Absence creates demand - marketers understand this. The issue isn't about marketing in magic though, it's about affect and that means we're on the same page, you and I. We should get drunk on skype one night...you know it makes sense.

Doing the impossible makes you impossible, and if you are impossible, by definition everything you do is impossible. It's a feedback loop - the sun does not radiate outward, but inward.

Light is given to a black hole by its gravity. This can only occur after it has already given out all its light to the universe.

"You want to know the secret of the world. It's this: save it, and it'll repay you, every second of every day." - Planetary.

That's the effortless, empty hand way.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

That kind of memory work always reminds me of Dark City: http://wolven.livejournal.com/955794.html

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Also, the potential in "Doll," and that working Foolish People did, a while back... Huh. Interesting.

[mrvi.livejournal.com]

Isn't it just? *grins*