Involution
It’s A Kind Of Magic
I am still deciding what I want to use this space for, but I think the answer may in part be “magic”. I want to do some thinking-out-loud about the concept of magic, and what I think it is, and how it works (or doesn’t), and whether it’s more useful to systematise it or just treat it as spontaneous interaction with unseen stuff. I mean, I do believe it in, as an almost-obvious mind-affects-matter, observation-affects-reality way; the interest is in the nuances and mechanisms.
There’ll be more on this as I think of it. But for now: I don’t think of magic as being a thing which is controlled by particular words and gestures, D&D style. That presupposes a lot about the way in which the universe is built, centering on the existence of people who produce human-like noises and have human-like hands that move in human-like ways at human-like speeds. If that were the case, then no other hypothetical species anywhere in existence would have much of a shot at it, and while I’m fairly sure the universe does play dice, I don’t think it plays favourites, or at least not before they’ve appeared.
I do, however, think of magic as something that is out there, over which we can exert some control, and that it is to some degree a control mechanism, a source code, for the universe. I am pretty damn sure that nobody understands it, but I do think we can get to “when I poke it like this, it does that”. Which is kind of how I learned web development, back when. This may mean that the universe is a simulation - which is pretty likely, really, and I’m fine with that - and if that’s the case, then the words-and-gestures magic is possible. But evidence thus far, and the lack of any universally functional spells from differing times and cultures, argues against that being in the code.
Ben Aaronovitch’s books use the concept of vestigia, the traces of magic which feel like the half-dreams you have before you doze off, but are external to you. I like that, and it goes some way toward explaining what I (think I) feel from some places and old trees and the odd person, now and again.
I also like the idea of spell diagrams; something related to circuit diagrams, and kabbalah, and the sigils of chaos magic. I probably need a sort of syallabary or glyph system for that. I know I started working up one some 20 years or so ago (at a point in time when I still took the Llewellyn books seriously), but I don’t know that I could take that seriously now. I suspect it started with elemental symbols, and that’s not really how I’d approach magic now, despite the importance of earth-as-element for me.
So some thinking to be done there.