More on Ju-Ju & Honesty

The joyful instigations stemming from the overheated minds that I wrote about last week stayed with me. On a parallel level, I also wrapped up a four week class about J.G. Ballard for Morbid Anatomy. Ballard was/is another great example of someone who churned his fanciful impressions of the outer and inner spaces via his unconscious interpretations and into fascinating art & literature proper. Focus, form, concentration, content... That’s how you do it; no further explanations needed.

But when it comes to thematically magical quagmires it seems a little bit trickier. Very seldom is a sanely individuated magician appealing to a mass market, or even beyond the closest coterie. You need a bit of madness in there to make it palatable for the addicts of phantasmagoria. Then add an impenetrable system and obsessive structures to administer the “wisdom” and you have a total winner!

But where the artist has art as a therapeutic playground, the magician is traditionally painted into a corner of suffocating symbolisms and perceived (delusions of) grandeur – not forgetting the condescending projections from the outside world. Today, it seems to me that archetypically, the magician is an artist (of sorts) who fell overboard into the great sea and can’t get back on to the boat. (Whether this image holds up tomorrow, we shall see.)

Basically, restraint is pretty good, useful and perhaps even necessary. And to acquire that, you really have to begin at the beginning. Nosce Te Ipsum, and all that jazz.