Cross-Pollinating

Image – via Angie Chavez

This writing is deeply inspired (cross-pollinated!) by a recent writing by https://substack.com/@rosiewhinray , in particular, quotes from within ‘On Being Galvanised, Not Paralysed’ (bolded).

“It’s a way of cross-pollinating my individual mind with the minds of not only the people I’m with in the flesh, but others I’ve never met, only heard or read; and with the legions of named and unnamed dead who went before, through whose breath the songs were shaped.”

Creating – writing like this, poetry (I do like to admire the blurred line between the two when it makes itself known, yielding to the Haze and how it delights in having me dance across the boundaries), art – as cross-pollinating deeply resonates. An offering of the internal pulsing heartbeat and the tangle of feelings within arching bone and beneath soft flesh currently heated by bone-crowned iron and electric-driven warm, suffused by cherished passions and lingering, rooted fears, passionate wants and Romantic dreaming longings. Offered freely (no toll here, the roads… no, wilds… are yours to traverse as seen fit; explore, explore!) and plainly, to share and to spread (sewing seeds or sharing drinks, both apt callings to mind of a mental image), to inspire and in turn, inspired in itself — as this is (words read while still trying to chase away the lingering cloudiness of the night begging me to yield back into slumber; that’s what an attempt at an all-nighter will do). Plainly, in the way that is dear and gradually becoming more fluent to my tongue, where before it was banal-dampened and choked down out of self-criticism, out of self-quietening.

What is created from the pollinating of inspirations, of offerings, is a fortifying honey, brought back to the hive — a rich and diversely bountiful hive of friends and beloveds, strangers and community (online and off; connections are connections. As much as I thoroughly enjoy encounters in physicality, I strive to be as authentically myself online as I am off; just as nerdy, awkward, fumbling, and drawn-to-the-dark) — to sustain, to inspire, to comfort, to bring a deeply-cherished element of the personal to banish drudgery and fears, to weave darling words that will become honeycombs made of memory and found within the heart. What was pollinated in turn, loved intense in a fleeting moment of encountering, is in turn able to spread further afield, drawn with the traveller on their tongue, able now to be carried in so many ways, carried afield as far as they may seek to go.

“Learning to speak plainly is really unlearning: scraping back the layers of years of politeness / silencing— external, internal— to come to the naked self that speaks the plain truth.”

I am reminded in turn of a quote by D. H. Lawrence, as quote by Jessica Grote: “Natural, alive, defenceless – inherently free of moral values, free of projections, free of judgments. And especially also free of the layers of illusions and protections we are used to build up around us, those ideas of Self, stemming from ourselves and others, which we enclose ourselves in and which are exactly what we put down, symbolically, when we disrobe. Only then, when we stand naked in the clearing, unashamed, and yet trembling, with the awareness of our new, true nakedness, the realization of the truth our body is/holds, only then are we ready – receptive – open — to receive, to embrace, to submit to ‘Life itself’”

Scouring away clinging fears, whispering self-doubts, criticisms once near-daily spoken and used to taunt has taken time and effort – and I do not anticipate this journey to be over. But I dedicate myself to unlearning to discover what is truly buried beneath, to become naked and bare in what I am and what I offer, in what I articulate and what inspires. A winding, occasionally widdershins, road that I set out onto journeying with my little iron candle-lamp in hand, bone- and iron-accompanied, to see where the bare vulnerability leads.

“Speaking from the heart is deeply embarrassing, and terrifying, and important, and necessary. It’s a leap of faith. It’s the gift that makes your work alive. It’s taken me years— decades— of unlearning to even begin to try and do it. But if you fake it, what you make is half-dead. Art-law: there’s no choice but to be real. That means dropping the veneer of cool, looking like a naïve idiot, risking fucking up, and knowing you might regret it later. What bow plays your heart’s violin strings? What are the medicines— for you personally— that are antidotes to the poison of world-news-induced despair and grief? Feel the fuck out of those feelings; then take the medicine, and get back to work.”

I gift my strange, queer, rambling and messy crepuscular-drawn self in what I write, in what I weave, in what I draw, doodle, and dance. Are my movements when enthralled by music choreographed or trained, or some other manner of formal refined? No. My movements are nothing less than the ecstatic extension of my limbs, the swaying of hips, the motions of my head emphasised by quickly-tangling hair what comes to mind – no, to body – in time to the music. I bare myself in willing, delighted vulnerability for witnessing and reading, for engaging and entangling, for exchanging and discovery.

Kick off the boots, go barefoot in the rain, and let’s dance and play in the mud; messy, in delight, in defiance.

Offering

30th August, 2023

Faced a fear. Where I live, I generally do not regard it as safe, not completely. During the daylight, I feel comfortable enough to walk around in most areas but not during the night hours. I have visited sites that I hold as places in which to communicate and work during the hours before day, but not yet in night’s hold. Not before the night, stated, when Saturn and the Moon shared the sky, visible above the thankfully only subtle glow from the lights of the village. While not as dark as elsewhere in the North, in the wilder and far less populated areas, it was dark enough to at least be able to see what I was searching the stars around the Moon for.

Finding a suitable site within which to do the working took some assessing. Too close to the housing, not enough darkness. Too far into the park, too much darkness. I have night-sight that is on the side of comically poor, so in the moment, the decision was made to utilise the patch of ground that was as close as I could find within sight of the moon as well as to a crossroad. Man-marked but no less the shape that I was open to working within. I have yet to fully plan offerings, rituals, dedications. While I often have a secure idea of what I want to offer, what I want to involve, the precise words I feel for me are better coming from the heart in the moment, for the time being. Not to say that I am adverse to more structure within my dedications but what I am doing in the moment, offered wild and guttural, is the now’s most fitting.

What I did not plan was to answer the tugging insistence down the way. The lodestone’s pull, the beckoning. Overdue. Past the blocks of terraces, past the built-for-pits homes, past the street-lamps. Past the artificial light’s reach. Up to this point, due to the aforementioned poor night sight that I am gradually working out adaptations to, I have yet to take that complete step into the dark. But then, I did. Even before the step was taken, the Sensing was dread-inducing and delighting in one. Arousing and anchoring. Testing. In the past encounter at that boundary point, I used to put up my hood before returning. This time? No. Hood down, head exposed, kept unhidden. The sensation of vulnerability and yielding, surrender and heart-clenching fear entangling in a knot in the chest, like tangled roots beneath the ribcage. Skin surging, pulsing, shifting in sensation. Self-offering.

The first step back, the second, and three more facing the dark. Surrender demonstrated. More visits planned. Exhilarating. Enthralling. Fear-inducing. Ensnaring. Offered. To Offer Again. Offering.

(add.) Something to explore, theurgy and bats, those darling psychopomps. One seen right before the boundary point was reached, as a shadow crossing my own, fluttering. I will not say a guarding presence was felt but, accompanying. Tentative consideration, on which to dwell in workings more.

Sacred Resistance

– Chris Veeneman

“The throngs that crowd the desoil causeway care not that the road has grown barren and has been paved at incalculable cost to Nature and to their own souls. They are too mesmerized by the lustre and convenience of its ever-proliferating technologies, too glutted by the swelling egoism that places human beings at the summit of a fabricated ladder…” – Richard Gavin, ‘The Benighted Path’.

To experience the world as it is – daemonic, primal, erotic – is to let go, and now in this age, this is more difficult to return to, for long has the Spirit been in a position of jarring and interposition, wedging, between the daemonic and the body ensouled. Mechanical carcasses. Nature has been steamrollered, and the gradual steps back throughout the lockdowns are evidence of the healing that needs to be done, and how things can change without constant, pressuring, imposition. But it is more than just a biome tending to that is needed – a step, only one on the pathway that wends into the depths.

Admitting to insignificance in the scheme of things, within placement in relation to forces of Nature that are unceasing, creative and destructive both, is a difficult pill to swallow but one that is in dire need of being taken. A medicine blackening and corroding away at the I’s arrogance, alchemically transformative.

While there are spots to be found amidst steel and iron where the rare sacred makes itself known, be it by natural configuration by way of layered and repeated desolation resulting in landscapes of shadow-steeped Dread or the locations made by sorcerous wound to the Spirit’s hold, places where workings of the daemonic can be engaged in are desperately in need of tending to.

“No longer was man able to experience the qualities of the world through holistic engagements with their forces, but now operated in the All as an exile, determining his place in the world by what he can rationally understand through analysis and detachment. The spirit expresses itself through the self-conscious ‘I’, creating an individual that fights against the flow of time and struggles to maintain its identity against the dark, daemonic forces which attempt to compromise or obliterate his rational self-awareness.” – David Beth, ‘Clavis Saturni: A Kosmic Heresy’ in The Cult of the Black Cube.

To engage with the world daemonic is to surrender, to yield, to understand oneself as part of something, rather than to strive to triumph over and be superior to. To detach oneself from this decentralised living to instead affix into a human-centric model of rationalisation is to remove oneself from the primal innateness of the All, to be bound in fetter, blinkers and all. It is isolating, disempowering, and alienating, imposing confines and fetters, further confining thoughts – inclinations encouraged to race, to pick apart, to struggle as the Soul struggles, yearning and clawing at the insides. Rationalising taken to the extents encouraged removes the poetry from one’s surroundings, making entangling within the beauty and rawness of the world and what it offers freely to coexist alongside in a balanced delicate web all the more difficult. Time for the claws to find purchase and rip open that which constrains.

Recognising the imposition of spirit against the Soul is to become aware of a loneliness within the gulf, recognising further still the deep-seated drawing to the daemonic, for connection Kosmic. This stirs beneath the cinching layers of spiritual decay, century by century, act by act, fighting alongside the raw and primal creative and natural forces surrounding that refuse to be harnessed – witnessing yearned for.

“The reductionism and deconstruction of the living Kosmos led to an inability of humanity to connect meaningfully to the enthusing forces, and the sacrality of the maternal daemonic Kosmos was degraded in favor of a world of abstract ideas and deities mirroring this idealism and transcendence.” – ibid
The Kosmos is not something to study. It is not something to try and force under a microscope, to analyse, to pick apart as though unweaving what is already a rich and beautiful tapestry (that and more, words are but an interface, and limited). It is not to be quantified or measured. It defies such attempts, and is instead Experienced, holistically and authentically, through the erotic mating of Body-Soul to the daemonic, through vulnerability and a level of nakedness that is beyond the exposure of flesh. It is exposing down to the bone, to the Soul. Trying to rationalise the Kosmos is to try and grasp something that is beyond the scope of comprehension, fluidly resisting the stranglehold, a defiant beautifully dark ichor. The ceaseless tide wearing away at stone and rusting metal, and so does the forces of the Chaos find ways to break through that which seeks to act as barrier and blinker. The ever-seductive call of the Night Consciousness.

The Kosmos’s stirring and inspiring potency has become hidden but ever-present, found where humanity’s hold is at its weakest, striking through in moments where the Resisting come to the fore. This is not a transcendence; it is chthonic and sorcerous; it is bodily and present, it is Within and it is unfettering, welcoming and embracing within every moment, from the present to the after-living, in the shift to the Present-Dead, to the never departed and transformed. Those who pass are not elevated but held sacred within the same world in which every one of our moments is lived.

“To us every credo, every doctrine of salvation seemed stillborn and useless. And there was only one thing we conceived as our duty and destiny: for each of us to become so completely himself, so completely in harmony with the creative germ of Nature within himself, living in accordance with its commands, that the uncertain future would find us ready for any eventuality, whatever it might bring.” – Herman Hesse, ‘Demian’.

But the walls, the barriers, that the Spirit have constructed are not without attempts at scaling. Whether it is a ladder made from the words of a poetry drawn by an emotion that wildly seizes or the intentional ritual wounding by way of sorcery and ensouled rite, whether it is a moment of shuddering, consuming and ravenous eroticism that cleaves all fettering from the Soul within the moment or an experience that shatters the shackles at least for a moment, loosening the Spirit’s hold, there is a sacred resistance to every dreaming, Night-beloved action and act, and exploration that is to the tune of the bone-flute, of the drum and of an enlivened heartbeat.

“The central aim of our esoteric work is to weaken the powers of the spirit while at the same time re-empowering the soul to enable ourselves to re-enter the lost Kosmos and commune with the myriad enthusing daemonic images.” – ibid

Two sides to the same coin. The defensive, to better guard and protect the Soul against encroachment, to re-empower, to strengthen. To strike out at that which seeks to throttle the daemonic, the Kosmos. The offensive, to weaken that which seeks to cleave Body from Soul, that seeks to further force apart from that which was once innately interwoven, an existence of experiencing, meaning-living, and erotic.

“Thrown into a world of separation from life and a dictatorship of the rational, we free the instinctual and primordial beasts within through the rush of cosmogonic ecstasy.” – David Beth, Voudon Gnosis

To focus on the imagination, on the image, on living in the present without striving for false constructed ‘higher’ is scorned, the Spirit seeking to strangle through imposed time, through clocks that run counter to innate rhythms, through the begging to hustle, to engage, to profit, to bespoil, at a pace that is damaging and draining, a brutal task that is without respite, leaving husks and cleaved wounds in its wake when left uncountered.

“To peel back the heavy membrane from the eyes of the Soul, one must adopt a stance that is contrary to all that is acceptably human. In the bog of idle chatter and industrious din, one must be Silent, like the funerary statues that hush all but the elements and the wild beasts. Within the machine of activity, one must be Still, as a corpse in its rigid and eternal meditation. And one must close one’s eyes against the ever-growing hordes of dense forms. One goes within, and in so doing one undertakes the downward path.” – Richard Gavin, ‘The Benighted Path’.

To authentically feel without reservation and to live in shamelessness is to primally feel to the beat of a drum made of discarded tool-bones and humanity’s tanned flesh, stripped from the dedicant in sorcerous act and poetic sacrifice, as each genuine peeling away of part of the ‘I’ rips away part of that destroying and Soul-throttling Self that hinders ensoulment and forces the wedge in further. Dreaming sacred and all that follows are snapping jaws fighting back, silver teeth. With this shameless truth, there is the Quiet of reservation, of refusing the pleading to give, to give, to give without truly feeding in return, of savouring that which truly sates without obligation to let the cups run dry from slaking the thirst of greedy intake.

Path-treading that which is littered with loose rocks, gnarled roots, and a canopy hung with lights housed within lanterns of the Dead, lighting the way but complementing the fog of the undiscovered as the journey to the Chasm’s edge is readily taken. The path of ease, linear and offered without hesitation and with no need for warning, is shunned for the adventure. But the Path down and within is taken because, really, there is no other choice to be made in the hearts of those truly drawn to it, to whom the yearning for the macabre and spine-shivering is more welcomed than Day’s illumination.

The Haze

Image – Miles Johnston

Inspired by a private conversation following a sharing of artistry and a discussion of deeply personal Path inspirations and influences.

There is a deliciously inspirational and creative moment when the eyes begin to blur and the mind is as though it is floating with a primordial tide, ebbing and flowing, between focus and Dreaming.

The Haze is a fitting way to describe this moment as it is when not just the vision begins to blur but other boundaries as well, those between the fettering Day and unfettered Night, where the stranglehold of the rational is loosened to allow the fertile, vigorous primordial ichor to seep in, gifting the wellspring, gifting the “...fertilizing power of the Nightside” (Tomas Vincente; from the foreword of ‘The Cult of the Black Cube’).

In emphasis, the Haze is not a forced naming, given to an unwilling moment in an attempt to rationalise it. Rather, the Haze is a descriptor, no more and no less. It is what it is, without definition secured and without limiting anchor.

Recent readings of fetisch have inspired a ravenous reconsidering of previous experiences and embracing of new ones, allowing intuitions and creative expressions to surface naturally rather than forced, as though brought into eye’s range and mind’s eye through eddies and ebbs, through the flow of the internal tide, filtering past the shackling of the “cosmic prison of isolation and exile” that is the strangling hold of the Spirit on the pleading, Dream-clutching, yearning Soul.

The Haze is, like water’s force, unstoppable once a certain point is reached; the point of balance to be found is that spot before sleep’s hold becomes absolute, and the body’s surrender is to rest. It is the delicious embracing of the abandonment of productivity’s yolk and tyranny (Clavis Saturni) or as near to it as possible within the moment, as unmeasured as it is unmeasurable. The enforced instinct to ‘clock-watch’ is discarded on the wayside, as are other foci that represent imposed structures and external demands; in the Haze, there is Dreaming, there is creation, and there is the immersion within the black waters, drawing it in as though ink mingling with blood’s passionate redness, precious liquid.

The Haze, cherished, a lover as a state, a force not to try and dominate but to yield to in the surrender of submission where there is interplay and exchange rather than letting things happen without generous giving in return, where the courter is paid heed to as the energetic source that it is. The Haze is not a creation of the mind trying to rationalise a moment where there is a struggle for control but instead a precious yielding to what is fought for, unfettered creativity and the seeing of things, the perceiving of inspirations, without the imposition of Day’s shackles.

⊶

_{The Cult of the Black Cube referenced here is available from Theion Publishing – https://theionpublishing.com/shop/cbcube3ed/}

Softest Intuitions

Image by Philomena Famulok

“…the time of softest intuitions.” – Gail Jones

Being up during the night hours often results, for me, in a rather delicious half-awake half-dreaming state where instinct, intuition, and imagination seem more readily coaxed out. My tongue feels more at home, more articulate. It is within these hours, these moments, that feeling that I am writing this.

What words can be woven together feel stronger and more vulnerable in their heartfeltness, somewhere between silk and steel, pushing through the hardened earth of self-doubt like the gnarled, twisting roots of a chthonic tree, blackened and thorned, writhing and parting the surface with jagged edges to let the ink spill out.

I am and have been slowly learning to listen more to my gut instinct. Which in itself is gradually developing, nourished, and something I am actively cultivating. In progress and it is high time that I saw there to be no fault in such a thing, willingly taking the time to listen to myself, to my instincts, to my intuition, than rushing in. Learning the lay of the land within, and looking forward to the adventures while doing so.

intuition / noun
– the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning

Broaching On The Gulf

“Only by passing through the I-feeling can we still perceive the voices of the All from which we have been separated…” – Ludwig Klages, ‘Of Cosmogonic Eros’, p. 117

Path
Feet on the path, making steps that are awkwardly both present and not, the sand beneath gritty and perpetual, darkened as if burnt. Sometimes slow in pace, steady and measured. But sometimes there is more of a dance, a skip. Sometimes still there is the dragged marks of the body in surrender, fingers digging into the dirt, lewd and instinctive, stalking and primal, expressing a dance that emerges as heated inspiration, as monstrous as it is erotic, seduced.

There is a yearning that is belly-deep, sometimes beyond articulation, sometimes best captured in moments of a spark that comes to mind with the intensity of a lightning bolt, a volcanic eruption, the peak of pleasure, the rumbling peal of thunder. Innate and land-connected, birthed through openness, a willingness to yield; rushing in through nocturnal cracks and crevices, prising apart the shell – with the hardness of a hammer’s strike, with the persistent presence of a glacier, constantly moving.

The pull is like that of a lodestone, magnetic and instinctive. Beyond words; I often feel as though attempting to describe it is clumsy, and that it is better left as unarticulated, as a feeling that is like a bodily enshrouding and interweaving than as something put to words – denying rationalisation of something that should not be rationalised, fighting culture’s pressuring urge and snapping with back, holding the cherished inspiration and rawness close, nurturing the primordial urge.


Alienation
Recent times are not the first when I have encountered a profound sensation within of disjointing, of separating, a sensation of there being a distance surrounding me even while in places and settings that involve close interactions. It is something that I have also felt in childhood – a yearning, a feeling of isolation that was beyond that of what could be termed loneliness.

Loneliness as a child was something that I readily adjusted to; turning to books, to reading, to crafted adventures of the mind, and to the day trips out to historical sites and places of natural significance. But looking back now, loneliness is the word used by others, rather than myself. I was never really lonely. Alone, yes. But also not, given the company of the adventures and stories within my imagination, be they self-created or drawn from the books that I had readily to hand. There was a sensation of off, of something ‘missing’.

” ‘Ek-stasis’ taken literally means to go “out of” “stasis”. It denotes a dis-placement but can easily be read (through a Kosmic Gnostic lens) as going out of a static being and into the dynamic becoming that is the reality of kosmic, pandaemonic Life. Ecstasy then implies to leave the heteronomy of ‘Spirit’ and enter (and restore!) the hegemony of the Cosmogonic Eros: “May Eros then reign who engendered it all!” – Jessica Grote, ‘Ek-Stasis’

Yearning for the dynamic, for the ensouled, for the daemonic, feels innate, a deep-felt instinct that is gradually, perpetually, strengthening in conviction. Mating with the daemonic, of experiencing the rush and all-Body/all-Soul dance with Eros; a reunion as it should be, as it was before the Spirit’s cleaving division took hold. There are moments when this awareness settles back, lingering but not preoccupation, then there are times when it comes to the fore, acute and distinct.

Additional –
This ties in closely to this writing, ‘Primordial Longing’ – https://primalobscurite.wordpress.com/2023/01/08/primordial-longing/ and ‘Shapes Within’ – https://primalobscurite.wordpress.com/2022/06/13/shapes-within/

Connections

THE TRANSFORMED

The energetic threads of knowing have always been something intensely cherished.

Whether they remain consistent over years, change with the passing of time as with the seasons, or organically entwine and then grow apart, and any other manner of shift and change, the flourishing and cultivation of connections is something that has become a precious part of my lived experience as much as it is part of my practices. Quite the contrast to long previously but definitely for the better.

The Present-Dead from whom I am descended are as regarded as here and now, although changed, as much family as those who are contactable through the means of a phone call rather than anything more ritual. These are connections I am actively working to nourish and to strengthen, to draw into my day-to-day so strengthen them and give them a place alongside rather than to one side, included rather than only sparingly consulted.

THE TRANSFORMING

When it comes to those in the present, to the connections within the now from the living alongside the Present-Dead, there is a ceaselessly beautiful and roiling maelstrom of potential – shifting and oscillating with each interaction, as if an expression of mutual artistry being endlessly added to and detailed. Threads reinforcing, threads parting, threads gathering, all forming part of the continual tapestry.

My personal interactions have the potential for unfettered development in terms of their direction, beautifully present without the need to attach a label or stuff them into a limiting category. Remembering that is a surge of cherished self-re-familiarising, a sanctuary for wellbeing.

Re-self-exploring, something I should remember to do more often.

Thoughts – Gast Bouschet, Antibody Interview

From the interview by Antibody — https://youtube.com/watch?v=hvnLMtwLzt8&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE

“The real challenge of sorcery is there: to step out of the human to become something else. Something that exists more… in symbiosis with what surrounds us. I don’t think of harmony here because I think the world is in bad shape. I think we have to work with what we have.”

The world is in a state of conflict; the creative, the primordial, the daemonic, is in a state of strangulation and humanity blinkered from experiencing the world in symbiosis through the rationalising, mankind-first stance that has been taken for so long. “Thrown into a world of separation from life and a dictatorship of the rational, we free the instinctual and primordial beasts within through the rush of cosmogonic ecstasy” (Voudon Gnosis, David Beth, p.6). Humans are sites of conflict, and it is through a warring that the restrictions must be broken to allow for sorcerous expression, an othering and drawing on otherness.

This conflict, this jarring, is further spoken of in the Fieldpath by Heidegger: “Man in vain attempts to bring the globe in order through his plans whenever he is not in harmony with the message of the Fieldpath. The danger threatens that men of today remain hard of hearing to its language. They have ears only for the noise of the media, which they take to be almost the voice of God. So man becomes fragmented and pathless. To the fragmented the Simple seems monotonous. The monotonous becomes wearisome. Those who are weary find only uniformity. The Simple has fled. Its quiet power is exhausted.” This forced ordering, this forced structuring, is contrary to the way of existence ancient.

Sorcery to this effect is to regard the powers worked with, the Lares, the genius locii, as spirits and the present-dead worked with in a manner where there is an equal regard rather than a thirst to dominate; a welcoming into the working-devotional space, a cultivation of locational relationships, an erotic seduction of the primal.

“Something that tears away the veil that anthropocentrism has thrown over the world. We need a different world view and in order to get it, we need to proceed in a radical way.”

To live where there are communications, matings, with the daemonic where the ‘I’-dentity is destroyed is radical in a world where the focus of living is anchored in enclosing boxes and packaged concepts is Kosmic Gnosis. To Experience without rationalising, without trying to disassemble a moment down to the components to understand it, is radical; it is a full-Bodied, full-Souled way living and become-innate totality, a prehistoric and primordial existence.

It is the Erotic rush that shatters the hold of the Spirit to mate with the Soul, a primal raw communion; the individual becoming beside-oneself in terrific awe. To embrace the Present-Dead rather than to regard them as separate, elevated, apart is to ground oneself in a living where the dead are perpetually present, as within our lives as the lived moments that we experience. They are not just for special occasions but ever-present, to be consulted, welcomed, given home and hearth as though living. I refuse to relegate them to special days, to distant plots, or myself to mourning, to thinking of them as gone.

Gast Bouschet’s works destroy artistic foundations and make their home in sites of decay, of wildness, and in habitat far from the confines and structures of creative theory and comparisons to artist’s past, eschewing structure to present a wildness in creative expression that is a stark and violently resistant.

Radicalness is to be cultivated, forged, lived, embodied, drawn from the sorceror-poet, the sorceror-smith, and from the guttural, deepest recesses of the soul, forced out from beneath rigidness and imposition, expressed liberally and without shame. Beginning my embracing of this living has encouraged what was once a trickle, a thin barely-tended to stream of poetry, to force past the stones of doubt, of theory, of ‘It has to be done just like this’ self-imposed to become an ink-blood wellspring. What I craft using words into poetry may never be award-winning or may never tick the boxes of what is expected regarding stanza, verse et al. but it is mine, it is primal, and it is going to resolutely, resistantly, continue where the inspiration strikes, be it on the commute to one of my jobs where the countryside blurs by, in the early hours of the morning like when I am writing this, or drawn from amidst the shadows and gnarled tree roots of Dreaming wildness.

“…the materiality of your work, this aspect of being one with the material, of entering into it, of dialoguing with it.”

To create – be it with physical materials or with words as in writing and poetry – is to interact, to engage, to exchange. For me, when I have the chance to work on something deeply personal and inspired, creating is as though disembowelling myself and offering my entrails, my inner core, my bones. To use a quote by Sappho as inspiration, my words become my sensitive nerves, my sentences, as resilient as sinew, paragraphs as bone, and the whole creation once complete, a naked and vulnerable offering.

When using materials, there is a sense of exchange. As it is shaped by my hands, so too does it shape me in return. In the antler tines and rune discs that I am working on, there will always be not just the Saturnine storm water and Venusian energy imbued into it but also cells from my skin where I worked the sandpaper to smooth out any sharp edges, sweat where held the tine and shaft of the antler as firmly as I could while cutting it, fighting against the recoil and power of the toil used to divide it into portions, and my time and energy itself entangled with every tine, every disc, in its very production.

I enjoy the learning experience of encountering new materials. When I made a talisman for the first time, time was put aside to share space with the crow’s feet and the snakeskin, to run my hands over the material to learn how it ‘spoke’, to understand how it moved and felt when handled. Like learning the body of a new intimacy or a route newly trodden somewhere unexplored.

“Death does not bring us pleasure or happiness, and so we try to repress it. But I believe that there is no wisdom without the awareness of death. The sorcerous purpose of my work is to disintegrate into something other than death, to disintegrate into non-human continuation.”

This non-human continuation is what I feel is aptly within resonance with the following quote from ‘Of Cosmogonic Eros’ by Ludwig Klages: “The dead had for them achieved the highest order. The deceased had become the mystes, hero, even daemon, and the act of dying coincided with the apotheosis of the consummating Gamos!” (p.182). This continuation is further emphasised: “But this did not lead to the dead of prehistory gaining ‘immortality’, rather it was as if they had not died at all but were present yet transformed!” (ibid, p.184), as “…it was not the annihilation of existence but life metamorphosis” (p.184).

From ‘Anarch’ by Scarlet Imprint – https://www.bouschet-hilbert.org/

Deeply informing my inspired responses is Kosmic Gnosis – http://kosmic-gnosis.org/
> “The Kosmic Gnostic strives to re-unite the ensouled biocentric Kosmos, home of daemonic, enthusing powers, with the isolated human Life through magical conjuration and fulfilment in esoteric ecstasis. The resulting primordial Ur-experiences shatter the dominance of the spirit, reigning in the profane ‘I-dentity’, and return the seeker to the homeland of the soul. Dying to the false reality and profane cosmos, the antinomian visionary resurrects in the World of Powers, the true Kosmos and Reality. Pregnant with the World, he frees from Things and Man the incarcerated God and gives birth to a Universe at every step he takes.” — “Only from the ensuing experience of night-consciousness are born magical incantations, sorcerous words and conjurations of true power which otherwise would neither originate in nor receive feeding from the daemonic spheres. Ur-sounds resonate in the soul of the Night-visionary and are then weaved into a seducing mélange of symbolic words of magical potency which will always transcend ratio and will withstand the analytical onslaughts of the profane.”

Drawn On —
‘Of Cosmogonic Eros’ by Ludwig Klages; Theion Publishing. https://theionpublishing.com/shop/of-cosmogonic-eros/
‘Voudon Gnosis’ by David Beth; Fulgur Press.

These thoughts were drawn from the interview direct. I anticipate the writing and thoughts it holds within developing organically in response to when ANARCH is read, as is intended.

GROTESQUE

Aloisio Giovannoli 1590-1605

Before I relocated Northward, I lived for a few years over a decade in the Cotswolds, situated in such a way that while we were immersed in an urban centre, escapes were both possible and plentiful to historic sites, limestone-heavy geology, and footpaths a plenty for exploration and adventure. A deep adoration of wandering country lanes will always been rooted within me from these memories, alongside a deep appreciation of the rural, more so the less cultivated parts of it, rare as they are.

One lingering memory that I now find myself revisiting with eyes-as-though-anew is a time in my youth, although at what age more precisely is not within my grasping.

Periods of time were spent in my childhood downstairs, as you do, and more so when I was ill. The furnishings, second-hand, were loved and loved again. The evening in question saw me laid on the sofa, wrapped up in an impressive nest of blankets. Directly opposite was a ceiling to floor length sliding glass door that opened out onto the garden. Small as said garden was, it was our little patch of beloved green. Whether I was asleep and then roused into awakeness through what was witnessed first in mind and then with the eyes, I do not know, but I starkly remember staring at the closed curtains at what can only be described as a screaming grotesque face backlit.

The words to describe it are at once both difficult to find and easy; some parts of the memory striking in their clarity and others vague and distorted. Framed in either a mane or wild tangles of hair, grossly exaggerated roughly human but also monstrous features, with the stark outline of staring eyes. Transfixed and shaken down to the bones both, at once both drawn to it and repulsed. It is something that has remained persistently interwoven within me ever since, stirring and shrouding as it wills. I will not attempt to pry into it, for the rationalisation of such a thing – encounter? – is not how I approach such a recalling. The grotesque, impacting and resonating, reverberating with an underlying consistence.

Poem – CONSUME

The little moments, the fleeting happenings,

are plucked as if a floating mote of dust,

grasped within a cage of snaring fingers

and drawn in, nibbled on, partaken of

as one might a delectable snack – the flavour

passing in a moment but no less filling the mouth 

with a flaring burst in the moment, tingling the nerves.

Choking, gagging, coughing up the 

broken shards of bone and gristle, the 

debris from the wrenching away of one known, 

even while gnawing ravenously on the marrow of grief 

and the sweet, rich filling memories within. 

Bittersweet meal, every bite as though anew. The

flavour ever-lingering, never truly leaving the palate, 

as the dead remain ever within, embodied in what

we learned from their time shared.

Sinking the teeth deep into yearning flesh, of the self 

or that of a bodily other, grasping and seeing the imprints

of eager palms. Interwoven and tangling, panting and inhaling

for needed breath even as the vulnerable core is torn into and exposed,

offered readily to grasping digits, to a maw dripping with the blood of the 

readily sacrificed self, to the tongue so barely able to process the giving 

in one go as to seek it again. The moans of peaking desire also those of delight

at the fullness of the experience, at the orchestra of memories and moments filling

the senses. Gluttony in the present, a feast to recall the taste of in the future,

savoured – the surrender and giving, willing, to dine on and remember.

Stripped bare, methodically purposeful, scraping down

to the bone itself, the isolation and search for something new with which

to entice the senses only finding what tastes as though ash in the mouth, 

deadened. Standardised and mechanical, without the crafter’s dedication and

effort and so without the exquisite refinement that comes from 

finding sustenance in the smaller, quieter moments and places. 

Trapped within the confines of a box, clawing at the walls of iron and industry. 

Eating if only to keep on moving, to keep on searching, as mechanical in intention

as the attempt at flavour, like a coating on the tongue. 

It is within moments of devouring – from the eager bites digging into elation and

lust (for self, with another, for something) to the scraps of deadened routine to the

delicious morsels of fleeting flavour – that we pass through the experiencing of the present, each

experience a consumption, a partaking in and interweaving, a sustaining offering.