Make it real, make it manifest

From one traveler to another

Listen, baby, come here, I need to talk to you. I’m grabbing your lapel in two fists as a cigarette teeters over my trembling fingers, slapping the fallen ashes off you like I’m beating a dusty rug, gassing you with the smell of my first 4 morning coffees. Because this is really important and I’m saying it directly into your eyeballs while you wish I would take a few steps back. I have to tell you something!

You’ve gotta start making your ideas real.

You have to start giving them a life outside you.

What do I mean? I think you know, and now I’m perched on a rickety iron bench taking a long drag off a short fag like we’ve got all the time in the world, but I know I’ve accosted you on your morning commute. You wouldn’t have even stopped if I hadn’t added a pinch (okay, a generous spoonful) of urgency to my approach. I just need you to listen. I don’t want you to end up like me—wasting the most virile and vibrant years of your creative life only so you could wind up wound-up years down the road, with a frantic and erratic urge to get all your thoughts and feelings and inane ponderings on paper whether they ever matter or not.

Your art is a magick spell. And you’re nodding, preparing to placate me once more because I yell this across the street at you every day you pass by—with a knife-like sheen to my gaze and a tremulous shiver to my voice. You get it, I get it, we all get it.

But you’re wrong, baby. Soooo wrong! You don’t get it.

This truth still exists as a simple idea to you. It lives inside your brain right next to your multiplication tables and a few Winston Churchill quotes. It doesn’t really mean anything in your precious little discombobulated, disorganized, compost bin of a head. And that’s why you won’t show up and do it.

You won’t make the magick.

You won’t give your ideas a life outside of you.

You won’t materialize the dross of your consciousness like a totem to an ancient god.

I’m sunken into this bench now; suspiciously relaxed, rampaciously reposed, violence sloshing right under the surface, and you can feel the steam coming off me even as I sit still with all the casualness of every other passerby. I’m itching to make a mess. I’m erratically driven by the desire to document my own disease.

I’m under the influence of the art spell. And I don’t think DARE can help us now.

The art of making manifest

You don’t get it yet. And I can’t explain it to you. I would just be uploading more bits into your brain computer and that guy is doing the best he can with what data he’s managed to collect. No redundancies here, folks. What I want you to do is feel it.

You know that feeling when you let yourself write a letter you’ll never send to a person who gutted you, dragging all your insides out, wasting your wantonness—your spark of life—and offering none of their own? You know that feeling when you see it all outside yourself? You feel the transmutation that has occurred. Those pages vibrate—they glitter at the edges like cinders. You sense the danger in that shaved wood so you rip it up and trash it or burn it for good measure.

Or maybe you don’t.

Maybe you put it in a drawer like a talisman against familiar foibles. An effigy to a mistake you won’t make again, a person you won’t be again, a life you won’t live again. The physical body of the fuel you still need to power something. You place it on your altar where you can watch it seethe like a sigil that hasn’t done its work yet. You lock that corroded love up like a ship in a bottle, the pathophysiological anatomy of a dying breed, as if someone might come along one day to study its extinction.

That letter is a work of magick. It’s a thought spell. It’s an emotional spell. Because thoughts are just packets of emotion, anyway. Packets of energy. Ingoing and outgoing. Containing their own information.

You know the power of that spell even if you don’t know you know it. Part of you remembers—an ancestral knowing that lives in your mitochondria, your DNA.

But if you really want to feel it, if you want to make this knowing conscious, you have to set up a real experiment—hypothesis and all. You have to start writing things down, drawing them out, collaging them, sculpting them from clay or found objects or whatever you can get your hands on. You have to let go of traditional ideas about making art or the ideal circumstances that never come. You have to let the art spell take you. You have to start seeing every part of your Self and your consciousness as the magick. That’s the real art. That’s the art that becomes The Art.

And you have to start committing to approximation. None of this “perfected vision” shit. You have to let that go. Simple spells are powerful. Simple art is just as magickal as the most elaborate.

And you have to start allowing yourself to feel it—really feel it! Look back at what you’ve created and notice how your nervous system responds, how your connective tissue slides over itself, how your muscle fibers twitch when you really take it in. You have to close your eyes and feel what’s been born. You have to sense the ghost in the paper. See the phantom made form.

Feel yourself become god as you breathe into these tangible objects, “let there be light.”

And so there was.

Do you feel it? That electricity in your fingertips? The impression of words spoken in a lost language as the wind whistles through the trees? The world coming alive beneath your nose, rising to meet you when you’re not looking? Do you hear the rocks singing? The concrete chorus under your feet? Do you feel it burning up your legs, rumbling through your sacral, settling in your throat like a warm lump?

Do you feel it?

Make it real.

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