Poetry, Chaos Magick and Virtual Worlds

The first of near-weekly blog entries will set the pattern ... an account of something that happened in the week before that is a little out of the ordinary run of things.

Treadwell's is an esoteric bookshop in Tavistock Street (Covent Garden) that has a tradition of holding lectures and events surrounding the by-ways of belief and literature.

This Wednesday saw a poetry reading that conceded nothing to modernism.  The aged but sprightly occultist Zachary Cox read from his own work (much of it comical parody), from a tradition now out of fashion (Poe, Swinburne, Chesterton) and from the Dragon Ritual, a Crowleian occult ritual that owed as much to Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern as to the 'wickedest man in the world'.

My business partner, of course, 'worries about me' (with a smile) because I give time to these things - as I did to earlier lectures on H.P. Lovecraft and will do to a forthcoming one on 'demonhunters of Japan' but this is a community of exploration of ideas that is far from po-faced, can sometimes laugh at itself and, even if my own approach remains horribly rational, is still trying to dig out the ineffable from the mundane where the rest of us have long given up.

More to the point, these cultural interludes spark creative ideas and innovative use of language in one's own world - and my income sometimes comes from making connections that others cannot make for themselves. The 'use-value' of Treadwell's events is not the point, of course, but it is nice to find a 'use-value' if only not to be unnecessarily defensive with business colleagues.  There is an odd mainstream prejudice against radical intellectual experimentation - as if the system as a whole depends on us all conforming to certain shared ideas to such an extent that any breach in that belief system might bring the whole thing tumbling down.  It suggests that we might be holding on to many of our beliefs out of fear for own survival if things were to change.

One final point - sometimes insights into new phenomena can come from surprising places.  We have scarcely touched the surface of what virtual worlds might do to our culture and personal development.  There is no precedent - unless it be some of the risky experimentation of the distinctly off-the-message-board practitioners of Chaos Magick.  This is not to accept the latter's version of the world but only to see that this closed world with its links to role play may have things to teach the wider culture about coping with changes that will partly detach mind from body through technology and then do so without restraint of geography and with a changed sense of time (which is one of the most remarkable subjective effects of entry into a virtual world).

For those interested in Zachary Cox, Treadwell's have released an Mp3 download of the recital at http://www.treadwells-london.com/downloads.asp