Love and Magick are Our Best Hope

The easiest, funnest, and most likely path to averting apocalypse

Cynthia Sley sings OV Power with PTV, in a video by Emily Hughston Hoffman

As I explained in my last few posts, I’m taking a bit of a hiatus this summer to focus on a couple of larger projects and also to “reset” my creative circadian rhythm after having succumbed to the implied pace of these platforms. It has given me the time to delve deeply into three creative projects, and already I realize that nothing will be the same.

The biggest shift came last weekend, at the tribute concert for Genesis Breyer P-Orridge that I performed in with PsychicTV and special guests including Cynthia Sley (Bush Tetras), David J (Bauhaus), Bob Bert (Sonic Youth), Shilpa Ray, Christeene, and Torii Wolf. The night before, Tribeca Film Festival premiered the new documentary on Gen’s life, S/he Is Still Her/e, which set both the tone and the agenda for the weekend. The movie made it clear that, at least according to Gen, the way to impact people is not to change their minds but to speak to their hearts and souls through music and art. Such forms of expression are less like treatises or manifestos than sigils — magickal ceremonies that recalibrate our collective perceptions, beliefs, and intentions. Reality become fungible.

As we gathered for the show the next night, we understood what the concert was for. Yes, in one song David J attempted to summon Gen while I monitored through a “Ghost Machine” (a kind of radio that sweeps frequencies for random words). But it was the spirit of the gathering that struck me. We were at once celebrating and retrieving the spirit of collective creative will in order to reclaim this world for the weird and wonderful. Rhythm, sound, movement, bodies together, unconditional acceptance, and clarity of intention. It doesn’t quite translate to words, but the easiest way to say it is Love.

It was as if we all realized together that we cannot think or debate our way out of the current chaos. (Take your pick: Trump, Middle East, climate change, species extinction, inequality, racism, slavery, disconnection, mental illness…and try not to judge me on the order in which I listed them.) It felt so clear that the shift we need to execute needs to come from someplace other than cable news, political machination, intellectual debate, Substack posts, podcasts, or polemical books. There’s no way to argue this.

People don’t listen to facts, anyway. They find the facts they need to fit their story, whether or not the facts are contextual or even true. Saving ourselves and each other is not a matter of convincing anyone of anything. What we need to offer each other manifests less like words than an embrace. It happens in real life, and through artistic or spiritual interventions that bring us together in pre-cognitive ways — before our belief systems mangle the essential transmission.

I’d venture that everyone in the space with us that night felt this same basic truth. We also felt a bit of hope, which is a feeling I had all but forgotten. More than a bit of hope, if I’m being honest. We were bathing in hope, so evident was the rightness and power of our collective memory and intention. This state of awareness is available to us all, all the time. And it neutralizes the current crazy, effortlessly.

I had been intending to do some sort of sigil myself this summer. I wanted to mark my own pivot to more creative pursuits, less scheduled output, and more live contact with collaborators who feed this passion. (Over the past twenty years, answering email has made up a majority of my waking hours. I’ve done this out of a sense of obligation or duty, I suppose. But I don’t think I’m really helping anyone, and particularly not the ones who are developing an alternative social network, internet infrastructure, monetary system, or planetary order.) So I decided I would talk to some of my more witchy associates and develop a simple sigil to help mark a shift away from arguing and emailing and Google Calendar and toward something more weird and creative and artsy and magickal and fun.

But that night playing with some of my dearest friends and music heroes was the shift. It couldn’t have been any more apparent. And it has already attracted a number of projects more consistent with this ethos. I’m finally working on my graphic novel, which is more of a wish than a lesson. Even my writing process has become less forced, and more open to the weird. I’m learning things about the story from some unconscious place, as if from the story itself. Plot elements and character names from the beginning of the story are unintentionally corresponding to stuff at the end — at least when I have the sense of mind to get out of my own way and let things unfold as if in a dream.

I got invited to consult on a horror movie, which has effortlessly become an opportunity to expose and critique the tech bro dominator mentality, but without ever pointing it out. I’m helping a friend with a new, highly magickal project (more on that soon…), where resources and people are appearing and enlisting as if, well, summoned. The same is happening for a movie I’m starting to work on — a rather psychedelic journey I’m hoping will help talk America down off its bad trip. Film and TV projects are super hard to get off the ground right now, but this one seems to be self-propelled.

I don’t regret the twenty-something books, hundreds of articles, and 300+ podcasts I’ve produced over the past few years. But all this writing and talking can only take us so far, particularly when it has been focused on making the best arguments for why we should realize this or that. To be fair, I have worked hard on trying model approaches that engender what I’ve been calling a “team human” way of life. My podcast conversations have been intended to demonstrate of a style of comportment or mode of relationship that matters at least as much as the particular content any guest (or I, myself) have to offer. The medium is the message, after all, even if it is nice to have some “thing” to be talking about.

For right now, I want to move from things to ways, nouns to verbs, or figure to ground. I feel like the trauma all around us has led me to wrap up my heart too tightly in a protective shield; and the pain and suffering of others has led me to deny myself access to the fun and ecstatic experiences that would actually empower me to do anything about it. I want more touch, more cuddles, more embodied experience that can help loosen this knot of dread and despair.

I feel like we can be present for each other in very real ways, actually holding space in our hearts for each other. But our access to those abilities doesn’t come through self-denial and reserve, but rather through celebration and communion. Yes, it’s okay to feel fabulous when other people are suffering. Especially if that ecstasy and shared experience is helping to metabolize the collective trauma and the abate the unresolved fear and rage that are at least indirectly causing all that pain and suffering to begin with.

On a practical level, my output here is going to be scarce over the summer. There are a couple of conversations I want to record and share, and some essays I want to write, but it won’t be close to weekly. If you want to suspend your paid subscriptions, I totally understand. For those who stay on, I promise to give you some cool things for free when they’re done, like a digital copy of the graphic novel and some sort of free access to whatever else I do.

Thanks for being there, in whatever way you are there. I’ve been relying on you for something much more precious than your subscription dollars, and want you to know I am truly grateful for your presence. You are a gift.