Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel. For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to weirdstudies.com. Why don't we start by you telling me a little bit about how the class went,
and that'll get us into the topic. Very briefly, JF was going to come to guest teaching my class, and then for reasons beyond our control, he couldn't. Right. It went fine, except, you know, I got to say, it was the last class and everybody's burned out. Right. You know, I spend a lot of time talking about deterritorialization. Territorialization, deterritorialization is very important to that particular chapter on the refrain, but it's just important to Deleuze and Guattari in general. You know, there's a kind of popular appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari in academia. like glows and gotari are among the most name-checked of theorists and very often in ways
that would probably have them spinning in their grave i mean like very univocal interpretations of concepts that are not intended to be univocal right people wanting to nail down these concepts into neat definitions that then can be instrumentalized in fairly straightforward ways, which seems to me to be somehow at odds with the spirit of DeLiz and Guattari's book. That's an example of re-territorialization right there. Exactly. And kind of ironically, one way that this happens in the kind of paint-by-numbers theoretical academia, de-territorialization is always good, and territorialization is always bad. Right. Whereas it's ambivalent.
Oh, absolutely. That's clear in the chapter that we were studying. Yeah. You can't not have a territory. Yeah, exactly. You know? Yeah. Actually, the most successful part of the class for me, at any rate, is a bit of episode eight of Twin Peaks, the return, the 2017 long-awaited return of Twin Peaks. It's a bit that I didn't plan on talking about before I walked in there, but then it just sort of was perfect. it's the bit before that long stretch of brakaj like experimental cinema that starts with the atomic bomb blast and goes basically to the end it's when evil coop and that fucker ray are driving in the car and ray is kind of winding up coop and saying like yeah i got the coordinates in my head
but you're gonna have to pay to get them out and you know he double crosses coop and shoots them and then this occult weirdness happens, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, as that is going down, they're on the highway. Coop does some kind of occult thing to lose all the electronic tracking devices on the car. And then once they're free and clear, they're just on this sort of like super highway, not super highway, but, you know, like an interstate. And Coop says, okay, take that turn off over there. And they go off, and now they're on a tributary road, right? a road that's still a highway but it's like smaller and then they don't say anything and but you get a lot of those very lynchian point of view shots where you just see the two headlights poking into the darkness and all you can see is what the headlights are picking up and you're
seeing them going through progressively smaller roads wilder territory progressively further and further away from the brightly lit, fully kind of signposted, mapped out, organized space of the interstate. And this to me was like a perfect kind of visual representation of moving from a thoroughly territorialized to a thoroughly de-territorialized space. Like at a certain point, you get a reverse angle shot where you see Ray and Coop in the front seat of the car, and suddenly you hear this bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, and you see them jiggling in the car, and you realize like, oh, they're no longer on pavement at all. And then you get another shot of what the car headlights are picking up
and it's just bushes and shit. Yeah. So it's like there's no man-made objects at all. Whereas just before that you would see like scraps of chain link fence, reflectors, bits of poured concrete and so on. But like as you're going deeper into the de-territorialized, you're seeing those elements become sketchier and sketchier. They become almost more like a few remaining symbols of human occupation. Yeah, vestiges. Yeah, vestiges until you're entirely outside of it. And I pointed out to the students, it's always in de-territorialized spaces that encounters with the weird take place. Exactly, yeah. UFO skeptics always say, it's like, why is it that it's always these hayseeds in remote rural areas that end up getting anally probed by aliens?
some dude in a bib overall being pulled up into a spaceship and the reason is because that's where people have always encountered strange beings fairies or what have you you're never going to encounter the fair folk like in your neighborhood Starbucks well they're hard to see there anyways yeah and you need to because you can de-territorialize without leaving the territory this is one thing but I really like Yeah, no, this is actually, this is an important detail, which we should probably return to. It's very true. Right. But nevertheless, if we want to rig up this thing where something extremely eerie happens. Yeah. You know, Ray shoots Coop, and then Coop gets this kind of strange help as these spectral woodsmen come and smear blood all over him.
Right. And do something that allows him to revive. That's not going to happen in a bright, sunlit, well-marked out, mapped space. dramatically speaking, it's always going to have to happen in some kind of de-territorialized space. I picked up on a few actually Deleuzian concepts in that sequence from Twin Peaks you just described. So the highway is the established territory, the territorialized space, and then he turns off onto this tributary road and they end up de-territorializing. But the kind of process by which they get there is what Deleuze and Guattari call a line of flight. So the line of flight is always the transversal line that leads you out of established territory, the kind of crazy train of thought that will de-territorialize a moment. You know, when you're just waiting in line for
coffee and then you get this crazy thought and all of a sudden the whole place starts to look kind of surreal because you're thinking of something that's worrying you or a new idea comes to you and all of a sudden it just de-territorializes. I mean, what territory means in Deleuze and Guattari is semiotic space. Like a territory is not a parcel of land necessarily. It's a space in which things have established meanings. And anything that destabilizes meaning is a deterritorialization. How this all plays into the idea of hyperstition, which is our concept for today, will probably become clear as we keep talking. We both agreed that it would be cool to do a show about hyperstition because that's the class we were going to do together at your university. So what's a hyperstition? So I'll give you my quick definition.
You can tell me what you think. First of all, we have to acknowledge that hyperstition is a concept that comes from the philosophy of Nick Land, which I've read a lot about. I've read some stuff, but I'm not, this is not going to be a show, at least from my end, it's not going to be a show about Nick Land's idea of hyperstition, although that might come into play a little bit. But just, we're just using the word in its general sense to mean fictions that become real. So Phil just talked about Twin Peaks as a work of hyperstition. So essentially what Phil was doing there and what we did in our Garmin Bosia episode and also what Phil does in his Garmin Bosia essay, is that available online or will you make it so? It's a work in progress. One of these days I'll publish it probably as part of a book.
So the idea is that you can use Twin Peaks almost as a kind of like theoretical lens to look at modern history and all kinds of things, actually, and make sense of them. Whereas, this is the simple definition of a hyperstition, whereas David Lynch never intended necessarily his work to become a theoretical apparatus for analyzing modern history, it so happens to be that because the aesthetic forces that comprise of the makeup, the Twin Peaks universe and the story, you can find their reflections in the world and you can actually use aspects of the Twin Peaks story or setting to make it. Or mythos, actually. Yeah, let's call it mythos, yeah. I mean, I'm borrowing that from now many people who use the Cthulhu mythos as a theoretical frame in exactly the way you're describing.
Exactly. And actually, one thing we might want to talk about or we could talk about is what makes a mythos as opposed to just a myth. Well, yeah, that's a good one. Or as opposed to a story or a corpus or body of work or whatever. Right. But anyway, but I don't want to get off on that right now. The point is that, and we do this all the time in our show, we'll take fiction and we'll treat it as though it were about reality and we'll look at how fictions reveal things that would have remained hidden had those fictions not come into being. So the idea of hyperstition, it's a play on words a bit. It's almost a portmanteau kind of term. You're changing the term superstition into hyperstition to mean a superstition that actually becomes real. So there's a similarity in Land's work. there's a similarity between hyperstitions and memes
ideas that catch on almost like viruses and spread and become they become normative they become and self-propagating self-propagating, yeah, right so two examples that Nick Land gives in one of the interviews we read were the idea of the holy city of Jerusalem which is for Nick Land an obvious fiction there's nothing holy about Jerusalem but by force of repetition and propagation, this idea turns Jerusalem into an actual holy city. Another example he gives is the idea of cyberspace, which originates in the minds of science fiction authors like William Gibson, but then eventually became an actual fact of life. These are hyperstitions. Another powerful example would be the idea of money. Money is a hyperstition. Money has no actual value. Like
if you were to give a monetary value, paradoxically, to a $1 bill, it would be less than a cent, probably right so and yet there's the whole symbolic structure that's that's infused into the monetary system and that gives money value that it never actually has but that we all believe it has and in a sense it comes to have actually so yeah one important wrinkle in all this when land defines hyperstition and you can find this in the collected publications of the ccru which is this kind of institution that ran unofficially within the University of Warwick philosophy department back in the 1990s. Nick Land led it. But in any event, the collected writings of the CCRU, which
are always sort of collective and anonymous, but a lot of them, I think, are Land himself. In those writings, hyperstition is defined as ideas that make themselves real. And there's a kind of a reflexive component to this. And this seems important to me. You were talking a moment ago about memes and Richard Dawkins' idea of the meme. That's very much on point because one of the fundamental things about memes that Dawkins is very careful to make is that there's no intelligence in memes. There's no purpose. There's no mind. There's no direction. There's nobody who is responsible for the propagation of memes any more than there is some god-like entity that is
responsible for the successful propagation of some genes and not others. The answer of how does evolution take place, it happens by itself. And if evolution is the overall process defined by genetic variation and adaptation, the genes are varying and adapting by themselves. There's no guiding idea. And this is actually, I think, philosophically, a rather difficult thing to wrap your head around. It's interesting if you read The Selfish Gene by Dawkins, you realize that he can't quite do it, that he talks constantly about genes as if they have a kind of an intelligence or a telos, a goal in mind. And he stops a number of times and says,
now this is just a figure of speech or this is a conventional way of talking because it's very difficult to talk of these things. otherwise, as if they're entirely devoid of intelligence. But that is exactly what I mean to say. So that's actually a sore point. There's almost something in language that makes it difficult for us to talk about this propagation in a purely reflexive way. It just does it by itself. But that, I think, is something that land or the collective entity of the CCRU is taking over from that definition of the meme. There's no human agency that you can't, it's not even, I think, quite right to say like, oh, well, what happens is we all get together and decide to believe something, and then somehow that becomes true. The way it's phrased, and at least in these original documents,
puts more emphasis on the idea that it's the ideas that are doing this. Yes, yeah, absolutely. They're making themselves true. Yes, but there is at least implicitly in Land's work and the CCIU stuff that I've seen, the belief that becoming conscious of this allows you some agency over it. A lot of the interventions of the CCRU and a lot of what Nick Land was trying to do in the 90s was trying to create these new hyperstitions, or at least to help certain hyperstitions develop. I think he defined the CCRU itself as a hyperstitious thing. Yeah, he did. So it's very ambiguous, as it always is in postmodern philosophy, where agency ends and automatism, automatic or completely arbitrary processes begin.
That's the thorn in the side of all postmodern thinking. Although the CCRU people are very quick to say that they're not postmodern. No, I know. Which is an interest. So there's every other postmodern. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, which we can return to because I'm actually not at all convinced that that's true in any event. Postmodern is a term that's applied to you. It's not something you apply to yourself, unless you're like Jean-Francois Lyotard, I think. It's the only exception. So, yeah, of course. It's like calling yourself hip. Yeah. Like, the only person who gets to say he's hip is like Bob Dylan. No one else gets to say that. Right, exactly. Exactly. When I read some of this stuff, and I've only read a little bit of it, I get the sense that ultimately the CCRU group and Nick Land, they pretty much share the same basic metaphysical assumptions that the rest of academia hold.
Like one thing I found really interesting was that Nick Land says that one of the characteristics of a hyperstition is that it acts as a call to the old ones. I found that interesting. So the old ones, he takes that notion from Lovecraft. He says that every hyperstition calls to these great old ones, these forces of irrational chaos that undergird everything. The way that I kind of made sense of it was to think that, well, the very idea that sacred ideas, ideas that we cherish and value, ideas such as, for example, the idea of the human being, the human rational agent, or the idea of human rights. These are hyperstitions for land. So the very fact that these are purely contingent memes, by that very fact, these ideas seen in their right light as hyperstitians call to the irrational, contingent, absolutely radically meaningless underpinnings of all ideas.
So therefore, the very concept of hyperstition, once it's accepted as the defining principle of culture, dissolves culture or relativizes culture and makes it so contingent that for all intents and purposes, we're in the world of the old ones, the world of absolute, bare, meaningless instinct and drives and that sort of thing. that sounds really dark and stuff, but you can follow this way of thinking all the way back to Darwin. It's just the unsaid assumption of modern thinking is that culture is completely contingent. There's no actual meaning. And to know reality is to know that nothing has any inherent value and that all of culture is just, in the Marxist term, a kind of superstructure erected
to make sense of what, in essence, doesn't need to make sense and doesn't make sense. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right to point out that this is really just kind of arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic of modern thought. Right. It's funny because Nick Land tried so very hard to break free of the modern bourgeois subject to the extent of literally driving himself insane. To all accounts, I mean, in my essay, I refer to him as the Wyndham Earl of philosophy. That's so good. You know, because he's sort of like this brilliant guy who whatever is in front of you, it's not enough, right? Right. It's not enough to question the bourgeois subject in the way that Nietzsche and any number of Marxist or post-Marxist thinkers have questioned the bourgeois subject.
You have to push all the way out of the rational individual into some kind of beyond. You have to, like, get entirely outside of your head, which, you know, Land's tenure at the Universe of Warwick is famous for becoming increasingly weird. Apparently, he did a lecture where he was becoming animal in the DeLuzo-Ghattarian sense and was, like, writhing around on the ground hissing and becoming snake. Yeah. and eventually descending into amphetamine psychosis, or at least that's the rumor, the word on the street. I don't know if it's true, allegedly. And finally showed up in Shanghai, works apparently as a journalist and is one of the fathers of modern neo-reaction.
So he's an important figure on the alt-right. So in so many ways, he seems to be somebody who, not only talks the talk but walks the walk, somebody who is willing to literally drive himself insane in order to get away from the structures of bourgeois modernity that underlie, among other things, modern academia. I take him very much at his word when he expresses contempt for the professional grumblers of academia where you're engaging in some dialect or other of post-Marxist or neo-Marxist or post-neo-Marxist or whatever cultural critique, but you are still a comfortably bourgeois citizen listening to national public radio and driving your Subaru.
And by the way, I resemble those remarks. I'm like right down to the Subaru, right? So I'm not saying that I'm better than that. But there's almost something of like the rebellious teen at Hot Topic or something, like wearing the goth accoutrement and being like, no, I'm different. I'm dark. And they're saying the same shit everybody else does, except dark. There's a, I can't remember how he says it, but I think it's in Being in Time. Heidegger writes something like, one can turn away from them or from the crowd. One can turn away from them, but one always turns away as they do. Yeah, if you turn your back on the herd,
your behavior is still entirely determined by the herd. Right. And you do it as everybody else who's turned away from the herd has done it. That doesn't mean that there's no value in that. You know, you look at someone like Gilles Leleuze who also turned from the herd in his work but lived a very bourgeois life but never pretended not to, you know? He's like, no, it's what you were talking about, that ambivalence, that all de-territorialization is good all territorialization is bad. That kind of facile reception of what Deleuze was doing, I think it can only be disingenuous because Deleuze never said de-territorialization is good. What he said was territory exists. There are re-territorializations, there are de-territorializations and we have to just acknowledge that
and we want to live in a world where you have some agency, some way of navigating this reality but it doesn't mean there's something wrong with the bourgeois subject as such. There's only something wrong with a reified bourgeois subject which doesn't allow for any other modalities, any other ways of expressing your being or whatever. By the way, if you want independent corroboration of what we're saying, that there is a large and unacknowledged continuity between Land's thought and the thought that he is strenuously trying to reject or the milieu that he's trying to reject. You know, I recently went to a conference that touched on occult themes or tried to at any rate. And if there was a sort of an academic conference drinking game,
if somebody says hyperstition, take a shot, you would have gotten thoroughly trashed as a result. Like hyperstition is a word that is much bandied about. And yet Land himself is never mentioned because these are all good Volvo driving academics who all voted for Hillary Clinton and hate Donald Trump. And so they're not going to want to mention the rather disreputable parentage of that idea of hyperstition. But that idea of hyperstition is just extremely appealing because I think it actually flatters an idea that everybody in academia or humanities academia always already holds, which is the idea that everything in reality is sort of a construct. And I think there's an idea that probably Land would say is a complete misunderstanding of the idea of hyperstition.
An idea of hyperstition is almost another way of saying cultural construction. Right. Or social construction, yeah. A social construction. You say gender is a social construction. That heteronormativity is a social construction. The way that is generally understood is something akin to the idea of hyperstition, where if you get enough people to believe in something like money, then it kind of comes true. Actually, one of my students pointed out that in one of the documents I had them read, LAND or CCRU goes out of its way to say, no, no, that's actually not what we're talking about. and I was trying to formulate, okay, what would be the difference between the way Land is thinking of hyperstition and this kind of standard issue postmodern academic idea? And the best I could
come up with is that Land actually seems to be trying to hold onto an idea of a subject-object dualism, that there's a subject side and an object side, that he's maintaining a space for there to be an ontological real. And what he's saying is not that, like, the cultural construction implies that there isn't any real, it's just everything is a matter of human negotiation, of more or less collective phantasms that are generated within language, if you're a post-structuralist, or within material culture, if you're some variety of Marxist. But he wants to say, no, there's an object side that is to some extent refractory to, resistant to, not, it doesn't
actually have to do with human beings. And this is actually where I take the Cthulhu stuff to come in. It's that the great old ones, for him, are a figure of a universe that still maintains a kind of objectivity over and against what human beings think and do, except that it's not a kind of oil and water never the twain shall meet kind of relationship that certain human beings, sorcerers, people who are hip to this, can make interventions on the subject side, you know, acts of sorcery that have effects on the object side over there in the universe, which is something rather different from the postmodern schema. And so for all I'm trying to say, like there is actually this sort of continuity
or actually I didn't say you did but I'm agreeing with you that there's this continuity between a tradition of modern thought and what land in the CCRU are up to. At the same time, got to give them credit for actually playing with an idea that I think is quite different from what the postmoderns are playing with. Anyway, I'm sorry. You were going to say something. Right. No, absolutely. Absolutely. No, I totally agree with you. And I think this is something that allies Land's project with Deleuze and Guattari again. And he's obviously very indebted to those two thinkers. But throughout A Thousand Plateaus, for example, there is this notion of some objective background, some objective grounding of reality. This is not a postmodern book. And the chapter we were going to read with the class, well, you did read, but I wasn't there,
of the refrain is all about this. At some point, a subjective agent forms itself, right? So So DeLers and Guattari say that subjects don't pre-exist. So you're not just a completely autonomous subject dropping into a world of objects and looking at. No, you're formed from these forces. They form a subject. A subject emerges out of tremendously complex processes that create this being that you are. But from there, you can take action. You can do things. You have agency. And that's what they, you know, the becoming animal, becoming intense chapter is all about the sorcerer and how the sorcerer can use the forces of the universe to make certain things happen. Hyperstition seen in that light, in the light you just described there, lands realism, let's call it.
Hyperstition looks very different from social construction. I mean, as we were doing research on this, I'm sure the same idea came to you, is that the hyperstition is basically the, let's say, the postmodern iteration of a concept that's existed in occult circles for a long time, the egregore, right? Yeah. An egregore is a psychic entity that is created by magicians and then becomes autonomous. It becomes an autonomous agent. I was thinking about egregores, and I was also thinking about how would occultists understand hyperstition in this sense. I think that the classical magical perspective would be that an egregore is a vessel in which certain objective forces come together to create a new entity.
That these forces always exist out there. This is the magical idea. The macrocosm is there, and you create a vessel for it. And the vessel is the egregore itself, but it's not just an arbitrary creation. It needs to appropriate or constellate a set of objective forces to become something in its own right. So that makes hyperstitians very different. And as I was doing this research, I remembered a chapter from William Irwin Thompson's book, Imaginary Landscapes. It's a fantastic chapter. William Irwin Thompson is a cultural historian, very brave kind of guy who draws a lot on the occult, on mythology, anthropology, just a really interesting thinker.
We'll put a link to the book in the show notes. But in this chapter, he basically analyzes the fairy tale Rapunzel, right? And what he does is he shows how this six-page fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm can be analyzed on multiple levels. And it's really ingenious when he does it. It's unbelievable. It's a virtuoso kind of thing that he does with the fairy tale. So on one level, he analyzes it to retell the process by which human civilization moved from a matrilineal system to a patrilineal system. And it's very convincing. I won't go into the details.
On another level, he explains how the story of Rapunzel tells of how we moved from one type of cellular organism, this is way back, billions of years ago, how the prokaryotic cell had to accommodate the eukaryotic cell, which is a cell with a nucleus. And that's the process by which cellular life moved from asexual replication to sexual reproduction. the individual was actually born with the first cell with a nucleus because that's the first cell that had to use sexuality to reproduce itself because the older type of cell would just replicate itself exactly so it was essentially immortal you would just create more and more copies of yourself they were genetically identical but with sexuality comes the individual each cell is unique
and therefore death so the birth of eros and thanatos at the cellular level is told in the story. And not only that, but the choice of the plant, the Rapunzel plant, that's a plant that actually, it's a hermaphroditic plant that splits off into a male and female component in order to inseminate itself. And then finally, as another level of analysis where various elements of the story symbolize the planets and the movement of the planets in the solar system, it all works perfectly well. How does a little fairy tale that the Brothers Grimm recorded from some probably illiterate peasant in Germany, contain all this information. It's crazy. It's a perfect example of a hyperstition. It's a story that's passed on that contains all this information
about the objective world, but nobody telling the story or listening to it knew it for thousands of years. So William Roman Thompson asked the question, how does this happen? I'll just read a quick paragraph. In the more romantic era of the 19th century, the presence of such a complex cosmology in the story of Rapunzel will be interpreted to mean that the story had to have an author who could compose the story to sneak lost knowledge into a society that was turning away from the old religion. But now in the 20th century, with our new appreciation of attractors in the emergence of complex topologies, we do not need to be that simplistic to insist that an authorial person is required for the existence of such a cultural story. Scientists have shown how
autopoiesis can emerge at the molecular and cellular level. So now we can begin to appreciate that nature has such marvelous complexities of immanental mind as conscious purposes. In other words, these stories aren't made by a particular individual. These stories are part of the natural process itself, which includes some kind of immanental mind that creates stories, myths, hyperstitions, egregores, ideas that actually connect with cosmic forces. So that's a completely different way of looking at hyperstitions. Hyperstition is a way for us to enact particular narratives that inevitably connect with wider
cosmic forces where the same patterns are repeated. While we're on the topic of egregores, I want to talk about one of the pieces that I had assigned my students for this class on hyperstition. Sorry, I'm just steeping some tea here.
So one of the things that I like to do in this seminar is to assign a range of things. So like serious philosophical works alongside publications from just like books that you would not find outside of an occult bookshop. I assigned a little chapter, except it actually started life as a blog post, in a book called Blood of the Saints, which is a collection of blog posts by two English occultists, Duncan Barford and Alan Chapman, who in the 2000 aughts had a really great occult blog called The Baptist's Head. And then after that, had a couple of other projects together.
And they basically disappeared off the face of the earth. I don't know what they're doing right now. Intelligent dudes wrote a lot of great stuff, writing up the practical results of various workings they did. And one of them is a little essay lit called About an Egregore. Did you read that? Yeah, I read it. We'll put it up in the show notes. You can find this book online. But it's about a collective working. So they had a magical group in Brighton years ago, and one of the things they wanted to do was to build an egregore. They were inspired by research conducted at the University of Toronto in the 1970s, where a group of students created an entity named Philip. and in the Toronto experiment I guess showed that you can have discarnate entities spirits
of a sort that might show up at a seance but that they don't actually have to be the spirits of dead people I mean that was always the operative assumption of the old spiritualist movement yeah that you would do a seance and there would be table wrapping and ectoplasm and all the whole line, that those manifestations would be from some dead person who was close to the person who was conducting the seance. That was the working hypothesis for a long time, yeah. Yeah. But it turns out, and this is in fact a general finding in chaos magic, it ain't necessarily so. And so this Toronto experiment, I haven't found, I need to dig into this, find out what the publication is that they're referring to here. but you know the the point of this experiment was discovered that you can create a spirit without
having an actual verifiable ideable human being in life to whom that spirit can be attributed so what barford and chapman did is they decided to create an egregore sort of a a spirit manifestation of this collective group well one of the synonyms that are often used is thought forms, you know, or tulpa in the Tibetan tradition. But they, yeah, to create, go on, sorry, I didn't want to interrupt. Yeah, tulpa, which we were talking about Twin Peaks, The Return earlier, and the concept of the tulpa becomes very, very important thought forms that this wicked sorcerer, evil coop is able to create. Anyway, so what Chapman and Barford do is they decide to create an avowedly impossible, in fact, ridiculous identity for their egregore.
So they named the egregore William Clementine Esquire, and they decided that this entity would be a 16th century car mechanic. Because, you know, no such thing, right? A manifestly impossible thing, like a Neolithic claims adjuster. And they even created a whole backstory for William that he cobbled together a working prototype of a car from Wood and Cat Gut and accidentally ran down the only male heir of Henry VIII, that this is a fact that has been expunged from the record books because Henry VIII was so grief-stricken that no one was ever allowed to mention that he ever had the sun, blah, blah, blah. It's a whimsical story. And perhaps unsurprisingly, or unsurprisingly,
if you pay a lot of attention to this kind of literature, they did in fact manage to manifest an entity who communicated mostly through the Ouija board, but they also had a lot of classic spiritualist type phenomena or apparitions, knocks and weird sounds and strange experiences. For example, this William Clementine turns out to be obsessed with cannabis. And one of the words that comes up in the Ouija board most commonly is weed. And so one time they drew a sigil that represented him and then blew some pot smoke on the sigil. And apparently everybody in the working group simultaneously got massively high, which is a magical result.
And then as time went on, you know, William seemed to be just going slowly insane, becomes really belligerent and moody and prankish, develops a streak of unlovely misogyny, and eventually becomes like kind of ungovernable, hard to deal with. And so they contact an experienced magician from outside the group. and this magician expresses some concern that they had gone about this entire experiment perhaps in a somewhat unmindful, perhaps even unethical way and this magician, unnamed magician, is quoted as saying a 16th century car mechanic is an impossibility and William knows it. You forced him into an impossible identity
and it has made him insane. Which is very interesting because, you know, the idea that like oh, well, you know, we're all having a bit of a laugh and we're making up this character and we're going to act as if he's real, which, you know, I've said before, that's sort of the open sesame of magic. And I'm not the first person to say it. I mean, Lionel Snell says it. Acting as if is the thing that makes magic possible as a kind of a working hypothesis in this world. But here they're not just acting as if. I mean, they're treating him as a fully autonomous, intelligent being who nevertheless is like a highly problematic individual. The conclusion of this essay, I think it's Duncan Barford who wrote this. He writes, our magical colleague had every right to be concerned about William.
In retrospect, the best way to create an egregore is probably to identify the ideals of that group through structured workings and create a thought form that manifests precisely those. William hasn't had the best start in life. Admittedly, his identity was forced upon him by us into a paradoxical crippled shape. Given a second chance, maybe we wouldn't do it that way again. His sense of inadequacy has forced him to adopt a paranoid survival mode simply in order to exist. Primitive, aggressive, basic personality forms are the simplest and therefore the easiest to assume. For William, it's a stark choice between these, or collapsing into self-contradictory nothingness. I think the latter may indeed have happened to him at times, judging by the gibberish and incoherency we've received for him.
And then he goes on to say, but I believe in William, in both senses of the word. And imagine there's great hope for him, because madness is a peculiar human pitfall, one that God's angels, servitors, elementals don't have to contend with. His identity is indeed contradictory, but all of us have parts within ourselves at war with other parts. what we call identities, the fragile outcome, this impossible-to-resolve battle, the compromise between the wild contradictions of life. Where the structure falls apart, there's madness. Where it holds together, there's personality. And where the struggle is transcended altogether, well, that's an arhat, or enlightened beings. So as the academics like to say, a lot to unpack there. I mean, one thing I did like is right at the end where he's talking about
how all identities are kind of contradictory, cobbled-together fictions. We are all, in a sense, 16th-century karmacanics. And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind, especially in the present day, where identity seems to have become this almost holy thing. People have this completely uncomplicated idea of what their identity is as something that's unitary, unquestionably real, and has to be defended fiercely at all times. An idea which, if you're a Buddhist, for example, And if you've spent any serious time meditating, it seems just patently absurd that people are doubling down on a fiction and in some ways destructive fictions in much the same way that William is a destructive fiction. Right. But I feel like that's maybe not the most interesting takeaway from this rather interesting story.
I'm curious what you made of it. Okay. So if we look at egregores, we'll just entertain the possibility that such things exist. that with enough psychic investment, a person or a group of people can create a non-physical, ethereal or astral entity that has a certain measure of autonomy and functions as a subject. How do you make one that works as opposed to one that falls apart? This is classic stuff. This is the story of the golem. So this rabbi wants to protect his ghetto against these pogroms that are going on and this anti-Semitism in the neighborhood. So he creates a golem to protect the neighborhood, but the golem goes berserk.
Frankenstein creates a monster. He loses control. There seems to be this tendency when you create something, when you give something life, you also give it this kind of freedom and you can't control where it's going to go. And so you need to make sure, if you're going to make an egregore, that you make it as sound and sturdy and complete. As possible so that it can maintain itself. And so it can be, I mean, ideally so it can be a beneficial presence. Like there's a kind of a flippant thing going on in that text where they just kind of did this as a kind of a chaos, almost like kind of a chaos magic experiment. And I. Totally. It's a chaos magic experiment. Yeah. Yeah. It actually literally is. I mean, it seems irresponsible. Right. And I'm sure if you asked Duncan Barford and Alan Chapman now, they'd be like, yeah, not our proudest moment.
Well, another example of this sort of thing that we exchanged some emails on is the whole Keck Pepe thing that led up to the election of Donald Trump. I mean, did you read the other thing I sent you about that? All the synchronicities and stuff that happened on 4chan? Yeah, it's weird. It's very weird. So long story short, these most, I'm assuming they're mostly dudes, these people who go on 4chan and I don't know exactly what people on 4chan do, exchange ideas. Masturbate mostly. Or as they call it, fap. So they had this meme, this little frog meme, Pepe, going around. And it was just this ironic, funny, nonsensical joke character, sad looking cartoon frog, rather badly drawn. And slowly this Pepe figure became linked to Donald Trump.
And because a lot of the people on 4chan wanted Trump to win, this is interesting because the 4chan people aren't white supremacists, supposedly, as they've been accused of being. They're actually just they're into chaos. They're into disruption. They're into trolling. They're trolls. And so they wanted Donald Trump to win because that would make a more, you know, make for better TV. It would be more entertaining to see this guy kind of trolling the whole world. and then a bunch of weird synchronicities started happening like they had replaced the internet acronym lol with kek for laughing and then they found out that kek was a frog god of the ancient egyptians it was a god of chaos and darkness it went on and on and on and eventually somebody wrote trump will win on 4chan and every post on 4chan has a number a long string of numbers
It's randomly generated every time someone posts. And they attribute a lot of importance to numbers that are doubled. So seven, seven at the end of it or something like that. So somebody wrote Trump will win. And the number that was randomly generated for that one post was all sevens. It was like 12 sevens. So from that day on, they thought they were doing some kind of meme magic thing where they're going to make Trump win against all odds. And in fact, Trump did win. And so this is an idea of this ironic, detached, unserious playing with forces you don't understand kind of thing, producing an effect that whose consequences are pretty much incalculable at this point. if there is any truth to that theory that the 4chan folks made trump win using chaos magic
well that's a pretty strong argument i would think for going back to a more morally responsible form of magical practice and not to stop playing with fire so much this is the weird thing about chaos magic is it it always intimates to me a desire to play with these ideas but ultimately a lack of belief in the ideas. Like I read Alan Chapman's book, Advanced Magic for Beginners, which even in the title is kind of a joke. And the way that he just throws out any type of Neoplatonic structuring traditions, saying all these things are just there to stop you from expressing yourself magically, seems a little dangerous to me. You know, all the Neoplatonists who developed the tradition of magic in the West over centuries, they weren't just all suckers,
all idiots who just fell for this bullshit about the need for tradition or moral responsibility or this belief in God. And all of a sudden you have these like new chaos magicians who are free from all that. And they know that you can just play with anything you want and make anything happen. That type of narrative doesn't, I mean, even if it's true, all the more reason to reject it because we can see what happens when you start fucking playing with fire. I haven't read it, but I know that Gary Lachman has a new book out called Dark Star Rising, or new-ish, anyway, it came out over the summer, Magic in the Age of Trump. And I'm sure that he goes over all of this in great detail, and I should have read it before we did this podcast, but oh well. One thing that strikes me about a magical revival generally,
like right now we do live in a magical revival, and this is something I talked about a bit in my class over the semester, is that magic is a phenomenon that seems more than most to have a kind of punctuated equilibrium. It goes in cycles, periods of time where nobody, but nobody, except a few hardcores, are talking about magic or anything like it, where it's completely underground. I think about like the 1980s, the era of the satanic panic, where people who are completely inoffensive, plain vanilla, neo-pagans, were having to go underground to not like lose their kids in divorce settlements and shit like that. I suspect some of that even still happens. But you know, that's coming only a relatively
short period of time after the big magic revival that coincides almost completely with the sort of high watermark of the counterculture from about 1965 to 1975. And we seem to be in a period right now where magic is just all over the place. Neopaganism is a very rapidly growing religion. In fact, it might be one of the only rapidly growing religions in the United States right now. There's a popular acceptance of things like astrology, for example, is very fashionable among the young people today, the millennials, about whom we've heard so much in the media. And when I started writing about this stuff a few years ago, I was expecting to be pelted with rocks and garbage. And what I did not expect was like the people would be not only curious about it and
hungry to hear more, but willing to entertain these ideas because I've grown up in an era where nobody entertains them or hardly anybody at any rate. You've got OGs like Eric Davis, who was quietly being a cult the whole time. He was into the occult before it was cool and after it was cool. But for the rest of it, you can kind of sort of feel this surge. And the feeling I always have about magical revivals is it'll all end in tears. There's something about the phenomenon of magic itself that seems to be allied with the character of Hermes, or any number of trickster gods. Not the first time I've mentioned it in this podcast, and this is a very familiar idea to anybody who knows anything about magic, but like the gods of magic in every society are always like
trickster gods like Anansi or Loki or Hermes or, you know, Mercury, whatever. These are always tricksters. And there's a tricksterish aspect of magic. If you ignore it, it will sneak up and blackjack you from behind the bushes. If you go running after it, if you look for it, it will hide from you and it will always escape. Ignore it and it'll pester you. Look for it and you will never find it. This kind of push-me-pull-you dynamic you can see happening in a very straightforward way, for example, in the accounts of the Skinwalker Ranch. There's a classic book called The Hunt for the Skinwalker, which tells the story of this ranch in Utah called Skinwalker Ranch,
which is one of the most charged paranormal hotspots in the world apparently and there is in fact a major research institution running there for several years trying to get to the bottom of what was going on and in this book is full of stories of whenever like recording devices would be set up the phenomena would not happen or if you turned your back then you'd come back and find all of the recording instruments vandalized somehow and it would always be you know people would see these strange apparitions and unidentified flying objects and so on, but only when there was no one around to corroborate it, only when the cameras failed. And, you know, it almost reminds me of, like, Snuffleupagus from the old Sesame Street show.
Now, people forget about this because eventually Snuffleupagus became not an imaginary friend, but just Big Bird's best friend. But in the original show, and I'm old enough to remember this from watching the show when I was a little kid. The idea was that Snuffy was Big Bird's best friend, but only Big Bird can see him. And so Big Bird would have adventures with him and have conversations with him, and then he'd get excited and say, I'm going to go and tell Gordon or whatever. And then Gordon would come back and inevitably Snuffy would have wandered off. And so it was always very frustrating that Big Bird could never convince the grown-ups that Snuffy was real. And eventually they decided that Snuffy would join the Consensus universe. But I always liked Snuffy best when he was this sort of maddening figure that just would never hold still for inspection.
He was never a collective representation. He was only a representation for Big Bird. And, you know, that's what magic is sort of like. Anyway, I'm kind of wandering all over the place. I guess what I'm trying to say is basically there's a kind of a trickster-ish element to these things. I do think that there is something very weird going on with the sort of appearance of magic, not only in the level of popularity, cultural popularity, but it would appear on the level of agency. Like, I actually have no trouble believing that there is some kind of strange magical agency at work in the presidency of Donald Trump. I'm not saying I believe it, but I'm not saying I disbelieve it either. But I'll tell you, it'll all end in tears.
I'm going to make that prediction, and perhaps that's not a difficult prediction to make, given how unstable Donald Trump appears to be. Something that I've talked about to you in our private correspondence is how important it is to banish. And this always seems to be an aspect of magical technique that eludes the bandwagon jumpers, the people who get into magic and don't really know what the fuck they're doing. you were talking about chaos magic as something that seems to court a certain kind of like irresponsibility at least at times or in some hands and you know one of the things about chaos magic is you would say like oh you know who needs like some kind of like tibetan incense sensor for example something special and magical when an old cracked teacup could do you know what i mean and
it was that kind of willingness to swap out ingredients that actually had a very great benefit for chaos magic, which made it, you know, much, much more accessible. If you try to follow the recipes in the sacred magic of Abramel and the Mage, you're going to be spending an awful lot of goddamn time trying to obtain rare items and going through extraordinary, tortuous processes to make certain things happen. You know, the great advantage of it was just sort of like, you could just really simplify and it'll still kind of work. That raises the question of why the complexity existed to begin with. Yes. So, yeah, it's true. And I think that's because you want to introduce an element of resistance because an element of resistance is going to be something which will act as kind of a handbrake or a natural limiter.
You know, I was talking about banishing a moment ago. Like one of the ways that chaos magic created substitutions was to say, well, you don't need to do some kind of elaborate banishing, you know, with like waving a sword in the four quarters and going only in the right direction and saying certain words of power and blah, blah, blah. You can just laugh. Laughter. Banish with laughter. So like a really common banishing you find in chaos magic manuals. But there's a difference there between, okay, so in Deneu's and Guattari's idea of the refrain, okay, so this is one of the ideas we were discussing in preparation for that seminar. that you gave. De Deux and Guattari basically posit the refrain as the fundamental aesthetics gesture. This is the gesture through which territories are established. So a refrain is basically a set of elements drawn from a milieu to create a territory. So like a bird song, the bird
song connects everything, the colors of its plumage to the vegetation around it, it establishes a whole world. But there are poor refrains and there are strong refrains. So the classical magical way of doing things where you need that particular type of silver knife to do this, and then you need this incense, you need that. All these things are actually strengthening. It's not just because it's giving you time to think about it, or it's solidifying your belief that it might work. There are actual connections. It's not just any old incense. It's that incense because that incense is linked to mercury. The question is whether there's any validity to that type of theory of correspondence. If there is validity to the theory of correspondence where certain types of incense or metals or days of the week align with certain cosmic forces, then we can perfectly understand
why all of those accoutrements and processes and steps are beneficial to the effect you want to get. Or whether all those things are completely arbitrary and are just there for psychological reasons, and you're going to get the same effects by just doing chaos magic using whatever's at hand at the moment? I think that's an interesting question. It's almost the same question we were asking in the beginning between the postmoderns who believe that hyperstitians are purely social constructions or the Nicoland slash Deleuzians who would believe that hyperstitians connect subjective forces with objective forces. So it's an interesting question. And I was thinking about that. You were talking about like magical revivals and I agree with there's a short term kind of short cycle
magical revival going on right now but it's part of a long cycle kind of revival that's been going on since the Victorian era. Yes. And so I was thinking about that because one of the things Lance says is that he basically describes capitalism itself as a kind of magical process where capitalism intensifies and multiplies hyperstitians. And you can see this very kind of at a very superficial level. Like some you need, you have a new brand of perfume. So you create a marketing campaign. It's essentially a hyperstition. A brand is a hyperstition that invests a story and an identity into that perfume. And then you sell it and then people purchase that identity. They're not purchasing just the liquid in the bottle. They're purchasing the whole brand that you've created around it, which is hyperstitious in nature.
And then it becomes real. Then, you know, Chanel No. 5 actually becomes the perfume that certain type of people use. And that's just a reality. But it starts as hyperstition. But it goes very, very deep. And it reminded me of those passages in the Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels describe capitalism as a magical process. And this is interesting because one of the consequences of capitalism's dissolving everything is he says, In a bourgeois economy, all fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away. All new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air. All that is holy is profaned.
And man is at last compelled to face the real conditions of life. This is how Marx describes what capitalism does to culture. Another point in the same text, he says, modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the subterranean world which he has called up by his spells. So one of the consequences of this new society that has arisen over the last few centuries is that a lot of stuff that was esoteric has become exoteric. So you look at the kind of last hurrah of the secret esoteric order that would preserve sacred knowledge and keep it away from the masses was something like the Golden Dawn, right?
Those spiritual societies from the 19th century. But Crowley, in true capitalist fashion and others like him, destroyed all barriers that stopped people from getting access to this esoteric occult knowledge so that the occult becomes a section at fucking Barnes and Nobles. It's like a complete oxymoron. You can't have a section in the bookstore called occult. It's not occult if it's there. So this liberation of all these esoteric, contained, channeled, territorialized forces, this de-territorialization of magic to make it available to everyone, just contributes to what Land describes as this accelerationist process by which capitalism just makes magic more and more pervasive everywhere and just liberates these esoteric currents.
So the question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing? But you look at something like the Chapman experiment you described, where they created this crippled entity that went insane as almost as soon as they created it. And you look at something like the Pepe meme magic of the 4chan people bringing Donald Trump to power against all odds and basically unleashing something like a kind of apocalypse, at least in a lot of people's opinion. and you ask yourself, well, was there a point to this esoteric knowledge being kept esoteric? Was there a point for the occult remaining occult? What are we doing here exactly with this so-called magical revival? And you're saying it all ends in tears. Well, yeah, maybe that's why this stuff used to be kept secret, right?
But that's a dangerous idea that you're promulgating there because the idea of secrecy, implicit in any occult society, any secret order, it's premised on inequality. Yeah. You know, the idea of like, we're going to keep the secret and only initiates can know about it, presumes that there's some people who are more worthy than others to know these secrets. Some people are more spiritually evolved, whatever. You don't think some people are more worthy of receiving secrets, knowing secrets than others? I do think that and I'm saying that that is an idea that is extremely difficult to think right for modern progressives yes yeah and you know I think that it's perhaps not surprising
that it's conservatives who are the ones that seem to have weirdly enough less trouble with occultism than progressives like you'd think I mean the United States conservatism is so allied with Protestant Christianity, with evangelical Christianity, which of course is blankly, implacably hostile to the occult. So on the face of it, that's a very strange bedfellows kind of connection to make. And yet, you know, in a way, it doesn't particularly surprise me that it's the right, or this newly recharged alt-right, about which we've heard so much, that is comfortable with magic, is quite happy to operationalize magic, not just on the level of praxis, like,
you know, weaponizing Pepe as a kind of chaos magic sigil to get Donald Trump elected, but also quite comfortable with the iconography, the symbolism, the style, the occult style, which is predicated on ideas of inequality. Right. You know, if you're a reactionary, you've got no problem with that. And this is a point that progressives very often make about the occult. It's almost the first thing everybody wants to mention. If you say, oh, you know, I'm a scholar of magic and mysticism and so on, which I am, you know, the standard progressive academic response to that. Fascist. Yeah, fascist. I mean, you know, and the thing is that on the one hand,
Julius Evola was an occultist and fascist who has had some kind of influence on, I think Steve Bannon is a fan of Evola, for example. So there are connections to these fascist occult thinkers and this modern era of neo-reaction, right? All of this is perfectly true. And I can say, well, you know, but then again, at the same time, what about someone like Starhawk or like almost anybody in the neo-pagan movement? And it's all about environmentalism and progressive gender attitudes and so on and so forth. and I can say something that Starhawk says in her book The Spiral Dance. Actually, I'm not going to be able to quote it exactly, but basically, you know, magic is just a tool. You know, a wicked person can use it just as easily as a good person. They can use it for different ends.
I can pick up a hammer and cave in your skull with it or I can pick it up and build a house for the needy. Right, exactly. But at the same time, on yet another hand, I think I'm up to three or four hands now. There is something about the occult that I kind of agree with you. It's just like it's a cult for a reason. Right. You know, shit ain't a game. If you take it seriously at all, and it's not just like a game we're playing, like people pretending to play Quidditch. I mean, if it is just a game, we're just dressing up, we're just having some fun here, then it doesn't matter. Right. But if you accord it any value whatsoever, even at least to the extent you say that by acting upon avowedly fictional notions, they can become real, in unexpected ways. Even if we are only willing to go that far, already you can see the ways in
which this can become dangerous. It's an inherently, at least I would say, an inherently unstable practice, a practice like you don't know where it's going to go. Right, exactly. Unfortunately, that seems to be true of the human imagination generally, and I never want to find myself on the side of those people who want to control the human imagination. Such people are my sworn enemy. Well, I mean, that's what Plato proposes in the Republic. I'm up to like five hands now. Yeah, it's a lot. You're like a Hindu god here. That's what Plato proposes in the Republic, right? It's the idea that the imagination needs to be controlled. Ultimately, that's what's going on there. And I'm against that idea as well. In fact, I am a progressive, but I think there are
two kinds of progressives. There's the progressive who thinks that secrecy should be abolished in all knowledge should flow because everybody's okay deep down. Right? Yep. And then there's another type of progressivism, which would say that a progressive society has the duty of making people worthy of secrets. It's different. There's a tradition in Canada, I don't know if it exists in the States, called Red Toryism, which is kind of a... Red in Canada is associated with the left, and Toryism is conservatism. Red Toryism is a conservative who is socially progressive, essentially. I identify with that to the extent that I have conservative reasons for being progressive, is what I would say. So there's too late.
We can't put all this esoteric knowledge back in some kind of sanctum sanctorum and make people forget that it exists. Yes. Okay? Yes. So it's out there. The image of the genie being let out of the bottle seems particularly apt. The genie's not going back in. So that doesn't seem to be a viable solution. And that's the kind of regressive right move you'll see. Maybe not pertaining to magic particularly because very few people take still, despite the fact that it's a revival, very few people take these ideas that seriously. Right. But the regressive reactionary move is we need to go back to some lost Eden. We need to reestablish and pretend that the intervening chaos never happened. So what do we need to do? but we need to make people worthy of having this knowledge.
It's a question, and this is the progressive answer that I really believe in. It's a question of education. It's a question of establishing some kind of moral horizon. That's something that's come up again at the end in our show. It's that if you have no moral horizon, then I just don't know. Establishing boundaries. And this is why I was laying an emphasis on banishing. This is something that I said to my students, actually, in the seminar, and it's something that seemed to have stuck, or at least it came up a number of times. Something in our correspondence that we used to do, we would write these long thousands of word emails full of all kinds of speculative madness, like coming up with all kinds of crazy ideas. And I, at a certain point, started writing as my sign-off line instead of like, you know, yours truly, Phil, or something.
I would write, what a load of bullshit. Yeah. And that was my little banishing because something that you see all the time with intellectuals, not just academics, but intellectuals generally, it's often been said, intellectuals seem to go a little crazy. And I think magic or study of the occult can actually teach you why. It's because they don't set up any boundaries to their ideas. Their ideas just metastasize. They grow. They cease to be something that the intellectual is just entertaining, just holding lightly. that becomes something that you hold to be really absolutely true. And there's this kind of almost monomania as you see thinkers taking their pet idea and trying to make it devour the entire world,
come up with an idea that will somehow account for everything, which is my problem with like Orthodox Freudians, for example, or for that matter, Orthodox Marxists. It's not that the ideas are bad. In fact, the ideas are very good. It's just this idea to try and create a Freudian or Marxist or Darwinian or DeLizagotarian monism, where your answer to everything is your little book. Ideology in a nutshell, right? Yeah, and thinkers who do that, you can say, oh, this is ideology. That's a classic style of thinking, but it's like, that's to think about it as a style of thinking. To me, it's a problem of personality or character. It's a problem of how you're living your life. What you're doing is you're not banishing. What a banishing is in magic is, say, you conjure a demon in your triangle of art.
You're doing some kind of old-school ceremonial magic. If you conjure an entity of some sort, at the end of the day, you're going to have to get rid of it. You don't want it to be your roommate. And they don't necessarily go away on their own. At least this is the lore of entities, right? This is what all the magical books say. You have to tell them to go away. You have to give them license to depart. And if you want to understand this in some kind of Jungian, psychologized way where, quote-unquote, demons are really parts of our own psyche, and by, quote-unquote, invoking them, what we're really doing is getting in touch with different parts of ourselves. Let's say I want to invoke the demon of anger, right? I want to get in touch with my anger, which is something that you used to hear in, like, encounter movements and transactional psychology and so on.
People get in touch with your anger. Primal therapy and all that. Yeah. Well, if I do that and then I don't give anger license to depart, you can just obviously see what the problem is. Right. I'll just become like kind of deranged by anger and it'll keep boiling up inappropriately and it'll manifest at times when I don't want it to. And just like if you called a demon into your house and it started a poltergeist and it started throwing books at your head when you have people over for tea. this idea of like banishing like writing what a load of bullshit at the end of some kind of febrile speculation you know the idea of that is like I like to have ideas but I don't want ideas to have me
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