Archive for July, 2008

As I’ve written before my interest in the occult started when I was about 14 and my prime interests was science fiction, fantasy, advanced physics and the occult. Summarized: anything that was filled with the promise of the fantastic. I read a few hundred science fiction and fantasy books, a few dozen occult and physics works. Not of the more speculative kind like ‘godel escher bach’ but genuine works of Einstein, Bohr and others. I think part of my motivation for that was to irritate my dad, because he was a physics teacher but his knowledge was limited to simple newton mechanics. I was proud I knew more than him about the subject at the age of 13 and kept bothering him with discussions he didn’t give a shit about.

At the age of 16 I bought some Crowley books, the first book I bought of him was ‘The book of Lies’ which is a collection of cryptical, kabbalistic writings ordered by numbers. The book starts with the observation that all thoughts, even this one, are lies because they are pictures of reality, subtracts rather than the real thing. That book rather fascinated me. It is not exactly an easy work but on the whole probably one of Crowley’s better attempts. What’s interesting about it is that he attempts to express truths as compact and abstract as possible without any rational makeup.

At 17 I began reading Carlos Casteneda. His works had an even deeper effect on me. Crowley was sort of interesting but I always felt he was somehow seriously lacking direction and oversight, partly because he had to build a system from scratch and partly because he had this rather irritating Libra personality which tends to wander off in any direction without much spine to see something through. Its beyond me how the guy could write such insane volumes of mediocre poetry without even once questioning his sources, methodologies or even the intent to ‘become the greatest poet in the world’ – I have noticed this allergy to criticism in many Libra people: they are in fact severely upset by even the most minute sort of critique. I find that mode of existence mindbogglingly dull but maybe its some sort of natural phase in natures grand cycle.

The yaqui system seemed far more subtle and advanced to me and I was completely fascinated by these works. I read all the casteneda books, 7 of them in that time, in a few months. Here I saw a vision of a reality completely different than the one we are brought up to believe in and it was a reality with a working system and sound philosophies behind it. I started to practice some of the techniques described in the books. The first one was the ‘right way of walking’.

By that time I had moved to a squatted school. I had a classroom as a room. It was a giant room and at first I was at loss as to what I should do with it. The previous guy had build a little room inside the classroom with foam bricks. I decided to make a forest in the room with that little room as some sort of oasis in the back. I carried shit loads of yellow sand upstairs in buckets and covered the whole floor with it. Then, it was just after Christmas time, I started collecting the Christmas trees people had put as garbage next to the street. At the end there it was: I had a forest of Christmas trees in my room and an shiny oasis in the back! It was magnificent. It was great to live in a room in the middle of the forest. Some people also thought it was way cool and some others thought I was seriously bonkers. The school was right in front of the Evoluon so when I looked outside of the window there was this giant UFO in front of it. My parents came to visit for the 2nd time since I had moved out but the forest was way to weird for them they thought I was even more nuts than they did already and moved in and out like they’d have seen the devil in person. Well I didn’t care. I had a great time in my forest. E. and me used to walk naked through it and she looked like an elf already. The room also had the only access to the roof and we used to sleep there in summer under the stars.

The school consisted of two buildings. Ours was the home of the group that came from the willemstraat squat. By now we were sort of a family, living together for 15 months and we were more creative sort of folks. The folks in the other building were more political. They used to have these board meetings that bore the shit out of me so I never went. At some point later a building came free in the tonglresestraat and 3 people would be able to move there. It was a real cool place and they offered me a room but at this time I was tired of moving and I told paul he could have my room so all the guys moved leaving me behind alone. This was the starting signal of a somewhat more darker time for me.

I returned from Paris on Friday completely exhausted from a dramatic week. I was absolutely useless for the first two days and am now trying to catch up with work, communications, wedding planning, pet sitting, reading, creation, etc. I am working on a long (by blog standards) illustrated story of the Paris trip, which will hopefully be posted this weekend, but for now an image from the sketchbook.

This is Kavorkian.

Comics requires one to be very rigorous. Drawing the same characters over and over necessitates an effort of sustained concentration and strictness in thinking that can become suffocating at times. I am continuously developing methods for more efflorescent forms of creativity, which will still fit with the graphic language I am developing in my comics. I am also consistently striving to harmonize left and right brained modes (amongst other more arcane modes) in all the work, but this kind of piece is unquestionably more right brained. I begin with a more or less hazy image or feeling and just start drawing, improvising as I go, but with very deliberate strokes causing the final image to appear planned.

Original post by Jehosephat Sunrays

And excellent essay by Erwin Hessle about, amongst other things, the nonsense of ‘spiritual evolution’.

I quote:

The ability to infer complete pieces of information from incomplete sensory stimuli is valuable to survival. The downside, of course, is that there will be – perhaps frequent – �false hits�. A rustle in the bushes will only be a lion one time in many, but the individual who runs away each time will always run away from the lion when it is there. The individual who waits to see whether a lion really is there is in grave danger of being eaten by it.

It is critical to understand that evolution is powered by genes that survive, not by individuals that are happy. The individual who experiences a fearful response at every sudden sound will probably be a thoroughly nervous, twitchy and unhappy individual, but such responses may help him survive, and if they do they will be passed on to his descendants. It is a common mistake by those who lack understanding that evolution is somehow, by virtue of its way of �fitting organisms to their environments�, directing life in general and humanity in particular to some kind of �advanced state� of spiritual bliss and cooperation, and that the purpose of spiritual practice is merely to advance that evolutionary process. This is nonsense. If abject misery, short life spans, constant fear and extreme aggression are conducive to the survival of particular genes, then those genes are likely to be selected for continuation. Evolution produces organisms that are optimally fitted to survive in their environment, not organisms who are optimally fitted to be happy in their environment.

Read the whole essay here

I lived about a half year on the willemstraat squat. It was the old majors house of eindhoven, right in front of the mosque. I shared the attic with Paul Beekhuis, a photographer and allover cool guy whom I still have contact with sometimes. Paul was one of the few dutch people that came to my wedding here in Istanbul. Anyway, the house had been empty 3 years before we occupied it and the place was a dump. The toilets didn’t work, there was no heating no water. We had to fill a jerry can with water everyday a mile away at some other squatters house. It was getting winter and the winter was pretty cold. It was freezing and we just had this small gas heater we would gather around with 10 people. It was an exciting time. There is something wild and exciting about living in such ghostly places with people you don’t know very well yet. Its a strange experience because these people become like your new family.

I remember two events that sort of stuck out in the months we lived there, besides the barricading frenzy I mentioned earlier. One time I came home late at night with arno and we saw a shopping car full of beer bottles which had been drunk by our squat by the guys. We decided to make some surreal artwork with beer bottles in the garden and stuck all of them heads down in the sand so at the end there was this giant field of beer bottles as our back garden. It looked surreal and cool and we went to sleep. Next morning paul came wake me up in great consternation. A large group of Muslims had gathered at our house, apparently today was the start of Ramadan and they thought that garden, which was right in front of the mosque, had been made specifically to insult them. We apologized and told them that wasn’t the case and quickly cleared all bottles from the garden.They weren’t aggressive or anything, in fact their logic was perfectly comprehensible, but of course our action had had nothing to do with the mosque.

Another event: an old sewage pipe broke in Patricks room downstairs and we had been using the toilets upstairs, and shit was literally spouting into his room. He had to go in and try stop it. A heroic effort if I ever saw one. He was covered from head to toe in feces but managed to stop the flood. He was like this sensitive sort of cancer fellow but no one wanted to volunteer to go in there, we were like ‘yeah dude, its your room man, you stop it’…

We also found this insane bastard dog in the street we adopted. We named him ‘zeiksnor’ because he had a drooling mustache and he would all the time chase his own tail and shit everywhere in the house. The first time my dad actually came to see where I lived I was already living there for 2 months. He came into the house and immediately stepped into dog turd. As he was already highly opinionated about squats you can imagine that didn’t improve his opinion and he was in and out of the house in two minutes. Oh well.

We used cooking turns so everyone had to cook like one day of the week. The only guy that wouldn’t cook was Jeroen. Jeroen was a strange fellow. He used to get up in the morning, take a beer from the fridge, sit down and sit in the same chair all day saying nothing at all. The only times he would get up was to get another beer. I think he was seriously depressed but at the same time I think he sort of felt it was really cool to be like that. We lived with him for 2 years and in this 2 years we could, one time, after applying an enormous amount of group pressure, get him to cook for us. ‘Ok ok I will cook’ he said. He went to the supermarket, got a can of beans, heated it up and that was our meal. When we moved to the school later on we put Jeroen in the weird basement of the school since there were no rooms left. We figured he didn’t actually need any daylight and he was perfectly content living in that half flooded cellar too, which sort of added to his ‘coolest beer drinking punk in the world’ image. Last time I heard from him he was actually talking to me and telling me he got some teenage girl pregnant.

Astrologers are right, we are cartoons.
We have holes in our destinies
and angels were connecting the dots
before we are born.

Sometimes we meet someone
with better holes, whose angel
is the neighbor of the cherub
that tortures the lawn of our souls

by ruling it out. The channeling moles,
shooting the franchise of glitter
into our bowels, we reproduce,

or visit a shrink
who plays with his pencil
and perforates his notebook, listening

to the screeching of chalk
on the blackboard of our choices,

darkening as the scars fallen
stars leave behind, the dust of love

is settling. Infinity is a hound
sketching up the dead weight
of its own chains.

When I turned 18 I stopped smoking marijuana altogether. I never liked that stuff too much. I smoked it intensively for two years and it was enough it just didn’t add anything to my creativity. The spirit that lives in marijuana is female and highly seductive: she makes you feel like you are being very creative but when fact you are doing fuck shit. I had some pleasant times with her but found out that she was increasingly feeding all sorts of paranoia in my mind. Most notorious of these were the countless times I was lying in bed and started to notice my breath and got confused about how fast I should breathe. That is pretty flippant, trust me, I was sometimes really panicking about the breath thing.

The last time I used marijuana was also the worst experience I had with it. Some guys from another squat were growing weed in their garden and they put about a kilo of weed into a single cake. The damn thing was entirely green! Some guys ate a piece and they had to call a doctor because some of them were flipping out. The next day one of them brought the devil cake to our squat, telling us to be careful because the thing was quite strong.

That sounded like fun so I ate a slice and went to my room and started painting. I was painting flames for about 20 minutes but it was harder and harder to hold the brush. At some point I crawled to my bed and lied down hoping to pass out. When I did so suddenly an enormous wind started blowing through my room and I was holding on to my bed for life. That wind was so strong it would completely blow me away and I was scared to death and screaming for help on my bed. Some guys came but they didn’t know what to do, they tried to comfort me which helped somewhat. I rode it out but swore never to take that stuff again. I don’t know what would have happened if I would have let go of my bed instead of holding unto it but it seemed like a quite dangerous situation to me. That just goes to show that even mild drugs in very high doses can be quite threatening! I have used various hallucinogenics but I never experienced anything this threatening with any of those.

When I got my high school diploma I took some lsd. After a half hour or so everything started to be inexplicably funny. After an hour or so this changed into calm bewilderment and I found out that my new hobby was to climb and walk roofs. I was in this serial housing squat and they had a great rooftop where you could climb for hours on end and that’s what I did. Some people might think it dangerous but it wasn’t I knew exactly what I was doing and was very happy being there. I remember Dennis/denvis once telling me he took lsd in Australia and sat at the edge of a cliff for hours. Its great to experience such total lack of fear or boundaries. I always liked roofs and I was always climbing and sitting in trees as a kid too. I guess I am some sort of roofman.