This image will be masked in arabesque
One of three small paintings coming concerning magical thinking. I am thinking of the dowser experience. It must be peculiar. Maybe not even a tingle, though, who knows.
This dowser holds a wand that is wedged against a certain plant. The plant informs the wand, because the dowser “pulls” the location to the wand. In this way, there is a field effect that has a local maximum and everywhere else a heterotrophic gradient approaching a minimum. A Higgs field of completely bagged hammers, vials of square water, inch tamers. How would you return a wand or a dowser to a baseline? Is it possible to “recalibrate” a wand? Seems likely.
Shape it, refine its shape, add or remove mass or add mass or idea of a different object, such as a talisman, image on vellum, spell book or pouch of a substance worn about the neck. Incantations. Performance on specific dates, or proceeding from or towards landmarks. Dipping it in jelly or providing momentary contact with consecrated substances. Do these practices inform other phenomena which may arise from ancillary magical thinking, like when (gag) exploring necromancy, astral travel, telekinesis, mind control, ritualized magic, ingestion of mind-altering substances, such as fungi or raw shellfish? McThink about it.
Let’s say I raised the dead, but my heartburn was ruinous, and I was tired of feasting on lizard bile snack wraps, so I checked my sheep intestines on the way there, doubled down with some chicken blood readings, dabbed my elbows with orchids grown from a two-headed dog’s nail clippings ground with vampire ash and glowing orb juice eau du champs. This is the eighteenth zone of Ulq’?McOhnoes.
The omens thickened. A sense of impending calamity was everywhere a drain. My dreams were fruitless and unforgiving. I astral projected into a Big Lots twice in one week. And I’m like, should I..fricking go there? After waffling for about three seconds, I decided to call off work and hold a seance in a utility closet at Big Lots with Barb, Xequ3 fetish dolls, a bottle of sarsaparilla, and Delores. As usual, Barb chickened out and Delores was drunk.
When she attempted a binding spell on a mop bucket that was giving me vibes, she vomited a little bit in her mouth and tried to clean her mouth out with mouthwash, but it was floor wax stripper and she went into cardiac arrest. I had to raise her from the dead, but in the form of a cricket.
Now I have to find a skrimshaw to tap with the dowsing wand in order to release Delores from the body of a cricket directly over a deposit of emeralds in the form of a gas. If the wand was wrong, the gas would not work.
If everything worked, I burn laurel under a dome enclosing a glass of sarsaparilla, feed it to a trepanned golem, and the golem climbs into the corpse of Delores and absorbs her death in the form of a crystal. I use these crystals. Most face dancers hate that one simple trick.
I use the crystals to tell the future. I tell it to make me a grilled cheese sandwich. About to Merlin out on these chumps.
These ideas leave artifacts. Over time, do these artifacts change hands within paths and forces that wrest from hidden territory an unfolding tale? Or do they conjure many such eldritch hokum of hoodwinkery in tandem, twisted and intertwined in a plot only fire could display, the words broken orphans that find no succor in treaty or confluence. Yet one searches, and in that search we acknowledge the failure of objective empiricism to make our socks roll up and down.
Wake up, eat jelly, sandwich bars, and barbed wire. Squash every week into a day.
All we ever wanted was…everything. All we ever got…was gold.
-Bauhaus
The truth remains obscure, untold.
Fifty State Banana 