#hex things

[janijaire]

Delirium

Haphazard, messy, unkempt. This isn't like him. He isn't this sort of person, never has been. 

You do not know what you are doing.

His mix of tonics that he has always been so very careful to keep absolutely perfect are not working. He cannot sleep, or else-- 

You do not know what you are doing.

He keeps dozing off at random--listening to a conversation here, sitting at a table there. Mid-word once so far, though blessedly only for a moment.

You do not know what you are doing.

He has not slept in seven suns.

You do not know what you are doing.

He paces through his chambers, flipping through the books he's bought and borrowed that maybe, maybe could have the answer he's looking for. They are laid out quite literally everywhere and on his next round near the door he makes sure that it's locked because the very last thing he needs is someone to come in to find books spread upon every half-level surface.

You do not know what you are doing.

"Shut up!" He yells to absolutely no one, throwing the book he holds. It crashes across his desk and takes a vase and teacup with it down to the floor where the latter two break. Groaning, he crouches down and shoves his hands in to his hair, clutching at the strands.

... You do not know what you are doing.

"I know," he rasps, throat sore from his previous shout. "I know. Just--shut up," he says to nothing at all.

[fettesans]

Top, screen capture from Atlantics, directed by Mati Diop, 2019. Via. Bottom, detail from Scott Benzel, N’abolira, 2020, Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ from Éditions Gallimard, ‘A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates’ published by The RAND Corporation in 1955, Stardust Casino and Hotel dice, wire, wood, glass, mirror, 66 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 11 inches, from the exhibition Mindless Pleasure on view at Bel Ami, Los Angeles, August 1 - October 3, 2020. Via.

--

This is a tension I’m sympathetic to — poetry fucks with the truth. We don’t always want truthful poems. Nor do we always want effective poems, though effect is the value by which a speech act (such as a spell) is judged. But if the meaning of language is opaque, how can we use words to make things happen? What’s the point in casting a spell-poem?

The point is not to change the world. Language cannot be trusted with this task; the spell, like the poem, is too open to bad interpretation.  Instead, the spell-poem aims to create a new version of the self through magic, a version more resistant to the shifting cruelties and misfortunes of the world. The self, as unknowable and unreliable as language, is the basis and subject of witch-lit, the channel through which experience becomes knowledge without needing external validation from rational, masculine authority. The spell-poem is a speech act that creates the witch, changes her perspective on, but not her experience of, a growing sense of disempowerment. Spell-poems may help you survive capitalism, but they won’t help you destroy it. Spell-poetry is political, insofar as it chronicles capital’s cruelty to the self, but stops short of associating itself with a defined political critique of our present moment. Collectivity occasionally has its uses, in anthologies as in covens, but ultimately the witch-poet acts, writes and speaks alone. Her spell-poems are simultaneously acts of self-creation and self-protection. Amid the cosmic disarray of 2020, this seems a very practical magic.

Caitlín Doherty, from How To Hex Things With Words, for The Stinging Fly, August 2020.