AN ASSEMBLAGE OF DISPARATE PARTS

The third and final volume of NO GODS BUT MY OWN is finished and is available on Lulu now!

An Assemblage of Disparate Parts was a major departure from The Damned Machine and The Four Color Grimoire in both style and purpose. The book is meant to be a collage of spiritual intent, outlining a lot of things that didn’t make it into The Damned Machine for one reason or another. The main body of Assemblage is a collection of aphorisms, thoughts, and ideas put together in an entirely randomized order.

Here are a couple short excerpts:

Perfection is the antithesis of progress.

While some things in life require high degrees of precision, most creative endeavors do not.

The itch of absolute vision can lead some to obsessively scratch their way right through the flesh of a vital idea, which can be sensitive and fickle enough as it is. Scratch too hard and the idea may hemorrhage and die from the wound you inflict.

A completed work done poorly is worth far more than a perfected work never finished.

No one has ever learned the proper use of a hammer by reading thirty books on how to swing it.

Nobody needs volume after volume on the philosophies and practices of turning a screw.

If the techniques of magic and art are nothing but tools then why should it take an entire library of blowhards and know-it-alls to feel like we intuitively know anything of value?

As important as teachers and scholarship truly are, there is just as much value in the esoteric lessons of smashed fingers and bloodied knuckles.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

That is probably the most important thing Bruce Lee said in his lifetime. I’m sure it originally came from his early days learning Wing Chun from Ip Man but Lee certainly said it frequently enough in interviews and his own writings to popularize the phrase.

Lee taught that adaptability is far more important than subscribing faithfully to a style or philosophy. He created Jeet Kun Do as a direct response to the rigidity of most martial arts practices that were popular at the time. It focuses on flexibility and flow instead of well practiced forms, embodying the philosophy of being like water and flowing according to the situation without asserting your will when it isn’t needed. The early practitioners of chaos magic found themselves in a very similar position when they shrugged off the strict fundamentalism of the different branches of occultism to start their own philosophy of magical practice.

Finding that flow can be difficult but is also absolutely beneficial. I like to call it THE INTENTION OF NO INTENTION and I’ve tried to utilize it for my artistic and magical practices with pretty good results. My sketchbooks have been filled with drawings started with nothing more than a pen pressed to the paper and a willingness to allow the picture to become anything that might emerge. The same goes for the ramshackle duct-tape-and-bubblegum assemblage that is my magical practice.

I look for the cracks and the furrows in the world around me, thriving to flow and adapt to the strange new places where I end up, trying my best to avoid the trap of form.

I also created 35 collages to go along with the text. These started as something to keep myself busy while I figured out the shape of Assemblage but ended up almost completely informing the final form this project took.

Along with the central piece of An Assemblage of Disparate Parts, I’ve included an old collage project of mine entitled CAN SHE ATONE?, the dice oracle I created a year ago called The Tethered Elements, and a shorter oracular experiment I call The River.