PANIC!
The situation has become dire. Confusion, darkness, and the unknown surround you. You dig deep into your bag, hoping for something useful, knowing that the bag will give you whatever fate decides.
Will you find help?
Will you find confusion?
Will you find glazed nuts?
This is the chance you take with BOTTOMLESS BAG!
Close your eyes
Reach inside
FROM WITHIN
This grouping was selected at random from a communally generated master list of four hundred. It is my hope that these ten items can be used as a forecast or guide to your week ahead. Whether you choose to take these items literally or metaphorically, it’s up to you to find how these things may help. For a more thorough overview go to Introducing Bottomless Bag and Bottomless Bag 01.
Item 021
#393: AN OWL LAMP THAT GLOWS
A knowing illumination
Item 022
#291: FLIGHT
The opposite of falling
Item 023
#316: A SMALL BOX OF SAFETY PINS
A repository of security
Item 024
#160: TEACUP
One lump or two?
Item 025
#239: A SNAKE BRACELET
Style eating itself
Item 026
#379: DOG
Loyalty on four legs
Item 027
#101: PAPER BAG BLOWING IN THE WIND
Trash performs a graceful dance
Item 028
#9: TRUNK
What is locked within?
Item 029
#338: A COUPLE MICROPHONES AND AN AUDIO RECORDER
Everything must be documented
Item 030
#80: FAN
Movement by force
DIGGING DEEPER
FACTORY GNOSIS
The one thing I knew when I was growing up was that I would eventually have to get a job and that it would probably be the only thing I would ever do with my life. It’s a forgone conclusion when you live in a small town. You go to school, go to church, get a job, get married, have kids, plant your feet, never leave. Lather, rinse, repeat, FOREVER. Nothing else holds any higher values than that. Sure, the texture of life may have some differences but the core remains the same.
I started on that trajectory at seventeen years old. This is how I changed that course.
When depression and anxiety hit I had been a perfect student in school. Straight A’s, open path to college, all of that. Suddenly that darkness closed the door and all of that was over. I dropped out and started working full time at my local McDonald’s instead, picking up every shift I could and gaining about seventy pounds from eating two meals a day there. Eventually I felt the need to move on and I was surprised at what exactly my experience at McDonald’s had prepared me for.
Just after my 19th birthday I got a new job. That job was at a place that put together wiring harnesses for trailers, military trucks, and medical equipment. It was a factory. It was poorly lit with lines of tables where people hunched over their workstations filled with soldering irons and heat guns. The soundtrack was the pneumatic hiss of air splicers and the clunking of injection molding machines. Dust hung in the air as constantly as the feelings of resignation and stoicism.
It was perfect.
Now, I understand what most people think about working in factories and, for the most part, they’re right. The stereotype holds accurate. The job can be soul shattering if you think too existentially about it. The easiest way to survive that occupation was to remind myself constantly that the things I was building were necessary and that I served an important purpose in the process of keeping those things in steady supply. I still feel that way. Factory work is ESSENTIAL.
You’re probably wondering what all of this has to do with magic or the occult. It’s far from an obvious juxtaposition. Some might even say that the nature of factory work is the antithesis of spiritual or magical working. Truth is, I would have agreed with you the first few years I was on the job.
What people may not realize is just how isolating factory work is. Even I had no idea until I was moved from the line and into what was called the Braiding Room. This room was completely enclosed and soundproof. I couldn’t see anyone and I couldn’t hear anyone. This was to block the clamor caused by the braiding machines, the loudest equipment in the entire plant.
I would spend ten to twelve hours a day in that room, alone.
At first it was unbearable. You never know how much you miss the sound of voices and human interaction until you spend 60 hours a week in a room by yourself with only machines to keep you company. After a few weeks I hardly noticed the absence.
What changed?
It is hard to describe the ego death that comes with long exposure to that kind of isolation. I was no longer myself in that room. I was the machine. I was the cable going through the braiding process. I was the spool of vinyl thread. I was the noise and light and blank white walls. There was no Eric in that room. There was only the work and the sound. Every shift became a communion with myself, facilitated by the part of my job that usually caused misery and boredom.
The connection with myself wasn’t the only thing that deepened. I also became empathic with my equipment. I came to view the machines as animals of a sort, with their own needs and motives. I treated them with respect and reverence and in return my machines ran more smoothly for me than most anyone else. Those relationships became the most fulfilling of my adult life.
Once that door was opened I couldn’t really close it. It didn’t matter what machine I was running anymore or what function I was serving in the plant. I could return to that no-space as long as I was alone with my machines, even across four different jobs and three different cities. As long as the conditions were there I could return to that place inside myself. The more mindless the task the better that connection was.
A lot of who I am was forged in the thrum of industrial machines, as an artist and occultist. That space is where I found the imagery and words that became most of my artistic output for fifteen years. It was where I tried my best to manifest all the things I wanted from life and allowed me to focus on them and nothing else.
It was at my last job that I created the first few Outlet Press releases, most notably AND AND AND, my experimental novel.
AND AND AND was possibly my first true magical working. It was a stream of consciousness, without much narrative driving it, all written while standing at my machine. Here’s a sample:
and saying where I am is not the same as hiding and I put myself in the box and it spits out secrets/and saying what I am is not the same as quiet and the box is not amused and the machine is building smaller and smaller circles and the teeth are cutting into the box/and the circles tighten around the box and the signal broadcasts blue and love is nowhere in the margins/and the machine is building circles around the cords that make it work and I consult the box for answers/and the machine circles answers and I am hitting buttons for my life/and the machine is answering riddles from the box and I am getting lost among the cords and the signal turns a habitual yellow/and the broadcast fills with static and the signal is turning blue///
Around the same time I had my first and only art show at a local float center. The paintings made for that show were created through my FACTORY GNOSIS and self-induced hypnagogia in equal parts. I worked in a blur, channeling images from the no-space.
It’s been over ten years since I left Bemidji, MN and five since I left factory life. The influence of both were far from ideal and I can’t leave here without being very clear about that. Sometimes I miss my old home or one of my previous jobs but not the culture. It’s all about skimming the cream off the crap.
I also have a few parts of that life that looked like such a trap when I was younger. I have a beautiful wife and incredible three year old son. I still work a shitty job on the weekends but spend my weeks watching my child and doing art. Those things stopped being a burden the moment I took them on my own terms.
I sometimes wonder if it was through my times in that mindless no-space that these good things manifested or if it was sheer bootstrap effort. How can you honestly tell the difference?
I never would have become the person I am without those experiences. It’s part of why I like the term “operator” for what I do as opposed to “practitioner” or whatever other magical titles others choose to use. Those machines and my deep connection to them helped build the center of my practice. The rhythmic beat of those operations match my heart. All of this just goes to show that sometimes we find our initiations in the most unexpected of places.
Thanks for reading this week’s BOTTOMLESS BAG. As always, see what’s inside, dig deep and
HAUNT ON
ABOUT ERIC J. MILLAR
Eric is the artist and writer behind Outlet Press. He has published over 20 books over the last four year with VACA: Outlet Illustrated, Volume 5 being his most recent publication. He is also the creator of The Disruption Generator, the randomly generated bibliomantic oracle, and The Impossible Game, a cleromantic oracle, both published in partnership with We The Hallowed.
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