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. You can also use a ten sided dice to turn each weeks items into a miniature oracle. 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 051
#301: ROME
A fallen empire
Item 052
#33: SCREWDRIVER
To turn the screw
Item 053
#66: SQUID
8 limbs and a sharp eye
Item 054
#318: SMALL METAL BULLDOG
Trinket on all fours
Item 055
#323: TAR
Substance of entrapment
Item 056
#172: PENCIL
A tool of record
Item 057
#47: FILIGREES
Decorative flair
Item 058
#329: HOUSES
A flock of shelter
Item 059
#362: FRYING PAN
Between food and fire
Item 060
#165: DOORKNOB
Implement of opening
DIGGING DEEPER
This week’s entry is a deep dive into a failed magical and artistic experiment and why I find it important to hang on to beautiful mistakes.
FAILURE
For as far back as I can remember I have always had a problem with eating and weight. I don’t know what it is but no matter how much I eat I always feel hungry. Because of this compulsion I have spent a good amount of my life overweight, with a brief exception of about 3 years where I forced myself to eat less than a thousand calories per day and run five miles without exception.
You could say that I have a slightly addictive personality. Cigarettes, book collecting, a brief love affair with pain pills and alcoholism, EATING. These things are the price I pay for the part of myself that pushes me to constantly work and do art. It’s the shadow side of my artistic drive. I honestly believe that I can’t have one without the other but I’ve usually been able to find an equilibrium that keeps me healthy and happy.
After my son was born my relationship to food took a turn for the worse. I am a horrible stress eater and almost nothing is as stressful as keeping a little human alive every day. So I eat and eat and eat. I feel like I have lost all control of that little voice inside my head that tells me to stop filling my face. All of the usual strategies for control have failed me and I’ve been trying new ideas to try breaking the habit.
An idea emerged from this place of desperation. I would take this hungry voice, turn it into a spirit, and bind it in a notebook. It was to be journaling as a form of building a prison around my personal hungry demon. I wanted to hold my problem in my hand and give it a face that I could learn to recognize and avoid.
Now, I hadn’t ever tried utilizing my practice so directly on a problem like this before. Generally I just try to tap into the creative space and let whatever currents I can ride take me where they want to go. Alan Moore’s description of Ideaspace is probably the closest approximation of where I try finding myself.
My practice usually results in books, songs, comics, or paintings and not things of a more mundane, physical nature. In this situation I was going to try using art to help me curb my drive to eat.
I started things very simple. It started with my carrying a special pocket sized notebook with me with the intent to record when and where I would get cravings and where my mental state was at that time. All encounters with my hunger demon would be mapped out. I would find its shape, its smell, its demeanor. This my introduction to my demon.
I did this for a couple months until I found that a pocket sized notebook didn’t feel like it could contain the complexity of what I was attempting. The level of communion and control that I wanted still wasn’t there.
Inspired by the journaling techniques described in the books of Lynda Barry, I attempted to build a more complicated prison. An average composition book replaced the pocket notebook and I intended to fill every inch of every page.
I began laying out my daily pages with a self portrait in the top left corner to record a “reflection” of my self image for the day. I would then record the successes and failures from the previous day next to that. My intention was to focus on what I felt was my main issue at the time which was the urge to eat and my insatiable appetite. I would sometimes wander to other subjects but only in how it weaved into the main intention.
My demon took up the entire bottom half of the page. I would visualize its physicality, it’s face, try to conjure up its odor and try to suss out its voice. I wanted a full profile of this thing that wouldn’t leave me alone.
It didn’t take long for the project to spin out of control. I got bored drawing myself over and over again. It felt as if I just couldn’t perceive any changes in myself and so I drew the same picture over and over until it became a lazy scribble. The demon profile became more and more complex and soon there was an entire cadre of entities that I was giving claim to my bad habits, all of them with clever or cute names.
I finally tapped out when I felt like I had even less control than when I started. I was eating MORE not less. Doing my pages had become stressful and anxiety inducing. I felt guilty about how lazy the drawings were. My own creation had defeated me.
When it was all over I had to ask myself why this strategy and practice failed. Where did I go wrong? I think it boils down a couple things.
First is simplicity. The project went off the rails the moment it became more about creation than introspection. Filling those pages became the main drive when what I was trying to do was study my problem and see it as a three dimensional thing that could be contained. My demon escaped its prison by feeding directly into my desire to overflow the page with details and filled its cell until it burst open.
Second is necessity. Did I really need to try disembodying my urges? Did I need them to be something outside of myself? Probably not. In fact, this removal from myself might have actually given them more power instead of less. Perhaps I would have been better served by figuring out a more terrestrial way of dealing. Not everything needs to be fixed by magical means and this problem may just need new strategies in urge control or behavior modification.
And last is my strategy. Where could I have found a happier medium between spiritual and terrestrial work? Perhaps conjuring allies would serve me better than exorcising my demons? Would those allies help to buttress my attempts at behavior modification or a new health regimen? It’s obvious that the strategy I used was flawed. Now is the time to suss out where it went sideways.
Now why would I spend all of that time on describing an utter failure of a magical working? Because our failures give us more information than our successes in my opinion. Failure tells us we’re still human and fallible. It keeps us humble and in the world of the occult that humbleness gets lost in a sea of inflated egos and opinions that feel like the big answers to the biggest problems. We fail so we can narrow down our paths until we walk the line that feels right to us.
Now I am left with the last question that failure always brings and that is how to proceed from here. The issue obviously still exists and a new strategy needs to be formulated. True and absolute failure only comes when you stop moving, not when you have to forge a new path.
As far as my project goes I must now pick myself up and dust this misstep away before making my next try. I have a fresh notebook and a pen. I have plans and ideas. Succeed or fail, I’m ready to try again.
That’s all for now. Come back next week for another dip into the 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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