The BOTTOMLESS BAG paperback available here!
Here we are, the 35th and final installment of BOTTOMLESS BAG. It’s a bittersweet feeling to finish off projects like this and I wanted to share a few conclusions I came to while working my way through my biggest oracular project to date. I generally hate dissecting my own work, opting to let the audience make their own decisions about what they’ve just viewed, but BOTTOMLESS BAG was a different thing for a different time.
Before I get started I want to thank everyone who has participated in this project in some way, from reading along to interacting on social media. The support was felt and appreciated. I also want to take this opportunity to once again thank everyone who provided lists. This project would not have existed without the lists I had been provided by these kind folks almost a year ago. Those contributors were: Niish, Keats Ross, Erik Arneson, Felix Ortega II, Robert Kelsey, Ryan Young, @moeknows_poetry on Twitter , Nick James, Douglas Batchelor, Rexmons, Coleman Stevenson, Ken Sparling, Charlie Adams, Saul Mondriaan, Mike Walls, Ruune, Vanessa Kindell, Leroy Lee, Leon Antaca, Tom Whiston, Orion Millar, Kammy Gaffney, Lotus Kozak, Shannon Wheeler, Taylor Bell, Tony, Devin Person, Steve Aylett, Peg Millar, Mary McKeever, Jill Millar.
Now let’s get this over with.
1.
I’m going to let you all in on a secret.
The TRUE origin of BOTTOMLESS BAG.
I’m not talking about how it was influenced by Dungeons & Dragons or rogue-like video games. I’m not talking about how Drywall from the comic Scud: The Disposable Assassin or Felix the Cat’s magic bag inspired the narrative spine of the book.
What I’m talking about is the deepest core of the project. The gut source.
What I’m talking about is FEAR
The fear of death and the unknown. The fear of vulnerability in the face of an unbeatable force. The fear of being left defenseless and not being able to protect myself or the ones I love.
There has been a cloud of fear overshadowing us for just over a year now and it was the biggest inspiration for BOTTOMLESS BAG. BOTTOMLESS BAG is totally and completely a plague book. It may not be a fearful work on its face but that is most definitely at its core.
That fear is what drove me to reach out to the people around me to create this absurd stockpile, at first as a distraction but later mutating into an obsession. It led me to draw more illustrations than I had ever done for any project before and much faster than even I thought I could.
That fear inspired me to reach out to the world around me so that I could try to craft some way to fight it, some way to fortify my defenses from the simplest of things.
The coffee cups.
The water fountains.
The toys and the knick-knacks.
I wonder now if I was trying to fill a space with all of these things to offset the fear. As if I could displace the fear like dropping a weight into water, letting the fear run down the sides and drain away.
If only fear was that easy to get rid of.
2.
It may have been a LITTLE too ambitious to commit myself to a forty week art project during a pandemic. The last year has been exhausting and stressful for all of us. Part of me was really hoping I would somehow be immune to that.
The world shut down just before my son’s third birthday. Suddenly he was without almost any of the pillars supporting his daily life.
No playgroups.
No trips to the library.
No adventures.
No extended family.
No friends.
Everything was just GONE. At least that’s how he experienced it. There’s no way to explain this sort of thing to a toddler.
This only added to the stress my wife and I were already under. That was simply what we were experiencing at home. We had a whole other set of things to worry about.
Unlike a lot of people, my wife and I had been lucky enough to keep our jobs throughout the years. Neither of us lost a single hour of work but there was a massive catch.
Both of us are frontline workers.
Every single day one of us had to go out and expose ourselves to possible infection. My wife’s office serves hundreds of people a day and I spend every weekend crawling around in other people’s dirty cars.
We had to worry about outbreaks, furloughs, or bringing the virus home to the rest of our family. All of us had a mystery illness just over a year ago that knocked all of out for the entire month of February and we didn’t want that to happen again. We couldn’t let that happen again.
We still worry about all of that.
I don’t think we’re ever going to stop worrying about that now.
3.
If you’ve listened to almost any of the podcast interviews I’ve done you’ve probably heard me talk about one of the core tenets of Mundane Magic:
The only difference between routine and ritual is intent.
It means that the simple acts of brushing your teeth or doing the dishes can be empowered and infused with deeper spiritual meaning. It means that everyday items can become items of greater significance.
This has been a central belief of my practice for over a decade. It’s served me well for all of that time.
The pandemic changed all of that.
How do you empower routine when routine no longer exists?
How do you imbue the mundane with wonder and awe when the space you inhabit stops feeling like a home and starts feeling like a prison?
Saying that all of my normal routines had been disrupted would be an understatement. I hadn’t had this kind of existential upheaval for YEARS. Not since my depression had hit it’s peak and my world was a much darker place.
There had to be some way to restabilize and adapt.
I was grasping for a way to cope.
4.
In hindsight, BOTTOMLESS BAG is what magical practice looks like under systematic failure conditions. It’s the part of the story where the hero grits their teeth and does that single drastic act that will either push them into or save them from their ultimate demise.
To bury the point under a few more pounds of metaphor:
Imagine that your house is on fire and there is absolutely nothing you can do to extinguish the flames. Every strategy you come up with only seems to feed the flames.
Instead of wasting your time and energy on throwing water on things or just giving up you go down an absurd path and see where it takes you. You decide that you’re going to go door to door around your neighborhood seeking donations of household objects. You enlist your community into an effort to build a completely different house on your front lawn while the old home burns down to cinders.
This home you’ve built isn’t a real one. It’s only the approximation of a home. There are no walls and no roof. It’s play-acting, busy work to distract from your real home turning to ash.
Now imagine that the fire was spreading throughout that same neighborhood. You’ve already collected up all the items. There’s plenty for everyone. Soon everyone takes what they can to build new faux homes on their lawns, cobbled together from everyone’s mundane detritus.
Looking at it now, BOTTOMLESS BAG was my attempt at building a totemic wall of novelty in the form of an oracular system around everyone in hopes that it somehow blunt the trauma of our current times in even the slightest of ways and distract us from watching the world burn for a moment.
Sometimes that’s all you can hope for in art or magic, that what you’ve made or done softens the blow just a little bit because something’s going to hit too hard to be prevented, evaded, or deflected.
5.
I think it would be impossible for me to gauge whether or not BOTTOMLESS BAG was a success. I definitely feel a sense of accomplishment and pride. It’s my largest project and my most idiosyncratic. I would probably even say that I like some of the drawings in it on a good day.
It’s function as an oracle is strange at best. I think it may ask too much of people in regard to decoding and interpreting the results of a query. I could definitely see it giving a string of readings that would leave someone cold but not every oracle is for every person and this is the one I needed to make at this time.
The only major failure I feel from it is that I didn’t engage more with people about it. At its heart, BOTTOMLESS BAG was intended to be a communal oracle and I feel like I let that community die on the vine after soliciting the item lists. I had hoped for more questions and more conversations from the audience but I can’t blame them, can’t blame you. I never put forth the effort either. I’m an introvert at heart and the pandemic has done nothing but cement that even further.
In the end my biggest hope is that BOTTOMLESS BAG injected a little bit of wonder in your world. I hope it helped you look differently at the microcosmic world around you and consider new depths within your mundane surroundings.
I hope you all keep digging, deeper and deeper, until you find what you need..
This bag has no real bottom.
HAUNT ON
The BOTTOMLESS BAG paperback available here!
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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