I released my most recent book today, the newest tome in the We the Hallowed Press library, THE DAMNED MACHINE: NO GODS BUT MY OWN, VOLUME 1. It’s a collection of the first twelve installments of my online newsletter on Substack.
NO GODS BUT MY OWN is an exploration of magic, creativity, and all the spaces between. Each installment contained an essay and a deity of my own creation. The intention was to inspire people to try creating their own pantheons and explore independent practices outside of tradition.
Volume 2 of NO GODS BUT MY OWN will be kicking off next Tuesday with the first installment of THE FOUR COLOR GRIMOIRE: AN OCCULT GUIDE TO THE SUPER SAINTS AND SECRET TEACHERS OF COMICS, which will be an exploration of superheroes as extradimensional spirit guides and comic books as dietic literature.
With THE DAMNED MACHINE being a We the Hallowed release, I wanted to give all of you a taste of what’s contained in the newsletter and book by sharing the essay this volume is named after.
Enjoy!
THE DAMNED MACHINE
LESSONS IN FACTORY GNOSIS
Introduction
I have to be honest.
This isn’t about magic.
Not really.
It’s about angles and approaches.
It’s about remembering.
It’s about labor and results.
It’s about fifteen years of communing with machines and nearly losing myself to the factory and the process.
It’s about five thousand days surrounded by tin walls adorned with warning signs and bright red exit beacons.
It’s about fifty thousand hours bathed in fluorescent light, standing on concrete, wearing uncomfortable steel toed boots.
This isn’t about magic.
Not really.
It’s about something else.
I’ve made rifle scopes, soldered circuit boards, molded wire connectors, twisted cable and assembled wiring harnesses for medical equipment and military trucks. I learned how to run over one hundred different manufacturing machines, built roughly ten thousand wiring harnesses, and twisted enough cable to reach the moon and back.
When I said this wasn’t about magic I might have been a little hyperbolic. It’s hard to consider this magic considering that my sideways path into occultism was cut through that menagerie of industrial machines, miles of copper wire, and pages upon pages of technical instructions instead of more tried and true ways of teaching. It was forged in a mundane existence of unmovable routines and shifts that felt like a bottomless pit of boredom.
It took a long time to realize what these jobs were accidentally training me for, back before I got that Karate Kid moment. The moment when Danny finds out that he isn’t just waxing a car or sweeping the floor. Mr. Miyagi was a sneaky teacher but so was the factory floor. Instead of learning the crane kick or how to sweep the leg I was given valuable lessons that were occult in a very traditional way and by that I mean they were abstract and very, very well hidden.
When that point arrived I finally felt that it all had a purpose.
The soul-sucking mundanity had a purpose.
It was an initiation.
This was when I started developing my ideas on magic and discovered my foundational ethos. It all came from those assembly lines and long hours. My magic is agnostic at its core. The power doesn’t come from gods or spirits, instead it’s much closer to a proactive animism where you petition the aspects already present in your environment. It’s about grounding the liminal while drawing out the light in your everyday life.
I like to think of myself as a blue collar wizard with aims for a quiet kind of existence, wanting nothing more than to have a good job and live a life of quality and respect while doing as little harm as possible to the world and people around them. It’s not about fancy things or reality breaking experiences. It’s about feeding my family or community and keeping a roof over my head. It’s about magical practice as a supplement to the grounded habits and activities that make this kind of life possible.
It’s difficult to distill fifteen years of occult education and practice into a single cohesive piece but that is what I am attempting to do with this. I hope to present working class magic within these pragmatic idioms and stories.
These are simply ideas and not a system. Magical systems provide a veneer for us to give more appealing shape to the unexplainable and unknown. These are nothing more than a novel way to approach systems that already exist.
There are no spells or rituals here. Plenty of other work exists for that purpose. Think of these lessons as an acetate overlay that reveals new paths on the map you already use every day. Apply what follows to whatever system you subscribe to or use them independent of a system.
The purpose within my magic is not to live BEYOND and ABOVE my environment. The point is to live WITHIN it. For me that meant coexisting with the machines and the labor, deep inside the industrial occult.
What follows isn’t about magic.
Not really.
It’s about work.
DRAW THE PROFOUND FROM THE PROCESS
It was so easy to get lost.
Lost in the noise and cacophony of so many people working at the same time.
Lost in the tumultuous sea of bodies and parts in constant movement.
Lost in the task at hand, mesmerized by the rhythmic beat of my machines and the monotony of my simple little step within the bigger assembly.
Our work was rarely, if ever, about some grand conclusion and we were pressured to focus almost entirely on the minutiae of the individual routine. This was the problem of the line, that the narrow view was sacrosanct and all that mattered were the pieces directly in front of you. The end product was the reason we were present but that wasn’t the task at hand. We were told to focus on the step that came before us only if it was done wrong and not to think about the step after us until we passed the pieces off.
Working this way forced us to think about the simple steps in the process in deeper ways but ignore a larger process at work. We existed as cells within the process, not as the process itself, so we had to gain an intimate knowledge of each step but stay ignorant of the whole.
The management had good reason to make us focus so hard on our own work. It made us forget our place among peers and created a manufactured disunity that only benefited them. Line leads drove competition over collaboration.
If the factory were a person this would be a near absolute focus on ego and self over all else, regardless of others and their environment. It would be a body at war with itself but still trying its level best to maintain a human shape while being pulled in hundreds of different directions.
We were asked to focus only on our step but we had to accept the fact that we lived within a larger process and that every step was a necessary function. It may have been against the instructions we were given but it was necessary to do our jobs in a functional way.
Imagine if your only focus for an entire week was brushing only your top teeth. The following week is spent on the bottom. The week after that is flossing. If this was your routine for oral health you would end up with gum disease and rotten teeth.
That was why our written work instructions were so important.These documents were usually about fifty pages and detailed every single step toward creating a thing, not just the step your workstation happened to focus on that day or week. They showed every step in an ecosystem within an ecosystem in fractal recurrence that ultimately builds up to an ideal whole, with each page just another layer peeled away to reveal a future process.
In both magic and life there is nothing more important than understanding that you are just a part of a much larger, much more complex process. It’s fine to focus on the smaller parts when needed but in the end we are all small components nested within larger, more complex components, which are nestled in even more complex facilities, until the pattern is so complex and multifaceted that it just looks like one single, seamless life.
Focus on the processes, both grand and miniscule.
Find the light between the steps.
ALL YOUR PROBLEMS LOOK LIKE NAILS IF ALL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMER
There was a special tool for every job at the factory. I can still hear the machine gun rat-a-tat of terminating machines crimping terminals on tiny copper wires and smell the hot vinyl of the injection molding machines. They were giants of steel, tin, and circuitry.
There was a cage in the center of the plant called the tool crib and it’s walls were lined with hundreds of different devices for hundreds of different tasks.If you wanted to keep working you had to learn as many of those tools as you could. There was no room for specialists on the line.
We were all journeymen but our machines were not.
We filter our view of the world and all of our problems through whatever tools we have at our disposal. If all you have is a hammer then all your problems are hammer problems. If all you have is wicca then all your problems are wicca problems. Sometimes it’s hard to see beyond what we have in our hands when we’re faced with things that need fixing.
It’s important to have a diverse set of tools and systems at your disposal. You need to be nimble and the key to being nimble is keeping your entire awareness on the swivel. The more you narrow the aperture, the more open things are to going in less than desirable directions.
It’s one of the bigger problems I see in occult circles. Magic becomes the one and only approach a practitioner thinks of when problems come along. I’m not saying that magic doesn’t work but sometimes it’s better to avoid it altogether if more terrestrial means will do. Why spend weeks petitioning spirits and building altars to try getting that job you really want when all you need is an airtight cv and a few well placed phone calls?
I’ve heard it said that if all you’re reading is books on magic then you’re not really learning magic and I find that to be true. You need to widen the aperture and take in as much as possible. If you were to ask me the texts I’ve found most useful in my own practice, not one of them would be what’s considered a book on magic.
Comics, martial arts, crafting, and so many other disciplines and venues can surprise you with a wealth of tools and lessons.
What tools can you find in an afternoon of axe throwing?
Or inside the act of a problematic comedian?
One shift at work I listened to the only known audio recording of the members of the Jonestown cult poisoning themselves and their children. I hoped that it would inoculate me against the siryn call of cults and blind faith.
It’s important to add those painful and uncomfortable tools to the toolbox, too.
So go forth and gather your tools.
There’s work to be done.
ANYTHING CAN BE A HAMMER IF YOU TRY HARD ENOUGH
My dad had a pair of tools that were always kept close when we had work to do. It didn’t matter if it was home maintenance or punching a transmission into my brother’s 79’ Mercury Monarch, these things were ever present.
The first tool was a block of wood, one of the most universal items I’ve ever seen. It could be used to hold something up, create a barrier for hammering soft material, or keep other tools out of the mud. My dad worked at a wood treatment plant so if we broke one block of wood or we needed a different size there was always something close by that could serve the purpose.
Then there was the BFH, otherwise known as the Big Fucking Hammer. This one is pretty self explanatory. There were plenty of problems that got solved by hitting them over and over again with a BFH. Sometimes it would fix things and sometimes it would break things. As a last resort, the BFH was a dependable but chaotic ally.
Of course, it’s always ideal to have the “proper” tool for whatever job you’re doing but sometimes all you can do is work with what you have. We could perform surgery with those tools sometimes and other times we would destroy what we were trying to repair because a hammer isn’t meant for fine work.
Learning that lesson at an early age helped later, both on the factory floor and in magic. Sometimes the company wouldn’t provide us with every tool necessary to do the job but still expected an exact result. Sometimes we don’t have the exact ingredients for doing the ritual or working but still feel compelled to perform it. That pressure, the pressure to get the job done with what’s available inspires invention. It may not always be a great or otherwise useful invention but it builds our skills of improvisation. There is risk but if it pays off there can be massive reward. This is the kind of thinking that brings us altars built with reclaimed items or LED candles instead of live fire. If there is passion and intention then you will figure out what to do with “close enough” and get the results you want.
Precision isn’t always necessary to get the job done. Every situation has its own levels of required quality and sometimes that means things can be messy and imperfect. You’ll still kill the fly if you use a hammer instead of a flyswatter but there’ll be one hell of a mess and some holes in your drywall.
Even if it’s true that any solution that creates more damage than it repairs is not actually a solution at all, there is something to be said about destroying a problem instead of allowing it to linger in a state of imperfection.
You could almost call it The Artists’ Dilemma, meaning that if you have a painting with a section that doesn’t look right you might put layer upon layer of paint or ink on it until all you have is a muddy cloud. Your painting is ruined but it leaves you open to gesso over the whole thing and start anew.
DO EASY
No wasted moves.
No wasted material.
No wasted time.
No wasted energy.
There were two main systems the plant used: LEAN manufacturing and Six Sigma. Both systems carried a reverence among the management akin to religious awe. The gist of both systems was that you only have as many supplies and as much labor as you absolutely need to get the current amount of orders done. Everything gets trimmed as close to the bone as possible. These goals were achieved through ergonomics, workstation layout, and material placement.
Six Sigma started at Motorola in 1988 and LEAN was created in 1930 for the Toyota Motor Company in the 1930’s but was later popularized and adapted for wider release in the late 80’s. I’m pretty sure the minds behind both of these systems and their later spread to the rest of the world had to be fans of the beats.
William S. Burroughs released a short story called The Discipline of DE, in his book Exterminator!, with the DE standing for DO EASY. It describes the philosophy of reducing all aspects of your life to the absolute minimum labor. You practice and repeat mundane tasks until they have been distilled to only needed movements.
The resemblance between LEAN, Six Sigma, and Do Easy are so uncanny it’s hard to believe they aren’t related in some fashion.
It’s very, very easy to go too far with most things. Too much solder corrupts the circuit, an excessive weld weakens the metal and breaks the seam, and too much of any ingredient makes your bread go flat. Unless the job calls for extravagance, never do too much when enough is enough.
This goes as much for magic as it does for anything else. Dress things up too much or make the ritual too complicated and you might lose track of your reason for performing itl in the first place. Keeping things as simple as possible protects you from potential mistakes or harm.
The other byproduct of the process of DE is the acute awareness of your presence within an environment. It’s impossible to find the most efficient process without knowing how your body moves or your physical influence on a place or system.
The goal is not to half ass things or be lazy about your work. It’s about efficiency, streamlining, and becoming aware of your place within your environment. You want to reduce the stress, the strain, and the expense. It’s about forming a state of flow in all that you do.
Learn the simplest ways.
Streamline.
Flow.
NEVER TRUST THE MANAGEMENT
Polo shirts.
That was my name for the managers that would wander around the plant floor, peeking over all our shoulders, taking notes on what they saw. Their uniforms earned them that title: they wore either a neutral colored button up or a polo shirt, khaki pants, and leather dress shoes.
These people were a sinister presence in their respective departments but dressed to provoke trust, confidence and professionalism. I always assumed that their uniforms were chosen to remind workers of their pastors or their parents. Either connection would bring with it a reflexive and unquestioned reaction to authority.
I saw that influence every day, whenever a manager let their appearance known while a group of workers would gather for “water-cooler meetings.” The conversation would stop dead and everyone would start fawning over the manager, even if they had been the topic of discussion and we were dragging them and their policies.
That anger and pent up rage would burn away, only to be replaced with awe and reverence. The manager would leave and the conversation always withered afterward, leaving us all to return to our stations again.
This brings me to the other reason I called them polo shirts: Much like the artificial polyester blend in their clothing, these people had about as much genuine substance as a scarecrow. It didn’t take long to get below the surface and find out how little these authorities knew about the ground operations or where their loyalties were.
Of course there were exceptions to the rule. There are plenty of managers that are great guides and leaders but at the end of the day even the best of them hold their loyalty with the company above that of their workers.
There is a very real, very dangerous thread in occult circles that echo this sentiment and that is the worship of gurus and experts.
Finding teachers and guides is an important part of anyone’s occult education. They’re truly necessary for many of the things you will need as you grow and expand your personal practice. The problem comes from the fine line that separates a valuable teacher and a convincing grifter.
Like the managers, there is an unknowable ratio of how many helpful guides you will find compared to the number of charlatans and scam artists and the higher density definitely falls on the latter category.
Experts, gurus, and people that are viewed as higher authorities are just people with slightly more information than most of us. They don’t elevate above the human strata, where the rest of us exist, just because they’ve been awarded a title or have been hoisted up by the crowd. If you have a question there will always be a line of people willing to be paid for their own version of the answer. What you have to determine is whether or not you are willing to pay the asking price for that guidance without knowing the validity of the answer you will receive.
Spiritual practices are a gray area where being an authority is based solely on belief. To be considered an expert in magic is to convince people that you not only know how to conjure your will into the world but can also show your notes so others can follow. That isn’t a concrete rubric to measure success. A guru only needs some charisma and a good sales pitch to gather the followers necessary to leverage some credibility.
If I sound like I have some bias in this situation it’s because I do. My own mother was seduced by spiritual teachers that wanted her money and her blind devotion. An evangelical church found her insecurities and took advantage.
Over the course of years the church convinced my mother that she needed to keep paying the church for her salvation. They also told her that if my entire family was hell-bound if we didn’t join the church and that she would be alone in heaven with her salvation.
I understand that this isn’t exactly magic but the cult of personality some esoteric figures have inspired are only a costume change away. Magical gurus take advantage of that very same compulsion. The compulsion to be heard and seen, to feel like there are answers in uncertain times, that someone knows the way and has your best interest at heart. Magic is full of influencers out for money, for control, and for followers. Just like a manager or a clergyman, they wield their knowledge to empower themselves or their systems. Empowering you or the community is the least of their concerns.
Ultimately it’s up to you to decide the fate of your spiritual existence. There will always be people ready to sell you their answers. You have to do your work and find teachers instead of polo shirts.
MIND YOUR REVISION
It was the easiest mistake for us to make on the line. A tiny detail, hidden deep amongst the word salad text at the top of every work order. They called it the revision level and it tripped us up all the time.
The revision level let us know which version of assembly plans were needed to build to the current customer specifications. It was usually a letter, a number, or some combination of the two. Changes found in new revisions could range from using a different connector to fundamentally changing the form and function of an assembly.
It makes sense. Needs change. Situations change. Tools and manufacturing technology changes. It’s as true in the factory as it is in life: you have to change to keep up with your needs within the time and place in which you live.
So why isn’t this true of magic?
Why is magic and other spiritual practices the only things that won’t change and evolve? Why is the resistance to advancements not only embraced but expected among many occult traditionalists?
The most popular threads in the occult community are wrapped around traditions, be it Golden Dawn, the Solomonic traditions, grimoires, or even Chaos. It seems as though new ideas live only in the cracks between the strains of rigid fundamentalism, left to fester in the shadow of a past that continues to monopolize the sunlight.
Traditions helped build what we have now. They shouldn’t be forgotten or cast aside but they also shouldn’t be placed on pedestals or treated as though they’re flawless gems immune to criticism.
Why does the community focus so much more on new translations of the past instead of coaxing new ideas out of the present?
There were two main culprits behind the ignorance of change at the factory and those were habit and hubris. Habit because people worked on the same parts day after day. Processes became muscle memory, making it hard to integrate changes. Hubris because everyone knew the process like the back of their hands. It was second nature. They felt as though their way of doing the job was far superior to the requested changes in the new revision. I believe the same can be said of those unwilling to move beyond tradition in magic.
History works better as a foundation than a permanent state. Clinging to the past is a denial of the movement of time and the inevitable future. Revisions happen because systems evolve and mutate. LIFE evolves and mutates. Existing only in history and tradition is the ultimate act of nostalgia and nostalgia is the opposite of magic.
I once worked at a rifle scope manufacturing plant. In the early years of the company they made reticles from the webbing of black widow spiders. Every year people died harvesting that fine but strong spider silk. Eventually they developed a synthetic line to replace the silk and completely phased out the dangerous task of spider wrangling.
This leaves us with the question: Do you uphold the tradition or do you embrace the revision?
That choice is up to you.
JUST BECAUSE YOUR HANDS ARE BUSY DOESN’T MEAN YOUR MIND HAS TO BE TETHER TO THE JOB
The hiss of pneumatic presses, up and down, rhythmic like a heartbeat.
From above, the cricket hum of exhaust fans, slow and consistent.
Like a metronome, crimping machines click a steady beat.
At first blush, the noise of the factory floor seemed like a chaotic din. Over time it became a peaceful soundscape that inspired some of the best moments of altered perception I have ever experienced.
It’s hard to describe the transcendent feeling I got when I was standing at my machine and allowing myself to space out and go blank. I’ve never felt more present. Entire novels were written and imagery was conjured up from the aether that became nearly all of my artistic output for that period.
How many tasks do each of us have in our day that don’t require us to be fully present? How many jobs do we do that open up the chance to try a more active style of meditation?
The odds are that there aren’t actually that many. Count up the moments in the day that you give up to meaningless things and distractions. There are far more than you realize. It’s time to treat that time as rich fertilizer instead of fallow ground.
What I am proposing here is the eradication of the wasted moment. Learn to compartmentalize and be of two minds while engaged in menial tasks; one mind to keep track of the job while the other dives deep. It will take time and discipline but is well worth the effort. It adds another layer of spiritual meaningfulness to the mundane and frees you to explore the imaginal and luminous instead of simply avoiding boredom.
That boring state was incredibly important to my magical work. I had always assumed that altering my mental state through more exciting ways like orgasm or running until exhaustion would be the most potent. I was wrong. That same state can be achieved through the dull and mindless. Not only that but it was so much stronger for me.
Only the entitled are allowed to do their work in a vacuum. Those of us on the ground, working the factories, digging the ditches, getting our hands dirty, have to find solace where we can. Sometimes that means sussing out moments of bliss amongst the cacophony.
THE JOB ONLY OWNS YOU IF YOU LET IT
“Left arm, bend at the elbow. 1…2…3…”
The voice was gentle but monotone. It would have been angelic had there been an ounce of emotion behind it.
“Release. Right arm, bend at the elbow. 1…2…3…”
On both sides, lined up in neat rows, were mostly middle aged Vietnamese women doing our daily calisthenics. Their form was rigid, each of them following cues from the moves of their neighbors.
“Release. Left wrist, bending down, hand flat. 1…2…3…”
Most days I would ignore that voice and keep on working, keeping my head down and hoping the lead wouldn’t notice as she patrolled the department for people doing exactly what I was trying to pull off.
“Release. Left wrist, bending up, hand flat. 1…2…3…”
There weren’t many of us, we shirkers of the stretch break. Most of the crew felt that complying was the path of least resistance.
They weren’t wrong.
“Release.”
Some people like to ride the fence when it comes to their jobs. They listen to the communiques from above but do it begrudgingly. They wear their uniforms and try to shave every once in a while. They keep in.
Then there are those people who have broken through the fence and get lost in the corporate wilderness. These people worship their jobs and devote themselves to it like a spiritual calling.
That same level of apprehension should be applied when taking inventory of your own relationship with your practice. No spiritual pursuit should ever eclipse every other part of your life. It makes what should be an act of enrichment into a vampiric codependency.
This was the biggest hazard during long stretches of overtime. Week after week would pass and we would all start to lose our connection to the outside world. It was hard not to get swept into a strange devotion to the place, like all of us were industrial monks filing into the temple for a day of prayer.
A good spiritual devotion is a symbiosis, meaning that it gives back just as much or more than you put into it. It’s important to cultivate that and focus on the ratio of cost to benefit because it can be a fine line between that symbiosis and parasitosis, meaning that your benefit is eclipsed by the amount taken from you. There is a very present danger of losing yourself in a toxic affair with the luminous once you untether from the world beyond it.
Taking a hiatus from magic once in a while is your best defense against a burnout or something much worse. Like with any other strenuous work, the human body and mind can only exert themselves so much before breaking.
I can tell you from experience that life inside that kind of breakage can get desperate and harrowing. I spent roughly two years buried in books, trying to unlock some unknown part of myself and transcend.
I never found that transcendence. Instead, I found new levels of loneliness, anxiety, and near suicidal depression. I couldn’t sleep and hardly ate. I lost so much weight and acted so erratically that my co-workers thought I had gotten hooked on drugs or had developed a tumor of some sort.
It took an intervention to finally break me out of the cycle I had found myself in. I had hit a point where the only way I communicated with anyone was anger and aggression. I resented anyone who tried to put themselves between me and my work. When the last few people I had kept in my life threatened to leave I had to reevaluate. I consider myself lucky to have been given that wakeup call. Not everyone gets thrown a rope.
It’s hard to say if the knowledge I found during that time was worth the price I paid for it. It was a life changing experience that I would consider the first step of a longer journey but I’m convinced that there were far healthier ways of finding that trail.
I thought I had control the entire time, that my education was a symbiotic relationship between myself and the forces I was trying to petition for help. It was my hubris that turned that symbiosis into something more dangerous.
Humans aren’t meant for that kind of constant pressure. You are bound to be crushed without forcing yourself to take some kind of reprieve once in a while.
Go for a walk.
Take a trip.
Spend time with the ones you love.
Seperate yourself from that pressure for a while.
This is also why it’s important to find things outside your obsession to spend time with. You need to seperate yourself from all the parts of the symbiote if you want it to stop feeding.
Every Friday there was a standing invitation to go out drinking with my coworkers and every Friday I would decline. Not because I didn’t like going out but because I had already spent sixty hours over the last five days with them. I knew them better than I knew my friends. I also knew that the only topic of conversation was going to be WORK.
Only a parasite takes over your vision so completely that you can’t see anything beyond it. Healthy relationships don’t take over a life so completely and remove you from the world so thoroughly. It’s a possession, of sorts. These things have taken ownership of you and only you can take that back.
Without the rest of the world, magic is nothing more than a tool without work to do.
What purpose does a hammer have if there’s nothing to pound but itself?
YOU DON’T KNOW THE SHAPE OF A THING UNTIL YOU’VE SEEN ALL THE SIDES
It would take weeks of planning before the engineers would give us the plans for a new prototype. It was up to us to manifest their ideas in the physical space.
These prototypes were important, not simply as a proof of concept, but as something that could be viewed and inspected in reality. The build could be viewed from all angles. Things like fitment and wire stress could be measured and tested. Those of us charged with building the assemblies were watched and timed to make sure it was feasible to take on possible orders in the future.
It was the only situation that an assembly became a sandbox of play and creativity. Things never, ever went as planned so we were left improvising and developing new processes on the fly. Sometimes weeks would pass before trial and error would finally bring us to an iteration that functioned as desired.
This idea, that you should be utilizing all of your senses and viewing things from every possible angle to bring something to life, was possibly the most vital and easiest for me to translate to my practice.
Nearly all of my magic is centered around the creation of art and drawing. While my drawings are two dimensional the experience of producing them is not. There’s the weight of the pen in my hand, the smell of the ink, the sound of the nib scratching against the grain of the paper, and all of it while I focus on the line as it emerges from the pen. The experience is deep and rich, taking every part of me and focusing it, centering it in on an outcropping of the imaginal. It’s hard for me to view my books as anything but long term rituals made in corporeal space.
Clay idols, calligraphy, acid etched metal, and any other physical manifestations of creation make great focal points and physical workings. They are full body experiences if you have the perspective for it. It’s full immersion magic.
Failure is an essential part of the process but creating and cataloging your physical creations allows for a three dimensional archive of what did and didn’t work. You are allowed the opportunity to roll those experiences in your hands, see the naked underbelly, and perhaps learn to improve next time.
Moving from the literal to the strictly metaphorical, this same rule could apply to most other situations and systems. Decisions should never be made without knowing all the sides and angles. Most mistakes get made when the unexpected suddenly arrives. It may be impossible to prepare for any given problem but it couldn’t hurt to know SOME of what’s coming.
There are rarely ever two sides to things and a coin is a terrible decision tree. When you make plans you have to take all of your senses into account, your motives, your desires, your skill level, your enthusiasm, the entity you want to work with, THEIR diaries or motives, and a million different things. If you want higher hit rates in your magical work try to think as multidimensionally as possible. Not taking any one of those aspects into account may be the single thing between success and failure.
FEED THE MACHINES WELL
I would get the weirdest looks.
I started each morning with a conversation, not with my co-workers or the boss but with my machine. I liked to let it know what kind of day we would be having, what I expected from it, and what it should expect from me. I treated them like they were my allies and partners, like beasts of burden about to start the harvest.
There was an accord struck: if they treated me well I would treat them well in return. To keep my end of the bargain I would take care to be attentive to their needs. This meant daily upkeep and cleaning, inspecting various connectors and ports, and making sure I had all the material I needed to get the job done. That was what we were both there for, after all. We had a job to do.
I never expected a reply, not a spoken one anyways. The results were obvious; my output was better than almost anyone in my department, with less errors and more consistency. My machines never broke down and if they had trouble I would fix it without losing time. The accord held like that for years. All the way until I quit that job those machines had my back and I had theirs.
At some point each of us has spoken to a machine. You might not have noticed because it was a time of stress or anger. That’s when a lot of people start to ascribe human characteristics to the equipment they’re using. Your car starts to chug up a steep incline and suddenly you’re giving her a pep talk. Your computer crashes and you’re cursing the day it was soldered.
It’s a natural urge, giving the things around us identity and intelligence, but some simply write it off as the result of a stressful situation or don’t notice they’ve done it at all. It falls into the same category as anthropomorphizing your pets or talking to yourself. For some of us it gets taken at face value, that everything around us has some sort of living essence that we can and do communicate with all the time.
Back when I was still speaking with machines I had never heard of Animism. My point of view at the time was far more mechanistic and thought that maybe my connection with the machine had something to do with my acknowledgment of the greater machine in which I believed we all existed within. I never figured out if the belief in a cold, unfeeling machine running all of reality was the byproduct of working too much overtime for too long or if it was a faith come by honestly.
It wasn’t until later that I began to feel that the opposite was true and that everything around us has a spirit and life essence. I came around to thinking that we are surrounded by allies that we can consult and befriend. For me, those allies have always been machines.
Sadly, it seems as though most people don’t view machines in the same light. We live in a disposable culture. We buy cheap items that come to us through exploitative channels, we throw those items out when they break instead of repairing them, those items break more often and inspire us to buy even more breakable products, and the waste created by manufacturing and disposing of those items causes untold damage to nature and our environment. It’s a tainted existence that only grows worse with the total disregard of the soul inside each and every part of that chain.
Changing that corrupted cycle may start with something as simple as language and syntax. Replace words like repair and maintain with care for and feeding. Name things like your car and your refrigerator.
Don’t stop there, though.
Get to know your machines intimately. Learn how to fix them. READ THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL.
Every machine is an individual. They may come from a product line where every assembly has the same design but each and every build is different in small, unperceived ways. No two cars run the same. No two blenders hit the same mixing speed. If a human hand has touched the manufacturing of a thing in any way there will be flaws and differences. Learn them like you would learn the idiosyncrasies of a friend or loved one.
Speak to your machines and give them love. This is how you feed them and you will be repaid for that care. Take care not to overwhelm yourself by filling your home with so many electronics. With this frame of mind, anyone who surrounds themselves with useless gadgets and devices is akin to a pet hoarder. Only take on what you can. You will easily survive without that bread maker or bun toaster with the holes for hotdogs.
A few weeks after quitting one of my long term factory jobs I ran into a manager from the shop. He explained that all of the machines I ran suddenly stopped working. No matter who they called or how familiar they were with the machines nobody could get them up and running again.
It was the damndest thing, he said.
I’m relatively sure that the only reason that could’ve happened was that I knew best how to care for those things but there is a part of me that is truly saddened by the idea that they may have just missed me.
PATIENCE IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR
Overtime was a memory hole. All of us were working so hard and so fast. Exhaustion and long hours made it so you forgot if it was Monday or Wednesday.
Maybe it was Saturday?
You didn’t know.
You couldn’t know.
The expectation was that we would not only work twenty percent more but that we would also produce that many more pieces in an hour. What came next was no surprise.
The schedule would return to normal for a week or two. There would be a communal sigh of relief. People had time for a life, for their families. They had time to BREATH for the first time in months.
Then came the wave.
Box after box showed up in the loading dock. Customer returns piled as high as the ceiling, from all over the country.
Rework.
In the rush to get through the glut of orders corners got cut and details were missed. It’s difficult when you’re trying to get that much done. It’s nearly impossible to do it right through the fog of exhaustion.
Patience.
It’s a concept that’s become an anathema. We know what we want and we want it now.
Fast training.
Fast turnaround.
Fast results.
Fast knowledge.
Fast experiences.
We attempt condensing time at every turn even though we know that it’s impossible and all of these things take the time they take.
You have to fight for patience, from yourself and from others. Nobody is going to give that to you. You will have to take it.
Getting good at anything TAKES TIME. It takes repetition and rumination for learning to stick. Rushing things is hubristic and only works to delay training even longer.
You can always read a rookie if you know what you’re doing. Especially when they’re young.
It was one of the big mistakes the management made when the rushes hit. They would hire a bunch of younger people, just out of high school, and expect them to learn the job in a week or two.
For most of them it was their first or second job. It was obvious fast that they were green but that didn’t matter as far as the managers were concerned.
Everyone had to fill their quota. You didn’t get to stay if you didn’t hit your numbers.
So these kids would push out shoddy work as fast as they could. Assembly after assembly destined to add to the wave of rework. None of them ever asked for help, not at first.
They knew the job.
Any idiot could do it.
You know how kids are.
If only they had taken the time to learn, truly learn, their job.
That applies to anything you’re trying to do. You have to breathe and take time. Live with what you’re learning. Realize that getting good only comes to those who wait to get there. It takes humility to wait and that humility brings more knowledge than ego ever will.
It’s not about striving for perfection because nothing is without flaws. It’s about taking the time to truly feel what it is you’re doing, to fall into a synchronous orbit with your ultimate goal.
Take the time.
Breath.
Life is long and gets longer every day. It took fifteen years to mine what magic I could from the factory. It’s taken even longer to learn how to make art or connect with the deeper veins of the luminous. Longer still to learn how to live with myself at any level of comfort.
To make a connection with your world with any level of depth or compassion it cannot be done without patience.
Take the time.
Breath.
CONCLUSION
It dawned on me while I was writing this that all of these words were directed at one very specific person and that person is me. Not the me of right now. No, it’s for the me of twenty years ago, the one just starting this journey. Lord knows he could’ve used the guidance and reassurance.
I’ve been meaning to write this for the last half dozen years. There’s been a lot of false starts and dead ends over those years and I think it may be because of him.
You have to understand that I failed him, way back then, and I didn’t want to fail him again. It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to grow up in a small town. Money and options are both in short supply. The horizon was a brick wall that I was screaming towards at high speed, every second an inch closer to the dead end my life would become if I tied myself to that place. I had to get out but the climb seemed too steep and my velocity too fast.
I didn’t get over that wall until just before my thirtieth birthday.
I wish I could tell him that his patience would pay off and that all of those ideas he had bouncing around his head would bring him to the happiest life he could hope to ask for.
But then it would all be different, wouldn’t it?
If I had known all of this before the process took hold and assembled me into my current configuration?
If I hadn’t been patient?
It may feel like the process is almost over but it’s always starting again and continuing on. There are always new things to make and new processes to test.
So, in the end, this isn’t about magic.
Not really.
This is about work.
THE DAMNED MACHINE: NO GODS BUT MY OWN, VOLUME 1 is available through Lulu for $8.
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