The Magick of Doktor Sleepless

From doktorsleepless

The Magick of Doktor Sleepless

Posted by Ian 'Cat' Vincent on February 10, 2008 at 1:36pm

(Disclaimer. This is the crazed ranting of a man who's spent nearly forty years fucking with his consciousness and studying 'magic' - and thinks they're pretty much the same thing.)

Whenever I think about Doktor Sleepless, the same pair of quotes come to mind. One from a magician, one from a SF writer. You've probably heard them before.

"Magick is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity to will."

Aleister Crowley

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Arthur C. Clarke

In the first five issues of the book, Ellis has dropped an awful lot of information on us, and much of it has been about the nature of personality. We've been told about Tulpas and invented personas. The illusion of 'authenticity' and the malleability of human consciousness...

... and there's a revised version of that Crowley quote (by another invented persona, Starhawk) which goes, "magick is the art and science of changing consciousness at will."

Those two or three quotes sum up for me what John Reinhardt is doing and what he intended Grinding to be. Using technologies to alter consciousness, to shape reality - to do what seems like (and functionally is indistinguishable from) magic. Or to do magic using tech. Or both.

We know that the young and straight-edged Reinhardt, altered by the death of his parents in the Darkening Sky event, went on a quest "in search of wisdom", not unlike that of another orphaned and traumatised young man in a big house on a hill - Bruce Wayne. (In many ways, Reinhardt can be seen as the anti-Wayne!)

He trained in ayahuasca-based shamanic techniques under the bullshit-free Don Bastardos - and those who've done aya' will know how very unforgiving a path that is in the first place. What does Reinhardt want to learn there? "How to permanently change my mind. Because the one I've got isn't big enough." He came back as someone new.

But before that, he designed Clatter and other Grinder kit, was active in imminent.sea writing about street uses of tech as Professor Zero (another persona, another invention...) - was basically building technological versions of magical powers like telepathy and illusion spells, and leaving them for others to play with. And we know that he'd been reading Robert Anton Wilson, pioneer of modern magical philosophy and Crowley aficionado...

Like Crowley, Reinhardt travels the world looking for magic, and finds it. Like Crowley, he invents and implements an altered personality for himself (the rogue-mage-adventurer Aleister Crowley is a very different person from Edward Alexander Crowley, spoilt brewer's son). Like Crowley, like any shaman, he brings back what he's learned to share with others...

...and very much like Crowley, he's quite brutal about doing it. But change, especially shamanic or magical change, always has a price.

(Does Doktor Sleepless want to immanentise the eschaton? Maybe so - but then again, so did Promethea.)

And maybe, somewhere along the way, he makes a tulpa or two. How does Reinhardt-in-room-23 define a tulpa? "A manifestation of intent in human form out of imagination." Look at that phrase through the Crowley-Clarke-Starhawk lens... you get something like 'a technology created from human will'. Tulpa as a metaphor for cloned consciousness? Or clones as a metaphor for Tulpas?

We know of three Reinhardts so far - The Doktor, Reinhardt-in-room-23 and the dead one. They seem to have shared some degree of connection/consciousness - as DS noted in issue 3, "It's always later than you think. It took dying for me to work that out". (And dying - or near-death experience - is a vital component of shamanic training and magical metaphor.) When DS talks to the mirror in issue 2, he says "I'm the realest version of me there is right now". Reinhardt 3.0?

(How 'real' is the Reinhardt we see anyway? Probably just as real as Charles Foster Kane... another figure mostly seen through the eyes of others and the blur of the media.)

The call to the Grinders is very specific; "Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own idea about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention." Grinders, descendants of the body-modifiers of today (and also their less-well-regarded parallels such as Otherkin and furries), are trying to externalise their own interior personas - to bring the dream of themselves into being. We've already seen how far people can go towards rewriting their bodies and personalities with the tech and knowledge we have on hand these days. It's even leaked into the mainstream via such (dubious but widely-seen) means as the CSI:NY Second Life episode. And magic has always to some extent been about rewriting one's mind and trying to get external reality to follow suit. Remember, the Crowley quote says "art and science..."

Consider;

The example of Bob Dylan, the creation of a kid called Robert Zimmerman, "in the same decade the telecommunications satellite was invented."

(Who invented the telecommunications satellite? Arthur C. Clarke.)

The shared personas of Karen Eliot and Monty Cantsin. The fusion of two experimental magicians and body-modifiers into the now tragically split Breyer P-Orridge. The false reality created for us by others...

...and a man whose first words we ever read are, "Today I stop being real." Who tells his audience that authenticity is illusory and personality is fluid, that we can become whoever or whatever we want to be, through will and technology.

Through magic.

I throw my mad words on the mercy of the group...

Reply by Seej Engine on February 18, 2008 at 5:50pm

As a side note I just read the Global Frequency trade (an earlier Ellis book) and in the third story, Big Sky, there's a magician who says the following quotes (slightly edited) that kinda foreshadow a lot of this stuff:

"Magic is a psychological discipline. Magic is about effecting physical change through perceptual change. You've heard of Aleister Crowley? Once in San Francisco Crowley told a friend he could prove his powers by making a man across the street fall over. He began walking behind the man, and matched his footsteps to the man's, audibly. He became the man's walk. After a few moments Crowley scuffed his feet. And the man fell over. Magic."

"When magicians talk about invoking gods and demons and the like, what they're really discussing is a process. A mental process that allows one to enter into conversation with the secret recesses of the human brain. That's where the gods and devils live. They are aspects of our own subconscious, loaded with information we don't ordinarily have access to, posessed of sub-personalities we never hear. Exorcism, for instance, is merely a code to allow the main personality to reassert itself."

"It is science. In many cultures science has historically been the preserve of the priesthood. And so was magic. One and the same."

So, is the dok on this route? If the Lovecraftian overtones of whatever happened in his parent's room are products of his own mind, then did he gain access to information he couldn't ordinarily have had. Is this in fact the source of his genius? Did the ayahuasca push him further down this route. Are the tulpa(s) products of such a mind, sitting at this intersection of tech and magic? Instead of scuffing his feet, is he going for the Eschaton? Does he need an exorcist to be able to revert to the guy who used to date Sing?

Thoughts?

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