We Are All Unintentional Hypersigil Machines

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

We’ve been watching Doom Patrol, a television show that riffs heavily on Grant Morrison’s ground-breaking run on the comics in the late eighties and early nineties. Naturally, this sent me scurrying off to revisit Morrison’s philosophy of narrative as a hypersigil—an extension of the chaos magic philosophy of creating a glyph that codifies your intention and imbuing it with energy to effect change in the world.

For Morrison, a hypersigil was an extended work of narrative that served the same purpose. Stories designed to change the self and the world. He created three works that were explicitly hypersigils—The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, and The Filth—all of which were created during or around his Doom Parol run.

Morrison is batshit insane, of course, and that’s part of his charm as a creator, but it’s interesting to watch some of his more out-there ideas get teased out by other writers.

For example, the curation of a social media profile lends itself to the process of sigilization, with users offering up a vision of their life and what’s meaningful in it, investing it with attention and intention, then creating a feedback loop where that increased attention reinforces the vision they’re curating.

Social media as subconscious magic powered by a story of the self told by the self. Fictions that make themselves real.

And what’s interesting about this is the way Morrison sounded like an outright mad bastard when he first started banging on about hypersigils on the internet, but it was also a time when this kind of active curation of the self wasn’t commonplace. We passively received more narratives than we created, and the choice to incorporate something part of your identity was relatively contained. You might be a hardcore SF fan around other hardcore SF fans, but you probably weren’t sharing your weird-ass Babylon 5 theories with friends at work.

Now, the bits of your life deemed important enough to like, share, or talk about on social media are likely to bleed out into the rest of your life. Every day you make choices about the way you think of yourself, which changes the way other people think of you.

Morrison may be barking mad, but the hypersigil is an intriguing metaphor for what’s become an incredibly commonplace way of engaging with the world. 

ROUTINE HACKING & EMOTIONAL TRIGGER OBJECTS

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

When my life goes astray, my first port of call is always walking through my morning routines and figuring out where to make changes. Inevitably, I can track a minor thing that’s throwing my whole day off, which usually sees a flurry of experimentation as I find a work-around.

Right now, mornings are a struggle, and I’m slowly working through the stuff that’s changed to find solutions. At first, I blamed the issues on new medication that left me groggy and prone to dozing off in the mornings (aided, in part, by the addition of a daily Wordle). Going to bed earlier and shifting the Wordle check-in until after 8 AM has helped, but it didn’t quite get me back into a writing frame of mind.

So I started tracking where else my day was going astray and quickly realized a common point: sitting down to work on my desktop right after I drink my coffee.

The desktop in question is new, and basically a beast of a computer compared to my other devices. A massive upgrade, given I’ve primarily worked off laptops for a few years. I love writing on a desktop, and miss having a space where work can take place… but since January, and the unofficial lockdown that accompanied Australia’s Omicron wave of COVID, it’s also been my primary workspace for my day job at Brisbane Writers Festival.

Working on a festival program is stressful. Working on a festival program with seven different “bosses” is even more so, especially when you’re not in synch with the person who has the most oversight. Factor in the last few months, which featured key staff departures, two months of frustrating my partner with work-from-home routines, and now a flood, and the stress levels have been off the charts this week.

We were going back in the office this week, but the premises flooded along with the rest of Brisbane, earning us another week of work-from-home just as I was looking forward to getting out of the house. Ever since the weekend, my morning routine has basically become wake up, make coffee, sit on the kitchen floor and weep at the futility of it all, after which I’ve got no genuine desire to write.

So today I worked off this theory: the desktop is an emotionally laden hotspot, where all my anger and resentment towards the job and its myriad difficulties overwhelm. Given that I have nightmares about programming and schedules right now, it’s also hard to fight the feeling that I should work twenty-four seven in order to make the stress go away. In short, it’s an emotional trigger, and every single one of those emotions is an obstacle to getting writing work done.

The best way to sidestep all those emotions is to take the desktop out of the equation, so this morning I went with a double-barreled approach. So I moved my Journal to the space my keyboard occupies and tucked a writing notebook in behind it. They became the first thing I went to after waking up, and I got to spend spent the first hour of the day working with tools not-yet-contaminated by day-job anger. 

For the first time in 2022, I started the day focused.

This change was backed-up with a second choice: pulling the USB Wi-Fi from my computer, so I physically couldn’t log into work after I turned it on. A subtle change, but it edged my brain back from the desktop=work equation it was running and meant I could get a little writing done at the keyboard before connecting to the internet and its myriad distractions. Plus, the nice thing about starting focused: it’s easier to break the automated routine of mail-Facebook-Twitter-check book sales that’s become my habit at the start of the day.

Physically disabling the internet is always a good starting point if you’ve got urgent brainwork that doesn’t require it. I only wish I had a career where I didn’t need to be online as much through the bulk of my day.

But the lesson here: if your day isn’t running smoothly, trace your morning routine and look for the emotional surge that derails you from your intentions. We tend not to wake up in a high emotional state unless there’s an early trigger, and if you can figure it out, there’s always a simple work-around.

Tarot

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

An interesting quote about the practice of tarot, which appeared courtesy of Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle’s interview for Chris Kraus’s Kathy Acker biography: 

“Tarot is totemic magic,” Geoffrey said. “The cards don’t tell us what will happen: they show us what to do. They are objects to think with. The spread is more a picture than a story. Everything happens at once. There is no empty time. Time with Tarot is not abstract, ambiance or ether. The cards are less psychology or personality than a plan of action. It’s like pulling up a map when you get lost. The cards make time happen.”

Kraus, Chris. After Kathy Acker (p. 168). Penguin Books Ltd.  

I don’t belive in Tarot as a divination device, but there’s the seed of an interesting mode of engaging with the practice here. Tarot as a means of forcing a new perspective on the present, then pushing for solutions that were overlooked or require breaking patterns.

It’s been twenty years since my last tarot reading, but I can see the echoes of that practice in a lot of my non-fiction reading. 

Case in point: my recent dive into Cliftonstrengths and how they might affect my writing/work life, via Becca Syms Dear Writer… series. 

My engagement isn’t founded on any genuine faith in the science underpinning the system, but rather the way a new system offers fresh perspectives on my current practice and work life, and a way of reframing my frustrations.