Thursday, January 22, 2009

Josh: Whoops, Forgot To Provide A Reasonable Answer to An Actual, Legitimate Question

Mom wrote:

"Joshua, do you still possess the Swiss army knife you took from Crayton? Perhaps it might contain some physical evidence to be used as proof? Also, did you by chance happen to maintain your grip on his identification during your encounter?"

I gave the knife to the cops and they're dusting it and doing all that C.S.I. stuff (below). I doubt it will amount to much, but it can't hurt. I just don't think Crayton's going to show his face again, at least not around here. His house looks abandoned and there's no trace of him.

Unfortunately I dropped his wallet when I ran from him in the Liberator. Mary told the police divers to look for it, but it was gone. Crayton probably picked it back up again after Lachlan and I fled.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yoshida’s one insight gleaned from his study of Magick is it’s resemblance to Science. Crowley glibly states in verse “We place no reliance on Virgin or Pigeon, the method of Science the aim of Religion.” But apparently Yoshida fails to see that where Science is a study of the quantitative and objective, Magick pertains to a likewise rigorous approach to the qualitative and subjective.

It is nonsense insofar as our subjective apprehension of the universe is nonsense. In many places Magick and Science can and do converge. Both presume a reality which can be observed and acted upon by one sensible to its laws and qualities. But how to gain self-discipline, the love of a woman or man, wealth, victory in battle, union with the Divine? What scientific experiments can we perform to accomplish these things? How does or can the quantitative guide us in this way? Magick is an Art. We can declare it of no use to us, or insist that we find it unintelligible, but that does not obviate it.

Perform certain actions and certain results will follow. Magick is designed thus as is Science, although truly both are merely frameworks, skeletons. I would imagine that if Yoshida were to apply to and join an order such as the Ordo Templi Orientis or The Order of the Golden Dawn, that he might be granted the grade of Zelator right off the bat for having perhaps read enough on the subject. A person who has not spent any time in a lab might say he knows something about chemistry. Magick contains a certain amount that one is invited to test and record experientially, even if those experiments are purely subjective . Perform certain actions and certain results follow.

There is even encouragement by Crowley himself to exercise skepticism. In Liber 0 he writes “2. In this book it is a spoken of the Sephiroth, and the Paths, of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.”

Yet he and many other learned persons have pursued and continue to pursue this Art, heedless of Yoshida’s lack of respect for their endeavor. How dreadfully unfunny it would be to find that this mass of gibberish was being used to its most artful extent against the poor persons of this tale who tossed it aside because the were too unsubtle to understand Art. And if the creation of a new world is not Art, then I do not know what.