Small-dose magic

Frazzled and dazzled on a hot afternoon

I was late. Not because I hadn’t planned. I’d planned plenty. But I had wasted precious minutes staring at my phone while turning in circles, heading in a direction that the (two) maps on my phone told me was wrong, and then turning in the ‘right’ direction to find myself facing a wall.

I sent Jules a frantic message: do I have to walk through a flea market? Is it inside the flea market somewhere?

She called me. She was between customers at the market patisserie. No, there’s no flea market, she said. Unassuming entrance. Walk parallel to the tracks. Brick building. ‘Send me your location. I’ll see if I can help.’

I did, but then ignored her messages. She couldn’t see the wall I was seeing. But I’d remembered today was Sunday, a flea market day, and she’d gone during the week, so maybe I did have to shoulder through this sweaty mass to the Lighthouse of Digital Art.

I finally found it. It was through the flea market. I had no time to stop and absorb the hot Sunday alternative-consumer activities other than to think that the only way I would try on that secondhand flannel lumberjack shirt that that girl with the minuscule – and yet elaborately slashed – shorts was trying on in 33 degrees Celcius, would be at gunpoint.

It was noon. The sun was screaming. I was late. I am so bad at being late. I freak out.

I finally found a brick building with an unassuming entrance but it didn’t say Lighthouse, it said Khromo. Khromo seemed within the ballpark so I headed towards it. I showed my QR code to a muscle mouse with a fannypack at his hip. ‘You can scan it inside,’ he said waving me in. There was a white desk in a big white space and two facially bejewelled people. One was working at a computer and ignoring me. The other was helping a man and his son buy tickets.

There was a little white contraption on the desk. I held my ticket under the scanner.

It wasn’t a scanner.

It was the hand-sanitiser dispenser.

If my children were with me, they would have died of embarrassment. I considered dying but I was too frazzled. Finally the woman at the computer smiled vaguely at me. ‘No, this ticket is for Lighthouse. We’re Khromo.’ She pointed me in the right direction. Further in, closer to the tracks. Out into the scorching sun again. I got to a door. It was closed. I pulled. Locked.

Fuck sakes.

Or fuck’s sake, or fucks’ sakes, or however you write it. Every time I edit a text with ‘fuck sakes’ in it I have to recheck. You’d think I’d know by now. Not that I was thinking about apostrophes in front of the big green locked metal door that didn’t have a bell.

It was three minutes past twelve. You are instructed to arrive ten minutes before the show starts at noon.

A woman came up behind me. ‘Do you have a ticket?’ I said yes. Showed her. She unlocked the door. Inside she asked for my name. Did nothing with my QR code. Then she opened another door, pulled aside a curtain and I felt her sympathy for my sweaty franticness metaphorically shove me into the darkest place I’d ever been in.

Nothing. I could see nothing. There would be people here already. Jules had told me you sit in beanbags on the floor. I didn’t want to take a step in any direction for fear of crowd surfing a bunch of strangers who had their shit together enough to not be late. A drop of sweat ran down my temple.

Then there was a quiver of light on the wall as the show began, and I saw an empty beanbag close to me. I dropped into it with such relief, I think the beanbag winced.

‘Particle Poetry’ is a 45-minute light and music show. The ticket was my birthday present from Jules, who went last year. You can’t know until you’re in it why you want to be there. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

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Particle Poetry

Once I had my breath back and the sweat was doing its job of cooling my over-heated body, I could give myself over to the pleasure of the light show.

Images appeared, danced, bounced and slid away. Firesticks, and pick-up sticks falling in slow motion; donkey’s tail succulents and blown leaves, and popcorn at the moment it explodes. Paper shreds, kindling catching on a dark night, a house of reeds, curtains in a breeze. A door opening from a lit room into a dark one; a container that grew the further we went into it until it atomised. Georgia O’Keeffe visions blossomed where mountain landscapes receded. Sand dunes. The aurora borealis.

It was none of these things and all of these things.

For a while I tried to convince myself to stop turning what I was seeing into representations of something familiar. To just let the shapes ooze and morph without interference from my brain’s language centre. But I couldn’t sustain it for long.

Is it possible to escape being animal symbolicum, ‘the creature whose distinct character is the creation and the manipulation of signs – things that "stand for" or "take the place of" something else’?

With the music – in a beanbag, in a cool, darkened warehouse space – the experience felt like a proximation of the guided psychedelic journeys friends have tried to describe to me.

I wonder whether people always say, after those journeys, ‘it’s hard to describe’ because they were able to bypass, for a short time, Wernicke’s area (the part of the brain concerned with critical language).

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The music of non-language

The music for Particle Poetry was done by Makoto Shozu whose compositions you will find here.

It reminded me of three albums I listened to often when I was younger: Tenku, by the composer Kitarō, Pieces In A Modern Style by William Orbit and Sweet Revenge by Ryiuchi Sakamoto.

I no longer have ‘a sound system’ (do people still use that concept in the domestic sense?) at home. Just little bluetooth speakers.

Maybe that’s why I stopped listening, so immersively, to those composers.

I follow a Substack called Flow State, which is where I now mostly source quality music without vocals, but it pains me that I listen to it in the background, instead of pointedly like I used to, until I could predict almost every progression, cadence and fall of a full album.

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Infinity feelings

After the show ended, I walked through the adjacent gallery of AI art, and into the Infinity Room, a box of mirrors and lights where your image is shattered and projected in six directions thousands of time.

I remembered my kaleidoscope, probably my most, and longest used, childhood toy. It simply disintegrated from age and overuse at some point.

It was a hardy cardboard tube, cheerfully decorated, with a peephole on one side, and a plastic red turning thing at the other. There were coloured beads in a compartment surrounded by mirrors. When you turned the turning thing (sorry, there is probably an actual name for that part), the beads fell and reflected. The arrangements never seemed to replicate themselves no matter how many times I lay on my back on the grass trying to trick the beads into revealing their pattern.

It was a kind of magic.

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Terrifying magic

I spent most of this past week thinking about Artificial Intelligence, some of it accidentally (you can’t really miss the topic, unless you are purposefully trying to block it out) and some of it for work I am doing.

It landed me in very unusual territory: a podcast called The Emerald, which focuses on the big issues of the day through the lens of myth and story, so that hot topics get refracted and bounced around inside the kaleidoscope of the presenter’s brain in a very alluring way. I was amused and puzzled by the form and the presenter, but I was also absolutely riveted to the AI episode called ‘So You Want to be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers’.

His (not unusual) take on AI is that it is a form of magic (and he gives the definitions of magic) but that it is currently mostly in the hands of the apprentices and, as we know from The Sourcerer’s Apprentice, this is a disaster, because without proper initiation, a wizard’s pupil is basically a clever twerp.

It is a very strange podcast, but utterly compelling. I couldn’t do anything else while I was listening. The presenter himself seems to have access to some kind of voice sorcery.

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Lots of love,

K.