NO GODS BUT MY OWN 02
Zobomba, the Heart of Fire
NO GODS BUT MY OWN
ZOBOMBA
MOTHER OF FIRE
COMBUSTION HEART
Zobomba is the bringer of change or destruction, sometimes both in equal measure. She loves the percussive song of fireworks, dynamite, and bomb blasts. Any day with the presence of noise, fire, and explosions belong to her and bring her close to the earth.
Like any fire, Zobomba is unpredictable and chaotic. You may think the flames will travel where you like but she will always follow her own paths and plans. Only call upon her if you are truly prepared for the ruin she may cause.
You also have to remember that fire can be the bringer of life. A forest cannot refresh without the underbrush burning away. Pinecones open with heat and pressure, releasing the seeds within.
An easy way to contact Zobomba is to draw this seal on a piece of paper and attach it to a firecracker. To curry extra favor this seal can be affixed to the exterior of an entire brick of cheap fireworks.
Safety is key, both for you and anyone around you. There’s no point in losing a finger or burning down your house. If chaos comes from dealing with Zobomba let it come directly from her and not your lack of preparation or caution.
THE LIVING IMAGINATION
Earlier this year I made the decision to drastically alter how I interacted with my own creative process. People that have been following my work for a while know that I used to have a publishing project called Outlet Press. It was the face of my self publishing efforts and over a seven year period I released over twenty books under that banner. I decided to end that with the release of my last book, BOTTOMLESS BAG.
There were a lot of reasons for this decision: exhaustion from the pandemic, a sense of creative stagnation from viewing all my ideas as books, and the loss of time to work on my creative endeavors were just some of them. I think these may have all been a way of justifying the biggest reason I needed to shake things up to myself.
For years I’ve told people that my magical practice is doing art and the act of creation. My reasoning is that magic doesn't exist without imagination so why not aim for the source. Without imagination you don't have visualization or ritual, no sigilization or ceremony. Magic without imagination isn't peanut butter without jelly it's peanut butter without PEANUTS.
Over the last few years I’ve felt a shift occurring that has made me feel uncomfortable. I’ve felt a coldness and distance developing in how I interact with my imaginal practice and I’ve been meditating on the growing discrepancy between the action and the emotion of creation.
The best way I could describe it is that I stopped viewing the imaginal plane as a commodity that can easily be exploited and now see it as a vast ecosystem in need of conservation.
How did this sea change come about?
My best guess is that it was a combination of my son getting old enough to start expressing his own experiences with the imagination and my impending 40th birthday splashing me with the cold water of middle age. Something about the collision of these landmarks of aging caused some rather significant ripples in the way I approach my creative endeavors.
Over the last decade my creative process had turned cold and methodical, bringing in many of the aspects of the industrial workflow I experienced from my day jobs. I spent the better part of fifteen years working in factories that concerned themselves with nothing but efficiency and productivity and it would be impossible to prevent that mindset from bleeding into other aspects of my life. It’s no wonder I produced as much work as I did in the last decade due to that mindset.
I treated my creative impulse the same way I would treat any machine of production and the imagination like a hopper feeding ideas in like raw materials. As long as the supply remained steady the machine would hum along without trouble, allowing me to create book after book after book. The ideas didn’t matter. Production mattered. If ever the hopper ran empty I would just hammer at it with my fists until a nugget or two would clatter out and I would try to use that, too.
I fully subscribed to the adage that using the imagination was like working a muscle. You had to keep getting those repetitions in, otherwise you would never develop as an artist, never grow stronger. It was all about building up the strength to keep pumping out content and strip-mining the imaginal environment for all it was worth.
That all changed when my son was born.
I know it’s a cliché to say that the birth of a child completely changes the way you view the world but stereotypes exist for a reason sometimes and this one feels incredibly accurate. Your sleep patterns change. Your social life changes. Everything takes on new meaning and context. It’s no longer just about you. It’s about what you do and its effect on your child.
When you start raising a child you have to learn a new emotional language and usually you have to create it from scratch because you are dealing with a blank slate. Kids run on emotion and instinct. They don’t have years of piecing together ways to communicate with the world around them like adults do. For a parent it’s like having to learn a second language but without the benefit of books or lessons. There are guides that give you a decent overview but parents truly have to learn by doing.
This wasn’t the only dramatic change. When my son was born I had to cut my hours at my day job and stay home during with him. It was the first time in over twenty years that I’ve worked less than forty hours in a week. It was a rough transition. Full time work, on this end of the change, feels akin to Stockholm Syndrome where you begin to value the entity that has been mistreating you for as long as you can remember. Removing the fog created by the dehumanizing and demoralizing environment where I was spending five days out of seven gave me a new and unexpected perspective.
Spending that much time with my son as he developed his own relationship with the imaginal had a profound influence on me. My son doesn't try to control the imagination, he just lets it flow without the hindrance of external influence or insecurities. He talks to beings that aren’t there, without embarrassment, as if they’re sitting right there. If he sees a pink horse in his mind then that's what he's going to transcribe onto the page. There are no preconceived notions of what a thing needs to look like or style choices made. It's clean and pure. It's the imaginal, raw from the tap.
Because of this the mechanistic productivity began to give way to something more natural and instinctual. A playfulness had seeped in, leading me back to an experimentalism I had left behind in the early days of Outlet Press, back when I was still doing cutups, blackout writing, and altered books. I returned to painting and sculpture. My relationship with the spirituality of creation grew and grew and with that a conflict began to develop.
Did I really want to focus more on the amount of work I produced more than the depth of it?
Did I want to continue having no more than a superficial relationship with my output?
Shouldn't I be striving for a more pure connection to imagination?
Does the imaginal plane exist as nothing more than a resource farm or should it be treated with reverence and care?
The insides of my books may not have been overly planned out but the design and layout of every volume was. Outlet Press was my attempt at being a professional when what I truly wanted was to be an enthusiast. It was like transforming intimate sex with a partner you care deeply for into nothing more than a business transaction. Basically, my relationship with creating had become toxic and instead of cultivating intimacy I fell into a cycle of exploitation and emotional distance from the act of creation itself.
This is where Alan Moore creeps in and I’m reminded of his thoughts on Ideaspace, a place where all thought and imagination originate. To quote the mad wizard himself:
Obviously there is more to our experience of a place than the bricks and mortar. Our reaction to various locations seemed to me to depend upon the richness of the web of association that we connected w/ these sites…. If you are a practicing magician or poet [then] you have a web of symbol systems w/ which to decode even chance appearances in this area...
“…this hypothetical “space,” which I have labeled Ideaspace…. Maybe our individual and private consciousness is, in Ideaspace terms, the equivalent of owning an individual private house… the space inside our homes is entirely ours, yet if we step through the front door we find ourselves in a street, in a world, that is mutually accessible to everyone…. This would explain dubious phenomena such as telepathy or knowledge-at-a-distance…. The actual ideas represent the equivalent of solid objects in terms of that space. An idea may be a pebble, a rock, a mountain or a whole continent in terms of its stature…. Distances could only be associational in Ideaspace. Lands End and John O’Groates, while famously far apart in the physical world, are usually mentioned in the same sentence and thus are right next to each other, associatively speaking…. Time, as a phenomenon, doesn’t apply in the same way to the realm of the mind as it does to the time-locked material realm. We can think as easily about events ten or twenty years ago as we can about something that happened this morning, or we can think about something that might happen tomorrow…. If this were so, then this would explain, at a stroke, such phenomena as ghosts, premonitions, apparent memories of previous lives… even… de-ja-vu.
“Ideaspace, where philosophies are land masses and religions are probably whole countries, might contain flora and fauna that are native to it, creatures of this conceptual world that are made from ideas in the same way that we creatures of the material world are made from matter. This could conceivably explain phantoms, angels, demons, gods, djinns, grey aliens, elves, pixies…
I find myself realizing that maybe I’ve been jamming my hand into this imaginal cookie jar and devouring whatever I ripped free of it like an insatiable garbage disposal. It’s pathological artistic gluttony.
The metaphor of imagination as muscle feels wrong now. It’s not a physical attribute to be expanded. Maybe your access point to the imagination is vaguely muscular like a diaphragm or sphincter but imagination itself seems to be something else, something more elusive and mysterious.
Imagination is not about skill. The imaginal is always there. Imaginative practice is more like learning to control the aperture through which you experience the imagination. The focus, the range, it's like photography. A layman will get a perfectly functional photograph but with training a person can apply style and clarity of vision on a subject.
This is where I find myself now and this is why NGBMO is my main project for the time being. It feels like an attempt at returning to the source of spiritual experience within the imaginal. I want to talk to beings that aren’t there without embarrassment, just like my son.
If the imagination is truly the source of magic, which I believe it is, then it is a place that should be treated with far more reverence than I have given it over the years. I'm starting to think my job as an artist is to be something akin to a nature photographer. I want to go into the imaginal environment, try to record what I see without interfering with the natural order, and do it all without leaving a trace behind. The denizens of that place deserve that at the very least.
I’m not surprised at all that Alan Moore announced his magical intentions on his fortieth birthday. I’m reaching that same milestone in a couple months and I feel that same static crackling around the edges, that same urge to throw caution to the wind and make big proclamations.
It’s time to take things in a different direction.
It’s time to play steward for the ecosystem of the imaginal plane and try to advocate for the inherent divinity within.
It’s time to suss out the gods that rule those strange, unknowable lands.
It’s time for no gods but my own.
NEWS AND SKETCHES
I’ll kick off this section with a few selections from the sketchbook from the end of April/start of May. I try to get some sketching in every day and never really know where things are going to go. Lately I seem to be gravitating toward faces. A few years ago I had planned a book I was calling The Outlet Press Book of Faces and it seems like some of the roots were never fully removed from my mind after I gave up on it.
The biggest news this week is that I’ve signed a contract for my book The Impossible Game to be rereleased by the legendary Portland publisher Microcosm Publishing. Really looking forward to this. Hopefully this is just the start of some of my old titles being giving new life at real publishers.
I’m circling a project at the moment, just trying to find it’s shape. The tentative title is Instructions for the Damned Machine: What 25 Years of Shit Jobs Taught Me About Magic. It’s a collection of tricks and techniques that I’ve picked up over the years, working in factories and other dead end jobs. To be completely honest, my magical practice wouldn’t exist without what I learned from the factory floors and grease caked kitchens where I spent my teens and twenties. More news to come on that front.
Thank you to everyone who have subscribed and read this thing. I appreciate each and every one of you.
Expect the next issue in a few weeks. Take care of yourselves. I hope to see you there in the future.
Your brother in the imaginal,
EJM