NO GODS BUT MY OWN 07
Enter Jah-Stohl, Warden of Memory
Hello again and welcome to another installment of No Gods But My Own. I hope you are all doing well. This issue has another rerun essay from the early days of my BOTTOMLESS BAG articles over at We The Hallowed. I’m very fond of these essays and glad I could fish them out of the garbage bin of obscurity to share them with you all again.
Jah-Stohl
The Beast of Backwards Sight
The Warden of Memory Prisons
Those looking for Jah-Stohl for assistance are those who have one foot trapped in the past. Jah-Stohl is the administrator of prisons built from memories and nostalgia. Who can better help one escape imprisonment in our past than their architect?
Even though Jah-Stohl is the master of nostalgia and is cursed to always be looking backwards, they can be called upon to help you suss out the motivations behind past decisions or help assess next steps could be taken from a realistic assessment of what has come before.
One has to be careful when calling upon Jah-Stohl. They are only helpful with the future as an opposition to the future. If given their druthers, Jah-Stohl would bind you in the amber of your past glory days and remove your means to freedom just as it had been done to them long ago.
To summon Juh-Stohl, picture a point in the past you would like to reexamine, recite a mantra or perform special breathing routines while winding an analog clock back. When eliciting Jah-Stohl's aid it's best to base any ritual you might perform on time and the passage of time.
FAILURE
For as far back as I can remember I have always had a problem with eating and weight. I don’t know what it is but no matter how much I eat I always feel hungry. Because of this compulsion I have spent a good amount of my life overweight, with a brief exception of about 3 years where I forced myself to eat less than a thousand calories per day and run five miles without exception.
You could say that I have a slightly addictive personality. Cigarettes, book collecting, a brief love affair with pain pills and alcoholism, EATING. These things are the price I pay for the part of myself that pushes me to constantly work and do art. It’s the shadow side of my artistic drive. I honestly believe that I can’t have one without the other but I’ve usually been able to find an equilibrium that keeps me healthy and happy.
After my son was born my relationship to food became much worse. I am a horrible stress eater and almost nothing is as stressful as keeping a little human alive every day. So I ate and ate and ate. I felt like I had lost all control of that little voice inside my head that tells me to stop filling my face. All of the usual strategies for control were failing me.
An idea emerged from this place of desperation. I would take this hungry voice, turn it into a spirit, and bind it in a notebook. It was to be journaling as a form of building a prison around my personal hungry demon. I wanted to hold my problem in my hand and give it a face that I could learn to recognize and avoid.
Now, I hadn’t ever tried utilizing my practice so directly on a problem like this before. Generally I just try to tap into the creative space and let whatever currents I can ride take me where they want to go. Alan Moore’s description of Ideaspace is probably the closest approximation of where I try finding myself.
My practice usually results in books, songs, comics, or paintings and not things of a more mundane, physical nature. In this situation I was going to try using art to help me curb my drive to eat.
I started things very simple. I began carrying a special pocket sized notebook with me with the intent to record when and where I would get cravings and where my mental state was at that time. I would map out the conditions where I encountered my hunger demon. I would find its shape, its smell, its demeanor. I was introducing myself to my demon.
I did this for a couple months until I found that a pocket sized notebook didn't feel like it could contain the complexity of what I was attempting. I still didn't feel the level of control or communion that I wanted.
Inspired by the journaling techniques described in the books of Lynda Barry, I attempted to build a more complicated prison. An average composition book replaced the pocket notebook and I intended to fill every inch of every page.
I began laying out my daily pages with a self portrait in the top left corner to record a “reflection” of my self image for the day. I would then record the successes and failures from the previous day next to that. My intention was to focus on what I felt was my main issue at the time which was the urge to eat and my insatiable appetite. I would sometimes wander to other subjects but only in how it weaved into the main intention.
My demon took up the entire bottom half of the page. I would visualize its physicality and face. I would try to conjure up its odor and try to suss out its voice. I wanted a full profile of this thing that wouldn’t leave me alone.
It didn’t take long for the project to spin out of control. I got bored drawing myself over and over again. It felt as if I just couldn’t perceive any changes in myself and so I drew the same picture over and over until it became a lazy scribble. The demon profile became more and more complex and soon there was an entire cadre of entities that I was giving claim to my bad habits, all of them with clever or cute names.
I finally tapped out when I felt like I had even less control than when I started. I was eating MORE not less. Doing my pages had become stressful and anxiety inducing. I felt guilty about how lazy the drawings were. My own creation had defeated me.
When it was all over I had to ask myself why this strategy and practice failed. Where did I go wrong? I think it boils down to two things.
First is simplicity. The project went off the rails the moment it became more about creation than introspection. Filling those pages became the main drive when what I was trying to do was study my problem and see it as a three dimensional thing that could be contained. My demon busted out its prison by feeding directly into my desire to overflow the page with details and filled its cell until it burst open.
Second is necessity. Did I really need to try disembodying my urges? Did I need them to be something outside of myself? Probably not. In fact, this removal from myself might have actually given them more power instead of less. Perhaps I would have been better served by figuring out a more terrestrial way of dealing? Not everything needs to be fixed by magical means.
Now why would I spend all of that time on describing an utter failure of a magical working? Because our failures give us more information than our successes in my opinion. Failure tells us we’re still human and fallible. It keeps us humble and in the world of the occult that humbleness gets lost in a sea of inflated egos and opinions that feel like the big answers to the biggest problems. We fail so we can narrow down our paths until we walk the line that feels right to us.
Now I am left with the last question that failure always brings and that is how to proceed from here. The issue obviously still exists and a new strategy needs to be formulated. True and absolute failure only comes when you stop moving, not when you have to forge a new path.
As far as my project goes I must now pick myself up and dust this misstep away before making my next try. Perhaps trying to conjure allies instead of exorcising my little demons will bring better results? I have a fresh notebook and a pen. Succeed or fail, I'm ready to try again.
SKETCHES, NEWS, AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
I’ll kick this section off with a few recent sketches before getting to the news.
The Outlet Omnibus came out a couple weeks ago, in case you missed the announcement. I released it through Lulu in both hardcover and paperback. Shipping seems to be taking longer than expected due to labor and material shortages so please be patient with your orders. I don’t want to take up too much space here to describe it all over again so I’ll link to the special installment of NGBMO I released and let you check that out if you’re interested.
There isn’t much news at NGBMO headquarters otherwise. As I mentioned above I’ve been working on some new essays and that’s been taking up most of my spare time lately. I’ve written around 12,000 words worth of material in the last six weeks. Now I just need to start editing.
I’m kicking around the idea of possibly releasing a printed version of NGBMO after issue twelve as a kind of yearbook for this project. I’d love to hear some feedback if anyone is interested in that sort of thing. Feel free to reply to this email or comment on the site. I’d love to hear from you.
That about wraps up this latest edition of No Gods but My Own. Thank you for reading and for the continued support. I love each and every one of you.
Until next time,
EJM