Blog Witch

"Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will." Dion Fortune

In wicca, everywhere is sacred space. There are no churches, no temples, no special groves; everywhere is the centre of an infinite circle, including where you are right now: a cabin in a northern boreal forest, the computer lab at a university on the east coast, a scorching afternoon in a southern garden with the laptop on a chaise lounge, watching a fine drizzle on the Pacific coast through your living room window. The unergonomic chair giving you carpal tunnel or the worn-out mattress you're sprawled on, with a spring poking you in the rib. Everywhere is the centre.

In a panentheistic religion (where god/dess is believed to be in the world) this is inevitable. Deity--the gods--aren't entities living in some special place that is above and beyond the earth who can only be contacted in particular earthly spots. They are the earth. The keyboard I am typing this on, the sun's glare on the windshield during my morning drive in to work, the trickles of melting snow on the road, the bits of pine tree littering the backyard, the monitor you are reading these words on, right now, are all god/dess. Yes, wiccans generally spend a part of their rituals calling the goddess from the moon, and the god from the sun; but these are metaphors. It would be more correct to state that the purpose of these portions of the rituals are meant to remind us of something that is always true: s/he is here, always, in the half-cold tea sitting in the mug beside the mousepad, in the voice of a friend on the telephone, in your fingers, your eyes. As you sit, this very moment, reading this, goddess is running through your veins.

A lot of people wrap themselves in knots trying to prove or disprove that magic "works." But whether or not it "works" depends on what it is you are asking it to do; if you asked me whether a pair of scissors "work," I'd say "yes" if you want to cut open a bag of potato chips and "no" if you need to scrub the bathroom sink. Does it work? Do you mean, can I turn you into a frog? No. If it worked that way, I'd have a mansion on a ten-acre lot, and a harem. I have none of those things so, clearly, that's not what it's good for.

Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will. All effective writing, for instance, is magic.

This goes beyond opinion pieces, where the goal is to change someone's mind. Mind-changing is important and valuable; but changing consciousness is something other, and it works on both the writer and the reader.

John Gardner called fiction "a vivid and continuous dream"; it is, but creating that vivid and continuous dream is magic. To arrange words on a page or a screen in such a way that their combined rhythm, sibilance, pattern and repetition, imagery, symbols, metaphors, allusions, influences, situations, scenes, tension, takes the reader out of their uncomfortable chair and puts them in a cafe in Paris or a battleground on Middle Earth or a rolling deck on a Viking ship at sea, to make them more aware of the imaginary events you have put together than they are of the ache in their right shoulder and their scratchy socks, is to alter their state of consciousness at will. It's magic. And if, once the incantation ends, the reader is transformed in some small way, then the magic was very strong.

But it isn't just the readers who are affected--especially here, on the blogosphere.

One of the rites of passage, for a wiccan, is to choose a name. The right name, like the right word, is powerful; it doesn't just reflect reality, but shapes it. We become what we name ourselves. When I first chose Athena Dreaming, it didn't quite fit; but now it does, like an old glove, and far better than my given one. I didn't just choose a name for myself; I chose my self.

Choosing a name pales in comparison to what we do every day on personal blogs.

Last year I struggled with the sense that blog-Andrea was fast becoming someone different than life-Andrea. By choosing what to include, what to leave out, and the words to frame what's here, it is inevitable that the version of me who emerges here differs from the version of me who brushes her teeth in the morning after eating an english muffin with peanut butter. Blog-Andrea talks a lot more, for one thing; she uses more ten-dollar words, she is more open, she is braver and stronger, better organized, and she doesn't lounge around on the couch on Saturday mornings in her pyjamas until noon. The more people who read the blog, the more of a difference I noticed, because the me who was created in the mind of each reader was added together in some kind of weird synergistic calculus, from which the me I really am was then subtracted. If you think back to the paragraph on fiction, imagine how different the Viking ship in your head was from the Viking ship in my head, and the Viking ship in the heads of the few hundred other people who will read this post. The specific creak of the wood, snap of the sails, the position of your feet on the boards, the presence of other people, the size of the ship, all of these details that I did not include will have been filled in by your imagination. And so it is when I talk about me--the colour of my hair, the clothes I am wearing, my tone of voice, the presence or absence of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink or a ring around the bathtub, will all have been filled in by your imagination; even if I am excruciatingly honest in every detail that I relate, there is so much that I do not and cannot relate that blog-Andrea and life-Andrea helplessly differentiate. This is then amplified and reflected back when readers take what I give them and fill in the blanks (which is exactly what you're supposed to do--still, it's a strange feeling). Sometimes when someone posts a particularly supportive comment, I feel like shouting, "My socks don't match! I never make the bed!"

But here is the cautionary tale: they then approach each other again. Not because blog-Andrea becomes more like life-Andrea, but because life-Andrea becomes more like blog-Andrea. Every day I write myself into being, here; and it changes me. Every day I use words to reflect my own experience; but they shape that experience, too. They alter my consciousness. They alter me.

So to anyone coming along behind me on the blogging path, who is slowly beginning to feel the audience and the construction diverging from her sense of herself, who is wondering to what extent the blog-self reflects or diverges from the life-self, who is seeing the amplification of difference from the audience, I would say, step carefully. Choose wisely. Be as honest as you can, spill your guts, open a vein and bleed all over the monitor; but when you lie, and you will have to even if only in ommission, lie carefully. Be sure the persona projected on your blog is a self you don't mind becoming. Because you will.

Blogs are magic.

We make the blogs, and then the blogs make us.

Make your blog-self a you worth being.

~~~~~

Dear Readers, I'm feeling a little spent. There wasn't much sleep last night (and is the 'last night' as I write this the same 'last night' when you read it?). I feel the last of my energy dribbling out through my feet; my blood is only blood, after all, and the imagined four readers at the four corners of the continent have vanished back into the ether. I'd like to thank them, though, for involuntarily participating in my conceit. And now it's lunch time. I don't know about you, but I'm starving.

The circle is open, but never broken. So must it be.

Posted by Andrea at March 13, 2007 7:18 AM under Witch

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