WAYS OF SEEING

On the January 7th while on a boat ride through the city I met up with an old college friend of mine, quite by chance. At the time I was reading a copy of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, and he rightly commented that it had been on the college reading list.
"Oh you remember that do you?" I said.
"Of course, I do. Everyone in college read that book, at one point or another."
"Well the thing that intrigues me most about it is the front cover," I said. It was a picture by Rene Magritte, the French Surrealist painter, called The Key of Dreams. "Do you have any idea what it means?"
"Well if I remember correctly it is to do with the incongruity of language and imagery."
"Quite right. But I believe it might have an even deeper meaning. Several, in fact."
"Oh? Well, seeing as we are going to be on this boat ride for sometime, I should think that you will enlighten me."
"Certainly. If you look though the window, which serves as the frame for the image you will see that the it is shaded black; the colour of night. Now notice that there are four different images in each section; a horse, a clock, a jug or jar, and a suit case. By applying the word 'night', which serves as a background to each of these four images, we can enhance or change their meaning, in turn. The horse becomes night-mare, the clock night-time, the jar a night-jar, which is a type of bird, and the suitcase a night-bag, as in overnight bag."
"That is very interesting. Perhaps it is The Key of Nightmares, as well as The Key of Dreams."
"That is what I think. I believe that Magritte was aware of a tradition that is stretches as far back into the dark mists of time, as mankind himself."
"This would perhaps be to do with the valise by any chance, would it?"
"Well as a matter of fact it does. How did you know?"
"Just a wild guess. But please go on I would quite like to hear your other theory."
"Well it has to do with how the words connect to their images in a deeply unconscious way and, in so doing, deepens their meanings rather than obscuring them, as once thought. For instance, did you know that the horse once served as a symbol of the rite of passage to the land of the dead?"
"Did it? I never knew that."
"It is quite true. Oisin rode to Tir na nOg on a horse and returned to Ireland on one, and many are the tales of Donn, the king of the dead, and his many horses. So you see, the horse and the door have a lot in common, both signify the entrance into another world."
"The clock and the wind, I suppose that has something to do with how time flies, which of course reconnects to the bird."
"That's correct," I said. "As for the jug, and the valise, this is where we get into more murky territory. The white jug, or bird, symbolises the Holy Spirit, which is commonly depicted as a dove in Christian iconography, and a favourite theme of Magritte's painting. The author Phillip K Dick specified that the Holy Spirit was an alien life form that had some connection to a holographic computer program called VALIS, hence the French valise instead of any other moniker."
"Ha, ha. Very good," replied my friend with a bemused smile. He then reached into his coat pocket and removed a well-used and rather unremarkable copybook, and after a quick glance around, he jotted something down in the margin of one of the pages. The handwriting and miniature doodles were very familiar to me. They could almost have been my own, I thought.
It was then that I noticed the boat ride had come to an abrupt end, at which point my friend said his farewells and went on his way. As he left, I noticed –for the first time– that he was carrying with him a very square and brown briefcase.

WAYFINDING AAC

An issue of interest to some readers may be the revelations that appeared in the Aisling Art Copy (AAC), as well as the issue of the AAC itself and how it came about. First referred to in Disturbia, the AAC is an ordinary school copy book filled with newspaper clippings and ‘bizaare musings’ that I compiled out of boredom a year or two ago. As pointed out in that post, a great deal of people on the planet are undercover agents in a war against the android Centurions from the Phantom Realms. After the success of the Terran Campaign against the Centurions, a reversal of fortunes saw the implementation of linear time. This period is said to end in 2012, but I scarcely believe this will occur (linear time has become too valuable to both the Shade Alliance and the Aphek Arms Trade in the Upper Realms). The implementation of linear time also created the material bondage we now experience; here alternatively referred to as the Metrix reality, on account of its decimal or Metric code generation. It is understandably quite difficult for those souls existing in the Upper Realms to enter into the Metrix, accessed by the nine runged ladder of the Alchemists. Those that do, must necessarily squeeze through the womb door and attain a level of competence and conditioning in the physical realm, so as to appear as if they are a productive member of society.

Although agents of the Upper Realm can take any number of different professions as a viable cover, one of the most rewarding and prodigious is that of the Artist. Whether a painter, writer, sculpter, or musician you are garaunteed to either be in the company of sleeper agents, or to be one yourself. In fact anyone who has a procedural skill, such as doctors, dentists, opticians, architects and engineers are likely to be from the Upper Realm Secret Services (URSS). Looking exclusively at the Artistic discipline, for the moment, it is easy to see how the level of observation required when developing an exceptional standard of draughtsmanship will focus the attention (or seminal) point fixedly on the material world. When this attention is then lead to other realms outside of the habitual ways of seeing employed by denizens of the Metrix reality, full attainment or Total Recall, can be attained under these circumstances. Noteworthy groups and individuals who developed some measure of this practice were the Surrealists Salvidor Dali, and the less well affiliated; though no less notable, Rene Magritte. The term ‘Art’ itself, although undoubtedly related to the word artifice, is assumed here to be the abbreviation of Alternative Reality Training.

We should consider ART to be associated with the burgeoning appearance of the ARG (Alternative Reality Gaming) which has appeared across the Internet, and other locations for the better part of a decade. My own experience with ARGs came one New Years when I was vacationing with friends in Kerry. While inspecting the alcoves of a ringfort for bats, I came across a jar filled with miscellaneous objects such as; a plastic butterfly, a penny, a train ticket etc. Along with these was a note indicating that the jar and the objects were part of a game called Cistes, which is very popular in France and other areas on the Continent.* Intrigued by the find, and coincidentally researching the Artistic philosophy of Psychogeography, as created by Guy de Bord, I decided to combine the two and so create the Orpen Aisle ARG, of which my current e-mail address orpenisle@gmail.com is a relic. The Orpen Aisle ARG was originally to be based around the locality of my former collegeª, in the Thomas Street area in the Dublin Liberties, but was abandoned due to lack of funds.

 An example of Psychogeography is trying to navigate your way around Paris with a map of London.º The idea is that you attempt to apply different operational schemas to your travels in order to create a sense of excitement or otherness. A related discipline to Psychogeography, known as Wayfinding, became a signifier for the seemingly random generation of codes of connectivity drawn up in the AAC. As its name would suggest, Wayfinding is the method by which operatives navigate the twisting paths of the Metrix maze. Wayfinding is achieved when seemingly disparate thoughts and writings are combined to produce an intricate lattice of meanings. For instance, a newspaper article juxtaposed with the scrawled name of a band you heard on the radio, might produce meanings with a new and more interesting resonant value. This technique, therefore, has commonalities with certain types of synchronistic magic, as well as Brion Gysin’s cut-up method. This urges the question, was William Burroughs – the ardent convert to the cut-up cause – an undercover operative, as his work would undoubtedly suggest? And if so, for which espionage firm was he so employed; the Shades or the Terrans?

It is doubtful if even Burrough’s himself would have known the answer to this; seeing as how the true nature of the espionage front is being played out on a fourth dimensional plane. But once this has been comprehended, it is possible to see how even the most seemingly random decisions that we make throughout our daily lives are part of an intricate web of hyper-dimensional calculations to produce a particular desired outcome. The data (or intel) that is collected in the Wayfinding manner is completely unintelligible to one not versed in its methodology, and the inconspicuous, low-tech approach provided by the copybook limits the amount of attention drawn to it in the first instance. This is the primary reason why scrapbooks and copybooks are used by undercover operatives of the Upper Realms.

* At the time there was only perhaps as many as three Cistes existing in the entire country!
ª Although the college was heavily infested by androids (most likely produced on an assembly line, on nearby Mars) it did give me the chance to brush up on my ART, by means of Lucid Dreaming techniques. Which just means I got to slept a lot through college.

º Interpreting Historical events from one time period by the events of another is known as Psychohistory.