I didn't quite know what to do now. Which was natural, in the aftermath of an encounter with Aunt Constance. All the more so after the truth bombs she'd dropped on me. Just live, eh?
So I shut the laptop, despite an hour of class remaining. Or maybe it was two hours. Oh well, I wasn't fretting over it. This was me naming the terms by which I would live. After all, it depressed me to picture myself sitting through to the end of the tutorial, more still to picture myself repeating this for two more days, and then for three more modules. And no matter how much it felt like I was setting fire to any prospects for a prosperous future, there was also a part of me that was going thank you, sweet frogs figure skating on seas of cheese, thank you.
I dropped on the couch, and with Nirvana's cover of 'Love Buzz' coming from the record player, picked up the book I had been painstakingly trying to complete. It was the The Crying of Lot 49, the second novel by Thomas Pynchon. Very briefly, the protagonist, Oedipa Maas stumbles upon a worldwide conspiracy involving a secret mail service referred to as Trystero. My copy was only a scant 150 pages, but man, it had been an uphill climb getting to the sixth and final chapter.
Is it perfectly okay to not finish a book? I'd like to think so. The reason doesn't really matter. You could be bored by the topics discussed, or turned off by the style.
The real problem is that the book doesn't go just disappear from your life. Instead, it lays unread in some dark corner of the room. Biding its time, like a long-forgotten ex or summertime hook-up. And inevitably I'd come across it in the course of looking for another much easier read, and feel like some kind of finicky book skank, swinging from text to text whenever the going got tough.
Usually I enjoyed Pynchon's dense prose. Call it masochism, but I've got a penchant for the tough books. I don't even brag about finishing them. I just silently bask in the knowing that I'm mentally superior to the average Joe. But sometimes you want to read a book and not feel like you're working on a dissertation with an ultra-niche thesis. And with Lot 49 there was so much to look up, almost every sentence. Like Oedipa, it was all too easy to find myself lost for hours in a rabbit hole over a negligible detail.
I pressed on, because once again, like with the Zoom class and Julia's seemingly cryptic words, I was identifying strange resonances with poor Oedipa's story. Maybe it was some lingering residue of the intelligence-boosting subliminals. I sure didn't feel like an academic wunderkind anymore, but all the same . . . she had been made the executrix of her late boyfriend's estate, and began to question if she really knew him at all; I was beginning to feel like I was sleuthing after my old self. The deeper she went looking for answers, the more alone and lost she became. Ditto, super ditto.
I got as far as two pages before the dampness forming at my back started to become a distraction, the threat of being fused to the faux leather permanently suddenly very real. A shame, with only ten pages to go before I could check it off my GoodReads. And oh, there was another reason why I'd been so hard up to finish the novel: after my first read I'd thought it be cool to tattoo the W.A.S.T.E symbol, and I figured I ought to better my knowledge of the text to fend off any Pynchonites seeking to gatekeep their lord and saviour. Yep, that was the kind of person I had been. In the brand-new image slowly taking shape in my mind I wasn't so sure there was room for the crude symbol of a muted post horn on my wrist anymore.
I put the book down and made for the desk. I pulled up Reddit and began digging through the subliminal communities. All cluttered with testimonials and success stories. Positive affirmations and subs worked, and these people would gladly die on that hill. Long-winded stories on physical changes, coupled with before-and-after shots where the afters pretty much just looked like the result of better angles and lighting . . . Maybe I should make my own post, I thought, tongue firmly in cheek.
It was hopeless. I was expecting a post, no scratch that, I was in dire need of the post, the one that would lay everything out so clearly that I could see my own reflection in it. But everything I was reading in the various subreddits conflicted, except for the really yuppy-sounding New Age stuff: tHiNK poSITive and alIGN YouRsELF. Give me a break.
Funnily enough, whatever bits of information I found relevant to my plight, I found on r/chaosmagick, in a comment posted by u/periwinkletinkle:
For a magical working to be effective, it must be able to get past the conscious mind's in-built censor. You are no doubt familiar with the state of gnosis, achieved through techniques that overwhelm or distract the conscious mind temporarily. Ecstatic dancing, sensory deprivation, meditation may all work. And of course, most if not all intoxicants, provided you are able to use the drug and not let it use you. Upon entering gnosis, the next step is to then implant your desire, condensed into a sigil beforehand, directly into the subconscious, from which it can then manifest in reality.
"Gnosis," now where have I heard that word before? I knew of the Gnostics, an ancient sect of Christianity who believed in secret knowledge. Curiously enough, I became aware of them through reading a book entitled TheGnostic Pynchon. The premise was that a better understanding of the reclusive author's message could be attained by filtering his works via the lens of Gnosticism. I thought it made good sense, since they often centered around the search for truth amidst intense paranoia and overlapping conspiracies.
With all this in mind, I hazarded a guess that gnosis in a chaos magick context was probably about entering an altered state of consciousness, where the knowledge one sought was readily attainable . . . a quick Google search dispelled this notion, and I learnt that gnosis was more like the Buddhist no-mind, the condition by which the mind was intensely focused on a single point or thought. This was pertinent to what happened last Friday: I got drunk, and blacked out while listening to the playlist. The security guards of my mind were incapacitated, and my subconscious, suddenly unburdened with the usual issues of my mundane existence, was free to focus and digest affirmations. From this, I reasoned that my breasts, feminine features and voice were likely resultant from the affirmations that had been repeated the most throughout the playlist.
I read the rest of u/periwinkletinkle's comment:
Chaos magick is a pragmatic art, if anything. A belief, however outlandish, is valid and useful if it produces the desired result. Consider the large number of magicians who direct their evocations to Cthulhu and other elder gods.
Here then, were the engines for my transformation: single-minded focus and belief. Without the two all tools and techniques were pretty much worthless. That helped me understand the intensity and quickness with which I got the results I did. I might not have believed 100%, but clearly I believed enough to warrant rapid changes. I'd always been a bit metaphysically inclined, prone to mystic interpretation.
The question was then, what do I do next? Do I try and reverse the effects of the feminisation process? Why did I even have to ask the question? I'm a boy, who grew up into a man.
Haven't I always been?