SECRETS OF THE ARCANE SCIENCE OF TORPOR VIGILISM
(A Brief Lexical Introduction for Boys & Girls Interested in the Art of Fine Quality Reality)

deliriomancy A visionary technique for divining the logos. A kind of intoxication of seeing, often leading to illumination of a hypersensory nature. Rational delirium, akin to Dali’s paranoiac-critical method and Rimbaud’s ‘dereglement de tous les sens’. It is metabaroque and may be tantric or parapsychotic. To stare at a mandala (or maybe a cabbage) while listening to the nuevo tango of Astor Piazzolla is a deliriomantic act. But then, almost any act could be, given the right approach (with or without a sacrament). Applied synaesthesia.

lexiconjury A magical linguistic art, the practice of which enables the adept to materialize words out of thin air. The surprising results of this process — which is revealed only by direct initiation or accident — can be used for oracular, incantatory, conversational, or poetic purposes. William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and Lewis Carroll are exemplars of sophisticated lexiconjury in the Western world. Speaking-in-tongues is a laudable art brut style of lexiconjury. Terence McKenna, an inspired lexiconjuror himself, says this: ‘I don’t believe that the world is made of quarks and electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of these things. I believe the world is made of language.’

neuralchemy The art of modulating and transmuting mental states by shamanic, tantric, mechanical, or chemical means. A way of provoking or catalyzing metaconscious states.

neureality ‘What passes for reality seems to me mostly a load of old rubbish invented by not very inventive minds’ (Herman Orff in Russell Hoban’s The Medusa Frequency). Reality is in the eye of the beholder, and is subject to change without notification. Why not take control of it yourself to escape being victimized by television, the government, religious institutions, your grocer's aesthetician, and anything else that purports to have the market cornered on ‘what’s real’. Don’t leave the downloading of your perceptual software to others, however confident they may appear. Quantum physics shows us that the observer affects the observed, so take a quantum leap and start wilfully affecting the world with your imaginative powers — afterall, as André Breton noted, ‘The imaginary is what tends to become real’.

Obliterature A new yet curiously archaic mode of language-play constituting a distinct school of anti-literary scribal behaviour — the movement you’ve been waiting for. As Pere Ubu might say, ‘Merdre!’

transmorpholution The exalted revolution of form and consciousness, signalling the initial ascent towards the transmutopian era, during which a new currency of imagination and desire, sensuality and cognitive luminescence begins to develop within the individual, supplanting, fixation by fixation, the old addictions and delusions. Gradually the community becomes aware of itself as a flourishing teleneural force, at once organic, cerebral, and dynamic. Intuitive revelation will be the prime facilitator of this transition. Bear in mind these words of Christopher Dewdney: ‘The distance between noetic consciousness & metaconsciousness is revelation.’

Transmutopianism A movement arising from the conviction that the human species is capable of transforming itself in accordance with an inherent ontological vision of ecstatic intent. This metamorphosis will herald the emergence of a strange and marvellous new era of life on Earth, or thereabouts.

turbulation A deliriomantic state of turbulent revelation.

vigilant torpor An approach to overriding mental conditioning via revery, trance, and hypnagogic states. In the sanctity of distractionless repose, a condition of alert languour and mesmeric concentration can be attained — an ideal mindscape for the imagination. This is the womb of direct apprehension and spontaneous invention. It exists outside of time and space. Vigilant torpor can be phantasmic and luxuriantly ecstatic. It can also make one prone to telepathy and — by luck or virtuosity — travel outside the body. As a generalization, it can be said that its signature brainwave frequency range is theta. Claude Debussy’s ‘Prelude de l’apres midi d’un faun’ and the Legion of Green Men's 'Extended Shadows' are two splendid manifestations of vigilant torpor in musical form.

© TVI 2001