Feverish Creations

As I mentioned before, I've got a project coming up. One of the things I needed to do as part of my preparations for the project was create a ritual icon to be used in the work. I knew the symbol and colors I should be working with, but a lot of the design for the icon was left open for my personal creative process.

No problem! I knew what I wanted to do, the materials to use, method, style... all good!

And then the whole house got sick.

I'm two or three days into this. I'm not sure. Yesterday may have been two days long, and symptoms are having an even heavier effect on me today. I would be cutting things close, but I could just wait a few more days and make the icon after the fever has passed.

But then I asked myself if that was really the best plan. Again, I would be cutting things close. It would reduce my time for consecrating the icon. I really needed to make it today. In my feverish condition? Why not?! A feverish condition can open gates of its own. This might, in fact, be the best time to do this work!

I couldn't work the way I had planned to. Doing it this way changed the materials I was working with, the way I could handle things... I almost stopped and decided I would just need to wait until I get well. That it might even cause me to start the project late, though I would do anything I could to avoid that. And then I thought again about the reasons I had decided doing it now may actually be the best option, and I pushed ahead.

Am I happy with how things turned out? That depends on what I focus on in making that judgement. Aesthetically, as a piece of art, I think what I made is crap. It looks like an elementary school child who just got comfortable with drawing straight lines did it. The really smooth pencils I used don't blend so well on such rough paper. It ends up looking like the coloring was done quickly with cheap pencils. I hate it.

But what about as a ritual icon? Well, that's different. Beautiful work takes a lot of investment, so it tends toward power. Ugly work doesn't automatically lack power, though. There are little symbols drawn under the coloring, and I stopped at some point to count how many of them I had drawn. The number didn't have any obvious meaning for me, so I was going to draw more of them. Something told me to go run that number through the ToA gematria calculator, though.

Nyarlathotep, The Great Dark One, The Inner Truth, Black Pharaoh, Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred

Okay, so the number of symbols stays where it is.

Nyarlathotep has a role in the coming project, and I've been picking up echoes of...something. I don't know what's going on yet, but I get the impression I'm moving into spending more time than I expected with this entity. That's been happening since the beginning of last month. And I mentioned that when I was looking at the gematria for "amethyst" in relation to to the coming work, one of the phrases that came up was Ech Pi El. I mentioned my intentions to write at some point about that name and the name Abdul Alhazred. (Yes, it's a terrible name for an Arab because that's not how the names work. But there's a reason I want to look at that name and "Ech Pi El" together.)

I accept that I stopped drawing the symbols at the right number. The coloring is horrible. Again, it's because of how the texture of the paper changes things so that those pencils can't blend like they normally do. But the result is interesting in its own way. It reminds me of things from my childhood that were often printed in a child magazine, or on a cereal box. One needed a "decoding lens" to be able to see the secret message. The lens was just a translucent piece of red plastic. Laying it over the area would wash out all the reds, leaving whatever was drawn or written in blues or greens. Without the lens, though, the area would look like visual static that was multiple colors pretending to be some kind of lively purple.

Reds and purples... garnet... shining trapezohedron... static... frequencies of transmitted information...

I remember reading once that Lovecraft didn't intend for "the color out of space" to be understood as a visual color. That it was more like trying to describe an experience as a color. It makes me think of octarine in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.

So, no, as a piece of art, I am not at all happy with what was created today. But, yes, it probably is exactly what I need for the work ahead.