To Open Every Kind of Lock

I should have included this in A Burglar’s Guide to the City: a magical procedure used “to open every Kind of Lock, without a Key, and without making any noise,” whether you’re dealing with individual padlocks or entire prisons, taken from a 15th-century grimoire called The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, the Mage, translated by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers.

The book also includes spells to demolish architecture and for detecting stolen and missing objects, all operating by way of linguistic grids and ritual repetitions. A kind of supernatural Sudoku.

On a superficially related note, I spent a day several years ago going through Aleister Crowley’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin—boxes, folders, and envelopes stuffed with, among other things, hand-drawn magic squares similar to those seen here, alongside journals and typed works by Crowley and his colleagues.

Of course, the idea of magically-assisted burglary crews hitting buildings across central Texas—or, for that matter, here in Los Angeles where I live—suggests way too many plot possibilities to consider in one blog post.

Bank heists using magic-number grids, cued to the names of angels, to get past alarm keypads; infrastructure-obsessed criminals drawing black stars across maps of precious metal vaults and nearby stormwater networks; an introverted art-school grad painting medieval symbols on the backs of padlocks and walking away with millions; etc.

To this, I’ll briefly add that I studied Latin in both Middle and High School, where our teacher actually lived in his room—a story for another day—a wood-paneled chamber lined with floor-to-ceiling book shelves and marble statues everywhere, including a stained glass window overlooking our school’s back quad. But, amongst all those books, from Catullus to Ovid and beyond, was a shelf devoted to vampirism, lycanthropy, and witchcraft—including titles by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (translator of the book seen here). I used to spend hours reading through that stuff—witch trials, premature burial, people cursed to wander the Earth alone for eternity.

Perhaps needless to say, it was a liberal arts school. In fact, surreally, both Bradley Cooper, the actor, and Tyler Kepner, a baseball correspondent for the New York Times, went there, although I was ultimately kicked out before my junior year for writing an underground magazine that I published with a friend, using his mom’s photocopier.

In any case, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, the Mage includes dozens of spells, if you’re into that sort of thing, although it was really just the magical locksport material that caught my eye.

Luminous Dreamlight

I spent part of the weekend down in Orange County, looking at birds, then the better part of an hour scrolling around on Google Maps, trying to figure out where we’d been all day.

[Image: Courtesy Google Maps.]

In the process, I noticed some incredible street names. I love this development, for example, with its absurdist, greeting-card geography: you can meet someone at the corner of Luminous and Dreamlight, or rendezvous with your Romeo on the thin spit of land where Silhouette meets Balcony.

The same development has streets called Symphony, Pageantry, and Ambiance—and don’t miss “Momento” [sic]. Nearby is a street called Heather Mist.

I live on Yacht Defender; please leave my packages at the front door.

[Image: Courtesy Google Maps.]

As you can probably tell, I have nothing particularly interesting to say about this; I’m just marveling at suburban naming conventions. I’m reminded of when we moved back to L.A. a few years ago and we were looking for paint colors, finding shades like “Online,” “Software,” and “Cyberspace.” A paint called “Download.”

A beautiful new house on Firmware Update, painted entirely in Autocomplete. Spellcheck Lane, painted in a color called Ducking.

[Image: Courtesy Google Maps.]

In any case, Orange County is actually a fascinating, Ballardian landscape of freeways built for no apparent reason other than to connect one grocery store to the next as fast as possible, residential subdivisions forming interrupted crystal-tiling patterns, migratory bird species flying over car parks, and vaguely named corporate research centers on the rims of artificial reservoirs.

Anecdotally, it has always seemed to me that fans of J.G. Ballard—or ostensible fans of J.G. Ballard—are suspiciously quick in condemning the very landscapes where so many of Ballard’s best stories take place, the suburban business parks, toll motorways, and heavily-policed private infrastructures of real estate developments outside London, in the south of France, or here in Orange County, where subdivisions seem named after the very animals whose ecosystems were destroyed during construction.

But, I mean, come on—where else should a J.G. Ballard fan read Concrete Island or Super-Cannes than in a $3 million rented home on Gentle Breeze, pulling monthly paychecks from ambiguously-defined consultant-engineering gigs, studying schematic diagrams for water-treatment plants at your kitchen table, all while driving a leased luxury car?

One such engineering firm, based near the developments described here, describes its expertise as tackling “earth-related problems” on “earth-related projects.” Earth-related problems. There should be a DSM-5 entry for that.

[Image: Courtesy Google Maps.]

Anyway, all future Ballard conventions should take place in landscapes like this—enormous rented homes impossible to climate-control, overlooking electric-SUV dealerships constructed atop former egret nesting grounds—at the metaphorical intersection of Luminous and Dreamlight.

Molten Roads and Airbursts

[Image: Max Ernst, “Landscape with a view of the lake and chimeras” (1940), via Archive.]

While we’re on the subject of astronomical events leaving traces in our everyday world, here’s another story, this one from November: “an airburst over the Atacama Desert 12,000 years ago melted the ground into glass,” according to new research aimed at explaining why “twisted chunks of black and green glass” lie scattered all over Chile.

The airburst—likely an exploding comet—“probably generated strong winds that flung the glass as it formed,” giving the glass an unusual “folded look.” This “folded look” suggests that “the glass had been thrown around and rolled. It was basically kneaded like bread.”

Given that this was only 12,000 years ago, it’s not impossible that some of it was witnessed by human beings; either way, the immediate aftermath would have been astonishing to behold, a 50-mile line of molten sand, warped and roiling like the sea, forming spheres and waves, freezing and shattering, a road of glass disappearing with an eerie glow over the desert horizon.

In fact, imagine such an event occurring in, say, the Middle East around the same time, thus forming the basis for bizarre future folklore, legendarily strange Biblical scenes, tales of molten glass roads appearing in a flash from the sky.

(Max Ernst painting included here purely for illustrative effect. Circumstantially relevant: Brainglass.)

Home Star

This was all over the news back in October, but I am a sucker for stories like this, in which seeds of cosmic revelation are found hidden inside everyday materials, especially when those materials are architectural in form.

In this case, it was “the imprint of a rare solar storm” that left traces in the rings of trees cut into logs by Vikings and used to build cabins 1,000 years ago on the Atlantic coast of Canada.

The wood grain itself was an archive of solar radiance, a warped record of the heavens: “scientists using a new type of dating technique and taking a long-ago solar storm as their reference point have established that the settlement [known as L’Anse aux Meadows] was occupied in AD 1021—all by examining tree rings.”

[Image: Wood analyzed in the study described here; image by Petra Doeve, via The New York Times.]

While there is obviously more to say about the science behind this discovery—all of which you can read here—what interests me is simply the idea that astral events, cosmic storms, stellar weather, electromagnetic pulses from space, whatever you want to imagine, leave traces all around us. That in the depths of our buildings, in our walls and floors, even in the wooden dowels of mass-produced furniture, there can be evidence of immensely powerful and beautiful things, and I would like to remember to look for that again. It’s been a miserable couple of years.

[Image: Reverse of “Saint Jerome” (1494), Albrecht Dürer, courtesy National Gallery, London.]

In any case, just a few weeks before this news broke, Lapham’s Quarterly published a short piece, promoting a new episode of their podcast, with some unexpected relevance here. The following quote is a little ungainly taken out of context, but here you go: “‘Hidden round the back of Albrecht Dürer’s St. Jerome of 1494, one of his first paintings… is this enormous star,’ Philip Hoare writes in Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World. ‘You would have seen it only if you knew its secret: the galactic event going on, on the other side. Radiating orange-red rays, careering through the perpetual night. A thing of darkness created in light.’”

Hidden on the backs of famous paintings, in the beams of our attics, in the timbers of ancient homes, are galactic events, black stars, things more interesting than this world, burning, and I suppose depression is what happens when you no longer think it’s possible to find such details. When they become inaccessible to you, or when you believe the world’s supply of revelation has been permanently depleted.

(Related: Glitches in Spacetime, Frozen into the Built Environment, Astronomical imprints: forensics of the sun, and Tree Rings and Seismic Swarms.)