De-Godding: How the West Stole Your Magic (and How to Take it Back)
Notes On Imagining The Future #21 by Fabrice Guerrier
Ok let me start and preface a small rant or perhaps an exposition to give you context of what I am about to do. Over the last decades I’ve been writing fiction and nonfiction and especially speaking here on the non-fiction side - I’ve written over 6 to 10 book proposals or even more! Endless sample chapters, provocations and musings, too many outlines of ideas that I believe to be urgent, compelling and should be made seen to the broader world. I have to declare here, I’ve endlessly failed to find proper agenting representation for these specific works and move towards that romantic yearning in me to go through the traditional channels of the publishing world especially it’s yielding to larger audiences where these ideas can and could flourish even more.
Hence this is one of the general veins why I founded Syllble and it’s publishing arm to get more stories out there and uplift other writers and creative voices around me through collaborative worldbuilding “The rising tide lift all boats” a mentally i harbor in me since we are all in this together especially for marginalized folks. But, I think ultimately the verdict here especially living in Los Angeles, is not having the proper financial resources and support that would give me ultimately the critical and necessary time and space to explore these ideas. Isn’t this the perpetual archetype of the artist moving forth avant-garde ideas?
I am quite tired of this endless pursuing but I really think this tiredness is emerging from trying to fit into broken systems that doesn’t acknowledge experimentation and new ideas that do not fit into a certain box and previous standards of success hence capitalist sensibilities that shape most of our meaning making today, this sinking into the hyperreality, we are lost.
This tiredness also stems from absorbing ‘the toxic collapse of our society’, it’s truly messy right now living in a ‘post-truth world’ it’s absolutely disorienting and in the west we only have capitalism to give us some sort of sense of continuity when our communities are being crushed down and our primal myths almost watered down to nonexistent.
So this is a reintroduction to “Notes on Imagining The Future” newsletter and what I plan to do with it in the ensuing months and years especially with this accelerated political and cultural decay occurring at the moment. I am going to use this space to propose new ideas, new concepts, new mystical visions, new meanings that I am personally exploring and me giving up entirely in the pressure of the great ‘hoarding of ideas’ for me reach an idealized end state of traditional publication from a huge New York publisher.
In the process, I hope to propose radical ideas that helps us deal and confront with this massing birthing process of this new emerging episteme —— — [I am calling for now “Moun Fou” which is a Haitian word meaning ‘crazy people,’ which I am reclaiming here as a ‘creative madness that is shamanic, indigenous and intuitive’ that we have to access in ourselves. Ultimately, Moun Fou here I propose is ‘the wild, intuitive visionaries who still remember the sacred madness that births new worlds’]—— to reach this new - collective planetary identity we must welcome it, visions for our highly digitally connected society, for all 8 billions of humans inhabiting this spaceship earth. Isn’t it exciting and scary. Birthing processes are painful, as mothers give birth there is pain, as babies a new, there is cries and tears.
Ultimately, voices are speaking within me, they are very loud, they are many, parts of my being are in deep resonance with each other, erupting volcanoes, new islands being born, catalyzing cataclysmic visions of hope. I am interested here in the “Psychology of Futures.” I believe deeply the future emerges from the inner life and is deeply an experience of our own psyche and the degrees of experiences of our own imagination. This is why I am a such prophet for worldbuilding and especially collaborative worldbuilding. I believe we need to be able to hold thousands or even millions of belief systems and paradigms in the ecosystem of our innerlife, even those that seek to destroy us, those paradoxical ones, opposing views that don’t fall into pretty, polished, civilized and normal narratives and logics that brings us comfort and peace. Imagination, this worldbuilding is an active moral struggle, its’ a becoming of the higher realms of divine truths we can never ever ever truly reach. But that’s the true beauty of being human, a becoming, an unfolding flower we are.
I don’t see this being discussed at all in our current society or even in futurist spaces, future focused communities..right now most people or even other futurists are stuck in imagining ‘new systems, new visions, new societies for our planet’, which I know and think is deeply and crucially important because it’s scarcely happening in main stream culture, but no absolutely, no one is truly speaking about the inner experiences and how that ties to “the psychology of futures”, the mystical, the unexplained, the birthing of new worlds inside of us, our radical agency, our radical imagination, expanding our moral map and meaning territory, expanding the meaning geography that stretches to an infinitude inside of us. As an identified “imaginatist” I am going further and further into the fringes of even the most prophetic futures focus spaces whose missions are to imagine futures, foresight and enabling our personal agencies.
Ok, i’ve ranted enough. This newsletter from now on is going to be extremely sporadic, stream of consciousness, raw and perhaps even unedited. Come on…our world is dying and something is being born. I know you feel it.
There’s no form to this, things are reaching to me temporally, expressively, prismatically and from the past and from the future there are messengers, and now they will be reaching to you here and it might not make sense, but I am trusting my intuition. I might send 20 newsletter a week, or one every six months, there won’t be a recipe, this newsletter will be my sounding board of my most intimate ideas, they might be long essays or just a paragraph or just a sentence. This will be a play field of what’s emerging inside of me. Big ideas, small ideas or just musing that could’ve been in a “polished book.”
Welcome to “Notes on Imagining The Future”, I am Fabrice Guerrier, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti now living in Los Angeles, I am writer, futurist, painter and producer. This newsletter harbors the souls and spirits of my future books, dead gods and beings from the beyond and the below, it’s a cemetery of ideas meant to compost and confront the madness we are currently facing in current society, where this battle sleeps and wakes a beautifully nightmare in the inner most corners of the imaginative forces of our pulsing heart. The cosmic is seeking you and it loves courage.
De-Godding: How the West Stole Your Magic (and How to Take it Back)
Ok, this bit is about how the Western world’s obsession with logic and rationalism and secularization has destroyed, erased, sanitized, anesthetized, degraded, lobotomized the inner reaches of where our souls exists, the connection with the gods of nature which essentially are the very fabric of us. The magic within us, within you, I think I can explain this through an anecdotal story — through this last few years a journey i had to begin was that everything I thought growing up in Haiti and materialized even more so, actually a hundred fold in the U.S to pursue - a job, a economic posture, a reasons d’etre, a singular belief system, ways to show up in the world, what to aspire in life, even what to think and not say, all of these seemingly have been an external processes from external markers. Last year, I made a full commitment to my intuition, to be intuition-first, to be intuition-led and now i am slowly living inside and out, and I am having to relearn everything. I mean relearning every single thing I was told and came to believe as I am moving into adulthood, by beginning to trust that inner voice more and that inner truth I must, this godding process of indigenization of reaching within us new myths, new souls, and cosmic gods that can interrupt this great robbing I am calling “De-Godding” that the west has done to our bodies and our minds. That spark is gone, we’ve been De-godded from the shamanic entrails and legacies of our karmic journey on this planet.
I implore you, I implore you deeply if you are reading these words, begin to trust your intuition to the utmost sense. I will not deny you the tyranny of your emotional heart, nor your logic and rationalism, not even your history, nor your many unfinished identities and dogmas, nor the shadows that sleeps painfully in you waiting, waiting desperately for a little courage from you across time and space to be integrated into you, but I will say this: your ‘intuition’, our intuition as humans is one of the oldest of intelligences. This De-Godding process and our obsession in putting things into an equation, a logic has gone for long enough, it may have built ecstatic momentous societies with tall buildings today but it’s killing our magic from within. This is my call here to move towards the unreasonable, to heed the callings of synchronicities, to seek the metaphors and archetypes, the feel the things that don’t make sense in accordance to the entrails of our decaying system, to see visions that blind us, to activate in us a little bit of madness to push through this malaise we all feel today. I implore you to move into your intuition, its the green saplings unto which in the bottom flooring of our inner life’s dirt that we can be fully begin to imagine - radically, beautiful and nuances futures for ourselves and the world. Your ‘intuitions’ is the mystical and the true mysteries of living and you will never be able to reason with it. Let its resonance and this slow rebuilding of this indigenizing language of yourself sweep you towards a new territory within yourself that is deeply uncomfortable but may chant the arrival of the healing we’ve all long awaited for.
To the Moun Fou inside all of us.
Thank you for reading and making it at the bottom of the newsletter. Shout out to my Patreon supporters!: Jan Fumosa, Trevor Lynn and Paulette Moore