asemic writing and pareidolia / jim leftwich. 2022


For practitioners and theorists of asemic writing, the perceptual deviation known as pareidolia is an acquired taste and a developed skill. We train ourselves to see alphabetical shapes where there are none, and then we celebrate our inability to read them. This phenomenon could occupy an entire chapter in the Magickal Absurdities Training Manual: The Ecstasy of Asemic Reading.

Personal Perception Management (PPM) is but one of a great many Existential Self-Help (ESH) methods reinsinuated transmutably in The Training Manual. It is known colloquially among The Asemic AntiMasters as PPMESH — Personal Perception Mesh. The tradition, or parade of asemic saints, involved in transmigrating this alchemy of perception from prehistory into the present, includes William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, Aldous Huxley, Diane di Prima and Jim Morrison. Cleanse the doors of perception to Illuminate the arrangement of the senses.

Or the arrangement of the world(s) by the senses.

Let’s say I make a sequence of tangled squiggles…
I sound them aloud, slowly singing their shapes…
Through the processes of transcription, transliteration, and apophenia, I arrive at a deliberate mishearing of a segment from a song sung by Jim Morrison:

meatza pocca hero, Esau funk, awe yeh

The world is a poem. Some of us know that. Know it whether we want to or not. The world snuck up on us when we were young, and planted the cosmic poem-seed at the base of our tender brains.

Asemic writing works as a kind of pagan missionary for The Poem.

Asemic writing is a mutagen.

Pareidolia is one of its tools, one of its schools, a side effect, mutual aid, elective affinities, the ace of hearts up its sleeve, one foot on the other side of the grave still kicking at the pricks, reinsinuated and impoxximate.

We see what we want to see. No. That’s not right. Read what Thou Wilt. We see what we need to see. Some realities are more real than others. Asemic writing is useful, as a kind of anti-linguistic self-medication for the perpetually seeking psyche. Pareidolia is a method of ongoing research. It allows us to discover, investigate and explore provisional realities. The worlds of pareidolia are experientially real, and as such are causal agents — in our thinking, and in our actions as they emerge from that thinking.

As an entanglement with the processes of pareidolia, asemic writing functions for the perennially seeking psyche as a way of practicing reality.