Noir magick

James Ellroy is to noir fiction what Herman Melville is to fishing stories, and the word is that his life is not so different from his stories.

I've just started reading his memoir The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women and it contains this striking passage.

The overall text buttressed religious lore I believed in then and believe in today.

There's a world we can't see. It exists separately and concurrently with the real world. You enter this world by the offering of prayer and incantation. You live in this world wholly within your mind. You dispael the real world through mental discipline. You rebuff the real world through your enforced mental will. Your interior world will give you what you want and what you need to survive.

I believed it then. I believe it now. My many years in the dark have confirmed it as a primary article of faith. I was nine then. I'm 62 now. The real world has frequently intruded on my spells in the dark.

I thought some of my occultist readers might recognize the sentiment.