Bottled Spirits: Section One—Theory
What is a Bottled Spirit? Let's get into the basic anatomy and the theory behind these useful constructs—assuming you've studied the warnings and disclaimers, of course. Time to get your hands dirty!
Section One: Theory
Body and Mind
Your aim here—if you’re following along with any seriousness and not just browsing to sample the weirdness—is to learn how to implement your own esoteric workings with ease and confidence, tailored to your needs as they arise. As with any field of human knowledge, there are four levels of skill.
Well, I say “levels,” but you shouldn’t think of them as strictly hierarchical. Perhaps “arenas” is a better term.
For every discipline, the central part is the science, which is the body of knowledge concerning how things actually work. Consider this the arena where the core principles are discovered and mapped. The science isn’t much concerned with matters of feasibility—what might actually be doable by an ordinary human with modest resources on a practical time scale. A scientist will try to identify new principles and test the parameters of old ones, usually leaving it to others to attempt to put them into practice.
On the practical side, we have technique. For example, a scientist might know that iron, as a metal, should be able to be softened with heat to make it workable, but a technician would want to know how to safely produce and apply the temperatures necessary to shape any iron needed. A technician is concerned with matters of production, assembly, upkeep, and simple repairs.
Engineering is about design and function. An engineer will try to determine what a project needs in terms of components and structures to be able to perform whatever functions are desired. Engineering also involves revising designs and providing workarounds for failed systems or missing materials—whatever gets things working.
Keep in mind that a railway engineer isn’t just a driver-operator. The engineer is responsible for getting the train moving again if it breaks down hundreds of miles from assistance—including fabricating replacement parts if there are no spares and inventing solutions to any other problems that prevent travel.
The final arena is art. An artist is concerned with impacts beyond the purely practical, including how the project is thought of by those who use or interact with it. An artist will use the praxis of bottled spirits as a medium of expression to convey metatextual and emotional messages to those who experience the products of the craft. Many of the intended effects of workings are emotional or psychological, so artistic impact is not something you can afford to neglect.
When you’re eventually making and using your own designs, you’ll have your tentacles in all four arenas. To that end, you’ll need to see some examples of projects at every stage of design and production. You’ll need to understand the choice of components and the methods for producing and assembling them. You will likely have to learn how to make do with more affordable or obtainable substitutions. And you’ll need to develop your sensibilities and skills for making your version of the finished product an aesthetic whole suitable for your purposes.
The Science
Your working can be thought of as a container full of stuff, sure, and maybe that’s a good place to start. In those terms, you, too, are a container full of stuff.
You’re not a container full of food, though. Forgive the gross details here, but topologically you’re a torus. You have an orifice at either end that, if they were larger, would just be like the hole through a donut. Food in its various stages of processing, while technically inside the hole, is still technically outside your physiology for the duration. You get nutrition through layers of specialized skin that line this hole, this tube, and through that skin you’re in continuous communication with the flora and fauna that help you digest what you’ve eaten, but the insides of your intestinal tract is outside.
And yes, unless you only need your project for a day or two, they will need to be able to eat. And for the most part, they’re fed through their skin. Just like you.
I’m talking about this because each of the workings to be described later on don’t have containers as much as they have bodies that will work in ways analogically to your own. They will have organs specific to the tasks you will need them to perform, including organs for whatever senses they need. And they will also need (or grow, or attract from the environment) a mind suitable for the project. Even if they are shaped like a container, their various organs need to be part of their substance, not just put in the container.
In addition to feeding them, you will need to be able to give them tasks and instructions, and give them feedback as they learn.
The Technique
As you learn techniques for the various parts of your projects, you’ll find that certain approaches will feel more comfortable. You’ll use them over and over until they no longer require much thought or active planning.
Will you use neutral clays to make the bodies of your projects and dope them prior to shaping and baking with materials and essences to tailor them to your needs? Will you work with extracts from herbs using water or solvents of various character and concentrate them down by heating? Will you powder minerals and add them to pigments and glazes? Will you make special papers and inks and work with writings and drawings? Will you work with wood or cloth or leather or fur?
The more techniques you master, the broader the range of artifacts you’ll be able to produce. Systematic practice is the best way to sharpen your skills.
The Engineering
What’s the best approach for an artifact that will suit your needs? How long will it need to operate? How durable will it need to be for the environment where it will be put to work? As the best materials may be unavailable or unaffordable, what will you do to find good substitutes?
The root of engineering is to be able to break down your design by the function of each system and each part, staying mindful that some components may not get along well with others either by basic nature or by how they are put together. Determining which part is going to be the “problem child” that causes performance issues down the road and reinforcing that in advance is going to be a particularly useful skill.
Every project is a work in progress while it’s operating. When it’s finished, the work might not even resemble its initial form.
The Art
Your artifact will need to interact with you (or others) in order to complete construction and start performing. How you treat it and take care of it is strongly influenced by what it looks like and feels like to you. In most cases its form should be compatible with its intended functions.
Does your project need to draw attention to itself? If so, what kind? Or should it basically be camouflaged, operating beneath the notice of those who don’t know it’s there? What emotions will it inspire in you every time you see it? What can you do about its overall aspect to help tailor your response to it? These are guidelines that affect your design from start to finish.
General Anatomy
In this book, these projects are referred to as “bottled spirits,” but usually that’s somewhere between a metaphor and … just a huge stretch. It’s possible that your bottled spirit could actually be a bottle with a spirit coerced or enticed into it, but it could also be a doll or a rock or a notebook or a cookie or a song or a recurring dream or just about anything. Here are a few notes about the general anatomy of a working in the “bottled spirit” style.
It will have a body—some kind of form or container. As mentioned before, it could be something as simple as a small glass bottle.
It will have an organ of memory. Typically this is something on which initial instructions will be written, inscribed, or encoded. You may need to leave a little space for later clarifications and expansions.
It will have at least one sensory organ through which it will receive instructions and monitor whatever small part of the world is relevant to performing its duties.
It will have at least one limb to perform any actions that are part of its duties if there are duties that require overt actions. It could be organs of speech or even intangible limbs for manipulating the nonphysical world.
It will have a digestive system for processing nourishment as necessary. If you don’t need it for long, you can give it a small cache of food that it will deplete at it works.
It will have an organ of problem solving. You can put one in at the initial construction, you can attract one from free-ranging entities in your area, or it may be grown inside in a prepared medium if you’re not in a hurry.
Once it has a mind of one kind or another, it will need a name. This name is usually separate from the name any entity coerced or enticed to reside inside it. A name for the construct itself, if you will.
If you need it to operate where it can be exposed to strong energy flows like sunlight or be the focus of concentrated attention, it will need a shadow.
This is nearly a complete set of anatomy for a working in the bottled spirit style. It’s possible there may be uses for other anatomical components as well. I’ll try to cover them as they come up.
First and foremost, however, it will need a purpose.
When it’s ready to serve it will need charging, which just means giving it its final orders and terms of service beyond whatever basic principles were incorporated into the design. And when service is complete it is best to give it a formal dismissal to prevent bizarre and noxious behaviors developing as it continues to try to function after running off the end of its mandate.
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Many students and hobbyists are tempted to make a bottled spirit just for the experience of having done so, just to see what they can be like. And that’s just fine. Curiosity and the desire to learn by doing or practicing your technique are excellent traits. But a bottled spirit is a minimalist entity, even when the spirit you’ve installed inside might be old and complicated.
The operating constraints and sensory organs are usually extraordinarily limiting, and that means that without an explicit list of things to do to keep it busy it will come up with its own ways to spend its time and fuel.
These are not equipped to be complete animals or people. They usually don’t have the full suite of instincts and learned behaviors that a complicated natural entity would have on hand for doing when it has downtime, and even if it did, the actions it may try to perform to pass the time might not translate well to the capabilities of its new body.
Without an explicit purpose and a detailed list of tasks to perform to fulfill it, your construct will be a bit insane.
Self-directed behaviors of a confused construct can range from amusing and harmless to incredibly destructive. If your project develops any unexpected quirks, you should disassemble it immediately and start debugging before it gets much, much worse.
With all of that said, your bottled spirit doesn’t actually need to be designed with an active purpose in mind. If it is of the right temperament, it is perfectly fine to design your construct to simply be, to be what it is where you place it, and let it rest like the proverbial sleeping dog.
I hesitate to use the word ornamental because sometimes I feel that people don’t understand the purpose of ornament—that sometimes people see ornamentation as frivolous or optional or largely pointless. I try to remain aware at all times that ornamentation changes the context of thought and awareness wherever it is applied with skill and forethought by bringing to mind associations in the observer, conscious or unconscious, that ordinarily would not be present.
I guess what I am trying to say is that your project can be an art project, with all that that entails. But it will still need care and regular (if not frequent) tending, and you should keep that in mind.
Principles of Design: An Example
At this point things will go easier with an example.
The Purpose
During one winter holiday season I had a large number of cooking projects to coordinate and I was having trouble with pests helping themselves to pastries and other goodies I was setting aside to cool before they could be packed and wrapped. I decided to try to build a construct to guard my kitchen and the baking projects in progress.
If you start with a purpose, the rest of the design tends to follow easily.
The Design
I didn’t need a kitchen guardian to last for a long while, so I chose to work in gingerbread as a medium. The baking temperature for gingerbread never has to exceed 450° F—which is the ignition point of paper, if you remember your Ray Bradbury—so I decided I would supply initial instructions on curls of ordinary paper, “fortune cookie” style, and seal them in a walnut shell that would double as a skull. For eyes I supplied four pairs of frozen blueberries and painted the inside of the sockets prepared to receive them, in pairs all around the head, with a silver nitrate solution with which I also painted the inside of the walnut shell, to at least sympathetically transmit any imagery. And inside the walnut shell with the instructions and silver nitrate coating I also sealed a small surplus jumping spider transferred from one of my windowsills.
My main body design was solid but formed around a tobacco-wrapped prune heart and gummy worms for intestines. I didn’t need it to move much, just to look a bit grim and inspire fear, so arms and legs were molded to make the whole body stable in a crouching pose.
I was unsure about the cooking time, but I needn’t have worried. It was happy to pound on the inside of the oven door when it was time to let it out.
The Implementation
I gave it a name, but keep in mind that names are, in a way, similar to passwords. Someone with the name of your project could use that name to confuse or disable or subvert it. I’ve been known to reuse names, so I tend to keep them secret on general principles.
By way of applying a shadow, I painted the upper surface with a citrus bourbon mixture and the undersides of the body and curves of the limbs and head and such with a licorice extract.
The blueberry eyes had burst and run down the head on all four sides, but this would hardly impede its function as a fear-generating artifact. As far as vision was concerned, it really didn’t need to do much beyond detect motion.
Using photos of rodents and household insects and my roommates, I instructed it as to what I meant by “vermin” in its internal instructions. And then we sang together a quiet song of terror as a charge to let it know it was as of this point on duty.
And I promised it would have a thimbleful of bourbon every morning as payment and nourishment until its time of service was over.
After that I just left it on the counter where it would have a good view of the working surfaces and staging areas for packaging, and it worked like a champ.
The Dismissal
When the last of my seasonal goodies were all packed away, we sang a quiet song of spidery peace together to dismiss it and I broke it apart—except for the walnut “skull,” which I buried in the yard.