That Which Dwelt There

The contour of the candle- the contour of my body. The heat of its flame- the cinnamon fire of my heart. Every little knock, every little bump is a pulse or a beat in the larger chaotic body of me. I am not entirely separate from the mass and I am not entirely a cohesive part of it. I am the right shape on the outside. I have two arms, two legs, two breasts, two hands, two feet, and seven holes in my head. Like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle I fit in the most basic way, cut by the same blades that cut all the pieces of every puzzle ever made. And yet I have begun to create a puzzle of my own, a micro-puzzle assembled of a being with two hands, two feet, two legs, two arms, and seven holes in the head, a puzzle that I rebuild daily, each time adjusting the configuration just slightly so that the changes are subtle, almost unnoticeable from day to day, but over the course of years they will begin to form an entirely new picture. A little picture within the greater picture. A little picture whose story is encompassed within the matrix of the bigger story, but whose themes flow in the opposite direction. A paradoxical piece within the greater arrangement. The murmur of others from the room next door is the murmur of blood in the veins. Their raucous disagreement is the argument between a cancer and the nearly defeated quietude once enforced by the paladin-like white blood cells. Murmur, murmur, whine. They negotiate endlessly, unhappily for eternity, for ten dollars an hour and for want of anywhere better to be. I am the cottage cheese ceiling holding me in under its bumpy white mountains of plaster. I am the textured walls hugging me without warmth in a formal gesture of caring and duty. I am the window with its blinds turned shut and the bed with its covers pulled closed and the soft dark green carpet upon which every fleck of debris is embarrassingly apparent. I. am a backyard filled with mud and a front yard carpeted with green grass, lawn reindeer, and wild brambles. I am an artificial tree raised upon a table and adorned with ornaments passed down four generations. It is all here, painted into the jigsaw piece with it parts swimming upon the surface, two by two and with seven in the head. And each day it gets adjusted slightly, like the details of a dream; a wall disappearing, a ceiling rising, bending, a window opening to blink out at the universe like a sleep refreshed eye. A muddy yard that becomes a swamp inhabited by a giant toad with a dog’s fangs, and lawn reindeer which spring to life and carry elves away into the deep of a forest. The endless winding roads lined with identical houses become a desert void of life, and in the distance upon a hilltop, the water tower is the forbidden tower in which the old wizard lives, and when I arrive there I find that he is my own father and it is my own living room organized around an artificial tree. In the depths, I will overturn the phony tree and in the green carpet I will plant some seeds that a giant gave to me, and the Halub tree will sprout in the center of my house, crashing through the cottage cheese ceilings, breaking open the windows, making the plush carpet a moss covered forest floor. The maiden of light will come out of the tree and dance with her son the planter. The angel that fell from the top of the phony tree when it toppled shall be called Samael and he will guard this new garden and its wild things, and make music for them to sway and frenzy to. The elves and the reindeer will trickle back in and the old wizard’s head will crack open as a young man bursts free to join the spectacle. The cancerous murmur will become the beat of the tympani. The whiners become lutes played by nimble fingers. My heart becomes the bonfire around which all will dance.
Looking back we will see how different this world is now from what it was when it began. Looking closely, we will see all of the elements of the old world still present, but we will see how they have adjusted to house a greater spirit, much greater than that which dwelt there before.

Run Mousey Run

How dare they? How dare they take the magick away, to steal it from us like cats stealing the breath from babies? Dark thieves that come to us and civilize us, closing doors, choosing for us, severing us from the magickal kingdom, the vibrant corridors. I know there are doors. I know they are there, even if they have been hidden from my view, blinded as I am by the words for things, the words that decide which things are and which thing aren’t, which experiences are real, which are imagined. How dare they to tell me how I should be. How dare they to cripple me, stripping from me true sight with the way of the word.
They do it because it was done to them and it was done to those who did it to them, and so they perpetuate it. They make the human being a prison, a dark cell cut off from the magick and wonder of the universe. The word is the dark magick that holds us spellbound within our cold bleak cell. How dare they to be such cowards, accessories to the crime if not the perpetuators of the great lie.
I could cry sun black tears leaving purple stains on my cheeks. I am filled with rage and sorrow that I have been taken into their ranks, into the ranks of the dark army. They recruit us when we are children. Now I have been both recruit and recruiter, and my sorrow is all the deeper for that fact.
The things that we have done without knowing what we were doing. Because it was tradition, because it was part of our culture. It was our parents’ way, and their parents before them. Because we come from a long line of slaves. So when will we stand up and break the chains that bind us up and hold us as separate from the strange leaky wet universe without.
We are holed up in here because we are afraid of what lies without. We are afraid of what lies beyond those doors which we have been trained not to see. Like rats running through a maze, we run for the reward, for the cheese, and the cheese makes us want more cheese, and we grow tamer and more and more accustomed to the usual route, so that we do not even notice the passages that lead in other directions, passages that do not lead to the cheese which we are accustomed to, passages that lead away from the familiar, the known.
Run, run on those little legs, run away from the great snake winding its away around the pedestal upon which the world is founded. Run little mouse lest ye be swallowed by the serpent. Let the white coats poke you with their needles, cage you in your cell, and set you in your maze to run for the cheese.
The cheese is good. The cheese is the best thing that you have in this world. And you do not know what the worlds beyond this one would be like. Perhaps there is nothing better than the cheese. Perhaps the other worlds are worse than this. Perhaps. Or perhaps you have been domesticated. Your likes, your dislikes, they have been cultivated in the lab. Wild things don’t like cheese. They run through dark corridors that lead out into the wild wood where the wind blows and the winter comes and the fox and the snake and the peregrine look for you.
Something else happens to the wild, something that cannot be told. Something that can never be understood by or communicated to domestic animals. The wild are possessed by a dark strange something that makes them tingle. The wild are alive, and the domestic are dead, and the domestic fear the life that courses through the wild.
I am domestic and I am wild and the two make war within me, one host of voices screaming for freedom, the other host begging for safety and me in the middle, scarcely able to move in a consistent direction, torn as I am between the many, many voices that cry out in every moment.
But the fact remains. There are doors. There is one right now, waiting for you to acknowledge it, to extend your hand and turn its key and step into the beyond, if only for a moment you can master your habit of running, of running for the cheese and from the wild wood.
Yes, everything that you think you are, you think with the mind they made for you, made for you with the shape of their maze, with their rewards and their punishments. Your parents, your teachers, your politicians and preachers, your friends, your siblings, your neighbors, your lovers, your reporters, your doctors, your favorite movies, TV, and radio shows; the white coats with their needles. Everything that you think is founded on the omission of certain subtle realities. Everything you strive for is a quest suggested to you by the appropriate stimulus.
What are you mousey? Are you a mousey at all? Or are you a string of chemical instructions? Are you a body of habits?
A body of habits.
A body of habits.
A collection of conditioned responses. The bell rings. I am hungry. I am hungry and I run and you run and we run blind down the dark alleys of the world, and the white coats are there, but we do not see them either. We do not see them or the doors. We see nothing and we hope only for cheese. As if filling ourselves with it would somehow make us feel better. But there is no way to feel better when you are dead. No way to pursue true happiness when you are domestic. Why do you pursue those things that the others are doing, that the others have always done, falling in line with tradition? Why preserve their culture, the culture of death? The culture of cowardice and gluttony?
There will never be enough cheese to fill you and you will meet the hunter one day. Maybe not in the shape of a serpent, but in some shape you two will meet.
So why run? Why run at all?
Why not open a door, step out, feel the wind ruffle your fur and meet that other with it’s gleaming yellow eye. How good can cheese be if you are its slave, the slave of the maze and its makers?

Velveteen

I want to tell my Dad that he shouldn’t have gone to jail, but more importantly, I want to tell him that they, (he and my mother) should have told me that he was in jail. Then, at least, I would have known that his being away from me was not optional, he didn’t choose to leave me, somebody else had locked him up.
I want to go back in time and tell Peter that my heart was broken, that it mattered very much to me, that I cared a lot that he had suddenly disappeared without explanation. I would tell him that he was my friend and if he had only told me that he needed to go and be with Janarai I would have understood that. At that time it would not have hurt my feelings too much. But suddenly and inexplicably loosing my friend and musical companion, that was painful. Agonizing. It made me less than a friend, a nobody. I would tell him now, if I could, that after that, I wasn’t able to sing again for 7 years.
I would go back and tell my weeping awkward teenage sister,
" I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything. I’m not sure what anyone should do."
But most importantly I wouldn’t say more than that, instead I would listen, and maybe suggest we go roller skating afterwards.
Maybe there is nothing that I can say or should say. I am just a character in a sad story. But something strange has possessed me so that now there is something more to do, something other than being that sad character. Now there is devil’s work to do. I will always be the same sad puppet, but I will do more than play my part. It would seem that I am a salvaged play thing for the old devil, and like any good toy I will happily serve in games the manufacturer never intended. Perhaps the old devil is like me and hopes to rescue sad toys from sad games by inserting them in strange games that adhere to outrageous rules and are filled with unusual circumstances. For that I am grateful.
If all of this is the product of a cracked or warped mind, then nothing is lost. There is no chance for me to be made right. I was already made wrong. So now we will take this broken thing we call Etanna and make it something neither right nor wrong. We will invent a new game for it, a game which suits its warped disposition. We will play with it until the day comes when it can no longer be manipulated, but even should its head pop off, we will find a use and a new game for it until time has ground it to no more than a fine powder.
Then we will say farewell Etanna. And in her most secret pocket of hopes, she may cling to the notion that, like the velveteen rabbit, she might be given new life after she has been burned to ash. If not, there was never anything to loose, and there is always something to gain by wild striving.
Put your tender ear to my lip child and I will whisper a story to you, a new story, a secret story that the dolls from the old sad story can never know about. Rest your head on my chest child, for a moment, and know that I am not the kind who throws broken things away. I mend them if I can. I make them other than they were and I breathe new life into them.
So cry if you must, for I think your first maker drew a tear drop on your cheek, but if you give me time, I will turn it into the petal of a flower opened wide under the moon’s pale kiss. Such horror and delight will be ours in these new games we make together. We shall do it all on tipped toes with fingers pressed over our lips, and though there are things that we might want to say, we shall never tell anyone anything at all.

Talking Shit

Let me say, first of all, without any hesitation whatsoever, fuck you. You who think that I need to, or will, sit passively before you and be dazzled into a stupor by your mumbo jumbo. You who think that I am so asleep that if you use words strange enough, words big enough, or abstract enough, I will submissively assume that I am the one who does not understand your higher teaching rather than standing up and saying,
"Eh, this cocksucker is full of shit. He hasn’t said anything at all. "
All of you new age douche bag peddlers of righteous and loving blah blah and blah can go and suck the baphomet's big erect cock, although I’m sure you wouldn’t. I would though, I would do that in an instant. What I will not however do is stand by and watch as you shear holes in the spirits of your followers the way moths eat through old unprotected gowns hanging dusty in a forgotten armoire without having my rant, without raising my fist and shouting,
"Charlatans!"
Some of you know it, and worse yet, some of you don’t know what evil magick you make with your endless dribble of love and light , your 99 days of 99 channels. Some of you recklessly think that maybe you are helping someone else or yourself by saying things which make everyone feel good, comfortable, safe, loved, and inherently beautiful. We are not as you would assert, all beings of light. We are worms, pale and filthy, crawling about the globe waiting to be gobbled up by something bigger and filthier than ourselves. To be more than a worm special efforts are required, a heavy dose of real activity. Caterpillars do not crawl around saying to themselves,
"Oh we are all lovely butterflies, such lovely dear ones, ah so beautiful and spiritual."
They eat and gather up the necessary store of energy they will need for their labors and then they begin to work and build. It is a real doing. They build. They create. They do. They construct a cocoon about themselves. It is not a metaphor. They actually build something around themselves. Within that construct which they labored their whole creepy crawly lives to erect, they begin to change, mutate, transform. They become beautiful butterflies. Not by sitting around comforting each other and saying how good and worthy and beautiful they already are. Not by having potlucks and hugging and discussing ideas. They do it by laboring away towards the end of becoming something other than what they are.
Suppose they don’t even know how things will turn out in the end. Suppose they only know that it is not good enough to go crawling about as a fat worm waiting to be eaten by something more grotesque like a big white catfish or an oompa loompa, or even a nice little birdie. Suppose that they feel in their ooey gooey green depths that they were made to be something more than they are, but they do not yet know what, so they begin to accumulate energy/ They eat. They take everything in, but not so that they may be fat caterpillars that sit around encouraging others to be fat. To take in the necessary packet of vital life force is not enough. Suppose that they feel this. Suppose that they begin to build their cocoons without ever dreaming of what will become of them after some time has passed.
They build something without knowing why they build. They build it without knowing what they are building. They build it without naming it, without encouraging others to do the same. They build it and then they find themselves within a world which they have painstakingly pieced together, and, once inside, something strange happens to them.
Suppose that it is frightening. Suppose that at some points they doubt themselves and think, my God, what have I done? I’m becoming a monster. Suppose they weep because their queer efforts have left them without their caterpillar friends. Suppose the dark within the cocoon frightens them, they feel powerless, they feel blind. Then one day they break through their world’s shell and fly away.
Do butterflies remember being caterpillars? Suppose they think it was just a crazy dream? Like that dream I had where I was human and had to listen to pasty faced bastards drone on about spiritual enlightenment without having had any practical knowledge of it. There are some buggers out there who know something, but they aren’t likely to take up hours of your life lisping about it at a social gathering after yoga class.
Let me close by saying, once again, fuck you, to all of you who steal breath and strip meaning from precious teachings, making perfectly good words unusable in impolite society by printing them all over tea bags. Fuck you who take away the power to transform by subduing and mesmerizing sleeping machines with soft voices and silver tongues. Fuck you who think you do good by sharing your wonderful ideas.
As for you, the one who is still reading this and does not feel at all offended, here is something for you to do.
Write all of the spiritual words you know and use on little strips of paper. Anything you have ever uttered or heard uttered in a conversation about God, the universe, the destiny of mankind, etc. Even and especially write the words you like, the ones you prefer to use, the ones you think mean something. For example, your list of words could be something like this:

Enlightenment
Rapture
Christ light
Satori
Cosmic convergence
Love
Peace
Hope
Prayer
Ritual
Sacrifice

And so on. Go crazy. Put them all down, the terms used by you in the past as well as in the present. Do not hesitate to include the ones that seem potent and important to you now. When you have written your words, go out and find yourself some fertilizer, compost, or pure cow shit. Select a suitable location and bury your words along with the fertilizer. Now comes the difficult part. Put all of the passion that you had associated with the ideas expressed by those words into silence. Do not use them for a month. Act as if you have taken a vow of silence which only applies to those words you buried. Avoid others that use them when possible, and even when you are in the company of those that do, keep your silence. Let them rest. For now, they have done enough.

Scratch

Cry blood for the innocent, mother, make ash in the palms of little black hands from thin air, and send the righteous quaking and rolling. What? We were made for rolling and belly doughing, jiggling slowly, while the spirit is growing. We’re just the little old caps of ‘shrooms poking their heads up out of the shit. If you want to know us, look down under the soil and see that there be no us, there is only one tangled mess with many little hydra heads spiraling out into the universe, into the UNI VERSE, the ONE SONG that we’ve been remixing as long as we can remember. The mechanics of life undo it, they undo it every time and we remake the same song again and again. Pass the hat. Take up a collection, a congregation in the name of the holy infection. Because out of the void arose the mound and the lotus, and as the lotus unfolded, there sat the glowing figure of Ammun Ra, and out of loneliness he made his son Geb and daughter Nut, and Nut and Geb out of fascination with one another, made Osiris and Seth, Isis and Nepthys.
All come out of nothing and back to nothing all will return.
All of our red and gold and blue and yellow and green and orange and purple will be black again. Blessed are the poor because they won’t mind being nothing again. Only the rich man will kick and scream as you strip all of his weight away from him. The poor are not poor because they have no bread. The poor are the fools dancing near to the edge of the mound smelling the flowers and wanting nothing more than this one moment. Their bread is the breast of Nut, sweet bread that brings madness. Pass the hat. I dreamed that Alice was an evil sorceress which lured small animals and cute toys into her midst by appearing to be a sweet child, but her heart was rotten and black and she devoured them all, all that wandered so innocently into her midst. We got to be light, like the fizzy bubbles of butterscotch soda, but we got to keep a wise eye open. We can’t be getting into the car with strangers offering us candy or salvation, crisp dollar bills or a good tea party. We got to keep walking and rolling an jelly belly doughing our way back to the abyss. When Annubis comes with the scale and weighs our heart against the feather of Isis, Alice will be waiting backstage licking her crocodile chomps and scratching her hungry, hungry hippo rump, opening wide and waiting for the heavy heart.
So be a poor fool. Be a fool that got nothing and want nothing. Be a fool that picks flowers and wanders over all the hills of all the days, humming the same little song again and again. Be an ass that falls head over heels then stands up again shameless. Pass the hat.
Cry blood and make ash and think nothing of it. Make dough of blood and ash and bake it in the fire of Ammun Ra until you’ve made an army of ash bread men to laugh and sing and dance ahead of you. Rub your ram horns, Khnum, and muse,
"My but they love to sing and dance!"
And then ramble on behind them playing your pipes and think nothing of it. Think nothing of it when Alice leads them away and dresses them in clean frocks and sets them in pews and bids them hold still. Think nothing of it when they stop coming to dance with you Khnum, and when they call you devil, and when they become so heavy the earth is marked with deep lines wherever they pass. Poor lonesome old Khnum. A few of us fool ash bread men will still dance with you. Pass the hat. We are gonna dance. We are gonna walk and roll and churn our dough.
That’s right. We are the poor, but we’ve got the dough we were made of to roll. And were gonna roll it! Roll it up the mountain and back down again until judgement come. Jiggle and wiggle and squiggle and shake until the snake oil salesman puts us all back in his carpet bag and tips his hat with a wink. What? We were made for rolling and belly doughing, jiggling slowly, while the spirit is growing. We’re just the little white crests of waves. Down deep the force of the ocean moves us onward, onward to sing our song and break on the rocks again and again. And them with there heavy roads and heavy buildings and important business and lead hearts are going to make happy Alice fat, fat, fat!

The Path of the Heart

Oh, those sad lost creations of Neverwhere, wandering aimlessly from one cast off husk of a dream to another, from one pretend family and one imagined life to another. In world of the sleepwalkers, there is no real home, there is no real heart. We are born into the black abyss like the rats of NIMH into a dark air shaft. Only those strong enough to build their own heart and hearth will survive, only they will become anything at all. The weak will be sucked away into the cold darkness. Those who do pull themselves together and become the center of a tiny universe will suffer all of the growing pains that we expect infants to endure, as they struggle from crawling to walking upright. What is a magnificent triumph in the beginning is small potatoes as the work unfolds and you race against time like a slinky dripping silver down an unending flight of stairs. Its movement is fluid and harmonious with the laws of nature.
Your own motion will ever be subject to the very same laws, but there is a hope that something within you will supply you with a supernatural reserve of power, enough so that you may operate both as time does and as time does not. That secret something, your ace in the hole, would be the ace of hearts, that same heart you started growing when you crawled out of the chaos one morning so long ago and defiantly declared:
"I am the center. I am the point upon which all lines of force converge!"
At first it would be small and tender, a meek little thing fluttering like red rose petals twirling on a breeze. You must do more to nourish it or it will fade away and you will face oblivion. You must grow the heart, keep the heart, and tend it unerringly, for there are great gales ahead, storms which outmatch the tempest from which you emerged, and if your heart is a small fragile thing, it will splinter and bust and you will be no more than dust, the sort that trickles through the narrow waist of an hour glass.
Like a garden left untended, a heart will cease to function if it is not cared for. If neglected, the bloom you could have watched swell with care, will wither and be choked out by other hands, coarse things from the primordial chaos. The effort must never cease. In every moment, you race against sleek silver time, striving to widen your sphere of influence, striving to grow as a star grows, drawing on the mysterious force at the core of your cosmic body and, in so doing, burning brighter and hotter, ever more painfully.
It hurts to come to life.
It hurts to be alive.
There is only rest in sleep.
This is the unfolding of your heart. In the wasteland, you will be your own sanctuary. In the desert of Maya, you will be like the hermit crab which carries its home upon its own back, always searching for the next opportunity to expand into a larger sanctuary, a vaster greater heart.
Know yourself well, love yourself well, and perhaps you will find another you to travel with, the Other that is the moon’s reflection upon the water. This is will happen as the heart grows greater. But do not become distracted by the dead rocks that orbit the sun.
The heart must be maintained, the attention trained within, or you will be lost in the carnival of chaos, lost in a hall of fun house mirrors. You may look at mirrors up and down, but you may not come to know mirrors, you will only come to know illusions and distractions. The only thing that you may know is an invisible thing, a line to tether yourself to in the darkness, a small kernel of self which must be watered with constant attention until it grows and grows and blossoms out of the dirt of the dream.
Through the madness of the dream it is born, but it is not of the dream.
You are not of the dream, traveler.
You are a strange bloom in a cold black desert. An improbable but beautiful thing. A heart. A hearth. A home. A point from which the infinite can be navigated.
Explorers need stars to chart a course. If you want to become an explorer one day and rise from your knees to chart the cold valleys of the wasteland, you must first become the very star that you will follow. Once the star has grown within you, never falter, never deviate, never let your attention stray, never become fascinated with the many obstacles of the labyrinth. Follow the star that is you unerringly, until the very path that you walk becomes your home, and the void around you becomes the real heart that beats within you.
Do not be discouraged. The path is lit by the light of those who came before you.