All For One

Our writer may not now how our story ends. He may not care, dabbling thoughtlessly, letting spew forth his every imagining. What contortions we may perform at the command of his pen driven by a fevered and unconcerned mind. Or perhaps he starts a life thinking, Ah this is the hero, there will be adventure and romance! But before the tale is finished, the author suffers some change of heart and all those adventures culminate in misfortune and romance becomes tragedy because some cloud has intruded upon the writer’s spirit. So Mme Bonacieux must die, D’Artagnan must at last become one of the Cardinal’s creatures.
Thus the life of all characters is drawn out by a mysterious author. Are we ourselves that author, that author that has become so identified with one character in his masterpiece that he forgets himself? Are we yet not even the written copy, but only the many fevered dreams of our writer, ideas and personages not yet put to paper?
Now I am with my dearest friends, in a moment, I will be alone and scorned by all. Here I am with my husband, now my husband is dead and I care for our children, now it is my husband that has survived me and does his best for our offspring, now it is a child that has died and we are driven apart by the tragedy. One little skip, like a frog from one pond to another nearby, or like a finger turning a page, or a pen writing first one version, then another.
Am I a story like the one my children watch in the nearby room, etched into a silver disc by some means beyond my comprehension, accessed by a laser scanning it like a beam of attention? Today it is this story. Tomorrow it is another. Like Audrey Hepburn, I can be a nun, or a sweet little chef, or a princess, or a white trash gold digger, depending on which story the laser accesses today. These are stories that have never happened, and never will happen, because they are the wild and incoherent dreams of an unknowable creature locked in a comma.
We say here, in this story that I inhabit, that man was made in God’s image. This may be, it may be that we are dreamed thus because the one who dreams us is trying desperately to remember herself, running through the dark mazes of an intoxicated mind, opening doorways and discovering chambers that range through the spectrums of light, each one presenting some clue, some key to the great puzzle. I am this and I am that. What am I?
Imagine the horror contained in the Being of this God. Imagine the delight. Imagine the wretchedness of being trapped not only in one unconscious and unsuspected dream but in many simultaneously. Imagine also becoming lucid, not in one dream only, but in many different strange scenarios all at once. Imagine finding that key in one, knowing it is a key, knowing you are a dream, and unlocking a doorway into the next related dream, another fantasy that is the difference between blue and violet.
Conceive of it, opening these chambers, holding these chambers at once like a juggler keeping so many balls suspended in the air, knitting together a vast network in which you can recall that you slumber somewhere. Some sweet dreams are stubborn and refuse to yield to that notion. Who wants to leave a pleasant dream behind or discover that it is not a final paradise? Some nightmares are equally unyielding, hugging us tight with their clammy grip of fear and confusion, drawing the spirit of the dreamer to them like shards of metallic dust to a lodestone.
The spirit would need its own strength to pull itself free. This thing might be accomplished with effort. Who knows how difficult it is to move one’s spirit, a usually passive being? Who has tried? Is it possible? Ha! What isn’t possible with dreams?
Once I could not fly, then I could, but only by flapping my arms, then I could lift off with just the will to do it. Why not? But all of these trifles could only be accomplished when I was certain that I dreamed.
Here, now, where I sit, it seems that I cannot fly. I can barely walk. I seldom leave this room. I have no mastery of this dream, only the occasional suspicion that it is a trap into which I have fallen. It is a terrain that I have been unable to connect to the network being weaved because of that fateful condition of being unable to maintain that I am an agent of a dream.
But what would I do to be more convinced? Go through other people’s houses uninvited? Kill someone? Make love to an abhorrent stranger? Attempt flight? It must be something shocking.
And even with the help of some little shock, even on the verge of seeing clearly that I am a dream, I recoil. Is this nightmare, this one lone bearable fantasy worse than running the gauntlet? What could be worse than the promise of Jacob’s ladder?
We begin as a brave D’Artagnan, adventurous and honorable, and become a somber Athos, wizened and drenched in grief, brave not because there is so much to gain, but because there is nothing left to loose.
There are those characters that raise their fists to the sky and cry out that the author is cruel. And then there are those that understand that the characters suffer because the author is suffering, and of these there are those that are unaffected by this revelation, those that are swallowed by a sense of helplessness and apathy, and also those that respond with pluck and a measure of irrational chivalry; "If my God needs rescuing, then however small I may be, I shall be his redeemer!"
After all, where this third class is concerned, if they fail, what have they lost? Absorption in their own role in a comedy or a tragedy that may as well have been decided by a roll of the dice? It is something to loose- the conviction that you are real, that you are important, that all stories have been leading up to your singularly fascinating tale.
On the other hand what is there to be gained? Ah! There is no real method for discerning what the outcome of such a success would be.
But one who is chivalrous and honorable is not so because they hope for a reward for themselves, if they did, they would then not in fact be chivalrous or honorable but something else all together. It would be only a very special agent within a dream that would be moved to search for a key and a door and hope to liberate a mysterious dreamer from the lethargy of a deep and confused sleep. The only motive that could see one such creature through would be a sincere desire to be of service to that other mysterious benefactor and sometimes torturer.
It is an occupation for one willing to embark on a quest for the sake of the journey itself, whatever the outcome. Our writer may not know how our story ends. He may not care. Whether we are beautifully written, or feverishly dreamed, what more can we ask for from one that is a prisoner of their own fabrications? And if that troubled dreamer requires our service to be liberated and we decline the responsibility, what cowards we have let ourselves become? What an apparition of diminished spirit I would be, having heard that the greatest princess I can conceive of is imprisoned in slumber and having declined undertaking the quest to free her because it would certainly mean my undoing?
The book is not called D’Artagnan or Athos and certainly not Monsieur Bonacieux. It is given the name The Three Musketeers. All for one, and one for all. A promise of sacrifice that flows from great to small and from small to great equally.
It is the mouse after all, who must save the lion.

Here And There

Can I tell you how I came to be here, at the this time and this place, this point of convergence between dimensions that I imagine or experience or dream, this moment that I may not understand at all? If I tell you, swear to me by every hole in this cheese you hold so dear that you will accept every word I say as true and not press me on matters which seem questionable, for I fear that it will break my delicate grip with this reality if you prod it unnecessarily. These things are like fine webs made of spun sugar mounted one upon one another to form pink cloudy softness, webs that once touched with sweaty hands or a curious tongue merely melt into sticky sweetness, no more constant or fixed than human promises. I will tell you because you seem sincere and because you are here, an imaginary ear for my imaginary voice, so take an imaginary seat there by my imaginary hearth and I will tell you the story of the black man and the little bird.
First I will tell you about the black man. It does not matter which of these things I tell you about first as the events surrounding these two nouns; man and bird, occurred simultaneously, if they occurred at all. That is to say that sequence has everything to do with language in that the word is like a narrow doorway through which only one topic may pass at a time, like little drops of dewy spittle from my lip to your ear, a tiny packet of data about things which have been occurring in a world too vast to squeeze into dew drops or words or feathers that have been made into writing quills instead of the wings of flying birds. One comes before the other only because that is all that the doorway permits, all that that ungracious lord, THE WORD will allow, one at a time to visit the well of communion between souls.
So first the black man. Let me tell you this of him; he who is the cohort of countless witches condemned to burn as well as those that fly round secret fires in a whirlwind of ecstasy before they are discovered by the mob, he is not what you expect. He, as I have known him anyway, is always mild mannered, self composed and unassuming. He that knows so much will ask you what he well knows as though he never knew it and not to play a game with you, but just that the two of you shall partake of knowledge together in the renewed asking of a question. His hair flecked with grey, his posture stooped, he keeps trees that bear fruit, unusual trees and he will peel back the leathery skins of those fruits to reveal the strange delights held within and offer it to you as water to a parched man. He would withhold nothing, least of all that which grows from seed to meat. Should you wish to partake, he shares without reserve. What is his is yours while you are with him and again later if you choose. He is also a fisherman who draws great shy beast from the deep with lures unlike any used by ordinary men. He will draw up the arcatuthus for you and then you will see your greed for the catch dissolve into sympathy for the beast and you will see its children born and hope that it survives captivity and may return to the deep, but if not, then there are still the offspring in whom to invest this new found tenderness. He is a stranger, a lover, a father all in one, your oldest friend, a friend that you have forgotten. Never did he forget you. Never did he hold it against you that you would forget or swear that you are unacquainted with him. He has all the tenderness of an old grandfather, the wisdom of a priest of one of those true orders of mystic stewardship. That is the black man.
And then there is the bird. I met the bird in a parking lot looking for a crumb to nab. I was putting groceries into the back of the truck and I heard him say that he was hungry, so I broke off some bread and tossed it gently his way as I had been taught by the black man. The bird turned his head slightly to look me in the eye and thanked me very much for taking notice of him. I told him that it was my pleasure and I hoped he would enjoy the fare and as he went heartily to it I got into the truck and drove away. How did he look? Well he was small and sort of grayish brown, a sort of sparrow maybe. It is his little voice which was clearest to me both then and now. I heard his voice again this morning while I walked from school. He was singing gaily. You will tell me that sparrows don’t sing, but I must tell you that by today he was no longer a sparrow. His voice was very clear and bright and I listened to it as I walked, touched by its merriment. Then I noticed that he sang the song that cars sing when they are rubbed the wrong way by someone who cannot disarm the alarm. It was the song of that alarm which goes off in low class neighborhoods and runs through a series of different obnoxious tones and rhythms so that the offending car rubber will be dismayed by the shrill and clownish noises and depart in all due haste. Now my friend the bird repeated this same song in his lovely trill. I stopped beneath the tree laden with pink blossoms and listened to his heart bursting with joy through his rendering of this popular new song. The outward form mattered not at all. The lyric to the song, the tones, the rhythms, all were quite unimportant. What mattered so was the heart. That is what he administered liberally to that tired old alarm call. He made it a masterpiece.
“You should try it.” The black man said tasting a succulent gem from one of his trees. “That’s what we do. We take what they made and we remake it, we remake it with ourselves in it. It doesn’t matter at all what they meant for it to be in the first place. We make it alive.” He said this with a little flittering hand gesture that reminded me of the bird. His beard was short and sparse then, composed of short curled salt and pepper bristles. His skin looked like milk chocolate, soft and weathered with age. I say, sing on little bird, sing on and I will listen to you and to the black man too.
What about you friend? Are you listening to me now, telling you this story with gaps wide enough for us both to fall through? If you haven’t heard, then no matter and never mind, so long as you spare me your criticisms. I tell it to you the best way I can with this clumsy stuff, trying to wedge a leviathan through a hole made for a mouse. I could have just told you the story of Iron Hans, painting the forest in greens so deep they were almost black like the rotted underside of forgotten chard. I could have told you any story at all, an old, old story, one that you have heard a dozen times before and done as much if not more that I did here. It is not what I told you really that will profit you at all, but what I poured into every senseless syllable. It comes from the fount at the heart swelling over after the rains of winter, ready to feed all the spring grasses and from them, little lambs, and from them, hungry lions.
That is the story of how I came to be here, how we crossed here like roads running unknown courses, my imaginary voice and your imaginary ear, joined for a moment and now soon to part, for now I take my leave of you. I will never mind if you forget me. I will never mind if you claim that we never met.

Process

They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal, or by way of letter or wires that burn when they touch each other and then they can transform themselves into things that they weren’t to begin with, but still they come toward me, they are unifying principles, pure mathematical equations which live and breathe and fuck and come back for more and they do it all in many different strange contexts, in chambers of nightmare, and chambers of light, and chambers of fullness and chambers of emptiness that stretch out beyond my sight.
They come to me and I take them in, I eat them and then I burn myself into them, we burn ourselves together and then we touch them some more, delicately letting their essence remain while stripping it of everything that came with it, and so we can see that feedback is a principle, not just a principle but the principle, the solid bed rock of our work, that has no name and claims no understanding, an activity without meaning in a world of pure and clear purpose, it is the feedback then that figures in our muddled science of ghostly cybernetics, we are pilots through a land of garbage, birds of carrion in a wasteland of dead cars. We are natural and we are industrial, they come and they are me, and I put myself into them and turn them into something other, they are the little bits of protein that we make into ourselves through elusive processes formed of other more basic processes, such as feedback, such as melting, such as fusion, such as analysis, such as dice rolling on a sunny day, such as confluence of events, such as random neurons firing when they shouldn’t and sprinkling their lightning semen all over the naked flesh of my inner cerebellum, procreating when they should be resting, fucking when they should be at peace. Leave them alone, that is what they do, and they will do it when they have to, not when you tell them to, and they won’t do what you say, what you say is just more food, and it filters through their shape and takes it into itself, much like them, for it is them, and what you say comes to me and I take it in, and sometimes it hurts me and sometimes it pleases me and sometimes I just bite into it and send it sliding down my esophagus like so much more food, eager to take on a new form, so feed me, beautiful, feed me what you have. If you want to set conditions, I will eat them. If you want to say what it was that you saw so many years ago, I will eat that as well. Feed me. My mouth is open and I am still hungry. I am as ravenous as I have ever been. My limbs shiver with the deep need to chew on your hot gifts.
At this time, and it is not guaranteed that this will last for more than a moment, and it is very likely that by the time you read this, this will no longer be true, and such is the nature of all messages, by the time they arrive they are already old news, and I can simply tell you that everything changes, and everything must change for it to be what I am right now, and what I am is a process, a conceptual scheme, an abstraction of the second level, a structure with holes and chambers, tubes and elevators, sliders and knobs, amplifiers and microphones, cameras and projectors, ovens and little plastic containers to store cold food. What I am right now cannot be easily handled and it can’t be clearly implemented, I am a few steps beyond my own understanding and so, any attempt at telling you what is happening is bound to be confusing or disruptive or simply a lie, and once I come to understand that, then I know that I must lie freely, for only in the free lies will I find the truth, and, having established this, I will tell you then that I am composed of:
A) An action, like running my hand over a woman’s back or slicing across a piece of meat with a razor sharp knife or licking at my lips or swinging from a tree or leaning back and exhaling loudly as my body adjusts to the comfort it’s been seeking after a long night of dancing in circles, and it is likely that it is the only dance possible, and if we see anything other than circles we are simply getting lost in the details, missing the vast circle of life for its individual iterations, circles upon circles, all dancing, and then we can say that all of these are circles, all actions step out and come back, in one way or another, the sliding of the hand over the woman’s back must eventually move up, back up to where it once rested on her cheek, and the razor sharp knife must eventually come back to its resting place in the drawers of a kitchen, here or elsewhere, and my tongue, as much as I enjoy its slimy surface running over my dry lips, it must eventually pull back into my mouth and I must let go of the branch and, as much as I enjoy laying here on this soft green carpet, in the darkness of a place so far away from anything I find familiar, still I must get up eventually, we have to go home, and home is where things start, and home is where they end, and so it is all indeed a circle, and so an action, a circle, and we see this circle as a sequence of constituting sub-actions, ever smaller circles, smaller and more refined, so tiny that they will escape even the most subtle description, for the woman’s back has as many hills and valleys as the most complex mountain range, and they are both monumental and they both must come to an end, for they are not home yet, they are in the middle of their vast circle, and as much as I enjoy being here, running my hand down this woman’s back, soon she will be gone, or I will be gone, or we both will go, and soon there will be nothing but dust where there was a vast smooth back and my hand itself will be a dank smelly memory of life turning into life, and that is indeed what I am then, a process through which death becomes life and then becomes death again. The states of the world through which we move in this circular dance of desire and laughter and tears are referred to as stages of the process, and so look around, and you will see all the stages before you, the stage of open mouthed admiration, the stage of intense dedication, when the eyes barely move and the hands vibrate with energy that had been previously hidden, then the moment of flowering, when things begin to come together and you see it all before you, yes, as if it had always been there, as if it could not be any other way, and then the moment of hardship, when it could definitely be some other way, indeed you wish that it was, and it seems that we are lost at sea and the ocean is just a vast land of grayness and sadness and clouds and rain and storms and hungry predators that long to tear you apart, and if you hold on long enough, if you resist the urge to give in to the pull of the darkness, then things finally do come together again, and your mouth opens wide, in a great surrender, and you say to yourself "I have finished… and now I will rest…" and that is when the green carpet feels so good against your back and you can actually hear your vertebrae crackling because you have danced so much and the work has taken all out of you and the air is pulsing with colors and you are so tired that you would love the silence, but there are still residues of what just happened within you, so you then talk, and what you say only makes sense in the moment, right in the moment and nowhere else, and if someone happens to be with you in that moment, then they may or may not understand you, because they may be with you and somewhere else, or they may be truly with you, it is very hard to tell, but you talk anyway, just in case, and what you say is like a shower of strange rainbows cloaked in the metallic shapes of language, and it sprays over the ceiling and the walls, but it leaves no residue, and finally you truly must rest and everything goes black and there is nothing, and the resting can go on for a long time, and then you must eat and drink and eat some more, that’s when they start coming at you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires and soon it is time to start all over again, as usual. This is all normal. Everything that you have just experienced is eminently normal, and it is painfully unique, and in that duality is the answer that you seek, but it is not an answer that I can tell you, not unless we dance together, and if we did dance together, then there would be nothing to tell. I am a process, and as a process, I am sequence of these stages and more, it is impossible to determine them all, I only have so many words and just a limited amount of food to go on. It is enough that you understand the little I can say and go on without me. It is an action which is a circle which is separated in stages which all lead you back home in the end.
What we speak of here may be confused with a kite, or the wind that moves the kite, or the little girl that holds the string of the kite, or the mother that stands beside her, contemplating the expanse of the sky and the ocean and the world itself and if we go any further then we will talk of concepts, and this is not what I wish to do, because concepts are only there in your imagination, in mine, in ours, and they lack the infinite mountain ranges of the woman’s back and they come crashing down to earth before you have even finished calling their name, demons that can’t hold themselves together, and as they fall they pull you down with them, their red skin pushes against your own and pulls you down, like a kite that is too heavy and then it falls, and the girl is not happy and the mother is not happy and the world is not happy, and so you will say "these are concepts" and I will have to admit that they are but try to say it softly, try to refrain from holding tightly onto them or we may both fall together, and then our tears will mingle and I might become what you are and you may become what I am, and maybe that would be for the best, because one day you leave your house thinking you’re going to paint a house and you end up filming a video in a strange little town full of witches and women that look away when you look at them and you talk of distant lands and you meet a beautiful brown woman in a room of shadows, and that is just what happens, things like these just happen, and for you, maybe, this is fine, because you are brave and strong and you fear nothing, but for others it might not be so good, and maybe then I will end up jumping over cliffs and hanging from vines over dark rain water, gasping for my life, and you will end up sitting in front of a computer typing away words that you can’t understand, all because we couldn’t hold our tears and we had to cry all over each other. In the end, this is what we must do, cry and laugh and fuck, I have to go deep inside you and feel the inner walls of your presence with the fleshy extension of mine and you have to open to me and suck in what I have to give you, take it in and cook it, and feed it and shape it and kiss it and lick it, and then, when you have put yourself into it, when it is ready and fully formed, then give it back to me through the doorway that I hold open for just such an occasion, open for you, only for you, you that are endless and everywhere, you that listen, you that never blink. This is in fact what we have to do, as scary and as slimy as it is, as drenched in sweat and smells and tiny errors, we have no other recourse, but let’s wait for the right moment, let’s wait until I can give you what I am and you can take it and put yourself into it, let’s wait for an ephemeral moment such as this, let’s not act in haste for the exchange has to be complete and if we halt in the wrong moment, we will have changed the whole process, and maybe home will no longer lie in the middle of a dark garden and instead it will be thousands of miles away, among people who speak strange languages and cover their skins with symbols they can barely understand, and when that happens, as it surely must, remember that you are still a process, such as I am, but only for this one moment, and when you remember, start all over again, and let them come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and put yourself into them, put your past and your future, your fantasies and your fears, your truths and your lies, and let it all slide right in there and make up something new, something new such as never has happened, and then let it go out, let it fly like a kite that is so perfect and so light that it will never come back down to earth and cut the cord and then keep on wandering, for the work will never end, and you are the work, and the process never ends, for you are the process, and the actions that you take go in circles and circles go on forever. These then that we talk of are the stages of the process and they may be seen as abstractions limited in space but that is only an illusion, an illusion caused by the process itself, don’t let it fool you, the head is the tail, the tail is the only head, and the body is only your life, and you will keep on going for as long as the body pulses, and the body will never end because it never started. Leave fear behind, leave all your suspicions at the door, and, for this one moment, this single moment that will soon come to an end, become a process with me and let me feed you, don’t believe that there is something in this food, something solid, something to hold onto, these are only stages, these are only mathematical abstractions, and the only thing real is what you make of it, right now, this very moment when your eyes flash across this strange page of blinking lights.
Yes, I must admit this to you, even though I am concerned for what you will do with this knowledge, for what your complex sequence of tubes will grasp and how it will divide it and how it will cut it into tiny pieces and what will it build with its component parts, I am concerned but I shouldn’t be, I am concerned but it is only my old demon trying to pull me down to the dusty ground covered in pebbles, yes, that one, the one next to the ocean where one day you were almost about to fly away with the little blue balloons and I had to hold you down, grabbing tightly onto your ankles, and if you remember it you will know that that day we didn’t want you to fly away, we didn’t want you to disappear among the clouds, but this was only temporary, for sooner or later you would have to go, sooner or later the clouds would be your home, and the balloons would be your only anchor, and that is what we must talk about now, even if the weighted elements of my structure hesitate at the doorway of this revelation. Yes, the process has definite initial and final stages. You will appear to begin, you will appear to move through a thousand different chambers, you will appear to be happy, you will appear to be sad, you will appear to be covered in sweat as you fuck through an afternoon of debauchery, you will appear to congeal into a ball of pain when the world comes down upon you like a big castle full of bricks and people screaming at you that you should stop, that this has been enough, that it is time to grow up, and it will do no good to tell them that you have indeed grown up, that you have grown into a different process and that is all that you could have asked for, that is all anyone could have asked from you, and they won’t ever be happy with you and so you will have to leave them behind, and your body will start failing, and the things you could once do will become progressively harder until they become impossible, and when they become impossible it will be time to just lie down on a big bed listening to the radio and old cassette tapes of your grandkids speaking gibberish and then you will remember the old days, the times that now seem so perfect through the filmy gauze of memory, and maybe you will smile and maybe you will cry and eventually you won’t be capable of either, and the last of your circular actions will seem like it lasts forever and you will say to yourself, why? Oh why? Why didn’t I live it all like this? All moments were so precious and they spilled through me like grains of sand when I rolled on the wet beach that one day, and that day was truly beautiful because it was ending and the sunset was just perfect, covered as it was in orange and purple and blue, and the wind was not too warm and not too cold, and your skin was so wet, covered in the salty water, and your eyes flashed like the lightning of a storm made of loving raindrops, and maybe if I had done that more often, or maybe if I had let them come to me, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, maybe if I had placed myself into them, maybe then I would not be here, or even if I was here, it would not be so bad, it would just be another eternal moment, no different from the rest, no different from any other moment that has ever been, that ever will be, because now, lying here in this strange bed, now I know that it is so, and it always was, and now I must go and leave it all behind, and I feel that I haven’t fulfilled my purpose, my work with my hands, my work with my chest, my work with my eyes, my work with my nails, my work with my hair, my work with my long fingers which I can’t even move now, and then it was all in vain, so much effort and all in the wrong direction, and such things you will say to yourself and they will echo within you like huge brass bells in an ancient cathedral and they will fill you tired body with dread and they will drive it all deeper into you, the truth or what seems to be dressed like it, specially when you overhear your son crying from the next room and you are not strong enough to say anything to him, and he will be so sad and you won’t be there to console him, at least not you as you have come to know you, but who was that in the first place, and did you really know it? Who were you back when you were you? And if you are not that any longer, then are you already gone?
Consider it all then an abstraction, an abstraction that occurs at the beginning and at the end, for now you are finally open, and now you can see, and now they come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and now you finally take them in completely, and now you can finally put yourself in them, this is your time, time has not ended, time is barely starting, and, let me tell you and let me say that I know it is confusing but there is no way around it, you are now at the initial stage and this initial stage is called the input, and as much as you may now fly through dark thoughts of nightmare, here is where you will feed, take it all in, open yourself wide and allow yourself to be fucked as deeply and as savagely as you always wanted, it will happen whether you want it or not, might as well enjoy it, let the pain and the pleasure become as one, and let that one experience shake you to the core of what you are no longer, and let the semen that is not you come into you, and form yourself in its image, for it is the one that is as much as you are, and together you will form the new process that is you, the new you that is the process, and as you find yourself in a world of falling stars and vibrant supernovas, don’t let fear overtake you, you are merely what you always were, the only difference is that now you see it clearly, and as you slide into a permanent shape, know that this initial stage is an abstraction from the final stage called output, you in your life, as a woman of great stature in a little country forgotten by God and the Lords of the Universe, as a little brown girl full of dreams and of great disappointments, as a boy who dreams of Egyptian tombs and heroes in white robes, you are the final stage of the process, you are the output of that fearsome moment, and if you hear me now, even for just this one moment, because you must understand, clearly and beyond doubt, this is truly the only moment that we have, and if you hear me now, you will then see, like me, for a fleeting moment, and nothing more, that this is the process, you are the process, we are the process, and it has always been so.
We can then speak of the process as transforming the input into the output and as such it is true, without forgetting that the inputs are outputs themselves, food that will come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and whatever you make of them, whatever you take in and how you heat it and shape it and pull it apart, it will be a process too, and it will go on to form what you were not, and it will do what you never imagined, it will become violence in that shape of red and black and it will be gentle love in greens and yellows and it will be savage desire in the invisible movements of blue and violet and it will grow beyond the reach of your vision, so as to be too big to hold, too small to envision, and you can never predict it, you can never know where it will go, and you can never control it, and you wouldn’t want to if you could, not really, although you might be fooled into thinking that you would, but this is something that will disappear along with the mountain ranges of your flesh. I am then the process that writes these words for you, and only for you, and you are then the process that reads them, and maybe thinks of the future and maybe thinks of the past, and maybe, just for a moment, it simply takes them in and accepts them as the semen that I give you to build your own output. Please know that I don’t know what you hear, that when you say body, I see a spaceship and when I say the doors, you think I am talking of rectangular wooden structures. So leave all thoughts of understanding behind and simply take me in. I come to you down the street, down the tubes, down the wires. I am with you now as much as I have ever been with you. There can be no obstacle, no condition, no request. I am with you always and I have never left. For I am the process that is the food of the process, and the process never rests.
Some notes before I finish and go back to lie down on the green carpet, which feels so good against my back after a night of wild dancing and demonic invocations, specially here in the darkness of this quiet room that seemed at times to be on fire, that seemed at times to be full of music that emerged from my fingers like ribbons of colored light, there are still some things I must tell you before we end, they are of no utmost importance, but then again what is? We will place the importance on the things we encounter, it is the food that we choose to eat, and as it runs over our mouths, it will be warm and delicious and it will be that most important thing of all, later to be forgotten, later to be remembered, later to be something else altogether and the importance will be as transitory as the thing we attached it to and you will then decide what is important, and when you do, you will give your heart to it, and I will press my heart against yours and I will kiss you and I will say "yes, this is it. Do it."
Here I give you a few morsels which may help digest what has come before. There are processes which have a definite initial stage, a moment of quiet when we all sit in a circle and decide what to do, when we all say what it is that we are trying to achieve and we set out to do so, in that moment maybe you lean against a white chair, maybe I walk around in a black shirt and black pants, or maybe you are naked and you sit on my lap, and my penis throbs inside of you, and as our presences become one, then we know that it has started, yes it has started, a new eternal circular action has come into being and it mustn’t stop, and it can’t, for it is now eternal, and it always was as much as it now is.
As such, I must tell you, a process may be infinite. What came before was always there, what came after was bound to happen, and the hills of her back will be different and the carpet may no longer be green and the sky may not be as blue as it once was, and there may be no kites flying, and the cool room of darkness where we danced for an age of unreason may now be an office of women in business suits looking desperately up at a clock, but the process will keep on going, because the beginning was an illusion caused by the process itself, and any end that you imagine is the same, just lights hitting mirrors and bouncing back to become more lights, nothing more, nothing less. Let the infinite wheels turn and don’t hold on too tightly, you’re not going anywhere, you have been here for so long that you have forgotten where you are, the birth is a death, the death is a birth, the moment of flashing lights is another opening, another flash of truth in the ocean of the Real. The illusions are as real as the rooms that stand behind them, and the things that you imagine back there, the tall black statues and the thick old books, and the secret prayers that will finally change the nature of existence, they all wait back there, and in them you will find the flower, the music, the sky and the bone, you will find me waiting, and, when I finally open my eyes to look at you, after waiting for a thousand ages of oblivion, then, with shimmering pupils and a trembling voice, I will say to you, "They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…" And we will start all over. As we always have. As we always will.
Maybe you will say that this is nonsense, that there you sit and I am nowhere, that I am just a bunch of letters on a screen of flashing lights, and you will be right, absolutely right beyond question, and I will have nothing to answer, nothing to respond, for I will not be there, not as you want me to be, not as I wish that I could be, but I am here with you, in this moment, and if you can only come to me, I will give you everything, I will hold nothing back, I will fly into you like a bird of a million colors, sparkling with the metal in my talons, flowing with the rainbows in my wings, and you will then see that I am nothing, I was always nothing, and everything that you saw in me was you yourself, you are the bird, you are the screen, you are the story. And you will say to me that you can touch your body, you can touch the wall, you can touch the floor, you can touch the carpet, and this is real, above all else, what my hands can reach out and hold is what truly exists, and since it exists then it is condemned to being a thing, and in being a thing it will start and it will end, and such we all are, you that write these things for no reason, you that read them for the same, you that will never come near me, you that once were close and now are gone.
But on a smaller time scale, so small maybe that you will have to squint so tightly, tighter still, in order to reach into the depths of its smallness, let’s do it together now, what I am and what I am not, what you once were and what you soon will be, down there in the miniscule reaches of our farthest perception, we observe constancy with respect to some cognitive actions, we observe that indeed some things stay the same, for as much as we talk of Eternity and the endless recurrence of our Being, some things manage to remain, earth abides, and with it the sky and the walls and the hands and the eyes, and this simple observation gives us the reason to speak of it as an object, a recurring perception of solid nature, a thing, stuff, food, stone, rock, dust, fever, blame, thought, vision, dream. On a larger time scale, this is a process, these are all processes, and, from far up in the limits of the sky, in the realms beyond the atmosphere, beyond our memories, beyond our thoughts, we looked down for a moment, for we have only a moment, I can never say it too many times, and in this one moment we look down and we say that the object is changing, it is not the same as it was, it is not the same as it will be. And if this thing, this stuff, this food, this stone, this rock, this dust, this fever, this blame, this thought, this vision, this dream… if it is changing then it is a process, and if this is a process then you know that you can’t be otherwise, and if I am a process, and we are together, then we are a process together, and a process can never end. How long have we traveled together, how long have you written strange things to be read on a screen of blinking lights? How long have I sat down to read the strange products of your fevered mind? How long will we be apart? How long will we be together?
The process that is me enters the process that is you and allows you to enter in return and we become something that is as we were, a process, nothing less, nothing more, and we stare out into nothingness and wait for our food to come, and as our multiple input channels open, I point out there, to the vast beyond that stretches in all directions, and I tell you:
"They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…"
Stay with me as it happens, for there is much for us to do. We have the work of a lifetime before us. And we only have a moment.

Campside

Alright now. It’s time for lunch; come and toast your marshmallows over the roasting pit that is my groin. Look here, just like a pit dug for a fire in the wilderness, here lies my own personal camp site blackened with the soot and charcoal so that it looks like a dank and dripping cavern that goes on and on. There is a physical limit to its depth. Like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, if your travel through this tunnel you will hit a wall where you will have to leave your body behind, but by then you’ll be flying so fast you won’t need that body any more, glistening as it does with beads of sweat like the sequins on an absinthe intoxicated flappers dress. By then, you’ll be flying with me in perfect seamless unity powered by the engine of grinding hips and in the faint distance you can hear the heavy breathing and moaning, but by now the blackest abyss has opened up in front of you and you spiral into it with me. We are a nameless formless thing swallowing itself endlessly as it deepens.
This is how we feed ourselves, when no one is looking, we come out like black eyed deer to drink from pools that reach down through the center of the earth and back out again into the farthest reaches of that star flecked darkness. Slurp! We suck in the dreams of our ancestors, the dreams of the first flecks of electrically charged specks of flint dust that came together in the nothing for a camp side sing along. Mamma electron in her shredded fishnets and leather mini skirt dances around Papa proton reclining in the cool shadows licked by flame, the rolls of his flabby stomach creeping out from under his greasy white tee shirt to hang over the black leather belt studded with silver, his beard trailing down over that unmovable gut. And then after she has wiggled her ass for him a bit she spots another camp fire not too far off and splits and he’s left muttering and weeping,
"Goddamn cunt! Got no fucking loyalty!" And another little dancer in the dark hears him sniffling and sees his sad little fire and aching with tingling desire brings some more kindling, rubs her tits in his face and says,
"Hey Papa don’t cry. I’ll keep you company." And so it goes on and on forever, and we drink deeply of it, letting it soak into our insides like kerosene poured over old rags.
It seems that this primordial dance is everything, a center for our worship to reside in, a Mecca to travel to and then, foot sore, throw ourselves down upon our knees and sway. Then we discover that it is not the destination at all, but rather the mouth of the true road, the point from which the real pilgrimage will be launched.
It is the matrix we skip upon like fantasia fairies skating on the surface of a freezing pond, the stage from which we may launch any story at all. We make our roads in the forge, from out of this primordial union, all pattern, all twisting labyrinths emerge. All of that rubbing and gasping, shuddering and screaming is our play dough, ready to be made into new shapes.
What do I know about the universe, about the cosmos?
Men go away and study at universities learning the mating habits of hydrogen and oxygen. I go to bed and look at what bubbles up from my only connection to every experience I have ever had; my self, spreading out like the scattered pieces of a fractured mirror.
What is this stuff?
What am I?
What is this experience we call life and its nympho sister death, always sneaking into life’s room to suck at it while everyone looks away frightened, ashamed, and embarrassed.
How can I pretend that it isn’t all me?
That it hasn’t all arisen from me, or that I haven’t arisen from it so that any nightmare that can crawl onto my back and make me scream and every dream that awes me with tantalizing beauty is the face of my own origin.
I am the ugliest.
I am the most lovely.
I am all things scattered upon the floor and I am no thing reflecting the face of no other thing.
When the black man comes to me and asks why I haven’t called him, I know that it is because I have forgotten him, lost in the maze that we made together, but in the very shape of my hands lie the clues as to who I am and who he may be. And we two are made to fly together, writhing by the fire.
So come now and warm yourself and feed yourself at my pit. We have many camp side stories to tell in the language of dilated pupils and advancing heart rates.