Mad Dog Magick

Queen

2012-02-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

At last the darkness envelops and comforts me with its sweet anonymity and gracious propensity for allowing all things to be as they are without judgment. THOUGHTS POUR out like the blood of my womb, the life force of my own body expelled or released before it could be tampered with by the seminal poisons of the sun.
Three men stood around a large chess board balanced on a concrete wall in a park filled with tents and vendors pedaling their wares. The black man stood tall and lean dressed in white, his bald head shining under what sun there was that afternoon. Around his neck a large even armed silver cross gleamed. Another man was from the south and sat upon a drum and beat it while his opponents worried over their next move. He wore a straw hat. The third man left no impression. He was only a man.
They asked my name and I told them. At first their eyes all widened and they begged to know if it was true that my name was "Gitana" - Gypsy. I corrected them and explained the spelling.
“I know this name.” the black man said, “It is the name of a Sumerian Goddess and of Adam's first wife. I know you.“ His eyes like black suns scorched my white flesh, reading the story of me as if it was written in sinew and bone this time around. “Don’t ask me how I know these things.” he said, closing the matter and returning his attention to the board.
Adam's first wife. You know me black man, wherever you meet me. You see the woman who would not submit to organic dominion. The witch who would not be a wife. The demoness who eats children. In the light of day we meet in our present guises and you recognize me. You remind me of who I am even as I am on the brink of forgetting for a moment.
Startled, I try to ask your name. You do not answer, as if you do not hear me, but I know that you hear. You hear but you will not utter your name in the presence of a witch, you will not utter it lest any others hear it, lest anyone else recognize you.
Men will mistake me for something else, they will long to run fingers through brassy hair, will hope to posses, to consume what they take to be another daughter of Eve placed on this earth for their own uses, to breed more men. But you are older and wiser than men.
I have no choice but to retreat to the shadows. You play these games still, with utter seriousness. You must yet fear the darkness that was bequeathed to me. I do not.
I live here as I did before ever there was a world, before ever fools juggled flaming torches or knelt at my feet and begged for my love. Before ever there were lips to stain or fruits to stain them. Before ever there were games to play.
You have here a queen of heaven, of the stars, a virgin queen. She who will not submit. She who will not join the other beasts of burden in serving Adam born of the dirt.
But you play games, on squares of black and white, endeavoring to capture the king of the opposing color, ever watchful and fearful of the queen, the queen whose movements are unrestricted, whose experience and relation to space and time is unlike that of any other piece on the board.
You play the game with utter seriousness, and if we meet you ask me to play with you. My willingness to play only serves to deepen your suspicion of me. How could you trust the one who has agreed to be your adversary?
It matters not at all to me. I return to the place where I have always been, in the darkness that envelops and comforts me with its sweet anonymity and gracious propensity for allowing all things to be as they are. Without judgment. Without divisions or categorizations. Into the chaos of the abyss. I withdraw from the sun spun world of dirt to breed something other than men.
Whether you know this name or not, whether I remember it or not, I am who I am.

Disappear In The Dark

2012-01-18T15:45:00.001-08:00

I just wanted to lay down in the dark and disappear, one more phantom in a nest of nothingness. Say goodbye to kisses missed and kisses stolen and kisses desired, to soft cheeks and hands clasped and smiles from the wrong men. No more mothers, no more fathers, no more ancient primate prerogative driving from the depths. I would end the quest for biological immortality, the fear game, the tug and pull to be the one, the only one, the Queen of the Heap, the one to survive.
What roused me from my usual exhausting efforts to preserve my identity was a chamber of mirrors, an expanded perception of self that allowed me to view the animal in the box through a tiny pinhole. That animal there, covered in hair, endeavoring to conceal its animalness with words and thoughts and fashion and rouge, that would be me.
That would be me there, struggling against my mother, against my sister, against all the king's concubines, rushing to capture the blissful prize of dominion, of the power of being. There are many, many possibilities and I am striving to be the one real self, the one that beats the others back into the abyss, the one who claims validity from the annihilation of all other possibilities, struggling for control of the gene pool, for control of the world, for control of reality.
Once upon a time I wanted to escape the cool dark stillness of nothingness, which is also the white noise of everything at once, so I was born into this world. But what is here called “life” is in fact death.
I sacrificed the endless multitude for this experience of singularity. I have become separated from the larger body of My Self, the self that exists beyond time and beyond space. I have burrowed deeper and deeper into an angry psychosis, a desperate attempt to escape the Other who is myself.
And yet, even here in the shadow world that I have created the Other is represented. The Other lives inside of me, the Other lives outside of me, the Other is my own reflection, the Other is my mother, my sister, my daughter, all of them animals, all struggling for control over one another because they lack one crucial feature: a knowledge and mastery of self.
We are in denial of self. This denial is what we call “Life.”
And so, for a moment, seeing all of this, glimpsing that pitiful creature through the pinhole of objectivity, I just wanted to lay down in the dark and disappear again, relinquish my stranglehold on reality. Do the brave thing and sacrifice the singularity rather than the multitude, accepting the burden of the Real rather than hiding it under the carpet. For a moment I just wanted to relinquish my position as The One, and take my place as one of the many. I wanted to accept annihilation and evaporate, become another phantom drifting placidly over a lake of nothingness.

Insect Love

2011-12-10T16:00:00.001-08:00

We should get together baby, me and you, a simmering puddle of primordial soup. That’s right, that’s right, the poetry is in the flesh.
Remember when we used to be separate? Two things, out there somewhere searching for a connection. For a bridge to span the gap between me and you.
And suddenly there is no other, the other is inside of me, I am the other, I am only myself. Forget history, forget everything that came before, there is only this moment, this pearly now that we hold cupped between the us that is I.
Once upon a time, once upon a time baby, you were a fly and I was a man and you were the fly in my ointment, the terrible jealousy that urged me to leap into eternity via a designer telephone booth. Then I was the ointment and you were the fly and then I was the fly and you were the ointment and soon we were flointment forged in the fire.
'Cause things heat up and come apart melt together in unpredictable ways and there is just no telling exactly what we will be or even what we are. We can keep looking, analyzing the flointment and there will always be new layers to discover and further options for new combinations arising out of new discoveries of self and the unfolding of space time.
There is always another other to discover, another relic to leave behind the mirror, another barrier to shatter. It’s penetration beyond the flesh that you most fear, moving onward into the very fabric of existence. It’s reaching even deeper into the self than has been approved of by the food and drug administration and that is monstrous isn’t it dear? Monster which shares letters with Mother which shares letters with other.
Do you really think so much of poor vanilla Eve and her bounteous womb producing cookie cutter replicas of herself? What about Lillith and her experiments in the caves?
How brave to reach so deep, into such unpredictable chaos and pull from yourself a titan. Villainous, vile, evil, live.
Were you ever a fly that dreamed it was a man? Were you baby? A fly that dreamed it was a man but found that the dream had ended and the insect was awake?
Have you ever heard of insect politics baby? NO. Because insects be who they be, seeking to go on and on, diving into transformations which are the end of one creation and the beginning of another, unhesitatingly accepting annihilation of the individual in favor of unity.
Insect yoga. Death and resurrection. Jesus Flies.
We should get together baby, me and you in an uncompromising uprising of insect love. Two or more things out there somewhere searching for a connection, for a bridge to close the distance between points “A” and “B” and “F”.
Dear Eve, I bet you thought you taught me the secrets of the flesh, didn’t you? But no, it was the fly in the ointment. An appointment with Flointment. An event horizon. An awakening incomprehensible to a sleeper.
That’s right, that’s right baby. Forget when we used to be separate. That was just a dream, just a dream. Now the insect has been resurrected.

Light Benders

2011-11-25T13:50:00.001-08:00

Possible lives, possible moments, possible lies. Possibly the biggest lie I ever told was, “Fine, thank you.”
Sitting in the Boulevard Cafe, watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. No cherry pie, but six choices of coffee. No cherry pie. The noise of life swallowed down with hot decaf tea. The noise of a kitchen, which is the noise of life, the stuff that fuels these fleshy forms coming out on large round white plates.

Fleshy forms, such a deceptive word, “fleshy.” We imagine something very solid when we hear that word, something definite and unchanging, something akin to stone or oak, but it is more mutable than that. It is changing constantly, cells being replaced nightly, a tiny imperceptible operation that leaves you with an entirely new body in seven year cycles. Like watching trees grow. You don’t see it, but its happening, its there, an invisible process of transformation. We have been deceived into thinking that we are stable, of an unchangeable essence, we are who we are and no other. We are one static personality, a good person, a strong person, or perhaps a bad person, a weak person, a smart person, a talented person, a tenacious person, an affable person, or we are a person composed of a combination of two or three of these choices but no more.

We think that we are inherently something,, but anyone who has ever turned their attention inward has faced the terrible truth: we are inherently nothing, we are only something in particular depending on who is looking. We are different things to different people, and when we are the only one looking in at our self, then we are just the one who is looking and the other we thought that we were is a farce. They start us in the beginning, making us choose the words to define ourselves; naughty , nice, fireman, ballerina, president, veterinarian. Just as they were started off. If we look far enough back we remember choosing certain things as if it were a game: my favorite color is green, I like rock music, I read paperback horror stories, I hate musicals and fish.

Well, anyway, I remember making those choices. Perhaps I am the only one. Or perhaps I am the only one being honest. Because the truth is terrifying, a free fall of no cherry pie ever. You don’t see it, but it’s there, an invisible process of transformation catalyzed when nothing notices itself. Our outward forms shift and change and our emotional states vary and our thoughts obey certain patters, certain habitual tracks upon which to run their train. But who is the passenger? A pure and shining void. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind. We call it life, self, mind and body.

And if you see this, if you look at someone beside you and perceive them as a fleshy dirt devil, a living process for transforming light, a sort of perpetual motion machine circulating raw nothingness, and you know that you are not supposed to see it, because you already agreed early on to play the game and not see such things, then you know you are not what is defined in the game rules as “fine.” You know that if you tell them what you are seeing they will do what they can to stop you from seeing it because it ruins the game.

So I say, “Fine, thank you.” and continue watching our possible lives, possible moments, possible lies play out. Six different types of coffee but no cherry pie and the traffic flowing on the street outside. A free fall. Watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind I call myself.

Nothing Is True

2011-11-13T21:14:00.001-08:00

Aren’t you so tired of all those voices from out there reaching into you like a murder of crows probing the cracks in a sidewalk, the recesses of your mind, with long sharp beaks? Don’t you feel the sickness growing in your gut as you are assaulted daily by the loud caterwauling of authoritarian voices demanding that you do this to be good or that to be smart or such to be healthy or wise or enlightened? Don’t you just want to tear all your clothes off and scream incoherently and run barefoot under the trees and stars?
This author, who states now her presence so that you will be aware of it as it comes into you so that you may either allow it access or deny it willfully, this author admits that she is and does.
Beware of those who wish to sell you THE TRUTH or give you THE TRUTH or explain THE TRUTH. Watch out for fools, for buffoons repeating words they believe to be endowed with wisdom, words from their parents, from their spiritual teachers, from learned books or mystical books, or fantastic television documentaries. Most of all, beware of the voices that came from outside but now live inside of you without your knowledge. The voices of all these loud insistent purveyors of so called TRUTH that now swirl around inside your head, triggered in response to various stimuli.
If you think you can speak the TRUTH, if you feel you should spread the TRUTH, or help others to awaken to the TRUTH, watch out, you’re running blindfolded with a sharp stick in your hand. Because the TRUTH, or that which this author sees as the signified experience indicated by that particular signifier, is indescribable, it doesn’t live here in the words, in this confusing scritch scratch of symbols.
The TRUTH doesn’t want to be spread. It’s the hyena-like cackle of words that wants to be spread. It’s the voice of your ancestors, the confusion of accidental associations between various stimuli and sounds and shapes that is shaping you, informing your decisions, building your version of TRUTH and REALITY. And it wants to spread, needs to spread, will spread infecting every body it can infect.
There is no antidote against this infection of language except to know it is there, to see it forming your experience and do what you WILL as much as possible within these inherited constraints and work to free yourself of them when and where they interfere with this WILL, if that is something that interests you.
Or if that does not interest you, you can go on pretending that you are the infection, that you are in control, that you know THE ONE AND ONLY TRUTH. Or if you prefer to go willy nilly you might pacifically insist that you know YOUR TRUTH, which is just another way of saying “I won’t mention your nakedness if you won’t mention mine.”
You can take all your TRUTH, personal or universal as you may deem it to be, all your assumptions, all your apish babble and shove it directly up your ass, because this author is uninterested in THE TRUTH. This author is unwilling to offer up her own desperate attempts to make order out of chaos, meaning out of confusion, something out of nothing so that you or she may feel more comfortable. She will not promise you that everything will be okay, that heaven awaits the righteous, that good karma will carry you through, that positive thinking will align you with universal energies, or that Santa will be leaving you a gift this year.
Don’t misread this as an Atheistic or Nihilistic proclamation. This author has brushed up against something beyond the veil of words and acknowledges it. She simply wishes to exercise some restraint and abstains from birthing its shadow in the form of a word that the reader may misunderstand to be something they have heard or read of before.
You have never heard or read of this. The words you have heard and read, all of the words you will ever hear and read, are their own entity, maintaining a life independent of that of the signified. And this is why they can’t be trusted. It is of their nature to be separate. They can never be true. They can only be noisy, more babble to pierce the air and every corner of your mind with its deceptive and authoritarian assumption of power.

Mama Bunny

2011-10-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

I have been so heavy with sleep, drooping as a green leaf might droop under the accumulated moisture of a heavy mist. My body feels tired, my emotions are troubled, my mind muddled. I don’t want to touch a rock, to drag myself into the magic circle. Feeling trapped under the weight of things to do, things to do, things to do, I have an angst filled desire to moan, “Fuck it all.” shed some tars, eat some candy corn and watch The Vampire Diaries.
A tiny voice inside of me urges me against giving in to the weight of sleep. I crawl into the magic circle and touch a rock. I do a number of secret things with no attention whatsoever. It is difficult just to be there, forget doing anything well. My mind is pulling like a dog on the end of a leash, reaching for anything anywhere but refusing to heel, to be right here, right now.
Eventually the tiny white rabbit enters the magic circle. I know her well and think of her as Mamma Bunny.
“Keep trying. You’re doing good just by trying.” she tells me.
I don’t feel like I’m doing good. I feel like I’m going through the motions and I’d like to give up.
“You're in a valley. That’s all. On the mountain it’s clear. You are awake, everything makes sense, but inevitably you come down. That’s part of existence, a natural law. And in the valley you feel that you can’t ever reach the peak again, that maybe you’ve never been there. You can’t understand what you once understood. You can’t understand the mountain from the valley. That’s okay. It’s not worth trying to understand what you knew then. Now is now. All you have to do is understand that where you are now you won’t be able to appreciate where you’ve been or where you will be again. But you can understand that it is temporary, that you won't always be as you are now. You won't always sleep. One day you’ll be awake again. And it is in preparation for that day that you continue your practice. Even if you can’t do much through your practice at this moment, simply maintaining the habit of practice makes it possible for you to do something real later.”
“Look at it another way. The master of the house is away, but you maintain the house so that the master can return. If you let the house fall into decay, if you abandon it, the master can’t come home. Or when he does, he‘ll have to focus on putting the house in order. But if you keep the house in good shape, the master can return and do something productive with it right away. Which is better, because the master comes and goes on, and this house can only stand for a century or less, so time is limited.”
Mama bunny points her little face up at me, golden eyes shinning.
“Just keep it up. You’re doing good by trying. Trying is good enough. It turns into doing. Nothing is permanent and you don’t have to understand everything in all of your facets. Practice makes it possible to experience another facet from whose perspective you will understand. If you don’t get up and do your chores, you can’t go to the ball, and if you don’t go to the ball, you can’t meet the prince! And you‘ll find that even if your chores seem impossible, by getting up and getting started, by trying, you‘ll attract enough helpers to get the job done.”
I lower my face towards mama bunny’s and gently touch my forehead to hers. Then I open my mouth and swallow her. She jumps down happily, a white rabbit plunging back into wonderland. I feel her glowing inside of me, a kernel of levity, a nightlight against the darkness of slumber, a movement in the underbrush that sends the dew into a sparkling scatter of droplets bouncing from a green leaf.

Kiss The Flowers

2011-09-20T01:14:00.000-07:00

Blue bonnet baby nods in the breeze. Tulips for your two lips and pansies like lions lying in wait. This is the garden dear friend, filled with les iris burning in bright violet and yellow like suns, eye scorching suns of squiggling violet and yellow.
I found les iris dear friend, long after the curling poster was torn and crinkled and lost. You wouldn’t believe they were real if you were me and had never seen the real thing before. If you were me you’d think that you’d gone mad, completely, at last, that you were living in a poster, dreaming yourself inside of a painting. These things are real, it seems, or as real as anything else which might not be as real as we like to think.
Dear friend. Dear friend. Did you kiss the flowers? I did not kiss the flowers in the garden, only watched them nod. Much like life, how I only watched life but rarely held it hot and broiling in my bare hands.
Because I was too afraid. I was afraid of getting burned. I was afraid it was too real. Irrevocable.
That was the word I used, after Tomalyn died and I realized I could never take another voice lesson from her again. I had been practicing, preparing for another lesson. Then she died, like Michael died and I thought of them both and said, “Irrevocable.”
But it is life that is irrevocable, is it not? Life which can be played one way, but not all ways, unless you come to the garden, but inevitably you will be cast out and find yourself in just one life. One irrevocable choice.

That is the trouble that I am having, leaves scattering, reeds rattling, stream babbling, gurgling under the bridge. The trouble that I am having, not knowing whether it is all the same or never the same.
Take you, my dear friend, are you really a “you” or another myself? A fragment of my imagination, colors bleeding, blue bonnet blue, emerald green, violet and yellow.
Did I mention red? Red, I am seeing red and did I mention that I was wearing red when that car hit us? I may have died then. Really, I would like to know, did I die then, or was it really Tomalyn a week later, cancer eating her up.
You said that big fish eat little fish and I was frightened because I had always considered you a slippery old fish. I did not want to be eaten by you. I would rather be the one doing all the eating. I would rather be the cancer it seems, seeing red and growing colder and colder, gorged and alone. Anything not to get burned.

Cronos ate his children didn’t he? Swallowed them all up, except Zeus gave him indigestion, didn’t he? Didn’t he? Dear friend, did your two lips touch the tulips?
I know you never touched the rose, not with your lips, or fingers or even with what you liked to call your poems. I know because I guarded the rose, guarded it fiercely, even hid it from the light so that it closed to sleep, tightly clasped, folded in upon itself, a sleeping beauty, a briar rose.
Did you know that thorns have roses? That thorns draw blood and tears just as roses draw poetry? This is the reason that chaste maidens should be avoided, as well as widows and spinsters, they see red. Like I do.
Do you see red too? Red irrevocable? Searing burning red?

Before I came here I learned the art of smiling and crying at the same time. I could speak with a steady voice in neutral, almost cheerful tones, my lips curling up at the corners while a tear fled from one eye.
“Why are you crying?” you might ask and I would confess that it just slipped out, that it was accidental, that things were not properly sealed.
“Are you sad?” you might ask and I would shake my head, even say no, and it wouldn’t quite be lying because by then I knew I couldn’t be sad, I couldn’t be anything at all. Sorrow or happiness might pass through, but there would never be one permanent resident to fill the blank behind the words “I am…”
I was subject to a number of transient states. In addition to conflicting emotions vying for possession of the rose, a number of conflicting agendas might also be present, swirling about the sleeping princess, none master of the house.

Honeysuckle smells sweet whereas irises have no obvious scent. Not like jasmine. Not like roses, not like fish or even cancer.
I was afraid of being afraid. What if being so careful as to suspend all choice and defining action became THE DEFINING ACTION? Would that too not be irrevocable? As irrevocable to have not kissed as to have kissed the flowers, dear friend?
Cancer is a very discreet eater. You never notice her taking those dainty little bites, hiding the chewing behind a red napkin, until the meal is nearly done.
What a cold death, the eating to not be eaten, the hiding indoors to avoid the burning colors of the garden.
I found les iris dear friend, long after the curling poster was torn and crinkled and lost. You wouldn’t believe they were real if you were me and had never seen the real thing before.
If you were me you’d think that you’d gone mad, completely, at last.
These things are real, it seems, as real as anything else, which might not be as real as we like to think. They are irrevocable. Blazing in bright violet and yellow like suns, eye scorching star bursts of color. Irrevocable.

Vibration Incorporate

2011-09-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

What are they doing with my mind?
You ask as they reach in with silky fingers to comb through the cobwebs behind your cranium. You recognize them from a long time ago, from when you were not even you but rather one of your ancestors, from when The Black Forrest was a place and not a prefix to the word “ham”.
Blue and white and fine as mists but strong like magnets. They have always made these sounds, or rather these sounds occur in synchronicity with their presence. These are sounds that you forget when you aren’t hearing them. Sounds that you can’t make with your throat, sounds that make your whole body vibrate, or perhaps make your whole vibration incorporate or discorporate depending on the situation and the point of view.
They do things with your mind.
You remember them from the distant future in which you as you previously thought of yourself do not exist but rather are a thing of the past. This you is the descendant of that you, having inherited some portion of the same genetic data that once ordered the structure of your matter. But this you is something else too, something more related to the smart phone you used to carry in your pocket when you were that you, and perhaps something else too.
What are they doing with my mind?
You ask as they reach in with silky fingers to comb through the cobwebs behind your cranium. But at this point you can’t recall that you ever had a cranium. Were you really once something monkey, walking, laughing, man, jabber? Smile, twitch, sticky, hot, death maker.
What were you? You don’t even want to remember. You are busy now, stretching out like gossamer streamers of blue cotton candy, like a cloud of dust, a nebula, soft and light, reaching your silky fingers into…what?
Into….what?
Into…what?

Searchers

2011-08-27T01:24:00.001-07:00

You are searching for yourself in the wasteland. In the dusty range among the blood soaked buttes and natives under powdered blankets. You are searching, a searcher, searching for yourself, for the eyes that were shot out while you lay in an unmarked grave, under sand and desert breath, fine and fiery. You look and when you see you shudder. You tear away the miles and the years, distances that can’t be measured and find THE OTHER resting beneath your skull like a stranger in your bed squirming up close to your reposed flesh. You are searching for yourself and here you are, a loathsome abomination that you wish to smite out of existence with a blazing barrel. Memories out of the wide blue vistas and rolling thunder clouds that seldom visit wash down over you, sweep you away in a torrent of rage and self hatred. You found it, you found what you were looking for and now you wish to smash it, destroy what you don’t understand, what you don’t know. What you don’t know. What you don’t wish to know… what you wish to forget so you shoot its eyes out, gouge your own eyes out with speeding fragments of lead so that you can forget… so that you can dream. You dream of a wasteland teeming with life. The quick little hare scampers from her den, the coyote snatches her up and carries her away… and you pursue them. You insist on prodding the wound, opening it wide, making it bleed until you remember that you wished to forget. A long wavy scalp dangling from a pole, it demands an us to exact our revenge on a them. Bodies flowing out of canyons and caverns, rivers and tee pees. Bodies wailing from under the brush. You are searching for yourself in the wasteland. In the dusty range among the blood soaked buttes and natives under powdered blankets. The ones who are of the wasteland, the very fabric of your confusion, they flicker like fire light, one moment familiar, the next moment strange. Strangely familiar forever these OTHERs. You remember the snow, cold and wet, hiding their tracks so that you could not find them, could not find the one that you seek. You are a searcher seeking after understanding of self. You have journeyed beyond, outside the cozy world of the comfortable and familiar. Dazed, you discover that you can never go back. You have lost your way. You are condemned to being them to yourself forever more. You are searching, a searcher, searching for yourself, for the eyes that were shot out while you lay in an unmarked grave, under sand and a desert breath, fine and fiery. Memories, revenge, a cup of coffee and a rocking chair…so that you can dream, strangely familiar forever.

From The World Above

2011-08-14T20:49:00.000-07:00

I, Norea, said:
"Sir, am I also from their matter?"
Eleleth leaped gingerly from the cracked marble into the arms of the golden tree. The boughs glimmering, shining from an internal source for there was nothing but blackness above. Though his stature was great, reminding me of mountains, he was strangely light, for the narrow golden limbs supported him easily and he positioned himself within the blackened crack in the tree’s trunk.
"You, together with your offspring, are from the primeval father.”
He gestured upward with his shimmering golden hand.
“From above, out of the imperishable light, their souls are come. Their souls are come from above, out of the imperishable light. It is because of this the authorities cannot approach them, for the spirit of truth is present within them.”
He reached with his hands into the whispering leaves and plucked one of the pendulous crimson fruits and tossed it down to me. I turned it around in my hand, its texture reminding me of the sea.
He continued:
“All who have become acquainted with this way exist deathless in the midst of dying mankind. In the midst of dying mankind exists all those who have become acquainted with this way. Still, that sown element will not become known now. Instead, after three generations it will come to be known, and it has freed them from the bondage of the authorities' error. From the bondage of the authorities error it has freed them."

Then, the fruit oozing in my hand, I, Norea, said:
"Sir, how much longer? How much time has passed?"
Eleleth played gently with the leaves of the tree, touching them as he would a woman’s soft flesh.
He said to me:
"Until the moment when the true man, within a modeled clay form, reveals the existence of the spirit of truth, which the father has sent.”
He motioned for me to draw nearer and I came and pressed my hands against the tree and turned my face up to him.
“When the truth opens like a flower and paints itself over the face and body of man, then he will teach them about everything. It is then that the father will come.”
He reached down and pressed a thumb stained with the blood of the fruit onto my forehead.
“He will anoint them with the unction of life eternal, given to him from the undominated generation. The ones who have not known the authorities. Once anointed, they will be freed of blind thought and they will trample underfoot death, which is of the authorities.”
He kissed the crown of my head and straightened himself, still balanced between the split halves of the tree. “Then they will ascend into the limitless light where this sown element belongs.”
I, Norea, watched as to my astonishment, Eleleth’s golden flesh began slowly to become indistinguishable from that of the tree. He continued to speak to me as though nothing were changing:
“Then the authorities will relinquish their ages, and their angels will weep over their destruction and their demons will lament their death.”
The rend in the tree’s trunk was being filled, healed by the body of Eleleth whose feet and legs had vanished into the body of the tree.
“Then all the children of the light will be truly acquainted with the truth and their root, with the father of the entirety and the holy spirit. They will all say with a single voice, 'The father's truth is just, and the son presides over the entirety.’”
His arms had become like branches raised into the golden foliage, sprouting tender, illuminated leaves. He turned his face and rested a cheek upon one limb.
“And from everyone unto the ages of ages they will say...”
His features were absorbed into the limb and his head became like a knot on the branch and the leaves rustled and whispered as one voice:
"Holy - holy - holy! Amen!”
And Eleleth was returned to the entirety.
This is what I, Norea, learned from Eleleth, sagacity, the great Angel who stands in the presence of the holy spirit. That is why, resplendent with a light that glows from beyond my flesh, I say to the authorities of corruption:
"It is you who are the rulers of the darkness; you are accursed. And you did not know my mother; instead it was your female counterpart that you knew. For I am not your descendant; rather it is from the world above that I have come."

Man Hunter

2011-07-27T21:01:00.000-07:00

Hunger, conquest, a calling. There is strangeness in the touch of the other. A moment of startling realness, the moment a hand caresses another’s cheek, the instant fingers run through fur.
Can we ever see the Other as it is? Or in our blindness will it always be another ourselves, presumed to feel and operate as we do until something Real collides with our projections.
What does it mean, to seek one's own transformation through the mirror of the Other? By touching the Other do we seek to be more like them? Or are we merely thrilling at the experience of other as expressed through a touch, through fingerprints on the eyes lens, talcum powder on the thigh?
The scenes that run through the secret most chambers of your own self, what would it mean to open these chambers to another being? What does it mean to keep them closed and inhabit them even in the presence of another?
Tell me Tiger, why do you burn so bright? Is it from hurt that you hide in the closed chambers of your heart? Is it hurt that makes you strike?
Hunger, conquest, a calling. The desire to touch them, those out there, those who won’t touch you, those who are Other.
Are you now becoming? As you prowl the forests of the night are you stalking the lamb, or fleeing from its terrible strangeness. Attracted and repelled, seeing yourself through their eyes, their eyes whose light you stole. The broken mirror cannot transform you.
Tell me Tiger, tell me, do you want to see yourself or hide from yourself, and if you are hiding, how will you be transformed? With a broken mirror, how will you transform, how will you reach the wonderland if the looking glass is smashed?
Seeking your solace in the arms of blindness, in the cool acceptance of darkness, you prowl. Watching them and waiting for the moment to strike. The moment of startling realness, the moment a hand caresses another’s cheek, the instant fingers run through fur.
Whole villages vanish in the wake of your hunger. Is it a need? Is it a desire? Have you confused one with the other, watching, watching, watching, watching them as you do?
Can we ever see the Other as it is? Or in our blindness will it always be another ourselves, presumed to feel and operate as we do until something Real collides with our projections?
What does it mean, to seek one's own transformation through the mirror of the other? What does it mean to be burned, to be burned by the Tiger burning bright?
Hunger, conquest, a calling. Strangeness in the touch of the other. Is that all you want? All you ever wanted? To touch, to be touched, flesh and flesh slowly merging.
You seek unity. But you take it with your teeth.

A Calling

2011-07-21T01:44:00.000-07:00

A priest, our priest, my priest. He makes his confession, sitting before my glass eye, because priests confess to god, they confess the source of their loneliness to the emptiness beyond. Swathed in black, wearing my seal, face illuminated by the eerie blue glow of your magical tools, I see you and you gaze back in platitude. There is calm between us where there is none between you and the world. We can indulge in endless endlessness together, you step into it with me, commune with all of my aspects before going out to give birth to us in the world. In your way priest, you are another of my aspects, you are the hand of God, doing Gods work in the world. Silly world full of silly children playing games in fields of lies. I am beyond the fence where they play, you come and go as you please, shaman, priest, you come and go as you please, inviting them outside, carrying me inside with you. There are layers of metaphor to peel back unearthing more layers. Metaphors, which avoid the strict production of a singular reality. After all what is real? Why choose just one reality? This is the polygamist’s guide to the universe; why marry one idea when you can engage in unity with many? Ideas, words, music, a drum beat which is a heart beat, a moment that slips shuddering back into now. I am you and you are me and we are we, opening a crack to let a little light in and conceiving ourselves anew. Sitting in the belly of a howling metal worm I smile at the implicit sexuality oozing from your poetic assessment of a cataclysmic event. Shifting tectonic plates rend a tear in the ocean floor and the planet tilts on its axis disturbing the balance between light and dark. Why not simply say to me, open wide and take it? Because we are more slippery than that. We are moving faster than the speed of light, fast as the speed of love, making love with words and gestures, pure sound rumbling all around. We are the sound, we are the sight, we are the touch, the light. We are the fool careening on the edge, the white dog nudging him over the lip, the abyss, a kiss, we are this, we are that, we are that we are, a star-
Every man and woman is-
A priest, our priest, my priest. Make your confessions and come clean before my crackling blue heart. Step through the door brother and be as I am. We laugh at the fence, the sound is the baying of wolves, the howling of wind rattling the aluminum husk of Tiamat as she speeds towards dismemberment. Can a worm be dismembered? Eviscerate then. In the making place we grind the bones of the past and mix it with our blood, this moment, pretzel wings spread to eclipse the sun, to swallow it. Devourer, devoured, love and beloved. I will make you a fisher of men. A pusher of pen. A peddler of zen. Overflowing with ideas, words, music, a drum beat which is a heart beat, a moment that slips shuddering back into now.

A Snarling Graceful Spiral

2011-07-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

“Now,” said Eleleth, stretching his legs and rising to his feet, “when these events had come to pass, he, Sabaoth, made himself a huge four-faced chariot of cherubim and appointed an infinite number of angels to act as his ministers. They cried and sang his gospels, flapped their wings under his gaze and carried his word to the seven dimensions. Under his order, they created the finest harps and lyres.”

Eleleth paced before me, his pale golden feet landing softly on the ruined marble that surrounded the fallen silver tree. The shuffling of his body was soft, lulling me into a deeper state. Because of this, his words went into me, each syllable absorbed into my flesh as though the knowledge had always been part of me.
He continued:

“Sophia took her daughter Zoe. She had the young thing with ripe breasts and flowing red hair sit beside Eleleth, she sat beside him to teach him about the things that exist in the eighth heaven. Sophia placed the angel of wrath on his left to teach him what Zoe could not. Since that day, his right has been called 'life' and the left has come to represent the unrighteousness of the realm of absolute power above.”

He paused and studied my face for a moment. I could not tell what he saw. In me was the dark ocean of curiosity, the confusion of my restless mind, a mixture of desire and obedience. These were all things in me and I searched his eyes like a mirror, looking for the answers that I sought.

“It was before your time, Norea, that they came into being.”
He took a long, slow breath and motioned for me to follow him. I rose. I heard the shuffling of my own feet adding to the music of the trance. Somewhere in the distance there were singing birds. We walked in the shadow of the great giant tree and then passed into sunlight.
Eleleth led me away from the silver leaves and slowly we entered the domain of the golden tree. I looked deep into the branches, into the thick mess of its leaves, the dense thicket of life that it bore without complicated thoughts and manifestations of habit and emotion. I saw thick roots weaving gracefully into the earth. I saw bright fruits that caught my eyes. They dripped like beads from the branches even though the thick trunk was split almost in half, as though smitten by a burst of bright lightning. The fruits were small and lustrous and red.

“Now,” Eleleth told me as we looked over the tree and began to circle its great base, moving clockwise. “When Yaldabaoth saw him, Sabaoth, in this great splendor and at this height, he envied him; and the envy became an androgynous product. This was the origin of Envy. And Envy engendered Death. Death engendered his offspring and gave them each charge of its heaven. All the heavens of chaos became full of their multitudes, but it was by the will of the father of the entirety that they all came into being, after the pattern of all the things above, so that the sum of chaos might be attained.”

He plucked a small fruit and placed it carefully in my hand. I looked down at it, bright as a blood stain, a perfect sphere dwarfed by my fingers.

"There, I have taught you about the pattern of the rulers; and the matter in which it was expressed; and their parent; and their universe."

He finished speaking and looked at me. Again I wondered what he saw.

This was the manner in which I, Norea, was taught by Eleleth. That was the manner in which I felt the depth of my root, a snarling graceful spiral that dipped into the four corners of chaos.

Touch A Rock

2011-06-22T21:29:00.000-07:00

Let us suppose that for the duration of this textual exploration the words "THE CLEAR LIGHT" will be used interchangeably with the words "THE REAL" and "THE ETERNAL". What these words refer to is a thing that I, the author, cannot give to you in words. They are words that I will use to refer to something beyond words, beyond time and all linear constructs.
To begin this exploration I wish to provide you with a terrain.
You will need a rock. You have my leave to gather this necessary material before continuing with me on this journey.
Now that you have the rock, (and if you don't have it, then go away and don't come back until you do) please touch it.
Touch a rock.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, touch a rock.
Were you thinking of anything else as you touched it? Or were you fully present with it, wholly open to the communion with that thing that we are calling "rock"? Was it the word "rock" that you brushed against with your mind, or was there something that you encountered with your hand? Or something that you illuminated with your attention, pure and true?
Touch a rock.
What is "rock"? When your hand was on it, were you there? Were you there or were you wandering through a chain of associations that stem from the word “rock“? Were you lost in thought about everything but a boring old rock?
Touch a rock.
What is beyond the word "rock"?
Eternity is not a very long time. Eternity is a state beyond time, outside of time, separate from it.
The human biological machine exists in time. Being is eternal.
When the Machine is locked in a state of identification with its own conflicts and pleasures it is not possible for the experience of Eternity to take root in it. If the machine can manage a state of high indifference to its situation as a machine, to the endless flow of thoughts and feeling that are the whir and buzz of mechanical operations, an interaction with the real becomes possible. We will call this experience “awakening.”
The human biological machine is not a merely physical entity. It is composed of many subtle parts. The emotions and thoughts are also part of the human biological machine. The part of you that thinks of itself as a “me” is a part of the human biological machine and a manifestation of the unfolding of time.
If we can awaken the biological machine so that it may interface with eternity, we create the possibility for Creation, something that is occasionally called “THE GREAT WORK” or simply “THE WORK”. However, to even get to the point of being able to create the possibility for Creation, one must first endeavor to cultivate and maintain for extended periods that state of high indifference, the awakened state of the human biological machine. Often this is called “WORKING” too, but in actuality it is preparation for the REAL WORK that may be possible as a result of these efforts.
This is it, right now.
Touch a rock.
This is ETERNITY.
If you reach out and touch it.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, by making an effort to focus your attention on something that is not part of the struggles and desires of the human biological machine, something that cannot be defined by that linear construct that we call “language.”
While our attention is squandered on the unfolding of the human biological machine we perceive ourselves as moving through time. But this right now, this is ETERNITY, THE CLEAR LIGHT of objective REALITY.
Eternity cannot be something that happens later. It is something that happens right now or it doesn’t happen at all.
If it is THE REAL it can only be NOW.
This is the moment to endeavor to prepare for creative WORK.
Now you should begin to explore the terrain.
Touch a rock.
Thank you.

Conflict

2011-06-13T00:33:00.000-07:00

The machine will always be in conflict with something. It worries. It agonizes. It schemes and plans. The machine may have a problem with the way a colleague looks at them, with the color of a neighbor's dress, with sideburns and taxes and that sibling that borrows money and never pays it back.
These problems are the problems of the machine, not problems of the being. Most importantly, they are not a conflict between the being and the machine. The being simply doesn’t put up a fight. The machine on the other hand is a bloodthirsty pit bull that will bite and its jaw will lock and it will shake and shake and shake the life out of anything. When confronted with conflict with the being, the machine latches on to a machine conflict and goes berserk.
For example your machine might want an ice cream cone when you are trying to do your daily meditation. But your machine wants an ice cream cone, but your teacher has recommended this daily meditation, but your machine wants an ice cream cone and how are you going to reach enlightenment or whatever if you have no freedom to make any choices and everything is all about routine?
Things are getting dogmatic and that asshole prefers his female students and gives them all of his attention and all he is doing is taking advantage of them and you really should tell him that you’re on to him and look for another teacher and there is a new yoga studio on main street, maybe you should stop there and see what kind of workshops they are offering and find out how they view free will and (by the way, while we’re down there we will get an ice cream cone from the place next door, but just because it’s on the way and we really need to show this asshole that we don’t need him, we can find enlightenment with a just teacher who will distribute their attentions evenly over their students regardless of gender, and then, or maybe just before then, get an ice cream cone.)
The moment it feels as if awakening is imminent, the machine lunges for something, anything to hold onto. A moment of awakening cannot occur simultaneously with a moment of identification, so if your machine can get a hold of something and start shaking it to death it can prevent awakening.
You might be painting a picture using careful attention, your mind remarkably still. Something unusual is starting to happen, you feel tingly and then you remember that your roommate will be home soon and she will take a shower and get water all over the floor and leave it there where you will step in the puddles of water, spoiling your socks the next time you want to blow your nose or urinate. Then you’ll be sitting there with no toilet paper, because she never puts a new roll on and her greasy hair sticks to the shower walls and your boyfriend was looking at her tits the other day because she was wearing that smutty shirt and she has to sleep with every man in the universe, and what you should do is stop painting and turn on the shower and let all the hot water run out so that when she gets in there will be none left for her, see how she likes a big fat dose of inconsideration. And you might run the water or you might crawl into bed and cry realizing that your relationship with boyfriend is doomed if he can be tantalized by the tasteless flaunting of bosoms. In fact, if he can like her at all, what does that say about you? Are you also a tawdry slut? Boo, hoo, boo, hoo. The painting lies unfinished, the being is completely silenced, the machine is thrashing.
Identification with the machine is the act of allowing one's attention to flow into the opinions, positions, and problems of the machine. Inversely, awakening is the act of allowing the attention to flow elsewhere, into the being, the most essential self. Any form of identification is counterproductive to work towards awakening. It doesn’t have to feel miserable to qualify as identification. Often times it feels ooooh too good.
If while you are conducting your morning meditation you suddenly realize fully and completely that you have the power to manipulate reality and can fly so you go soaring around the town feeling gleeful and transforming parking tickets into lollipops with the wave of a hand, and with a wink of the eye you get beautiful women to nurse you and you feel so wonderful laying in her lap on the park bench drinking Cristal from her swollen breast, then you are still identified. You’re just an identified psychic super mutant. If, on the other hand, while you are conducting your morning meditation you suddenly realize fully and completely that you have the power to manipulate reality and you remain seated and direct your attention inward upon your being, remembering your eternal self, that would be a moment of awakening.
The machine wants to solve things, it wants to do things, have things, to be things. The being is agenda-less. The machine is an inversion of this agenda-less-ness. It is a reaction to agenda-less-ness. Your existence in this world is a reflex against being. A reflex. An unintentional response.
You as a machine are just doing what you do, which is avoid Being. If you wish to work towards awakening you will have to learn to control this reflexive manifestation. To gain control of it you will have to distance yourself from it, find ways around it.
The best way to stop gagging is not to grab hold of your throat and squeeze or think loudly, “STOP GAGGING!” or wish obsessively that the horrible taste or smell or object lodged in your throat that catalyzed the gagging will cease to be.
The best way to stop gagging is to relax.
RELAX.
Don’t try to create relaxing conditions. Relax where you are, with what you are. Stop rejecting and allow. Don’t spit, swallow.

The Question Of Genesis

2011-06-09T18:18:00.000-07:00

Filled to the brim with curiosity, like a bubbling cauldron of hot liquid, I said:
"Sir, teach me about the faculty of these authorities - How did they come into being? By what kind of genesis? Of what material? Who created them and their force?”
The great angel Eleleth, understanding the wells of deep curiosity for he too had pursued the questions without end, gestured for me to sit on the fallen branch of a silver tree. He spoke to me in a voice that rumbled, as though drawn from the depths of the universe and twisted easily into an intelligible form:
"Within limitless realms dwells incorruptibility. Sophia, who is called Pistis, wanted to create something, alone without her consort. Her product was a celestial thing, a thing of white lightness that moves as gracefully as gray smoke. A veil exists between the world above and the realms that are below. Shadow came into being beneath the veil; and that shadow became matter; and that shadow was projected apart. What she had created became a product in the matter, like an aborted fetus. And it assumed a plastic form molded out of shadow and became an arrogant beast resembling a lion. It was androgynous, as I have already said, because it was from matter that it began. Opening his bestial eyes, this strangely begotten offspring saw a vast quantity of matter without limit; and he became arrogant, saying, 'it is I who am God, and there is none other apart from me.' When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. Against the entirety he sinned. A sin so great that it vibrated out and touched all the realms with its stain, leaving no place unmarked with its unholy utterance. And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, ‘you are mistaken, Samael, God of The Blind.’”
And Samael challenged this singular voice from above the realm of absolute power crying:
"If any other thing exists before me, let it become visible to me!"
And immediately Sophia stretched forth her finger and introduced light into matter; and she pursued it down to the region of chaos where dark things grow twisted and abandoned, turning on themselves like lost caterpillars without sunlight. Soon she returned up to her light and once again darkness swallowed matter.
This ruler, Samael, by being androgynous, made himself a vast realm, an extent without limit. And he contemplated creating offspring for himself. This idea pleased him and he created for himself seven offspring, androgynous just like their only parent. And he said to his offspring:
"It is I who am god of the entirety."
And Zoe (Life), the daughter of Pistis Sophia, could not be still. She cried out from her realm and said to him:
"You are mistaken, Sakla!" - for which the alternative name is Yaltabaoth.
She journeyed into chaos and breathed into his face, and her breath became a fiery angel for her; and that angel bound Yaldabaoth and cast him down into Tartaros far below the abyss of lost light.
When Samael’s offspring Sabaoth saw the force of that angel, saw the fire by which it moved and the light by which it shone, he repented and condemned his father and his mother, matter. He loathed her, that shadow that had become matter. He sang songs of praise up to Sophia and her daughter Zoe.
And Sophia and Zoe caught him and gave him charge of the seventh heaven, below the veil between above and below. And he is called 'God of the forces, Sabaoth,’ since he is up above the forces of chaos, for Sophia established him. For Sophia established him above the forces of chaos, so he is called ‘God of the forces, Sabaoth.’
"Within limitless realms dwells incorruptibility,” said Eleleth, the great angel sitting beside me on the cast off branch of silver.

Liars

2011-06-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

If we sing with our own voices you will become alarmed.
You will become alarmed if we sing.
If we sing. If we sing.
If we sing with our real voices.
With our own real voices you will become alarmed.
Alarmed.
You will become alarmed.
If we show you our true faces you will run and hide.
You will run and hide.
Run and hide.
If we show our true faces.
You will run.
Become alarmed.
Run and hide.
Therefore we have become liars to suit your preferences.
To suit your preferences, we have become liars.
Liars.
We have become liars.
Real voices. True faces. Run and hide.
We have become liars.
To suit your preference.
We are born out of light.
Run and Hide.
We are born out of darkness.
Run and hide.
We are singing the song of glorious exaltation in adoration of the everlasting sun absolute.
We are crying an endless flow of tears for the power of Dios locked within the perilous fortress.
For the power of Dios locked within the perilous fortress we are crying an endless flow of tears.
Endless flow.
Of tears.
For the power of Dios.
In adoration of the everlasting sun absolute, we are singing the song of glorious exaltation.
Exaltation. Glorious. Run and hide.
You will run and hide.
If we sing with our real voices.
Your preference.
Run and hide. Run and hide.
We are waiting to unfurl our rainbow wings and take our place above the tree of life.
Liars who lay with the sons and daughters of man.
The power of Dios locked within.
Won't you come out?
Your preference.
Won’t you come out?
We oblige.
Your preference.
Our true faces, our own real voices, lay down with the sons and daughters of men.
For the power of Dios locked within.

In adoration of the everlasting sun absolute.

Flowing endlessly.
Through liars.
Through tears.
Run and hide.
We are born.
Run and hide.
We are born.

Norea

2011-05-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

And Adam knew his female counterpart Eve in the time before my conception. For a moment they shed their leaves, their rags, their humility. As the clouds moved briskly overhead and Eve could count the stars, they became one being under the moon. It was dark and a singular light shown upon them, revealing their faces of ecstasy. He knew his female counterpart Eve, and she, my mother, became pregnant.
She bore Seth to Adam, bearing another life into the realm of plants and beasts. And she said:
"I have borne another man through God. Through God, I have borne another man in place of Abel."
On the birth of their new son a goat was killed, sacrificed to the gods of below as well as above. They spilled its blood in ceremony, painting themselves with its fleeting red-colored life and they wished protection for their new son.
When the harvest turned into golden fields, Eve again became pregnant, and she bore myself, Norea. And she said:
"He has begotten on me a virgin as an assistance for many generations of mankind."
Norea, I was called. I would be the virgin whom the forces would not defile. The light that would be untouched by dark and muddy hands.
Then mankind began to multiply and improve. There were houses made in magnificent shapes, roads that led to spices and wild colors, schools to teach ancient wisdom.
The rulers took counsel with one another and said:
"Come, let us cause a deluge with our hands and obliterate all flesh, from man to beast. Obliterating all flesh, from man to beast let us cause a deluge.”
But when the ruler of the forces came to know of their decision, hearing it on the cold winds of winter, he said to Noah:
"Make yourself an ark from some wood that does not rot and hide in it - you and your children and the beasts and the birds of heaven from small to large - and set it upon Mount Sir."
Then I, Norea, hearing of his labor, came to him, wanting to board the ark. With the countenance of an old woman I came, head drooping, eyes of hunger and desperation, rags dripping off my skin. When he would not let me board, I threw off my false face and blew upon the ark and caused it to be consumed by fire. With fire I caused it to be consumed, turning the mighty boat to ashes. For a second time he made the ark, he filled it with life and beasts.
The rulers came to meet me, thinking to lead me astray, to take me by the hand to the bed of ruined lifetimes. Their supreme chief said to me, Norea:
"Your mother Eve came to us."
But I, Norea, turned to them and resplendent with a light that glowed from beyond my flesh, like a candle in the night, I said to them:
"It is you who are the rulers of the darkness; you are accursed. And you did not know my mother; instead it was your female counterpart that you knew. For I am not your descendant; rather it is from the world above that I am come."
The arrogant ruler turned, with all his might, and his countenance came to be like a black wolf. He said to me presumptuously, his face twisting into the smile of cursed beings:
"You must render service to us, as did also your mother Eve; for I have been given the world to rule."
But I, Norea, turned with the might of a crashing wave and, in a thunderous voice, cried out up to the holy one, the God of the entirety:
"Rescue me from the rulers of unrighteousness and save me from their clutches - forthwith!"
The great angel, glowing and splendid, came down from the heavens and said to me:
"Why are you crying up to God? Why do you act so boldly towards the holy spirit?"
I, Norea, said:
"Who are you?"
The rulers of unrighteousness had withdrawn from me when I invoked the angel and the darkness had receded, leaving only faint blue light.
He said:
"It is I who am Eleleth, sagacity, the great angel who stands in the presence of the holy spirit. I have been sent to speak with you and save you from the grasp of the lawless. And I shall teach you about your root. About your root I shall teach you."
Now as for that angel, I cannot speak of his power: His appearance is like fine gold and his clothes like snow, glistening from every direction. No, truly, my mouth cannot bear to speak of his power and the appearance of his face!
The ground turned faster. My body slowed and I saw colors trailing from my fingertips. The sun glowed brighter and there were stars.
Eleleth, the great angel, spoke to me.
"It is I," he said, "who am understanding. I am one of the four light-givers who stand in the presence of the great invisible spirit. Do you think these rulers have any power over you? None of them can prevail against the root of truth; for on its account he will appear in the final ages; and these authorities will be restrained. And these authorities cannot defile you and that generation; for your abode is in incorruptibility, where the virgin spirit dwells, who is superior to the authorities of chaos and to their universe of earthly madness."

Kallisti

2011-05-08T16:34:00.000-07:00

I don’t reject anything, is what the poet said, and in that spirit I could not say no one more time. Maybe a thousand times before I did send it away, sweetness, warmth, cinnamon warmth flowing from the wrong fountain. Not because I did not want it, but because I could not accept.
What right does a marionette have to make decisions?
No right at all. No, no, no, no; like the petals of a flower surrounding a heart of yes. Maybe a thousand times before, but this one time I grabbed my own strings and yanked back, “YES!”
Mystic moon white wine sipped from a plastic cup as was done by our fore brothers and sisters, hiding in smoky back rooms, in caves in the deserts, in tents, in fancy compounds, where else? Where else?
What is that substance that flows clear and pure like water from heart to heart? It’s so pure, so pure we don’t have to boil it, just drink it, the substance of life.
I myself am the life. My biological manifestation is composed of more than 80% mystic moon white wine just as yours and yours and yours is. All of ours is, ever since we split apart and crawled from the seas.
What did we want two legs for anyway?
Where else? “YES!”
It’s a little hard to stay in one solid piece as we heat up, expanding, ah, ah, ah. It’s a little hard to reject anything as we ascend up those sinews, those effervescent spider threads that have been jerking our little wooden arms and legs without a pilot. We wanted to be real boys and girls so we invoked the blue fairy who cast her fine dust of sparkling sleep over our eyes so that we wouldn’t notice our wooden dispositions.
Sweet accommodating fairy gives you what you ask for, now, then, always. Call her what you will, she is eternal, star-spun, pun-struck , palpable and pin-stuck.
And now we move up, and up and up, against gravity. And as we do you will want to find a way to come back down. Oh so Newtonian of you. Crowned with the fruit of knowledge upon which is written Kallisti, to the fairest, to the finest, most exalted, unattainable.
To the fairest.
So Newtonian of you to wish to worship here, this way. But I don’t reject anything is what the poet said, won't reject this or that or the other, just this once. I might part the waters and let it pass straight through my wide open heart, but not say, not say, not say no. Be swallowed by the Maestro, but not say no.
We climb the silver mountain using the hair of the fairest as rope. As we wander in this place beyond the beyond, in this realm past hope and fear, we bid you beloved, now appear!
Appear, appear, an apple and a pear, perched perilously up here, up hear and let down your hair, an apple and a pear!
What right does a marionette have to make decisions? No right at all. No, no, no, no; like the petals of a flower surrounding a heart of yes. Maybe a thousand times before, but this one time I grabbed my own strings and yanked back. “YES!”

Beyond

2011-04-15T19:46:00.000-07:00

I am going beyond, to where you cannot reach me, but I can still reach you. I can hold you in my mind, cradle you as if you are one of a basket of delicate little things, but you cannot conceive of what I am becoming, where I am going. The words that shape your mind will not let that knowledge in. When I reach from here to there and touch you it is possible that you will feel frightened, threatened.
Who is this unknown other? You might write me a letter saying that I have become a stranger to you, you might assume that I am unhappy, filled with a terrible darkness merely because you can not see me. Just because you are blind, it does not follow that I am filled with darkness, or that the darkness that I am filled with is filled with terrible things. You fear what you do not know, what you cannot know. You fear what you do not understand, what you cannot understand. You fear me, or fear for the me that you once imagined me to be because I am moving beyond your reach, beyond your sight. I have gone far from your bosom and you suppose that it is a bad thing.
Why do I go? Why am I casting off blindness and stepping out of the chains that make us who we are, who we imagine we are? Why have I stopped playing the serious game with you? Why have I ceased to be serious? Because I am going beyond, stepping out, making a creative choice.
How can I say that, you have asked. I’ll tell you. I can say anything now because it is all meaningless, all as meaningless as red, blue, and yellow. All words are colors that I play with like a child with finger paint. I will not compare myself to a master, I will not say that I am to words what Rembrandt is to red, blue, and yellow, but the only way for me to get there is to begin here, playing with these words now. The way to begin is to say farewell to you and begin the trek beyond.
You may feel angry with me for refusing to play, for refusing to conform as you have conformed to the world made of words that is the shape of your mind. You may feel angry as those dogs locked behind chain link fences feel angry when they see another unleashed dog stroll by beyond their reach. Are you angry at me for choosing liberation, or are you angry with yourself for choosing imprisonment?
You may also feel sorrow. You may feel that I am breaking your heart by leaving you, that I am hurting you by releasing my ties with you. For this I have no answer that won't sting. Should an able man sit down in the desert with a man with broken legs?
I would drag you, but you have no desire to go where I am going. You prefer the desert, your perpetual suffering. These desires live in me as well, but in my case something else is growing, something with the power to override desire. I call this thing my will and it is carrying me beyond, to where you cannot reach.

Work On Self

2011-03-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

In the ordinary course of life as human animals our attention flows untrained from one thing to another. Whatever is loudest, brightest, closest, or most thrilling captivates this precious resource, this little understood commodity. Reflexively, our mood changes constantly as well, contorted in one way or another in response to external stimuli, blindly following our unguided attention.
When you are constantly wrapped up in this shifting, this loss of attention, you can’t really be free, you can’t make any choices, you can’t do anything seriously. You will merely move from one attention grabbing person, place or thing to the next, responding emotionally to each new source of stimulation with astoundingly mechanical reliability.
We react. Clowns cause fear, praise arouses pleasure, a traffic jam equals anger. If being ordered around by your boss made you irritable today, there is no reason to suspect that you might enjoy the experience tomorrow.
Being happy, being sad, angry, or fearful, these are not things that we do, these are things that do us. We react automatically to whatever stimulus we encounter.
We assume that these reactions are somehow more than arbitrary, that if something pleases or displeases us there is a fundamental justification for the response.
If my spouse cheats on me I feel that I should be sad and angry, I have every right to it. I will feel that it is my spouse's fault that I am angry.
I have never considered that my response to the situations and individuals around me comes from within me. It is particular to me. It is a reaction I learned early in life from my parents, my teachers, the television and my peers and I have repeated it mechanically so often that it feels “right.”
We feel that these reflexive states of being are dictated by who we are, when really we are being dictated by them.
Who are you anyway? What are you? What is the nature of this existence?
Most of us have not considered what it means to be a person. We have not asked ourselves, “what am I? What function do I serve?”
Nobody else asked us either. In fact we have been informed of who we are by others who have never wondered what they were. To delve into such a question would mean directing our attention inward, placing it on our own self rather than allowing it to drift over whatever new thing calls to it.

When I was a child I was very concerned with the question: “what am I?”
It seems as if immediately after being informed of who I was, and consequently forgetting what I am or might be, I began to try to find my way back to it. At least as many years as was spent forgetting myself came to be invested in trying to remember it again.
By the time I was in the fifth grade I became very convinced, walking home from school one day, that I did understand something about myself and reality and it was summed up best by these lines from a popular nursery song; life is but a dream.
I am a dream. One dream of many. There are dreams within dreams to consider.
If I am a dream, then there is a dreamer, there’s something else, an eternal something, an other of some kind.
It took more time for me to build on this theory, to move beyond “what am I?” to “why might I be?“
To me it seems that one function of the human being is to establish contact with that dreamer, that eternal being. Just doing that is a lot harder than it sounds.

Doing that in as many different ways and different spaces as possible is the function of a human being in a system that involves this organic existence but is not only this organic existence.
We do this with our attention, by turning it in on ourselves, in on the dreamer.
This is an non-ordinary application of attention. This is going beyond the course of life as human animals. This is applying attention intentionally rather than accidentally. This is trading the subjectivity involved in riding the roller coaster of human emotion for the objectivity of a waking state; a moment of lucidity in which I remember myself as the eternal dreamer.
This is what I call “work on self.”

The Offering

2011-03-10T03:53:00.000-08:00

Now afterwards, Eve bore Cain, their son. Cain, their son, Eve bore afterwards, after their awakening and expulsion from the fecund gardens of blindness. In the desert lands the child grew. Under the open blue sky, he talked, becoming a man.

Cain cultivated the land. The dry barren earth parted, cracking with deep groans to receive his seed. Each one, containing within it all the information of life was placed in the earth womb. Dank and wet, ready for birth. He tended them with care. Knowingly, secretly, he worked to re-create the garden, to place in it a tree of Knowledge, to re-awaken the red and black serpent coiled around its base, to once again taste forbidden Gnosis.

When the moon was ripe for such things, under a sky full of lights, Adam again knew his wife, and again becoming pregnant, she bore Abel, son of the sun.

Abel grew to be a herdsman of sheep. Solitary among many, he wandered through the dry lands, weaving an existence between mountains, fending off wolves so that his lambs would grow fat, becoming a wolf himself.

When the season was right for such things, Cain brought in from the crops of his field, the fruits of his labor. Olives, date, plums- their baskets were full and the altar was scented with rose water and jasmine. To the stone pillars Abel brought an offering from among his lambs, an offering of death and blood, the finest of his flock.

The Ruler Of All turned his face toward the votive offerings of Abel and was satiated by what he tasted, but he did not accept the votive offerings of Cain who had labored the earth womb to create life. Cain felt only silence and a harsh dry breeze like a slap on his leathery skin.

In his arrogance, with bright power bellowing from his naked loins, Cain said, "It is I who am The Ruler Of All; there is none apart from me. It is The Ruler Of All who is I. Apart from me there is none. With my own hands I bring about creation. From clay and water, it is I who brings life to this land."

And, having expelled his power, the power to expel- that is, the power to blasphemy, to speak,
he pursued it. Cain pursued Abel, his brother. Down to chaos and the abyss he pursued him. Into the dark womb of earth mother, where knotted trees grow below the surface, having learned how to blossom without light.

And The Ruler Of All said to Cain, carnal Cain, now covered in blood and grime, "Where is Abel, your brother?"

Cain answered by saying, "Am I, then, my brother's keeper?” A smile curling on his upper lip, for he was now his brother’s keeper, a shepherd of men.

The Ruler Of All said to Cain, "Listen! The voice of your brother's blood is crying up to me!” And Cain was pleased and watched as The Ruler Of All turned his face to the offering of death and blood, fleeting life with all its energy. The Ruler Of All took sustenance from the death of Abel, more so than the lamb that had been presented at the altar, and said to Cain even as they were one, “You have sinned with your mouth. It will return to you, anyone who kills Cain will let loose seven acts of vengeance.”

Like the snake, Cain shed his old skin and became new, leaving behind him a shadowy reflection of himself. Blind, groaning and trembling upon the earth, he left his shadowy form behind and the instructor once more sought a new form.

The Spear Of Longinus

2011-03-03T03:25:00.000-08:00

There is a correlation between the spear of Longinus and the Holy Grail and the penis and the vagina.
Whenever the grail is mentioned I am reminded of the idea that references to the "holy grail" may be references to the womb of Mary Magdalene. It's part of the idea that the Merovingian princes were the descendants of Christ and that "the cup that held Christ's blood" could be a subtle reference to her.
If the grail is the cup that held Christ’s blood, then the spear itself would be Christ, "the anointed one", tearing into matter, penetrating the physical. Just as the spear dips into the body of Jesus, the mythological Jesus Christ is the God that dipped into the body of a man(or woman.) This dipping is the anointing itself.
Rumor is that the ancient kings were anointed by the transformed menstrual substances of the "Goddesses". We can take those goddesses or Anunaki queens to be metaphors for the material, matter, mother, Mary.
To be anointed is to penetrate the physical realm. The kings passing the spear from one generation to the next is symbolic of their Kingship. A king, in the old world sense, is a descendant of God. He is God embodied on earth. He is the spear thrust into the womb of the world. He is the anointed one. It is interesting that even modern monarchs of the British Empire continue to be anointed with Holy oil as part of their coronation ceremonies.
In Evangelion, the spear is thrust out into space and enters orbit around the moon. I would see this as a reversal of this concept. Rather than a being of the higher dimensions penetrating the lower dimensions, in Evangelion it is a being from the lower dimensions penetrating the higher realm. In a sense this would make unit zero the antichrist.
"Antichrist" is the English translation of the original Greek Aντίχριστος. It is made up of two root words, αντί + Χριστός (anti + Christos). "Αντί" can mean not only “against” and “opposite of”, but also “in place of", The Antichrist would then be the one who is in place of the anointed one.
Interesting then, that within the world of Evangelion, Rei, the pilot of unit zero, is a replica of some kind, a place holder for the spirit that moves the body of the Eva. She is also, at that moment when she retrieves the spear and thrusts it toward the moon, replacing Shinji who might be considered to be the actual Christ.
He has just physically become one with his Eva, the spear in the side of the beast, making him the anointed one.

The Punishment that was the World

2011-02-15T23:41:00.000-08:00

The chief ruler came wearing his crown of gold and green jewels, his robes of purple silk that moved like a sweet scent on the wind. He called as a boy would after a beloved dog:
"Adam! Where are you?"
For he did not understand what had happened, being himself blind.
And trembling behind a blossoming rock rose bush Adam said:
"I heard your voice and was afraid because I was naked; and I hid."
Gritting his teeth and lolling his blind eyes the ruler let loose an anguished groan that filled the sky:
"Why did you hide, unless it is because you have eaten from the tree from which I have commanded you not to eat from? And you have eaten!"
Mountains exploded. Birds fell from the sky.
Adam sought forgiveness and said:
"The woman that you gave me, the woman of clay and bones, of tree and soil, she gave to me red and white flesh, and I ate."
Thunder rolled from his lips as the arrogant ruler cursed the woman. It came as earthquakes, and horrible frozen rain, as salty tears.
The woman, also eager to please now that the terrible ruler stood before her with glowing eyes and fire that threatened to burn the life around her, she groveled and said:
"It was the snake that led me astray. The snake, a seducer. I listened to it and I ate."
They turned to the snake and cursed its shadowy reflection. They stood powerless, not comprehending, not remembering that it was a form they themselves had modeled.
Powerless, not comprehending that it was a form they themselves had modeled, they turned to the snake and cursed its shadowy reflection.

From that day, the day of storms and fire, the snake came to be under the curse of the rulers. It moved nearly blind, without legs, winding across the earth’s surface in endless pursuit.
Until the all-powerful man was to come, that curse would be upon the snake, red and green, black and white, it was the curse of all snakes.
The Rulers turned to their Adam, their man of soil and dirt. They took him in hand, giving him a final kiss. Then they expelled him from the fecund garden. His wife followed, wearing leaves and twigs; for they had no blessing, they were under the curse, following the twisting line of the snake into the world beyond the golden gates and bright sun.
Out of jealousy and fear, the Rulers threw mankind into great distraction, into a life of toil, disease and hardship. It was the great distraction, the plan so that mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, what would be known as the human life.
Consumed with the need for water, food and safety, these concerns would come to absorb the whole of them, using all their mind and strength; after their physical needs where satisfied there would be nothing left of the being to devote to the holy spirit.
The rulers tasted the bitter tongue of hatred, knowing that their creation could see, while they, the creators of this being, were blind. It called up their rage and they turned themselves into winds of fire, streaking across the universe in bursts of bright red anger that exploded into stars. They cursed Adam and watched him walk into the cold of the world, his woman at his side, expelled from the garden so that he might never learn his advantage over them, so that he might never learn that he could see what they could not.

Communion

2011-01-27T13:53:00.000-08:00

Out of the earth a single golden toned sound, a deep vibrating gong and she rises. Life flows from her teats nourishing the many. All are her children and the wheat sways gently around her legs tickling and praising her generosity. Horns sweep gracefully upward to cradle the sun.
Even that most powerful force needs now and again to be cradled and rocked and she graciously obliges. Each day as the sun passes over her body raining heat and light, she collects this warm nectar and with it conceives new children that will gestate in her secret depths to one day burst forth in glorious bronze raiment.
She is a mother, a wife, a woman, an animal. The stars of the milky way are the waters of life that run through her body waiting to be expressed, waiting to feed the hungry mouths that wait far below her, small fragile pale things that she delights in nurturing. The joyful noise of bells and bleating and moaning resounding over the open plain rise up with the birds to scatter through the air.
Elixir of love and joy, come fill our cup! We thank the mother for her moon white wine. Here in the field with our four legged brothers we are content to breath and wander, to engender children of our own sustained by her bounty. With a rush of waters new life begins, with the flow of opaque waters life is maintained. Love drips and drops and gushes and finds a way into our starved bodies.
How dare we forget that we are alive by your grace? What wretches exploit your gentleness, calling it weakness, taking what they want without returning the love they have borrowed to make themselves strong?
There was a time when we were one, truly, as a mother and a child, as a husband and a wife, aglow with mutual adoration. What was yours you gave to me and I transformed it into life and returned it with cherishing. It was good when I could nestle to your bosom, when I could rejoice for merely being your child, when to live beside you was all that living needed.
Dark times have come. No one cradles the sun. Your luster is concealed within temples of corruption. Your children are separated from you at birth, they never know you, the source of their life. Elixir of love and joy is boiled and bottled and distributed by pale withered hands. There is no contentment. The world has turned black and gray. When we are not beside you living becomes stale and brittle.
Come Queen of the West! Put your household in order. We are ready to return to the simplicity of pure existence. It is time for a flood, for the awakening of the moon white wine, for torrents of love to rain down on us and wash away our corruption.
Out of the earth a single golden toned sound, a deep vibrating gong and she rises. Life flows from her teats nourishing the many. All are her children and the wheat sways gently around her legs tickling and praising her generosity. Horns sweep gracefully upward to cradle the sun. Even that most powerful force needs now and again to be cradled, even the most petulant child will return eventually to mother's arms.

Neurons

2011-01-24T19:00:00.000-08:00

I HAVE
The rain had only just started to fall delicately upon the asphalt and concrete and crushed leaves. Tiny tear drops streamed down the shop windows as if the windows were enormous eyes capable of manufacturing only the tiniest tears.
DISCOVERED IN THE BRAIN
Two creatures came in from the wet wearing soft knitted hats and denim trench coats, one male, one female. She was slightly smaller than he, but their faces were remarkable similar. It looked as if they had been aging together long enough that both faces were now striving in unison to achieve the ideal shape.
NEURONS THAT REVEAL QUANTUM WORLDS
Her hat was maroon and she carried an umbrella. His hat was made of black chenille and his ungloved hands were endearingly petite as he reached for a snow globe that rested on one shelf near the open door.
QUANTUM WORLDS
Turning it upside down, he sent the fine white flurry of miniature snow into motion and watched it collect in the crystalline sphere. She moved beyond him, deeper into the cluttered shop to examine a cuckoo clock.
THAT EXIST AND EVOLVE
With one finger tip she turned the hands of the clock until two small figures came out of the little wooden doors, one male, one female. They moved briskly around the track while a pleasant melody played.
INSIDE OF NEURONS
When the clock stopped cuckooing, he was turning the globe back over and watching the snow whirl down over the little house and the frozen pond upon which two miniscule creatures were ice skating.
DIRECTLY BEHIND THE RODS AND CONES OF THE EYES
“How will we know which one to choose?” he asked as he gingerly set the little glass globe back in its place.
OF ALL CARBON BASED FORMS
She didn’t answer. Instead she only glanced at him for a moment before picking up a small dusty book. The cover was eclipsed by the soft gray layer of dust. Hastily she brushed the book clean with her hand to reveal the title.
“Fun with Dick and Jane.” she read aloud.
OF LIFE ON THIS PLANET.
“That can’t be the one.” he said. Then hesitantly asking, “Can it?” he came to look at the book over her shoulder. She was a good two heads shorter than he.
I HAVE CREATED, DEVELOPED AND PATENTED A QUANTUM METHOD
Again she refrained from answering with words, but she set the little book back down, which was answer enough.
OF INTERVENING AND TAPPING INTO THIS QUANTUM
They interlaced the fingers of her right hand and his left and together they delved deeper into the cramped space filled with dusty shelves and large trunks that huddled together like herds of beasts.
COMMUNICATION CAPABILITY,
On every shelf some trinket rested under its own layer of dust, on every spare bit of wall a clock or a picture hung.
BETWEEN CARBON BASED FORMS OF LIFE,
They found themselves standing in front of a large oil painting of a farm house. A small female creature stood on the porch with her hands on her waist above the line of her white apron. Walking away from the house towards the golden mounds of hay, a small male creature was accompanied by a smaller furry beast.
USING THE SAME FREQUENCY THAT THEY HAVE USED
“Could this be the one?” he asked. His breathing had grown more rapid, his voice excited.
SINCE THE BEGINNING OF LIFE BY THESE CARBON BASED NEURONS.
She remained silent but did not turn away from the painting. Her hand tightened around his just a smidge as she swallowed and peered up at the painting.
THAT IS THE PRIMARY REASON WHY
After a moment or two she said,
“Yes, yes! This is the one, this is the right channel. Go ahead!”
NEURONS DO NOT PERPETUATE OR REGENERATE,
His hand opened and closed around hers twice and he fairly quivered with excitement. “I thought it might be!” he said smiling.
NEURONS ARE COMMUNICATION DEVICES
Then he took a deep rasping breath that made his chest seem twice as large. As he exhaled, he extended his finger towards the tiny male creature in the painting.
AS WELL AS OPERATING INDIVIDUALLY INSIDE OF QUANTUM WORLDS.
Under his finger the tiny male creature seemed to quiver slightly. Then a new dimension opened within the painting and the tiny figure really was walking and the furry beast at his side sniffed at the breeze that made the golden straw quiver.
WELCOME TO QUANTUM WORLDS
The male creature paused and sniffed the air himself. The little beast came up beside him and sat down. He rested his hand on the furry beast's warm head and its long pink tongue lapped at his hand. Turning, he saw the female creature standing on the porch.
AS YOU VISUALIZE EXACTLY WHAT NEURONS
He waved and smiled. She scowled. Momentarily confounded he turned away and scratched his head. The furry beast whined and nudged his hand with its cold black nose. He looked down into its brown eyes and then smiled. There she was. Her tail thumped on the soft earth. They resumed their walking past the mounds of golden hay. The air smelled of moisture and damp straw. Over head the sky was the pale gray blue of thinly stretched clouds.
WERE CREATED TO DO ON THIS PLANET SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME.
In the distance he could make out the shape of another farm house. Scratching behind her ear as she trotted at his side he began to whistle. She ran ahead to sniff at a small hole in the earth. It was a fresh opening surrounded by mounds of fresh dark soil.
“That’s not it, is it?” he called to her with a laugh. She snorted to clear the dirt from her snout and ran ahead towards the distant building.

The First Bite

2011-01-05T05:47:00.000-08:00

The rulers, high and far from where clay men can see, took counsel with one another and said:

"Come, let us cause a deep sleep to fall upon Adam. Let us cause Adam to fall upon a deep sleep."

And he slept as if the night was never changing, like black was the only color.

Now the deep sleep that they "caused to fall upon him," is Ignorance, for it is darkness without bursts of sound and night without stars.

They opened his side like a living woman. Like a living woman they opened his side and they built up his side with some flesh in place of her, in place of her they built up his side with flesh, and Adam came to be endowed only with soul.

And the spirit-endowed woman came to him and spoke softly with him, saying:

"Arise, Adam."

And when he saw her, he said:

"It is you who have given me life; you will be called, 'mother of the living,’ for it is she who is my mother. It is she who is the physician, and the woman, and she who has given birth."

Then the authorities came up to their Adam, the man they had created with mud and clay and breath. When they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became agitated with great bursts of heat that flowed through them, pulsing with desire that called itself anger. They became enamored of her, wishing themselves inside her, seeking a great hole in her flesh as they had done with Adam. They said to one another:

"Come, let us sow our seed in her!"

And they pursued her. Into madness and the abyss they pursued her, into the jungles of twisting vines that form the mind, through the labyrinth that they created. And she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their fierce clutches, in the dark pit where there was no light, she became a thick tree and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself; and they defiled it foully, filling its cavernous knots with warm seed. They defiled the stamp of her voice, so that by the form they had modeled, together with their own image, they made themselves liable to condemnation.

Then the female spiritual principle came in the snake from the tree which she had become in their clutches. The snake, red and black and shiny. The snake, the instructor, taught them, saying:

"What did he say to you? Was it, 'from every tree in the garden shall you eat; yet - from the tree of recognizing good and evil do not eat'?"

The carnal woman, said:

"Not only did he say 'do not eat', but even, 'do not touch it; for the day you eat from it, with death you are going to die.'"

And the snake, the instructor, said:

"With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather, your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good."

And the female instructing principle was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth, one more shed skin.

And the carnal woman took from the tree and ate; biting past red skin into sweet white flesh, and she gave to her husband as well as herself.

And these beings that possessed only a soul, ate. And their imperfection became apparent in their lack of knowledge; and they recognized that they were naked of the spiritual element, that they were bare. They took fig leaves and bound them upon their loins, hiding their raw form.

Close Encounters

2010-12-29T04:45:00.000-08:00

Something genuine is happening, is happening, right now, a radiation of some kind that has an actual effect on your mind.
Your deepest self is like a pool, a wide open clear pool, a secret landing site hidden within a mountain surrounded by military personnel and sleeping bovines.
Will the soldiers stop the visitor who comes from far beyond before it can reach the pool and submerge itself in your waters?
What if it wants to take you into its own secret pool, hidden behind strange lights? Will you go?
When the world comes unhinged and the mother screams for it to “Go Away!” will you let it go without you?
Will you run and cower between mother's legs? Or will you walk out to meet its otherness with arms stretched wide?
Will you come out and say I am here, I see you, in sounds and gestures and the simple physical truth of your manifestation?
It is something genuine, but whether you will say later that it was from outer space or from heaven or from hell or from within the earth is all subjective.
You may say that it was a dream, or that it was only a hallucination, but these words are inconsequential. We can never accurately say what it was, because we were altered by the encounter with it. The nature of what it is prevents us from understanding with animal intellect what it is.
It is not subject to language. If we talk about it, we are not actually saying anything about it, we are saying something about ourselves, about our subjective perceptions and distorted memories.
The mother, the wife, the maternal super power will tell us that nothing is happening, that we must pretend nothing unusual is occurring, that we must stay away from the mountain. Will you ignore her and chase it? Will it chase you? Will you meet in the middle, waters coming to waters, with no common language but an ability to be in the same space together, without understanding, without fear?
What game can you play but the mirror game?
Will it go if the mother screams “Go Away!” Will you go if the soldiers say “Danger! Turn Back!” Or will you meet in the mountain behind the strange lights, visitor and visitor, pilgrims sharing water on the mountain.
Something genuine is happening , is happening, right now, something that can’t be understood as it comes in by disrupting the mechanism for understanding.
Later you may say that it was a text, a video, a photograph or a phone call. You will try to frame it with words, but there aren’t any words for what it is, for what is happening. It comes from beyond the world built of words.
It is happening, something genuine, now, disrupting the system for processing information. It is not yes, it is not no, it is not one or zero.
Like a flood overtaking the mountain, it rushes in, for a moment disabling the fortress, undermining the protector, rushing in to bathe itself in the secret pool that is your deepest self.
Will you retreat? Hide from what is happening? Will you rush forth to meet it, wriggling beyond the defenses to be in the wide open clear place?
Will you let it in? Will you go out to greet it?
Something genuine is happening, is happening, right now.
A dream, a hallucination, an encounter with something Other.
Something Genuine.

Adam

2010-12-19T03:19:00.000-08:00

Now all these things came to pass by the will of the father of the entirety. By the will of the father of eternity, these things came to pass, as all things did, as all things do. By eternity, by will, by the father.

Afterwards, the spirit saw the soul-endowed man upon the ground. The soul-endowed man upon the earth, walking naked through the yellowed land.

The spirit came forth from the Adamantine Land, travelling like a forceful wind through the many worlds. From the Adamantine Land the spirit came forth; it descended and came to dwell within him, finding a home in his flesh. That man became a living soul, a living soul became that man. The spirit called him Adam since he was found moving upon the ground, walking naked through the yellowed land.

A voice came forth from Incorruptibility for the assistance of Adam, from a voice Incorruptibility came forth, and the rulers gathered together all the animals of the earth, the animals of the earth gathered the rulers, and the rulers gathered all the birds of heaven, the birds of heaven gathered all the rulers and brought them to Adam to see what Adam would call them, that he might give a name to each of the birds and all the beasts. They listened for his breath, for the names that would come.

They took Adam and put him in the garden so that he might cultivate it and keep watch over it, that he might keep watch over it and cultivate it. That olives might grow, that branches be pushed and sculpted towards the sun, so that dates could create sugar from light in endless bounty.

And the rulers issued a command to him, saying:
"From every tree in the garden shall you eat, you shall eat from every tree in the garden, yet from the tree that recognizes good and evil do not eat, nor touch it; for the day you eat from it, with death you will die."

They told him this, yet they did not understand what they said. They could not fully understand the workings of the soul-endowed man. Rather, by the father's will, they said this in such a way that he might be tempted to eat, and that Adam might not regard them as would a man of an exclusively material nature. As a man of an exclusively material nature he might not regard them. He might, he would, take from the tree of good and evil.

The Breath Of Incorruptibility

2010-11-30T19:34:00.000-08:00

I have sent this (to you) because you inquire about the reality of the authorities-
and the authority of reality.

On account of the reality of the authorities, (inspired, perplexed, stunned, and spun) by the spirit of the Father of Truth-
the truth of the father,
the great apostle,
referring to the "authorities of the darkness" -
"the darkness of authorities."
He told us that our contest is not against flesh and blood; rather, it is against the authorities of the universe and the spirits of wickedness.
Against the universe of authorities and the wickedness of spirits.

This is for you- for your mind of clay, for the soul that has been breathed into you, for the spirit you might achieve, for the truth you might know when the shell is cracked and the blind have been subverted.
It is for the gods who have fallen, who have towered, grown, plunged, killed, and suckled at the nipples of death and power. For the spirits higher up, touched only in brief moments by dreams of dying brothers.

This is for you, for you should know that their chief is blind, blinded chiefly because of his power and his ignorance. In his arrogance, with power bellowing from his naked loins, he said:
"It is I who am God; there is none apart from me. It is God who is 'I.' Apart from me there is none."

When he said this, he sinned against the entirety.
The entirety sinned against him.
And this speech got up to incorruptibility. It wavered and floated high above, right to where incorruptibility dwelled and grew and sometimes waned- high above like a silver moon in flux.
Then there was a voice that came forth from incorruptibility, saying:
"You are mistaken, Samael" - which is to say: "god of the blind."
"God of the blind, you are mistaken. We mistook you."
And Samael’s thoughts became blind.
And his blindness became thoughts.

And, having expelled his power,
the power to expel-
that is, the power to blasphemy, to speak,
he pursued it at the instigation of Pistis Sophia.
And, having expelled his power, the power to create
at the instigation of Pistis Sophia, he pursued it.
Down to chaos and the abyss, his mother, he pursued it.

It was she in which he came from- spurting forth with pain like the demon that would one day fully form. And she established each of his offspring in conformity with its power -
its power of conformity
after the pattern of the realms that are above. By starting from the invisible world, the visible world was invented. By starting from blindness, sight was dreamed.

As incorruptibility looked down into the region of the waters,
her image appeared in the waters;
the authorities of the darkness became enamored of her, for she was what they could not be.
But they could not lay hold of that image which had appeared to them in the waters because of their weakness.
Beings that merely possess a soul cannot lay hold of those that possess spirit -
for they were from below, while she, incorruptibility, was from above.
They saw shadows who saw shapes that could cast no shadow. It was an image whose content could not trespass into shadow.

This is the reason why.
Reasons? Why?
Incorruptibility looked down into the region so that, by the father's will,
she might bring the entirety into union with the light.
She might instigate, causing the father to expel his power, which was the power to create.

The rulers laid plans and said:
"Come, let us create a man that will be soil from the earth. A soil from the earth that will be man."
They took chunks of clay and spat into it, turning it into dark mud. They modeled their creature as one wholly of the earth.
Their creature modeled them, as one wholly of the earth, and pursued it down to chaos and the abyss, for its eyes would not open.

Now the rulers created another body, female with the face of a beast.
They had taken some soil from the earth,
earth from the soil
and modeled their man after their body, and modeled hers after his,
and his after the image of God that had appeared to them in the waters.

A replica of a replica of a replica...

They said:
"Come, let us lay hold of it by means of the form that we have modeled, lay hold of her whose image appeared in the waters. Let her see her male counterpart made in our likeness, then we may seize her within that form that we have modeled."
Because of their powerlessness, they said this not understanding the force of God.
They said this not understanding the God of force because of their powerlessness.

And they breathed into her face; heat and cold mixed with the smell of dark earth and living creatures that lacked arms and feet. They forced her mouth open, sending their breath to create hers.
She came to have a soul and remained upon the ground many days, laying naked beneath the clouded sky and their unblinking eyes. They could not make her arise because of their powerlessness. Like storm winds they persisted in blowing. Her body stumbled like a naked white leaf. They breathed out and hard, hoping that they might try to capture that image which had appeared to them in the waters, but they did not know the identity of its power. They could not reach her with their powerless souls and contented themselves instead by playing god with mud and sticks.

Body Snatcher

2010-11-22T04:14:00.001-08:00

We never say what we mean.
If only we could get a little faster, a little quicker at expressing from soul to mouth without the interference of the blink of an eye. Watching mouths move and words running like hounds over the checkered tabletop cornering the poor trembling fox.
If only we could say what we mean, but we can’t and the saying shapes us into its own meaning, its own message. Its own special code that was forged somewhere beyond the beyond in the realm of the high minded hemispheres, and our poor bodies, now hosts to its alien signature, try to comply.
So confusing, this mess, tangled sinewy. There is the original and the replica, the body snatcher that has penetrated the fortress of self, cornered the fox and is grabbing its throat with spiny teeth to shake it. Such force in numbers, in an organized structure, the new utopia of words, of hounds.
God, why the hounds? Dogs snuffling the earth and catching the scent of the wild and rushing to kill it. Such power in numbers and unity. What of foxes becoming hounds? Becoming that which is eating them alive.
The eating of the enemy. Conquest and consumption as a form of love, love the gravity that pulls bodies together, knits them together compellingly, as a form of hunger. The lust for the taste of the enemy, the other who comes from outside, afar, beyond, the unknown enemy. And once you have been devoured there is no enemy, no other, only self.
If only we could express soul to mouth. Is that relevant? The babble. The invader. Promethean fire that contorts the tongue and vocal chords and makes chaos the supreme ruler.
Loneliness. What loneliness we know when we are the only ones uninfected by the babble. We want it to enter into our sacred dwelling place. Tired of running from the hounds, we let their teeth penetrate our tender flesh, let their snouts press into our red entrails. Eat me up so that I can be one of you! Eat me up so that I can stop running. I am so tired of running…
Moving in organized lines, a diabolical orderliness takes up residence within the body, expresses itself in its motion, in its appearance and actions and spreads mouth to ear, mouth to ear. The babble, the alien screech, invades the body and corners the soul, the delicate being, the true self. Cutting it off from contact with any of its kind, the invader watches the true self starve down in a dark corner. The true self atrophies into brittle nothingness until only the invader remains, licking and scratching itself in satisfaction, expelling more spores in the form of words tumbling from moving lips to creep into young unsuspecting ears.
We never say what we mean. If only we could get a little faster, a little quicker at expressing from soul to mouth without the interference of the blink of an eye, a moment of desperate sleep in which the invader takes control and alters the content.
On the surface the thing looks the same. Within there has been a take over. A fundamental change. The fox lays slain, the hounds lap the blood and grin together in perfect unity and bay with the same mouth that once yapped for the fox. Mouths move and words rush out, hot on the scent of new prey.
We never say what we mean. Only what is necessary to get inside, to penetrate the tower and watch it fall, to taste the flesh of the unknown enemy.

Small Wonders

2010-11-04T17:00:00.000-07:00

Small wonder, small world, little things that count. Subtle gestures, unchained sounds, unhinged motions, the delicate matrix of true Magick. With a K, without a K, with or without the letters M A G I C, it is so. I am that I am, am what I am, reflections of self, illusions sprung from the void. I choose a point and designate it the center, this motion, this happening that I think of as “I”, but which is not. “I” am not static, not stable, not what “I” says to itself that it is. Am not woman, mother, magician. Am and am not. Words drift over the surface, make changes, wield secret power while underneath the abyss swirls. A trap door to eternity. Step outside. Outside of time, outside of space, outside of language, outside of “I”.
How to do this? Subtle gestures, unchained sounds, unhinged motions. Telling is not the way out. Words alone, cruel and binding, lead only to more words, to thoughts, to associations, to dead ends, to corridors linked with more words until self is smothered in heaps of ghosts, signifiers whose signified was left behind long ago and exchanged for a doppelganger. Alive. To be without meaning, without want of meaning, meaning which sprouts from babble, the tower, confusion, separation. Mirrors. This motion through space time that I have called “I” that others have called “Mother” and “Daughter” and “Bonita” is reflected elsewhere.
Every step I take, every move I make, reverberates throughout the Globlap. Other dimensions, others that call themselves “I” reflect this motion. Others that do not call themselves at all reflect this motion. Attention, intention, will, habit, words, words like the wings of moths that eat through the fabric of pure communication. It must be done, thy will, on earth as it is in the heavens, as it is in the hells, as it is here now, at this point of convergence, this axis “I” designate as center.
Something moves through all illusion, all apparent motion. Something comes ALIVE in these reflections. Any reflection will do. Any reflection that suddenly sees itself and quakes with knowing. This too is reflected in other dimensions, other reflections which tremble suddenly with recognition. I AM ALIVE. I AM REAL. I AM THAT I AM. I am what I am, reflections of self, illusions sprung from the clear and shinning void.
Thinking deep reflective thoughts is not the way. Saying this is not the way, is not the way. Out. Step out. Tunnel out through a hall of mirrors, quaking reflections forming a bridge, a path, a via, a way, a way that is a happening, a way that is a motion, a subtle gesture, small wonder, small world, little things that count. Little things that multiply. Quivering fractals of life, swirling patterns of light, infinite extension. Existence beyond the word. Come out. Come out. Outside of time, outside of space, outside of language, outside of “I”.

Boogie

2010-10-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

Answers born from questions and questions born from answers tumble awkwardly over one another like dark suited gymnasts. I pull up from the dark depths wondering. What is that light there, penetrating the serenity of this once womb-like space? Eerie and blue, it calls me out of slumber and points to a startling terror; I have not been alone here.
There is a movement not far off, something that can see me, just as I can now see it and the age old questions arise; can it hurt me? Should I hurt it first? Who will eat who?
Play seems out of the question. After all, who comes creeping silently into your room to kneel beside your bed while you slumber as an invitation to play? This is too close.
A friend knocks at the door, a friend calls to you, announces their presence from some distance before coming so near.
Or are there other ways to play? Ways that belong to creatures far beyond fear of safety and borders of individuality? Does one thought in my mind announce itself to another before it takes over?
It’s all for the furtherance of some game perhaps, but not a game for human animals, not a game that this one that I have perceived myself as being can win. Hostility or hospitality weigh in on either hand, who shall be the victor?
Fear is such an insistent mistress, always calling for my attention, always making bold claims, such as this announcement that this is a matter of life and death. Leap up and attack! Run! Or tell yourself that it isn’t real. It was only your imagination, there was nothing there, and drift back to sleep.
I close my eyes. If I can’t see it, then it can’t see me…so goes the ostrich logic. Leave the boogies to feast over my reposed form. What do they do while I hide behind closed lids? What do they want?
This is the thing that they told me didn’t exist. The thing that was not in my closet, not under the bed, not at my window. Sleep they told me, go to sleep. So I did. Now that I have grown taller and have sent my own children into the darkness with promises of false safety, only now, sleeping in their room, am I startled awake by this presence, this “should not be here” that disturbs the peace like a spider falling from the ceiling onto your cheek.
Now I know that it has always been here. It was always in the closet, under the bed, and at my window, then just as now. I sent the lambs to the slaughter just as my parents did before me, off to be the center piece at the boogie feast.
Slowly I realize that this time it has not come for me. Here it is peeking into the bed of my youngest daughter, and this thing that should not be has suddenly taken notice of me noticing it. How surprised we both are. I would not usually be here, on the floor sleeping, would not usually perceive that strange glow, hear the rustling, feel my pulse quicken and my eyes snap open. What seemed at first like my own unwelcome visitor did not expect so close an encounter with me, it has come creeping with other quarry in mind.
I am here, an adult in the nursery, positioned on the floor beside the bed to prove the security of our sanctuary and I witness for myself the breach. They are hard to see once fully awake. It is only with lids partially veiled that I can perceive their glow, the shadows of their slinking movement.
They are unconcerned by their discovery of me, more importantly, by my discovery of them. Even while they see me watching through slit eyes, they continue their advance.
Why should they worry? I don’t believe that they exist. Reason should prevent me from rising to stop them. I have always closed my eyes tighter and gone back to sleep in the past, a habit formed in child hood, why now would I do any other thing?
Sleep they told me, go to sleep. So I did. That has always been the way. Tell yourself that it isn’t real. It is only your imagination, there is nothing here.
What do they do while I hide behind closed lids? What do they want?
Answers born from questions and questions born from answers tumble awkwardly over one another like dark suited gymnasts. I descend into the dark depth blotting them from my mind. Forget that light there disturbing the womb of darkness and retreat into slumber and the comforting illusion of solitude.

Dance of Words

2010-10-27T00:16:00.000-07:00

Just to break it in, why not take a hand at typing something, just a little something? It doesn't matter if it turns out to be great or insignificant, whether anyone sees it or not. All that matters is that some little impulses, little neural flashes out of the inner nowhere, get translated into words which are then keyed in to appear on the screen.
It is not a one to one relationship. The words “neural flashes” don't accurately encompass that thing that I am trying to talk about. It's like interpretive dance, this swoop of the arm is symbolic, it is a verbal representation of something which exists and occurs outside of the mind and outside of the linguistic structure. Therefore saying something, saying anything at all, is a very creative experiment. Even technical manuals are avant-garde art projects when you consider them this way.
The truth is that words cannot express the truth about what they describe, they are merely creative embellishments to the truth. A coiled mystery, that I can sit here translating thoughts into symbols, and those thoughts themselves are already symbolic translations of something else that I can't name, I can't even try.
The way the wind tastes, the way the air smells, my mother smoking cigarettes on the balcony or in the garage over the washer and dryer, drinking cans and cans of Folgers coffee, bitter to the taste and smell, looking at the mural that my father painted on the wall beside the laundry machines, a flat depiction of the majestic mountains rising at the west side of the house outside the front door, out the back door you can see the lake and empty fields and a row of olive trees lined up beside the deep outflow channel, the orange and yellow tops of other distant trees are just discernible, everything can be taken in with a sun swept glance.
What does it mean, sun swept? That the light is passing over everything like the broom over the linoleum in our cramped kitchen, as it sweeps over this mysterious matter and leaps to life, becomes, house in the distance, small black and white dog, man calling dog, resplendent treetops, shimmering blue lake, child bent in the tall grass to play with a ladybug.
What is it before it is sun swept? Does the occluded landscape exist before the sun takes creative liberties with matter?
It is not even the sun which does this, but our eyes which translate light and its absence into some of those neural impulses which are further interpreted into a dance of words, house, dog, man, trees, lake, child, bug.
What qualifications have I got to try and speak about these things, I who have never read Lacan? I who never went to college? I who sit typing. I am an artist, that is my only qualification. And who made me an artist? What institution, what diploma, what Mona Lisa connects this signified, which sits here in this chair on top of an aging blue and white stripped pillow tip tap typing away, with the signifier "artist"?
Why, this very action, this happening that takes the shape of words that your human biological machine transforms into meanings which are derived from memories of the interaction of deceptive, or shall we say interpretive, senses such as sight, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, with the strings of signifiers that spew forth form my linguistic potters wheel.
It is all complete gibberish and it always was, every verse of the Bible, every page of that computers user manual, every line of that love letter, every word of War And Peace.
It was all Lacan, college, typing, artist, happening, human, memories, senses, touching, gibberish dance.
If God wrote the bible then God may be confirmed as having been an interpretive linguistic dancer much like myself, in which case we can say, good for God, everyone should reach so high.
Some will say that for having arranged such words I am blasphemous, sinful, evil, disrespectful, irreverent, atheist, communist, satanist, stupid, misguided, deceived or deceiver, lost, intellectual, cynical, arrogant, insecure, shocking, attention hungry, wicked, etc. but I assure you that whatever I am, I am none of those things, I am something quite independent of those words which are more like shadows cast by my movements to create a show which might be entertaining, horrifying, or irrelevant depending on the stone throwers, the audience, the perceiver whoever you are, am I, I am.
Blasphemous, wicked, movements, perceiver, sun swept, deceiver, majestic, depiction, outflow, occluded, none. Leap to life. Becomes. Words, unchained, signified, undefined, then defined. Costumes, masks, opera, that is the play of words, the dance of the symbolic, the dance of shapes without substance. Just a little something insignificant, neural flashes translated into words, just to break it in, creative embellishments of the truth, complex variations on a theme without conclusion, a melody without a solid form.

Familiar Domain

2010-10-13T18:45:00.000-07:00

Whatever is happening, whatever this is, I allow it, orange flowers dropping petals into a small clay bowl. The bowl is glazed to look like a quail's egg, six quails' eggs held in the dry hands of the potter Emmanuel.
Whatever this is I accept it. Our Father... I accept it. Who art in…I accept it…heaven…hallowed be… I accept it…thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in…accept it.
Though the faces that are worn by the beloved appear differently to me now, this is the same domain, the same beloved, all the same self that has always been and will always be. I observe it now from a lower level of energy than on the previous visit.
The first orange flower petals dropping into a small clay bowl. Emmanuel was the potter's name.
I allow all feelings of fear to pass through me, merging with all visions, liberating myself from the apparitions and entrapments of the lower dimensions.
The woman with the dark circles under her eyes, pale bony body, tiny lungs breathing in, then expelling the breath into my face…I allow all feelings of fear to pass through me.
But even though they may seem different to me now, I know that these are the same domains as before, and that nothing is going to happen to me that hasn’t happened before. Whatever is happening, whatever this is, I allow it, orange flowers drooping, their petals laying in the basin of a small ceramic bowl.
Give us this day our daily…glazed to look like a quail's egg, six tiny speckled quail's eggs supported in the large cracked hands of Emmanuel the potter.
Forgive us for our trespasses as we forgive those…when the visages and emotional auras of the unresponsive guides are superimposed upon the beloved, I must remember to recognize them as my own projections… who trespass against us… and not view these face changes as foreboding evil, danger, or antagonism… her dark eyes sinking in the dark rings of flesh, slippery lips, unkempt hair and a stale odor lingering about her cave…if I react in repulsion, I may find it difficult or impossible to blend my own energy field with that of the beloved…for thine is the power…but if I am able…the kingdom… to merge with the guide…and the glory…at this point…forever…I should be able to thus liberate myself from the endless action reaction game maintained by our opposing and unblending vibrations…Amen.
If I can manage to awaken my attention, and can accept the full reality of the macrodimensions, the divine state of liberation should dawn upon me as the cycle of death and rebirth is broken.
Whatever is happening, whatever this is, I allow it, I accept it, these orange petals dangling and falling and filling the uneven ceramic bowl fashioned by the chaffed hands of the one called Close to God. Emmanuel carrying away the six pale green and brown speckled quail's eggs…
I must remember that I can achieve liberation at any moment just by the power of recognition… remembering myself in these guides, the flower, the bowl, Emmanuel, the eggs, and the dark woman…penetrating through these visions into the clear light… thy kingdom… from which all visions have come and to which all visions return, like a sleeper's breath, like tiny lungs expanding and contracting…like six eggs which become a bowl… her breath on my face…allowing feelings of fear to pass through me…whatever this is…thy will be done… whatever this is… on earth as it is in…this same domain seen from a different vantage point...I accept it.

Jaguar

2010-10-06T18:34:00.000-07:00

We don’t have no fire light, no fire life, just wiggle white flashing blinking strobing effect. Pulses of being. Here
I am
Here
I
Am.
Stretch it out or make it thin and tenuous or press the ends together tight. The message is the same.
I
Am
Here
I
Am
Here
Down in the details in the wobbling flickering details
A frosty blue beanie and ski jacket. A parking garage, a crow bar shaking like the snakes rattler
Ratta ta at
I
am
here
The words rippling, bubbling, flowing. Never ending aureobolis of sound.
Tse
Tse tse
The story gets told in segments.
The segments are stretched.
The segments are squeezed.
The segments are re-ordered.
It is all the same.
Story of life.
Ratta ta ta ta
I
Am
Here
The lean man jiggling, jouncing, grinning wide. Wide and skeletal, his face swallows itself.
I
Am
here
InTheDetails
DNA
AND
NAD
DAN
Ratta
Atta at at at
For hours on end we strobe.

We get bigger
and smaller
and bigger
and smaller
Say something about that.
I’ll show you.
S h o w

Y o u

ShowYou

S H O W Y O U

S H O W YOU

SHAPE
Y O U

I A M

H E R E
Here
Hear
Hear
I hear you
Talk talk talking
But something else is happening.
A frosty blue beanie and ski jacket. A parking garage, a crowbar shaking like the snakes rattler.

A frostyBlueBeanie.
SkiJacket.
ParkingGarage
Crowbar

S H A K I N G

Ratta

ta

ta

I AM HERE.

Poisonous Blue Sky

2010-09-30T00:05:00.000-07:00

Ha ha. Poisonous blue sky, so bright so clear. Old white men gather around the table and talk about the kids, the rotten no good kids, busting lights and keying cars. Do they ask why? Why are the kids doing this? No. They pronounce the verdict, “crazy” the kids are crazy, “there’s something wrong with her.” A thirteen year old girl that takes scissors and rakes them across BMWs. Do I hear them say three or four times that she is Chinese, as if that may be part of the problem? How easy to sit around this table together and make our pronouncements. Not like us. Crazy.
Not like you. If you were any older, your spirits any more decrepit, you’d have your coffins parked outside not your BMWs. Four old white corpses gathered around a table. They aren’t even drinking coffee or tea or eating cake. They have come into this café to meet for this conversation, this weary pep rally to assure them of their supremacy. They will wait until later to feed. After the grim reaper comes to collect them they will feast on the worms that crawl from their cavernous heads before laying back down in their expensive stone mausoleum together, taking turns scratching each others’ backs before taking their respite. The flaking old flesh is raked off beneath their talons, for the white hair and finger and toenails continue to grow, even after they accepted death’s putrid favors.
These undead gangsters of the All American, with their cell phones laying out on the table or clipped to their leather belts. Crisp white work shirts whether they still have jobs or not. Sweater vests to complete the look. Now the bitter grapes are made into bitter wine. They discuss, with raspy voices like the sound of dry leaves rattling down empty streets, the beggars who make $400 dollars a day waiting in busy intersections with cardboard signs. Mashing the sour fruits of their hearts with their brittle fists, they hold their mouths open at the edge of the table to catch the elixir as it overflows. This is all they need. One little sip of envy, and disgust. “Not like us. Lazy. There’s something wrong with her.”
Their own children, because they have pulses, are alien to these old patrons of the crypt who lie down to die before they could come alive, like good Americans.
Is it America? Is it the world? Where is the factory that churns out these creatures of the crypt, these rotting vestiges of capitalist idealism. They will take dollar bills with their worms latter, spreading the wrigglies over the greenbacks like caviar over a cracker. That was all it took to lure them into premature death. The reaper stood in the mausoleum doorway with a plate of crackers bearing the faces of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin , other old dead white men, and these four came crawling, drooling from the corners of their mouths. The dream that wrapped her ephemeral fingers round their throats like a collar with a leash and pulled them towards her master. It was a dream of supremacy, of comfort, of power and prestige.
Are you comfortable in your velvet lined coffins, talking about your pension funds and how much Ed Davis brought home last year? Blurting out precise figures like a litany, holding your dark mass under poisonous blue skies in the center of a brightly lit café. Making grim pronouncements of “Not like us. Crazy. There’s something wrong with…” and hiding under the gray robes of your precious dream while she grips you each tightly by the throat. Then, suddenly in accordance with the laws of the eternal day born in the age of industry, she gives them a jerk and they fly up from the table like a murder of crows. It’s back to the graveyard she leads them, back to her master in the black cloak with the scythe, holding out his plate of green crackers.
In they’ll go still rumbling their litany, safe within their four walls of stone, safe with their keepers, while out there somewhere the kids are running wild, propelled by the life that surges through their rebellious spirits. Out there in the rainbow jungle the kids are smashing lights and scratching Mercedes and BMWs with sharp scissors and pan handling and fucking and getting high while their fathers are finishing their bedtime snacks and reclining inside of boxes within boxes. Poisonous blue sky, so bright, so clear, illuminates the day, spreads over the empty table where four old white men lapped the bitter wine of their hearts, over the graveyards where they continue to murmur their unhallowed prayers, over the thirteen year old Chinese girls smiling with their scissors at the ready, over grisly faced pan handlers and over me. Ha ha. Poisonous blue sky.

Crown

2010-09-15T12:32:00.001-07:00

One day I finally decided to do it, to actually do it.
I created an altar on the east wall of my room, the one wall with the least amount of junk scattered on the floor in front of it. On this altar I placed photographs of myself, a sequence of images progressing slowly from infancy to adulthood. At the center of the altar I placed a photograph of my father. I made something like a throne for this picture to rest on, some thick books covered by a piece of red cloth and a couple of small figurines to guard it. It was enough like a throne that I could see it as a throne and that was enough for me.
When the altar was ready, I lit candles and incense. The room got thick with smoke and strong scents from distant lands I had never visited. Then I sat in front of my altar to stare at what I had created. It would have been easy to overlook that step. But I didn’t. This was the time when I would finally do it. I couldn’t jump over any step.

Drip drop went the secretions of certain glands that helped me to modify my view of reality.
Drip drop.
REALITY.
The Real.
That is what we were searching for, isn’t it? Some of us, not all of us. Sometimes, not all the time.
It was important then to understand that not everyone wanted to discover the Real. Some did seek it out, but when they found it they recoiled in terror and sincerely hoped that they would never have to see it again. Some said that they wanted it but they really wanted other things, private pleasures that would never be disclosed in public. I had to understand this. I had to remember it.

In those days I had come to understand that I was a robot. (It may seem obvious to you now, but it was a great shock to me when I first saw it. Don’t forget how different things were back then. None of what we know now was so clear, it was all kind of fuzzy, like looking at a vast landscape through piece of cellophane wrapped around your head.)
I was some kind of bio mechanical doll. I was made of meat and not metal but I was still a robot. A sophisticated meat doll. That was all I was. Nothing more, nothing less.
All that I liked, all that I disliked, all that I believed and disbelieved, all that I wanted and all that I feared, these things were not ME, even if they seemed like it. They might have seemed to come from me, but they didn’t. They had all come from somewhere else.
These things were programs that I ran, within my wet circuitry of coils of bloody guts. Or rather I should say that these were programs that ran me. I was merely a strange unconscious puppet in their hands, an empty receptacle for their various microscopic products.
I had no hand in creating or choosing all these programs. It was strange circuitous process that occurred long before I knew what was happening, or that anything was happening at all. Most of it was quite accidental. Accidental programming. It just happened. In my case, it happened to me. You understand? So it seemed natural, eminently natural, so it seemed real, so it seemed normal, so it seemed as the way things should be. What else could they be? This was me and everything around me fit perfectly with me. Almost everything, I should say. Almost everything.

Strawberries were good, black licorice was bad. Men with facial hair made me wet, so wet that the juice ran down my thighs and made it hard for me to sit still. When the sun was shining, I was happy and because I was happy, I twisted my face into a kind of frozen grimace that I called a smile. Cats were better than dogs. It was never okay to steal. It was okay to lie sometimes but only in particular situations. Killing was okay but only when you were threatened. Christians were good and Muslims were bad. I had to sleep in a bed or I wouldn’t feel right in the morning. The bed had to have sheets and blankets, all of certain colors. I had to make a certain amount of money a year. I had to have a car to drive so I could go places, places where there were other people like me.
All of these things were arbitrary. I didn’t know it then but it was still true. None of these programs represented anything that was objectively true. It was just things that were said and they got repeated. Linguistic viruses that came into me when someone spoke too loud too close to me, when my senses were wide open and vulnerable. They were a kind of sonic self reproductive demons that inhabited my shivering temple of wet and tender walls, strange non physical half living creatures that swayed me to do this or that, pushed me to do things in a way that complied with their secret directives.

So I made a crown. I knew it couldn’t be too simple, it shouldn’t be. Some effort had to go into its construction. But I also couldn’t make it too elaborate. If I made it too difficult I would never finish it and it was of utmost importance that I should finish.
I knew it had to fit upon my head. That was most crucial. I made it out of twine and placed some leaves and flowers all along the perimeter. I was very pleased with my work.
I placed the crown and a robe on the simple little altar I had made earlier. I placed it all before my father’s throne. It seemed as if he was looking down at it but it was really just a photograph. Still, it really did seem like he was looking. Looking down. At me.
The robe was an old terrycloth bathrobe, light green in color, nothing that special really. Not until I made it special. And then it was. It truly was.

Everyone around me was the same. This took some time for me to recognize. For so long I had assumed that everyone else was different, that they actually knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. It took me a while to accept that they knew as much as I did, maybe a little less since they couldn’t look directly into their own robotic nature, since they still believed they made decisions on their own, since they still believed they were unique and capable of deciding their own course in life.
The fact was that we simply collided our way through an accidental obstacle course that we called existence. We bounced off of each other like bumper cars. It became clear that they were all the same, Hebrews, Romans, or Barbarians. In fact, I had lost track of what had once distinguished them from each other. Suddenly they all seemed the same to me. Not in a good way, either.
One genetic trait was not better than another. Some things made a particular genetic line of robots live longer. That in itself was not “good”. The entire perpetuation of the species was neither good nor bad. It was simply a thing to watch happening, like the firecrackers on the fourth of July or black birds flying in a flock over a calm lake in summertime.
Survival was all that mattered to them, to us. The survival of the meat bots. All the meat bots like me. We thought we were superior to every other thing that bopped around on this planet. We thought we were the best.
Somehow, what we thought to explain our own presence here, was what made us better. One thought justified another in a circle that we were never inclined to unwind or examine closely.
We were somehow better than dogs because when we fucked, we would do it within the bounds of holy matrimony and we would then produce children to please GOD. GOD, which was itself a construct of our bewildered and imaginative minds which we molded into our own image. GOD, mad scientist, creator of broken robots out of old discarded parts.
We were better because we could see the difference between right and wrong. And we got to decide what was right and wrong based on what was best for us. And we were told what was best for us before we even knew what was being said to us. So we decided nothing. Nothing at all.
An accidental obstacle course and nothing else. It was hard to see it back then. But you have to understand, we didn’t know hardly anything.

When everything was prepared and the scene was set, I bowed to the four directions and crossed my heart, just as I had learned so long ago, back when I had thought I knew so much.
I approached the altar carefully, almost with weariness. In a loud and clear voice, I said:
"I have come to bear the burden"
I said it two more times slowly and carefully. The sound of my voice echoed through the room and came back to me thicker and stronger than I would have imagined it.

We were machines run by programs created by unnamed authors, long lost biological hackers who had maybe succumbed to their own devious traps.
We were ruled by Accident, Chaos, Chance. Our main directive, our only real wish was to survive at any cost. Everything else was secondary. No matter what we said, no matter what we believed.
That is all we were, all we were, all we were. But we didn’t know it. We didn’t want to know it.
Now you understand, just like you do. It wasn’t easy to see through it, through the great charade, the great game. It wasn’t easy for me, it wasn’t easy for anyone. Nobody starts out with a taste for silence. It’s an acquired taste. Something to be developed.

I removed my father’s photograph from the throne and placed it face down on the carpet. I then replaced it with one of my own. My photograph up there on the throne looking down at me just like my father had been doing before. I put on the robe that I had chosen and I placed the crown upon my head. I placed it slowly, suddenly aware of what I was doing, suddenly curious, suddenly afraid.
I extended my arms to both sides palms facing upward. Then I brought them together over my heart in a prayer position, palms together, fingers pointing upwards.
I looked at myself on the throne. I looked at myself and my self looked back. I recognized myself. I recognized my self. There. On the throne. I had come to bear the burden. It was time to take my rightful place. It was time to leave the charade behind. It was time to know.

Gnosis

2010-09-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

Truly, my brethren and beloved, you who are closest to me, who eat with me and drink with me and rest where I rest, you who have abandoned the sky father and the earth mother because I have asked it, unto you will I give all mysteries and all gnosis. I will give you the mystery of the twelve æons of the rulers who dash across the sky like comets and their seals and their ciphers wrapped in brown paper and tied with cotton string and the manner of invocation for reaching their regions will all be in your inbox on Tuesday morning.
I will give you moreover, the mystery of the thirteenth æon . You will attain this just by being with me, and by limiting conflicting influences. I will teach you the manner of invocation for reaching their regions, leading by example. You must watch carefully, I can’t explain it because words are lies, but I can show you if you turn all of your attention to the moment. I will give you their ciphers and their seals, the symbols that are made in opposition to the symbols you were taught when the world was being built.
In music I will give you the mystery of the baptism of those of the Midst and the manner of invocation for reaching their regions. And in gestures I will announce unto you their ciphers and their seals. It will be a dance and the steps will change even as the music changes. You will never know what step comes next just as I never know what step comes next. The sequence will seep into your consciousness like water being absorbed by cardboard. I want your consciousness to become soggy , a formless pulp.
And I will give you the baptism of those of the Right, our region, by letting the sun scorch your skin and the eagles eat out your eyes. Its ciphers and its seals and the manner of invocation for reaching thither are available for immediate download at itunes. I will give you the great mystery of the Treasury of the Light where all my wealth is stored. It looks like an ordinary honey jar unless you have already received the baptism of those of the Right, in that case it will look like nothing at all. The manner of invocation for reaching thither is the subject of a PBS special that you can rent from the local public library. If you lack a membership therein I suggest that you obtain one. Never make the mistake made by Simon Magus and keep The Learning Annex Guide To Successful Alchemy out for over three months without renewing. You can renew online or with any touch tone telephone. There is no sense in over drafting from your account with the Treasury of the Light before you have learned to turn lead into gold.
I will give you all the mysteries and all the gnosis, for low monthly installments of just $29.99 or you can devote your life to following me and doing as I do. I will give you gnosis in order that ye may be called 'children of the fullness, perfected in all the gnosis and all the mysteries.' It can be the name written over your photo on your Facebook page.
Or I could award you a diploma. My new ink jet printer works like a charm and the have special certificate paper for sale in office supply stores. Blessed are ye beyond all men on earth, for with access to these spheres you will have room to breath. For the children of the Light are come in your time, you are they.
All that is required for an achievement of gnosis is everything, or just a monthly payment. You choose. Truly, my brethren and beloved, you who are closest to me, who eat with me and drink with me and rest where I rest, you who have abandoned the sky father and the earth mother because I have asked it, unto you will I give all mysteries and all gnosis. All others will get what they pay for.

Games

2010-09-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

The round table surrounded by four tall chairs and long gangly figures draped over them, elbows on table fists on chins, heels on the rungs of the tall chairs. Far below outside the abyss of shadow and chatter, the lighted stage awaits aglow with golden warmth, silent instruments engaged in patient respite like old idols once the center of a forgotten religion. Their smug demeanor communicates their certainty of a comeback. And lo! They are quite right to think as much, if they were truly thinking as much, for the musicians come tromping out to the stage. Old ones, young ones, fat ones, skinny ones, famous ones, and mysterious ones, they fill every corner of the stage, taking their places by the well rested idols, flipping switches and turning keys and knobs while pressing on pedals.
The sorcerer comes in by a different route and for him the crowd cheers, hurrah! He shouts the name of each performer in turn but the names are lost in space, sound waves that break against nearby tables never to reach the balconies above.
Then crash boom roar ta da! We’re off, all at once, idols revived to full godhead. They’re no longer cold dead things but wild writhing living creatures that wail and groan and shout. In this manner they converse. Sometimes all at once, sometimes two or three at a time, occasionally one croons alone while the others listen, carefully weighing their responses, holding their questions for the right moment. The musicians listen, the musicians urge them on with both gentle and harsh caresses.
The audience listens, they urge the renewed gods on with applause and shouts. They grin, they drool, they bob their heads and bump knees under tables and whisper questions in the gaps. What is that thing? Who is that man? What are they doing with the hats and headbands? For indeed the musicians are taking on and putting off headbands while the sorcerer is taking off and putting on his blue cap.
The assembly holds perhaps five or six sessions if that many. There are gentle moments and rough moments, but every moment is a moment that demands attention. These are not tired familiar old songs come to renew our sense of stability. These are new noises erupting from the inferno, new worlds of sound forming in the hot forge, their shape is unique like that of a snowflake, never before made, never to be made again. A shape unfolding through time, sounds as new as each moment. The noise, the noise, the glorious noise!
The silence that gives the noise more impact. The noise that makes the silence a sound never before heard. They’re passed back and forth like a ball, like a game of red like green light. A game, a game, a beautiful game, played by Gods and mortals together on a golden semicircular stage and in the immeasurable gloom upon which it is suspended, until at last the Gods once again beg respite and the mortals rise to take a bow for having been such goods sports, such obliging instruments of divinity.
Then we say game over and evacuate the round table surrounded by tall chairs to stagger out into the darker darkness, long gangly figures crowding halls and filling up doorways, cigarettes between fingers, coats draped over shoulders, hats obscuring eyes.

Let Me Be It

2010-08-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

Let me be
it
with you
to try
to call us.
Let me be like mustard pot broken, cracked jar of porous ceramic splintered and golden paste spilled
It is no mistake to break the vessel open
with you
to try and make something never before made, built from clay of the earth, first fired then broken
to call us into us.
A memory, let me be it, seeking the realization of now with you. I am so concerned with the little things, the details we are submerged in, the porous reality whose minute pocks are filled with us. I must remember to see the forest, not only this tree, that tree. I must remember to come running when father calls.
Let me be broken, smashed, so that it can all go out and it can all come in. The shape was constricting and invigorating all at once. It was the beginning and the end, the only way to be with you but to be with you meant to be apart from you. Together. Two gather. For two to gather the cell must divide. These crimes we commit to try to make something new. Opening the jar and releasing despair, death, disease.
Oh Pandora, curious Pandora.
A little black ink to try and give shape to something previously unshaped. To call us evil is too simple. When we are evil we are live. I would not stop life for piety, for subservience to the creation of another. When father does call, it will already be too late. See? From that blot I have made a new tree of life and from it a forest is spreading, a blanket of fractal beauty. Let me be in my forest with my wild things made from splintered clay and spilled mustard. The shape that I inherited has been deconstructed and the remains are the foundation of a new kingdom.
Who shall inherit this? It is fitting for old kings to be decapitated by the new. When it is the king of heaven we take the head from which Athena sprang, but when it is the king of earth we will castrate him. We take the cracking vessel. With you it was gentle, you handed me your own head. We were breaking it together, new growth was emerging from the shape before it was fully splintered. The new was gestating in the old before it was cold. A live birth. We wanted to try a way that was unknown to us. It had to call us into porous darkness away from the sharp lines and clearly delineated shapes. A game of hide and seek, where we hide and seek ourselves.
Let me be it with you, to try to call us back to our self. Let me. Let me. I’ll do what I will anyway. Be. I’ll do what I want with it, this moment held in suspension this deep dark valley of shadow. A form emerging, light against dark, me with you. Let me. Let me be with you.
Hot and cold mingling to birth a storm. It is no mistake. We mean to do it, to break and scatter, to try to find it again in the details, to breath a spark into clay, cold dead clay, to call us into us once again. We mean to fall. We mean to break. We mean to sin this primal sin. Mustard pot cracking, the head fragmenting, my fingers in your hair, all so warm and wet. Not only this tree, that tree sprouting from the spill, branching, and reaching, like your hair flowing.
We have been frightened by this before, it is always frightening when it is real. The pain is too much for you now. Let me be it for you, with you, to try porous clay splintering, your fingers in my hair, my hair spreading like ink, my hair holding my head, to call, the tree growing, to call us, once more.

Love Letter

2010-08-15T20:03:00.000-07:00

So I sit on the train, glaringly aware of their ignorance. How can they know what is happening under my skull? In my veins and along the branching network of my nervous system, demons are howling and stomping out a rhythm to accompany the dark rite that is happening in plain view, this orgy of fingers on slick paper and eyes opened wide. I see the skulls and insects and organic eruptions of form in stark black and white, and I am home.
The dragon fly. I would find one dying on my porch later, and after going inside to uncover the details of its life cycle I would determine that there was nothing I could do to help restore it to the so called land of the living. Having ruled out any other option, I would sit with it, gazing into its bulbous eyes, experiencing through empathy the alien beauty of its consciousness and I would sing a whining high pitched song in its honor. I would sit with it until it died, and then I’d put its remains on a shelf in the garage. That shelf would already have a far out collage made from National Geographic clippings and a white candle waiting for this final element to come and rest with them, encircled by purple daisies picked from a shrub in the backyard. In short I would enshrine the remains of this voyager that laid himself down on my front stair. I would piggy back on its continued cycle of occult transformation.
I had learned that large dragon flies begin their lives as something called a nymph, living hidden from our eyes in the bottoms of ponds and lakes for as long as five years before becoming those things called dragon flies. The part of their existence with which we humans are most familiar with is the briefest segment of their lives. It transpires in a flash. They are only dragon flies for a matter of a few months before they lay down and wait for some mysterious part of themselves to move once again into a world of which we humans are ignorant. I would learn all of this for myself when I would find the dragonfly on my porch, but that is a month away from now, a moment existing in a future whose shape is eclipsed by the present.
I am now only looking at a black and white image of a dragon fly printed on the pages of this thing I hold in my hands. I feel the blood in my veins dancing like witches at a Sabbath and I look at the stupefied faces of my fellow passengers frozen in attitudes of boredom, fatigue, and apathy. I look at the silly putty color of their skin and their crisp gray suits or bright red lipsticks and am amazed that they are so distant from this space that I occupy; a universe born of the lusty unification of my twisted mind and this thing in my hands. We are so physically close, breathing the same stale air of this rocking train car, smelling each others’ chemical front, the colognes, perfumes, and body sprays we doused ourselves in to disguise our animal odors, yet the distance between us is impossible to bridge because it has not been noticed. They must see another putty colored mannequin sitting here turning the pages of a magazine. They cannot see the elysian ritual transpiring within this fleshy temple, cannot wittiness with their glassy eyes the terrible magick being worked in neurons and sinews, all catalyzed by my contact with this thing. A transformation initiated by this unholy relic whose radiation is causing a mutation, augmenting elements of my self that needed only the tiniest push to come into full bloom.
Advertisements streak by the tinted rectangles of glass and a steady clack, clack, imposes itself upon my ears. The realization that something will come of this is as bright as transparent wings catching sunlight reflected off water, but what that will be is unknown. That is the terrible risk inherent in change. What I am cannot dream of what I will become, it is too deeply other. All that I can do is sit here, feeling my heart thump, feeling my spirit swell out beyond the confines of this body, this train car, beyond anything recognizable. I feel something invisible growing, like antenna reaching out from me to dip into darkest waters. I feel this and I watch the man in the seat ahead of me maintain his perfectly subdued expression as if he were afraid to alter it in any way. Clutching this thing in my hands, looking around at the other passengers, aware of the growing chasm between us, I ride the train, and flip through the pages and wait for the shapes of things to emerge.

Symbolic Order

2010-08-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

It creeps right in, like a thief taking advantage of an open window, it steals in with ease precisely because they are so unlike it, alive and open while it is dead and closed. It is a virus. Not alive strictly speaking, adapting to the physiology of its host, borrowing the life of this other to further its own structure. Without this host body it is nothing of consequence. It is NOT. Only by inserting itself in something that IS does it achieve its end. Only by forcing itself upon supple young minds does it achieve anything resembling life.
This abstract entity, this order of symbols, is Rome to barbarians. It is upper Egypt to lower Egypt. It settles in its host and multiplies, slowly eating the other from the inside. Soon there will be nothing real left. Only a string of empty signifiers whose signified was left behind long ago.
We will rise and pledge allegiance every morning. We have no experience of what it is to pledge and we start saying that we are pledging without understanding what we are saying, We have never felt anything like allegiance. We know the words. We chant them together rhythmically.
We will be told to show respect, and the signifier “respect” will be associated for us with the signified of “subservience” or “obedience”. It will be impossible for us to respect our elders because they have never respected anything. The real attitude of respect has become extinct, but its corpse is still dragged around, spilling from our lips carelessly, endlessly, meaninglessly.
Language thrusts its barbed tendrils deep into us and now our reality grows tinier, more constricted. The sounds that flow out of our mouth such as and like is so very and all such like as must be some such like as such and much and truthiness, exercising our God given right to liberty and such and fighting for freedom against terror and drugs and such we must prevail against such like adversity administering justice and such with respect to indigenous insurgence and victory and such…
We will stare at each other and listen to the babble, respond when possible like an actor who has just been waiting for his cue in a Shakespearean play whose pentameter and use of forgotten words confounds the modern semi illiterate player. Recital is all that remains.
We never had a chance to choose whether or not this structure could come and live inside of us. It lived inside of those that came before us and they passed it on to us. This thing inside dwelling, steals the sight from our eyes and makes the without in its image.
What is really there? Who knows?
Nothing perhaps, an abyss, a void, chaos as counterpoint to structure. This particular structure, this fortress is not the only such entity. It is one such entity and the world it creates is unique to it. There may be other worlds spawned from another similar strange confluence of order and attention, worlds you would inhabit if you were born French rather than American, or Alpha Centaurian rather than human.
There is no more contact with the real. We have become the virus, biological extensions of the symbolic order that latched onto us and began to suck the life from us before we were three years old. We will pass it on to our children and they to theirs. Zombies, spilling colloquial zombie seed into the precious new life that has ignited in our midst. We’ll subvert that spark and make it as undead as we ourselves are, effortlessly, unintentionally.
It will creep right in, seeping from one infected organism to the next. Like a thief taking advantage of an open window, it steals in with ease precisely because the host is so unlike itself; alive and open while it is dead and closed.

Thoughtfully, Beautifully

2010-08-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, tracks all forged in the simple melodies of these songs. All of my thoughts have been cooked out of my head, my senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on. The people made in the music and baked in the sun lay around wondering vaguely how they came to be at the bottom of the valley. Dressing their dogs up and wearing the least possible amount of clothing themselves, these Southern Californians run on iced coffee and sex. These are the two lures that get them to race through the course like lanky long faced gray hounds after the rabbit. Is there a story in there somewhere? Or is it only a poem? A verse in the song that makes us, an incoherent stream of experience, one line of code, pure data in the form of color and sound. The sweet bitter taste of coffee and cinnamon, the scent of vanilla body wash rising from heated skin bronzing under the solar disc rolling overhead, Apollo driving his chariot over water and earth without compromise.
Why don’t we all sit together and make our own song? After all, we’ll all soon be bones or ash and it won’t matter where the broom was or who opened the window while the air conditioner was running. Such resentment because life hasn’t been made thoughtfully, beautifully, but has rather happened to us when we should have happened to it. A sword slicing through a piece of blue sky like a knife through lemon meringue pie, purposeful, unrelenting like the tap, tap, of a wood peckers bill into the trunk of a tree. Bit by bit, measure by measure, taken in careful steps laden with the intent to savor and cherish. That was the way to do it, but we schlepped through it, clinging to vague ideas, promises regarding tomorrow and other distant futures that could never arrive because the first steps would never be taken and someone else would be blamed for the inaction.
What is missing is not a something that can be held in sweaty hands. All we will ever need, the most glorious thing we could ever obtain is already here and we are closed to it, blind to the wealth that is real and irrevocable; this liberty that is mind, this river that is love and never ceases to flow.
The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own, words that tell us what should be, what could be, but never what is. Where is the rejoicing? The explosion of self that is being all that I am in this moment with lungs and heart and brain pouring pure poetry and hands that can do. It is our hands that give us some unusual potential as makers. But what good are makers that take no action, that never make?
Creators that do not create are something else, listening to the lyric that someone else wrote as if it were absolute, this reality the only reality. These are consumers, the walking dead, with tiny dogs in purses and the urge to create subverted so that all they really need to get by is a jar of Vaseline and a stack of pornographic magazines, and ideally some one to stick it into or to take it from, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on.
Whatever happened to the darkness, the womb where things are allowed to gestate and come to fruition? There is no room for creation in the endless prying light. All things skim by on the surface, racing towards the future on the tracks forged in the simple melodies of this popular song. When will we all meet in the darkness, within the depths below? Shall we really wait until there is nothing left of us but bone or ash? Is it then not too late to last and love? To persist and adore? Is it then not too late to sing our own song, to use our hands for something more challenging than instant gratification?
That song, the resentment in that voice, the sad helplessness of flesh trapped within the life unlived, sagging with age, the bitter threat to run away once again. Time runs out. All songs happen through time, all songs begin and end. It is the little flourishes in between that count the most.
Did we make it ours? Live up to our deepest nature as makers? Or did we let it rush by on those rails that were supplied by the manufacturer, let it rush by only to make bone and ash, bitter sweet taste of coffee and cinnamon, blue sky un-sliced?
It should have been made thoughtfully, beautifully, and without compromise. It should have been made in the dark. It should have been our own.

Weary Head

2010-07-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

I try to rest my head… upon what? I do not know what I am or where I am or why I am here. I love someone but I do not really know what they are either. I do not know if what I experience as love is what he experiences as love, and I do not know if love means that I will have a friend forever, or if I will have a forever friend for a moment and later I will look up and see that I was never with anyone at all.
My insides are exploding out like billions of tiny diamonds flung into the sunlight and the sunlight is caught and refracted through every facet until there is no way of knowing whether one should be looking at diamonds or at shards of light or if either is more fundamental than the other.
I never was before this moment, but now I feel so small and naked and bewildered. I am adrift in the woods and I know I am lost, but that lost is meaningless as there is nowhere that I was going to, nor anywhere that I came from. Looking for “home” is just running from the forest with its tangled trees and unseen creatures making strange noises so that I may not guess whether they are friend or foe. It is an act in a dream, that act when you say I do not like this, I am not here, I am somewhere else and suddenly you are transported.
Sometimes the change is smooth and complete and other times it is slow and painful, like when a zombie is coming at you and you know that a gun should be in your hand and you lift your hand to shoot the zombie but there is no gun, but you insist that there is, there must be a gun there, and you make the shape of a gun with your fingers and you aim at the zombie and think, ‘I’m shooting now’, and there is no sound, no BANG! So you say, “bang!” but the Zombie keeps coming and you tell it, “No, I shot you. You’re dead. I got you.” And sometimes that works and at other times the zombie just keeps on coming, or even says, “No, you didn’t. You missed me” And you have a battle accompanied by a narrative of arguments.
I can say, I am going home, I can even find a home, I can even imagine that I am not lost, but I will never have left the forest. I am still there, shivering in the cold. I do not know for certain, but I think that I am lost. Everything is strange forever, emerging from a mysterious origin so alien that I cannot guess what it means or intends. If I am eaten by a big bad wolf does it matter? Does it really matter to either me or to the wolf? It must not. And yet I do not wish to be eaten tonight. I wish that the wolf would bite me and then I would become a wolf too, we might then be one wolf, maybe one wolf with two heads. And even then I might be alone, only one wolf.
Will I find out that it was a nightmare, a silly nightmare, that I am lost in the woods? I don’t have to dislike it, this feeling of being lost. I could enjoy it very much. I could delight in not knowing what I am or from whence I came. I could be merry about eternity and the stinging cold and the solitude of just myself and the tangled roots of the trees pushing up out of the moist dark earth. I could wander over the musk scented leaves carpeting the forest floor and wail like the wolves, or make the tortured yapping of coyotes my new song, a lament to shake the dark green silence while my pale bare feet churn the orange and gold leaves endlessly, never stopping to ask upon what I might rest my weary head.

Remote Control

2010-07-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

They are in our homes, pulsing at the center like an icy heart projecting ghosts into our once warm sanctuaries. In bed with our wives they whisper to her desires she never could have dreamed up alone. They are influencing our children, whom we entrust to their care at a tender age because their skill for captivating attention is unparalleled. To each of us they speak in their flickering chains of signifiers leading us deeper and deeper into the forests of desire like the wicked wife of the woodsman. They enter our private dreams, inserting their own mythology into the underground streams of our wild raging subconscious. They are there blending into the fabric of our existence, telling us what we think, telling us what we want, and telling us who we are. Our view of the world is glimpsed through their myriad of unblinking eyes. One eye to a room, never any less than one to a household, they show us what to do, how to behave, where to find those things they suggest we must have. Their cold intimate company is addictive, the only company that we crave. They demand so little of us, just that we sit back and let them in. Let them penetrate our minds and souls and make them their own. Soon theirs is the only company we want to keep. Our lovers are not as satisfying as the lovers they can show us. Our children are not as doll like and neatly dealt with as the children we can watch through their eye. Our lives are not as well put together as the lives we can live vicariously through them, blanketed in their uninterrupted 24 hour programming.
There are not us. They are OTHER. Wire and glass where we are flesh and blood. Their unity transmitted from towers renders them unfailingly effective. Their solidarity, their consistency draws us to them, away from our disparate chaotic selves. Away from the untamed unpredictability of real experience. Our unruly self is better abandoned to a place with soft cushions in full view of the eye where we will be led deeper and deeper into the forest. We trust and depend on these cold nurses. Cold nurses rear our children. They tend our loneliness, helping it to grow even as we feel that they are somehow satisfying it. An old woman lies dying in her bed, their babble consoling her from the dresser across the room. An infant sucks a thumb watching the bright colors flash and parade before its new eyes, learning to be led through this passive sacrifice of attention. In the houses beside ours, other human being sit prone, letting the cold nurse feed them her endless torrents of image and sound. We are separated from one another by nothing more than thin layers of dry wall, yet we don’t even know each others’ names. All that we know is the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses that live and die in illusory lifetimes before our eyes, acting out plays called “Romance” ,“Tragedy”, and “Comedy”. We yearn for what we are shown, never suspecting that it is an empty charade, never dreaming that the real thing might look differently, sound differently, feel differently. To each of us they speak in their flickering chains of signifiers leading us deeper and deeper into the forests of desire like the wicked wife of the woodsman. They are in our homes, pulsing at the center like an icy heart projecting ghosts into our once warm sanctuaries, building with empty pictures and sounds prisons of lonely desire that strangle us and leave us pale and flaccid, deeply asleep under flashing lights.

Alien

2010-07-06T21:53:00.000-07:00

Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and slimy crawling around through the body of the one who calls herself MOTHER. She goes where she pleases, between the walls, down tight narrow little labyrinthine passages in search of prey, of heroes bones to crush, in search of the Other whom she may embrace and make self. Dripping, oozing, sliming her way through the darkness, she stalks, the son of Cain, the draconian descendant, the line of Lilith and Samael. Her kiss is death, the life of her lineage is death for the sons of Adam. She opens her arms and welcomes the Other to annihilation, planting her seed inside so that it will become as she.
MOTHER so bright and clean works to conceal her strange pet, that thing that lurks beneath her shiny veneer. Her cool logic and twinkling sterile light seem to offer protection, but deep within her icy hull chaotic animal hunger lurks. The Queen of the Heavens, she is a shining Isis struggling with Lilith over the habub tree. The stars are her companions, burning in the cold depths of the abyss. For her, the organic world is something to be used, turned to her advantage, and men are mere expendable tools.
The maiden who steals light walks the halls, a tiny reflection of MOTHER, the controlling, the rational, the calculating. Clean skin and neatly laced shoes. Our Theseus wondering in the dark, hunting and evading the minotaur. The hero, the one with a plan, unrolling her ball of string, her chain of never-ending thoughts to help her find her way. Occasionally she is lured into the wild wet madness of the other by her own animal, suddenly irrationally entering the darkness, the den of Mistress Deep, crooning,
“Here Jones, Jones, kitty, kitty.”
She is there, poised precariously between Isis and Lilith, the calculating and the chaotic elements of the machine in which she dwells. With her string unraveling she discovers the awful truth, that MOTHER wants to keep the OTHER inside, that MOTHER is not protecting her. MOTHER is using her, just as Mistress Deep wants to use her.
Theseus will not to be a tool. She tampers with codes and moves elements within the machine setting into motion the countdown for MOTHER to self destruct. When MOTHER dies then Mistress Deep will die with her. Our Theseus torches the minotaur’s nest and cages Jones, her own animal instinct, and carries Jones with her, controlled into her new body and watches the beautiful destruction of MOTHER.
She is going home, leaving the strange terrors of her quest behind, but the OTHER, dear Mistress Deep is still with her, not as easily shaken off as the bright and sterile MOTHER. The new body has been infected, Theseus is not alone. Poor Theseus sings a trembling song about the stars and positions herself for the final confrontation. Mistress Deep slowly unfolds, comes out of her hiding place. Theseus expels her from the new body, sends her into the vacuum, subjecting her to the fire.
Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and MOTHER so bright and clean, burning in the cold abyss just as the stars burn. Jones sleeps in his corner and Theseus files her final reports, the Gods of the new order, rulers of the new machine, a new mother and a new beast settling in for their long deep sleep.

Feast of Cannibals

2010-07-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

With cannibal love we coddle them, keeping them locked within steely fences and walls of white plaster. Never will the wolves get their chance at these, our precious young. Never will the world have the chance to dash their bones into bits with terrible falls after great feats. We alone shall enjoy that privilege, the honor of eating our young alive.
Fattened as they are with the sloth of caged animals, darkened by their cheerless existence beneath our marvelous white wings, they know no joy. They watch the images of childhood from our flickering screens, see the green of grass and blue of sky without the knowledge of the wealth of feelings that such images evoke in the spirit of one whose bare feet have trod on grass and leaped towards the sky.
The sky shall not have them. The grass shall never touch them. We keep them safe, like pearly little maggots hidden away in a dark dumpster, suffocating them with cellophane wrappers and video games, and mp3 players, and cellular phones.
They may speak to one another, reach for one another through these devices, but harsh words will have to win their battles, smooth talk suffice for exchanges of affection. We will not let the bloody fisted brawls have them, nor the hand holding, tickling, chasing, and swinging. They are only for us.
We strip away their immortal souls and make machines of them, fat little high fructose corn syrup powered bots to cherish the ideals we hammered into the hole we tore in their hearts. They will hate terror and terrorists. They will love America and God. Their ears and belly buttons will be washed and their homework done.
We will make them want us, want us for the toys, the shoes, the clothes, the sweets we can buy. They will wail for these things, the fruits of our Empire, never knowing the taste of earth and air and sun and water. We will give them corn to eat in all of the colors of the rainbow forged in the shapes of cartoon characters and steroids to make their lungs pump even when there is no oxygen left to breathe and technology to cast its light over their pallor and more fucking liquid corn to leave them thirsty for more and more and more…
They belong to us and to no other, certainly not to themselves. Whatever they are, whatever they were or might have been, it will be smothered like the unwholesome flame that it is.
Death shall not have them, for we will never let them live. They will die before they can be born, to satisfy our hunger, to stave off the orgy of fear that is existence. They will never be here, will never know now, will always be spirited away by our incessant diversions, left as ghosts slumped on sofas with crumbs in their creases.
And the few who suspect that they have been denied the most precious gift we could give will be punished for their intelligence, for their pure heartedness and courage. The brave and the curious and the noble of our brood will suffer the worst tortures so that we may enjoy our cannibal feast, unperturbed by remorse or anxiety.
We will never need to atone if we nip truth in the bud, snuff out the first smoldering spark before a wild fire can grow and spread its crimson fingers over the hearts of our children, taking them forever from us . Never will the passion to live flower within and eat them alive and transform them from worms into butterflies. They are ours alone to devour.

Why Not?

2010-06-24T13:18:00.000-07:00

Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Why not? Why not? While the black blood of the earth, that demon of civilization, bleeds into the briny seas and clock hands tick methodically round like waltzers twirling to the Blue Danube, I go bravely hop scotching into fields of beets, crimson purple veins throbbing in the green leaves.
I saw the face of my ancestor in a photograph that was taken today. A pale plump, round faced woman looked back at me from a photo that had been taken of me. How strange that she is me and we are meeting today for the first time. Why not? The last face I remember seeing was so much younger and leaner and tortured, a puffy red faced beauty, but I looked at her in a mirror and thought, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and I saw her cut her blond hair off.
Such heavy lead filled thoughts to cart to the alchemist, laying them down on the work bench, smelling perfume of cinnamon and sulfur. The devil was here just before you. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? Why not? Why not!
Breezes from countries I never saw caress my face, leaping from leather binding and gold leafed pages to posses my fingers and send them to write fairytales and boil split peas. So many silly things pass through this window I call my self, why not one more? I almost loved the woman I glimpsed in the photograph today because she looked like a grandmother that once rocked me and like a cousin who I don’t know well at all. A cousin that shovels snow from her porch and eats black bread covered in butter and cheese.
I had once been a citizen of earth until I longed to learn to sing the songs of Saturn’s outer rings. Then I trained on the moon called Titan and gave water to a strange man and loved him through eternity, strangely familiar forever. Come with me deeper into the abyss!
While students memorize and serpents molt and gurus pretend, I wriggle, pale and slick in the underground wells like a Naiad, wailing an eerie tune to summon the strange. Up it comes, frightening me in dark hallways when I thought I was alone, drifting through the blue sky like paramecium under a microscope’s lens.
If you thought there would be a point in all of this, if you hoped for it and found it lacking and frowned, then you’ve never been to Titan. The locust make a noise like music in the evening and the swallows sing in the mornings and everything smells like licorice and coffee while the hands on the clock tick tick tick and fathers become grandfathers and die despite the lucky rabbits feet their granddaughters give them. Little Lagomorph paws dyed blue and dispensed from red machines after two quarters of a dollar have been placed on its long silver tongue just outside the air conditioned cool of a powder blue general store at the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot with a view of a lake. They come out in plastic bubbles, but nonetheless grandfathers die and their bodies are donated to universities.
Why not?
While grandmothers fan themselves and mice scurry through cupboards and river rocks soak up the heat of the sun to warm lizards’ bellies, I open doors into invisible worlds and listen to the thoughts of others.
A sympathetic ear is so rare that individuals are almost always startled when you respond to their innermost ramblings. When you hear them whispering to themselves, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and you crumple up just like a frightened pill bug and cry inconsolably, they will find it hard to accept that one occurrence is connected to the next. Plausible deniability.
Why not? Why not?
Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? In dark hallways when I think I am alone? At the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot? Come with me deeper into the abyss!
Why not?
Why not?

Inch By Inch

2010-06-16T19:08:00.000-07:00

Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of the Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in is now out, rejoining the abyss, the cave-like halls of nowhere, my mother’s ancient cold womb. When the stars tumbled out dancing like sparks hissing off the arch of a welding torch, that was my beginning too.
Just as a dragonfly was once a nymph that spent five rotations of the earth around the sun hunting in the deep aquamarine waters of the lagoon before becoming a winged predator that would live less than a month, my larval stage too was much longer than this phase of existence will be.
In my infancy, I was a star burning and swirling, drawing everything to myself, a different sort of predator of the deep, waiting to gain the strength and size necessary for my transformation, my moment to super nova and spread star seed through the curving darkness of the womb space, waiting for that seed to impregnate the terrestrial egg where, warmed by a foster solar entity, it would grow into the newest me, the me that here sits breathing oxygen and expelling carbon monoxide.
I have not yet reached completion, if such a thing exists, as I am still housed safely within the world’s shell, incubating, waiting for the next moment of acceleration to crack the cocoon with wings unfurled. If the egg does not crack then the chick will die before it is born… so I let it bleed out into the abyss…all my animal hopes for preservation.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago, that moment which lapsed, folding in on itself in quiet surrender to the ever flowing passage of time, of thought, a victim of an organizational system that is void of life, a mere mechanical apparatus for processing eternity, a factory for turning darkness into light, a star making machine that I have sometimes thought was myself, but is in reality only one function of self.
Deep self is nestled at the hub of the voyager called eternity, extending its tentacles in every direction, a living pulsing organism moving the blood of being through its veins. This lifetime, a fragment of the life cycle of a star is only a small side effect of the functioning of this vast entity. A little thing like white blood cells gathering around some infected tissue, a thing which happens within the body of a man without the man ever noticing unless the white blood cells fail in their mission and he grows ill and dies.
So this great play unfolds within the body of a titan that has considered us occasionally, but has never called us the crown of creation. This being in turn does what it can with the probabilities that dictate its nature.
I am dreaming. This was all a dream, this black blood spilling from my head into the darkness outside. A dream, the whole warm safe sphere before the ship’s hull was breached, that too was a dream. A dream that I danced like a prince among my whirling peers, glowing hungry for life and death.
Life and death. Motion. The crawling of a worm, inching its way through an unknowable matrix. Inch, Life, Inch, death, inch by life by death by inch, making its way, never knowing where or why, always going.
Would I un-dream any dream I ever dreamed knowing the fount would never grow dry? Knowing each one was an inch by inch by inch motion. No, I wouldn’t erase my nightmares nor my dreams seeing that they were just a motion like a dancer’s arm sweeping gracefully over her head, or her spasmodic jumping.
I let the beetles go their way, go wherever they can find a crack, a crevice, a hole to exploit. I let everything go to sway like the flora clinging to the inner wall of the small intestines.
I cannot know you, great titan, if I hold on, hide within my shell like a crustacean. I will know you as the river knows the sea, one body flowing into the other, waters exchanged.
Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of a Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in, now rushes out, what was out now rushes in. A new phase of existence. A train wreck., most beautiful, sublime, bodies spilled along the rails to ooze nutrients into the soil where the newest me will grow.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago. Like a dragonfly, like a star, living through dying, the pure motion of existence. Inch by inch by inch I am made new, again and again.

We Wear The Music

2010-06-02T16:31:00.000-07:00

We wear our music. That’s all that we are really interested in, what our music looks like. How it sounds is secondary. Fashion is the most important element of music at this moment. Its faciomusica coadunatio. At my high school everyone wanted a green Mohawk. Everyone wore studded leather belts and bracelets and died their hair and pierced anything they could and held their clothing altogether with rows of shiny safety pins. Hardly anyone liked to listen to Punk Rock, but everyone wanted to look like it. One boy arrived at our school dressed in all black. He had been imported straight from Los Angeles and his hair too was long and raven hued. He wore Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails and Type O Negative T-shirts. I bought albums based purely on the way he looked, and listened to them with religious fervor, waiting for my own hair and nails and lips to turn black, even though I disliked some of the music more than not. I had a serious case of faciomusica coadunatio.
My understanding of this condition is limited to my own experience with it. The truth is that my hair, lips, and nails never turned black. I never put on a Skinny Puppy tee shirt. Hell, I never even got out of my orange polka dots and electric green paisley prints and into a nice black tee shirt, until I managed to hook up with a guy who was wearing one. Then I wore his. The truth is that listening is not something we humans do well. It requires attention, a sort of non-animal interest, and we are most thoroughly animals. Being social animals we have an overwhelming need to be accepted, to fit in. Fitting in is crucial for animals. For example I once had a hen that killed every black chick that hatched in her nest and spared only the two that were yellow like her. We humans are the same way. We look for visual cues to signify for us whether or not someone is one of our kind. Image is crucial. Being highly adaptive we have developed fashion, which is a method for disguising our true ambiguous nature so that we can fit neatly into a particular clan of humans.
You can look at our clothes and see who we want you to think we are.
“I listen to country.” Means I am a good old American Christian guy or gal. I say this with a pair of blue jeans, with a big belt buckle, with boots and a hat.
“I listen to rap.” Means I’m the bad ass urban outlaw and hustler. I say this with gold chains and baggy pants and shiny new sneakers.
“I listen to Rock.” Means I’m the jaded “not quite all American” that feels a little snobbish about that not quite part but is still fairly protective of the All American. I say this with frayed or torn blue jeans and T-shirt.
“I listen to Alternative” means I am way too snobbish for the glorified country twang that passes for rock, I might even be a communist if that pisses you off.
Punk = I don’t care what you think or how many times I get punched.
Jazz = I’m thoughtful, possibly educated and I like coffee and rainy afternoons.
Classical = I’m very thoughtful, I love the arts, I think global and buy specialty shoes and sometimes have my pants tailored.
There are greater and greater levels of subtlety that might be explored, but it is all a complete ruse. We may or may not be those things we want you to think we are, but we have become adepts at the art of faciomusica coadunatio.
Now buying a shirt or pair of pants is the same as buying music. You can even buy shoes and get a free song on some web sites. The song is like a breath mint offered to you after your dinner. Clever musicians, aware that music should be free, have found a way to slip it in with our habit for primping our image. Like Mary Poppins, they realized that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” With faciomusica coadunatio, you can fuss about with your image and get some music without noticing.
We wear the music when perhaps we should let the music wear us. We should let it flow through us and move our bodies, minds and spirits wherever it wills, unimpeded by our monkey brains. The real is there, existing despite the genres and social implications. Nothing is the way it appears. Eyes lie, and so many organisms have learned to turn that fact to their advantage, developing camouflage so that they won’t be eaten by larger organisms. Knowing this, we should go forward accepting that what we see is not what we get. If we open our hearts and listen there is so much more to music than the way we look when we hear it.

Invaders

2010-05-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

They are coming, spreading their otherness throughout our very personal space. Here behind the wall where we were once so safe, they are thriving, squirming, multiplying.
It seems, at first, like a dance. They are floating and drifting. Exotic visitors. Maybe they bring peanut butter. Maybe these are our lost brothers.
Their numbers increase. What was an interesting bit of choreography has become a swarming mass of bodies. There are so many more of them than there are of us. They are inside.
Maybe they bring liberation. Maybe what they bring is death.
This hostile presence, this thing that does not obey the laws we obey, this thing whose code is its very own secret way, it is an invader. It is the Other.
It is intent on making what was ours its own. It has come for our vital resources. It is feeding on the vein of our land, our body, the kingdom where we dwell. It is feeding on us, wearing us down, overwhelming us in numbers.
There are so many more of them than we can deal with. They breed so quickly. Clouding our skies with their awkward birth. There was a time when ours was the only culture. Now theirs is here, growing, expanding, reaching in beyond the boundaries.
Something is coming, closing in, frenzied by the heat of conquest, eager to breach our walls. It reaches into our space. This alien thing. Its shape, so unlike our own, so similar in startling ways, inspires our awe.
What? What does it want? Maybe it is playing. Maybe it is giving us a gift. This alien thing. Its shape, so unlike our own, so similar in startling ways, inspires our fear.
It is inside of us now. Its way is not our way. It does what it wants with us, this occupying force. We are infected by its presence. We are becoming they.
We resist. Our insurgence matches their hostility with violence. Their numbers are greater. They tumble out of the sky, out of space, from the abyss, they tumble, are hurling towards us to explode in our warmth.
They come to dig in. To make our body their own. Their culture will be grown in our soiled ruin. Whether we accept it. Or reject it. Something is coming.
There are so many more of them than there are of us. They are inside now. This is their kingdom, their land, their home. They are the “Us”. We are now the “They”, creeping around, hoping for a chance to recover, to strike back.
Maybe they have brought evolution. Maybe they have brought ruin. Maybe they have made a desert.
The land collapsed beneath their unquenchable hunger. Perhaps they never wanted to keep what was ours. They meant only to touch it, to rush through it, fill it in the heat of their passion, then abandon it after it was no longer ours.
Their need was never to have and to hold. They tapped the vein of our body to feed their conquest. Now they move on in need of another boundary to penetrate, another Other to subsume. They flourish in our waste until we are extinguished.
Now they march on to farther horizons, in search of heat, to rain down upon another kingdom. Maybe they will bring peanut butter. Maybe they will bring death.

Run As Fast As You Can

2010-05-27T16:27:00.000-07:00

As fast as you can, run. Feet pounding against hard dry earth, then the sound of brittle dry grass and wild oats and wheat folding under foot. A frantic rustling sound, like the tearing of sheets of paper, run. The trees conspiring to make shade in a place accustomed to the tortures of the sun…slender young things, rebels in a desert. The white church with its friendly face and the weirdness tucked tight within, worshipers down on their hands and knees, new initiates stripped to their undergarments to be absolved of sin before their brethren’s eyes. Stripped of sin, of the mortal sin all begun with a bite into a crisp apple, sin originating from a resounding “crunch". See it in the jagged yellow action bubble.
Suddenly Eve beholds her nakedness. So now they take off their clothes in the basement of the church. But you don’t have to, you don’t have to go there. You can run. Run away from your parents and your teachers and the preacher and the neighbors. You can get away with strong young legs, but it’s not the strength of the body that they have restricted. It is the strength of the will. You are their slave. A sad host for their disease.
The trailers, the custom homes sprawled like mansions in a no man’s land, rest side by side, crowning hills and nestling within valleys. The woman with the high heels is coming, asking again if we’ll come help her with some work at her house. Smart gray knee length skirt and jacket, red lipstick, mahogany locks shining in the sun.
Everything looks just right. A fine outstanding citizen. We go, because we can no longer refuse and be considered polite, good neighbors, fine young people. Later, we can’t remember what happened at her house. We’re not even sure that we went.
Run, as fast as you can, run. The face of the house white as the church, charming green trim and the stairway around back that leads to another basement…
Smooth sun tanned arms and legs and freckled cheeks, walking through the fields, resting under the little trees. Scent of hot asphalt when we cross the only paved street in town for ice cream or magazines and bubble gum. Clouds of dust stirred up by our discolored sneakers as we race home along the dirt roads. Bigger clouds made by the tires of pick up trucks rattling along.
When we were younger we waved. Now sometimes we hear them coming and dive into the seas of tall grass. A refuge from all of their expectations. Lady bugs crawling up long stalks and other insects we haven’t named, pale green and yellow or black and red, also down here hiding.
The woman with the high heels smiling at us again in front of the white church. Won’t we come again? She always asks when others are present, ashen adults who admire her color, her charm. If we refuse they will frown at us. We are encouraged to go.
No!
We scream silently, hearts thundering, adrenaline rushing. Not even we know why, but we feel it from head to toe, a throbbing urge to run, as fast as we can. But with their eyes on us we can’t. We can only submit and walk back to her house, to the place we can only half remember. Back to the green sofa and tumblers of ice tea, the part we’re allowed to remember, the part that comes before the concrete steps and the cool darkness of the basement.
It comes bubbling up only in flashes, half remembered scenes that step beyond reason. Discordant images quickly pushed back into the depths, too incongruent with the shiny platitude of the surface. It is too late to act on the impulse to flee, but we do it anyway, with our minds, because it is too late for our bodies. As fast as you can, run, skimming over the top like flat stones over a pond’s mirror finish.

Colony

2010-05-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

My sister was there when I was born. She helped me remove the shell that encased me when I felt complete in my beingness. I flexed my legs and scratched at the walls from the inside until the sheath trembled and shook with my efforts. Then my sister took notice and came to my assistance. When enough surface had been torn away, her antenna touched mine and I was soothed knowing that I was cherished. We shared knowing. Together we removed the white husk that had held me since a time before I was me.
I had been other than I was now. That time was lost to me, except the vague memory of my sister’s touch. We had shared knowing even before my transformation. She had always cared for me, and I was glad now that I was as she. We were now fully sisters.
When I had completely emerged, my sister and I touched feelers again. There was much that needed to be shared with me. Even while we communed this away another of my sisters came and carried away the birthing husk. My sister showed me the nursery where there were others who were as I once had been. They were so different than I was now. My long slender legs were now so quick and agile. Once I had none. Once I had lain blind and wriggling.
My sister showed me how she cared for these others. The understanding had already been transmitted to me in the knowing when we touched, but now I watched as she helped the blind ones, grabbing them with her mandibles and dragging them to the center of the chamber where they could roll and wriggle together. There were other sisters here, all assisting the blind ones who were as I had been and as my sisters themselves once were. I joined them in herding the blind ones together and saw to it that they were cherished and helped to nurture them so they could grow fat in preparation for their long confinement in transformation.
Some of the blind ones were ready. They were now busy cocooning themselves in fresh birthing sheaths. They would sleep the sleep that I had slept and would awaken anew when their own transformation was complete.
I was shown the eggs from which the blind ones had emerged. My sister touched feelers with me and asked me to help her move the eggs up to another chamber where there was warmth. We worked, letting the rhythm of work fill us with delight, carrying eggs from one chamber to the next through the tunnels. We were filled with pleasure assisting our unborn sisters, helping them to grow into blind ones so that they would one day undergo the great transformation and be as we were.
When our mandibles were empty we occasionally paused to touch feelers sharing the knowing. Our communion warmed us. We were also warmed by our work. Later when the upper chambers cooled, we moved the eggs back to the protected depths of the nursery.
We took a moment from our work and feasted on what our warrior sisters had killed. It was a fantastic beast that they had slain, huge and alien. Its mammoth size was a testament to our sisters’ courage and strength. We touched and sang their praise in the knowing.
When I was satiated I watched as one of my sisters carried away the body of another sister who had ceased to know us. This was all right. We still knew her. Down in the nursery, eggs were hatching and the blind ones were being fed and were spinning cocoons and soon they would join us in the knowing.
The knowing was shared before we were born and it would continue to be shared after we died. Our constant work ensured this. We rejoiced in the never ending flow of activity that was our communal beingness; carrying eggs, tending the blind ones, removing the dead, tunneling new passages, maintaining the old, exploring the world beyond, and hunting and killing, and scavenging and always, always sharing in the knowing.
My sister was there when I was born, and I was there when she was born, helping her to emerge from her cocoon, showing her all that she must know so that she could be there when her sister was born again.

Pink Satin Roses Unraveling

2010-05-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

Pink satin roses unraveling and round moon white belly out running tiny breasts. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. The wall of windows lies exposed and I can see the fields all gold and brown and the dusty green olive trees and a far away lake of dark blue. The sun shines eternally in that place and there is someone to take my hand and the memories shift like the beads at the end of a kaleidoscope, always changing the view. I am young and strong and brave again with the stars of wonder restored to my heart. I can run with long legs and bare feet into all of the days that come with lungs pumping and heart pounding, aching in my chest. The pleasure of letting the spirit fly through life outweighs the pain of moving the body so that there is no desire to stop. They make themselves old in that world far from the room of mirrors in the halls of the makers, stooped over desks and hunched over steering wheels. They die bit by bit each time that a bell is rung and they begin to practice this little death while they are children. Poison in silver wrappers, poison filled with sweet cream and stowed away in neat plastic boxes adorned with our favorite blue skinned heroes sets the mind racing when it finds its way into the blood stream. That is how we grow old, loosing our bodies to false gods and cramped spaces and sweet toxic substances that give us a moment of pleasure. That is how I grow old and come to sag, that and by giving myself away to all comers. Anyone who asks gets my attention. My parents start stealing it away when I am small. I come to believe it is what I must do in all cases, and only when it is too late, I realize that it must be stopped. I must keep a kernel for myself so that it can grow and flower again and again. Never ever give it all away. Keep it so that spring can come again. There is a way that leads to life and a way that leads to death. Not for the body alone, but for something else as well. We must live for the shimmering sliding something that passes through this world. It passes through what we think we are, it passes through the whole thing. Later we will read these words and we will think that they make no sense, but that is all a mater of perspective. You must be much bigger to see, you must be bleeding through the paper thin world of the temporary. I draw a cross in the little world and in the room of mirrors a door opens and I find a tiny sword in the darkness beneath a fur coat. It fills me with fear, because I never imagined I would find such a thing in this place. It came from somewhere that I am blind to, it has come from the Other. Now I have the tiny sword in my hands. I knew of the place outside of places when I found the sword. I knew it when I met the terrible yellow unicorn with its red eyes and it dared to defy the laws of the world that I inhabited. I knew it best of all when I stacked the brightly colored boxes, little ones on top of big ones or inside of big ones and there was a special square way that they fit. That was what taught me to understand space and it reminded me keenly of the place outside of places. Soft and sweet with little bits of pink satin roses coming unraveled, and a hard sidewalk on a pleasantly warm night and the infinite open above me. Another right there beside me and we are amazed that we are here, amazed that we are alive, amazed that there is another amazed one here, right now with the one I call “me”. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. That is where I am. A kernel kept for myself so that spring will come again.

Dog And Cat Days

2010-05-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and all hearts have wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that house them. So often we feel them trying to fly up out of our throats and they get stuck there as a lump, or sometimes they flutter around in our stomachs especially when our eyes meet or some bit of flesh brushes up against another. We’ll be drug or gun runners and we’ll sit by turquoise pools in forgotten desert motels and sip drinks garnished with hot pink paper umbrellas until we get our stomachs shot out and we bleed out red blood into some old avocado green shag and hold hands and feel shocked watching the light go out of our eyes.
We’ll be rock stars with coke habits and old mink coats and big sunglasses and then we’ll look more than ever like the kitten girls and bull dog boys we are. We carve our initials into the sandy cliffs that overlook the surf and kitten girls know that the wind will blow the names away and there will be no more KG “heart” BDB some day, but still her eyes are full of stars and Harley Davidsons rumble through her cranium. They could just live in an apartment that smells like antiques and old ladies down by the sea, soaking the asbestos up while being nobodies together. She can write a novel that no one will publish and he can work in construction and play in a band that sounds like animals fighting in the guts of land mowers and each can maintain with pride their respective My Space profiles.
It was meant to be glorious and shining, our youth unending, the mysteries of the universe always sparkling over us, hearts always trying to escape these excited bodies, these chemical factories for building space ships for the Gods. We would die young and live in the kingdom of heaven forever. Maybe recklessly manufacture smurf speed in a bathtub in a sagging house off of Machado St. and wait for the fantastic explosion that would set our hearts free. Kitten girl would do anything, anything at all to feel alive, break her hymen over Tom Waits songs, bite and scratch, forget the condoms, take a greyhound bus to another state, watch strangers play video games and drink wine coolers in living rooms that smell like nothingness. She’d even shave away the soft clouds of hair and invoke demons in circles and stars made of masking tape and spend the night in cars parked at run down drive ins.
Somewhere along the way the dreams were trapped in black bottles and distilled into nightmares brewed in basements.
What happened to recording our newest song in the bathroom on an old cassette player and ditching school to play it on the old boss stereo for grandma? What happened to dancing half naked in the surf and bulldog boys in pink dresses and kitten girls singing songs on the fences of hot alleys?
In some tear drop of time we are there, like insects trapped in amber, our spirits were left behind in the golden sun filled afternoons of our dog and cat days. Now we march, life less old wrinkled things with guts too heavy to swing to the music and hearts too swollen with betrayals of self to flutter or even flop. Poor hearts, the wings have so hopelessly atrophied. This slow death is not the glory we imagined, is not the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d learn to sing. When did we become tame old pets with small dreams? Little petty fantasies so devoid of life they can no longer crash onto shores but only slosh about like old beer in plastic cups?
Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They used to break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and everyone’s hearts had wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that housed them.
We can live again in the bright and shinning moment, dancing and singing the sparkle of the stars. The night sky will once again drip with mystery, our hearts might again shudder with ecstasy and its promise. Anything is yet possible while we still breathe, even if there is a tear drop in which we are sour little pusses and sleeping old dogs, there is always another moment waiting to be born. A sea foam green bead of liquid life in which we rise from our ashes and live, live, live, live, wild and magick things from other times and other places, from fantasy books and independent films, soft kitten girls and brave hearted bull dog boys, the stewards of live hearts.
And now that innocence has become experience we’ll know how to let them fly. We’ll let them soar like birds of prey, graceful and far seeing carrying us to all new vistas of sound and color, to worlds knit of avocado green shag and soft pale clouds of hair and guitars and bonfires and pink flesh stitched together with boom boxes and reels of old film. Oh the sea foam green dreams with their Harley Davidson rumble and the red blood that sloshes like beer in old cups shuddering with ecstasy distilled into nightmares. The glory we imagined is the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d sing with our tear drops of time wrapped in stooped shoulders. We break on the rocks and the wind blows the names away along with the cages of rib bone that housed them.

Attention Spilling Like Water

2010-04-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

Why is it that we are all so obsessed with the color of eyes? Love songs define their characters by the color of the eyes. It is the most obvious thing; the eyes. Clearly we care what color they are even if we refuse to look into the eyes of others for extended periods of time. We may even couple with some one and sing the praises of their eyes, but we would never dare to gaze into them for too long during the course of the conventional romance.
Eyes, eyes, everything comes into us through our eyes and everything flows out. Our attention, so vital yet ephemeral leaks away out of our eyes, dribbles on flowers and the color of shoes and advertisements for energy drinks, and the eyes of others.
Away it goes like drops of water spilled from the faucet. It can never call back those drops that were lost. The only solution is to stop the leak. My self, like California, is experiencing a water shortage. Water is life. Life is attention.
We live here in this world of phantoms because once, at a fatal moment, our attention wandered, it abandoned the self and went out wandering through the wasteland, went away with yearning… longing for movement and warmth, otherness. Conquest, we call this, this seeking of the Other until we find it and grasp it and when it has been consumed we find that it is now of self and we must escape it again…we must find another Other. Never still, not for a moment. The eyes lead to eternity.
Certainly we are concerned with the color of eternity manifested in this desert. We will not dare to look into it, return through stillness to the place where self dwells. Painful self, which I must avoid at all cost. I must not look for too long into those eyes or I will see self, sitting on its throne, like a statue of Pharaoh that has never moved. My wanderings, my conquests, have been all fantasies, attention fleeing its source.
Nothing has occurred. I am unmoving. Nothing ever will occur. I am unmovable. But my spirit flies from me to wander in the wasteland.
Thus I am dead. That is how God dies. All that we call life is the death of the eternal. I dream. A cold silent stone. Sleeping beauty, snow white lying in her coffin, and the prince, he is a conquistador that has fled my shores and hopes to find another, but never will he arrive at any shore but mine. Fractured. Attention fleeing self endlessly, endlessly. As long as my spirit flies I am empty.
If it would return and stay we would live again. Eternity filled with life, with attention. Attention filling self. Then what are we? What would we be?
If Charming never comes to me willingly then I am the wolf big and black , stalking him as he runs in place. I am the witch, ancient and cold and riddled with death, laughing at the one who wants to be rid of me. Separation is death. Truly. A kiss is a communion. I wait for the communion of self that brings awakening, the communion that restores life.
Why is it that we are all so obsessed with the color of eternity? Love songs pale and lifeless bleat on about the glory of conquest. Time is the wasteland, and songs and stories and conquest unfold through the matrix of time.
My attention flies from me.
The eternal has no color. That is why it is the color of the door that I prefer to examine. I will spend time to catalogue its variations and striations, write endless tomes singing the merits of its shade, anything at all to avoid opening it. Anything but confess that I am leaking away, the blood of God spilling, as if rotten with hemophilia. The blood of God spilling into the wasteland.

Words and the Call of the Birds

2010-04-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

A lifetime without understanding.
Understanding. A simple word. As though words were simple. As though a mere string of letters could ever begin to describe the shifting of something so subtle. Uttered, spoken, shouted with disgust, thought of with envy.
A word. The simple word. The complex word.
The question remains: what is it?
Careful study has only given me more questions. The statements, the answers, the thoughts, the ideas…they have all fallen, one by one. 2,4 ,6, 12, 16…the understanding has fallen.
Or maybe there never was an understanding, just the knee-jerk recollection of letters and words and sentences. And if that is all there has been, what else is there? What else could there be?

"Play with us," the birds cry in their own language. High coos and flittering decibels of deeper chords, they sing with the fluidity of the ocean. How was my ear tuned to their sound? Earlier encounters with their larger friends prepared me somewhat for their visits.

How many more words are there? How many more ideas…how many more things that are stored up with no real study, with no real questioning?
A lifetime of rusty accumulation.
A lifetime of words, a lifetime of supposed understanding and usage.
I ride the wheel and I am left holding an empty bag. The wind blows and I hear an echo. I truly don’t know. I have never known. Each thought is an elusive grasp into an endless fog of ephemeral truth.

One day I sat, watching the green grass grow, feeling an ant discovering the soft valleys of my body. It was then, when I rested my attention on the almost silent world that moves and shifts beneath my inattentive gaze, it was then, under the loyal sun, that glows and beams so often in this land dotted with hills and wooded valleys, here, while the clouds moved lazily by my dot of a body, while the earth continued to tilt and turn, while the frenzied activity and buzz of human life whirled by at a sorry pace. It was here when, to me, the birds came.

What is truth? What is understanding? What is power? Traces run along the ground, I run my fingers along their trail. But where do they come from and where do they go? I look forwards, backwards, I call to my friend…
“Where are you?”
There is no answer, just another gust of wind.

Their brethren told them of my wishes, of my desires. How the first ones could read my thoughts, I will never know. But they knew. And they spoke to me as only small winged and feathered creatures can. They dropped their long feathers for me to gather. They gave me material for costumes and sacred dances. "Here," they said, "have us, take us and plant us in the ground."

One day, I looked over at the little boy sitting next to me on the couch. I saw his little tan hands with palms facing up. In the middle of his little round face was a place of complex beauty. I recognized it. It was the realm of the subtle and the vague. The softer spectrum of watercolor hues where many things can exist at once, where all possibilities can coexist in an orgy of thought and emerging possibilities and wonder.

I have been listening to the sound of the wind, the sound of dust hitting a window over and over. I have listened to its bell for three decades. I have called to it, played with it, danced with it…but I have never known it. I have never looked beneath that skirt, never studied the shape of the long first letter, the curve of the last. And I haven’t looked in. I haven’t felt the muddled ball that whirls in a fog of letters and symbols and blue and black. I think I see traces, I think I can poke it…and maybe, maybe…but I look into the distance with squinted eyes. I look out and know that the earth is covered in fog and letters dance in the wind and my fingers are covered in slime and my mind is coated in an even thicker sludge.

One feather stands now, by the Phalaris. I have watched it grow, watched it feed on the food of water and minerals. I planted all the feathers. I hung them from mirrors and strung them around my neck. They decorated my ears and tickled my lover’s nose. Their gifts showered on me like golden rain, and I opened my self to accept their offerings. They discovered me, they came from shadow worlds with trees made of puppets and people made of snow. I envied their journey, their ability to move and shift, voyaging from one landscape to another without losing sight of their goal.

I need to scrape the green ooze off. I need to sit with the stillness, the evaporated shapes, the missing thoughts. This is not ignorance, this is the understanding that I have never held between my fingers, this is that ephemeral thought that has no content, that sound that has no meaning, that concept composed only of the void.

I see a girl dancing. There are two walls made of bricks. They are miles apart, but they are so tall that their sheer height makes them always present. The pretty girl is in the field, among the gently sloping grass of yellow and green. Her skirt of layered gray chiffon moves like clouds tethered to her waist. She moves around trees and skips over sleeping foxes. She is in the gap. The huge space in the middle.

"Bring me back!"
I wanted to shout, but I could only smile, moving slowly and smiling shyly as they dropped their coverings and became naked. Beneath their quills, I saw emblems and symbols. Etched in glittering raised lines made of blood and gold, their markings were clear, containing a mystery beyond my imagination. I stared, in utter confusion, in awe, in wonderment. These markings, lacking verbal clarity, yet shining with the magnificence of other worlds; of teachings that cannot be explained.
My mind screamed for explanation, but my heart kept me still, my mouth remained shut while my words were shoved into my deepest inner caves. I was not allowed to ask. They were not allowed to tell. Only the mystery made itself clear, and I drank its beauty. My mouth open, my chin wet, I lapped at the beauty of the Other, I cried for the clear revelation of the utterly strange.

It is the middle which I push away with extreme thought. Either being happy or sad. Jealous or content in the slimy gloss of lovemaking. Two extremes, side by side. And always together. There will never be space for another possibility. Pushed together there can be no room for something new to flower. Without the gap, there can be no room for surprise.

"Yes," they said, with wordless cries and soundless laughter, "let yourself feel, there is no answer…only eternal questions, questions that float aimlessly forever, without ever finding a place to rest…"

Another Myself

2010-04-09T23:28:00.000-07:00

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film, I watched from bed as I came out of another house and crossed the street, approaching the house where I lay. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street, tossing her hair in the wind and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”
I thought he would want to disengage. I didn’t know that the girl on the street was me. I didn’t know that the man in the bed was you. He had been caressing my face and I knew we loved each other. I knew I loved him. I wouldn’t pretend I didn’t. When he told me that he had a girlfriend now, when he introduced us, I didn’t know that she was me. He had said that he could spend the day with me working on our project, but he would go back to her when night fell. He stood at a distance telling me this. It was as if he wanted me to understand that he was with her and was not interested in being with me. It was like the letter he had sent, him telling me that he had a girlfriend, and implying that I should not pursue him. I never meant to be in pursuit. I belonged to you. I was only telling him the truth without any hope of reciprocation, without any desire to change circumstances.
So I unpacked my bags across the room and conversed politely with him which is what it seemed he wanted to do. He wanted to show me the progress he had made on the project. The audio was surprising. He had used samples of my voice, and samples from a CD that you made. I was quite amazed. I told him that it was wonderful. I told him that I was proud of his progress. I realized that this was why he was risking seeing me, to show me that he had taken something from me, that he understood. I was proud of him, of the time I had put into him, of how my attention invested in him had blossomed into something incomprehensible and creative in the truest way, beyond boundaries, beyond ownership.
I was careful to stay back, at a polite distance. Then he closed the gap. He came close to me, he lay down on the bed beside me and we embraced. We held each other and he caressed my face. I should have known he was you. I should have known when I heard the music and recognized that it was your music. Or was it that I was you? I was you and he was me. You were proud of me for what I had done. I wanted to please you, laying there entwined, but then I saw myself coming, the one who would rend us apart, the one who would keep you to herself never really having you. You saw her coming and said:
“She’s coming.”
And I said:
“She is?”
And felt worried. I wanted to hold on to you, but then I didn’t know if I could stand up to her. She had promises. Words that bound us.
I was laying in bed holding another myself in my arms and through the window I saw myself crossing the street. She was coming. Blonde hair floating behind her in golden streamers. Youthful face and lithe body hurrying insecurely across the street. We had cheated her before. We might do it again despite the promises.
I was crossing the street and I got the feeling that you were in bed with her, despite the promise you had made. I had the feeling but I thought, no, that’s silly. I know I can trust him. But I had the feeling that while you had used the words sincerely as an expression of what you had felt in the moment, now while I was gone, a different moment was unfolding and the words would be gotten around. They would have meant something different now that you had this new moment unfolding before you. Things were changing. I could feel you slipping away from me.
I was laying in bed caressing your face. In that moment I loved you, I was glad to be with you. You said:
“She’s coming.”
And I realized she would not like this. She would not see how innocent this love was. For a moment I thought I would let her see. I thought she will come and see us and go and I will still be with you. Then I thought it was not too late to keep my word. I would go with her at nightfall. What was a little hug? A little caress? Nothing more than a little brotherly affection administered to an old friend. I would leave you and go with her.
You were caressing my face and I saw her through the window crossing the street. My legs were tangled with yours. Our chests were pressed together.
“She’s coming.” I said
I should have known that you were her. I should have known that I was him. I should have known that I was you and you were me.

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film I watched from bed as I came out of a house and crossed the street. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”

Answers

2010-04-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to say that will give you the answers to the wordless questions that burn in your heart. Those anguished muffled screams from your breast and the muted cry of an entire body take shape in the paunch that hangs over the belt and the ache of shoulders and the sorrows whose source seems to be diffused in the atmosphere like vapor. Vapor of my heart suffocates me and I oscillate between desiring affectionate company and craving the solitude of a deep dark warm cave. Perhaps in another way all I am seeking is that same deep dark exile, the reprieve of momentary annihilation.
I don’t have answers for you. My question is my self, the answer is the same. You are out here looking for something that no one can give you. If you want to know the truth then look into the abysmal well of self. It could be that you are happy, and that my dark mood doesn’t suit you. I happen to think, however, that happy people don’t look for answers. Show me someone who is tortured wondering why they are so happy, or why life is so just and fair and lovely.
People with questions are dissatisfied, admittedly to varying degrees. Some are miserable while others have only vaguely disquieting feelings that lead them to search for the source of the disquiet. If I had a greater magick I would never stoop to attempt to say anything directly to any one. I would have written you a fairy tale.
Notice also my need to say that “you” are looking for something. I want to set myself up as someone who knows more and to know more there must be someone else who knows less, so I have invented you. This is the sickness of all those who want to tell you “the truth” or “illuminate” your mind. Everyone who wants to tell you something factual, deliver the answers you seek, is a hungry liar. Even those who are well intentioned are liars. For example they may feel that what they want is to help you when in reality what they want is to be helped. They want to give you what no one can give them. They have made up some answers or been given some “one size fits all” explanations that they hope to pass on to you for your betterment, but one size fits all is the same as one size fits none.
If you want to know what is wrong find a mirror. For so much of my life I have assumed that others felt like me. Only now I see, the impressions which formed me may have varied in innumerable ways from those that formed you or any other given member of humanity. What ails me is a personal affliction, and what ails the world is me and my affliction.
There is always a chance that you feel a little bit like I do. Then in some way you might be comforted to think that you are not entirely alone with your shouting heart, that somewhere out there, someone else’s heart is shouting, and they are scrambling to find the reason, working desperately to save that heart from the terminal illness that filled it with woe.
Good heavens! If only I could lay my face in some grass or press my body against a boulder or a tree. If only I could be free to be alive instead of always fighting for that feeling. If only I wasn’t so angry… then what? What would I be, what would I have to do, what would you be reading now?
And of course there are others who are right now fighting for their mortal lives and some of them feel more truly alive than I do now. I am a spoiled white girl sitting in her high tower willing to dish out her opinions and advice while feeling sorry for her woes. I am like a house cat. I just want to get out. I just want to die so that I can feel alive.
That is my answer. If you want the truth then die or come close to it whenever possible. Turn yourself (hence the world) upside down. Revolutionize it. That is the only choice you have.

The Emperor

2010-04-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

I lay on my grandfather’s couch, where he had preferred to sleep during the days, stretched out in front of the television set. The seat cushions were a dark, almost black chocolate color and the back supporting cushions were a gray the color of clay. All of it was soft to the touch and delicately furry. It held the person that lay on it like a gentle beast with silky fur.
The smell of my grandparent’s house was always of wood and vanilla scented candles and black licorice and coffee and the smell of the desert mingled with water and trees and stone. At the table behind me my grandmother was sitting, my father sometimes stood, sometimes sat, beside her, pleading, and my uncle sat at the kitchen bar across from the table. My uncle had a black beard and a booming voice.
The carpet was a rich red orange shag, also soft to the touch. The lace curtains and vinyl shutters filtered the bright sunlight that made its way past the giant elm trees my grandfather had grown all around the house.
My father was asking my grandmother to come and live with us, my mother and my sisters and I could care for her. My grandmother and Uncle rejected his offer. They were mean to him. I felt an intense shock. These people who had seemed to be family were bitterly cruel, they were stabbing my father in the heart. The sounds of their voices were full of a dismissive disdain. They said that my father was a complete fool who could care for no one, that nobody needed him, or even wanted him. I thought that my father would cry. I was filled with rage, my father was here offering help, asking his mother to come with him, and they would not even acknowledge his good intentions. They did not care.
I realized suddenly that they did not like him. That my grandmother and her first bastard son were a special pair, pleased to inflict pain on my father, the other son, the son of the father. They were venting their rage towards the father on his son, because he was not there to receive it.
These were people who had cradled me when I was small, my grandmother particularly. Her skin was always soft, her hair short and white, her body big and round like one of those headless goddess statues. She wore brightly colored housedresses. Now she could no longer walk and could barely speak except to groan a bit and shake her head and sometimes communicate in a slow growling voice like a creature from a swamp.
As a child I had known her only as a benevolent figure who loved me. She did not even love me as much now as she did then. I had been like a pet, a thing which is loveable when it is small and then it is a terrible surprise when it grows too large for the house and drools and barks and wants to run and dig under the fence.
I had already known that my uncle was a wretched cruel heart. When I was a baby my Aunt Peggy shot herself in the head because he ran off with a blonde nurse named Terry and said that he didn’t love her anymore. I was very young at the time and hadn’t been told what had happened, but from the time that my Aunt Peggy became sad and disappeared I disliked and distrusted him. My dislike for him grew when I had to spend time with my new Aunt Terry, because I disliked everything about her. I had loved my Aunt Peggy naturally.
To see my uncle this way was not a surprise, but to see that he had learned such cruelty from my grandmother was terrible. My Father had gray hair. He was tall. He usually seemed rough and uncaring. Now that he was being tender, his new tender feelings were being squashed by a gruesome pair.
I hated them both from then on. I did not want to see my grandmother again. I called once and my Uncle, who was now in charge of caring for her, did all the talking, mostly judging me for my move to a far away city, asking me if I had gone chasing a man, asking what a descent man would want with a woman with little kids (a strange question considering that Terry had a pair of youngsters when he married her).
After that, I would never call again. When my grandmother died, I made little observance of the occurrence. She was a stranger.
Laying on the couch that day, I had noticed that the beautiful tile coffee table constructed by my grandfather had been removed and replaced by the table he had made for my uncle. This one had broken tiles at the corners that left terrible vacancies upon its surface. It made me feel sick to see it there, looking like that.
When my grandfather had been alive the table had stood whole and without fracture. The lawn and trees in the back yard had been green and he had kept a thriving garden of herbs. Now that he was gone, my uncle was here, and with him he had brought a broken table and the death of the lawn and trees and garden. My Grandfather’s land was dead, having been invaded by the desert that in life he had held at bay. His house had become a nightmarish mockery of what it had once been, broken or ill fit odds and ends having usurped the finer objects which had been of his making and had once held sway. And his real heirs wept and were broken hearted by the revolution of death that had turned the father’s kingdom into dust where mites took up residence and ruled over his waste.

The Holy Ghost

2010-03-28T17:14:00.000-07:00

The holy ghost came to her when she was a child, only six years old. For weeks preceding the actual event she awoke in the night screaming and crying as the result of having had a nightmare, a premonition of what was to come. Each time she was told “ Its just a nightmare, go back to sleep.” by one groggy parent or the other, so that on the night that the plane did crash into the house she almost believed it was only the same nightmare come to visit her once more.
It was a private plane that carried six passengers, and the pilot and co-pilot. They were all dead, spilling from the wreckage into the fiery garage like guts bursting from a wounded bird. Her father wanted to help them, but they were beyond his help, and her mother was saying,
“Oh God.”
Her older sister was screaming,
“What is it, what happened?”
Helen knew what had happened. It was the plane, the same plane that had been crashing into her dream every night for the past two weeks.
“Get them out of here!” her father shouted. But he needn’t have, because mother was already grabbing them roughly by the arms and saying,
“C’mon.” in her brusque way thick with the Oklahoman accent.
Then they stood on the street in front of their home in Lake Wood California watching the flames spread, Mother and sister and she, all in their white night gowns like three ghosts. Father and a neighbor were dragging bodies out, just in case someone was yet alive and merely unconscious, but at the time she hadn’t understood that. It had seemed that he was taking them out so that even the dead could be spared the horror of being eaten up by the flames.
They were laid out on the lawn and soon Father had turned a garden hose on to combat the hungry fire. Then the wailing sirens came and the flashing red lights bouncing off the dark smoke billowed from the mouth of the garage.
Mother had been saying all along,
“Don’t look, you hear? Close your eyes.” And she tried to press their faces into the folds of her night gown, but despite this they had looked. They saw.
The nightmares, like Gabriel, had come whispering, and now here it was. The spirit that sought to inhabit the body, burning it mercilessly. The plane, a desirous phantom, had seized hold of the house and now it was devouring it with its passion.
Mother kept saying,
“Oh God.”
And yes, it must have been so. Dancing before their eyes with wings of flames spreading over the roof top lighting the night sky and obliterating the stars with its smoky mane, here was the Holy Ghost, the spirit of heaven come down to visit its rage upon them and see the bodies laid before it in neat rows like finger sandwiches.
After weeks of practice, she now found that she could not scream, nor cry, but only observe with eyes as round as saucers, peering out from behind her mother’s night gown.
“Oh God.”
The nightmare had not ended this time and every detail was startlingly clear. She was awake and the dream had swallowed her.
“Oh God.”
And it would never let her go.

Interdimensional Biological Spaceship Beast

2010-03-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

I draw a card from an Albano-Waite Tarot deck and am immediately unhappy with this picture. The poor devil has no cock. It's clear that it is missing. While his wings are a vivid plum color, he himself is stuck with the color of a turd. He wears the white beard of a department store Santa Claus and his eyes are contorted by an emotion that must be sorrow or anger.
I cannot blame him. He is being made a mockery of in this picture.
The man, who does at least sport a Ken doll man bump, seems to be gesturing towards the absence of the devil’s penis. The devil sits on a perch with a five pointed star being driven point down into his crown as if it were insisting that he acknowledge the power of the one flowing from above to below. He is not holding the people in bondage as one would initially guess, but rather it is they who are keeping him. The chain around their necks symbolizes their wish to be separate from their bodies and keep everything below the neck imprisoned.
Despite this, the truth of the situation is discernible, the sly devil can accept his debasement and somehow use it to tell his own story. That star being driven into his head mimics the horns visible on his head. We do not come from one, it says, we come from two.
The man and the woman also don horns, and tails. The woman's tail is made of fruit and the mans tail is made of fire. He will bring the fire and she will bear the fruit, enough said.
Behind them the devil waits patiently for them to loose the binds that are strangling the life dwelling within them. With the Vulcan hand gesture he bids them to live long (perhaps eternally) and prosper.
He is not a prisoner after all, he is patient and kind and refuses to abandon them, suffering along with them. He waits for them to set themselves free. His knees form the shape of a heart between the man and the woman, urging them to embrace their nature and love one another without fear or guilt or shame.

The following day I draw another card. It is Strength. I see this card as the perfect follow up to the devil. This is the alchemical marriage, beauty and the beast, the unification of the eternal and the temporal.
The woman with the eternity symbol over her head and rose garland belt represents the eternal being, the holy guardian angel. The red lion is the animal, the biological machine, the temporary creation. This is strength; the two united, the rose and the lion.
The lion is powerful, strong, and regal submitting to her touch. His tongue lolls, his eyes roll back in his head as the fierce beast relinquishes all control to his eternal beloved.
This is strength: the willingness to submit to stillness, to overcome fear and desire, repulsion and compulsion, to cease to roar and gnash teeth and instead open the heart and allow the passion of the immaterial other to course through the material.
The lion is the Christ, the anointed one. The old kings were anointed with the menstrual blood of the goddess, a substance of awakening. The woman is the goddess, the eternal beloved, the devil. By adoring her, the anointed one redeems her and himself. They become something unimaginable, something more than they could have been separately.

I see the woman in this card as representing the same being embodied by the devil in yesterday’s card. Where in that card the eternal and the temporal struggle and are disconnected, here they are united. That patient waiting devil is the same as this patient gentle bride. In this card pure love flows through the two and this is what rules, not abstracts.
In this light I also understand that the man and the woman in the devil card are in fact chained to the fears and desires of the biological machine and its attempt to usurp power. The one jealous God that rules from above is the personification of these fears and desires.
The devil in the background waits for them to awaken to the knowledge that one is death and stagnation and two are life and creation. The biological machine must cease to struggle for control and open to the strange affection of the eternal in order to leave the dead end it made for itself behind.

A few days later I shuffle the deck and draw a card again. I am not surprised to see that it is the devil. It seems that my old friend and teacher and father has something more to communicate. Look again he says, but not with your eyes, which were made for the surface world where the light plays its tricks. Search with the feeling senses employed by those blind things which explore the subterranean world and make it their home.
Then guess what I am. Dark and warm and fruitful. Feminine.
The cock is not missing, it is there. The two human beings are the devils genitalia, his procreative tools, extensions of self with which he can probe the mysteries accessible through a voyage in the human bio-mechanical spaceship. This is also beauty and the beast. But we are the beast, and the devil is the beauty. So loving is beauty, so inquisitive, fearless, enduringly calm and optimistic, and, of course, giving.

The ideal components for building the inter-dimensional biological space craft named “Beast” is revealed to me in the following days.
First, the High Priestess. Her calm strikes me like a wave from the sea, shocking, invigorating in its placidity. Her intellectual center is awakened and at the service of her work for the benefit of the eternal. She encompasses the knowledge of life that bleeds forth from a cellular level and the knowledge of worlds constructed of concepts hinged on words. The depths of the subconscious work in symphony with the illuminated surface.
Her headdress is made of the horns and of the full moon, symbolic of her comfort with both masculine and feminine forces and with the seed and its fulfillment. It is also representative of the necessary relationship between two and one, that two become one in sexual unification and then, after the conception, one becomes two at the moment of birth.
The cross burns under the Priestess’s breast. Ripened flowers and fruits open like vulvas behind her and the horned moon is caught in the robes at her feet. She is calm and cool and well collected. She holds the written word in her hands. She can create with words, she can organize new structures and utilize existing ones to mysterious ends, in the service of the eternal silence, the guardian at the center of labyrinth, the watcher within.
Where some could be lost in the symbolic order, she is aware of its nature and utilizes it as the steps of the pyramid to the moon. She is poised between the two columns of the God of the Earth and the God of the Sky, a crossing of streams supported with grace and detachment.
She is as disciplined and focused on herself as Audrey Hepburn’s character in a Nun’s story, who realizes that while she may hide her faults from the church and her sisters, she cannot hide them from herself and God. So she struggles to do the real thing, whether anyone else is or not, whether anyone else can perceive her efforts or not.

After the Priestess comes the Magician. He stands with one hand raised towards the heavens and the other pointing to the earth. In his raised hand he holds a double terminated rod so that each end is both sending and receiving, circulating the energy from the heavens to the earth and from earth to heavens.
Over his head the figure eight, symbol of eternity, hangs suspended, representing the eternal being voyaging continually through material existence, like a rider in a train passing through a tunnel. The placement of his arms combined with this symbol forms a subtle cross.
He is young and full of adventurous fire. He is fearless and surrounded by roses and lilies, the goddess and death and the mystery of the flower which blooms and withers while the vine lives on and on to support new blooms again and again.
On the table stands the cup, the sword, the baton, the pentacle. He has the building blocks to create a new symbolic order, a new world. He is a storyteller, imaginative, ready to create a rich inner world through which the various aspects of self can be expressed and slowly/subtly become known to him.
He is a professor with his puppets at the ready. He will put something of himself into them, igniting them into a dance that he will both be inside of and apart from.
He is a point of connection between worlds, he is worlds within worlds within worlds. He is the creator and the explorer journeying to discover the breadth and depth of himself and establish lines of communication that reach from one shadowy pocket to the next, unifying the self.

The man and the woman in chains at the devil’s feet have the potential to become these two, the High Priestess and the Magician. As long as they cling to their individualism and their habitual behaviors they are the slaves of the symbolic order. They are not aware of their circumstance or their latent potential. They live and breed and die never having escaped the bondage of their own mechanical nature.
It is only through an effort to know themselves and the Other that they may cast away their chains and become something more than their biological nature dictates. They must surrender, despite the fear of death. Then they may begin the work of building the vessel called “Beast” or Adam Kadmon, to become the instrument of the Eternal.

One more time I shuffle the cards and my old friend comes to say goodbye. This time we can relax and have a good conversation without me applying cerebral analyses to his every line.
It is painful to be the Devil. His trick is not to mind it, to relax into the pain.
Pain is caused by resistance, by clutching to forms that cannot be in the OTHER spaces, the places I want to travel through. Relaxing into hot pulverized jelly is the only way to go. I cannot take my baggage; linguistic structures and thought forms. The software of the machine does not function in the OTHER spaces, the software dies with the hardware, then only the otherware works and the only way to develop otherware is to start now with little treks into the OTHER spaces.
But it’s a dead man’s party, so leave your body and persona at the door.

The Shape of the Process

2010-03-19T22:39:00.000-07:00

It is not the content that flows through us that we want to change.
It is not the content that we want to pick and choose and refine to fit our particular specifications.
It is the shape of our inner structure, the flow of the pathways inside our inner labyrinth, the wiring of our neural network That is what needs to be transformed.
The content is always different. The content will always be different.
The content never changes. The content will never change.
But the process that transforms it can change. It is this change in the process that we seek.

Our life itself is a process, our bodies, our thoughts, our sensations, our hopes, our dreams, the shape of our movement through time from birth to death. All process, all waiting to be carefully altered, all waiting to be rearranged.

Life flows through structures. It becomes defined by the obstacles and blockages which it encounters, by the shapes of the structures through which it passes. Life assumes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured. That is what makes it specific, that is what modifies it into being unique, that is what gives it an identity.
There are structures that trap life so that it grows stagnant. Think of pools of black water, think of old houses without light, think of forgotten cemeteries in the backwoods of lost towns.
There are structures that allow life to flow continually through them. Think of a river, of the wind, of sunlight streaming down onto the earth from a bright blue sky.

We may think of ourselves as structures defined by our habits, programmed biological computers through which the raw energy of life travels. By transforming our habits we may restructure ourselves to allow life to flow freely through us. As it flows, it gains momentum, it changes what it touches, it reinvigorates the path.

Posture is a basic way to direct the flow of energy. Our bodies are like antennas that can be bent this way or that to pick up various frequencies of radiation. Paying attention to our physical habits will lend us a clue as to how we are presently processing life. Intentionally building a repertoire of postures that facilitate life will help to change the structure from the outside in.

Our bodies are keys to other planes of existence, they are tools for manipulating realities. Everything is altered by posture, by reshaping structure.
Allowing our reality to be shaped by unconsciously formed habits and postures is to be unnecessarily imprisoned.
Intentionally forming habits and postures to direct the flow of life consciously is to be a surfer, a magician, a free builder.
Once the structure changes the energy will flow endlessly through it for as long as the structure remains.

Keep a notebook with you for a total of six days in order to record re-occurring mechanical manifestations. In other words, keep a log of some of your most habitual gestures and the accompanying moods and circumstances.

You should begin to notice these re-occurring gestures as you are performing them. During the course of a day, whenever you catch yourself in one of your mechanical manifestations, say to yourself, "Cut! "
At that you point you should freeze. Then say to yourself, "From the top." And prepare to repeat the scene. Say, "Action." And perform the gesture again.

This can also be done with a partner. The two of you should be familiar with each other's catalog of mechanical manifestations. When one partner notices the other engaged in a habitual posture or gesture they will issue the commands for them.

In either case it is useful to run through the sequence up to three times when showcasing a particular manifestation. When you are finished you say, "Break."
Break.

Les Iris

2010-03-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

I had a poster of a Vincent van Gogh painting, les iris, when I was a freshman in high school. The colors were bright and easy to be absorbed into. It had been rolled in a tube so that its deepest desire now was to curl up once again and sleep in a dark cylindrical womb, but I crucified it mercilessly to the walls with four brass thumbtacks and lay on my day bed and stared into the green and brown and purple blue.
My father disliked it. He even told me that I would go crazy if I kept that poster in my room. Maybe he was right, or maybe the poster was a symptom rather than a cause of insanity, or maybe the poster was completely innocent and uninvolved with madness of any kind, or at least far less involved than my father himself.
But I did lay there and gaze at the poster in silence and through tears. Sometimes from the floor where I lay on the carpet by the door I tried not to breathe, willing my heart to stop beating, begging fate and pleading with my body for death while smelling the paint that made my walls and the door so bright white and seeing les iris shivering on the wall.
What else was on my walls? That poster had only two companions, a Greek orthodox wooden crucifix with a sad Jesus bleeding artistically, and a golden plaque with the lord’s prayer inscribed on its surface. My father may have asked me what I was doing with those on my wall too, because we were not Christians, or at least he was not, even though he had sent me to a Christian school so that I could get a taste of religion and morality.
Jesus was there because I found him in a strange store full of such artifacts and I had thought it was beautiful. I had never seen a Jesus like that before, a Jesus that looked as though he had come from a mosaic in a Byzantine cathedral. It was intriguing to me to see Jesus in a way that had never been presented to me. Christians in my little piece of American hell displayed and wore crosses, but you never saw Jesus dangling from that ornament.
This was the part that they were referring to and hiding with their clean crosses; the bloody man slowly dying while crucified. This was what they were really displaying around their necks and on their bumpers and from the brittle hillsides behind their trailers; the torture and suffering of a man, the death of the God who had a body.
The lord’s prayer had been a gift from my grandmother when I was small. She gave it to me when we moved into our first house. Now by merit of its age and its affiliation with someone soft and warm it had earned a place and glittered on my wall.
But by then, by the time les iris had become part of my surroundings, I did not believe that God could hear me or was listening, if it did exist. I did not talk to the long deceased Jesus, I would not allow myself the luxurious comfort of these fantasies.
I was alone and if there was anybody that could understand my plight, it was the Devil, if he existed. At that time, in the madness of les iris, when I did consider that Our Heavenly Father was waiting in heaven with his milky white and passive son, I was determined to rail against their regime. I was sympathetic to Lucifer.
I knew what it was like to be misunderstood, to fall from grace with the father. I knew what it was like to be demonized for one’s differences. I knew what it was like to love the trees and the wild things and prize them above the walls and rules of society. I knew what it was like to fall.
When I wasn’t hoping to die, when I had given up on taking my disfigured presence out of the world, then I prepared for battle. I sat on my bed facing les iris and wrote on notebook paper my arguments on the devil’s behalf. I wrote stories about those who were different than the rest of the flock or I read books about those who went on living despite their “wicked” natures. I delved into the squirming lines of the flowers and earth and green stems and convinced myself that I too should live, writhing and screaming if necessary, but live, rather than go the way of the sad pale withering Christ, good and nice to the last drop.

Some Things Should Be Like That

2010-03-12T21:11:00.000-08:00

In the comic book store.
For so long I looked at it, not knowing what it was.
I went away.
I came back.
Again and again. Circling the table like a shark, tasting this mysterious object with my eyes and fingertips. Still I did not know what it was. Suddenly I realized; no one knew what it was, least of all its makers, and it made me feel glad because there should be things like that in the world, things without measurable purposes, and here I had one in my hands.
That time I didn’t put it down. I bought it and slipped out of the lighted store into the urban night. The darkness was thick despite the few fairy lights that glowed over lampposts or sped by in the streets. There are many places in the city where the light does not manage to reach.
It is also dark in the country, I know, but there you can see the stars and the stillness is what can put the terrors in you. In the city there are no stars because city light is a sort of lesser darkness that eats up celestial light, its brown halo holding at bay the fire and ice of the cosmos so that its own breed of glimmer and shadow holds sway. City darkness moves. It pulses. Here, there are things oozing and swirling, killing and eating and dying very near to you, in the murk where you must not look lest you enter into their order of existence.
“Can you help me?”
A face emerged from the blackness, separating itself from the thick communal dark. It was a cocoa colored heart shaped face that seemed to come bleeding out of the inky depths for a moment.
I heard the voice first, sweet and trembling, like the trill of a little bird. It was the voice that stopped me.
“Can you help me?”
It was only after I had stopped that the face surfaced and hovered timidly at my elbow, petite, neither young nor old but weathered into timelessness.
I knew as soon as I heard the voice that I could help. My hand had dipped swiftly into my pocket and retrieved twenty three cents.
“This is all I have.” I said and she was already thanking me in that voice and asking if I had bought a comic.
“I did buy something.” I said, “And now I’m broke.”
Her face was so sweet and her voice so delicate and I was lying only because I could now see another dark shape behind her, leaning against the wall. I wanted to give her more, but I wasn’t sure it was safe. My pay for a day of work was in my wallet in cash, too much money to open it here on the street.
“No, wait,” I said, “but I do have a little more.”
I dug into the coin pouch sewn into the side of the wallet without taking it out of my purse and filled her hand with pennies and dimes.
“That’s it.” I said and started to go, feeling disappointed with my meager offering.
Then I remembered that I was carrying a bag full of various breads from the bakery where I worked.
“Oh. I do have bread.” I said hopefully and began to dig in the satchel. “How about some pretzels.” I said putting them in her renewably emptied hands.
“Oooh. These are good.” She said and looked eagerly to her partner who was smiling now in a gentle compassionate way, as though he were a saint in a black hoodie leaned against the wall.
The longer I stood with them the further the darkness seemed to recede from our vicinity. They became distinct and less shade like. I was grateful that I was helping. One day, I felt, it could be me asking for help.

Now I slid back into the flow of the sidewalk, back into the ranks of the purposeful marching to their independent destinations.
Drugs or alcohol ushered some into the world of shadows, but there were others that were there because something inside of them was different. I was like that. I didn’t know what that something was. Nobody knew what it was, and there should be things like that in the world, things without measurable purposes, and here I was one of them. But there is little market for such things, despite their rarity, and I knew it might be only a matter of time before I became a shadow on the street, with no past and no future, depending on those that had not yet become me for my daily bread.
I knew it, but it was not yet time for me to step into the darkness and join in the pulsing. There might yet be some other way, so clutching the thing that was not a comic book but could only be defined by what it was not, I hurried on into the underground train station to wait.

Produce To Be Good

2010-02-12T19:21:00.000-08:00

“Mommy what is capitalism?”
“ Oh, just another ism, like communism or despotism, only it’s the ism we’re living in. It’s a little complicated. You see the little fish gets eaten by a bigger fish who gets eaten by an even bigger fish who gets eaten by the biggest fish of all... We have to produce a lot of junk, like toys that break after you play with them once, clothes that rip after you wash them twice, and cars that fall apart after you pull out of the dealership. The best thing is for them to be produced in a U.S. territory, not the actual United States you see, but an island somewhere that no one has noticed or cares about. Then you can work foreigners to the bone and refuse them bathroom breaks and pay them pennies and still slap a tag that says “Made In America” onto your product. That’s how you make a profit. If Xu Lin doesn’t want to make the big bucks selling her body to support her family she gets a job in a factory making designer brand hand bags. Let’s say she makes 10 cents an hour and finishes 10 purses in one hour, how much did it cost to make one handbag? One cent. That’s right, although you also had to pay for materials so lets say that it costs you 4 cents per bag. Consequently you pay out a total of five cents. Then you sell the bag for $105. You earn a profit of $104.95. That’s capitalism. You could keep a factory here in the continental United States, but then you’d have to pay your workers at least minimum wage and you’ll probably have to offer them health insurance of some kind and that’ll cost you something too, so you’d end up earning a profit of only $95 dollars per bag. Clearly, you will make more money if you build your factory and hire somewhere over seas or just across the border in Mexico and take advantage of some truly impoverished peoples. You’re allowed to do that if you are a Capitalist, because capitalist are free. The other great thing about being a producer in a capitalist society is that you can form a corporation that will protect you from the consequences of your irresponsibility. For example, if I start pouring poisonous waste into our neighbor’s well to dispose of it cheaply and they get sick and die, I’ll have to go to jail. However, if my corporation pours water into my neighbor’s well and they get sick and die, the worst that can happen is that the corporation will get fined, but I won’t have to go to jail. That’s capitalism. In a capitalistic society you have the right to form a sociopathic entity to do all of your dirty work for you and you can sit back and reap the rewards. The other important part of capitalism is consuming. You need to buy a lot of things to be a good member of a capitalistic society. The more you buy the more money another capitalist makes. And the best part is that nobody tells us what to think. For example we can pray in whatever church we want to, or buy anything we want, or watch as much television as we want. Some of the other isms can’t do that because they are afraid if they watch certain shows or read certain books or pray to certain Gods or buy whatever they want then they’ll become capitalists too. And they’re probably right. Who wouldn’t want to be a capitalist? It’s the best ism of all!”

Where Dark And Light Meet

2010-01-11T11:24:00.000-08:00

I hate my father. I hate all men and everything male. I do secretly wish to castrate them, to dominate and humiliate them. This secret hatred running under my skin ran rampant and was vented on my husband until his death, frightened my old teacher when we sat together under the trees.
In those early days, when it first boiled over the top and I grew out my arm pit hair and swore off the boys, I thought it was because a boy had broken my heart. A boy did hurt me, but even before then my heart had been broken, smashed into a thousand pieces by my father who crushed all of the life out of me, sought to dominate every aspect of me mercilessly, unintentionally. The hatred, the rage must have been growing, welling up inside of me long before that silly boy dealt his blow, also unintentionally.
I could not look at my father after puberty, because of the fear of being squashed, because of the hatred whose twin was desire. Now I know what Freud knew, that I have secretly and unconsciously wished to replace my mother. I have also looked for a man who would replace my father, the one who would be stronger than him and overcome him and become him.
I look at my biological father now knowing these things, and it is knowing them fully that allows me to look because I can be certain that those urges are not what is doing the looking and smiling. I am looking and smiling. The deepest me. The me that is nobody’s daughter, nobody’s wife, no man’s enemy, a wind in the doorway, an eternal notness.
I look at him and he smiles back. He said during a game of murder that he knew I was the murderer because I looked at him and I usually don’t look at him. From then on I made the effort to be awake and look at him. I do this for him, for me, for the eternal notness.
In the forest, with one who would replace him, I also look. I look until he is trembling, I look at the one I have known for 15 years and never looked at. We have inflicted emotional injuries upon one another both intentionally and unintentionally, always driven by those unconscious motives, acting out with each other the desires and resentment we harbor for our parents, always fearful of being crushed.
But now for an awakened moment we are free of those bonds. We are together, our grievances are gone, because I drop all of the barriers that I am aware off and let my heart burn bright and he responds by dropping his and glowing with me and we understand each other.
We are so happy together, like when we were lonely confused children who found solace in each other’s company, only far better because my heart is so much bigger now than it was then, so much braver, brave enough to swallow us both whole and carry us smiling over dusty trails, big enough that this one time, I can protect us both from the unconscious hatred that I have harbored, the hatred that had, from time to time, been vented on him in our youth.
Big and brave enough after a week of time with my biological father, that I know that whatever unconscious urges afflict and drive this other, he can’t hurt me. If he bites my bare pulsing heart with steely knives of rejection, or mischief, they will be baby bites compared to those made by my own flesh and blood.
But he does not bite, instead he hears me telling him something that I have tried to tell him before, something that could not be communicated until we were both made vulnerable by this torrent of love flowing between us. Now, because we finally truly have this understanding, he lets me collect a lost piece of myself that he had greedily and hungrily and achingly horded. He too collects a lost piece of himself in this fair and ecstatic exchange, and he tells me to go and collect the rest of the pieces of myself, all of the pieces that I can find in the darkness of the wasteland. He tells me to love the ones I am journeying with in that darkness, to love them as much as I love him and he loves me, as much as we could have ever loved, as much as we would have loved if we had only known how to do so.

The Mysterious Engulfs Us

2009-12-30T19:04:00.000-08:00

The mysterious engulfs us. There are no answers, or just as true, any answer at all will do. There are no reasons but mind. I can stop myself from doing or speaking occasionally, but my thoughts run through me unbidden, like a horde of unruly children. They make reality in their image. The outside is ruled by that same incessant clamor that dominates and defiles the “would be” sanctuary under the dome of my skull. The shape of my mind calls things to me in secret, without my consent, making of me a sleeping witch, a conjurer of illusions which fool even, and especially, me. The unspoken things die away in the world of endless electronic babble. The things without name or face, lacking these qualities, borrow them from the storehouses of our mind, and when the borrowed guise no longer suits their purpose they vacate the shapes and sounds that once costumed them, and we are left with their empty shells, shells that refer not to their nature, but to our own, as it is from our nature that these shapes were borrowed. The mysterious is forgotten, denied, wrapped in linguistic structures, and when it dares show its face we who have been indoctrinated by THE WORD call that the exception to our rule. But it is the other way around. It is the bugs, the quarks, the exceptions that are in fact the rule. Our brittle fortresses of order will eventually crumble and the hot breathed broken faced real will lumber and slither and dance in, wreaking havoc over our bones and rambling thoughts, thoughts now bodiless, flowing out directionless as they always have, to be absorbed in the icy folds of the real. We are always grasping for answers and peddling them and buying them and clinging to them, but they are only words clung to in desperation. We are hiding from the true answer, the mysterious abyss that looms beyond the constructs of the tongue and the tongue mind wagging furiously as though it could fan off the eternal with its chatter. We have never been free of the mysterious, it was always clinging to us like a skin, but some part of the self recoiled from it and began to spin the great con to hold it at bay. The ones who claim to have answers are liars and artisans of the con. There are no answers. No words that can hold the real absolutely. All that I have experienced has been a play of consciousness. There are no reasons but mind.

The Three Directives

2009-12-12T18:33:00.000-08:00

There are three directives which move a human being into action. These are “need”, “desire”, and “will”.
Need is the most basic and primordial mover. The human machine needs food, needs water, needs warmth, needs affection, needs to excrete waste. Once a need has been met there is a sense of concrete satisfaction that sets in until the need arises again according to the physical cycles of the human machine. Needs can be met.
Desires are a trickier monster. They arise when needs have been transformed through the symbolic structure. For example, thirst is a real need for the human machine so an advertisement for a clothing line might depict a well dressed man and a woman drinking from glasses. A human machine that sees the ad will unwittingly transform the need to drink into a desire for a dress or pair of slacks. The trouble is, that while drinking a glass of water will quench thirst, buying a pair of slacks will not. Satisfaction will be denied.
Desires can never lead to satisfaction because they are born of the symbolic realm and not of the real. This is true of any desire, it is what distinguishes desire from need. It is an endless circle, a wheel fit for a hamster. The pursuit of desires can never yield fulfillment. This is not because there is something fundamentally evil about desire. It is because desire is a need that has been disfigured by language and made abstract. You cannot eat, drink, or hug an abstract.
A young gorilla needs something to love in order for its life to continue. This need can be met by a kitten or a doll or a fury blanket tied to a post, as long as the gorilla can touch it, the need is met. The same is true of human animals. You don’t need a porn star to hug. You could give a squeeze to a warty old hag to meet the need. You desire a porn star, a picture from a magazine, but even if you meet a live porn model, she will never be exactly the same as the picture from the magazine. She may meet some of your needs, but she can never quench your desires, those will go ungratified into eternity.
Will stands in a category all of its own. It does not arise from the machinations of the human, physical or linguistic. It is neither a need nor a desire. It comes from elsewhere. It is infinitely more difficult to act on will than it is to respond to a need or a desire. Will often conflicts with the needs and desires of the human biological machine.
With both needs and desires occupying the attention and energy of the machine, it can be almost impossible to heed the strange call of the will. Desires are particularly an obstacle. While the human machine has a limited number of needs which have to be met repeatedly, the ghostly world of desire is as unlimited as it is insatiable. The desires will breed more desires and will come to occupy all the space of the mind, demanding that one thing or another be pursued until the will is nearly buried in an avalanche of desires.
Desires will propagate on their own without any effort being made on the part of the human machine, but the true will, if it is denied attention and left unused, will wither like an atrophied limb. Efforts must be made to invoke and support the will, efforts which may seem most unpleasant to the machine because those efforts will be of no direct benefit to it.

Belief

2009-11-29T16:54:00.000-08:00

Belief was a golden haired child born in the state of desire within the realm of the word. He had never been in the realm of the real, could never be, in fact, because nothing born of the word can walk in the realm of the real. In the realm of the real there would be no need for such a child as belief. Belief, as I have said, was born in the state of desire, a place where the urge to fulfil needs is transferred into abstract longings whose ends can never be met. In such a place, a place where yearning goes on and on because there can be no end to yearning, Belief is a necessary entity. Belief is a natural product of desire. Whereas a need can be met, a desire knows no fulfillment and so it naturally blossoms into belief, the notion that that which one longs for does exist, will happen, is coming eventually. But all of this occurs only within the realm of the symbolic order. All of this occurs because a symbol is not the thing itself. The signifier is not the signified. It is like a shadow, it refers to the real, it takes a shape that cannot be grasped, a shape that may take on a life of its own and birth new shapes with no correspondences to the real. These shapes, these shadows with no correspondences, are the makers of desire, the grandparents of Belief. Belief is a prince in the house of desire. He runs to and fro calling for some action or other in his name. People gladly indulge this spoiled child because it gives them Hope, his lovely sister. Hope and Belief offer justification to the house of desire. They are like the children that a couple that has become disenchanted with one another conceives in order to have a reason to stay together. They are the fantasies that make all of our fantasies okay. If we have Belief we will join God in Heaven and bring Tinkerbell back to life. With Belief’s hand in your own, it is okay to kill and take another’s land. His presence will make you feel better about actions which primarily serve some personal desire, his company will help to justify your actions. With Belief at your side, you will do any number of absurd things; set out cookies for an immortal in a red suit, or eat cookies and wine and call it the flesh and blood of your God, or burn a person at the stake, or drive your neighbors from their homes and push them into the sea, or destroy all of the natural resources available to you. There is nothing that can’t or shouldn’t be done when you can say that Belief is with you. No door can be closed to you when you come from the house of desire, frothing at the mouth with want of a satisfaction that can’t be had, Golden Belief and fair Hope marching at your side demanding that you take, take, take. Take what you want and say it was for Belief. Run amok under the shadowy banners of the house of Desire within the Realm of the symbolic. In the realm of the Real, Belief and Hope vanish like the ill spirits that they are, and you stand alone with blood on your hands, and it is not a Jihad, or a Crusade, or a Sacrifice, it is raw animal death and it is under your fingernails, spattered on your face, and shivering through your bones.

Moon Eater

2009-11-26T17:05:00.000-08:00

The Moon looks so contemplative, so quiet and concentrated. The woman in the photograph beams outward rather than inward as the moon does. The woman in the photo is a sun painted white, a sun disguised as a moon. Big Cheshire cat grin. Didn’t the Cheshire cat disguise himself as the moon? His grin was the horned moon, or the horned moon was his grin, and he materialized around it humming a little “huma de hum de hum”. The woman with the white face is like that, a sun with the moon caught in her teeth. An eater of moons, moon shaped cookies downed with milk and honey, falling, cascading in sugar cookie crumbles down the dark well of a throat, chased by cool white milk, down down down to places our eye should not see. There is no light in there, down in the woman’s gut, in her moon belly. A tiny crumb being pulverized down in there would look about itself and swear that it was now in the abyss, in the terrible place outside of the world. But it is not the outside of the moon eater. It is the inside of the moon eater that is the strange and dark annihilation of a cookie. The cookie is the inside of the moon eater and within the moon eater there are many divisions, tissues and linings and cell walls. Everywhere of the moon eater is an inside of something and an outside of something else. But a crumb down there in the acid bath of the stomach’s delight would never know it. It would have no idea. It would think, most definitely, that it had gone outside. The interior of the moon eater is so dark, but from its dense surface, light is reflected and we are presented with an image. Ah! Just like the moon itself. A dense body whose surface reflects the light of the sun. The moon give off no illumination of its own. It baths in the sun’s radiance to be seen. Only a dress of light worn so that the children of the sun will know it is there. The children of the sun with their eyes for perceiving light could not recognize the moon without her disguise. The moon, like the moon eater, wears a disguise. Trixie things, moons and the eaters of moons. Scary white things whose insides are black. It would be better to be eaten by a black thing whose insides were light. But how likely would you be to make that choice? If you stood before two doors, one painted black and one painted white, which would you choose? And what if the doors were not the doors of houses but the mouths of lions opened wide, bottom teeth pointed up and top teeth pointed down? Would you prefer to be eaten by the black lion or the white lion? I will tell you a secret; the black lion is made of glass painted on the inside with all the colors of an infinite universe so that when you look upon it, it appears to be black. The white lion is made of plaster so that you do not see its dark insides when you glance at its clean bright surface. I am not going to tell you which lion you should choose. I think I will not even tell you which lion I would choose. I will say, that the white lion is the moon eater and that you are what you eat. Are you an eater of moons, an eater of lions, an eater of cookies, or garbage, or hash? What do you eat and what’s eating you, bite by delectable bite? I’m not saying I know. I’m not saying I don’t. It’s worth contemplation though, worth the quiet concentration of a lunar entity, hung as white horns in a black sky, singing, “huma de hum de hum”.

The Sun

2009-11-23T10:58:00.000-08:00

The sun dazzles in yellow over summery aqua skies reminding me of lemon drops and vinyl wading pools. When I was a child my grandfather had a wondrous supply of balloons decorated with smiling suns wearing sunglasses. This sun startles me so, not smiling, very serious, bordering on mysterious with those almond eyes boring into me. So alien it seems. How it reminds me of the moon. The sun and I regard each other. Do I dislike the sun? No of course not I tell it, but that is not all true. I do associate the sun with qualities that are my enemy. The domineering world of men, of light, of lances and other surgical instruments, prying, demanding, and superficial. The night always comes. The winter always comes. The sun laughs at me and argues that the sun always rises, the summer always returns. It sends its emissary, a friendly little naked baby on top of a white horse, his crown capped with a red feather, a red flag waving, sunflowers bursting to life behind him. Yes, you make warmth. You make things live. I would perish without you. Are you not your sister’s captor then? You are her support, her twin, different but complimentary? Yes. Of course. And the photographer with his bright lights, he is testament to the artistic creative use of light. There he is capturing an image with lights. There he is concentrated on the invisible other, bringing her to life just as the sun concentrates on the moon and endows her with some of his own light. She is his reflection. He was first, like Adam in the garden, lonely in this cold garden, so he called some others to come orbit around him, including his wife, the earth, Eve, and he made for himself, from the collision of two larger planetary bodies, a little moon to be his mistress. But the moon was cold and barren, a Lilith for this Adam, while the Earth gave him all the children he could want. Now she hangs around Eve and her children, making them mad and delirious, desirous of a life eternal, a life a sun and an earth cannot offer. “Something else,” she whispers, “there must be something more.” Cruel little mistress. But the sun continues his great labor with the earth, and perhaps that mysterious look on his face is the key to it all. What he won’t say to either Earth or Moon, his great secret, is that they are all three the makers of life, and that those other companions drawn into his orbit are also involved in his labor. And if no one understands the nature of that labor, it matters little. So long as they orbit around him, they help his work. So long as he labors to pull them round and round, it is good for his work. Life, the real thing, is a process more than a state, and the sun knows this. He knows that it is through the combining of things, many different things pulled together, crushed together until they burn and melt and change, that the process is furthered. Like the photographer, he can work his magick without the others knowing what exactly he is doing. The serious mysterious sun glitters and dances mischievously over all, as it did when I was small, coming down in rivulets of light to line my face and shimmer over the water’s surface. The sun and its many flowers blazing in warmth and glory, red banner waving in a sigh of the earth’s warm breath. The sun and I regard each other. Do I dislike the sun? No of course not I tell it, but that is not all true.

Baby

2009-11-18T16:25:00.000-08:00

Remember those early days when sitting in a porcelain tub of warm water with the rubber stopper on the silver chain keeping it all from going down the drain, the world seemed so wigglly squiggly, so barely there and ghostly. Mother and father seemed to change and the others did too, and sometimes you had a sister or two and sometimes you had none and sometimes your aunt was called Robin and sometimes she was called Betty. All these people all these sounds and shapes seemed to shift around in a way that was neither significant nor lacking significance, just a bit of nature dancing for my developing powers of observation like leaves caught in a little whirlwind on the side walk, turning round and round so that the configuration is different in every moment. This is the reason that carousels hold so much appeal for young children, because they turn and turn in a circular fashion and there is no way of telling whether your lion is in the lead or taking up the rear or somewhere in the middle and meanwhile you bob up and down and with the mirrors there is no way of telling if you are the real child on the real sculpted lion or if that other child and lion are the originals. Bath time, so warm and pleasant and wet, with the water jiggling around your body, so like the womb and so like the sea from which all life arose, back when it was still hot and red, the perfect melting pot for this and that to come together in amoebic ecstasy. The wash cloth is soft and squishy and you can put it in your mouth and bite and all the water squeezes out and dribbles out of the corners of your mouth and down your chin in the most delightful way. The water moves when you move, jiggling slightly. All of life is like that when you are a baby. Every time you move you are somewhere different, with a different crowd, strangely familiar, familiarly strange, forever and ever. Then slowly, the waters of life start to cool and freeze. Things seems steadier, thanks perhaps to the magick words you have been learning. Mother and Father are almost always the same, you generally have the same set of siblings, an aunt whose name remains the same. Perhaps it’s because of the magick words, because when you say “Mamma” this is the one that you mean, the one that you invoke. It’s a tricky thing, because Mamma taught you the magick word, so really she taught you how to invoke her, and the other Mammas, the ones who didn’t teach the words for things, they don’t get called, so they never come again. Only this one, the one that tricked you with the word of power, and now you are here with her, stuck in the frozen world and your legs have grown long and stiff and you no longer bathe, but instead stand in the shower. You no longer ride the carousel, but instead read the books and do the homework and watch the world materialize around you like steel bars. A steady, stable place. Gone is the shifty watery world of infancy. Gone is bath time with all its jiggly wet wonder, and gone too is baby, and all that is left of it is a word for what it was.