Invitation

When I was a wee lass the woman down the street was very concerned that I was out of touch with "reality."
My mother assured her that I was playing pretend.

I was a very good play pretender. I rarely said things like:
"Let's pretend there is a little man living in an underground house beneath our own house."
Instead I said:
"The little man won't answer the door under my bed. Something might have happened to him. I'm going outside to find him."

I knew the trick to the best kind of play was not saying "Let's pretend," or "I'm only pretending." I knew that all play was equally real and unreal, that bravery, kindness, and trust were true whether you were dreaming, pretending, telling a story or playing "real life."

Certain truths are especially hard to grasp in "real life." Fairy tales and certain types of pretend can remind us, show us, and teach us the things that are not allowed or are undervalued in "real life."
They can remind us that "real life" is a game we began to play long ago, a very dangerous game in which you choose masks to wear and insist they are the real you, a game that demands that no other games, no other stories, no other worlds are "real." They are ONLY pretend, and only the "real life" game is important.

And if you play "real life" with us and play it well we will love you, and be proud of you, and you will feel safe, never needing to worry about the unknown, about the dark, about the mysterious, or about the possibility that you yourself are less "real" and not in fact the masks you have been wearing, but rather an innocent traveler who stumbled into a deadly serious game with eternal consequences; that you may never be able to leave the game because you will be convinced that you are not playing a game but rather are having a "real life."

And what if you were so lucky that someone stronger, someone with a better memory of the multicolored land beyond "real life",  started to play a different game with you, a game that bleed into "real life", and you started asking yourself, "What is real?"

Not just, "Is this a real game? Or something else?" but "Is 'real life' real?"

And what if by asking yourself these questions, rather than asking your benevolent benefactor (who could never actually answer these questions for you) you began to remember that you aren't "real", that you are a pretender, a storyteller, a dreamer, a liar trapped by deadly seriousness (a.k.a gravity) in a heavy game. A game in which your abilities to play have atrophied, a game that didn't just start when you were born, because actually time is a function of the "real life" game and you have been trapped on the wheel of "real life" for much "longer" than you realized.

And what if you remembered this for a moment and began to learn to play again thanks to a trickster who started playing a game within a game with you and called it deadly serious...

What if? What if?

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”

― Shel Silverstein


So let's not say, "let's pretend." We're better pretenders than that. Let us be open hearted and true whether our experience is real or imagined. Let us play in earnest, let us play with levity, and flexibility (fluxability?) and bravery, and kindness, and trust.

Let us play in bright axiom.

Other Mysterious Lights

It was entirely possible to say something new each day. Marty would wake like a vampire rising from a coffin in a quirky b movie, stiff as a plank at a 90 degree angle, as if lifted by a row of invisible supporting dancers. Once vertical he could see his reflection perfectly in the full length mirror mounted to the wall opposite the bed's foot. The red shape of his mouth covered in clown paint would stand out in sharp contrast to the white grease paint on his face and the baby powder in his curly hair. It was entirely possible to then contort his mouth into shapes supported by the motion of his tongue and the vibration of his vocal cords, allowing him to emit mostly coherent phrases to be captured by the gramophone operated by twelve tiny mice.
On day one Marty rose and said,
"I want to roll through the garbage like God."
Diligently the mice recorded this statement and played it back for him.
On the second day, upon rising like an arrow from the bed, hands crossed over his chest, sheets tossed sloppily asunder by his rising form, Marty announced,
"This one has a crooked mouth."
The mice recorded it and played it back before resuming the construction of a dress made of various garments collected from unattended dryers in a nearby laundromat.
On day three, rising in the usual fashion, Marty spoke the following words,
"You know how everybody says I used to cry all the time? Well I did, but it wasn't just because I had  a bad marriage and a bad childhood, even though I did. I used to cry a lot because I feel things really deeply, not just for myself, but for other people too.  My husband shot himself in the head. That's why I used to cry so much, not for myself, for him, because of the way he must have felt to do that."
Dumb founded, the mice played the recording back for Marty. One of them fell into the mechanism and caused  the needle to skip replaying, "must have felt, must have felt, must have felt" until his compatriots freed him.
The next day, the fourth, the mice were poised to receive another monologue.
Marty rose and uttered a single word,
"Connecticut."
On day five,
"More riding in boats, eating brie, writing poetry."
Six
"What is your favorite fruit?"
The mice took a survey. Three for pineapple, 2 for apple, 4 for blueberries, 2 for banana, and 1 for avacado. They embroidered their answer on Marty's pillow case.
On day seven more cause for reflection,
"Let me ask you a question, do you have any sort of rule that you follow? A reason or something?"
Due to the fact that Marty never commented on the pillowcase the day before, the mice refrained from responding to this particular query. They spent the rest of the day drinking  peach schnapps from thimbles and wondering about the merit of their work.

Storm Of The White Wolf

All the ideas that I had, all the memories pulsing out from my core were like a distress signal reaching for the Big Other. I had come un-tethered and was drifting out in the storm of the white wolf. The city was rubbing against my skin, demanding that I let it back in. As much as I might have wanted it, I continued to resist, caressing with one hand and slapping with the other.

Whatever I had been was gone. Seven years of cellular rejuvenation had left me sparkling and new. Food made me heavy. What I craved was sunshine, I wanted it in my darkest hungriest caves. A little bird pulled grasses from the crack in the sidewalk and flew away as I approached, adding it to her nest. I ran away down the street, wind in my face, just barely cool enough to temper the warmth of that yellow star I so yearned for.

A bicycle lay abandoned by the side of the path and a young man was seated beneath the mother tree whose roots jutted out of the embankment like long talons. He smiled as I passed. I ran. Whatever I had been was gone. Assuming that I would stop and speak, who would be speaking? The cells singing for life and sun and run, run, run? The language coiled round my mind? Some third party seeking brokerage through them both?

I had stood and looked close at the tanned muscular bodies ahead of me, had thought that I could almost feel what it was to be them, that if I reached I would become one of them and never know I had been another. Suddenly I felt my tall pale soft body and knew that it had already happened before. That I was within the most recently inhabited other. I was the stranger I longed to experience.

At the feast we dined on the larvae of some invertebrate species and drank fermented spirits from slender stemmed goblets round as grapefruits. We had been made aeons ago to travel space and time in the service of our masters the Illuri. They traveled through us without ever leaving their crystal palace at Theruex. Slowly we forgot them.

Our DNA mutated in response to the radiation of the yellow star, changing the design synthetically manufactured long ago in a system far from recollection. We had been designed to change many times, to adapt, to thrive, to snake our way through the universe on their behalf, and yet we had come to a place where origin was so distant we could no longer imagine it. Still further we would travel and change.

There had been a viral invasion at one point after which we could not remember whether we were the descendants of this infection, or whether we had descended from the yellow star, or the shadowy Illuri inhabiting our dreams. All these factors pulled us in different directions from within. We would run. Having come un-tethered we drifted in the storm of the white wolf. Whatever we had been was gone. Seven by seven had left us sparkling and new, hungry for the heat of a yellow star.

Stream

Outside, the snow was silently ebbing and flowing across the war field. Wondrous dreams in the stillness of the dark would battle my foes with passionate zeal.
Only a short time ago I felt that my physical presence, ecstasy from a light dimmed, was blowing in the breeze. Images of the sacred carving holes where there were none before, away from prying eyes. It is in fact underground where the impulse to break beyond the imposed barriers of consciousness and flow outwards into the unknown holds a basket full of gifts. 
Unknown to its own creators, lost flowers look back at the trail of rot that they leave behind. They are spiritual sacraments and repeated cyber beats of rave, trance and ambient music stream to God's altar.

The left and right hemispheres of the brain were operating in synchronicity just as the millennium was coming to its end. Outside the cold air was really invading me in some kind of multi-cellular structure that seemed to have its own survival as its only purpose.
Great conglomerations of self reproducing electrical entities could make the original vision available to others. The maelstrom of feelings, thoughts and emotions get twisted into small one way streets called misunderstood telepathy that have been known to cause lucid dreaming.
The shining blue lights at the edges of the U.S. overlooked the spectacle of mesmerizing movements flashing in my mind.

I look at the gentle touch of the void showering you with hot kisses of energy. Sleeping crowds of monkeys, ready to be released into the frozen pathways of the nervous system, explode into visions, memories,  and myths.
Strangers bearing gifts hide in libraries, altering forever what I once thought was unquestionable, beyond doubt. Lost until the next moment of finding, that understanding that goes beyond the dry roots of your being shows you the way through.
The black magician comes at night, willing to set aside everything in the name of Life. His fellow colleagues, upset by the "methods" employed by both the womb of creation and warriors in a drumbeat at journey's end, utter certain secret incantations.

The fiery battle between whatever you are clinging to and  twisted histories alter you ever so subtly. In that shining moment, the flicker of fire light attracts the attention of beasts.
Warm human breath scatters in moist fragments, a kaleidoscope of sun, moon, and stars. Lying on the wooden bench, looking up at the sky beyond the glass windows, I make love to the original vision.
Outside, the snow is silently ebbing and flowing across the war field. I met strangers along the way, altering your sense of reason, embracing whispers on the wind. Let’s gather all of them.

Walker on White

All the birdies sing for me because I am a golden child born of winter morning and an endless spring of the heart.
Do you see her long flowing robes of silver, the sterling furs, the crown of antlers? My mother the wild wood has come down to dance for my birthday and silver moons shiver off her undulating belly, rams frolic at her heels, foxes lick her finger tips and prance into the hollows of ancient trees.
They have music in their cars, I think, and I smile imagining all the lonely people listening to music while they drive. I imagine Oberon noticing their music and then I realize that they are music, that the highway, the sea, the trees, the entire globe and everything shimmering on its skin is music.
What God knows or cares that we call them cars and we believe we are hurrying to important things in them?
No God knows or cares, or no God that I would see worthy of admiration.
The Lingua? Let them take the words from my brain and scatter them like crumbs for the birds. Blue birds, black birds, doves, sparrows let them feed on the remains of a psychotic break as the language bleeds from the artifice formerly known as myself and the Ligua dies and I cease to exist.
Will this be my birthday mother, when you touch my face with long pale fingers and I go black eyed to the mulch and white worms? Will I dance and sing ecstatic as moon eyed coyotes tremble faun-like and drink the dew from your lashes? Will grasshoppers make of me a dress for their bodies and wear me wherever they go? Will I dream animal dreams under a velvety blanket of darkness, the sun setting orange and pink over my brow?
Music in the pulse, in the breath, in the teeth, music without words scattered across the universe in the pulsing of white stars.
I am pushing up delicate green tendrils of life, unnamed, daughter of unnamable. We are all united here in the kingdom of light and dark, dancing our dance.
Do you see her long hair flying like pale streamers to tangle with moths reaching for the moon's pale fire? Do you see her eyes glittering as dark pools where deer lower their heads to drink? Do you see her thus etched out in shapes loaned by the usurper demiurge? Or can you see what I see with eyes like burrows prying into the womb where silky rabbits dream?
I remember human and I laugh. I laugh at hands and eyes and shit, always at shit.
The Sabbath is then over, as my head comes back together and I know the meanings of the sounds that carve a world in my nervous system. Always forgetting what we were and are and will again be only to remember it again when Lingua is once more toppled from his throne.
Does the chick return to the egg? Of course. Capitulate. Fall away, I command it, fall away like leaves of gold and umber from the stark white bodies of trees, oh Lingua.
Come winter bleak, dear winter. I am a walker on the white, two faced, undying shape shifter. A golden child born of a winter morning and an eternal spring of the heart.
Cup my waters in your hand and touch them to your lips if you would join us in the kingdom forever. And on my right hand sits brother Michael and on the left Uriel, for about me flames the pentagram and in its center stands the six rayed star.
Etched in the lego of our entrapment, but building freely. Cracking the world's shell and building it again.
I will return. But which is the coming and which is the going is not mine to know.

Pale Horse Rider

Pale horse rider, dripping font of pure overflowing knowledge of life.
You know what I mean friend? Real knowledge, the kind that awakens in the flesh, like when you hear the sound of a rattlesnake in the grass. That's what he carried in his saddlebags, liquid lightning to crack your skull, enough to open thousands of minds and set them free as jackrabbits under a wide blue sky. He had been an angel once and now he roared through the wasteland gathering up the dead and making them quick.
Some might tell you it was chance that led him to each particular individual, but it was something trickier than chance. One might call those meetings synchronistic events. I'll tell you this; he was looking for them, for each of them in particular. Just as a man with a vendetta will go from town to town finding his debtors and delivering them of debt by way of steel, fire, and hot lead, so the pale horse rider went in search of the men deserving of his liquid lightening. He administered his medicine, town by town, man by man, with unrelenting resolve.
And I'll tell you another thing, as important as the last; they were also looking for him. Even if they didn't know his name or face in this world, their hearts were calling to him loud as squawking crows. That's the real way of it. In any encounter of unearthly significance, you can be sure both parties were looking for action.
In his never-ending quest to make the dead lightning quick, he met many a man whose face and name you would recognize. Men of reputation. Dead men trapped in limbo crying out for liberation. The pale horse rider hunted them, patient and steady, a spider. He found them and cracked their skulls wide, tore their ribcages open and let those screaming birds fly.
Each time this was done, the new quick went forth into the world, his apostles. Born in the fire and light of knowledge, rising from the ash of what they had once been, they returned to the wasteland as phoenixes armed with liquid lightening. Hunting heads in the western lands.
Methods vary. Not all of the quick are nomads. Some make their webs and wait in shadowy places for the dead to seek them out. Others call loudly for the dead to gather around. Some hunt one by one by one like the angel of the wasteland that found them.
He is out there still, as he has always been, riding down dusty roads, quest unending, name unuttered, face unknown. He is legend. He is many and he is none. Seeking the seeker and making the dead quick, pale horse rider, angel of the wasteland, ride on.

Two Angels

Don’t break the silence. One word, a single word could send us crashing down into the terrifying gritty details of organic existence. We hold our breath, two angels poised face to face, the substance of our intricate bodies swirling and crawling with electric light. We are two angels who share one mind, one center held between us in the tenuous absence of thought and motion, so still that we are almost not angels, we are almost nothing at all.

Don’t break the silence.  We have two faces and each face contains two more faces, which contain two more faces, which contain two more… Watching the kaleidoscope of apparent being shifting across the surface of ourselves, our eyes grow ever wider.
Yes, angels have eyes. And tails. And wings, and horns, and ears, and fingers, and toes, and rivers, and forests, and ponds, and stars. What would be called flesh is a multicolored light show, but it will all shatter and melt and cascade into tight places if we make a sound just now, any sound at all.
So we are silent.

Bursting with music, we bite our tongues, press our ears down against our heads, freeze our ponds and hold it in. For now.
Eventually we will let it out in torrents of song that will carry us away from this place, up for a while, then down, then perhaps up and away again. We’ll ride the sonorous currents hither and tither, rippling as we go, dissolving, emerging, shimmering, vanishing, gleaming...

But for now silence, cradled between us like a sleeping babe, a pearl set in a silver ring, a solitary star shining in indigo sky, a crystal goblet upon a golden table. Hush, hush, our eyes blink to each other, two and two, faces sliding away like night and day.
Hush, hush glistening lashes flutter, hush, don’t break the silence.
Don’t break the silence.

Close Encounters

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.

Small Wonders

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”.

Words and the Call of the Birds

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…"

Baby

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.

Enjoy The Trip

As a passenger you get to sit back and enjoy the trip. You don’t have to know what is happening in the cockpit, you don’t have to know what is happening in the communications tower. You are entirely unaware of the 5 other hunks of flying metal that are lifting off the ground in the same second that your own is rattling out of gravity’s finger tips. You have no idea that another plane has just been redirected so that it won’t collide with yours as it attempts to come in for a landing 59 seconds early. You know that the charming woman up ahead is going to bring you peanuts, (mmmm… peanuts) and a fizzy beverage after the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt lights. Your mouth is watering and you’re trying to decide whether you would like a Coke or a Clamata and wondering if you might persuade her to part with two bags of peanuts on your behalf while death is soaring around with you, talons neatly spread, wondering if it can make off with two jet planes full of people (mmmm… people). While you fret over the discovery that this airline no longer serves the honey roasted peanuts you had so perfectly envisioned and has switched to serving pretzels instead, some prematurely balding man in a button up white shirt is determining your fate. All you have to do is sit back, relax and enjoy the trip. When you hit that bed of clouds where veterans of the war that decided Satan’s fate are swapping stories and drowning their woes in tankards of still born’s tears, the turbulence makes your Sprite (the caffeine in Coke makes you pee and Clamata sounded too salty for this time of day, especially without vodka and celery) splashes all over your tray. Damn! You wipe it up with a napkin that conveniently sports a map of the US with all of the cities which this airline serves highlighted. When your plane changes course to avoid a lightning storm, you’re oblivious, reading the latest issue of Forbes that you bought in the gift shop back at the terminal. When you’re done with that, you ogle the flight attendant as she comes around again for your garbage and enjoy the view of her rear as she works her way up the aisle past you. Soon your plane is engaged in a whole new ballet of high speed hunks of metal guided by fallible human directors who may or may not be distracted just now because this high stress job has taken a toll on their sex life and their significant other stormed out this morning with packed bags. Death perks up again, hopeful, but you land safely and get to see the fasten seat belts light turn off and smell the armpits of the guy next to you as he reaches into the overhead compartment for his duffel bag. As a passenger, all you have to do is sit back, enjoy the trip, and say thank you when it is over.

Chewing The Moral Fibers

What if my father had not despised chewing gum so? He said to me when I was a child that chewing gum was despicable and that all chewers of gum should be executed. I liked gum. Perhaps if he had not said this, then maybe I would have agreed with him that Niggers and Jews should also be lined up against the wall. I might have swallowed hook line and sinker the notion that there was a world wide conspiracy in progress being orchestrated by sixty rich families that would stop at nothing short of a bloody revolution resulting in the destruction of their lineages. I may have accepted without question that the human race was created by a more advanced civilization of beings to provide a work force that would mine the gold which they needed to power their space craft. But he pushed me over the edge with the chewing gum issue. This was the first matter on which I was willing to disagree with my father, the first thing which made me feel that it was okay to defy him. I wanted to chew gum. I did chew gum. I did this despicable thing and nothing happened. The righteousness of the world did not come slamming down upon me like a dump truck full of text books. My father did not shoot me in the back of the head. He did not even ground me. He only shook his finger at me and said,
"I better not find that on the floor or anywhere else but in the trash can."
Maybe once or twice he did find it on the floor, but as it was not clear whether it had been my error or my sister’s (not clear to even my sister and I, or, at least on my end, I truly believed I was innocent and believed her when she said that she was) nobody could be punished and life went right on ticking. I chewed it and I REACHED INTO MY MOUTH WITH MY FINGERS AND PULLED ON IT TO WATCH IT STRETCH FROM MY TEETH FAR OUT BEFORE MY EYES, THEN STUFFED IT BACK IN MY MOUTH AND CHEWED SOME MORE. I was told not to do this, but I wanted to, so I continued to chomp and smack away and even learned to blow bubbles that would burst and cling to my face as a sticky pink film and sometimes it even made its way into my hair and had to be cut out.
But I was not executed, nor were the scores of other children I was aquatinted with who were as despicable as me in their gum chewing habits. We continued to exist. And because my father had been so extreme and severe in the way he spoke about chewing gum, it seemed likely that anything else that he said might be equally ludicrous. I could probably marry or even just fuck a black man today (even though I was passionately warned against it), and send our smiling photo to my parents in an email headed, “Me and My man Jamal at Golden Gate Park”, and still suffer no consequence. My Dad probably would not disown or kill me or Jamal (though he promised that he would when I was seven). He would probably even let him into the house on Thanksgiving. He might even play computer games with him, Jamal could be an Orc and my Dad an Elf and they would go on missions together and play for hours and life would go on. We couldn’t listen to rap music while we visited without my fathers head exploding and sending his crunchy brain matter flying through the room as if a bag of pork rinds or Funions had burst, in which case there would at last be a tragic fatality and we’d have to sweep up the mess. But the criminal (me) would go on listening to devil music with Jews and Negroes while chewing gum and buying the things that keep the rich getting richer behind those imposing locked doors in tall dark towers far from sight. Being as extreme as they were, my father’s words burned a hole right through my psyche, a hole through which all manner of things is capable of passing without causing me to shout,
"Off with their fucking heads!"
A hole deeper and darker than Alice’s, with tunnels which branch off into Wonderlands of every kind and color, where every wrong lives with every right and they exchange hats like teenage girls trading bangles. An infinite network of possibilities that would be closed to me if my father had bought me chewing gum at the Nickel And Dime and patted by blonde pig tails.

The Burning Princess

I need more time in the dark, like a mushroom nestled at the underside of a fallen tree, drinking in the moisture and nutrients necessary without being prodded at my the nosy sun. I have so very little to put forth. I am a field that hasn’t recuperated properly from the last harvest. What will spring up out of this soil? Something has gone awry upon this day, some small thing which has led me to feel scorched inside as if I had been splayed open like a fish for the sun to blaze down upon my tender insides and burn them like a laser smoothing out the unwholesome imperfections on an aging starlet’s face.
What if I do have a monstrous deformity, one that can’t be seen, one that affects my thinking, my feeling, my perception of reality? Would you correct this deformity that is me? Would I be me without it? Perhaps I am the deformity, an asymmetrical thalamus made for communing with things left undisturbed by proportionately formed minds. What if I choose not to use my deformity to pray for money, health or peace? What if I don’t care whether there is a god greater than me, or if it hears me? What if I am only interested in the quest, in rescuing the princess from her deep slumber in the inky hot depths reeking of sulfur? Not because I have to, not because it would make me good, or better than any other pale ape, but because I heard her call out to me, I heard her say, "Please help me. You are my only hope."
So I run the gauntlet, which looks like a cluttered apartment filled with children and the belongings of a displaced girl and a tangle of electronics; computers, cameras, and cell phones. I make my way through the deadly maze that is blonde hair and blue eyes and acne scarred skin stuffed into tight jeans.
From the outside, from beyond the glass-less window they might look in and say:
"Her life is a waste, look at that dump that she lives in, she has no car and lives off government money. Why won’t she get off her ass and do something, make some money?"
"Mother," I say, "They’re playing our CD on the radio."
"Will you get any money?" she asks.
Money, money, money, and things, that is the measure of worth from that other side of the window. Without it you will suffer. Worse than not having it, is not wanting it more than any thing.
Lazy.
Shiftless.
Do nothing.
But no, I can see the princess burning down in the flames, hear the crackling of her flesh, the rustling of her shackles.
"Please help me. You’re the only one who hears me crying. Please, please…"
If I am the only deformed creature that can hear her plea, then she is unreal. Yet she is real to me, as real as any other thing, the deformity which I am acerbating causes me to see it that way, so I will have to best the labyrinth, make my way through the pattern forged of hopes, fears, desires, things made in the intense heat by a clumsy smith.
If I run this road, it will change, with every step it is made anew. I can run rabbit run and it will be known to me only as it is coming undone and reconfiguring, like grains of sand lifted by a wind and laid back to rest.
If I am ill made, will you stop me?
Tell me why, if my princess is imaginary, why should you stop me?
What has the world to fear from deformities like me?
What have you to fear from imaginary princesses?
I need more time in the dark, away from the prying light of illuminated minds. I need a dank place to nurse my defective nature into full blown monstrosity. Then see what comes forth from this point of convergence called human, from this crossroads where sacrifice should be made on behalf of shadowy things. One day of sun can be undone. You have witnessed its undoing.

Intelligent Life

We would not know it if an intelligent life form or species of life forms was attempting to contact us even if they were. We lack the openness and unbiased power of observation that would allow us to perceive intelligence in an organism or system which was not very much akin to ourselves in physicality and ideology, but neither of these attributes signify intelligence in and of themselves.
Consider that as human beings we have been unable throughout the course of our brief history on earth to grant that other human beings who were physically different from us and whose language and culture varied from our own were equal in intelligence to ourselves. We have been unable to recognize intelligence in others of our own species. We have denied them freedoms, taken advantage of their perceived weaknesses, abused and tortured them, and only now, in the 21st century, are we beginning to consider it politically incorrect to assume supremacy based on race, and that is still up for private consideration in the minds of many. As long as the bigotry can be thinly veiled, it will still be granted entrance into mainstream politics and our day to day interactions. Supremacy based on creed yet runs rampant and no consideration whatsoever is given to the notion that our philosophies, our ideas and habitual mind sets are not inherently worthy, they are just ours.
We as a species may not even be adequately equipped to interact in a meaningful way with an intelligence functioning on a vastly different level than our own. For example, something could be transmitting a message to you right now, but, without the appropriate aperture to receive that message, it will go, metaphorically speaking, right over your head. Forget that what we consider a message and what we consider intelligence may not in fact be very intelligent or ripe with meaning in a more universal context.
We are not alone in our ability to self perpetuate and colonize, we are only unique in some of our methods, in the applications of certain tools. Are we really better than all the other life forms present upon this planet because of our linguistic skills and cognitive reasoning? Perhaps these are aberrations more than special qualifications.
Evolution functions via mutation, and that mutation which caused our Cro-Magnon ancestors to beat out (possibly even violently, contributing to the course of their extinction) the Neanderthals may be the cause of our isolation. We perceive ourselves as being alone in the universe because we are mutants, creations with an deviant consciousness that has been cut us off from the rest of the cosmos. Skills that have allowed us to flourish as hunters and conquerors, have usurped abilities that would make contact with intelligent systems possible. We may be the psychopaths of the natural world, deaf to the voices of those that we crush, unable to feel the harm we cause ourselves through the course of our conquest, because we are somehow neurologically damaged.
Our cunning, our breed of intelligence, may be our Achilles heel; the secret to our success and our debilitating weakness. We are surrounded by life, by organisms and systems which behave intelligently, which reach out to us with soft tendrils of warmth and light, speaking to our disabled senses, the senses that we have written off as nonexistent. The hardware may be there, but the software is damaged, infected by a virus that we have misnamed intelligence.
We have supposed that our own abnormal consciousness is the real deal, and that the rest of the universe is cold and dead, but it is the other way around. Our primary waking consciousness is cold and dead, and all of those things which we have considered beneath us from that vantage point, are in fact vibrant, and primal, they comprise the true kingdom which has been patiently awaiting our return.

Is It True?

Is it true?
Am I just one little shadow come to displace another and send an entire pantheon of Gods into exile behind the black glass?
It seems that I am a character caught in a sticky web of cause and effect. I remember that as my first daughter was being born I realized that maybe one could never have their cake and eat it to, that perhaps the having displaces the eating, and the eating displaces the having, and that it is written in the laws which may escape ordinary perception that one simply cannot have everything all at once. Only the Gods try to have everything.
I find myself as a character gravitating towards such a God, like a moon orbiting some larger cosmic body. It is endlessly troubling to feel that you are only a supporting character, and yet, this is the one life that you seem to have access to. In all of the confusion of selecting one dream over another sometimes something that you desired is displaced by some other thing that you desired. Only a many armed blue skinned deity can juggle so many probable dreams, hold them all in mind all at once crossing from one into another through nexus points, little places where one dream bears some similarity to another, to engage in rich microcosmic adventures, all the while still holding the multitude of possibilities in mind.
The shock that the character experiences when it realizes that it is just one of an endless supply of shadows, as readily available as paper clips or number 2 pencils in a K-5 elementary school, might cause a momentary recoiling from that truth. This we call identification with the sleeping state which means that our window into a dream, the character that we currently inhabit is resisting opening up to let the dreamer, that blue skinned terror, in. But like virgins, dreams can be wooed or pressured into slutdom, eventually spreading wide and either enjoying being taken or at least tolerating it.
When do peasants become magicians and magicians become Gods and Gods become animals? It seems that I am a moon ever hoping that if the gods visit here often enough I will acquire a supernatural increase in gravity which would make me eligible for promotion to the rank of sun. How to go from being a cold dead moon to being a burning star, the center of a system around which small dead moons gyrate giddily uttering their wishes to "become real" to the blue fairy?
It is very dangerous to make requests of faeries. It is almost certain that they will help you to become more acutely aware of your wooden condition, which could cause a sudden burst of reckless animation that may ultimately transform you into a jackass before leading you into the belly of a whale. If the whale is white you will at least have found your way into a mythology worthy of the likes of Oberon or Merovee. The fabulous thing about being made of wood is that you will burn easily, and stars need plenty of fuel to shine so bright.
How do you go from being pencils to puppets to stars? You do it by doing as gods do, by crossing the bridge from one ghost world to another. Where did I recently see the book about traveling between ghost worlds? Ah no, ‘twas not a book, it was the old magician whose raven hair is frosting over into strands of silver who sat in a folding chair and explained to me how one manages to escape from a ghost. You must do something unexpected to disengage, you must change from pencils to puppets. Pray that the pencils will not begrudge the puppets the honor of wearing the spotlight for a moment in some neighboring universe where lord Shiva dances and burns forever.