Father and the Elf

When looking for proof of any theory
it will undoubtedly appear.
Ego has been spoken of in many ways
as if it was never part
of the psychedelic realm.

Through hypnosis and other means
we embarked on a study
of the Pythagorean cult, the pentagram,
the Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Ratio,
the Wizard of Oz and Lady Gaga.

The word psychedelic was used
for the elf that we discovered
within this network of signifiers.
It was hard to agree on his existence
but everyone missed him
when he was not there.

As is the case with most beings of influence,
he required extra added coverings
and ways to get along with the outside world.

It was around that time
that Father was identified
as a member of the Illuminati.
When we made this discovery
we viciously hit the frontal lobe of his brain
with a tiny steel hammer.
In this way
we filtered out the data that was unwanted.

Later that week
we found ourselves noticing things
we had never paid attention to before.
We noticed a number of changes.
We could no longer feel sadness
we could no longer feel angst.

One recurring accusation was that
our thoughts were riddled with subliminal messages.
We began to see evidence of this everywhere.
We found a detailed description of the pentagram
and we cried or laughed at inappropriate times.

We experimented with a magical technique called
the filter theory of selective attention.
There were numerous Illuminati symbols hidden
all throughout our symbolic realm
but we were not able to find the single eye.

We found that
the core of the persona
the core of our very being
would actually become psychedelic
at the very least amount of effort,
it had been this way all along.

We used a mind control method
where half of us were induced
into dissociative personality disorder.
Since then,
it became apparent
there were at least two groups of us
completely unknown to each other,
maybe more.

This was similar to what happens
in the legendary blot experiment
of the Pythagorean cult.
Something we would soon discover.

Because the part of Father's brain
controlling social action
was completely destroyed
his thoughts became truly psychedelic.

We found that we had
grown within this person,
this being we called Father.
Father was the cave
Father was the house.

But what really was Psychedelic?
What did we mean by this word?

Father is very childish now.
It’s infectious.
He is full of lightning bolts and broken mirrors. 
When any of these symbols are seen in any context,
we place them in the unprovable category,
the same word we once used
to describe the elf.

Then he starts to laugh.

The Matter

Something is hidden, just beneath the new surface, beneath the chaos and rubble something lies hidden. Behind the symbols and overt gestures, under wraps, underground, something other gestates.
Even in the places that you thought were wholly yours, even there, something that is not you has been skittering around the edges and dark corners.
There is an entire floor  of your house where the Other is at work. You have never been there, have never seen it, have never suspected when perhaps you should have.
There is another hidden within you.
Outside too, the Other lurks, and what is outside may find its way under your skin. What is inside controls your destiny without your consent.
There are those who dig deep into the secrets, searching underground for their self. In the center of a war zone, in the worst part of a ghetto, they are working diligently to gather the necessary supply of energy so that they may unearth and awaken their sleeping self.
It may take 20 years of consistent effort and everything they have worked to accumulate may be lost in an afternoon. Nonetheless, there are those who work at the center of the storm, quietly, secretly, unnoticed, reaching for the impossible against all odds.
Then there are those who stay on their own floor of the house, never asking questions, making many assumptions, assuming superiority, assuming knowledge. They try both consciously and unconsciously to keep the Other away.
Despite their best efforts, however,  it will find its way into that space they thought was theirs exclusively. It will rise to the surface accidentally, unexpectedly. It will grow to a point that what  was Other is now simply self and what once was self has now become Other.
One may be a helpless victim of the back and forth struggles of Other and self by trying to avoid the truth. But one who seeks to know the Other finds power.
Something is hidden, just beneath the new surface, beneath the chaos and rubble something lies hidden. Behind the symbols and overt gestures, under wraps, underground, something Other gestates.

Disappear In The Dark

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.

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”.

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. 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?

Creation and Property

Nobody can own music.
Nobody can own a sound.
You can make music, you can make a sound, but you can’t keep it in bondage.
It’s like a child. You may birth it, name it Rainbow and raise it on organic vegetable matter and Dalai Llama quotes excerpted from coffee table novelty books, but when it turns 18, if it wants to ride in red sports cars with gangstas and shake its ass in a skin tight mini skirts made of genuine baby white tiger skin, then that’s just what it will do.
The things which accumulated in you and resulted in "the song" were not unique to you, they came from elsewhere.
For example, your siblings also feel the angst that remains from your father’s drunken abuse, and your love of wild flowers is shared with scores of green peace enthusiast, hippies and botanist. That chord arrangement is only slightly different from others, and probably is identical to an arrangement featured in a polka song written by an accordion player that lives with his mother in Michigan and works as a used car salesman by day. The only thing distinguishing your arrangement from his is that the rhythm is different and yours is strummed on an acoustic guitar rather than keyed on an accordion and you have an audience and got a record deal while he suffers from loneliness due to his pig nosed face.
The very idea that creative material should be owned is an uncreative idea. It is an idea that says: “Now I have made this and no one else can make anything else like it or from it or I’ll sue their ass for copyright infringement”
Creativity is using anything and everything and making something new from it, something slightly different or unrecognizably different. Kudos to anyone that can take part of a song about love and peace and turn it into a song about hate and violence. That is called being creative. No one comes up with anything brand new and all their own.
We are all composites of the many different influences which converge within us and our ideas and creations stem from this composite creation that we call self. We do not know the nature of our self, and not knowing our self, how could we ever presume to possess it, let alone those composite spores that it spews into the ether in the form of poetry, song, or sculpture.
This self is on loan. We borrow it for a while, taking it for a spin before it evaporates. These impressions shaping our creative impulses, are viewed through the borrowed lens of self. They did not originate within us. The color of the sky was present long before we were and the birds were singing about it long before we started writing about them singing about it. The thing which made the song was not yours, the things that the song is made up of is not yours, those things that inspired its making are not yours, how could the song itself be yours?
Nothing is new under the sun. There are no original ideas. Your ideas come from others. From the sound of your mother’s voice when you were twelve, from your father’s old car, from the lake you nearly drowned in, from the song that played on the radio when you first kissed, from the way she screamed when she left, from the theme of that cartoon you watched when you were four, and the song your grandmother hummed when you were 13 months old.
There are things at work within you which you are not even aware of. That song you wrote may very well be an approximation of something you heard when you were a child or in the elevator three months ago. That you were unaware of its influence on you does not make the resulting song original. It came from somewhere.
To be creative is to see what there is to work with and work with it in any way possible. To steal, to borrow, to reuse and cause mutations, that is creative. To forge something new of what was is God-like, opening up infinite possibilities. To spend one’s life obsessed about protecting a small blot of intellectual material is limiting and can only lead to decay, to the end of possibilities.
Creativity is brave. To be a true creator is to scatter creations like droplets of water from the trembling wings of a heron. You do not take time to count the droplets, or to try to catch them before they can dance off of the wings of another.
If someone takes what you have made and does something new with it, that is a compliment. If you were focused on creation and not ownership, you would be unafraid to loose the drops of water that scatter from your wings, you would know that soon you will dip into the waters of life in search of the wriggling fish and new things will scatter from you as you part with the water again and ascend with your catch. This can happen again and again if you are active and not busy catching and adoring the product of dives into the deep that occurred once long ago.
When you create, you are in the present. What you created, that is already in the past. Dead and gone. If you are interested in ownership, sue the earth itself. For that is where you came from and that is where you’re going.

Intelligence

It is hysterical to me that conversations about intelligence can be had with a straight face. There is an abyss there, a place that exist beyond our own human-centric notions and needs, and somehow we are completely blind to it. We run around on a plateau with our eyes shut. One day we will drop over the edge and that will be that. That is what comes of running around blindfolded on a plateau, it’s like a game of Russian roulette, you can be okay for a maximum of five rounds before oblivion snakes its hand around your ankles and pulls you into the darkness. We are only just barely beginning to understand the workings of the human mind, and even in these studies, there is little hope of finding an objective truth. The assumptions that are made at the beginning of any undertaking have direct bearing on the results that such an undertaking will yield. The beginning is also the end.
Where we start determines where we will end. And we as human beings begin all undertakings from the point of view of a human being: can we eat it, can we wear it, can we fuck it, will it cause us to experience emotional well being, or a more comfortable material existence? Will it perpetuate the species, or advance our treasured ideals? We are only interested in ourselves. We assume that we are the crown of creation, the best direction that evolution could have taken.
And what if this is not the only world in which life thrives? What if this is just one direction that evolution may take when restrained within a certain set of conditions? Not the best, or the most unique, or the most special, just one of many?
So much of what we think is colored by the idea that there was a supreme maker and that we were the best that he could do. Let’s suppose that we accept that our ideas about a supreme maker are all egotistical fancies, stories that any schizophrenic would tell themselves, or any available listener, to justify that alluring suspicion that they are special. We want to be special. We have created a mythos or two to give credence to our specialness.
Each individual human wants to be the best, the most adored, and these desires that color our most personal impressions of the world around us also worm their way into the expressions of the collective. The village, the state, the nation, the race, the species….mine must be the best. My existence is justified by my righteousness, my righteousness is justified by the existence of a creator whose existence is implied by my own. Everything that I come up with that originates from my humanity ends with my humanity. It is an endless feedback loop.
It is hell.
It is life as a human animal.
We may ask: what is intelligence?
In the case of humans, Intelligence is a process of evaluating information based on currency and relevance to the human intelligence rather than on detail or accuracy. Our intelligence is self centered, self serving. Our intelligence is the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience. We are all about profiting ourselves.
But suppose that we are just one direction that evolution may take under certain conditions. Suppose that different conditions dictate different forms of intelligent life. The values that arise from that other evolutionary process would be different from our own. What is important and useful in material, and intellectual and even emotional terms, to one system is not shared by all systems.
Sometimes the interaction between a pair of intelligent systems is profitable for both systems. Sometimes it can profit only one and not the other, and at other times it may be neither harmful nor beneficial to either system. Not in any obvious way. Given that situation, how then would we measure intelligence? How would we define it?