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.

Produce To Be Good

“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!”

Moths And Hobos

My experience with hobos and moths has taught me that it is a mistake to be attracted to warmth and light; these are the real death traps. These are the places where there are walls that hold the warmth and light together in stagnant pools allowing virulent strains of consciousness to engage in a frenzied process of growth and replication. In the cold, endless, dark, night where there are no walls, your own radiance is all that you have, all that is required if you prefer freedom to entrapment. You may shiver and come to know death’s pale face in the wide endless wood, but you will have lived unfettered. Uncontaminated.
The life in the light is like no life at all. It is the life of chimps in dresses and lions behind bars and baby elephants in clown paint. It is no life at all. Where everything is chained in certainty, in safety, in comfort and doused in fluorescent splendor and halogen homeliness; on the inside.
It can be so tempting as you flit by in the night, a solitary lone entity, a one that has no other, no assurances, no desires to lead you from one unsatisfactory chamber within the labyrinthine city walls to the next and the next, sampling the buffet offering of colored lights; trying the red light, the blue light, the green light, the yellow light, the orange light, the violet light and even the white. It can be so tempting, the promise of something to warm your cold skin, the promise that death will no longer be able to look in on you and leer at you so.
You can leave her behind, outside the walls. You can be warm and full of the same stuffing the rest of the may hens and Christmas geese of civilization have been stuffed with. You too could be filled with the disease, the warm disease. No longer alone. No longer unique. No longer alive. One of an assorted variety of creatures fastened by steely pins to a white back drop, carefully labeled, preserved beneath the glass, made brilliant under the light.
It is so tempting. I know. I know.
We shiver and run barefoot through the blackness and ascend invisible mountains and tumble from great heights never knowing what we are doing, or where we are going, only doing it with style, somersaulting on wings the color of soiled doilies or whirring by in a drafty box car over the clickity, clack, clikcity, clack, or strolling by the glittering glass display windows without peering inside. It is so tempting because death has gone all mad, or always was and always will be and whispers all sorts of things through her broken teeth and the gaping black holes where they used to be.
She is always out here with us, hanging on our arms, or walking five paces behind, and sometimes she’s a gay old time, but sometimes she makes you shiver, or rather something in you switches around and makes you shiver, because people are hot and cold like that. Sometimes we are repelled by the real deal and sometimes we accept it, all depending on which of our masks is doing the driving just then. And when you are one of those “I's” that can’t stand her rancid breath and wailing cackle anymore, then you might start looking for the nearest well lit window, looking for a crack to slip in.
But then you might remember, Rome always falls, and when it does she will be waiting and feeling scorned, and you might even think for a moment how lonely she would be if you weren’t out here turning summersaults down her black cape. And you might remember that moths get trapped in brightly-lit kitchens and die under lampshades and behind curtains, having battered themselves to death against the confines of the oppressive walls of the labyrinthine city. You might think, as I sometimes do, that hobos are wiser than the moths, trying to get outside instead of in, and you might take a step backward, away from the open window or door, away from the light and the warmth and sickness of the living dead and not enter Rome with its comfort and delights.
Those things, they come with a price, so you see, you can sell yourself to Rome or give yourself to the wild, and one you do to escape the pain of living and the other you do for love, because mad as she is, death is your companion, your immortal beloved, and maybe you can help her to carry the burden of eternity and give her a shoulder to lean on in the wilderness.

Anger

We must begin with the understanding that I am a very angry person, so much so that nearly anything that comes from me is sure to be laced with a fine trim of rage, either subtle or not so subtle. This is because I have been sensitive my whole life to being forced to do as others suppose I should. I have been threatened by angry outbursts and squashed and prodded with the hope that I would become what is considered a model citizen.
My father made me mad in every sense of the word. My mother played the role of the villain’s henchman, the one that is in the story for comic relief and because the villain needs someone else to do their dirty work. I am angry because I was told that my drawings weren’t good enough, that you must do something right or not at all. The music that I liked was NOT music, it didn’t qualify. All real music was set to 4/4 timing, a rhythm that was natural, like the beating of a heart. I am angry because I was told that reading fiction was a waste of my time and I should read a real book. Perhaps the only thing that was praised was my writing, my story telling, maybe because a teacher had reported that I was talented. Then I was prodded to write stories with the idea of selling stories, as though there were no other possible reason to write a story, sing a song, or paint a picture. When I did make music I was told that I needed to make an effort to write a song that could be sold to Joni Mitchell so that she could perform it. When I announced that I would be an actress, I was taken to a commercial acting class… “O.B. sanitary napkins keep me confident and dry all day long…”
Anything that wasn’t pleasing, relaxing, and palatable by the masses wasn’t art. My father would have liked Hitler’s paintings. This is the reason that I am angry, so angry that I don’t even notice that I am angry, so angry that I could jump off a couch crush strawberries over my face until I am crimson and recite the national anthem backwards to the tune of a Lady Gaga song. I am angry because I knew that he was wrong but I was too small to defend my delicate creative being from my father’s corrosive view of life. I am angry because I was bullied by a greedy critic for more than half my life.
When I see anything that resembles these characteristic in others, when they champion greed or criticism with know-it-all confidence, it triggers a violent reaction within me. When someone appears to be making even the subtlest attempt to place a yoke over my creative being or that of another, even a hypothetical other, I feel the urge to smash a glass on the coffee table and slash the offender from their guggle to their zatch in order to fashion a hat from their entrails and paint the story of my victory over the walls with their blood.
Instead, I write something that will never make it to the best seller’s list or be published in a Newberry award winning children’s book because now my delicate creative being is active and productive and I will let nothing stop it.
I do not think that anger has no place any more than I should think that laughter has no place. They both belong here in my selection of words. Whatever I am, whatever I think, whether I am angry or frightened or joyful, that is what I can use, the raw material that I have to be creative with. I must not wait until I am a happy or peaceful person to start creating. Then I would never create. I write on the wall with my own gory entrails. The twisted workings of my machinery are bent to the ever unjustifiable purpose of being a free builder. So while I must confess that in my spirit aggression is a very near cousin to affection, I feel that there is nothing at all problematic with that unless it prevents me from doing that which I am determined to do: make stuff, whatever kind of stuff I can.

Unhinged Words

So beautiful I could cry. Friendship is a mysterious ephemeral thing. We all do know from experience that no one gives us anything for nothing. All has its price. And yet sometimes, rarely, once or twice in a lifetime, someone looks at us and their heart is so brimming with compassion that it spills out through their eyes and they offer us something that no one should offer; something so good one usually keeps it all to one’s self. True love, pure love, friendship, compassion. One in the same, these many words, these many unhinged words.
The sun peeks out for a while, then the sun goes away and there is cold again and gray mists. My life again. Wondering about the story of my life, how it will read, what it will awaken in the reader. Will my life bring others to life? Or will it go out like a light, extinguished with a clap so that only empty full darkness will remain? What has been done to us? Have we really done this ourselves? Betrayed ourselves so that we are no longer free?
No longer free to live. Another unhinged word. Free. Live. They have all come undone. They all mean nothing because they refer to experiences that we have never had, that our parents have never had, that someone, dear fool, did have and bursting with it endeavored to explain, to share by virtue of oral communication, spilling pearls out onto the grimy sidewalk before pig faced orphans that grabbed them all up and snuffled them and rubbed them in sweaty hands and passed them on to a new generation of piglets.
There are still a few fools rattling around out there, a few who have had the experience and then watered at the eyes realizing that they had said compassion, they had said love, they had said discipline, responsibility, freedom, but had never experienced it until this moment. And now in this moment the word means something, for the first time ever.
Can I give you an example? Can I give it to you now in writing…with words, some of which are still empty for me, and some of which are full?
Empty full darkness that clings to us on all sides. This one life, this one moment, perhaps infinitely more complex than we realize, like the insides of a pomegranate, can it be lit like a fuse? Make it bright, dazzling for a moment so that we can see the delicate tendrils that connect so much to so much else?
With pictures darling, with stories.
By seeing the woman sitting on the flat trailer bed in her red and white striped dress, singing, while the man drives the tractor round in circles. What does it tell you? The buildings are stretched squares making them rectangular and they are frosted with white stucco and pale blue stucco and the pigeons stand around kissing on top as though they were the adornment of a dirty wedding cake. The thick black power lines hang crossing and re-crossing over the streets, making the sky into a piece of modern art when viewed through the eye of the round boy in his stained white shirt and black pants looking up as the flock of pigeons flies from one frosted rooftop to the other, basketball gripped under his arm. There are iron bars on the windows and gates in the garages and front entry ways so that small brown girls stand behind them looking out like prisoners before retreating to ride pink plastic tricycles in the gloom. At the end of the street the chain link fence stands between the apartments and rows of head stones besieged by mustard yellow lichen, keeping company with decaying bouquets of both organic and synthetic flowers. A fence to protect the dead from the living, and a wide green lawn punctured by words, where memories go to slowly fade away. A mysterious, ephemeral thing. So beautiful I could cry.

Free Builder

Has my heart grown so faint that I now doubt my ability to construe meaning from the endless chaos? What is there to fear from there? That I will create the wrong thing? Extract and accentuate the improper details? There can be no impropriety. I am the shaper of worlds, trembling with the fear of my own power. Noise momentarily organizes into something we call music and then it flees back into the abyss like a flight of edgy birds. All of the scattered flecks of magnetic dust gather again and dance to the electric demand before they scatter once more to a fine powder. Even my mind momentarily takes shape, becomes a force and then returns to the maelstrom as a ghost and I wander sleeping through the land of the dead. Temporary forms rise from the eternal chaos, the great roar of the beastly mother of infinite night.
We must become magnets ourselves if we wish to bend the dust, our own dust, to our own will. Aye, what is the will but a center of gravity? Magic is the science of propulsion. Didn’t Jack Parsons spend his time launching rockets in the desert when he wasn’t fucking his mother or their dog? All semblance of sanity may disintegrate as the heat rises. The heat is the fuel that powers our little psychic meat rockets. Intense heat brought on by sleep deprivation, sexual deviation, shock, and something else that I can’t remember now. You may well fear what you will become, what you may create.
We depart from familiar shores, and find that it was our homeland that made us who we seemed to be, our island that we identified with, and now launched as we are into the thrashing seas as explorers, adventurers, and creators, we cannot know what we will become. There is no longer a point of reference. We are at the center, and from our pulsing heart, lines are drawn of radiant heat extending in every direction. It is then, when you are crucified by these infinite shining points, that you come to understand that there is no point at all.
It is a little known fact that pirates were often freemasons, not just criminals, not just adventurers, but free builders as well, cruising the endless sea brimming with Eris’s prized pets, monsters of unimaginable proportions, titans that had to be locked away in Tartarus so that order and civilization could come to fruition upon the scalding cracked earth.
I can do no wrong here, kneading and twisting the nothingness to my whim like a child manipulating clay. It is no fault of mine that there is red clay as well as blue. I cannot help but mingle them until there is purple, thus sealing my fate as a heretic. If the shapes I call forth from the fertile possibility are monstrous, then so be it. From the perspective of the limitless, unbound, raw blob they are as beautiful as any other creation. Who am I to judge one random mix against another? I am just a shape myself which may be attracted or repelled by configurations more or less, (even far less) alike to my own.
I remind myself of the words of the puck:

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,"

Yes a dream, sprung from the unending river of the unconscious, ever running just beneath the surface. A road to the underworld, a convenient place to tuck those thing which do exist, but which we find offensive to our own configuration. An outflow channel to allow some of our infinite nature to run off so that we do not explode with the madness, the fervor, the nectar of the real, like crazed maenads in the wild wood. A shadow to give us definition and three dimensional "depth". A hiding place for the weak hearted.

NOVO

For years I had been near it, but that boundary between us had never been crossed. At the end of the small street where my grandmother lived, from the time when the house itself was built when I was only 4 years old, there had been a small hotel, the "Novo". I came to visit my grandmother many times, week after week, month after month and year after year. Eventually, I lived there for a couple of years. I walked back and forth from the gates to the main street and back, and the sign "Novo" was always on the periphery of my vision without fully catching my attention. I knew there was a hotel there and that small bit of simple information was all that was necessary for me. My reality tunnel was clearly etched in the sidewalk, through my grandmother’s black gate and to her big house at the top of the long cement driveway. And the hotel was very distinctly outside of that tunnel.
A few years ago, when I was back in El Salvador with my companion on the path and the world had taken on a strange dream-like quality that we could both clearly perceive like a translucent liquid all around us, I walked into the hotel. This hidden chamber was very different from the one that I had imagined. First and foremost, it was full of detail where my imagination had been only a faint outline without depth or mood. There were walls of red brick, little lawns in the middle of short pathways, a small swimming pool and a bar next to it with European reporters drinking beer and sharing stories, laughing and arguing late into the night. In their interaction amongst themselves and with the waitresses that brought them their drinks and food, I could sense a history, not only made of individuals but of adventure, connections between worlds and life changing discoveries. Upon experiencing this rush of new information, which removed inside of me many years of false assumptions and simplified imagination, I felt the kernel of a greater truth. Here was this place, complex and open and mysterious and full of color, and it had been sitting next to me for decades, it had existed falsely in my mind as a simulacrum, a mental place holder that separated me from what was Real and right there, only a few steps away.
Today I look around me and I can faintly perceive the many narrow reality tunnels that surround us. Faced with an infinity of choices, our machine has responded with limitation, extreme and uncontrolled. The reality tunnels that surround us, our habitual sequences of motion and attention, our steps that have settled into a steady rhythm and refuse to change, these can seem insurmountable, like giant black walls that prevent our escape. Faced with a city full of wonder, my machine will walk in the same directions, turn on the same streets, look at the same places, point out the same sights, park in the same streets. Faced with a land full of life, my machine will reach for the same fruits, stop at the same places, rest on the same benches, stand underneath the same tree, look at the same two rocks, the same that I saw before, the same that I will see many years from now.
How truly difficult is it to move away from these predetermined steps? Would it take only a momentary decision to allow me to step away from life as I knew it and onto a completely unexplored path? What would be the price? How much will the unknown charge for admission into its dark caverns?
When the machine finds itself awake, momentarily devoid of these habits, it may be unable to decide what to do, it may find itself frozen by the new and vast universe of possibilities that suddenly opens before its eyes. If no new conscious habits have been developed, the machine may then return to the habits it knows well and, in the process, fall into a deep sleep again. Each moment of freedom then becomes a golden opportunity to push a step further into the vast unexplored territory of the infinite Labyrinth.
Even in the midst of deep machine sleep, where there may appear to be no hope of flight and our tenuous attention fades away like a dying ember, may we find a way to strive to step away from the Paths of Death that are made of stone and dust and, through our sincere and persistent efforts, create new paths that flow freely on ever changing waves of Light.