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.

Chatter

We behave as if these words, these sounds that we make daily without consideration, are something that has always been, will always be. WE feel that it is something eternal. These words really mean something. They have inherent value. But the truth is that it is all gibberish invented from necessity. When I want to eat, I grunt a certain way and it sounds like “eat” or “food” or “hungry” and then that other over there knows that I want something and learns which cries mean what. Anyone that has lived with a cat or dog for some time can understand this. One learns that this whine means I’m hungry, this yip means I want out, this bark means someone is coming and so on. We have a greater range of noises that we are capable of making thanks to our complex vocal systems. Lucky us, that we have lips and tongues and teeth and a larynx that makes a greater range of sounds possible. I can make a noise that not only means I want to eat but means that I want to eat oranges. Other primates are capable of deciding that they would prefer bananas to oranges and can even communicate this using sign language or charts pressed on them by humans in white lab coats. They simply lack the physical sophistication that would allow them to speak. Meanwhile many birds can do better in terms of speech, but lack the intelligence to say much. (This is not really to say that they are inferior in any way, but rather that they have not had a need to capitalize on that particular habit to further the evolution of their species. They have taken a different route.) Gray parrots can both reason and then speak to us in our own language, which in my book makes them superior to us as a species as I don’t see us (other than the occasional two year old or horse whisperer) trying to speak in parrot or magpie or any language, verbal, visceral or otherwise, employed by any species other than our own.
We think we are so great. We think our words are so grand. It is all really gibberish. Cats and dogs and rats even learn to respond to our prattle. I attribute this to a sort of social intelligence, meaning that they have learned that communication with our species benefits them in some way. They are networkers. They have a memory of past interactions and capitalize on their previous experiences and this is what we generally think of as intelligence: an ability to adapt to surrounding circumstances and other organisms for the benefit of one’s own survival. The reason that we think that this sort of opportunistic system for organizing external stimuli is superior to any other is that it is the method we employ. We coo over how intelligent dolphins and apes and cats and rats and dogs are because they are networkers like us, because they will jump through hoops for fish if necessary. Their intelligence is similar to our own in this respect. Their method for survival involves interacting with others just as our own method depends on such interactions. So we think that they’re the greatest.
We think we are great and therefore those things which share traits with ourselves are great. We are species-centric. The way that we evolved through time is THE BEST no doubt, and our mode of communication is ACES. Our way of approaching the world is THE WAY. We don’t consider that we are noise makers. We are the kind that cover the world with our nests and destroy the habitats of other life forms to make more space for ourselves. We have the might so we are RIGHT! We fill the night sky with our artificial light. We fuck the night over with this light pollution so that nocturnal species suffer disorientation that affects their mode of survival. We don't ’care. You shouldn't be nocturnal. You should be like us. Our way is THE BEST! We wreck everything for everybody, shit all over the world and babble incessantly, even sending our babble out into space. Because we feel that there is something special about ourselves. There is something unique about the way we think and speak.
We are a mad hatter species. That dirty old man muttering to himself and occasionally shouting into the crowd is to society what we as a species are to the universe. We are creepy. We are crazy. We take up a lot of space with our noise and filth. Yakka yakka yakka, blah blah blah. We can even write it down. Some of us used to be able to read. Now we have television and radio and cell phones so we can chatter, cha cha cha cha cha cha cha yakkity chat and listen to our own clamber day and night. We think that we matter, that what we say matters, that what we say is real. We make these noises daily without consideration, but seldom do we manage to say anything that comes even close to describing something real, something that would stand beyond language in a space that we never seem to quite reach. Meanwhile, the chatter goes on.

The Dreams of Monsters

What could I tell you if I could remember no dreams? I’d have no tongue to wiggity wag because I’d not remember this here fantasy where I dream of dreams forged from words. They say that it is most restful to sleep beneath three feet of ice nestled within two down sleeping bags with a wool cap clapped over your head and a little air hole dug through the snow, just snoozing away in the ice mother’s belly. They say that all the action of sleep happens during the REM cycle, all the Freudian fun that allows you to wake up and say,
“ I dreamed I drank a chocolate shake through a straw.”
But the psychologists and dream analysts know that what you were really dreaming about was fucking your father. You only remember it as drinking a chocolate shake because the brain makes things right for us when we wake up, makes it so that we can feel like a healthy drone and not some deranged maniac. There is however another cycle where the very deepest of sleep occurs and to catch these elusive z’s, they say that the best place is beneath snow or in a Turkish cave or on a whaling ship with no heat and just a thin blanket between you and the North Atlantic chill. So they say. They say that the dreamless sleep is the most restful, and who am I to disagree?
I have seen the light that burns in the darkness, the light from nowhere that burns behind closed eyelids and comes with the hum and buzz of the eternal. If you listen to it deeply you will evaporate completely, so you resist as often as you can, being identified with this dream of mortality, this dream of ATM machines and airplanes and dish washers and pop stars. But if you were to give in, to let go, then what would you be? Nothing you could talk about here, where if you told them that you saw great monsters of light shifting and changing shape in an electric light parade jungle to a music that needs no ears to pander to, well then, they would just say that you had been dreaming about fucking your mother. (And maybe that’s exactly what you would be doing.)
Or if you could tell of the time that you were a giant with purple gray tendrils rising from your crown and your body was interlocked with that mysterious other and you sang songs with the voice of a pipe organ, songs that turned purple and black and neon green and glowed through the infinite darkness, then wouldn’t they just say that it was a dream about replacing your mother so that you could be with your father?
But what, what if that was not the dream. What if that pipe organ song is the reality, the dream weaving machine, the stone dropped into a pond that makes all the little ripples that we think are the real world. What if having a mother and a father is only the dream of a mushroom headed God that comes from many and none and returns to many and none.
How could you remember this truth in the middle of dreaming that you must make it to work on time and your children must be picked up from school on time but a woman in the train station won’t help you with your ticket and you are stuck there for much longer than you would like? Is there any way to describe the translucent limb extending through space time that suddenly got crimped and caused this nightmare to be my life?
Me, a tiny pin drop of light. A partial opening in the eyelid of a titan who gently sleeps, twitching tortured through the rapid eye movement cycle of slumber, invisible limbs quaking, metropolises plunging into the sea, planets melting, civilizations crumbling, and new stars bursting into brightness to warm little clay marbles on a black tablecloth under which a wild black dog sits snarling, insisting you stay on the table spinning and rolling, for the truth of what you are is too monstrous, too mammoth to be explained to a little pin head of dream stuff like you. Your story, your life, your play on the stage of the Goliath mind will come to a close, and you cannot begin to understand what you are or what moves you, you can only be shoved across the board like a chess piece moved by a sparkling effervescent tentacle that wants to forget what it is and rest for a minute in your strange strife.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side…
So monsters dream of being human, and humans dream of fleeing or being monsters. If I were not a dream thing I could not speak these words, for the thing that sleeps has no tongue, no eyes, no ears, and wrestles with an eternity of stillness. I am made to do the things that it cannot do for itself. I am made to do the things it can only dream of.

I AM NOT

What I found in the cracks between those yellow tiles installed in the late 1950’s is a mystery. The sight of it made me weep diamonds. They trickled down my cheeks like tiny crystal ants, their antennae twitching observantly as they made their way over the dunes of my cheek bones and crawled around behind my earlobes to march in a line down the nape of my neck, moistening the forgotten curls of hair hidden there.
I will never tell you what I saw. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. They say that it’s possible that the ancient Greeks couldn’t perceive color in the way that we do. This theory is based on certain curious passages in the Iliad which suggest that the sight of the author was somewhat different from the sight of the modern man, used to sitting upon his sofa watching Spike TV on a high definition plasma screen television, his Bermuda shorts catching the survivors after he crams greasy handfuls of brittle potato shavings into his open mouth, pupils dilated attentively as crimson arcs of blood splash across the screen before him.
When Homer looked out at the arid cliffs of the Mediterranean, he saw something more akin to black and white, only we haven’t got the words to accurately describe what he actually saw, and at this point we have even less imagination than words, so you see, ours is a desperate situation. We will never actually uncover the secrets captured in the blink of a Greek eye.
For that same reason I cannot tell you about the landscapes that I have visited in the lines of grout near the kitchen sink, nor about the craters around the abysmal mouth of the drain. I look at the mouths of the humans nearest to me and watch them move in complicated contortions of tongue, lip and teeth, and in the end all that I can hear is my own whispered interpretations, like a gentle Zephyr blowing through my mind, bringing back to me notions tied to my earliest perceptions. Sensations tangled in my fathers beard and the sunlight glinting off the window frames to shimmer on the gossamer web of a green spider.
These things outside trigger a little pop fizz inside, a torrent of psychic and physical sensations. The muscles in my own face jerk and contort correspondingly as part of this miniature animal dance. The flicker of an eye lid, the slow rise of brows, mouth curled up at the corners, a flash of teeth.
No, I have no idea what any of it really means. It transpires automatically. I like it better when I put the scene on mute so that nonsense is the only sense left to me. I cut the line between the outside and the inside. What I see on the screen of the mind will not make me jump and dance. I will dance when I say "Dance!" All of this human twitching and confusion is draining, a waste of the liquid fire running in figure eight from prow to stern of the biological space ship I inhabit.
With this vessel, which as far as I can actually tell, despite the appearance of others that would seem to be of like kind, is the only one in existence, or at least the only one I can influence directly, I voyage into an arena of color and sound that combines to create a chaotic roar, (we call this noise) and when the anarchy reaches critical mass it becomes silence. It is like turning the television on to watch the snow and hear the static as you meditate in a straight back chair, a mechanism for blotting out the more distinct noises of your neighbors talking through the paper thin walls and car horns bleating outside the window. All of those very distinct sounds which call me into human existence, I drown them out with the hiss and roar.
I do this to lessen the great shock that I will no doubt experience when I die and discover that I was never human at all. Why insist that I am human now? Oh it’s true, I am in a human spaceship now, but that does not mean that I am a human space ship.
I am not.
I am.
I am NOT.
When they see me in those places that I cannot describe to you, they, the indescribable others, say, "Welcome back Not! We’re so glad to have you!" Then all of us Nots crash together and howl, bouncing one off of another, creating a din that can only be appreciated by the initiated Maenad, who standing barefoot on the forest floor goes stock still, eyes widening as she feels us crashing in through the open portal in her chest, mud smeared upon her bare arms, twigs lodged in her hair, crystal ants crashing down to shatter upon her naked breast.

Restoring the Dead God

The pressure is on- be spiritual, do something magickal, say something esoteric. There is an intense fracture somewhere, somewhere. I can’t place it now. I know it’s a broken mind from which many tiny blue tear drops dance down to the black soil, nearly colliding with the golden moths that flutter by in carefully rising and descending helixes like animated leaves in a whirlwind.
The pressure is on. The kettle of polished black enamel rumbles urgently, the first traces of steam slipping through it’s pursed stainless steel lips. Its scream pierces the atmosphere of the pearl dream time. It wails and wails about the blackness of the horrid cast iron skillet with which it has been forced to share the stove top, red hot electric coils glowing under its tortured steel bottom.
Meanwhile the moths have descended upon the electric blue skeletal remains of a humanoid life form. They crawl through the wide eye sockets to lay eggs inside the skull, a practice of theirs, thousands of years old. I know it’s a broken mind and I’m in it. I know that my body is a vague idea, an almost created dream that will evaporate as the tide rolls in and the sun pops up like an awakened eye to glare in at an emptied black stage where nothing played briefly.
I listen to the tiny little voice speaking to me about the excruciating pain that she’s in. She cannot wait for the sun’s gaze to burn her away. She is a bad dream. I know it must be a broken mind. We dreams seem to go on forever and ever and sometimes we think that we have awakened only to find that we are another dream, another glistening shard of a fractured mirror.
That’s all it is, smoke and mirrors, but no one believes me, and they keep on playing in the fun house, in the emptied blue skull of Shiva, where they are content to crawl as larvae, out of the nasal cavity, over the smooth dome, back in through the gaping eye socket mumbling about 2012 and Christ consciousness, tax returns and a water shortage.
Say something esoteric. I am asked to tell the truth, but so long as I am using words I am lying, there is nothing that I can say about the great adventure, about life, or death, or love, or beginnings or ends that will be true. I am very angry that I am being asked to say anything. Answer your own questions, I need to return to the sea.
After eons of living in the pool house of a dilapidated mansion, a tangled mess of countless winding hallways and dark rooms filled with mystery and murder and magic, the minotaur came and lifted me out of the pool with it’s chipping plaster and faded underwater lights. He was strong and muscular, covered with coarse brown fur, more like a buffalo than a bull. I went willingly with my savior, knowing that I was leaving behind my children , scattered throughout the many rooms, and I would never know what was to become of them in this story. Smooth hot pink skin with aqua blue nipples were mine and a long slippery tail, also hot pink. I was old. As old as the mansion and my companion, the long forgotten lord of the manor, the minotaur now carrying me away to open water.
Do something magickal. More magickal than creating this cracked up illusion? Yes, I can do that. I can come alive in it. I can feel this dream body tingle until it evaporates. I am none with nowhere to go and nothing to do. So I wake up inside of the dream, as one with somewhere to go and the capacity to do something. I do something in Shiva’s hallowed out skull, listening to the waves breaking on the shore beyond, knowing that the eye is burning outside. I let it burn inside of me as well, and I do something.
Anything.
Nothing spiritual.
Nothing magickal.
Nothing esoteric.
Just something, something for nothing.
Something to mend the break.
I build a chrysalis.
Something to mend the break.