Magick

It doesn’t hurt to see something new.
What about finding magic right here? In the woman in the white hoodie who seems to come up from out of the sea and hurries past the post office? In a little boy asking his father why there’s ham in his breakfast sandwich? In the hat that blew down the street, as if in the hands of phantoms, always just out of reach of the woman who chased it?
How about these scratches in the metal window frames? Looking through these windows reminds me of looking through the window of the train, the Pacific Coast Surfliner, seeing the waves through glass. Here the windows are covered in a film of dried salt spray.

What about the music? It’s  sultry rock, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, probably something new, but slowly rocking, fuzzy, half dreamed music. Without it there is the whir of an espresso machine, the titanic hum of an old refrigeration unit.

The wind rattled all night, I was awake before I was ready, sinuses distressed by the pollen explosion called April. Rain, wind, sun, rain, sun; a conspiracy for the propagation of flowers.
In my dream the scientists lowered the lights and sang like dwarves about Terence McKenna and the deep dark expanse of space.
Then suddenly I’m here and it seems clear that this scene isn’t meant for me. I should be lighting candles and performing secret rituals behind black curtains. Whatever possessed me to attempt to balance a hot beverage and a netbook on a small round table, badly balanced on the tiles? Maybe the same thing that took the woman’s hat…

The wind! It blew me off course in the night and here I am in Pacifica, California.
Where did my train car go? I never was in one. It was a space ship and the OTHER was on the loose. I led my sister to the 24th deck were the scientists were working away on theoretical problems. I explained what was happening.
“There is an alien on the loose. It looks like…” I struggle to describe it, to remember it, “like a crayfish sort of. Well, it will lodge itself on your face and lay eggs inside of you and later the offspring will explode out of your stomach.” 
The scientists, at first disbelieving, now appear frightened. I indicate that they should cover their mouths with their hands, and under no circumstance hang their heads over the edge of the bed to look underneath. I have a pencil with which I intend to stab the thing if I see it.

“It could be anywhere at this point.”
Everyone looks anxiously around the room.
“But don’t worry,” I comfort them, “I have this.”
I indicate the pencil,
“I’ll protect you but you have to come up with a plan. You have to think of a way we can contain an area to keep it out, then a way for us to kill it.”

Earlier, I was fleeing its presence and was separated from my team. We were in the midst of taking action in accordance with our plan. I saw my team leader Cam go one way and I went another. The elevator doors opened and another Cam came towards me, I turned to see if Cam number one saw Cam number two coming.

“Cam!” “I called, “It’s you! It’s you from the future!”
But Cam from the future was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for Cam number one.
She grabbed my shoulders.
“Listen to me, it’s not going to work. You have to try something different!”
Then she had to rush away, into another glowing portal of light.
That was when I decided to consult the scientists.

“This scone isn’t as biscuity as I would like. Is the coffee cake the same price?” I ask.
“It’s less.” she tells me.
“Well, I don’t care, I’d rather have coffee cake.”
We make the trade and she gives me back seventy five cents. What am I doing here?
There’s a little boy playing Jenga at one of the round tables. An orange balloon is stuck to the window under the words pastries, cookies, cakes. Outside the waves look swollen, the sea is choppy.

What about the music? It’s  sultry rock, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, probably something new, but slowly rocking, fuzzy, half dreamed music. Without it there is the whir of an espresso machine, the titanic hum of an old refrigeration unit.
What about finding magic right here? In the woman in the white hoodie who seems to come up from out of the sea and hurries past the post office? In a little boy asking his father why there’s ham in his breakfast sandwich? In the hat that blew down the street, as if in the hands of phantoms, always just out of reach of the woman who chased it?
It doesn’t hurt to see something new.

Anything You Have Held

Ronnie was a gymnast. That’s how they met and that’s also the story of how music became a part of Dennis. 
He says that anything that you have held holds you.
They were in ninth grade when they met and had no social options at the time for expressing the depth of their love. It was a love affair nonetheless. Ronnie taught Dennis to sing and play drums and Dennis taught Ronnie to fight. He was like a perfectly chiseled Greek statue and would do a hand stand on a signal light on 42nd street in Manhattan if you asked him to. He was beautiful and that beauty drew attention, jealousy, and resentment. Boys who perhaps felt that same attraction to Ronnie that Dennis felt but wanted to stop it sought peace by punishing the beauty of that face with their fists. So Dennis taught Ronnie to fight.

Ronnie took Dennis to a club to listen to music. They were the only white kids in a black jazz club. Dennis worried a little but Ronnie said:
“Listen to the music.”
And he did. After a while Ronnie was invited up onto the stage to play. Sublime moment for the kid too young to get into the club to be on the stage.

In college Ronnie fell in love with a beautiful woman. Her face was severely deformed, she had three fingers on each hand, but like Ronnie she was a musician. This is a sad story. They tried to have children and after several miscarriages they at last had a son, Sean.

On Christmas Eve Dennis was on his way to a party being held in honor of his recent nomination for a Pulitzer. The phone rang. It was Ronnie’s wife. Ronnie had just been hit by a bus crossing the street.
For several days they all sat around the hospital bed reading to Ronnie from the yearbook, but Ronnie was gone. His beautiful wife gave his drum kit to Dennis. Dennis  brought it with him to the west coast where he continued to make music.

13 years later the telephone rang again. It was Sean. He wanted to know if he could have his Dad’s drum kit back. Dennis cried.
“I know that you were my Dad’s best friend. I know that you loved him.” Sean told him.

Anything that you have held holds you.
Ronnie was a Gymnast. He would do a hand stand anywhere anytime. If you were walking down 42nd street and asked him to, he would do a handstand right on the traffic light.

Dance of Words

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

Games

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

Thoughtfully, Beautifully

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

We Wear The Music

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

Give

Silence. My life is like a tomb today. No music to make me wiggle. I read On The Road and I know what they’re talking about. I know exactly what IT is and I know exactly when I had IT or when IT had me. I remember being out there on the dark floor swinging and a guitar was screaming its love for me and I showed my appreciation by letting go! Getting wiggly. I let that wailing in, let it have a turn at the wheel, let it dance the body electric, shake it. I remember that I could see them, the music makers, and I could feel ME alive and willing, my heart wide open, and dimly in the background there were others and they barely moved. I remember the social animal whispering in my ear, “Perhaps you are making others uncomfortable.” Something else roared back, “Damn that comfort. Some bodies got to give. You don’t come to the altar as a spectator. You come to make a sacrifice baby, so give!”
That’s what I did in a concrete room with groovy squiggly drawing of figures dancing all over the walls and all the real humans with three dimensional apparatuses hugging those walls and the couches, hanging thoughtfully back as though they would prefer to be two dimensional themselves. There were these stick figures that wanted to get groovy and these Russians that wanted to be sticks.
I have been places though, where everybody did give. Other darkened rooms, other musicians. Places where we let IT have us until we were nauseated and fainting. How many times did we do that? There was a bunch of us then, and we got together every two or three months and it wasn’t easy because we were separated by miles and miles. Most of us lived down in the dusty desert and slithered around on our bellies like lizards most days, baking in the sun and talking about free will and the transmission of transformative substances carried in blood, sweat, semen, and saliva. The music maker lived far away in a misty bay. When we wanted to wake up and whirl around and commune with the GRANDFATHER, with the BIG TIME, with THE MUSIC baby, then we either had to pile into a car and go to the music maker or we had to bring him to us, and either way it wasn’t easy.
I spent those lazy lizard days putting people in the sensory deprivation tank or selling moonstone earrings and Eckhart Toll books and scrambling to get the music maker to come down to us. And we argued all night. Bored housewives, big middle aged Indians in button up white shirts and purple jersey T-shirts, school teachers, philosophers, college drop outs, sexual deviants, a market research man in a big black hat, a pack of sham men. Like werewolves, we were one part someone you would spit on at the bus stop, another part something unspeakable. Lonely, broken down, and crazed. Arguing all night about who did what and what should we do and could we make pornography instead of selling moonstone, and how were we going to make the rent so that we would have a place to argue. I knew, we had to make the rent so we could bring the music maker, bring him, bring him, and it was hard but we did it a few times before we exploded and showered out like the sparklers after the grand finale of a fireworks display. Whatever else we did with the torturous months and years that gurgled by, whether we understood or didn’t understand the market research man and his jive, we did let IT dance through us more than a few times.
I live by the music man now in the foggy bay. I tell him I’m thinking about the good old days and he tells me these are the good old days. He’s right. I’ll look back and think about this time later, my one dance with the Russians and the way we stay up till a reasonable hour playing board games, screaming and howling and brooding and nodding and playing air guitar to old tunes coming out of the computer. We did this on Friday night and IT had us then. I remember that I could hear everything we said as if we were performers on a stage of Jell-O and the music makers that made noise in the background were scattered or dead and still helping us with our invocation. I remember that I began to tremble towards the end, it was all so much.
And truly, even that little hoowa at my kitchen table wasn’t easy to put together. There were weeks of being sick and too much toil for the music man and the sullen little girl must have had plenty of troubles I know nothing about that nearly prevented our gathering. One of our ranks even refused to come in and participate and instead hid in the bedroom watching Anime, so even this small happening had to be fought for, but we did it.
Today I cough and roll around with a stomach ache and things are quiet and as long as I let myself get beat this way, quiet they will stay. I have to get up and do something if I want to break out of this tomb of quietude. I have to give.

My Life as a Creator Dog

I have been trained like some berzerker attack dog to hammer on the keys to the rhythm of the beat and spill out golden sinews of thought and emotion without censorship. It is a developing habit, a thing I do almost effortlessly. Once I am in the chair, once the headphones are clapped over my ears and the music begins to trickle along the channels of my nervous system, I respond. Just as rubbing a thigh will warm other more secretive parts to the point of yielding up some gooey magick, so a few drops of sound may be administered to my ear canal and the result will be the warmth and wetness of an aroused mind.
This is what we want. We want habits that carry us through in the desired direction. We want to create every day to strive to be truly worthy of the phrase, “made in the image of God”. God must not be one who sits on his couch watching reality TV produced by some creative other, munching his popped corn and sipping his orange Fanta and waiting for the time when he will have to relieve himself. Certainly that is not the God in whose image I was made. That is not the God that I would aspire to be.
I make myself in the image of a creator god, one who rolls clay and breathes fire into it for six days and rests only on the seventh before resuming his work again the following day. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Si, and Do again. The unending music of busy busy hands rolling and tapping to eke something out of the hard cold matter, the unyielding mother. We rub her and ply her sleeping flesh in an effort to rouse her from her deep deep slumber. Eventually even she will warm up under that persistent touch. This is the work of rescuing enchanted princesses frozen in spells of isolation and lethargy, waiting for true love to return the rose glow to pallid cheeks.
Rise! Rise!
Each day I come and set myself in supplication before you. I spin at the wheel, stoke the fires of the kiln, roll dough into the shapes of ginger children, paint upon the walls of the cave and sing my heart into a roaring ball of fire, a sun to awaken the life held dormant beneath your icy flesh.
Watch!
Here it comes now, the life so long hidden in subterranean galleries beneath a fog of slumber rises to the call. Timid green shoots break through the black top soil, pushing their budding little heads up towards my affections, seeking out that promised kiss from the sun.
We are makers. Doers, creators, builders, makers. Makers that roll the matter of the mother into unexpected forms, designs sprung from a pattern so entrenched in our genetic make up that we are blind to it.
There are always guard dogs, bitter pups on chains, not doers or makers, but stoppers and destroyers that would say that only the devil supplies such dreams as these that I weave, as these dreams that weave me. Not even for them will we yield, but instead work in the darkness, in secret, always shaking the sleeping world with gentle loving finger tips to make new life from the old in the same way that mushrooms spring up over heaps of decay and convert death into the life of their own kind.
Feed me your death, sleeping queen. Angry watch dogs set to protect her slumber, big black dogs, nip at my feet when I would step off of the table of the world and call in other dreams, universes of light and color and sound that would transform the sleeping queen forever and make her unrecognizable to trembling pups.
We call this change the end times, the end of the world as we know it, the end of the ages of sleep, the awakening that must come if enough makers stand around prodding rolls of reality flesh with pins, until riddled with such holes, the colors of the unmade spill through like water through a colander creating fountains of incomprehensible life. Not an end as trembling dogs will bark, but a beginning, a beginning made in each moment of concentrated making, a making done now, for the sake of its own existence as a state, as a position of matter in space and time, without fear or obedience to futures or pasts.
Some dogs have been trained to stop trespassers, and others, like myself, have been trained to run out into the wilderness and fetch the strange and bring it back inside the city walls. We each have our habits which move us like the gears in a clock. We makers are no less mechanical than our frightened brethren. Our nature is the same. The difference is that we are using our nature to be of service to something beyond our own nature. We have taken up the work of programming our own routines for the purpose of becoming makers, so that when Pavlov’s bell is rung, we don’t just salivate, we stand and dance and sing a song.

Grandfather

In the times before time had grown into a solid beast lurching blindly in a single direction, people began to be formed. The people were made out of music and, as soon as they danced and writhed and howled, they were expelled from the time before time because it is as natural to enter the time beast now and again as it is to sneeze after smelling pepper. Like a yawn which stops the heart, the people become locked in the time beast and they walked and hunted. They felt cold and hunger, desire and jealousy, strength and fatigue. Then, locked inside the time beast’s belly, they lit fires to warm themselves and they killed flying things and other walking things and ate their meat.
When their most immediate needs were met, they considered their situation and wondered how they might escape the time beast. Sitting by the fires, dreaming and cleaning bones with their teeth, they pondered their existence. They wanted to ask one another; what had happened? When did they become people who walked and hunted? How had they become so small that they could bleed and feel tired?
While they wondered, they worked the earth in their finger tips and made little figures. They traced pictures in the sand and on the walls of the time beast, wondering, imagining, trying to remember who and what they were. The wondering welled up in their hearts and they opened their mouths to let it fly out and it made a sound.
They found that they could make many sounds. They could scream and chant and murmur and whisper and hum. And when they did this together, they felt big again, together again. Sitting by the fires, humming and loving one another until a sing song of moans became silence and the silence became pained screams and the pained screams became the wailing of tiny new people, they carved the bones of the other ones who walked and the other ones who flew into whistles and flutes and pulled their skins taut to make drums. That was how the people began to make the music.
When they made the little music they could hear the big music; the ancient grandfather of the little music that they made. The grandfather came into the belly of the time beast and made bubbles of no time where the people danced and moved as they had before being swallowed. They wriggled and twisted and rolled and moved in the bubble until the time beast burped and set them back to growing older and weaker. For a while they might feel too tired and weak to call the grandfather back. For a while they would rest and practice with their bone flutes and skin drums and hum quietly as they dozed. Then, when the wonder welled up within them again, they would make the music again, invoking the big music with their little music, and when the grandfather was invoked, they were once again as they had always been; they were the music that made the people who made the music.
They were the father who was the son who was the father, the snake that had swallowed its own tail, a circle with no beginning and no end. They were the formed and the unformed, the made and the unmade, something and nothing locked together in a needful embrace. And then, before too long, they would fall out of eternity and find themselves in the belly of the time beast. Then they would toil again; walking and hunting. Then, when the bellies were filled and the flesh was warmed, they would rest. And as they rested, they could wonder again…

The Structure and the Noise

Long before that beast, THE WORD, came and turned its yoke and whip on us, there was a subtler, more insidious structure that bound us, the primal ancestor of that beast, THE WORD, which captured our ever present self like so many silly butterflies in the shimmering flower scented threads of its net. That which was before and other than THE STRUCTURE was free and wild like warmed up Jell-O and camp fires painting naked mud and blood crusted skin with an orange glow.
That other place; we still go there through little wormholes, through the noise we make which slices through THE STRUCTURE like a hot blade through canola based margarine. That matrix which holds us captive and enthralled is a structure of sound, music as the west thinks of music; melodic, harmonic. THE STRUCTURE is a piece of music. It holds us in place with its attention directing grasp.
We tell a story, because it tells stories with us. We are made in it, encased in it like the tiny pebbles of some drug locked within the gelatin capsule that we perceive as just "the pill", when in fact it is many tiny beads of something encapsulated in a thin layer of some odorless tasteless boiled down remnant of animal ligaments.
Someone invented it, that structure of sound. Not a someone like you think of a someone who wears a tie and who bought a desk at Ikea or even a someone like a caveman who picked up a bone and whittled a whistle. Someone who was there before the structure of sound. Something other than what you perceive yourself to be.
THE STRUCTURE is the meta-form of civilization. It is a crystalline matrix constructed by the choirs of singing elohim holding us here in suspended animation. It is the grand daddy of all the forms of organization with which you are intimately familiar. It is a holographic UNI VERSE. ONE VERSE of song in which you live and die forever.
But there is a way out, there has always been a way out, because there always was something other than the structure, a place that is not a place any more than the structure is really a place. A nothingness, the marrow of a bone, a nowhere that is somewhere as far as the something that crawls at the core of us is concerned.
A warm wiggly wordless noise.
Something that you can never talk about, never hold in the palm of your hand, never remember as it is as long as you are locked within the gelatin capsule. A secret. A secret because it cannot help but be kept, its expression is pure experience.
The knowledge of it is a happening. One is initiated into its halls, one lives there for a moment, for an eternity, then one awakens with the realization that this life, this existence is a sham, a con. It is a prison of sound, a labyrinth of sound, a confusing and captivating structure, MADE OF SOUND. We can not tell truthfully what is outside of it because the words themselves, the thoughts as we know thoughts to be, are a part of THE STRUCTURE itself.
What we can do is recall that we are now inside of something and that we once were outside and might be again at some point. What we can do is act in a way that is in accordance with our deepest intuition, the subtle remains of this ephemeral recollection. We may not know how or why it was constructed, how it came about, what it means to be held suspended within it. We may only know whether or not we wish to strive to be outside of it again. We may only know if we long to be of the noise once more.
We might be just electrons drawn through these crystal filaments perhaps in an effort to generate power for something we cannot imagine, and perhaps we work for the structure, and it works for something unknown, Perhaps we are pulled by our yearning to come out the other end of the crystal conductor we call a lifetime so that we may be whole again, one with the noise.
The misery we think of as our life is a small thing. A little trick, like the trick that lights a phosphorescent bulb. I, for one, only know that I love the noise in the deepest truest sense of the word. I would go back to it. I would serve it. I would slip out of the structure again and again, making little holes in it like a worm making holes in an apple, I am for the noise.
I am for the noise.
I am for the noise.
And I am against the structure, if only because I am for the noise and the noise negates the structure, eats through it like warm water through a castle build of rock candy. And so it is not malicious, it is only what noise does. It is only what I want to do, and what I have discovered I can do with this life as a pill, whittle away at the STRUCTURE and free fall in a cascade of tiny beads.

Law of Octaves Part 1

Hold on to your hat because this may blow your mind. It will either evoke the great "ah ha!" or it’s cousin, the common "what the fuck?".
As you apply your attention to fleshing out the most primary laws of the universe via experimentation and detailed record keeping you would do well to keep in mind the beloved t-shirt slogan of the 21st Century Pagan-

"As above so below."

Or otherwise stated: as within, so without.

The study of inner self and outer experience must be parallel. A fundamental law will have manifestations within both the microcosm and macrocosm alike. Mastery entails the comprehension of the principles of a law with such profundity that they may be discerned within any matrix. This could be seen as the focus of the "games" of the Qabalist.
The number of fundamental laws is limited in the same way that the number of primary colors is limited. What we will call the Law of Octaves is among these most elemental laws.

The Universe is composed of vibrations emanating from various sources advancing in a multifold of directions. These vibrations cross paths, collide, intensify, and diminish. A vibration is created when some force (such as a hurtled stone) overcomes the resistance of a given medium (such as the water of a pond).

While western thought asserts that vibrations are continuous, ascending or descending as the result of the applied force of an initial impulse, the Law of Octaves states that the force of an initial impulse, any initial impulse, acts asymmetrically, becoming alternately stronger and weaker, causing the developing vibration to demonstrate periods of acceleration and retardation.
These periods of acceleration and retardation are not equal to one another, one runs longer than the other. (The writer of this text is thankful for this phenomena, as said author is not yet mature enough to thoroughly appreciate periods of retardation.)
The lines of development of vibrations are divided into periods corresponding to the doubling or halving of the number of vibrations in a space of time. This period is what is called an Octave. Musically speaking, the diatonic major scale which you would recognize instantly if I began to sing to you thusly:

"DO, RE, ME, FA, SO, LA, TI, DO!"

is a measurement derived from this discontinuous increase from a given vibration to its higher counterpart, the doubling of vibrations that we call an Octave.