Connection

He showed me some pictures of our not yet conceived experiment that I had relayed to him from a distant space time probability . We were not well acquainted, but shared a mutual interest in the transgressive applications of astral light put forth by G.

"True creation is not about words. It's about tears," J. said.
The connection between us was instantaneous. We built delicate structures from hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. I thought it best to make observations and adjustments from a closer vantage point.

I was now diving into some kind of primal network, a tightly woven system of existing and evolving quantum worlds. The details were quite clear. I transmitted the schematics back to J. using a patented method of intervening and tapping into the quantum communication capability of carbon based neurons.

To develop a system of emergent intelligence I tried to reach the part of my own brain that processed fear and mapped our creations after my own design. We wondered if there might be some danger inherent in this method.

"Will the thing that passed through the makers still live?" J. asked.
"Only if there are some specimens willing to leave the safety of consuming behind to become makers themselves."
I suddenly realized this is where I would meet my fate. Despite risk and ethical ambiguities we pressed forward, certain that a sacrifice was called for. I would have to go deeper.

Due to the similarities between my own system and our manufactured systems the interface was often confusing. The delineation between self and other grew blurry.  On the day of my final descent J. suggested:
"If we loose communication, don’t stop, especially not when you feel lost. The best method for finding the way when you feel you have lost it, is to keep going. Ignore the question of whether you’re going in the right direction. If you stop when you feel lost, you will remain in the land of the lost."

As I became more entrenched in our designs, communications with J. were indeed severed by electromagnetic interference. I had entered the black valley. In the interior I met with the ministers of culture.
"What has become of J.?" I asked them
"We are sorry madam. He is beyond our reach. We have prepared a place for you among us that you might be comfortable despite your loss. "

They offered me sustenance but I refused. I could no longer remember who J. was but  I just knew I had to keep going. If I could break through to the other side I would then accelerate forever becoming both more and less than I had been before whatever it was that I had started with this mysterious J.

Secret Journeys

I found myself in the street, feet carrying me swiftly along as though with a will of their own, the scent of flowers wafted to my face and tantalized my olfactory senses. I thought at first that I was imagining it, or that somehow it was the quality of my mood. But it soon dawned upon me that the breeze was actually carrying the perfume of roses in bloom, and that I, miraculously, was able to perceive it.
The sky above was a patchwork of blue and thick low clouds being pushed along by the brisk current of air. The sun was warm on my skin and the breeze would brush that warmth away, leaving its own cold touch on my naked arms and face. 

I made my way beyond the street with its smell of fresh tar into the little field where the grass was yellow and short and the trees grew in various sizes. The earth yielded soft beneath my feet, moist pliant earth beneath dry brittle grass.
I spied a strange insect in the path of my footfall and changed course without loosing the rhythm of my step. This happened so quickly that I didn't have time to think of it. It was a reaction from deep within. In fact, I was watching the earth closely as I stepped, avoiding trampling small flowers and other tender live things that had made the effort to push up through the soil.

I came to the pine tree whose trunk split low and sent two arms running  parallel to the ground before they reached up. Another arm rose directly to the sky.
I sat for a moment on one of the low arms and a small insect similar to a bee hovered near my face. I wished it away and stood, but I could hear its buzzing for a while, even though I couldn't see it anymore.
I remained standing under the tree and noticed a small bird standing on the side of the erect pine branch as though defying gravity. I wondered at its tiny claws could grasp the crevices in the bark to hold it in place. Observing it until it flew up into the canopy, I became aware that the entire tree was aflutter with its little brethren plucking insects from under the bark, hopping and flitting from branch to branch and chattering merrily.

I must have stood there for a very long time watching them. Their bodies were small and round, their beaks straight, their feathers a dark gray on top and their bellies a faded dust hue. Their movements were rapid and constant, their voices bright, expressed in short bursts full of conversational tones.
I was so enthralled and still that one eventually nearly landed on my head. Only at the last moment did I stir in surprise and it averted its course as easily as I had altered mine to spare the bug in the grass.
The bug I remembered had stirred, thus catching my eye, and I realized that just as I had seen the bird coming, so the bug had seen me. As my motion alerted the bird to my identity as “not tree”, so had the bug's movement alerted me to its nature as “not grass.”

I thought the birds seemed a bit quieter after that and I thought that perhaps my presence was now inhibiting them. So I bade them a silent farewell and resumed my walking.
My feet lead me back to the concrete sidewalk. As I followed its winding course uphill I spied a different cluster of birds in the shade of a low growing tree.
They were larger than the others and moved at a leisurely pace picking through the fallen leaves in search of grubs and bugs. They spoke to each other less frequently, taking long pauses between statements that were musical and unhurried.
As I drew nearer one or two announced my arrival with increased urgency and they flew up into the tree. A few remained on the earth watching me, one right on the edge of the sidewalk. He remained in place maintaining his air of calm though watching me attentively. As I approached I saw that his belly was a warm orange color and I crooned to him:

“You are so beautiful, what kind of bird are you? Are you a robin? You must be a Robin with a belly like that. You are so pretty.”

He watched me and listened to me.
Soon I was gone, feet returning me to the street. My mind surged forward to home and the walk was over. But the next day I left the house again taking a similar path.

On the street I noticed right away the moisture in everything. The smell of it was refreshing, it was the smell of rain that has yet to fall.
The sky was gray and the air cool but I had on my sweater and felt very comfortable. I breathed deeply that moisture infused air and walked on.
It wasn’t until I was on the sidewalk near the field that I knew I would enter the same way that I had on the previous day. I had intended to stay upon the path but as I neared the field my feet felt called and I stepped unhesitatingly onto the soft earth. I watched my step as I had before, but I felt that I was moving quicker, that my powers of observation were perhaps less keen than on the day before. Nothing that I could see stirred in the grass but I left green things undisturbed.

I made my way into the trees and was greeted by an unwholesome sight: white and beige feathers strewn in mangled heaps. I slowed and took in the signs of a violent struggle, but found no further remains.
There was no way for me to know, but I felt certain that they were owl feathers. It was as if the feathers could whisper to me the truth of their origin to me.
Head swiveling uneasily, I stumbled underneath a pine and realized that the canopy above my head was heavy with a litter of leaves and twigs. This I thought was the owl's nest. Hurriedly I got out from underneath it. There was an unclean feeling beneath those branches. I tried to look into the nest, but it was too high.

With no further interest in lingering in the area I left it behind and ventured to the tree I had visited on the previous day. It was utterly silent. Gone were the chipper little birds that had animated its canopy.
I paused for a moment letting the silence enter me. Then I continued on, taking a detour through some shrubs before re-emerging on the concrete path.
As I approached the hill I saw a man leaning against the rail further up, so I parted ways with the path once more. Tromping up the soft slope, my boot heels sank even deeper than they had in the field. The earth fell away beneath them to cascade downhill. It was necessary to take great strides to gain ground. As I passed  the area where I had seen them, I looked for the robins, but they too were absent.

At the top of the hill I swung my legs one at a time over the rail. I had successfully avoided crossing paths with the stranger and overtook the path several yards above him.
I was careful not to look back at him. His presence was irksome to me, an interference with the sublime solitude. He was to me an agent of the symbolic order, the eyes of the BIG OTHER prying into my secret life.
From the corner of my eye I could see his head turn towards me then away again. I wondered if my presence was to him as his was to me.
Home was in sight now. I let it come to me before I could come to it and the street melted away like spun sugar on the tongue.

Recognition

I saw your face again today for the very first time in a long while. Your eyes sparkled like diamonds.
When we looked at each other it was as if there were nothing separating us, we could see each other, and we each knew the other was seeing us back. It hasn’t been quite like that for a very long time. Not quite like that.
It reminded me of a night in a distant dream where you came and sat on the couch in my living room while my lover was out. You came and sat there on that maroon sued couch not far from a life size painting of Pan that my lover had commissioned months ago.
I saw you and I said:
“It’s over now.”
And you looked at me, perhaps coyly, smiling while the rest of your face and body seemed passive, immobile. You asked me what I meant.
“Seeing you sitting here. It’s like you’ve come to claim me. My life is over.”
You were pleased, because it was true. I was frightened, but you told me not to be afraid.
We left that dream together and entered another and here we have been.
This has happened many times between us, in many different dreams. You arrive and I go with you. Whatever dream I have been living, when you come, it is a pale mirage in comparison to your stark presence.
My lovers, my families, my hopes, my wishes, my plans, my hobbies, my friends, my accomplishments, my shortcomings, my possessions, I leave them and we go on.
You have led me out of the nightmare dimensions in this way, you are still leading me from them in this way. We are at this moment, in the darkest chamber of existence and in the brightest and in every place between, and in all of them, I am seeing you and you are seeing me and we each are aware of this rare experience of recognition.

Un

I was born under a pile of corpses. They nurtured and grew me into the malformed beast that I am. Heavy with death and blinded by darkness, I could see nothing of objective reality and could not move.
Can you see it? Chained in place by my biological link to the family of death and rot, the family of the world.
They would press me down under their weight, feeding off of me even as I fed off of them struggling for life, struggling to press my face up out of their coiled nest of flesh towards the sun. Where I could not go with body I had to go with mind.
I grew out into the darkness, into the strangeness, into places they could not touch. I dreamed a sun and a moon and countless stars burning in a vacuum, Hisssssssss. Burning stars like hearts forming bodies, solar systems pulled towards the gravity of their passion.
The heart is the first organ to form in the body of Adam. So it is in larger bodies that the star is first born and grows and collects smaller celestial objects to make its body. All bodies are made of love, love is gravity,  the glue, the lehadbik pulling strange bodies together making new bodies from them.
Can you see me buried under the pale bodies of my parents, under their pain and anguish and their cannibal desire to consume my passion before I could become a star?
Do hearts or stars ever say to their parts, go on, go if you like and be the center of your own universe? Be free.
What they’ve made, what they’ve collected, what they’ve gathered, they hold. If you are born into a body of death that is who you are. You must fight a civil war if you wish to transform. You will have to slash and burn the body you gestated in to be free.
It sounds monstrous doesn’t it? It is also monstrous laying at the bottom of the heap, grown to a size that can better feed the body of death, parents, preachers, and teachers feeding on the blood of your heart, tearing new wounds to sip from so that their rule is strengthened by your meager borrowed life.
When you are born into  dark world do you remember the space before your phantom life as a luminous wonderland? How many births have you suffered to be buried so deep under the heap? How many births have I suffered to be way down here, suffocating?
More important: how many deaths will I have to die to be released? How many selves shed, how many voices silenced, how many regimes of parents, preachers and teachers slashed away before I find the shinning emptiness at the center, the pure untouched well of being that has always been and will ever be and is none and nothing, entirely un.
When will I stop desiring the caresses of dead hands and the praise of phantom voices? When will I be free of my self?
Clawing, clawing towards the surface, angering ghosts as I go, feeling the loss of connection with the body that was as I move towards an unknown.
There is no conclusion. I am mad and madness has no limit. This limitlessness was born in the strictest confinement, containment and isolation.
I am looking for the sun that burns me into un. I am looking for the love that is death. Freeing black bird, devour me and carry me away from the wheel into the terrible luminosity of the Absolute.
Can you see it?
I was born under a pile of corpses, they nurtured and grew me into the malformed beast that I am. Heavy with death and blinded by darkness I could see nothing of objective reality and could not move.
In my stillness I am traveling. I am going beyond. Beyond the strictest confinement, containment and isolation into the burning dissolving madness of un.
Can you see it? Can you?

Beyond

I am going beyond, to where you cannot reach me, but I can still reach you. I can hold you in my mind, cradle you as if you are one of a basket of delicate little things, but you cannot conceive of what I am becoming, where I am going. The words that shape your mind will not let that knowledge in. When I reach from here to there and touch you it is possible that you will feel frightened, threatened.
Who is this unknown other? You might write me a letter saying that I have become a stranger to you, you might assume that I am unhappy, filled with a terrible darkness merely because you can not see me. Just because you are blind, it does not follow that I am filled with darkness, or that the darkness that I am filled with is filled with terrible things. You fear what you do not know, what you cannot know. You fear what you do not understand, what you cannot understand. You fear me, or fear for the me that you once imagined me to be because I am moving beyond your reach, beyond your sight. I have gone far from your bosom and you suppose that it is a bad thing.
Why do I go? Why am I casting off blindness and stepping out of the chains that make us who we are, who we imagine we are? Why have I stopped playing the serious game with you? Why have I ceased to be serious? Because I am going beyond, stepping out, making a creative choice.
How can I say that, you have asked. I’ll tell you. I can say anything now because it is all meaningless, all as meaningless as red, blue, and yellow. All words are colors that I play with like a child with finger paint. I will not compare myself to a master, I will not say that I am to words what Rembrandt is to red, blue, and yellow, but the only way for me to get there is to begin here, playing with these words now. The way to begin is to say farewell to you and begin the trek beyond.
You may feel angry with me for refusing to play, for refusing to conform as you have conformed to the world made of words that is the shape of your mind. You may feel angry as those dogs locked behind chain link fences feel angry when they see another unleashed dog stroll by beyond their reach. Are you angry at me for choosing liberation, or are you angry with yourself for choosing imprisonment?
You may also feel sorrow. You may feel that I am breaking your heart by leaving you, that I am hurting you by releasing my ties with you. For this I have no answer that won't sting. Should an able man sit down in the desert with a man with broken legs?
I would drag you, but you have no desire to go where I am going. You prefer the desert, your perpetual suffering. These desires live in me as well, but in my case something else is growing, something with the power to override desire. I call this thing my will and it is carrying me beyond, to where you cannot reach.

The Center of All

The day begins frosted in mists that drift in from the sea, a persistent fog that wets the concrete of the front stairway and the sidewalk that leads to the BART station. It blocks out the sun and the blue of the sky with its homogenous hues of gray on gray. I find it difficult to rise. I find it difficult to accept that this is day, this is morning, time to throw back bed sheets and sing to the world the way birds do. The darkness seems to mute out the possibility for song. It welcomes heavy jackets and lethargy in July. It feels like an extended night. I bring in the paper which has thoughtfully been encased in plastic to protect it from the wetness. The weeds poking up out of the cracks in the driveway are a welcome sight. I can smell their green life on the moist air. I can smell the sea that I can’t see nestled under its blanket of fog in the far distance. If the briny blue won’t sparkle, what else can? I shuffle back inside and add the paper to a pile on the floor. It grew during my absence, that little mountain of news so important that no one bothered to remove it from its protective plastic covers.
I am not yet affected by any of these details. The blazing sun and trail dust and tall evergreens and shimmering sea and winding roads are still burning bright in my chest. My present surroundings are muted, less real than the internal landscape impressed upon me during my recent voyage. I resolve not to let this bleak world outside infect and obliterate the vivid world thriving within. It occurs to me that I might be able to change this place by holding tight to that other. If I will not let it bleed out of me, if I hold it boiling inside of me, perhaps, everything around me will be infected by me rather than the reverse.
I sit at the kitchen table to write my dreams. It is hard not to nod off as I write. The pen moves, my eyes close. My mind so focused on dreams begins to slip into their gossamer halls once again and begin new adventures spun from the fabric of the old. Then I rouse my self, and scribble less than I would say if I was speaking in the language of a dream, and put the little book half away. It occurs to me that I should hide it, for these are my dreams meant to be kept from uninvited eyes. The mere occurrence of some intruding peepers peering over those pages lined with the symbols that signify the landscapes and occurrences of my inner world would pollute my dreams, my shining, sparkling dreams filled with the beat and pulse of a great heart that I feel, that I hold but do not own. That heart, it owns me. So that it doesn’t abandon me, I must keep it secret, keep it protected from the ill intentioned and habitual prying of others.
I was in a place where the ground was carpeted with dust as dry as flour. In some places, the dust had blown away and what remained was a rock hard tanned skin so dry that it was cracked. In some places velvety patches of yellow sage crawled along, alive and happy in a heat that killed off other things. Some yellow straws protruded here and there like whiskers from a chin. The trees dropped red peppercorns and tiny dried leaves to make a carpet of pink within stone lined paths around their trunks. They too thrived in the sun and the dry. Their skin was cracked and rougher than the earth, but the leaves on their limbs were green and these bowed over to lend shade as graciously as the limbs of any river willow. They’d brush my face and hair with those many delicate fingertips and shiver gaily in the evening breeze. Lizards shot like rocket ships over the terrain, made quick by the warmth. Hills rolled like brown waves all around me, their soft curves radiating some silent love reciprocated by the bright blue sky. Beaches of hot sand and smooth stones crawled out of the forest to kiss the waves. Tiny villages clung to the folds of mighty mountains and glowed with tender light when night invaded those folds with cold penetrating fingers.
All of this I have stored down in my bones, a magick elixir stopped within an ivory vial. It is my very marrow. Holding the skeleton of scenes together lie the winding roads, like sinews of muscle and tendon, the curving path between earth and sea. The road that binds all things. The glowing water of life, blue when the sun is high, gold when it begins to sink, and inky black when it is gone. The smell of salt. The fragrance of trees and ferns, of rushing streams and cascading falls. On my right hand; the immovable. On my left hand; the ever turbulent, both pressing me into a fine line, a path between the two. A passage between chaos and stability that is my eternal home, not a place of rest but a journey that is the center of all.
I am a margin between worlds, one dark and cool, one bright and warm, and I must be the mediator.

The Path of the Heart

Oh, those sad lost creations of Neverwhere, wandering aimlessly from one cast off husk of a dream to another, from one pretend family and one imagined life to another. In world of the sleepwalkers, there is no real home, there is no real heart. We are born into the black abyss like the rats of NIMH into a dark air shaft. Only those strong enough to build their own heart and hearth will survive, only they will become anything at all. The weak will be sucked away into the cold darkness. Those who do pull themselves together and become the center of a tiny universe will suffer all of the growing pains that we expect infants to endure, as they struggle from crawling to walking upright. What is a magnificent triumph in the beginning is small potatoes as the work unfolds and you race against time like a slinky dripping silver down an unending flight of stairs. Its movement is fluid and harmonious with the laws of nature.
Your own motion will ever be subject to the very same laws, but there is a hope that something within you will supply you with a supernatural reserve of power, enough so that you may operate both as time does and as time does not. That secret something, your ace in the hole, would be the ace of hearts, that same heart you started growing when you crawled out of the chaos one morning so long ago and defiantly declared:
"I am the center. I am the point upon which all lines of force converge!"
At first it would be small and tender, a meek little thing fluttering like red rose petals twirling on a breeze. You must do more to nourish it or it will fade away and you will face oblivion. You must grow the heart, keep the heart, and tend it unerringly, for there are great gales ahead, storms which outmatch the tempest from which you emerged, and if your heart is a small fragile thing, it will splinter and bust and you will be no more than dust, the sort that trickles through the narrow waist of an hour glass.
Like a garden left untended, a heart will cease to function if it is not cared for. If neglected, the bloom you could have watched swell with care, will wither and be choked out by other hands, coarse things from the primordial chaos. The effort must never cease. In every moment, you race against sleek silver time, striving to widen your sphere of influence, striving to grow as a star grows, drawing on the mysterious force at the core of your cosmic body and, in so doing, burning brighter and hotter, ever more painfully.
It hurts to come to life.
It hurts to be alive.
There is only rest in sleep.
This is the unfolding of your heart. In the wasteland, you will be your own sanctuary. In the desert of Maya, you will be like the hermit crab which carries its home upon its own back, always searching for the next opportunity to expand into a larger sanctuary, a vaster greater heart.
Know yourself well, love yourself well, and perhaps you will find another you to travel with, the Other that is the moon’s reflection upon the water. This is will happen as the heart grows greater. But do not become distracted by the dead rocks that orbit the sun.
The heart must be maintained, the attention trained within, or you will be lost in the carnival of chaos, lost in a hall of fun house mirrors. You may look at mirrors up and down, but you may not come to know mirrors, you will only come to know illusions and distractions. The only thing that you may know is an invisible thing, a line to tether yourself to in the darkness, a small kernel of self which must be watered with constant attention until it grows and grows and blossoms out of the dirt of the dream.
Through the madness of the dream it is born, but it is not of the dream.
You are not of the dream, traveler.
You are a strange bloom in a cold black desert. An improbable but beautiful thing. A heart. A hearth. A home. A point from which the infinite can be navigated.
Explorers need stars to chart a course. If you want to become an explorer one day and rise from your knees to chart the cold valleys of the wasteland, you must first become the very star that you will follow. Once the star has grown within you, never falter, never deviate, never let your attention stray, never become fascinated with the many obstacles of the labyrinth. Follow the star that is you unerringly, until the very path that you walk becomes your home, and the void around you becomes the real heart that beats within you.
Do not be discouraged. The path is lit by the light of those who came before you.

Beng's Bargain

Beware round which forbidden corner you turn, little worm. You’ve been warned that the devil waits behind the black door, and with old Beng the eternal fire burns, and suffering is assured. You have been shown that there are two paths to choose from at this fork; the path of the righteous- a straight and narrow course, and the path of the wicked- as crooked as an old man’s back. Choose the path of the righteous and your fate is painted over the door of the butcher’s shop and spelled out for you over his block. For see, the straight and narrow is like a conveyor belt carrying you most assuredly through the great factory farm to the bright white light of the slaughter house, and once you’ve settled on that course you’ve no more choices to make. You will be processed and packaged and fed back into the hungry mouth of the organic mass and the heavenly peace of eternal sleep shall be yours. Choose door number two and your foot is in a different shoe altogether, for once you go past the black door marked "yes", you will be assaulted by all the color denied the inhabitants of the two toned world. Here you will be faced with multiple choice, a never ending network of diverging branches, a veritable tree of life through which you must learn to flow like quickened sap. It is a gauntlet through which you will run with no hope of respite. Your lot is not the comfort of an undisturbed slumber, yours is an eternity of wakeful motion, of building beyond binary choices. To live well beyond the black door you must become a god. Hell is everywhere, inescapable but deniable. You were in hell before you chose black over white, you were in hell even after you chose one or the other, but behind the white door you submit to it, sleep through it to deny it, escape the difficulty involved in being responsible for it by ignoring it. Behind the black door you reign in hell, it belongs to you, every torturing moment of existence, all of the tiny and infinite details. You are a small god with the potential to grow, for whatever you can take responsibility for is yours, whatever you can hold suspended with your attention in the great cosmic juggling act becomes you, expands you, or rather you expand into it.
Honestly, worm, looking back, choosing the straight and narrow is like making no choice at all. You will be carried through that door without having made any effort at all. It happens naturally. You are asking me why I insist on calling you worm. You are looking over your shoulder to see if I am addressing some other. No, it is you, exactly you and no other to whom I speak. You are the creepy crawly larvae that must break out of the cocoon. You must crack the worlds shell if you want to fly with the dragons. Staying wrapped in the comfortable blindness of your cocoon is not life at all. You will be offered two choices to begin with. If you sacrifice knowledge, freedom, the power to create and move, you may have comfort and stability. You will be handled by qualified forces. If you sacrifice your personal comfort and stability you may know, move, and build freely. You may become a force at work in the mechanics of creation. We offer no refunds, nor guarantees on either choice. You are offered this moment, as is. You must ask yourself what it means to be alive, and whether it is possible that there is some yet undiscovered value and purpose in living, a possibility not available in the dimension of the binary. It is possible that the value and purposefulness of life can only be reckoned by those who are indeed living. And worm, I can assure you that you haven’t lived until you’ve passed beyond the black door.