Voluptuous Agonies

 

In the violence of overcoming, when the heart thrashes like a sick hound dragged across a river of stars, I lay naked on the cold concrete and laughed until blood pooled in my ears. And then I wept, for there was no longer a distinction. In the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, the rituals were broken—no circle, no wand, no chalice—and I knew then that the gods had left me to the crude machinery of the self. My body became a sigil drawn in filth, tremoring through the alphabet of ecstasy and anguish.

Who has not, in the moment of rapture, seen their own death masked in gold? Who has not, with pupils dilated beyond sight, recognized that the spear and the kiss are the same shaft, the same entry wound? O thou Serpent coiled in fire, I called to Thee in my flesh’s convulsions, not with prayer but with the bellowing grunt of an animal in heat and in slaughter. There is no “either” in this temple. It is always “both.”

In the excess of raptures that shatter me, I became legion. One part of me screamed into the open mouth of the abyss, while the other part answered back with the voice of a thousand young girls torn from their sleep. The veil was not lifted but rent. I saw the beast and I rode it. I saw the child and I was it. There was a smell like scorched honey and old leather; there were colors only the blind can know.

I seize on the similarity, yes—between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me. Between the rat gnawing through the linen of the grave and the fingers that once undid my belt with reverence. Between the final scream of the crucified and the moan of the possessed. Between the burning of witches and the shining halo of the saints. These are not opposites but siblings. Lovers. Mirrors.

Between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy there is only the breath—shallow, ragged, holy—that we dare take as the veil slips. And I, who have crossed that trembling threshold, know now that the key to the temple was always written on the skin—beneath the scars, beneath the ink, with trembling hands.

Father and the Elf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he starts to laugh.

Direct Experience

Terrible questions looming just beneath a thin layer of bone and flesh. Tiny capillaries doing their best, a silent symphony of flowing red life pulsing beneath the surface. Terrible questions looming.
If I am not what I think I am, then what am I?
Antero Alli mentions that the awakened human brain is the alien and that those whose brains have awakened are the aliens among us and can be recognized by the light in their eyes.
He says Timothy Leary said this, and his host becomes stricken, turns ashy and stammers: "I've never heard that."
Ali laughs, "This was in a private conversation."
Ha ha. The man who has read all the books quivers when he meets a man with a direct experience of a third man whom the first man with all the books has only read about, but feels he knows.
Can't follow that? Am I being confusing or are you being dull?
Trick question. The answer is both.
Terrible questions looming, questions worse than these. An uncomfortable feeling that can almost be drowned by television and social networks and booze and parties and romance and cinema and literature.
Will it make a good comic book? Will it be a three part television miniseries?  Can we sell it? Does the second man have any idea what the first man is talking about when he says direct experience?
Ashy complexion. Uncomfortable voice.
Now things have gone too far if we are talking about aliens and the light in their eyes. LSD, ok, secret oral traditions, ok, aliens with light in their eyes, no! No! No! He's gone too far. How dare he?
We are only interested in reality here, which we have a clear understanding of thanks to the books written by others claiming something called direct experience.
Fuck it man, are you really still reading this?
What I am trying to tell you is that you should eat something from outer space that just might help you access a little inner space.
I tell her that mushroom spores could have been carried to this planet on comets.
"Are mushrooms really from outer space?"
Everything on this planet is from outer space baby.
"Yeah some scientists think that water was first introduced to this planet by comets. Bacteria too."
That's right baby, we are all stardust.
"The alien doesn't necessarily come from outer space, contact is made in inner space, and why not? We ARE the alien."
No! No! No! We've gone too far.
Terrible questions looming. Shaking the foundation of what we know. But brother there is a serious difference between gnosis and what you think you know now that you've read all those damned books and posted those comments about the video online.
God, if you're still reading this it must be because you don't know where to find the mushrooms.
Listen, listen, you should try printing this out and eating it. Right now.
At this moment you're just reading some shit somebody else wanted to say about what some other people said.
You should eat this. Go ahead. Take a bite. Chew. Swallow.
That's a direct experience.

Pale Horse Rider

Pale horse rider, dripping font of pure overflowing knowledge of life.
You know what I mean friend? Real knowledge, the kind that awakens in the flesh, like when you hear the sound of a rattlesnake in the grass. That's what he carried in his saddlebags, liquid lightning to crack your skull, enough to open thousands of minds and set them free as jackrabbits under a wide blue sky. He had been an angel once and now he roared through the wasteland gathering up the dead and making them quick.
Some might tell you it was chance that led him to each particular individual, but it was something trickier than chance. One might call those meetings synchronistic events. I'll tell you this; he was looking for them, for each of them in particular. Just as a man with a vendetta will go from town to town finding his debtors and delivering them of debt by way of steel, fire, and hot lead, so the pale horse rider went in search of the men deserving of his liquid lightening. He administered his medicine, town by town, man by man, with unrelenting resolve.
And I'll tell you another thing, as important as the last; they were also looking for him. Even if they didn't know his name or face in this world, their hearts were calling to him loud as squawking crows. That's the real way of it. In any encounter of unearthly significance, you can be sure both parties were looking for action.
In his never-ending quest to make the dead lightning quick, he met many a man whose face and name you would recognize. Men of reputation. Dead men trapped in limbo crying out for liberation. The pale horse rider hunted them, patient and steady, a spider. He found them and cracked their skulls wide, tore their ribcages open and let those screaming birds fly.
Each time this was done, the new quick went forth into the world, his apostles. Born in the fire and light of knowledge, rising from the ash of what they had once been, they returned to the wasteland as phoenixes armed with liquid lightening. Hunting heads in the western lands.
Methods vary. Not all of the quick are nomads. Some make their webs and wait in shadowy places for the dead to seek them out. Others call loudly for the dead to gather around. Some hunt one by one by one like the angel of the wasteland that found them.
He is out there still, as he has always been, riding down dusty roads, quest unending, name unuttered, face unknown. He is legend. He is many and he is none. Seeking the seeker and making the dead quick, pale horse rider, angel of the wasteland, ride on.

The First Bite

The rulers, high and far from where clay men can see, took counsel with one another and said:

"Come, let us cause a deep sleep to fall upon Adam. Let us cause Adam to fall upon a deep sleep."

And he slept as if the night was never changing, like black was the only color.

Now the deep sleep that they "caused to fall upon him," is Ignorance, for it is darkness without bursts of sound and night without stars.

They opened his side like a living woman. Like a living woman they opened his side and they built up his side with some flesh in place of her, in place of her they built up his side with flesh, and Adam came to be endowed only with soul.

And the spirit-endowed woman came to him and spoke softly with him, saying:

"Arise, Adam."

And when he saw her, he said:

"It is you who have given me life; you will be called, 'mother of the living,’ for it is she who is my mother. It is she who is the physician, and the woman, and she who has given birth."

Then the authorities came up to their Adam, the man they had created with mud and clay and breath. When they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became agitated with great bursts of heat that flowed through them, pulsing with desire that called itself anger. They became enamored of her, wishing themselves inside her, seeking a great hole in her flesh as they had done with Adam. They said to one another:

"Come, let us sow our seed in her!"

And they pursued her. Into madness and the abyss they pursued her, into the jungles of twisting vines that form the mind, through the labyrinth that they created. And she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their fierce clutches, in the dark pit where there was no light, she became a thick tree and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself; and they defiled it foully, filling its cavernous knots with warm seed. They defiled the stamp of her voice, so that by the form they had modeled, together with their own image, they made themselves liable to condemnation.

Then the female spiritual principle came in the snake from the tree which she had become in their clutches. The snake, red and black and shiny. The snake, the instructor, taught them, saying:

"What did he say to you? Was it, 'from every tree in the garden shall you eat; yet - from the tree of recognizing good and evil do not eat'?"

The carnal woman, said:

"Not only did he say 'do not eat', but even, 'do not touch it; for the day you eat from it, with death you are going to die.'"

And the snake, the instructor, said:

"With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather, your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good."

And the female instructing principle was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth, one more shed skin.

And the carnal woman took from the tree and ate; biting past red skin into sweet white flesh, and she gave to her husband as well as herself.

And these beings that possessed only a soul, ate. And their imperfection became apparent in their lack of knowledge; and they recognized that they were naked of the spiritual element, that they were bare. They took fig leaves and bound them upon their loins, hiding their raw form.

Close Encounters

Something genuine is happening, is happening, right now, a radiation of some kind that has an actual effect on your mind.
Your deepest self is like a pool, a wide open clear pool, a secret landing site hidden within a mountain surrounded by military personnel and sleeping bovines.
Will the soldiers stop the visitor who comes from far beyond before it can reach the pool and submerge itself in your waters?
What if it wants to take you into its own secret pool, hidden behind strange lights? Will you go?
When the world comes unhinged and the mother screams for it to “Go Away!” will you let it go without you?
Will you run and cower between mother's legs? Or will you walk out to meet its otherness with arms stretched wide?
Will you come out and say I am here, I see you, in sounds and gestures and the simple physical truth of your manifestation?
It is something genuine, but whether you will say later that it was from outer space or from heaven or from hell or from within the earth is all subjective.
You may say that it was a dream, or that it was only a hallucination, but these words are inconsequential. We can never accurately say what it was, because we were altered by the encounter with it. The nature of what it is prevents us from understanding with animal intellect what it is.
It is not subject to language. If we talk about it, we are not actually saying anything about it, we are saying something about ourselves, about our subjective perceptions and distorted memories.
The mother, the wife, the maternal super power will tell us that nothing is happening, that we must pretend nothing unusual is occurring, that we must stay away from the mountain. Will you ignore her and chase it? Will it chase you? Will you meet in the middle, waters coming to waters, with no common language but an ability to be in the same space together, without understanding, without fear?
What game can you play but the mirror game?
Will it go if the mother screams “Go Away!” Will you go if the soldiers say “Danger! Turn Back!” Or will you meet in the mountain behind the strange lights, visitor and visitor, pilgrims sharing water on the mountain.
Something genuine is happening , is happening, right now, something that can’t be understood as it comes in by disrupting the mechanism for understanding.
Later you may say that it was a text, a video, a photograph or a phone call. You will try to frame it with words, but there aren’t any words for what it is, for what is happening. It comes from beyond the world built of words.
It is happening, something genuine, now, disrupting the system for processing information. It is not yes, it is not no, it is not one or zero.
Like a flood overtaking the mountain, it rushes in, for a moment disabling the fortress, undermining the protector, rushing in to bathe itself in the secret pool that is your deepest self.
Will you retreat? Hide from what is happening? Will you rush forth to meet it, wriggling beyond the defenses to be in the wide open clear place?
Will you let it in? Will you go out to greet it?
Something genuine is happening, is happening, right now.
A dream, a hallucination, an encounter with something Other.
Something Genuine.

Jaguar

We don’t have no fire light, no fire life, just wiggle white flashing blinking strobing effect. Pulses of being. Here
I am
Here
I
Am.
Stretch it out or make it thin and tenuous or press the ends together tight. The message is the same.
I
Am
Here
I
Am
Here
Down in the details in the wobbling flickering details
A frosty blue beanie and ski jacket. A parking garage, a crow bar shaking like the snakes rattler
Ratta ta at
I
am
here
The words rippling, bubbling, flowing. Never ending aureobolis of sound.
Tse
Tse tse
The story gets told in segments.
The segments are stretched.
The segments are squeezed.
The segments are re-ordered.
It is all the same.
Story of life.
Ratta ta ta ta
I
Am
Here
The lean man jiggling, jouncing, grinning wide. Wide and skeletal, his face swallows itself.
I
Am
here
InTheDetails
DNA
AND
NAD
DAN
Ratta
Atta at at at
For hours on end we strobe.

We get bigger
and smaller
and bigger
and smaller
Say something about that.
I’ll show you.
S h o w

Y o u

ShowYou

S H O W Y O U


S H O W YOU

SHAPE
Y O U

I A M

H E R E
Here
Hear
Hear
I hear you
Talk talk talking
But something else is happening.
A frosty blue beanie and ski jacket. A parking garage, a crowbar shaking like the snakes rattler.

A frostyBlueBeanie.
SkiJacket.
ParkingGarage
Crowbar

S H A K I N G

Ratta

ta

ta

I AM HERE.

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.