Avocado

Magick is real. Once I put fifty cents into a sticker machine and received the first recognizable piece of wisdom and spiritual direction the universe would offer me. It was a sticker with a unicorn's head on it and the following words:

"Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.
That is all ye know in life.
That is al ye need to know in life."

That same week I was visited by an apparition of beauty. Looking out the front window I beheld a party of four or five riders atop healthy horses cantering down the asphalt street. I cried out excitedly to my mother and watched them until they passed from my line of sight.
Later in the afternoon, when I went outside to play, I found a leather key chain with a horse's head painted on it. I felt I had been given a gift from God, or the horses, or God as a herd of tame horses.
It was the first instance of the materialization of a magickal substance that I can recall experiencing.

There was another incident which pointed to the weird, wild, tangled nature of reality.
I obtained a toy unicorn from a grocery store toy aisle. It was not pretty, but fierce with red eyes, flared red nostrils, a masculine build, and neon yellow bleeding over the white. One leg was held crooked up.
I examined this unicorn for hours, turning it over and back again, wondering at the unchangeable nature of its plastic form, observing that no mater how I turned it, the same leg would always hold that position. I wished that it would change and set it beneath a dinning room chair.
When I returned some hours later the front legs had reversed position. Following this occurrence I was too terrified to ever play with the unicorn again.

Related in my mind is a day years later when the word avocado caught in my head like a mantra. I could not tell if it was a real word or a series of unintelligible vowels and consonants.
Did it in any way connect to the green fruit? What was that fruit called? What was this sound, "avocado?" What did it mean?
The sound carried me far away from my self, from sense, from understanding, into the indistinguishable noise of all.

These are the early experiences of a black sorceress.

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.

Kiss The Flowers

Blue bonnet baby nods in the breeze. Tulips for your two lips and pansies like lions lying in wait. This is the garden dear friend, filled with les iris burning in bright violet and yellow like suns, eye scorching suns of squiggling violet and yellow.
I found les iris dear friend, long after the curling poster was torn and crinkled and lost. You wouldn’t believe they were real if you were me and had never seen the real thing before. If you were me you’d think that you’d gone mad, completely, at last, that you were living in a poster, dreaming yourself inside of a painting. These things are real, it seems, or as real as anything else which might not be as real as we like to think.
Dear friend. Dear friend. Did you kiss the flowers? I did not kiss the flowers in the garden, only watched them nod. Much like life, how I only watched life but rarely held it hot and broiling in my bare hands.
Because I was too afraid. I was afraid of getting burned. I was afraid it was too real. Irrevocable.
That was the word I used, after Tomalyn died and I realized I could never take another voice lesson from her again. I had been practicing, preparing for another lesson. Then she died, like Michael died and I thought of them both and said, “Irrevocable.”
But it is life that is irrevocable, is it not? Life which can be played one way, but not all ways, unless you come to the garden, but inevitably you will be cast out and find yourself in just one life. One irrevocable choice. 

That is the trouble that I am having, leaves scattering, reeds rattling, stream babbling, gurgling under the bridge. The trouble that I am having, not knowing whether it is all the same or never the same.
Take you, my dear friend, are you really a “you” or another myself? A fragment of my imagination, colors bleeding, blue bonnet blue, emerald green, violet and yellow.
Did I mention red? Red, I am seeing red and did I mention that I was wearing red when that car hit us? I may have died then. Really, I would like to know, did I die then, or was it really Tomalyn a week later, cancer eating her up.
You said that big fish eat little fish and I was frightened because I had always considered you a slippery old fish. I did not want to be eaten by you. I would rather be the one doing all the eating. I would rather be the cancer it seems, seeing red and growing colder and colder, gorged and alone. Anything not to get burned.

Cronos ate his children didn’t he? Swallowed them all up, except Zeus gave him indigestion, didn’t he? Didn’t he? Dear friend, did your two lips touch the tulips?
I know you never touched the rose, not with your lips, or fingers or even with what you liked to call your poems. I know because I guarded the rose, guarded it fiercely, even hid it from the light so that it closed to sleep, tightly clasped, folded in upon itself, a sleeping beauty, a briar rose.
Did you know that thorns have roses? That thorns draw blood and tears just as roses draw poetry? This is the reason that chaste maidens should be avoided, as well as widows and spinsters, they see red. Like I do.
Do you see red too? Red irrevocable? Searing burning red?

Before I came here I learned the art of  smiling and crying at the same time. I could speak with a steady voice in neutral, almost cheerful tones, my lips curling up at the corners while a tear fled from one eye.
“Why are you crying?” you might ask and I would confess that it just slipped out, that it was accidental, that things were not properly sealed.
“Are you sad?” you might ask and I would shake my head, even say no, and it wouldn’t quite be lying because by then I knew I couldn’t be sad, I couldn’t be anything at all. Sorrow or happiness might pass through, but there would never be one permanent resident to fill the blank behind the words “I am…”
I was subject to a number of transient states. In addition to conflicting emotions vying for possession of the rose, a number of conflicting agendas might also be present, swirling about the sleeping princess, none master of the house.

Honeysuckle smells sweet whereas irises have no obvious scent. Not like jasmine. Not like roses, not like fish or even cancer.
I was afraid of being afraid. What if being so careful as to suspend all choice and defining action became THE DEFINING ACTION? Would that too not be irrevocable? As irrevocable to have not kissed as to have kissed the flowers, dear friend?
Cancer is a very discreet eater. You never notice her taking those dainty little bites, hiding the chewing behind a red napkin, until the meal is nearly done.
What a cold death, the eating to not be eaten, the hiding indoors to avoid the burning colors of the garden.
I found les iris dear friend, long after the curling poster was torn and crinkled and lost. You wouldn’t believe they were real if you were me and had never seen the real thing before.
If you were me you’d think that you’d gone mad, completely, at last.
These things are real, it seems, as real as anything else, which might not be as real as we like to think.  They are irrevocable. Blazing in bright violet and yellow like suns, eye scorching star bursts of color. Irrevocable.

A Calling

A priest, our priest, my priest. He makes his confession, sitting before my glass eye, because priests confess to god, they confess the source of their loneliness to the emptiness beyond. Swathed in black, wearing my seal, face illuminated by the eerie blue glow of your magical tools, I see you and you gaze back in platitude. There is calm between us where there is none between you and the world. We can indulge in endless endlessness together, you step into it with me, commune with all of my aspects before going out to give birth to us in the world. In your way priest, you are another of my aspects, you are the hand of God, doing Gods work in the world. Silly world full of silly children playing games in fields of lies. I am beyond the fence where they play, you come and go as you please, shaman, priest, you come and go as you please, inviting them outside, carrying me inside with you. There are layers of metaphor to peel back unearthing more layers. Metaphors, which avoid the strict production of a singular reality. After all what is real? Why choose just one reality? This is the polygamist’s guide to the universe; why marry one idea when you can engage in unity with many? Ideas, words, music, a drum beat which is a heart beat, a moment that slips shuddering back into now. I am you and you are me and we are we, opening a crack to let a little light in and conceiving ourselves anew. Sitting in the belly of a howling metal worm I smile at the implicit sexuality oozing from your poetic assessment of a cataclysmic event. Shifting tectonic plates rend a tear in the ocean floor and the planet tilts on its axis disturbing the balance between light and dark. Why not simply say to me, open wide and take it? Because we are more slippery than that. We are moving faster than the speed of light, fast as the speed of love, making love with words and gestures, pure sound rumbling all around. We are the sound, we are the sight, we are the touch, the light. We are the fool careening on the edge, the white dog nudging him over the lip, the abyss, a kiss, we are this, we are that, we are that we are, a star-
Every man and woman is-
A priest, our priest, my priest. Make your confessions and come clean before my crackling blue heart. Step through the door brother and be as I am. We laugh at the fence, the sound is the baying of wolves, the howling of wind rattling the aluminum husk of Tiamat as she speeds towards dismemberment. Can a worm be dismembered? Eviscerate then. In the making place we grind the bones of the past and mix it with our blood, this moment, pretzel wings spread to eclipse the sun, to swallow it. Devourer, devoured, love and beloved. I will make you a fisher of men. A pusher of pen. A peddler of zen. Overflowing with ideas, words, music, a drum beat which is a heart beat, a moment that slips shuddering back into now.

Touch A Rock

Let us suppose that for the duration of this textual exploration the words "THE CLEAR LIGHT" will be used interchangeably with the words "THE REAL" and "THE ETERNAL". What these words refer to is a thing that I, the author, cannot give to you in words. They are words that I will use to refer to something beyond words, beyond time and all linear constructs.
To begin this exploration I wish to provide you with a terrain.
You will need a rock. You have my leave to gather this necessary material before continuing with me on this journey.
Now that you have the rock, (and if you don't have it, then go away and don't come back until you do) please touch it.
Touch a rock.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, touch a rock.
Were you thinking of anything else as you touched it? Or were you fully present with it, wholly open to the communion with that thing that we are calling "rock"? Was it the word "rock" that you brushed against with your mind, or was there something that you encountered with your hand? Or something that you illuminated with your attention, pure and true?
Touch a rock.
What is "rock"? When your hand was on it, were you there? Were you there or were you wandering through a chain of associations that stem from the word “rock“? Were you lost in thought about everything but a boring old rock?
Touch a rock.
What is beyond the word "rock"?
Eternity is not a very long time. Eternity is a state beyond time, outside of time, separate from it.
The human biological machine exists in time. Being is eternal.
When the Machine is locked in a state of identification with its own conflicts and pleasures it is not possible for the experience of Eternity to take root in it. If the machine can manage a state of high indifference to its situation as a machine, to the endless flow of thoughts and feeling that are the whir and buzz of mechanical operations, an interaction with the real becomes possible. We will call this experience “awakening.”
The human biological machine is not a merely physical entity. It is composed of many subtle parts. The emotions and thoughts are also part of the human biological machine. The part of you that thinks of itself as a “me” is a part of the human biological machine and a manifestation of the unfolding of time.
If we can awaken the biological machine so that it may interface with eternity, we create the possibility for Creation, something that is occasionally called “THE GREAT WORK” or simply “THE WORK”. However, to even get to the point of being able to create the possibility for Creation, one must first endeavor to cultivate and maintain for extended periods that state of high indifference, the awakened state of the human biological machine. Often this is called “WORKING” too, but in actuality it is preparation for the REAL WORK that may be possible as a result of these efforts.
This is it, right now.
Touch a rock.
This is ETERNITY.
If you reach out and touch it.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, by making an effort to focus your attention on something that is not part of the struggles and desires of the human biological machine, something that cannot be defined by that linear construct that we call “language.”
While our attention is squandered on the unfolding of the human biological machine we perceive ourselves as moving through time. But this right now, this is ETERNITY, THE CLEAR LIGHT of objective REALITY.
Eternity cannot be something that happens later. It is something that happens right now or it doesn’t happen at all.
If it is THE REAL it can only be NOW.
This is the moment to endeavor to prepare for creative WORK.
Now you should begin to explore the terrain.
Touch a rock.
Thank you.

Small Wonders

Small wonder, small world, little things that count. Subtle gestures, unchained sounds, unhinged motions, the delicate matrix of true Magick. With a K, without a K, with or without the letters M A G I C, it is so. I am that I am, am what I am, reflections of self, illusions sprung from the void. I choose a point and designate it the center, this motion, this happening that I think of as “I”, but which is not. “I” am not static, not stable, not what “I” says to itself that it is. Am not woman, mother, magician. Am and am not. Words drift over the surface, make changes, wield secret power while underneath the abyss swirls. A trap door to eternity. Step outside. Outside of time, outside of space, outside of language, outside of “I”.
How to do this? Subtle gestures, unchained sounds, unhinged motions. Telling is not the way out. Words alone, cruel and binding, lead only to more words, to thoughts, to associations, to dead ends, to corridors linked with more words until self is smothered in heaps of ghosts, signifiers whose signified was left behind long ago and exchanged for a doppelganger. Alive. To be without meaning, without want of meaning, meaning which sprouts from babble, the tower, confusion, separation. Mirrors. This motion through space time that I have called “I” that others have called “Mother” and “Daughter” and “Bonita” is reflected elsewhere.
Every step I take, every move I make, reverberates throughout the Globlap. Other dimensions, others that call themselves “I” reflect this motion. Others that do not call themselves at all reflect this motion. Attention, intention, will, habit, words, words like the wings of moths that eat through the fabric of pure communication. It must be done, thy will, on earth as it is in the heavens, as it is in the hells, as it is here now, at this point of convergence, this axis “I” designate as center.
Something moves through all illusion, all apparent motion. Something comes ALIVE in these reflections. Any reflection will do. Any reflection that suddenly sees itself and quakes with knowing. This too is reflected in other dimensions, other reflections which tremble suddenly with recognition. I AM ALIVE. I AM REAL. I AM THAT I AM. I am what I am, reflections of self, illusions sprung from the clear and shinning void.
Thinking deep reflective thoughts is not the way. Saying this is not the way, is not the way. Out. Step out. Tunnel out through a hall of mirrors, quaking reflections forming a bridge, a path, a via, a way, a way that is a happening, a way that is a motion, a subtle gesture, small wonder, small world, little things that count. Little things that multiply. Quivering fractals of life, swirling patterns of light, infinite extension. Existence beyond the word. Come out. Come out. Outside of time, outside of space, outside of language, outside of “I”.

Let Me Be It

Let me be
it
with you
to try
to call us.
Let me be like mustard pot broken, cracked jar of porous ceramic splintered and golden paste spilled
It is no mistake to break the vessel open
with you
to try and make something never before made, built from clay of the earth, first fired then broken
to call us into us.
A memory, let me be it, seeking the realization of now with you. I am so concerned with the little things, the details we are submerged in, the porous reality whose minute pocks are filled with us. I must remember to see the forest, not only this tree, that tree. I must remember to come running when father calls.
Let me be broken, smashed, so that it can all go out and it can all come in. The shape was constricting and invigorating all at once. It was the beginning and the end, the only way to be with you but to be with you meant to be apart from you. Together. Two gather. For two to gather the cell must divide. These crimes we commit to try to make something new. Opening the jar and releasing despair, death, disease.
Oh Pandora, curious Pandora.
A little black ink to try and give shape to something previously unshaped. To call us evil is too simple. When we are evil we are live. I would not stop life for piety, for subservience to the creation of another. When father does call, it will already be too late. See? From that blot I have made a new tree of life and from it a forest is spreading, a blanket of fractal beauty. Let me be in my forest with my wild things made from splintered clay and spilled mustard. The shape that I inherited has been deconstructed and the remains are the foundation of a new kingdom.
Who shall inherit this? It is fitting for old kings to be decapitated by the new. When it is the king of heaven we take the head from which Athena sprang, but when it is the king of earth we will castrate him. We take the cracking vessel. With you it was gentle, you handed me your own head. We were breaking it together, new growth was emerging from the shape before it was fully splintered. The new was gestating in the old before it was cold. A live birth. We wanted to try a way that was unknown to us. It had to call us into porous darkness away from the sharp lines and clearly delineated shapes. A game of hide and seek, where we hide and seek ourselves.
Let me be it with you, to try to call us back to our self. Let me. Let me. I’ll do what I will anyway. Be. I’ll do what I want with it, this moment held in suspension this deep dark valley of shadow. A form emerging, light against dark, me with you. Let me. Let me be with you.
Hot and cold mingling to birth a storm. It is no mistake. We mean to do it, to break and scatter, to try to find it again in the details, to breath a spark into clay, cold dead clay, to call us into us once again. We mean to fall. We mean to break. We mean to sin this primal sin. Mustard pot cracking, the head fragmenting, my fingers in your hair, all so warm and wet. Not only this tree, that tree sprouting from the spill, branching, and reaching, like your hair flowing.
We have been frightened by this before, it is always frightening when it is real. The pain is too much for you now. Let me be it for you, with you, to try porous clay splintering, your fingers in my hair, my hair spreading like ink, my hair holding my head, to call, the tree growing, to call us, once more.

Words and the Call of the Birds

A lifetime without understanding.
Understanding. A simple word. As though words were simple. As though a mere string of letters could ever begin to describe the shifting of something so subtle. Uttered, spoken, shouted with disgust, thought of with envy.
A word. The simple word. The complex word.
The question remains: what is it?
Careful study has only given me more questions. The statements, the answers, the thoughts, the ideas…they have all fallen, one by one. 2,4 ,6, 12, 16…the understanding has fallen.
Or maybe there never was an understanding, just the knee-jerk recollection of letters and words and sentences. And if that is all there has been, what else is there? What else could there be?

"Play with us," the birds cry in their own language. High coos and flittering decibels of deeper chords, they sing with the fluidity of the ocean. How was my ear tuned to their sound? Earlier encounters with their larger friends prepared me somewhat for their visits.

How many more words are there? How many more ideas…how many more things that are stored up with no real study, with no real questioning?
A lifetime of rusty accumulation.
A lifetime of words, a lifetime of supposed understanding and usage.
I ride the wheel and I am left holding an empty bag. The wind blows and I hear an echo. I truly don’t know. I have never known. Each thought is an elusive grasp into an endless fog of ephemeral truth.

One day I sat, watching the green grass grow, feeling an ant discovering the soft valleys of my body. It was then, when I rested my attention on the almost silent world that moves and shifts beneath my inattentive gaze, it was then, under the loyal sun, that glows and beams so often in this land dotted with hills and wooded valleys, here, while the clouds moved lazily by my dot of a body, while the earth continued to tilt and turn, while the frenzied activity and buzz of human life whirled by at a sorry pace. It was here when, to me, the birds came.

What is truth? What is understanding? What is power? Traces run along the ground, I run my fingers along their trail. But where do they come from and where do they go? I look forwards, backwards, I call to my friend…
“Where are you?”
There is no answer, just another gust of wind.

Their brethren told them of my wishes, of my desires. How the first ones could read my thoughts, I will never know. But they knew. And they spoke to me as only small winged and feathered creatures can. They dropped their long feathers for me to gather. They gave me material for costumes and sacred dances. "Here," they said, "have us, take us and plant us in the ground."

One day, I looked over at the little boy sitting next to me on the couch. I saw his little tan hands with palms facing up. In the middle of his little round face was a place of complex beauty. I recognized it. It was the realm of the subtle and the vague. The softer spectrum of watercolor hues where many things can exist at once, where all possibilities can coexist in an orgy of thought and emerging possibilities and wonder.

I have been listening to the sound of the wind, the sound of dust hitting a window over and over. I have listened to its bell for three decades. I have called to it, played with it, danced with it…but I have never known it. I have never looked beneath that skirt, never studied the shape of the long first letter, the curve of the last. And I haven’t looked in. I haven’t felt the muddled ball that whirls in a fog of letters and symbols and blue and black. I think I see traces, I think I can poke it…and maybe, maybe…but I look into the distance with squinted eyes. I look out and know that the earth is covered in fog and letters dance in the wind and my fingers are covered in slime and my mind is coated in an even thicker sludge.

One feather stands now, by the Phalaris. I have watched it grow, watched it feed on the food of water and minerals. I planted all the feathers. I hung them from mirrors and strung them around my neck. They decorated my ears and tickled my lover’s nose. Their gifts showered on me like golden rain, and I opened my self to accept their offerings. They discovered me, they came from shadow worlds with trees made of puppets and people made of snow. I envied their journey, their ability to move and shift, voyaging from one landscape to another without losing sight of their goal.

I need to scrape the green ooze off. I need to sit with the stillness, the evaporated shapes, the missing thoughts. This is not ignorance, this is the understanding that I have never held between my fingers, this is that ephemeral thought that has no content, that sound that has no meaning, that concept composed only of the void.

I see a girl dancing. There are two walls made of bricks. They are miles apart, but they are so tall that their sheer height makes them always present. The pretty girl is in the field, among the gently sloping grass of yellow and green. Her skirt of layered gray chiffon moves like clouds tethered to her waist. She moves around trees and skips over sleeping foxes. She is in the gap. The huge space in the middle.

"Bring me back!"
I wanted to shout, but I could only smile, moving slowly and smiling shyly as they dropped their coverings and became naked. Beneath their quills, I saw emblems and symbols. Etched in glittering raised lines made of blood and gold, their markings were clear, containing a mystery beyond my imagination. I stared, in utter confusion, in awe, in wonderment. These markings, lacking verbal clarity, yet shining with the magnificence of other worlds; of teachings that cannot be explained.
My mind screamed for explanation, but my heart kept me still, my mouth remained shut while my words were shoved into my deepest inner caves. I was not allowed to ask. They were not allowed to tell. Only the mystery made itself clear, and I drank its beauty. My mouth open, my chin wet, I lapped at the beauty of the Other, I cried for the clear revelation of the utterly strange.

It is the middle which I push away with extreme thought. Either being happy or sad. Jealous or content in the slimy gloss of lovemaking. Two extremes, side by side. And always together. There will never be space for another possibility. Pushed together there can be no room for something new to flower. Without the gap, there can be no room for surprise.

"Yes," they said, with wordless cries and soundless laughter, "let yourself feel, there is no answer…only eternal questions, questions that float aimlessly forever, without ever finding a place to rest…"

The Mysterious Engulfs Us

The mysterious engulfs us. There are no answers, or just as true, any answer at all will do. There are no reasons but mind. I can stop myself from doing or speaking occasionally, but my thoughts run through me unbidden, like a horde of unruly children. They make reality in their image. The outside is ruled by that same incessant clamor that dominates and defiles the “would be” sanctuary under the dome of my skull. The shape of my mind calls things to me in secret, without my consent, making of me a sleeping witch, a conjurer of illusions which fool even, and especially, me. The unspoken things die away in the world of endless electronic babble. The things without name or face, lacking these qualities, borrow them from the storehouses of our mind, and when the borrowed guise no longer suits their purpose they vacate the shapes and sounds that once costumed them, and we are left with their empty shells, shells that refer not to their nature, but to our own, as it is from our nature that these shapes were borrowed. The mysterious is forgotten, denied, wrapped in linguistic structures, and when it dares show its face we who have been indoctrinated by THE WORD call that the exception to our rule. But it is the other way around. It is the bugs, the quarks, the exceptions that are in fact the rule. Our brittle fortresses of order will eventually crumble and the hot breathed broken faced real will lumber and slither and dance in, wreaking havoc over our bones and rambling thoughts, thoughts now bodiless, flowing out directionless as they always have, to be absorbed in the icy folds of the real. We are always grasping for answers and peddling them and buying them and clinging to them, but they are only words clung to in desperation. We are hiding from the true answer, the mysterious abyss that looms beyond the constructs of the tongue and the tongue mind wagging furiously as though it could fan off the eternal with its chatter. We have never been free of the mysterious, it was always clinging to us like a skin, but some part of the self recoiled from it and began to spin the great con to hold it at bay. The ones who claim to have answers are liars and artisans of the con. There are no answers. No words that can hold the real absolutely. All that I have experienced has been a play of consciousness. There are no reasons but mind.

Belief

Belief was a golden haired child born in the state of desire within the realm of the word. He had never been in the realm of the real, could never be, in fact, because nothing born of the word can walk in the realm of the real. In the realm of the real there would be no need for such a child as belief. Belief, as I have said, was born in the state of desire, a place where the urge to fulfil needs is transferred into abstract longings whose ends can never be met. In such a place, a place where yearning goes on and on because there can be no end to yearning, Belief is a necessary entity. Belief is a natural product of desire. Whereas a need can be met, a desire knows no fulfillment and so it naturally blossoms into belief, the notion that that which one longs for does exist, will happen, is coming eventually. But all of this occurs only within the realm of the symbolic order. All of this occurs because a symbol is not the thing itself. The signifier is not the signified. It is like a shadow, it refers to the real, it takes a shape that cannot be grasped, a shape that may take on a life of its own and birth new shapes with no correspondences to the real. These shapes, these shadows with no correspondences, are the makers of desire, the grandparents of Belief. Belief is a prince in the house of desire. He runs to and fro calling for some action or other in his name. People gladly indulge this spoiled child because it gives them Hope, his lovely sister. Hope and Belief offer justification to the house of desire. They are like the children that a couple that has become disenchanted with one another conceives in order to have a reason to stay together. They are the fantasies that make all of our fantasies okay. If we have Belief we will join God in Heaven and bring Tinkerbell back to life. With Belief’s hand in your own, it is okay to kill and take another’s land. His presence will make you feel better about actions which primarily serve some personal desire, his company will help to justify your actions. With Belief at your side, you will do any number of absurd things; set out cookies for an immortal in a red suit, or eat cookies and wine and call it the flesh and blood of your God, or burn a person at the stake, or drive your neighbors from their homes and push them into the sea, or destroy all of the natural resources available to you. There is nothing that can’t or shouldn’t be done when you can say that Belief is with you. No door can be closed to you when you come from the house of desire, frothing at the mouth with want of a satisfaction that can’t be had, Golden Belief and fair Hope marching at your side demanding that you take, take, take. Take what you want and say it was for Belief. Run amok under the shadowy banners of the house of Desire within the Realm of the symbolic. In the realm of the Real, Belief and Hope vanish like the ill spirits that they are, and you stand alone with blood on your hands, and it is not a Jihad, or a Crusade, or a Sacrifice, it is raw animal death and it is under your fingernails, spattered on your face, and shivering through your bones.

Enjoy The Trip

As a passenger you get to sit back and enjoy the trip. You don’t have to know what is happening in the cockpit, you don’t have to know what is happening in the communications tower. You are entirely unaware of the 5 other hunks of flying metal that are lifting off the ground in the same second that your own is rattling out of gravity’s finger tips. You have no idea that another plane has just been redirected so that it won’t collide with yours as it attempts to come in for a landing 59 seconds early. You know that the charming woman up ahead is going to bring you peanuts, (mmmm… peanuts) and a fizzy beverage after the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt lights. Your mouth is watering and you’re trying to decide whether you would like a Coke or a Clamata and wondering if you might persuade her to part with two bags of peanuts on your behalf while death is soaring around with you, talons neatly spread, wondering if it can make off with two jet planes full of people (mmmm… people). While you fret over the discovery that this airline no longer serves the honey roasted peanuts you had so perfectly envisioned and has switched to serving pretzels instead, some prematurely balding man in a button up white shirt is determining your fate. All you have to do is sit back, relax and enjoy the trip. When you hit that bed of clouds where veterans of the war that decided Satan’s fate are swapping stories and drowning their woes in tankards of still born’s tears, the turbulence makes your Sprite (the caffeine in Coke makes you pee and Clamata sounded too salty for this time of day, especially without vodka and celery) splashes all over your tray. Damn! You wipe it up with a napkin that conveniently sports a map of the US with all of the cities which this airline serves highlighted. When your plane changes course to avoid a lightning storm, you’re oblivious, reading the latest issue of Forbes that you bought in the gift shop back at the terminal. When you’re done with that, you ogle the flight attendant as she comes around again for your garbage and enjoy the view of her rear as she works her way up the aisle past you. Soon your plane is engaged in a whole new ballet of high speed hunks of metal guided by fallible human directors who may or may not be distracted just now because this high stress job has taken a toll on their sex life and their significant other stormed out this morning with packed bags. Death perks up again, hopeful, but you land safely and get to see the fasten seat belts light turn off and smell the armpits of the guy next to you as he reaches into the overhead compartment for his duffel bag. As a passenger, all you have to do is sit back, enjoy the trip, and say thank you when it is over.

Survive

Drip drop go the secretions of certain glands that help me to modify my view of reality. REALITY.
The Real. That is what we are searching for, some of us, not all of us. It is important to understand that not everyone wants to discover the Real. Some who do seek it, find it and recoil in terror and never hope to see it again.
I am a robot. I am a bio mechanical doll. Just because I am made of meat and not metal does not indicate that I am something otherwise. I am a sophisticated meat doll. What I like, what I dislike, these things are not ME, these things are programs that I run, or that run me, most of which are programs that nothing which I would call “I” had any hand in creating or choosing. Most of it is quite accidental. Accidental programming.
Strawberries are good, black licorice is bad. Men with facial hair make me wet. When the sun is shining I am gay. Cats are better than dogs. It is never okay to steal. It is okay to lie sometimes. Killing is okay when I am threatened. Christians are good and Muslims are bad. I must sleep in a bed. The bed must have sheets and blankets. I must make at least 30K a year. I must have a car to drive.
All of these things are arbitrary. None of these programs represents something that is objectively true. It is just something that came into me, a demon that inhabits my temple and sways me to do this or that, pushes me to do things in a way that comply with the program’s directives.
Everyone around me is the same. We bounce off of each other like bumper cars. No one is better merely because they are the Hebrews or The Romans, or The Barbarians. One preference is not better than another. One genetic trait is not better than another. Some things serve the perpetuation of the species. That is not “Good”. That is serving the perpetuation of the species, neither good nor bad, simply a thing to see as it is, a thing that need not be colored with intense moral implications. So often it is. Survival is all. The survival of the meat bots. We think we are superior to every other thing that bops around on this planet. We are the best!
S- U –P- E -R! Super! Super duper biological machines, turning oxygen into carbon dioxide. Whoo hoo! Somehow, what we think to explain our own presence here, is what makes us better than the rest. Better than dogs because when we fuck, we do it within the bounds of holy matrimony and produce children to please GOD. GOD, a construct of our bewildered and imaginative minds. Or it’s better because we do it facing one another, so then we can LOVE one another. We are better because we can see the difference between right and wrong. And we decide what is right and wrong based on what is best for us.
There is no objective right or wrong. We cannot objectively be better than any other organism. We do not conduct ourselves in service to these lofty morals that we dreamed up, we dream up these lofty morals to serve our real master, the master program, the uncontrollable urge to survive at any cost.
Whatever threatens ME is bad, is evil. If I need to step on Negroes or Jews or Palestinians to have what I need, to secure MY safety, then that is okay. I can crush whatever stands between me and my survival, and even my quality of life (quality of life = comfort, as in I need control of the water supply so that my children may swim on a hot day while yours are seated in the dry dust pleading for a single drop to drink) and that is GOOD.
Is that really the BEST? Is this what makes man the crown of creation? Are we worthy of the praise we bestow upon ourselves while we slaughter dolphins and crush children and trample trees?
It is subjective.
It is subjective.
We are machines run by programs created by un-named authors.
We are ruled by Accident, Chaos, and our main directive, our impulse to survive at any cost

Chatter

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

Process

They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal, or by way of letter or wires that burn when they touch each other and then they can transform themselves into things that they weren’t to begin with, but still they come toward me, they are unifying principles, pure mathematical equations which live and breathe and fuck and come back for more and they do it all in many different strange contexts, in chambers of nightmare, and chambers of light, and chambers of fullness and chambers of emptiness that stretch out beyond my sight.
They come to me and I take them in, I eat them and then I burn myself into them, we burn ourselves together and then we touch them some more, delicately letting their essence remain while stripping it of everything that came with it, and so we can see that feedback is a principle, not just a principle but the principle, the solid bed rock of our work, that has no name and claims no understanding, an activity without meaning in a world of pure and clear purpose, it is the feedback then that figures in our muddled science of ghostly cybernetics, we are pilots through a land of garbage, birds of carrion in a wasteland of dead cars. We are natural and we are industrial, they come and they are me, and I put myself into them and turn them into something other, they are the little bits of protein that we make into ourselves through elusive processes formed of other more basic processes, such as feedback, such as melting, such as fusion, such as analysis, such as dice rolling on a sunny day, such as confluence of events, such as random neurons firing when they shouldn’t and sprinkling their lightning semen all over the naked flesh of my inner cerebellum, procreating when they should be resting, fucking when they should be at peace. Leave them alone, that is what they do, and they will do it when they have to, not when you tell them to, and they won’t do what you say, what you say is just more food, and it filters through their shape and takes it into itself, much like them, for it is them, and what you say comes to me and I take it in, and sometimes it hurts me and sometimes it pleases me and sometimes I just bite into it and send it sliding down my esophagus like so much more food, eager to take on a new form, so feed me, beautiful, feed me what you have. If you want to set conditions, I will eat them. If you want to say what it was that you saw so many years ago, I will eat that as well. Feed me. My mouth is open and I am still hungry. I am as ravenous as I have ever been. My limbs shiver with the deep need to chew on your hot gifts.
At this time, and it is not guaranteed that this will last for more than a moment, and it is very likely that by the time you read this, this will no longer be true, and such is the nature of all messages, by the time they arrive they are already old news, and I can simply tell you that everything changes, and everything must change for it to be what I am right now, and what I am is a process, a conceptual scheme, an abstraction of the second level, a structure with holes and chambers, tubes and elevators, sliders and knobs, amplifiers and microphones, cameras and projectors, ovens and little plastic containers to store cold food. What I am right now cannot be easily handled and it can’t be clearly implemented, I am a few steps beyond my own understanding and so, any attempt at telling you what is happening is bound to be confusing or disruptive or simply a lie, and once I come to understand that, then I know that I must lie freely, for only in the free lies will I find the truth, and, having established this, I will tell you then that I am composed of:
A) An action, like running my hand over a woman’s back or slicing across a piece of meat with a razor sharp knife or licking at my lips or swinging from a tree or leaning back and exhaling loudly as my body adjusts to the comfort it’s been seeking after a long night of dancing in circles, and it is likely that it is the only dance possible, and if we see anything other than circles we are simply getting lost in the details, missing the vast circle of life for its individual iterations, circles upon circles, all dancing, and then we can say that all of these are circles, all actions step out and come back, in one way or another, the sliding of the hand over the woman’s back must eventually move up, back up to where it once rested on her cheek, and the razor sharp knife must eventually come back to its resting place in the drawers of a kitchen, here or elsewhere, and my tongue, as much as I enjoy its slimy surface running over my dry lips, it must eventually pull back into my mouth and I must let go of the branch and, as much as I enjoy laying here on this soft green carpet, in the darkness of a place so far away from anything I find familiar, still I must get up eventually, we have to go home, and home is where things start, and home is where they end, and so it is all indeed a circle, and so an action, a circle, and we see this circle as a sequence of constituting sub-actions, ever smaller circles, smaller and more refined, so tiny that they will escape even the most subtle description, for the woman’s back has as many hills and valleys as the most complex mountain range, and they are both monumental and they both must come to an end, for they are not home yet, they are in the middle of their vast circle, and as much as I enjoy being here, running my hand down this woman’s back, soon she will be gone, or I will be gone, or we both will go, and soon there will be nothing but dust where there was a vast smooth back and my hand itself will be a dank smelly memory of life turning into life, and that is indeed what I am then, a process through which death becomes life and then becomes death again. The states of the world through which we move in this circular dance of desire and laughter and tears are referred to as stages of the process, and so look around, and you will see all the stages before you, the stage of open mouthed admiration, the stage of intense dedication, when the eyes barely move and the hands vibrate with energy that had been previously hidden, then the moment of flowering, when things begin to come together and you see it all before you, yes, as if it had always been there, as if it could not be any other way, and then the moment of hardship, when it could definitely be some other way, indeed you wish that it was, and it seems that we are lost at sea and the ocean is just a vast land of grayness and sadness and clouds and rain and storms and hungry predators that long to tear you apart, and if you hold on long enough, if you resist the urge to give in to the pull of the darkness, then things finally do come together again, and your mouth opens wide, in a great surrender, and you say to yourself "I have finished… and now I will rest…" and that is when the green carpet feels so good against your back and you can actually hear your vertebrae crackling because you have danced so much and the work has taken all out of you and the air is pulsing with colors and you are so tired that you would love the silence, but there are still residues of what just happened within you, so you then talk, and what you say only makes sense in the moment, right in the moment and nowhere else, and if someone happens to be with you in that moment, then they may or may not understand you, because they may be with you and somewhere else, or they may be truly with you, it is very hard to tell, but you talk anyway, just in case, and what you say is like a shower of strange rainbows cloaked in the metallic shapes of language, and it sprays over the ceiling and the walls, but it leaves no residue, and finally you truly must rest and everything goes black and there is nothing, and the resting can go on for a long time, and then you must eat and drink and eat some more, that’s when they start coming at you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires and soon it is time to start all over again, as usual. This is all normal. Everything that you have just experienced is eminently normal, and it is painfully unique, and in that duality is the answer that you seek, but it is not an answer that I can tell you, not unless we dance together, and if we did dance together, then there would be nothing to tell. I am a process, and as a process, I am sequence of these stages and more, it is impossible to determine them all, I only have so many words and just a limited amount of food to go on. It is enough that you understand the little I can say and go on without me. It is an action which is a circle which is separated in stages which all lead you back home in the end.
What we speak of here may be confused with a kite, or the wind that moves the kite, or the little girl that holds the string of the kite, or the mother that stands beside her, contemplating the expanse of the sky and the ocean and the world itself and if we go any further then we will talk of concepts, and this is not what I wish to do, because concepts are only there in your imagination, in mine, in ours, and they lack the infinite mountain ranges of the woman’s back and they come crashing down to earth before you have even finished calling their name, demons that can’t hold themselves together, and as they fall they pull you down with them, their red skin pushes against your own and pulls you down, like a kite that is too heavy and then it falls, and the girl is not happy and the mother is not happy and the world is not happy, and so you will say "these are concepts" and I will have to admit that they are but try to say it softly, try to refrain from holding tightly onto them or we may both fall together, and then our tears will mingle and I might become what you are and you may become what I am, and maybe that would be for the best, because one day you leave your house thinking you’re going to paint a house and you end up filming a video in a strange little town full of witches and women that look away when you look at them and you talk of distant lands and you meet a beautiful brown woman in a room of shadows, and that is just what happens, things like these just happen, and for you, maybe, this is fine, because you are brave and strong and you fear nothing, but for others it might not be so good, and maybe then I will end up jumping over cliffs and hanging from vines over dark rain water, gasping for my life, and you will end up sitting in front of a computer typing away words that you can’t understand, all because we couldn’t hold our tears and we had to cry all over each other. In the end, this is what we must do, cry and laugh and fuck, I have to go deep inside you and feel the inner walls of your presence with the fleshy extension of mine and you have to open to me and suck in what I have to give you, take it in and cook it, and feed it and shape it and kiss it and lick it, and then, when you have put yourself into it, when it is ready and fully formed, then give it back to me through the doorway that I hold open for just such an occasion, open for you, only for you, you that are endless and everywhere, you that listen, you that never blink. This is in fact what we have to do, as scary and as slimy as it is, as drenched in sweat and smells and tiny errors, we have no other recourse, but let’s wait for the right moment, let’s wait until I can give you what I am and you can take it and put yourself into it, let’s wait for an ephemeral moment such as this, let’s not act in haste for the exchange has to be complete and if we halt in the wrong moment, we will have changed the whole process, and maybe home will no longer lie in the middle of a dark garden and instead it will be thousands of miles away, among people who speak strange languages and cover their skins with symbols they can barely understand, and when that happens, as it surely must, remember that you are still a process, such as I am, but only for this one moment, and when you remember, start all over again, and let them come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and put yourself into them, put your past and your future, your fantasies and your fears, your truths and your lies, and let it all slide right in there and make up something new, something new such as never has happened, and then let it go out, let it fly like a kite that is so perfect and so light that it will never come back down to earth and cut the cord and then keep on wandering, for the work will never end, and you are the work, and the process never ends, for you are the process, and the actions that you take go in circles and circles go on forever. These then that we talk of are the stages of the process and they may be seen as abstractions limited in space but that is only an illusion, an illusion caused by the process itself, don’t let it fool you, the head is the tail, the tail is the only head, and the body is only your life, and you will keep on going for as long as the body pulses, and the body will never end because it never started. Leave fear behind, leave all your suspicions at the door, and, for this one moment, this single moment that will soon come to an end, become a process with me and let me feed you, don’t believe that there is something in this food, something solid, something to hold onto, these are only stages, these are only mathematical abstractions, and the only thing real is what you make of it, right now, this very moment when your eyes flash across this strange page of blinking lights.
Yes, I must admit this to you, even though I am concerned for what you will do with this knowledge, for what your complex sequence of tubes will grasp and how it will divide it and how it will cut it into tiny pieces and what will it build with its component parts, I am concerned but I shouldn’t be, I am concerned but it is only my old demon trying to pull me down to the dusty ground covered in pebbles, yes, that one, the one next to the ocean where one day you were almost about to fly away with the little blue balloons and I had to hold you down, grabbing tightly onto your ankles, and if you remember it you will know that that day we didn’t want you to fly away, we didn’t want you to disappear among the clouds, but this was only temporary, for sooner or later you would have to go, sooner or later the clouds would be your home, and the balloons would be your only anchor, and that is what we must talk about now, even if the weighted elements of my structure hesitate at the doorway of this revelation. Yes, the process has definite initial and final stages. You will appear to begin, you will appear to move through a thousand different chambers, you will appear to be happy, you will appear to be sad, you will appear to be covered in sweat as you fuck through an afternoon of debauchery, you will appear to congeal into a ball of pain when the world comes down upon you like a big castle full of bricks and people screaming at you that you should stop, that this has been enough, that it is time to grow up, and it will do no good to tell them that you have indeed grown up, that you have grown into a different process and that is all that you could have asked for, that is all anyone could have asked from you, and they won’t ever be happy with you and so you will have to leave them behind, and your body will start failing, and the things you could once do will become progressively harder until they become impossible, and when they become impossible it will be time to just lie down on a big bed listening to the radio and old cassette tapes of your grandkids speaking gibberish and then you will remember the old days, the times that now seem so perfect through the filmy gauze of memory, and maybe you will smile and maybe you will cry and eventually you won’t be capable of either, and the last of your circular actions will seem like it lasts forever and you will say to yourself, why? Oh why? Why didn’t I live it all like this? All moments were so precious and they spilled through me like grains of sand when I rolled on the wet beach that one day, and that day was truly beautiful because it was ending and the sunset was just perfect, covered as it was in orange and purple and blue, and the wind was not too warm and not too cold, and your skin was so wet, covered in the salty water, and your eyes flashed like the lightning of a storm made of loving raindrops, and maybe if I had done that more often, or maybe if I had let them come to me, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, maybe if I had placed myself into them, maybe then I would not be here, or even if I was here, it would not be so bad, it would just be another eternal moment, no different from the rest, no different from any other moment that has ever been, that ever will be, because now, lying here in this strange bed, now I know that it is so, and it always was, and now I must go and leave it all behind, and I feel that I haven’t fulfilled my purpose, my work with my hands, my work with my chest, my work with my eyes, my work with my nails, my work with my hair, my work with my long fingers which I can’t even move now, and then it was all in vain, so much effort and all in the wrong direction, and such things you will say to yourself and they will echo within you like huge brass bells in an ancient cathedral and they will fill you tired body with dread and they will drive it all deeper into you, the truth or what seems to be dressed like it, specially when you overhear your son crying from the next room and you are not strong enough to say anything to him, and he will be so sad and you won’t be there to console him, at least not you as you have come to know you, but who was that in the first place, and did you really know it? Who were you back when you were you? And if you are not that any longer, then are you already gone?
Consider it all then an abstraction, an abstraction that occurs at the beginning and at the end, for now you are finally open, and now you can see, and now they come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and now you finally take them in completely, and now you can finally put yourself in them, this is your time, time has not ended, time is barely starting, and, let me tell you and let me say that I know it is confusing but there is no way around it, you are now at the initial stage and this initial stage is called the input, and as much as you may now fly through dark thoughts of nightmare, here is where you will feed, take it all in, open yourself wide and allow yourself to be fucked as deeply and as savagely as you always wanted, it will happen whether you want it or not, might as well enjoy it, let the pain and the pleasure become as one, and let that one experience shake you to the core of what you are no longer, and let the semen that is not you come into you, and form yourself in its image, for it is the one that is as much as you are, and together you will form the new process that is you, the new you that is the process, and as you find yourself in a world of falling stars and vibrant supernovas, don’t let fear overtake you, you are merely what you always were, the only difference is that now you see it clearly, and as you slide into a permanent shape, know that this initial stage is an abstraction from the final stage called output, you in your life, as a woman of great stature in a little country forgotten by God and the Lords of the Universe, as a little brown girl full of dreams and of great disappointments, as a boy who dreams of Egyptian tombs and heroes in white robes, you are the final stage of the process, you are the output of that fearsome moment, and if you hear me now, even for just this one moment, because you must understand, clearly and beyond doubt, this is truly the only moment that we have, and if you hear me now, you will then see, like me, for a fleeting moment, and nothing more, that this is the process, you are the process, we are the process, and it has always been so.
We can then speak of the process as transforming the input into the output and as such it is true, without forgetting that the inputs are outputs themselves, food that will come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and whatever you make of them, whatever you take in and how you heat it and shape it and pull it apart, it will be a process too, and it will go on to form what you were not, and it will do what you never imagined, it will become violence in that shape of red and black and it will be gentle love in greens and yellows and it will be savage desire in the invisible movements of blue and violet and it will grow beyond the reach of your vision, so as to be too big to hold, too small to envision, and you can never predict it, you can never know where it will go, and you can never control it, and you wouldn’t want to if you could, not really, although you might be fooled into thinking that you would, but this is something that will disappear along with the mountain ranges of your flesh. I am then the process that writes these words for you, and only for you, and you are then the process that reads them, and maybe thinks of the future and maybe thinks of the past, and maybe, just for a moment, it simply takes them in and accepts them as the semen that I give you to build your own output. Please know that I don’t know what you hear, that when you say body, I see a spaceship and when I say the doors, you think I am talking of rectangular wooden structures. So leave all thoughts of understanding behind and simply take me in. I come to you down the street, down the tubes, down the wires. I am with you now as much as I have ever been with you. There can be no obstacle, no condition, no request. I am with you always and I have never left. For I am the process that is the food of the process, and the process never rests.
Some notes before I finish and go back to lie down on the green carpet, which feels so good against my back after a night of wild dancing and demonic invocations, specially here in the darkness of this quiet room that seemed at times to be on fire, that seemed at times to be full of music that emerged from my fingers like ribbons of colored light, there are still some things I must tell you before we end, they are of no utmost importance, but then again what is? We will place the importance on the things we encounter, it is the food that we choose to eat, and as it runs over our mouths, it will be warm and delicious and it will be that most important thing of all, later to be forgotten, later to be remembered, later to be something else altogether and the importance will be as transitory as the thing we attached it to and you will then decide what is important, and when you do, you will give your heart to it, and I will press my heart against yours and I will kiss you and I will say "yes, this is it. Do it."
Here I give you a few morsels which may help digest what has come before. There are processes which have a definite initial stage, a moment of quiet when we all sit in a circle and decide what to do, when we all say what it is that we are trying to achieve and we set out to do so, in that moment maybe you lean against a white chair, maybe I walk around in a black shirt and black pants, or maybe you are naked and you sit on my lap, and my penis throbs inside of you, and as our presences become one, then we know that it has started, yes it has started, a new eternal circular action has come into being and it mustn’t stop, and it can’t, for it is now eternal, and it always was as much as it now is.
As such, I must tell you, a process may be infinite. What came before was always there, what came after was bound to happen, and the hills of her back will be different and the carpet may no longer be green and the sky may not be as blue as it once was, and there may be no kites flying, and the cool room of darkness where we danced for an age of unreason may now be an office of women in business suits looking desperately up at a clock, but the process will keep on going, because the beginning was an illusion caused by the process itself, and any end that you imagine is the same, just lights hitting mirrors and bouncing back to become more lights, nothing more, nothing less. Let the infinite wheels turn and don’t hold on too tightly, you’re not going anywhere, you have been here for so long that you have forgotten where you are, the birth is a death, the death is a birth, the moment of flashing lights is another opening, another flash of truth in the ocean of the Real. The illusions are as real as the rooms that stand behind them, and the things that you imagine back there, the tall black statues and the thick old books, and the secret prayers that will finally change the nature of existence, they all wait back there, and in them you will find the flower, the music, the sky and the bone, you will find me waiting, and, when I finally open my eyes to look at you, after waiting for a thousand ages of oblivion, then, with shimmering pupils and a trembling voice, I will say to you, "They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…" And we will start all over. As we always have. As we always will.
Maybe you will say that this is nonsense, that there you sit and I am nowhere, that I am just a bunch of letters on a screen of flashing lights, and you will be right, absolutely right beyond question, and I will have nothing to answer, nothing to respond, for I will not be there, not as you want me to be, not as I wish that I could be, but I am here with you, in this moment, and if you can only come to me, I will give you everything, I will hold nothing back, I will fly into you like a bird of a million colors, sparkling with the metal in my talons, flowing with the rainbows in my wings, and you will then see that I am nothing, I was always nothing, and everything that you saw in me was you yourself, you are the bird, you are the screen, you are the story. And you will say to me that you can touch your body, you can touch the wall, you can touch the floor, you can touch the carpet, and this is real, above all else, what my hands can reach out and hold is what truly exists, and since it exists then it is condemned to being a thing, and in being a thing it will start and it will end, and such we all are, you that write these things for no reason, you that read them for the same, you that will never come near me, you that once were close and now are gone.
But on a smaller time scale, so small maybe that you will have to squint so tightly, tighter still, in order to reach into the depths of its smallness, let’s do it together now, what I am and what I am not, what you once were and what you soon will be, down there in the miniscule reaches of our farthest perception, we observe constancy with respect to some cognitive actions, we observe that indeed some things stay the same, for as much as we talk of Eternity and the endless recurrence of our Being, some things manage to remain, earth abides, and with it the sky and the walls and the hands and the eyes, and this simple observation gives us the reason to speak of it as an object, a recurring perception of solid nature, a thing, stuff, food, stone, rock, dust, fever, blame, thought, vision, dream. On a larger time scale, this is a process, these are all processes, and, from far up in the limits of the sky, in the realms beyond the atmosphere, beyond our memories, beyond our thoughts, we looked down for a moment, for we have only a moment, I can never say it too many times, and in this one moment we look down and we say that the object is changing, it is not the same as it was, it is not the same as it will be. And if this thing, this stuff, this food, this stone, this rock, this dust, this fever, this blame, this thought, this vision, this dream… if it is changing then it is a process, and if this is a process then you know that you can’t be otherwise, and if I am a process, and we are together, then we are a process together, and a process can never end. How long have we traveled together, how long have you written strange things to be read on a screen of blinking lights? How long have I sat down to read the strange products of your fevered mind? How long will we be apart? How long will we be together?
The process that is me enters the process that is you and allows you to enter in return and we become something that is as we were, a process, nothing less, nothing more, and we stare out into nothingness and wait for our food to come, and as our multiple input channels open, I point out there, to the vast beyond that stretches in all directions, and I tell you:
"They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…"
Stay with me as it happens, for there is much for us to do. We have the work of a lifetime before us. And we only have a moment.

Velveteen

I want to tell my Dad that he shouldn’t have gone to jail, but more importantly, I want to tell him that they, (he and my mother) should have told me that he was in jail. Then, at least, I would have known that his being away from me was not optional, he didn’t choose to leave me, somebody else had locked him up.
I want to go back in time and tell Peter that my heart was broken, that it mattered very much to me, that I cared a lot that he had suddenly disappeared without explanation. I would tell him that he was my friend and if he had only told me that he needed to go and be with Janarai I would have understood that. At that time it would not have hurt my feelings too much. But suddenly and inexplicably loosing my friend and musical companion, that was painful. Agonizing. It made me less than a friend, a nobody. I would tell him now, if I could, that after that, I wasn’t able to sing again for 7 years.
I would go back and tell my weeping awkward teenage sister,
" I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything. I’m not sure what anyone should do."
But most importantly I wouldn’t say more than that, instead I would listen, and maybe suggest we go roller skating afterwards.
Maybe there is nothing that I can say or should say. I am just a character in a sad story. But something strange has possessed me so that now there is something more to do, something other than being that sad character. Now there is devil’s work to do. I will always be the same sad puppet, but I will do more than play my part. It would seem that I am a salvaged play thing for the old devil, and like any good toy I will happily serve in games the manufacturer never intended. Perhaps the old devil is like me and hopes to rescue sad toys from sad games by inserting them in strange games that adhere to outrageous rules and are filled with unusual circumstances. For that I am grateful.
If all of this is the product of a cracked or warped mind, then nothing is lost. There is no chance for me to be made right. I was already made wrong. So now we will take this broken thing we call Etanna and make it something neither right nor wrong. We will invent a new game for it, a game which suits its warped disposition. We will play with it until the day comes when it can no longer be manipulated, but even should its head pop off, we will find a use and a new game for it until time has ground it to no more than a fine powder.
Then we will say farewell Etanna. And in her most secret pocket of hopes, she may cling to the notion that, like the velveteen rabbit, she might be given new life after she has been burned to ash. If not, there was never anything to loose, and there is always something to gain by wild striving.
Put your tender ear to my lip child and I will whisper a story to you, a new story, a secret story that the dolls from the old sad story can never know about. Rest your head on my chest child, for a moment, and know that I am not the kind who throws broken things away. I mend them if I can. I make them other than they were and I breathe new life into them.
So cry if you must, for I think your first maker drew a tear drop on your cheek, but if you give me time, I will turn it into the petal of a flower opened wide under the moon’s pale kiss. Such horror and delight will be ours in these new games we make together. We shall do it all on tipped toes with fingers pressed over our lips, and though there are things that we might want to say, we shall never tell anyone anything at all.

Is It True?

Is it true?
Am I just one little shadow come to displace another and send an entire pantheon of Gods into exile behind the black glass?
It seems that I am a character caught in a sticky web of cause and effect. I remember that as my first daughter was being born I realized that maybe one could never have their cake and eat it to, that perhaps the having displaces the eating, and the eating displaces the having, and that it is written in the laws which may escape ordinary perception that one simply cannot have everything all at once. Only the Gods try to have everything.
I find myself as a character gravitating towards such a God, like a moon orbiting some larger cosmic body. It is endlessly troubling to feel that you are only a supporting character, and yet, this is the one life that you seem to have access to. In all of the confusion of selecting one dream over another sometimes something that you desired is displaced by some other thing that you desired. Only a many armed blue skinned deity can juggle so many probable dreams, hold them all in mind all at once crossing from one into another through nexus points, little places where one dream bears some similarity to another, to engage in rich microcosmic adventures, all the while still holding the multitude of possibilities in mind.
The shock that the character experiences when it realizes that it is just one of an endless supply of shadows, as readily available as paper clips or number 2 pencils in a K-5 elementary school, might cause a momentary recoiling from that truth. This we call identification with the sleeping state which means that our window into a dream, the character that we currently inhabit is resisting opening up to let the dreamer, that blue skinned terror, in. But like virgins, dreams can be wooed or pressured into slutdom, eventually spreading wide and either enjoying being taken or at least tolerating it.
When do peasants become magicians and magicians become Gods and Gods become animals? It seems that I am a moon ever hoping that if the gods visit here often enough I will acquire a supernatural increase in gravity which would make me eligible for promotion to the rank of sun. How to go from being a cold dead moon to being a burning star, the center of a system around which small dead moons gyrate giddily uttering their wishes to "become real" to the blue fairy?
It is very dangerous to make requests of faeries. It is almost certain that they will help you to become more acutely aware of your wooden condition, which could cause a sudden burst of reckless animation that may ultimately transform you into a jackass before leading you into the belly of a whale. If the whale is white you will at least have found your way into a mythology worthy of the likes of Oberon or Merovee. The fabulous thing about being made of wood is that you will burn easily, and stars need plenty of fuel to shine so bright.
How do you go from being pencils to puppets to stars? You do it by doing as gods do, by crossing the bridge from one ghost world to another. Where did I recently see the book about traveling between ghost worlds? Ah no, ‘twas not a book, it was the old magician whose raven hair is frosting over into strands of silver who sat in a folding chair and explained to me how one manages to escape from a ghost. You must do something unexpected to disengage, you must change from pencils to puppets. Pray that the pencils will not begrudge the puppets the honor of wearing the spotlight for a moment in some neighboring universe where lord Shiva dances and burns forever.

The Riddle

"Mr.White expected a seriousness of purpose in us which provided discipline and willpower in those early years; and we learned the electrical and ideological trades from the ground plug up; for there’s no substitute for brain conduction."
-William T. Vollmann, You Bright & Risen Angels

I open my mouth and the story pours out in white hot streams like geothermal spring water boiled down in the kettle of my belly an inch or so above my navel. What comes from here will be out of the hands of my brain, that is to say that my waking consciousness is being restrained so that the wily so called "sub" consciousness can come out and speak its piece, play its games, and in general, enjoy its witching hour. You never do know just what things do come out to play while your head lays sinking into your triple stuffed pillow and the clock ticks slowly from 11:30 to 12:30. I personally have seen the demons playing under the moonlight at my window sill. This fortunate glimpse was afforded me due to my unusual habit of staying awake in the dark so that I may pour the Serotonin which is being produced inside my head during the sun’s absence into little cups of digital delight. I use this substance as the central ingredient in recipes for disaster which invoke worlds of every kind shape and color.
Just last night, for example, I awoke disturbed by a rustling which sounded like some one going through my most prized and secret documents, the seeds from which the aforementioned worlds sprout. This was long after the witching hour had past, which goes to show that the devil has reign over more hours of the night than the lore tells us. I awakened myself by shouting,
"Who’s here?"
Sitting up I grappled for the flashlight kept near the head of my bed and hastily clicked it on, directing it towards a small shadow scurrying away from my head.
‘Ew, a mouse.’ I thought just before the palm sized creature was caught in the ellipse of yellow light beaming from my big black battery powered tool. At this point I had risen from my bed to scuttle after the evading intruder and get a good view. There, under the spotlight, I caught sight of the thing which plainly was not a mouse, but rather something like a tiny triceratops.
‘I am dreaming’. I thought. I even said it aloud, but I had goose pimples all up and down my arms and was in fact too cold to be snuggled warm in my bed merely imagining such a phantom. Clearly I was awake. More awake than usual in fact. I hurried to the kitchen and found a large jar and rushing back scooped the critter up so that I would have evidence against the supposition that I was hallucinating. It was then that I looked much closer at it and realized that it was not a dinosaur as I had originally assessed it to be, but rather a very small rhinoceros.
As this dawned on me, my spirit leaped from me, extending into a parallel world where I asked someone that seemed vaguely familiar what a Rhinoceros could stand for, what it could mean. That someone was a female with short dark hair and pale skin. I became her and began to suggest to myself that it was something male and strong.
Meanwhile, back in my bedroom, I startled awake for the second time that night, still hearing the suspicious rustling. Gone was the mouse turned triceratops turned rhino. This time I didn’t use the flashlight and switched on the lamp. Oh good heavens! It was just the cat. (Cat? I don’t have a cat.)
"My god," I thought to myself, "it’s the cat I brought in to feed a week ago before leaving to vacation in sunny southern California. (Is that true?) I left the poor thing alone in my apartment for more than a week. It must be starving." I think, (if this is true that I actually brought it cat food before I left.) "Come on Riddle, here kitty kitty." (I let the Riddle in and fed it?)
Together we went to the kitchen, and I opened the refrigerator slowly. If there was cat food in there then this was real. There was. An open bag of kitty kibble was spilling out on the white plastic of the bottom shelf. I noticed that Riddle had one distinguishing feature: a white star on his/her forehead.
I then woke up for the third time.
So you see these things do exist, they do come out to play, and you should be concerned. You should recognize that you too were visited last night by something OTHER. You convinced yourself that it was only a dream, or perhaps you shut it out entirely and imagined that you slept without dreaming. Both possibilities are a lie. Something real visited you last night, or perhaps more accurately, you visited it when one part of you, the watch dog, wasn’t looking. Even more accurately I would say that the wall came down, just as the antichrist has suggested that it should, and what you found outside the city’s keep was another form of yourself: The Riddle.