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.

Give

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

The Dreams of Monsters

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

It Was Taught Outside : Tanya

"Shall we step into Yesod?"
He nods and says: "Definitely. Right now"
We move together and instantly the world changes. The dark trees swirl around us like a tornado of greenery speckled with flashing lights and high frequency sound. In the center, where we are, there is a sense of quiet and solid stability, a place where we can stand and remain in place, nothing will disturb, nothing will pull us out until such a time comes that we decide to move again. We are together here in this bubble of tranquility, and inside of us, something changes as well. Tears start to flow, but without the added baggage of sentimentality. There is no sadness, no remorse, no desire for the past, only a simple ongoing release, salty currents that run down our faces, down upon our shirts and to the ground.
"So many avenues to travel on…"
"Let’s pick one."
"I choose Tanya."
"Yes, I know."
And we both remain in place while travelling to a far distant place, a place of danger and warmth and chaos, where we lived together and we both knew a shining girl that left her mark on us forever. She was small but not frail, strong but not pushy. Her temper was just enough to be fiery and severe, but not so much that she would lose her simple flowing beauty. Her desire was explosive and apparent, but it was balance by kindness and restraint. She would reach out to us through the gap that separates humans from each other and meet us at the place where we could be met. She would only demand what we could give and nothing else. And she would greet our efforts with a true smile and eyes that pressed almost shut in a burst of soft sincere love and friendship. With just such an explosion of light she must have given herself over to the guerrillas one night, giving her heart, her will and her body to the legendary lost brigade of the hills, and setting in motion the process that would end with her tied up, on her knees, with a soldier pointing a gun at her head. The pain of the bullet bursting through her face and cranium must have been terrible but quick. It was the echo that left her wandering, questioning the nature of what had truly happened and where she was now.
The tears continue and as they flow, our chest is torn apart, our hearts open wide towards each other and the energy flows unimpeded. For the moment, all obstacles have been removed and we become one, here in the cold and darkness, in our temporary space that tonight radiates with a rumbling vibration and the presence of the Others that have always been within us but tonight manifest openly and joyously without any reservation. In the process of invoking Tanya, we have invoked something that is greater than all three of us, and it now surrounds us from all sides.
Her gentle contact and accepting eyes, her rush towards self sacrifice, glorious in itself no matter what the human ramifications or effects, her open and warm embrace, innocent and sexual at once, it all descends on us here and breaks apart our assumptions, our old ways of being and deciding. It reminds us of microscopic knowledge that we have forgotten and which has roamed in the backwaters of our consciousness for years. The very movements of our bodies change and we dance and sing and laugh… while the rushing tears continue… and the forest itself joins in our celebration.
She is here and it is clear that we have learned from her, a subtle non verbal message that can never escape our lips and cannot be transformed into a simple statement, and that, in itself, makes it more Real.
"The Book of Tanya" records the special Jewish teachings of the Hassidic tradition and the Kabbalah. Here, in our own initial attempt at a Kabalistic invocation, we have invoked a shining girl we both knew, and through that memory, we have called forth the living spirit, the same that rushed to us through her eyes with great generosity, the same that moved the hand that recorded the teachings in a book centuries ago, the same that we will now call forth day after day, in the hope that it may once again honor us with its presence.
A spirit that has been named an endless number of times in an endless number of tongues, but which dances nameless in the Eternal chamber that is here before and after words, or ideas, or lips, or sound.

This night we say Tanya.
Not the book.
Not the girl.
Not my memories.
Not the stories.
Not the flesh.
Not the smile.
Not my friend.
Not her hands.
Not my companion.
Not me.

May she visit us often.
May she stay for a while.

What is Attention?

What is attention?
At this moment, dear reader, place your attention on the sounds in the space where you are sitting as you read these words…
Now place your attention on the overall posture and position of your body, the muscular tensions produced by the posture…
Now place your attention on your hands…
Now place your attention on your breathing…
Now on your heartbeat…
And now back to the sounds in the environment.
What is happening? What is it that moves? What is it that does the moving? What is the nature of this phenomenon?
What is attention?