Invitation

When I was a wee lass the woman down the street was very concerned that I was out of touch with "reality."
My mother assured her that I was playing pretend.

I was a very good play pretender. I rarely said things like:
"Let's pretend there is a little man living in an underground house beneath our own house."
Instead I said:
"The little man won't answer the door under my bed. Something might have happened to him. I'm going outside to find him."

I knew the trick to the best kind of play was not saying "Let's pretend," or "I'm only pretending." I knew that all play was equally real and unreal, that bravery, kindness, and trust were true whether you were dreaming, pretending, telling a story or playing "real life."

Certain truths are especially hard to grasp in "real life." Fairy tales and certain types of pretend can remind us, show us, and teach us the things that are not allowed or are undervalued in "real life."
They can remind us that "real life" is a game we began to play long ago, a very dangerous game in which you choose masks to wear and insist they are the real you, a game that demands that no other games, no other stories, no other worlds are "real." They are ONLY pretend, and only the "real life" game is important.

And if you play "real life" with us and play it well we will love you, and be proud of you, and you will feel safe, never needing to worry about the unknown, about the dark, about the mysterious, or about the possibility that you yourself are less "real" and not in fact the masks you have been wearing, but rather an innocent traveler who stumbled into a deadly serious game with eternal consequences; that you may never be able to leave the game because you will be convinced that you are not playing a game but rather are having a "real life."

And what if you were so lucky that someone stronger, someone with a better memory of the multicolored land beyond "real life",  started to play a different game with you, a game that bleed into "real life", and you started asking yourself, "What is real?"

Not just, "Is this a real game? Or something else?" but "Is 'real life' real?"

And what if by asking yourself these questions, rather than asking your benevolent benefactor (who could never actually answer these questions for you) you began to remember that you aren't "real", that you are a pretender, a storyteller, a dreamer, a liar trapped by deadly seriousness (a.k.a gravity) in a heavy game. A game in which your abilities to play have atrophied, a game that didn't just start when you were born, because actually time is a function of the "real life" game and you have been trapped on the wheel of "real life" for much "longer" than you realized.

And what if you remembered this for a moment and began to learn to play again thanks to a trickster who started playing a game within a game with you and called it deadly serious...

What if? What if?

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”

― Shel Silverstein


So let's not say, "let's pretend." We're better pretenders than that. Let us be open hearted and true whether our experience is real or imagined. Let us play in earnest, let us play with levity, and flexibility (fluxability?) and bravery, and kindness, and trust.

Let us play in bright axiom.

Stories

If only the story had a clear beginning or a clear end then I would give it to you straight instead of in these helix-like curly cues. I intent to purposefully obfuscate the truth, not because I want to lie to you, because if I tried to speak directly to you THAT would be the lie.
It was very unfortunate that I had not recently suffered the proper amount of brain damage to initiate the multidimensional scanning process. I knew he would ask,
"Is this a mash up?" and I would say no, because the mash up was coming from inside my head rather than through an external process of combining seemingly disparate texts. It's the natural beauty of my mental illness. He would say from his crystal palace,
"I connect things too, that seem unrelated."
At this juncture it is wise to explain that clearly there is only one "he" ever. It may seem that there are a multitude, that I am in fact sitting around an octagonal table with multiple individual "he" right now, but I have learned the deeper secrets. I understand that all along I have only known one primordial he and have interacted with him through various emissaries both conscious and unconscious of their roles as high priests within the order of the shinning eternal nil.
The music, by the way, was noise and we listened with gusto, filling me with hope. Sometimes I met one who was both he and she, a creature capable of invoking all the powers fluidly. I am one such of these creatures, a rainbow unicorn once held sealed within a lead tomb beneath layers of Korean soil waiting to be unearthed by the emperor. You will see that there is some internal logic, a special hidden system for decoding the sacred texts. I could no longer be a human woman although I had played the part well in biological excess and had difficulty separating myself from MOTHER.
I wanted to tell him not to ride that motorcycle straight towards death, but his life and death were not mine to dictate and I would not like to interfere with his appointment with destiny.
Such strange beautiful mysteries I have questioned and viewed from the observation deck. I was thoroughly interviewed on entry myself . They examined my oral cavity for contraband that I was attempting to smuggle in from the womb, so I took it into my lungs and held it there for 30 years.
I saw a movie about a girl with a friend and it reminded me a little that one time I did have a friend like that one. She had an opportunity to escape and said she didn't want to leave me, but I told her that she had to go, that I wanted her to go, that it was the opportunity we had both wished for, so she flew away trailing rainbow streamers. We met at the estuary where we were both hatched and learned to manipulate him.
I look in amazement through the oculus and wonder how anyone could have stomached me when I was the arch-duchess of Coldsville conducting psychological experiments on those alien entities I called "friends."
I had of course been warned by my father, the duke, that these so called friends would be my ultimate demise if I let them get too close to me. It happened just as he had said it would, but not as he had imagined it. When the walls came down and I let the alien other in, his little proxy was damaged beyond repair allowing for the multidimensional scanning process to be performed with this bio terminal. The angels began the process of molecular distillation that altered my basic shape retrofitting me for the other process without leaving a bad taste.
Of course none of that was real. None of this is real either. If you want to understand this text you will need to find the other two books but I wont tell you where to look.
I believe that I am "her" which has made it difficult for me to see or interact with her often. While I have amphibian capabilities, they have been little exercised and my time above water has made aquatic flips more challenging than they were after I first hatched. Initially I was uncomfortable with being "her" but eventually I escaped his expectation that I replace him and learned to embrace my subverted femininity. Thus I learned to walk and paint my fingernails, but at a much later date.
In the end, the end that I thought could not be found, it was Miley Cyrus who showed me the secret to storytelling. She said:
"A flower is a rose, a rose is a whore, a whore is a sailor, a sailor is a mermaid, a mermaid is a hippo, a hippo dances in a ballet, the ballet becomes a circus, the circus has clowns, clowns wear flowers that spit water from their lapels."
Even then, as he busily ushered orgone from the lower dimensions into the crystal palace, he answered:
"Some day together we will shine."

Sixteen Below

He tells me of the first time he met Allen Ginsberg. He was a young man, an independent reporter from New York come to Boulder Co. to interview Ginsberg about a planned act of civil disobedience. There was a factory there where the triggers for the Atom bomb were being manufactured. Ginsberg planned to sit on the railroad tracks thus preventing the train from reaching the factory.

My friend follows Ginsberg into a house, his mind racing with thoughts about the other man's homosexuality, asking himself if he could really say no if Ginsberg wanted to have sex. The first thing he sees upon entering the house is a woman giving a man a blow job.
Ginsberg is oblivious. It takes him a moment to realize that something is going on. When he does, he merely says, “Oh, lets go upstairs.”
Upstairs my friend sits on Ginsberg's bed beside him. His heart is pounding. In addition to concerns over sexuality, his mind is embroiled in the matter of the first question and what his peers at the radio station back in New York will think.

“Mr. Ginsberg,” my friend begins.
“Call me Allen.”
“How do you reject nuclear madness?” my friend blurts the question out spasmodically.
“I don’t reject anything.” Ginsberg tells him. “I’ve come here to make love to plutonium, to sit on the railroad tracks and be connected to it, to be connected to everything.”
Ginsberg suggest that they do some free associative poetry spinning. Gazing out the window at an empty curbside he lays the moment on my friend. All of this, along with the rest of the conversation, changes my friend's life.

He tells me this, and he tells me that he has never told the story in quite this way to anyone before. He has mentioned interviewing Ginsberg, he has mentioned having the recording in a box somewhere.
He has never had this moment before. This moment is new, unique to us, we two who are reflections of one another, who create with words our identities from the fabric of fear, the fear of being.
We sit in silence and look into one another's eyes, dissolving for a moment our creation, our creation of the world and the other to inhabit it, the other to speak to, the other to wonder at, the other to fear and to love.

We don’t know why this is possible, this silence between us. It allows my friend to tell me his story in this particular way for the first time and the only time.
We could try to recreate it, but it will never be the same. We will never be the same two people on the same day in the same place, daring to press against the veil of fear. Daring to speak and be heard. Daring to listen and accept everything.

All For One

Our writer may not now how our story ends. He may not care, dabbling thoughtlessly, letting spew forth his every imagining. What contortions we may perform at the command of his pen driven by a fevered and unconcerned mind. Or perhaps he starts a life thinking, Ah this is the hero, there will be adventure and romance! But before the tale is finished, the author suffers some change of heart and all those adventures culminate in misfortune and romance becomes tragedy because some cloud has intruded upon the writer’s spirit. So Mme Bonacieux must die, D’Artagnan must at last become one of the Cardinal’s creatures.
Thus the life of all characters is drawn out by a mysterious author. Are we ourselves that author, that author that has become so identified with one character in his masterpiece that he forgets himself? Are we yet not even the written copy, but only the many fevered dreams of our writer, ideas and personages not yet put to paper?
Now I am with my dearest friends, in a moment, I will be alone and scorned by all. Here I am with my husband, now my husband is dead and I care for our children, now it is my husband that has survived me and does his best for our offspring, now it is a child that has died and we are driven apart by the tragedy. One little skip, like a frog from one pond to another nearby, or like a finger turning a page, or a pen writing first one version, then another.
Am I a story like the one my children watch in the nearby room, etched into a silver disc by some means beyond my comprehension, accessed by a laser scanning it like a beam of attention? Today it is this story. Tomorrow it is another. Like Audrey Hepburn, I can be a nun, or a sweet little chef, or a princess, or a white trash gold digger, depending on which story the laser accesses today. These are stories that have never happened, and never will happen, because they are the wild and incoherent dreams of an unknowable creature locked in a comma.
We say here, in this story that I inhabit, that man was made in God’s image. This may be, it may be that we are dreamed thus because the one who dreams us is trying desperately to remember herself, running through the dark mazes of an intoxicated mind, opening doorways and discovering chambers that range through the spectrums of light, each one presenting some clue, some key to the great puzzle. I am this and I am that. What am I?
Imagine the horror contained in the Being of this God. Imagine the delight. Imagine the wretchedness of being trapped not only in one unconscious and unsuspected dream but in many simultaneously. Imagine also becoming lucid, not in one dream only, but in many different strange scenarios all at once. Imagine finding that key in one, knowing it is a key, knowing you are a dream, and unlocking a doorway into the next related dream, another fantasy that is the difference between blue and violet.
Conceive of it, opening these chambers, holding these chambers at once like a juggler keeping so many balls suspended in the air, knitting together a vast network in which you can recall that you slumber somewhere. Some sweet dreams are stubborn and refuse to yield to that notion. Who wants to leave a pleasant dream behind or discover that it is not a final paradise? Some nightmares are equally unyielding, hugging us tight with their clammy grip of fear and confusion, drawing the spirit of the dreamer to them like shards of metallic dust to a lodestone.
The spirit would need its own strength to pull itself free. This thing might be accomplished with effort. Who knows how difficult it is to move one’s spirit, a usually passive being? Who has tried? Is it possible? Ha! What isn’t possible with dreams?
Once I could not fly, then I could, but only by flapping my arms, then I could lift off with just the will to do it. Why not? But all of these trifles could only be accomplished when I was certain that I dreamed.
Here, now, where I sit, it seems that I cannot fly. I can barely walk. I seldom leave this room. I have no mastery of this dream, only the occasional suspicion that it is a trap into which I have fallen. It is a terrain that I have been unable to connect to the network being weaved because of that fateful condition of being unable to maintain that I am an agent of a dream.
But what would I do to be more convinced? Go through other people’s houses uninvited? Kill someone? Make love to an abhorrent stranger? Attempt flight? It must be something shocking.
And even with the help of some little shock, even on the verge of seeing clearly that I am a dream, I recoil. Is this nightmare, this one lone bearable fantasy worse than running the gauntlet? What could be worse than the promise of Jacob’s ladder?
We begin as a brave D’Artagnan, adventurous and honorable, and become a somber Athos, wizened and drenched in grief, brave not because there is so much to gain, but because there is nothing left to loose.
There are those characters that raise their fists to the sky and cry out that the author is cruel. And then there are those that understand that the characters suffer because the author is suffering, and of these there are those that are unaffected by this revelation, those that are swallowed by a sense of helplessness and apathy, and also those that respond with pluck and a measure of irrational chivalry; "If my God needs rescuing, then however small I may be, I shall be his redeemer!"
After all, where this third class is concerned, if they fail, what have they lost? Absorption in their own role in a comedy or a tragedy that may as well have been decided by a roll of the dice? It is something to loose- the conviction that you are real, that you are important, that all stories have been leading up to your singularly fascinating tale.
On the other hand what is there to be gained? Ah! There is no real method for discerning what the outcome of such a success would be.
But one who is chivalrous and honorable is not so because they hope for a reward for themselves, if they did, they would then not in fact be chivalrous or honorable but something else all together. It would be only a very special agent within a dream that would be moved to search for a key and a door and hope to liberate a mysterious dreamer from the lethargy of a deep and confused sleep. The only motive that could see one such creature through would be a sincere desire to be of service to that other mysterious benefactor and sometimes torturer.
It is an occupation for one willing to embark on a quest for the sake of the journey itself, whatever the outcome. Our writer may not know how our story ends. He may not care. Whether we are beautifully written, or feverishly dreamed, what more can we ask for from one that is a prisoner of their own fabrications? And if that troubled dreamer requires our service to be liberated and we decline the responsibility, what cowards we have let ourselves become? What an apparition of diminished spirit I would be, having heard that the greatest princess I can conceive of is imprisoned in slumber and having declined undertaking the quest to free her because it would certainly mean my undoing?
The book is not called D’Artagnan or Athos and certainly not Monsieur Bonacieux. It is given the name The Three Musketeers. All for one, and one for all. A promise of sacrifice that flows from great to small and from small to great equally.
It is the mouse after all, who must save the lion.

Transmission from a Galactic Winged Bard

Now the time has come my pretty friends to tell our tale, our rainbow story, of how red and blue and yellow and orange fade from one into the next without warning or remorse. Now I am this. Now I am that. Draw near and I will whisper into your ear something like the trickle of a leaky faucet, a fountain at which roaches impervious to the years and poisons and harmful radiations have come to hear the songs of their troubadours. Tell us now about the district under the kitchen sink… are there still wars raging between the underside of the refrigerator and the crack in the pantry?… it’s not right the way our people were pushed into the narrowest margins of existence…in the shadows we have always thrived…yes we will always be, so long as there are others that waste, we will be here to make life of the refuse of the Gods…
So many lines, some touch and others are separated by yellow and never even suspect the existence of red on the other side of that sunflower resplendence. A great kaleidoscope of dreams and fantasy. The play of the eternal mind with its many distinct bands, its parallel worlds of fancy. See now, this motion of my fingers typing upon the keys has correspondences in all parallel tunnels. It does not look the same in green as it does here in red, and yet this that I am doing now sends ripples through the multicolored pool. It is like a doughnut shaped pool, with a great drop off in the center, the end of all worlds, the eternal silence, the no mind, the void, our holy mother.
All beings approach this event horizon simultaneously, the children drawn inexorably back to their root. We are all reactionaries. We are all a reflexive motion away from the great nothing. It is not enough that I live and breath. I am not. I never was. The conspiracy to separate myself from the multiverse, to create a sense of permanence, to cryo-freeze this world, this shade of blue that I have come to identify with, it is a vain attempt at immortality. But I cannot live eternally for I am already life eternal and her sister death. I cannot freeze, I cannot exist, I cannot change, and yet I am all variance. I am everything at once.
Profanity of course is a silly notion. The ogre’s hand protruding from the wall is only an offense to my illusion of individuality. There are of course other realities, other vantage points, other highs and lows. This knurly slimy pasty ogre’s thumb with fungus blackened finger nail emerging erect is only ugly here, lodged midway in my bedroom wall. Elsewhere it is sublimely beautiful, the most perfected of all creations. Everything that is, was, will be, is the perfected creation.
Breath deeply now, take it all in, the odor of sweat and mold, the garbage rotting upstairs, your neighbor’s rose water perfume, the dogs breath, the musky opalescent substance oozing from your lovers miraculous genitalia, the tiny blooms of the English lavender emitting their scent to attract small furred bees that produce the antiseptic propylis which has it’s own scantly perceptible odor, and sweet honey too. It is all the crown of creation.
Humanity is a tiny drop in the sea, and all of those things which we can see, hear, smell, and touch are but a thimbleful of the rainbow nectar of the gods. Those things which you cannot even imagine make up the rest of the great roaring sea, along with just a pinch of the things that you can. If you should happen to be experiencing this as a sudden unexplainable knowing as you drift disembodied out past the milky way recalling your life as a griffin on a blue moon somewhere in the Sirius star system, then please do not be alarmed by the limitations imposed here by the workings of my own handicapped consciousness. They have sent those of us who are especially disabled to come and live in the home for the challenged which we call Earth. Here I am to be rehabilitated by engaging in various arts and crafts, which I do find therapeutic. After all, it has allowed me to make contact with you, which has expanded my heart a bit and helped to melt some of the inhibitions which might otherwise cause me to recoil like a snapped rubber band, sending me into a deeper state of dementia.
Thank you so much for flowing into me as I flow into you in this senseless, purposeless, blessed, dance of unity. If we should become displaced and exchange places as a result of this etheric copulation, look into the lines of the hand of the body you have come to occupy. You might as well look now, as it seem that the transference has taken place (although you should note, as part of your rehabilitation, that you never really were you, nor I). Look into those lines, into the tiniest wrinkle and detail. See how the ectoderm nearly sparkles in the light, as if a few stars were still embedded there just to see if you’d notice. When you look at this deeply enough, without fear of the dark and direction-less fall, you will automatically enter into a series of summersaults and be seized by a series of undulations that would be laughter if you were still embodied in that home (or some other) for the transdimensionally impaired.
You know, there are some patients there who do not use their stay for our benefit. They only become further habitualized and lost in their addictions, forming relationships with other inpatients in denial, taking advantage and making ill use of medications and a situation that could help under the right circumstances. Here is the problem with all organizations and institutions, and in fact every kind of structure ever formed (not excluding the present configuration of ideas): its destruction is knit into its very fabric. The thesis and the antithesis dwell back to back, Siamese twins, one black, one white, conveniently blind to one another. Neither is actual. The synthesis was always present.

Storytelling - Daedalus

Time and storytelling have made caricatures of Gods and their sons, noble priests and kings. Story telling shapes reality. The mythology that we encounter in this culture is being stripped of its richness, reduced to the basest, most humanly digestible bit of tell tale. The latent characteristics of such stories may be extracted by those for whom it is critical that their dormant message reach: the lost sons and daughters of Europa.
Their eyes and ears will be searching, and if they have not been too damaged by the surrounding culture, something may be activated in them. Histories, mythologies, are written by the victors. Good and Evil are subject to majority rule. The villains will one day be heroes, the heroes become villains. One day the ship will flip, and then it will flip again upon another.
Is there some way to live in neither one camp nor the other? A middle way perhaps?
Icarus illustrates for us the danger of straying from the middle way. His father Daedalus had been exiled from Athens as a murderer. In Crete he was received as a great artist, architect, and engineer. There he helped Pasiphae to conceive the Minotaur, Asterion, and built the Labyrinth in which this, the bull of Minos, resided.
But, eventually he was reduced to criminal status within Crete, an accomplice to the murder of Asterion. Locked in a tower with his son Icarus, he built them each a pair of wings of wax and bird feathers.
Daedalus attempted to pass his wisdom on to Icarus. The neophyte was warned: fly neither too near to the radiance of the sun, nor to the sea with its dark depths, but instead maintain a steady course in between. Against his father's advice, Icarus flew as near to the solar power as possible until his wings melted. Then he fell into the abyss and was no more. Daedalus himself was welcomed back to Athens, a great artist, architect, and engineer…