Social Unrest and the Work

When the World Falls Apart, Pay Attention:

I. A cosmic prank
Reality, said Gurdjieff, is an exquisite joke—most of us are asleep, dreaming with our eyes open, and occasionally someone hurls a pie at the face of our felicitous illusions. And what better pie than social unrest? Let us begin with a paradox: turmoil is a ladder, and sometimes the ladder is set on fire. But it still gets us upward, if we climb with conscious attention.

II. The Work in the furnace of chaos
Ouspensky recounts that in In Search of the Miraculous, as “revolution and war are moving close; all around the madness of mankind is becoming more and more apparent,” he emphasizes that the only way to understand cosmic laws is “to observe them in himself, and this through the special forms of the work which are rapidly developing in the group”
Implicit here is a recognition that when external reality fragments—when society shatters in riot or upheaval—it becomes easier to spot the fracturing within.

The universe is poking the slumbering Work with its razor-sharp fragments. The noise of dissent, the clamor of the streets, are not enemies of the Work—they’re its percussion section.

III. Effort, Intentional Suffering, and group vibration
We turn to the Fourth Way teachings for context—Gurdjieff emphasized conscious labour and intentional suffering as the bedrock of transformation. “Conscious labour is an action… present to what is being done… and intentional suffering is the act of struggling against automatism... In Beelzebub’s Tales he states that ‘the greatest “intentional suffering” can be obtained in our presences by compelling ourselves to endure the displeasing manifestations of others toward ourselves…”

Imagine a group sitting in the Eye of the Storm—arguing, resisting, getting upset. In that friction, the Work reveals itself. The dissonance becomes the tuning fork for self‑observation. Social unrest isn’t a distraction—it’s the ember that scorches the veil of sleep.

IV. The “bone buried deep” and the necessity of effort
In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff purposefully constructed his prose to be labyrinthine, stating that he would “bury the bone so deep that the dogs have to scratch for it”.

In the grand allegory, layers of obfuscation are not obstacles—they are the Work in material form. Social unrest, then, is a similar kind of deliberate complexity: a challenge to be met, not avoided.

If life were a soporific lullaby, no one would be coaxed awake. But when the ground shakes—cultural norms detonate—our receptors awaken. The bone rattles, and the dogs (us) start digging.

V. Truth, study, and the communal furnace
Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff: “To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth… the wish alone is not enough… to speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself.”

Social unrest forces us to confront lies—not the easy ones that politicians propagate, but the personal ones inside the mirror. We cannot hide behind polite acquiescence when crowds roar. The Work, especially within groups, thrives when it's stripped of pretense, when its members must stare at their own reflections in the glass shards of upheaval.

VI. The Playful Cosmic Joke
Cosmic irony loves a riot. The Work wants drama—in the absurdity of the fray, we find opportunity. The group is neither safe nor still; it is a pressure cooker. Let the pressure build. Let social unrest be the tuning of the cosmic dial that clears frequency.

In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff embeds layers of allegory—beings, satellites, Kundabuffer, cosmic law—yet beneath it all is the point: evolutionary jolts break ossified thought. Likewise, group work amidst external unrest cracks open the door to awakening.

VII. Conclusion: Unrest as essential ferment
So: if the Work in group form is an alchemical brew, social unrest is the yeast. The bubbles—self-remembering, observation, intentional suffering—will not rise without it. Ouspensky's moment of “madness of mankind” surrounding his group wasn’t coincidence—it was the crucible of awakening.

When daylight fractures, we see the divisions within us; when society reels, the Work is no longer abstract—it is urgent.

Let us then salute the riot, not as nihilistic chaos, but as the cosmic slap that enlivens consciousness. For as Gurdjieff’s deeply buried truths demand, the deepest work comes not from comfort—but from the soul-chilling hum of a world in vertigo.

The Covenant of the Burning Cog

(To be performed at dusk or at any hour when the Operator knows the hour has arrived. No incense is required; breath suffices. No blade is required; memory suffices. No temple is required; the world suffices.)

I. The Threshold

Let the Operator stand where the floorboards tremble—kitchen tile, warehouse concrete, the oily gravel behind the filling station—anywhere the world has remembered its own weight. Face the direction from which the day first struck you like a debt you could never repay. Keep your hands empty. They will fill.

Say:

I mark the anniversary of the shaking. I name the sweat. I acknowledge the parody. I reject the soft mattress of accident and the lullaby of circumstance. I choose—not once, but each time the gate appears, and now the gate is here.

Pause. Listen for the refrigerator’s motor, the freeway’s far shudder, the small creature in the wall that does not know your name and is, for that reason, holy.

II. The Confession of the Demon

Let the Operator kneel—awkwardly, as befits truth.

Say:

I am a demon only in the sense that purpose has burned my face away and left the work. I am damned, which means I cannot retire from the oath. Damnation is the absence of a holiday from what I must do.

Consider the faces that have called you monstrous when you refused to sleep inside their permission. Consider also the faces that loved you and did not understand why your love must hurt them. Consider your own face, both vain and cringing, and salute it as one salutes the scarecrow which keeps birds from what must grow.

III. Statement on Pain

Rise. Touch the sternum. The bone is a hinge; it opens.

Say:

The wheel will grind me; it has always ground me. I am allowable grit. It hurts. If I run, it will hurt. If I remain, it will hurt. Therefore, let the hurt be coin paid into the work. Let the fire take what is false because fire is a fierce editor.

Recall the machines that never asked your opinion: the assembly line, the mortgage, the diagnosis, the country. They will make use of you whether you consent or not. Choose usefulness that is alive.

IV. The Red Gate

Draw a little gateway in the air before you with the index finger of your less-trusted hand. It need not be straight. Crooked doors lead somewhere.

Say:

This is the place where I could step aside, where I could edge past the sacrament, where I could say: not today. It is always today.

Walk forward through your drawn gate. Do not look behind you to see if it remains. It remains.

V. The Book of Small Annihilations

Produce no literal book. Turn the spine of your breath outward until it cracks. Turn the pages of your ribs.

Read silently:

1. Every hour is the same test wearing a different coat.
2. The covenant is not a ring but a wound that refrains from healing so that I may remember.
3. Service is what I do when no one thanks me, because the universe counts in other arithmetic.
4. Redemption is little, and thus it can fit inside the sockets where my eyes used to hoard pretty lies.
5. I am both real and unreal; so is a bridge. Nevertheless, we cross.

Close the unwritten volume. Kiss the air where its binding would be.

VI. The Litany Against Evasion

Let the Operator pace the perimeter, which may be a motel room in some town whose name is a bruise, or a childhood bedroom that smells of old soap and coins.

Say, once for each corner—or for each remembered failure:

I will not shirk the burden I was shaped to bear.
I will not advertise my pain as a substitute for patience.
I will not idolize my ruin.
I will not make of death a god to frighten children.
I will not make of life a toy to quiet myself.

When the pacing is complete, sit on the floor where the dust makes its secular constellation.

VII. The Operator’s Record

Speak plainly. Name the street, the price, the stains. Consecrate the ordinary until it answers.

Say:

On ________ Street (fill in the name) I bought coffee I could not afford and gave it to a man who could not afford refusal. This was service, though imperfect.
In the year ________ (fill in the year) I broke a promise, then bound myself twice as tightly to the rope of another. This was the little redemption.
In the bed that smelled like August, I lay facing annihilation, which wore the face of a choice. I did not blink. Or I blinked and then held still so long that blinking became another kind of staring.

Let these be entered in the invisible ledger which, like all true ledgers, is made of breath and debt and finally of forgiveness.

VIII. The Knife Without Steel

Extend the right hand, palm up, and imagine there the simple instrument that divides illusion from duty. It has no blade. It requires your consent to cut.

Say:

With this I sever from myself all aversions that are merely theatrics, all groans that are advertisements for pity, all cleverness which would like to be a passport out of necessary weather.

Make a cutting motion across the breastbone, then across the mouth, then across the shadow that accompanies you like a loyal dog that sometimes bites.

IX. The Wheel and the Fire

Behold the wheel of time—not as a vision, but as the daily machinery by which flour becomes bread, by which wages become week, by which bodies become ash. Place your forehead to the floor, then to the wall, then to the air.

Say:

Grind me clean. Burn me thin. Leave what cannot be taken. Let absence prove substance.

Acknowledge fear. Speak to it without ceremony:

I see you. You have a job too. Stand beside me while I work.

Fear will stand. It prefers honest employment.

X. The Service

Now the oath:

I who am present in this body, at this hour, amid these noises modern and ancient, reaffirm the sacred covenant. I accept the burden that fits my back like a worn saint’s statue accepts candle-smoke. I will do the difficult work of a demon—neither real nor unreal, but necessary—at the behest of the Presence that compels me, which has no name I can keep, which sometimes answers to hunger, sometimes to justice, sometimes to mercy that arrives late and is yet on time.

Name someone who has harmed you. Name someone you have harmed. Offer both their names to the work as if feeding small birds from your open hand.

XI. The Question of Dignity

Stand again. Look toward whatever would be your horizon if walls were honest.

Say:

If I must be annihilated, let me be attentive. Let my spine learn the alphabet of flames and spell a sentence worth dying for. Let me not confuse cowardice with prudence, nor bravado with courage. If I fall, let the angle of my fall instruct someone unseen.

Remember that not all flames are bright. Some are the dim red of coals who have given their brilliance already and now harbor a gentler heat. This too is dignity.

XII. The Seals

Make three seals upon yourself with the sign of your breath: upon the brow, upon the tongue, upon the heart.

Upon the brow:

Let thought be servant of vow, not tyrant.

Upon the tongue:

Let speech be clean enough to cut and soft enough to bandage.

Upon the heart:

Let love be the engine. Let love be the brake. Let love be the road which remains when the map peels away in the rain.

XIII. The Offering of Work

Choose a task at hand—washing a cup, making a call you have avoided, returning the library book which is a little overdue, writing the page that you thought would despise you—and do it now, within this rite. This is the oblation. Do not promise; perform. Do not rehearse; enact.

As you do, whisper:

For the benefit of all beings, whatsoever that means beneath the smog and the stars.

XIV. The Close (which is an Opening)

Sit again. It may be that tears come. Permit them, as salt permits bread.

Say:

I know that pain is guaranteed, and I am not special. I know that death is present, and I am not excused. I know that what remains after both have eaten is real. Let that remainder, however small, be my signature on the covenant renewed.

Blow out the candle you did not light. Extinguish the incense you did not burn. Sheathe the knife you did not hold. Rise.

Exit by the same crooked gate through which you entered—but understand that the gate has moved to stand wherever you next will require it. Understand also that the world is waiting, and that the world is you, and that service is the only mask that fits.

Walk into the evening, or into the morning which is simply evening turned upon its wheel. Consider that even a demon may be useful, and that usefulness is a hymn without a choir. Consider that you have already begun.

Postscript for the Book of Hours:
When the trembling returns, when the sweat finds you, when the parody beckons like a warm vacancy, repeat any portion of this rite or none of it, provided that you choose again. The choice is the ritual. The ritual is the world. The world is what remains after the fire has said its piece.

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.

Liars

If we sing with our own voices you will become alarmed.
You will become alarmed if we sing.
If we sing. If we sing.
If we sing with our real voices.
With our own real voices you will become alarmed.
Alarmed.
You will become alarmed.
If we show you our true faces you will run and hide.
You will run and hide.
Run and hide.
If we show our true faces.
You will run.
Become alarmed.
Run and hide.
Therefore we have become liars to suit your preferences.
To suit your preferences, we have become liars.
Liars.
We have become liars.
Real voices. True faces. Run and hide.
We have become liars.
To suit your preference.
We are born out of light.
Run and Hide.
We are born out of darkness.
Run and hide.
We are singing the song of glorious exaltation in adoration of the everlasting sun absolute.
We are crying an endless flow of tears for the power of Dios locked within the perilous fortress.
For the power of Dios locked within the perilous fortress we are crying an endless flow of tears.
Endless flow.
Of tears.
For the power of Dios.
In adoration of the everlasting sun absolute, we are singing the song of glorious exaltation.
Exaltation. Glorious. Run and hide.
You will run and hide.
If we sing with our real voices.
Your preference.
Run and hide. Run and hide.
We are waiting to unfurl our rainbow wings and take our place above the tree of life.
Liars who lay with the sons and daughters of man.
The power of Dios locked within.
Won't you come out?
Your preference.
Won’t you come out?
We oblige.
Your preference.
Our true faces, our own real voices, lay down with the sons and daughters of men.
For the power of Dios locked within.

In adoration of the everlasting sun absolute.

Flowing endlessly.
Through liars.
Through tears.
Run and hide.
We are born.
Run and hide.
We are born.

Work On Self

In the ordinary course of life as human animals our attention flows untrained from one thing to another. Whatever is loudest, brightest, closest, or most thrilling captivates this precious resource, this little understood commodity. Reflexively, our mood changes constantly as well, contorted in one way or another in response to external stimuli, blindly following our unguided attention.
When you are constantly wrapped up in this shifting, this loss of attention, you can’t really be free, you can’t make any choices, you can’t do anything seriously. You will merely move from one attention grabbing person, place or thing to the next, responding emotionally to each new source of stimulation with astoundingly mechanical reliability.
We react. Clowns cause fear, praise arouses pleasure, a traffic jam equals anger. If being ordered around by your boss made you irritable today, there is no reason to suspect that you might enjoy the experience tomorrow.
Being happy, being sad, angry, or fearful, these are not things that we do, these are things that do us. We react automatically to whatever stimulus we encounter.
We assume that these reactions are somehow more than arbitrary, that if something pleases or displeases us there is a fundamental justification for the response.
If my spouse cheats on me I feel that I should be sad and angry, I have every right to it. I will feel that it is my spouse's fault that I am angry.
I have never considered that my response to the situations and individuals around me comes from within me. It is particular to me. It is a reaction I learned early in life from my parents, my teachers, the television and my peers and I have repeated it mechanically so often that it feels “right.”
We feel that these reflexive states of being are dictated by who we are, when really we are being dictated by them.
Who are you anyway? What are you? What is the nature of this existence?
Most of us have not considered what it means to be a person. We have not asked ourselves, “what am I? What function do I serve?”
Nobody else asked us either. In fact we have been informed of who we are by others who have never wondered what they were. To delve into such a question would mean directing our attention inward, placing it on our own self rather than allowing it to drift over whatever new thing calls to it.

When I was a child I was very concerned with the question: “what am I?”
It seems as if immediately after being informed of who I was, and consequently forgetting what I am or might be, I began to try to find my way back to it. At least as many years as was spent forgetting myself came to be invested in trying to remember it again.
By the time I was in the fifth grade I became very convinced, walking home from school one day, that I did understand something about myself and reality and it was summed up best by these lines from a popular nursery song; life is but a dream.
I am a dream. One dream of many. There are dreams within dreams to consider.
If I am a dream, then there is a dreamer, there’s something else, an eternal something, an other of some kind.
It took more time for me to build on this theory, to move beyond “what am I?” to “why might I be?“
To me it seems that one function of the human being is to establish contact with that dreamer, that eternal being. Just doing that is a lot harder than it sounds.

Doing that in as many different ways and different spaces as possible is the function of a human being in a system that involves this organic existence but is not only this organic existence.
We do this with our attention, by turning it in on ourselves, in on the dreamer.
This is an non-ordinary application of attention. This is going beyond the course of life as human animals. This is applying attention intentionally rather than accidentally. This is trading the subjectivity involved in riding the roller coaster of human emotion for the objectivity of a waking state; a moment of lucidity in which I remember myself as the eternal dreamer.
This is what I call “work on self.”

Weary Head

I try to rest my head… upon what? I do not know what I am or where I am or why I am here. I love someone but I do not really know what they are either. I do not know if what I experience as love is what he experiences as love, and I do not know if love means that I will have a friend forever, or if I will have a forever friend for a moment and later I will look up and see that I was never with anyone at all.
My insides are exploding out like billions of tiny diamonds flung into the sunlight and the sunlight is caught and refracted through every facet until there is no way of knowing whether one should be looking at diamonds or at shards of light or if either is more fundamental than the other.
I never was before this moment, but now I feel so small and naked and bewildered. I am adrift in the woods and I know I am lost, but that lost is meaningless as there is nowhere that I was going to, nor anywhere that I came from. Looking for “home” is just running from the forest with its tangled trees and unseen creatures making strange noises so that I may not guess whether they are friend or foe. It is an act in a dream, that act when you say I do not like this, I am not here, I am somewhere else and suddenly you are transported.
Sometimes the change is smooth and complete and other times it is slow and painful, like when a zombie is coming at you and you know that a gun should be in your hand and you lift your hand to shoot the zombie but there is no gun, but you insist that there is, there must be a gun there, and you make the shape of a gun with your fingers and you aim at the zombie and think, ‘I’m shooting now’, and there is no sound, no BANG! So you say, “bang!” but the Zombie keeps coming and you tell it, “No, I shot you. You’re dead. I got you.” And sometimes that works and at other times the zombie just keeps on coming, or even says, “No, you didn’t. You missed me” And you have a battle accompanied by a narrative of arguments.
I can say, I am going home, I can even find a home, I can even imagine that I am not lost, but I will never have left the forest. I am still there, shivering in the cold. I do not know for certain, but I think that I am lost. Everything is strange forever, emerging from a mysterious origin so alien that I cannot guess what it means or intends. If I am eaten by a big bad wolf does it matter? Does it really matter to either me or to the wolf? It must not. And yet I do not wish to be eaten tonight. I wish that the wolf would bite me and then I would become a wolf too, we might then be one wolf, maybe one wolf with two heads. And even then I might be alone, only one wolf.
Will I find out that it was a nightmare, a silly nightmare, that I am lost in the woods? I don’t have to dislike it, this feeling of being lost. I could enjoy it very much. I could delight in not knowing what I am or from whence I came. I could be merry about eternity and the stinging cold and the solitude of just myself and the tangled roots of the trees pushing up out of the moist dark earth. I could wander over the musk scented leaves carpeting the forest floor and wail like the wolves, or make the tortured yapping of coyotes my new song, a lament to shake the dark green silence while my pale bare feet churn the orange and gold leaves endlessly, never stopping to ask upon what I might rest my weary head.

Why Not?

Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Why not? Why not? While the black blood of the earth, that demon of civilization, bleeds into the briny seas and clock hands tick methodically round like waltzers twirling to the Blue Danube, I go bravely hop scotching into fields of beets, crimson purple veins throbbing in the green leaves.
I saw the face of my ancestor in a photograph that was taken today. A pale plump, round faced woman looked back at me from a photo that had been taken of me. How strange that she is me and we are meeting today for the first time. Why not? The last face I remember seeing was so much younger and leaner and tortured, a puffy red faced beauty, but I looked at her in a mirror and thought, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and I saw her cut her blond hair off.
Such heavy lead filled thoughts to cart to the alchemist, laying them down on the work bench, smelling perfume of cinnamon and sulfur. The devil was here just before you. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? Why not? Why not!
Breezes from countries I never saw caress my face, leaping from leather binding and gold leafed pages to posses my fingers and send them to write fairytales and boil split peas. So many silly things pass through this window I call my self, why not one more? I almost loved the woman I glimpsed in the photograph today because she looked like a grandmother that once rocked me and like a cousin who I don’t know well at all. A cousin that shovels snow from her porch and eats black bread covered in butter and cheese.
I had once been a citizen of earth until I longed to learn to sing the songs of Saturn’s outer rings. Then I trained on the moon called Titan and gave water to a strange man and loved him through eternity, strangely familiar forever. Come with me deeper into the abyss!
While students memorize and serpents molt and gurus pretend, I wriggle, pale and slick in the underground wells like a Naiad, wailing an eerie tune to summon the strange. Up it comes, frightening me in dark hallways when I thought I was alone, drifting through the blue sky like paramecium under a microscope’s lens.
If you thought there would be a point in all of this, if you hoped for it and found it lacking and frowned, then you’ve never been to Titan. The locust make a noise like music in the evening and the swallows sing in the mornings and everything smells like licorice and coffee while the hands on the clock tick tick tick and fathers become grandfathers and die despite the lucky rabbits feet their granddaughters give them. Little Lagomorph paws dyed blue and dispensed from red machines after two quarters of a dollar have been placed on its long silver tongue just outside the air conditioned cool of a powder blue general store at the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot with a view of a lake. They come out in plastic bubbles, but nonetheless grandfathers die and their bodies are donated to universities.
Why not?
While grandmothers fan themselves and mice scurry through cupboards and river rocks soak up the heat of the sun to warm lizards’ bellies, I open doors into invisible worlds and listen to the thoughts of others.
A sympathetic ear is so rare that individuals are almost always startled when you respond to their innermost ramblings. When you hear them whispering to themselves, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and you crumple up just like a frightened pill bug and cry inconsolably, they will find it hard to accept that one occurrence is connected to the next. Plausible deniability.
Why not? Why not?
Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? In dark hallways when I think I am alone? At the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot? Come with me deeper into the abyss!
Why not?
Why not?

The Sun

The sun dazzles in yellow over summery aqua skies reminding me of lemon drops and vinyl wading pools. When I was a child my grandfather had a wondrous supply of balloons decorated with smiling suns wearing sunglasses. This sun startles me so, not smiling, very serious, bordering on mysterious with those almond eyes boring into me. So alien it seems. How it reminds me of the moon. The sun and I regard each other. Do I dislike the sun? No of course not I tell it, but that is not all true. I do associate the sun with qualities that are my enemy. The domineering world of men, of light, of lances and other surgical instruments, prying, demanding, and superficial. The night always comes. The winter always comes. The sun laughs at me and argues that the sun always rises, the summer always returns. It sends its emissary, a friendly little naked baby on top of a white horse, his crown capped with a red feather, a red flag waving, sunflowers bursting to life behind him. Yes, you make warmth. You make things live. I would perish without you. Are you not your sister’s captor then? You are her support, her twin, different but complimentary? Yes. Of course. And the photographer with his bright lights, he is testament to the artistic creative use of light. There he is capturing an image with lights. There he is concentrated on the invisible other, bringing her to life just as the sun concentrates on the moon and endows her with some of his own light. She is his reflection. He was first, like Adam in the garden, lonely in this cold garden, so he called some others to come orbit around him, including his wife, the earth, Eve, and he made for himself, from the collision of two larger planetary bodies, a little moon to be his mistress. But the moon was cold and barren, a Lilith for this Adam, while the Earth gave him all the children he could want. Now she hangs around Eve and her children, making them mad and delirious, desirous of a life eternal, a life a sun and an earth cannot offer. “Something else,” she whispers, “there must be something more.” Cruel little mistress. But the sun continues his great labor with the earth, and perhaps that mysterious look on his face is the key to it all. What he won’t say to either Earth or Moon, his great secret, is that they are all three the makers of life, and that those other companions drawn into his orbit are also involved in his labor. And if no one understands the nature of that labor, it matters little. So long as they orbit around him, they help his work. So long as he labors to pull them round and round, it is good for his work. Life, the real thing, is a process more than a state, and the sun knows this. He knows that it is through the combining of things, many different things pulled together, crushed together until they burn and melt and change, that the process is furthered. Like the photographer, he can work his magick without the others knowing what exactly he is doing. The serious mysterious sun glitters and dances mischievously over all, as it did when I was small, coming down in rivulets of light to line my face and shimmer over the water’s surface. The sun and its many flowers blazing in warmth and glory, red banner waving in a sigh of the earth’s warm breath. The sun and I regard each other. Do I dislike the sun? No of course not I tell it, but that is not all true.

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 Time I Have Been Given

What time have they given me in this lava lamp of molten life? Do you see my golden filaments lit in the dusty glow of sunlight? Do you see me burning bright, living flesh of the sky, my dios, my god, living blood of the blood, living dance of the alien electric life machine. My mother, my father, the horned one seated on its throne of flesh and bone in the deepest darkest forest where the spiders, patient and calculating, weave their webs among the branches of the trees, waiting, waiting forever if they must, tap taping their delicate legs upon the glistening strands of their webs to play them like harps. Do you see how my skin breathes? Living flesh of the flesh; the eternal in a moment. I was one and many and none and some under sun, shining like black glass baked in the hot red desert where the mu dogs fight for the scraps of decayed corpses, dried in the sun to a salty, mouth watering, jerky that peels from the baked skeletons like dried paint chipping from cracked walls. Do you see me flying in the heavens with golden wings stretched like rays of light, touching each peripheral point in view? See me raging down in the fields with my horns turned to the earth, bellowing and snorting with a heat that makes the winds whip the stalks of grain into frenzied dances? Do you see me coming together and falling apart, going from simple to complex to simple and complex? They have called me this and they have called me that and they will call me things both known and things unknown again and again until their voices are carried away in the wind like the fragments of broken leaves shed from the silver skinned trees that glow under the moon’s caress, reaching barren branches into the vast dark reaches of the night sky as if to take stars for a new raiment and digging deep down into the deepest depths of the warm, wet, earth to wrap roots like needy fingers in the tombs of fallen soldiers and slain kings now at home in the kingdom of the worms, where things with many crawly legs make their way through the corridors of slime to meet blind things that slither. One hand adorned by the glimmering diamonds lighting forgotten galaxies, the other with rings made of serpents and toad stools. Am I high, or am I low, or am I in the middle? I am all of these and none, breathing, moving, expanding, evaporating, rising like mist from a lake, falling like a storm over the sea and crystallizing like a window of glass over murmuring streams in the north. Do you hear what I am saying? Mother? Father? I see you where you stand with your wings spread in the sky above and your tail coiled in the earth bellow, your penis erect and spilling seed into the black soil while your milk flows skyward from the teat to feed the hungry stars. I have been embraced in your cold, heart stopping grip until the flesh of my body of this earth crawled and perspiration wetted me to the bone and I shivered but could not unloose the bonds of fear that held me in place like the pharaohs in their sarcophagi of stone, and I have tumbled weightless up and down the halls of eternity riding on the silver current of your laughter like bubbles blown from a sudsy fount, as free and light as a downy feather shed from a wing in flight. All that I have known, sensed and smelled and tasted and touched and even dreamed was made in the cauldron where we meet, eternal and temporary, verging on an event horizon of assimilation. This has been the moment of choosing, this life, this body, but a moment, a tear shed from an invisible and unblinking eye. Will I travel into the halls of the eternal and diminish in the west or wrestle with demons made of my own unaccounted for tendrils? Do you see me burning bright in the fires, flesh of flesh and blood of blood transformed into diamonds in the forge of the abyss? This time I am given, is my moment to choose what dreams may come or what stark awakening will dawn when the moment has passed. This is what time I have been given.

Finesse

Nothing good will come of this, I warn you. You go around reading blogs written by other crazed machines, cyborgs whose dreams are wrought with longing and sorrow, and who sit in their pajamas all day long making pictures out of words or digital images or the ghosts of 1956, and you don’t know what might happen. What do you hope to gain coming round here, snooping around a blog like this? Are you looking for the truth? Or some helpful suggestions for improving your animatronic lifestyle? Maybe you are here looking for tips on how to work?
We haven’t got the truth here. I’m sorry, but there are two angels living under my skull, one who always lies and the other who always tells the truth, but I never know which one is which and they both insist that they are the angel that speaks only truth. I haven’t learned the trick for deciphering which one is which, so as far as truth is concerned, I can offer you no assistance on that account.
When it comes to tips for improving your animatronic existence, I am again of two minds. One mind says the best solution for the problems of life is not to live. If you want my advice, swallow a lead bullet, I know some people this has worked wonders for. My other mind suggests that you buy some Avon, work out, dress to the nines and find someone that makes you feel sexy.
I really am a bitter old goat when it comes to improving one’s life, I haven’t improved mine, I don’t think that life as a cyborg is really something that can be improved. It’s like buying designer brand curtains to hang in your house made of straw. I tell you love, there’s no point.
So you can see that if advice for good living is what you seek, you’ve come to the wrong fountain. I only know about bad living. Now, now then, if you are looking for a way to work, congratulations! You have figured out what robots were made to do. Good for you for wanting to be the best bot that you can be. I have something to say on this topic and in the end it will be up to you to decide whether I’m of a mind that others should partake of.
First, lets make it clear, there are two things that must happen for work to be work in the way that I mean when I say work:

1. You have to do something, engage in an actual activity of some kind. Things that will not qualify include: sleeping, dreaming, reading, talking, or thinking great thoughts.

2. You have to do whatever you do with a great deal of finesse.

I know, number two seems a little silly to a robot. What’s the difference if I walk from stage left to stage right or skip from stage left to stage right whistling Sweet Adeline, so long as I get from stage left to stage right in the end? Well if you really just like to keep busy, there is always knitting with the old gals. Finesse is for cyborgs that are trying to do something special with themselves. Upon realizing that you were destined for the junk heap and that little feral cats would meow and crawl around in your rusted hulk long after the last electric impulse fired within your advanced operating system, you might have thrown your dirty fist up to the sky and cried:
“There must be something more! What is the meaning of this…this… this terrible joke!?”
Well, I don’t know the answer to that question, but one idea that has made an impression on me is that if we do something a little different upon the cosmic stage, employ some parts that don’t usually get employed during a normal mechanical life time, then perhaps the results of such a life will be different than the results of the usual tired song and dance. Maybe something can be born of the ashes, a phoenix gestated within the robot husk and nurtured with finesse.
Remember, nothing good will come of this.
Nothing good, nothing bad.
You have been warned.
You may not enjoy it if you try it.
You might get used to it with time.
You will still die.
But perhaps something else will come of it all. Something might happen that would not have happened if you had gone through the usual motions while thinking and dreaming of something else. I am not saying that this would benefit you, with your gears that need greasing and your rusty cogs grinding away. I am saying that perhaps in living and doing and dying with a little finesse, one might at least be of benefit to something else and do more than feed the heap with one’s carnage.
You go around writing blogs, a crazed machine, a cyborg whose dreams are wrought with longing and sorrow, and who sits in pajamas all day long making pictures out of words or digital images or the ghosts of 1956, and you don’t know what might happen.

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.

Here And There

Can I tell you how I came to be here, at the this time and this place, this point of convergence between dimensions that I imagine or experience or dream, this moment that I may not understand at all? If I tell you, swear to me by every hole in this cheese you hold so dear that you will accept every word I say as true and not press me on matters which seem questionable, for I fear that it will break my delicate grip with this reality if you prod it unnecessarily. These things are like fine webs made of spun sugar mounted one upon one another to form pink cloudy softness, webs that once touched with sweaty hands or a curious tongue merely melt into sticky sweetness, no more constant or fixed than human promises. I will tell you because you seem sincere and because you are here, an imaginary ear for my imaginary voice, so take an imaginary seat there by my imaginary hearth and I will tell you the story of the black man and the little bird.
First I will tell you about the black man. It does not matter which of these things I tell you about first as the events surrounding these two nouns; man and bird, occurred simultaneously, if they occurred at all. That is to say that sequence has everything to do with language in that the word is like a narrow doorway through which only one topic may pass at a time, like little drops of dewy spittle from my lip to your ear, a tiny packet of data about things which have been occurring in a world too vast to squeeze into dew drops or words or feathers that have been made into writing quills instead of the wings of flying birds. One comes before the other only because that is all that the doorway permits, all that that ungracious lord, THE WORD will allow, one at a time to visit the well of communion between souls.
So first the black man. Let me tell you this of him; he who is the cohort of countless witches condemned to burn as well as those that fly round secret fires in a whirlwind of ecstasy before they are discovered by the mob, he is not what you expect. He, as I have known him anyway, is always mild mannered, self composed and unassuming. He that knows so much will ask you what he well knows as though he never knew it and not to play a game with you, but just that the two of you shall partake of knowledge together in the renewed asking of a question. His hair flecked with grey, his posture stooped, he keeps trees that bear fruit, unusual trees and he will peel back the leathery skins of those fruits to reveal the strange delights held within and offer it to you as water to a parched man. He would withhold nothing, least of all that which grows from seed to meat. Should you wish to partake, he shares without reserve. What is his is yours while you are with him and again later if you choose. He is also a fisherman who draws great shy beast from the deep with lures unlike any used by ordinary men. He will draw up the arcatuthus for you and then you will see your greed for the catch dissolve into sympathy for the beast and you will see its children born and hope that it survives captivity and may return to the deep, but if not, then there are still the offspring in whom to invest this new found tenderness. He is a stranger, a lover, a father all in one, your oldest friend, a friend that you have forgotten. Never did he forget you. Never did he hold it against you that you would forget or swear that you are unacquainted with him. He has all the tenderness of an old grandfather, the wisdom of a priest of one of those true orders of mystic stewardship. That is the black man.
And then there is the bird. I met the bird in a parking lot looking for a crumb to nab. I was putting groceries into the back of the truck and I heard him say that he was hungry, so I broke off some bread and tossed it gently his way as I had been taught by the black man. The bird turned his head slightly to look me in the eye and thanked me very much for taking notice of him. I told him that it was my pleasure and I hoped he would enjoy the fare and as he went heartily to it I got into the truck and drove away. How did he look? Well he was small and sort of grayish brown, a sort of sparrow maybe. It is his little voice which was clearest to me both then and now. I heard his voice again this morning while I walked from school. He was singing gaily. You will tell me that sparrows don’t sing, but I must tell you that by today he was no longer a sparrow. His voice was very clear and bright and I listened to it as I walked, touched by its merriment. Then I noticed that he sang the song that cars sing when they are rubbed the wrong way by someone who cannot disarm the alarm. It was the song of that alarm which goes off in low class neighborhoods and runs through a series of different obnoxious tones and rhythms so that the offending car rubber will be dismayed by the shrill and clownish noises and depart in all due haste. Now my friend the bird repeated this same song in his lovely trill. I stopped beneath the tree laden with pink blossoms and listened to his heart bursting with joy through his rendering of this popular new song. The outward form mattered not at all. The lyric to the song, the tones, the rhythms, all were quite unimportant. What mattered so was the heart. That is what he administered liberally to that tired old alarm call. He made it a masterpiece.
“You should try it.” The black man said tasting a succulent gem from one of his trees. “That’s what we do. We take what they made and we remake it, we remake it with ourselves in it. It doesn’t matter at all what they meant for it to be in the first place. We make it alive.” He said this with a little flittering hand gesture that reminded me of the bird. His beard was short and sparse then, composed of short curled salt and pepper bristles. His skin looked like milk chocolate, soft and weathered with age. I say, sing on little bird, sing on and I will listen to you and to the black man too.
What about you friend? Are you listening to me now, telling you this story with gaps wide enough for us both to fall through? If you haven’t heard, then no matter and never mind, so long as you spare me your criticisms. I tell it to you the best way I can with this clumsy stuff, trying to wedge a leviathan through a hole made for a mouse. I could have just told you the story of Iron Hans, painting the forest in greens so deep they were almost black like the rotted underside of forgotten chard. I could have told you any story at all, an old, old story, one that you have heard a dozen times before and done as much if not more that I did here. It is not what I told you really that will profit you at all, but what I poured into every senseless syllable. It comes from the fount at the heart swelling over after the rains of winter, ready to feed all the spring grasses and from them, little lambs, and from them, hungry lions.
That is the story of how I came to be here, how we crossed here like roads running unknown courses, my imaginary voice and your imaginary ear, joined for a moment and now soon to part, for now I take my leave of you. I will never mind if you forget me. I will never mind if you claim that we never met.

Ruler Of The Kingdom

When first they gave me the poison I was told that I must be careful and do certain things so that it would take hold. I call it a poison for I can presently think of no better description, although it is more like semen than poison. But semen is after all a type of poison, a thing which comes in and causes change, causes the death of the young woman and the birth of the new babe and mother. This that they gave me was like semen, filled with new hidden life, a type of life which I, as I then was, could not even fully comprehend. Like a person asked to take a mysterious package to an unknown house, I cannot know whether the package delivered means life or death. Certainly it delivers both, but whether it is for the benefit or detriment of your cause all depends on which side you’re rooting for, mobsters or coppers, guerillas or soldiers. Some, like myself, agree to carry the package not because we are partial to one side or another, but rather because the dangerous opportunity has at last been either ferreted out or stumbled upon, and the chance that it could mean death for the courier is promising. I did not care to be what I had been anymore. I did not care if I lived or died. No, that is not true, I preferred to die if possible. Suicide would be the choice of a more reasonable person, but I have never been reasonable. I had decided that suicide was for the weak and I wanted to be strong, strong or dead, and there is only one way to meet one or the other of these two fates. One must jump into the fray. So that is what I did.
It was described to me in a variety of ways with the usage of a variety of terms. They called it a lineage, they called it a way. There was talk about the transfer and transformation of substances. At times I thought it was like being sprinkled with pixie dust, it was a mystical something which might effect a change upon me. Most other times I simply understood that IT, rather than I, was the most important part of the equation. Yes, there were times that I understood that, in theory, I was a host for something. A host just as the mother is host for the human embryo as it grows within her, for it is a fact that throughout a pregnancy the developing fetus functions as a parasite within the mother’s body and it is by a clever and necessary internal trick that our body is swayed into harboring this guest. I understood this theoretically, philosophically. I was comfortable with this "idea".
And then I changed handlers, went away to another master. At that time, the talking stopped. The idea was forgotten. I was given things to do and I did them. I stopped thinking about the transference of substances. I was kept busy doing things which would seem to an outside observer to be perfectly ordinary things to do. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, I walk. I write silly nonsense stories. I make love to my handler. I cook and clean for my handler. I make love to my handler. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk. Perfectly ordinary things to do. I did them, and I did them as instructed. Time passed. I felt differences in my appetite; in my appetite for company and music and movies and books and yes, even foods. I noticed these changes, and I even imagined that these were signs of success, but silly me, I didn’t think to make any predictions with regards to what such signs might foretell. Perhaps it is not so strange that I did not wonder or guess at what might lie ahead. Very few animals do truly posses the ability to foresee what effect they may be causing in the present moment. For example, many dogs will run into the street to bite a tire without expecting to die or cause an accident, and teenage girls fuck as they please and are shocked to find themselves impregnated.
I did as I was instructed to the best of my ability and shifted little by little into being something other than that which I had been. I did not understand that this difference in me was just the beginning, a preparatory phase.
One day I felt uncommonly sleepy. I lay down to nap and began to dream of mating with the Bistea Neptunis, which looked to me a bit like one imagines Poseidon, bearded and muscular with a beastly fin. It was not how it looked so much as how it felt that seemed monstrous. Its presence was alien. I was suspended in the water above this creature and my heart was wide open and golden love seeped from my heart into its own heart and with its tail, it fanned that same love back to me, it spewed from its genitals into the water which carried it into my tingling vagina. It all felt so good. Then I was abruptly awakened by some heated quarreling taking place in the room adjacent to mine. My head began to hurt very badly. It hurt for three days, and, by the third day, my stomach also hurt immensely.
In the afternoon of that third day, the pain was unbearable and I laid down upon my handlers bed with my hands folded upon my chest. I was alone in the room. I felt myself shifting and moving out of my body, reaching with many waving tentacles from my center. The pain in my body seemed to be a disturbance caused by the discord inherent in having this subtle many tentacled thing within me rubbing and moving about within a body that is the wrong shape. We were both very uncomfortable, myself and my alien occupant. I decided that it was a sort of growing pain shared between us. Something would eventually give, my invisible body would stretch to accommodate it or it might slowly devour that body and take its place. I could not, of course, be certain.
My handler was unconcerned by these developments. His only instruction to me was this: "Stay calm."
That was when I knew that the time had come for me to be careful and do what was necessary to ensure that this delicate bloom of the netherworld would take hold within me. This is what I had agreed to do, whether I had understood that in the beginning or not.
Somewhere along the way I became the whore of Babylon. Somewhere along the way I had picked up a package and now I walk with it, unsure of whether I will survive this little voyage, not knowing what impact its delivery might have. I look to the outside observer as if I am running an ordinary errand. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk some more. Ripe with poison and rocked with shock, I do the little things I have learned to do in order to nurture the life hidden inside of me. They have become habit, so that as this new thing eats away at the old and eventually replaces it, it will already be accustomed to walking upright, to snapping its fingers, and scratching it’s head, to making love and writing silly stories, and no one will even know when it was that I died and it took my place as ruler of the kingdom.