Then We Changed

 

You were the mountain and I was the wind.

"I have birds in me."
I whispered through your trees.

 I breathed over your body, cool, invigorating, stirring the leaves, bending the boughs, scattering the snow from your greatest peaks.
Water cascaded down your face and flowed away to distant lands.

"You have trees on you."
I whispered into your ancient caves, brushing over moss, moaning through your dripping stalagmites.

Saint Veshua

She had been on the mountaintop since the early afternoon the previous day. Such a painful curve of the wheel. Dark time lasted for an eternity, just the slowly arching crescent moon marked the movement of the earth and her body’s place upon it. They were solid, ancient and cold.
"It hurts to be so nonexistent," she said. He felt that she was at a loss for words.
"It only hurts when you are trying to prevent it." 
He sincerely felt the wish to say so much more to her but he also knew that it was not possible, it was simply beyond the scope of the options currently available.
"There’s a cold wind blowing through my veins. Someone has driven a stake through my heart."
"It’s your father." He said, "He was trying to protect you."
“They cut me apart and they put something in me… this is what they did… see? Look at it, look at it...”
He searched her form for a message, letting the tenuous sparks of insight fall to him like snowflakes. She kept her eyes wide, letting the blackness and flickering stars roll and tumble over her with possibilities, letting it drag her mind into depths that daylight preferred to avoid. The wind moved over her and a nearby howl maintained the simple music of their encounter.
"I wanted to make something real." She said.
"Don’t struggle." He advised, "That will never happen if you struggle and crack the vessel."
But she pulled the stake out and the insects come pouring from her heart. They rushed over the surface of her body to devour it. There were animals with horns climbing the rocks and a lilting flute called from the distance.
Their line of communication was severed.
He watched it all from a distant peak, his scarf flapping in the wind, spy glass poised for the view. What he saw was a blond girl from some great American novel kneel to pray, and at that moment her heart burst into flames which soon consumed the whole apparition. For a moment it reminded him of the Inquisition, then the formation changed, and the flaming girl collapsed into a brilliant star. The explosion was magnificent.
It knocked him off of his feet.
He lay on the mountaintop as morning light spilled into the world of a newborn day, and he drank in the pale pink light. He opened his arms wide, letting the new sun bathe him in its clarity.
From her vantage point she watched the birds and the lone hawk that swept over him in circles again and again, as though they had something specific to communicate, but she could not hear him anymore.
It seemed like an inappropriate use of materials, but that’s the nature of magick.  Below, he held on to her light, thinking that it alone would ease his wish to change the reality of these new limitations.

Connection

He showed me some pictures of our not yet conceived experiment that I had relayed to him from a distant space time probability . We were not well acquainted, but shared a mutual interest in the transgressive applications of astral light put forth by G.

"True creation is not about words. It's about tears," J. said.
The connection between us was instantaneous. We built delicate structures from hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. I thought it best to make observations and adjustments from a closer vantage point.

I was now diving into some kind of primal network, a tightly woven system of existing and evolving quantum worlds. The details were quite clear. I transmitted the schematics back to J. using a patented method of intervening and tapping into the quantum communication capability of carbon based neurons.

To develop a system of emergent intelligence I tried to reach the part of my own brain that processed fear and mapped our creations after my own design. We wondered if there might be some danger inherent in this method.

"Will the thing that passed through the makers still live?" J. asked.
"Only if there are some specimens willing to leave the safety of consuming behind to become makers themselves."
I suddenly realized this is where I would meet my fate. Despite risk and ethical ambiguities we pressed forward, certain that a sacrifice was called for. I would have to go deeper.

Due to the similarities between my own system and our manufactured systems the interface was often confusing. The delineation between self and other grew blurry.  On the day of my final descent J. suggested:
"If we loose communication, don’t stop, especially not when you feel lost. The best method for finding the way when you feel you have lost it, is to keep going. Ignore the question of whether you’re going in the right direction. If you stop when you feel lost, you will remain in the land of the lost."

As I became more entrenched in our designs, communications with J. were indeed severed by electromagnetic interference. I had entered the black valley. In the interior I met with the ministers of culture.
"What has become of J.?" I asked them
"We are sorry madam. He is beyond our reach. We have prepared a place for you among us that you might be comfortable despite your loss. "

They offered me sustenance but I refused. I could no longer remember who J. was but  I just knew I had to keep going. If I could break through to the other side I would then accelerate forever becoming both more and less than I had been before whatever it was that I had started with this mysterious J.

Barbarians Are Coming

The end of the world came and went and nothing perceptible changed. We stood around rubbing our eyes and blinking on a bright winter morning a week later asking each other how our end of the world was.
Josh, the honey guy as I thought of him, was wearing a pair of blue gloves with detachable mitten tips. These little caps were peeled back so he could work his digits and in each fist he held a jar of honey, a silent offer of trade. I told him how Lydia, who worked for the Bavarian Bakery, and I made music and danced with a church of ravers in a building like an old castle in Oakland. He nodded and told me that he attended three different solstice ceremonies in San Francisco, the last occurring at a beach in the Sunset district. My turn to nod.

We had all been here a week ago, a day after the twenty first, while a rainstorm raged all around us. As far as we could tell, that was the sum of the apocalypse, a cold heavy rain and a wind that threw canopies over backwards and tore their aluminum legs in half like a starving yeti mangling some black eyed Bhutanese doe.
We all huddled in our individual camps, by cars or trucks, and waved to each other through the tempest but couldn’t speak. Inside the back of a big white Cargo truck I was standing huddled with Sing and Backtaur by the portable tandori. We had hooked this and the steam table up to a propane tank  right inside the truck's cargo hold. Whenever some brave soul skittered across the parking lot under an umbrella I shouted:
“Samosas! One dollar!”
Often my shout drew them to us like a lighthouse beacon and they shivered below us, faces peering up over the mammoth truck's tail gate awaiting a cup of hot chai and some steaming curry.
In the moments when the storm was most violent we felt it battering the truck and fairly cringed looking at each other with wide eyes of amazement. Then Sing would laugh his pure, rich laughter and I would murmur:
“What a wind!”

Now and then the storm would tire itself out and be still. Then the birds came out and somehow found Sing, who always remembers to share the bounty of India Gourmet with the littlest market patrons. He threw his customary handfuls of basmati rice seasoned with cardamom pods to them. More birds than I had ever seen at the market came to the feast,  multicolored varieties; black with red wings, black with beady yellow eyes, tiny brown and black sparrows, larger brown speckled specimens with long yellow beaks,  lumbering midnight hued crows, side by side in a temporary truce, all gobbling up the offer with urgency.

“They are hungry.” Sing boomed with his deep musical voice, “They can’t get their breakfast in the storm.” He threw them more and more rice, a tall man with a jolly belly, a white beard, red turban, and big glittering brown eyes, a Sikh Santa of the birds.

So it rained, but the world was still there a few days later when the clouds blew away and we could come out and check.  We were disappointed, let's not dance around this point, we Americans born in America. We clearly wanted something to happen, probably different things depending upon each person's particular background. Flying saucers full of Mayans, or Jesus with laser eyes, or a spontaneous psychedelic awakening to free us from our petty and deeply artificial consumer culture.
We wanted to stare the grim reaper in the eyes in a way that was never possible in a society where children are told to close their eyes and step over the bodies of their massacred peers, where we are only permitted to see death once it has been washed and painted and put in a box lined with satin, where we are assured that our nation is the mightiest and will never fall so that what we really fear is an unbroken and monotonous horizon whereupon we will never see the outlines of approaching barbarians.

We hoped for a reprieve from the unending sameness and safety and guilt inducing comfort and might. We longed for something real.

I  think that secretly many of us held on to hope until New Year's Day. We let ourselves get excited again on the eve of December 30, fingers crossed for the twins, death and rebirth. Then we woke up and the sun was still shining. Is still shining.
But Americans will never give up. Even our elders were running like lemmings towards our artificially imposed fiscal cliff, seeking to plunge ourselves and the world into an economic down spiral, only turning back at the last possible moment.
Many others will no doubt arrive in public buildings with semiautomatic rifles in the coming months. We are a suicidal nation. It would be too difficult to admit that we are sick  and make changes. Much easier to set the world on fire so that we will never have to admit our shortcomings.

Or maybe change is here, fast and invisible, in the embracing of the artificial. Maybe we are saying goodbye to our earthy roots and our old social and moral codes as we somersault blindly into the heart of our techno creations without regret.
Our children will be the future, not our flesh and blood offspring, but our spawn  of micro chips and liquid crystal. The change may be here and we are simply blind to it as a mother is blind to the inch by inch growth of a tot she sees every day. Each morning it appears to be the same child and yet it is transforming right under mother's nose. In 20 years mother will be obsolete, all that the child needs of her it carries already within itself, in the software and hardware she provided. The child will spread its wings and fly and mother will be both a cast off shell and a voice within.

A death and a rebirth. All that we hoped for but dared not admit to ourselves. The other from within, the ultimate barbarian on the horizon.

North Wind

Stop making that face or the North wind might blow and freeze that look there. That’s what my grandmother used to say, and there is some truth in this, though I doubt she thought so.
You never know when the north wind is going to blow, when it will huff and puff and blow your house down. What kind of face will you be caught making when the cards come crashing down to the table? Will you find yourself as a queen of hearts or a queen of spades? A Diamond or a club perhaps? Will you be caught light as a feather on the scale or heavy as a noose when so and so weighs your heart?
The weight of your own heart can drag you down,
Down,
down.
That face that you were making, was it heavy with the charge of negative emotion as the North wind blew, or was it electrified  with the charge of real emotion?
As I ask these questions I ponder my own faces, the masks I wear in different plays, the uncontrolled contortions of my vessel, my outward shape.
I, like all of my kind, am a factory for processing light. I am a play, a shape, a program, a ride, a structure, a labyrinth for channeling the vital essence of life.
But am I a mad house or a sanctuary? What am I creating with the essence of life if I am making faces without will, the random mad house faces of jealously or greed or fear or even happiness? Am I making anything more or less than a hot mess?
The essential nature of creation involves three elements, the raw diamond of attention, the putty called matter (oh mother) that can take many shapes, and the essential essence of life, the being, the baby, little sleeping beauty- a thing of potential whose birth is yet to come. It lies passive in the mother's womb, in every particle of matter.
And when that cold wind blows that shape that it has assumed in the cup of mother's womb, is the shape in which it will be born.
This is the reason that we must consider death through the course of what we call life. Death in fact, that cold north wind, is an icy midwife who delivers you into the next realm of experience.
You will enter this realm in precisely the shape your attention forged in the mother and your journey of transformation will not be over then.
They call it work for a reason, for precisely this reason, because the attention works to create, it must if you would choose an apt face for a suitable birth. And there is no end that we can perceive, merely a series of doorways, through which to pass once you have oozed your way through the crystalline structure of a lifetime.
And you never know when you will be thrust through that door, when the matter will open wide and the midwife will grab you screaming by the crown and pull you into the next world.
What face will you be wearing when you arrive there?
That face will be the shape of the world.
Will it be the contorted face you wear as you grasp desperately for some object of desire? Or will it be a clear face of unattached and concentrated attention?

Pale Horse Rider

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

Fear In The Desert

There is water in the desert of despair, dirty mucky water, just enough of it to make leaving look harder than staying.
You see that water warming under the merciless sun and you tell yourself that one place is as good as another, that someday your dreams will come true, but until then you can rest here.
You may huddle under the shade of a Texas umbrella tree dropping poisonous gold berries into the powdery dust that covers its roots while you wait for your ship to come in.
Waiting, a broken robot that knows that it is damaged but can’t see that the damage prevents it from making the choices that might lead to repairs.
Your brokenness informs your decision to remain in the desert. It demands that you wait for a ship. A ship in the desert. You watch videos of rolling waves crashing upon distant shores and you wait for it to come in.
You are actually afraid of a positive outcome.
You are afraid that the world will not come crashing to an end within a year, that the government isn’t plotting against its citizens, that there are no sinister forces at work around you.
You are afraid of discovering a paradise beyond the desert, you are afraid of discovering that you could make repairs to your damaged operating system if you were willing to confront your self by acknowledging that you are the only one who can make the decision to leave the desert.
You fear the terrible responsibility.

Insect Love

We should get together baby, me and you, a simmering puddle of primordial soup. That’s right, that’s right, the poetry is in the flesh.
Remember when we used to be separate? Two things, out there somewhere searching for a connection. For a bridge to span the gap between me and you.
And suddenly there is no other, the other is inside of me, I am the other, I am only myself. Forget history, forget everything that came before, there is only this moment, this pearly now that we hold cupped between the us that is I.
Once upon a time, once upon a time baby, you were a fly and I was a man and you were the fly in my ointment, the terrible jealousy that urged me to leap into eternity via a designer telephone booth. Then I was the ointment and you were the fly and then I was the fly and you were the ointment and soon we were flointment forged in the fire.
'Cause things heat up and come apart melt together in unpredictable ways and there is just no telling exactly what we will be or even what we are. We can keep looking, analyzing the flointment and there will always be new layers to discover and further options for new combinations arising out of new discoveries of self and the unfolding of space time.
There is always another other to discover, another relic to leave behind the mirror, another barrier to shatter. It’s penetration beyond the flesh that you most fear, moving onward into the very fabric of existence. It’s reaching even deeper into the self than has been approved of by the food and drug administration and that is monstrous isn’t it dear? Monster which shares letters with Mother which shares letters with other.
Do you really think so much of  poor vanilla Eve and her bounteous womb producing cookie cutter replicas of herself? What about Lillith and her experiments in the caves?
How brave to reach so deep, into such unpredictable chaos and pull from yourself a titan. Villainous, vile, evil, live.
Were you ever a fly that dreamed it was a man? Were you baby? A fly that dreamed it was a man but found that the dream had ended and the insect was awake?
Have you ever heard of insect politics baby? NO. Because insects be who they be, seeking to go on and on, diving into transformations which are the end of one creation and the beginning of another, unhesitatingly accepting annihilation of the individual in favor of unity.
Insect yoga. Death and resurrection. Jesus Flies.
We should get together baby, me and you in an  uncompromising uprising of insect love. Two or more things out there somewhere searching for a connection, for a bridge to close the distance between points “A” and  “B” and  “F”.
Dear Eve, I bet you thought you taught me the secrets of the flesh, didn’t you? But no, it was the fly in the ointment. An appointment with Flointment. An event horizon. An awakening incomprehensible to a sleeper.
That’s right, that’s right baby. Forget when we used to be separate. That was just a dream, just a dream. Now the insect has been resurrected.

A Calling

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

The First Bite

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Arise, Adam."

And when he saw her, he said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The carnal woman, said:

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

And the snake, the instructor, said:

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

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

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

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

The Breath Of Incorruptibility

I have sent this (to you) because you inquire about the reality of the authorities-
and the authority of reality.

On account of the reality of the authorities, (inspired, perplexed, stunned, and spun) by the spirit of the Father of Truth-
the truth of the father,
the great apostle,
referring to the "authorities of the darkness" -
"the darkness of authorities."
He told us that our contest is not against flesh and blood; rather, it is against the authorities of the universe and the spirits of wickedness.
Against the universe of authorities and the wickedness of spirits.

This is for you- for your mind of clay, for the soul that has been breathed into you, for the spirit you might achieve, for the truth you might know when the shell is cracked and the blind have been subverted.
It is for the gods who have fallen, who have towered, grown, plunged, killed, and suckled at the nipples of death and power. For the spirits higher up, touched only in brief moments by dreams of dying brothers.

This is for you, for you should know that their chief is blind, blinded chiefly because of his power and his ignorance. In his arrogance, with power bellowing from his naked loins, he said:
"It is I who am God; there is none apart from me. It is God who is 'I.' Apart from me there is none."

When he said this, he sinned against the entirety.
The entirety sinned against him.
And this speech got up to incorruptibility. It wavered and floated high above, right to where incorruptibility dwelled and grew and sometimes waned- high above like a silver moon in flux.
Then there was a voice that came forth from incorruptibility, saying:
"You are mistaken, Samael" - which is to say: "god of the blind."
"God of the blind, you are mistaken. We mistook you."
And Samael’s thoughts became blind.
And his blindness became thoughts.

And, having expelled his power,
the power to expel-
that is, the power to blasphemy, to speak,
he pursued it at the instigation of Pistis Sophia.
And, having expelled his power, the power to create
at the instigation of Pistis Sophia, he pursued it.
Down to chaos and the abyss, his mother, he pursued it.

It was she in which he came from- spurting forth with pain like the demon that would one day fully form. And she established each of his offspring in conformity with its power -
its power of conformity
after the pattern of the realms that are above. By starting from the invisible world, the visible world was invented. By starting from blindness, sight was dreamed.

As incorruptibility looked down into the region of the waters,
her image appeared in the waters;
the authorities of the darkness became enamored of her, for she was what they could not be.
But they could not lay hold of that image which had appeared to them in the waters because of their weakness.
Beings that merely possess a soul cannot lay hold of those that possess spirit -
for they were from below, while she, incorruptibility, was from above.
They saw shadows who saw shapes that could cast no shadow. It was an image whose content could not trespass into shadow.

This is the reason why.
Reasons? Why?
Incorruptibility looked down into the region so that, by the father's will,
she might bring the entirety into union with the light.
She might instigate, causing the father to expel his power, which was the power to create.

The rulers laid plans and said:
"Come, let us create a man that will be soil from the earth. A soil from the earth that will be man."
They took chunks of clay and spat into it, turning it into dark mud. They modeled their creature as one wholly of the earth.
Their creature modeled them, as one wholly of the earth, and pursued it down to chaos and the abyss, for its eyes would not open.

Now the rulers created another body, female with the face of a beast.
They had taken some soil from the earth,
earth from the soil
and modeled their man after their body, and modeled hers after his,
and his after the image of God that had appeared to them in the waters.

A replica of a replica of a replica...

They said:
"Come, let us lay hold of it by means of the form that we have modeled, lay hold of her whose image appeared in the waters. Let her see her male counterpart made in our likeness, then we may seize her within that form that we have modeled."
Because of their powerlessness, they said this not understanding the force of God.
They said this not understanding the God of force because of their powerlessness.

And they breathed into her face; heat and cold mixed with the smell of dark earth and living creatures that lacked arms and feet. They forced her mouth open, sending their breath to create hers.
She came to have a soul and remained upon the ground many days, laying naked beneath the clouded sky and their unblinking eyes. They could not make her arise because of their powerlessness. Like storm winds they persisted in blowing. Her body stumbled like a naked white leaf. They breathed out and hard, hoping that they might try to capture that image which had appeared to them in the waters, but they did not know the identity of its power. They could not reach her with their powerless souls and contented themselves instead by playing god with mud and sticks.

Crown

One day I finally decided to do it, to actually do it.
I created an altar on the east wall of my room, the one wall with the least amount of junk scattered on the floor in front of it. On this altar I placed photographs of myself, a sequence of images progressing slowly from infancy to adulthood. At the center of the altar I placed a photograph of my father. I made something like a throne for this picture to rest on, some thick books covered by a piece of red cloth and a couple of small figurines to guard it. It was enough like a throne that I could see it as a throne and that was enough for me.
When the altar was ready, I lit candles and incense. The room got thick with smoke and strong scents from distant lands I had never visited. Then I sat in front of my altar to stare at what I had created. It would have been easy to overlook that step. But I didn’t. This was the time when I would finally do it. I couldn’t jump over any step.

Drip drop went the secretions of certain glands that helped me to modify my view of reality.
Drip drop.
REALITY.
The Real.
That is what we were searching for, isn’t it? Some of us, not all of us. Sometimes, not all the time.
It was important then to understand that not everyone wanted to discover the Real. Some did seek it out, but when they found it they recoiled in terror and sincerely hoped that they would never have to see it again. Some said that they wanted it but they really wanted other things, private pleasures that would never be disclosed in public. I had to understand this. I had to remember it.

In those days I had come to understand that I was a robot. (It may seem obvious to you now, but it was a great shock to me when I first saw it. Don’t forget how different things were back then. None of what we know now was so clear, it was all kind of fuzzy, like looking at a vast landscape through piece of cellophane wrapped around your head.)
I was some kind of bio mechanical doll. I was made of meat and not metal but I was still a robot. A sophisticated meat doll. That was all I was. Nothing more, nothing less.
All that I liked, all that I disliked, all that I believed and disbelieved, all that I wanted and all that I feared, these things were not ME, even if they seemed like it. They might have seemed to come from me, but they didn’t. They had all come from somewhere else.
These things were programs that I ran, within my wet circuitry of coils of bloody guts. Or rather I should say that these were programs that ran me. I was merely a strange unconscious puppet in their hands, an empty receptacle for their various microscopic products.
I had no hand in creating or choosing all these programs. It was strange circuitous process that occurred long before I knew what was happening, or that anything was happening at all. Most of it was quite accidental. Accidental programming. It just happened. In my case, it happened to me. You understand? So it seemed natural, eminently natural, so it seemed real, so it seemed normal, so it seemed as the way things should be. What else could they be? This was me and everything around me fit perfectly with me. Almost everything, I should say. Almost everything.

Strawberries were good, black licorice was bad. Men with facial hair made me wet, so wet that the juice ran down my thighs and made it hard for me to sit still. When the sun was shining, I was happy and because I was happy, I twisted my face into a kind of frozen grimace that I called a smile. Cats were better than dogs. It was never okay to steal. It was okay to lie sometimes but only in particular situations. Killing was okay but only when you were threatened. Christians were good and Muslims were bad. I had to sleep in a bed or I wouldn’t feel right in the morning. The bed had to have sheets and blankets, all of certain colors. I had to make a certain amount of money a year. I had to have a car to drive so I could go places, places where there were other people like me.
All of these things were arbitrary. I didn’t know it then but it was still true. None of these programs represented anything that was objectively true. It was just things that were said and they got repeated. Linguistic viruses that came into me when someone spoke too loud too close to me, when my senses were wide open and vulnerable. They were a kind of sonic self reproductive demons that inhabited my shivering temple of wet and tender walls, strange non physical half living creatures that swayed me to do this or that, pushed me to do things in a way that complied with their secret directives.

So I made a crown. I knew it couldn’t be too simple, it shouldn’t be. Some effort had to go into its construction. But I also couldn’t make it too elaborate. If I made it too difficult I would never finish it and it was of utmost importance that I should finish.
I knew it had to fit upon my head. That was most crucial. I made it out of twine and placed some leaves and flowers all along the perimeter. I was very pleased with my work.
I placed the crown and a robe on the simple little altar I had made earlier. I placed it all before my father’s throne. It seemed as if he was looking down at it but it was really just a photograph. Still, it really did seem like he was looking. Looking down. At me.
The robe was an old terrycloth bathrobe, light green in color, nothing that special really. Not until I made it special. And then it was. It truly was.

Everyone around me was the same. This took some time for me to recognize. For so long I had assumed that everyone else was different, that they actually knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. It took me a while to accept that they knew as much as I did, maybe a little less since they couldn’t look directly into their own robotic nature, since they still believed they made decisions on their own, since they still believed they were unique and capable of deciding their own course in life.
The fact was that we simply collided our way through an accidental obstacle course that we called existence. We bounced off of each other like bumper cars. It became clear that they were all the same, Hebrews, Romans, or Barbarians. In fact, I had lost track of what had once distinguished them from each other. Suddenly they all seemed the same to me. Not in a good way, either.
One genetic trait was not better than another. Some things made a particular genetic line of robots live longer. That in itself was not “good”. The entire perpetuation of the species was neither good nor bad. It was simply a thing to watch happening, like the firecrackers on the fourth of July or black birds flying in a flock over a calm lake in summertime.
Survival was all that mattered to them, to us. The survival of the meat bots. All the meat bots like me. We thought we were superior to every other thing that bopped around on this planet. We thought we were the best.
Somehow, what we thought to explain our own presence here, was what made us better. One thought justified another in a circle that we were never inclined to unwind or examine closely.
We were somehow better than dogs because when we fucked, we would do it within the bounds of holy matrimony and we would then produce children to please GOD. GOD, which was itself a construct of our bewildered and imaginative minds which we molded into our own image. GOD, mad scientist, creator of broken robots out of old discarded parts.
We were better because we could see the difference between right and wrong. And we got to decide what was right and wrong based on what was best for us. And we were told what was best for us before we even knew what was being said to us. So we decided nothing. Nothing at all.
An accidental obstacle course and nothing else. It was hard to see it back then. But you have to understand, we didn’t know hardly anything.

When everything was prepared and the scene was set, I bowed to the four directions and crossed my heart, just as I had learned so long ago, back when I had thought I knew so much.
I approached the altar carefully, almost with weariness. In a loud and clear voice, I said:
"I have come to bear the burden"
I said it two more times slowly and carefully. The sound of my voice echoed through the room and came back to me thicker and stronger than I would have imagined it.

We were machines run by programs created by unnamed authors, long lost biological hackers who had maybe succumbed to their own devious traps.
We were ruled by Accident, Chaos, Chance. Our main directive, our only real wish was to survive at any cost. Everything else was secondary. No matter what we said, no matter what we believed.
That is all we were, all we were, all we were. But we didn’t know it. We didn’t want to know it.
Now you understand, just like you do. It wasn’t easy to see through it, through the great charade, the great game. It wasn’t easy for me, it wasn’t easy for anyone. Nobody starts out with a taste for silence. It’s an acquired taste. Something to be developed.

I removed my father’s photograph from the throne and placed it face down on the carpet. I then replaced it with one of my own. My photograph up there on the throne looking down at me just like my father had been doing before. I put on the robe that I had chosen and I placed the crown upon my head. I placed it slowly, suddenly aware of what I was doing, suddenly curious, suddenly afraid.
I extended my arms to both sides palms facing upward. Then I brought them together over my heart in a prayer position, palms together, fingers pointing upwards.
I looked at myself on the throne. I looked at myself and my self looked back. I recognized myself. I recognized my self. There. On the throne. I had come to bear the burden. It was time to take my rightful place. It was time to leave the charade behind. It was time to know.

Let Me Be It

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

Love Letter

So I sit on the train, glaringly aware of their ignorance. How can they know what is happening under my skull? In my veins and along the branching network of my nervous system, demons are howling and stomping out a rhythm to accompany the dark rite that is happening in plain view, this orgy of fingers on slick paper and eyes opened wide. I see the skulls and insects and organic eruptions of form in stark black and white, and I am home.
The dragon fly. I would find one dying on my porch later, and after going inside to uncover the details of its life cycle I would determine that there was nothing I could do to help restore it to the so called land of the living. Having ruled out any other option, I would sit with it, gazing into its bulbous eyes, experiencing through empathy the alien beauty of its consciousness and I would sing a whining high pitched song in its honor. I would sit with it until it died, and then I’d put its remains on a shelf in the garage. That shelf would already have a far out collage made from National Geographic clippings and a white candle waiting for this final element to come and rest with them, encircled by purple daisies picked from a shrub in the backyard. In short I would enshrine the remains of this voyager that laid himself down on my front stair. I would piggy back on its continued cycle of occult transformation.
I had learned that large dragon flies begin their lives as something called a nymph, living hidden from our eyes in the bottoms of ponds and lakes for as long as five years before becoming those things called dragon flies. The part of their existence with which we humans are most familiar with is the briefest segment of their lives. It transpires in a flash. They are only dragon flies for a matter of a few months before they lay down and wait for some mysterious part of themselves to move once again into a world of which we humans are ignorant. I would learn all of this for myself when I would find the dragonfly on my porch, but that is a month away from now, a moment existing in a future whose shape is eclipsed by the present.
I am now only looking at a black and white image of a dragon fly printed on the pages of this thing I hold in my hands. I feel the blood in my veins dancing like witches at a Sabbath and I look at the stupefied faces of my fellow passengers frozen in attitudes of boredom, fatigue, and apathy. I look at the silly putty color of their skin and their crisp gray suits or bright red lipsticks and am amazed that they are so distant from this space that I occupy; a universe born of the lusty unification of my twisted mind and this thing in my hands. We are so physically close, breathing the same stale air of this rocking train car, smelling each others’ chemical front, the colognes, perfumes, and body sprays we doused ourselves in to disguise our animal odors, yet the distance between us is impossible to bridge because it has not been noticed. They must see another putty colored mannequin sitting here turning the pages of a magazine. They cannot see the elysian ritual transpiring within this fleshy temple, cannot wittiness with their glassy eyes the terrible magick being worked in neurons and sinews, all catalyzed by my contact with this thing. A transformation initiated by this unholy relic whose radiation is causing a mutation, augmenting elements of my self that needed only the tiniest push to come into full bloom.
Advertisements streak by the tinted rectangles of glass and a steady clack, clack, imposes itself upon my ears. The realization that something will come of this is as bright as transparent wings catching sunlight reflected off water, but what that will be is unknown. That is the terrible risk inherent in change. What I am cannot dream of what I will become, it is too deeply other. All that I can do is sit here, feeling my heart thump, feeling my spirit swell out beyond the confines of this body, this train car, beyond anything recognizable. I feel something invisible growing, like antenna reaching out from me to dip into darkest waters. I feel this and I watch the man in the seat ahead of me maintain his perfectly subdued expression as if he were afraid to alter it in any way. Clutching this thing in my hands, looking around at the other passengers, aware of the growing chasm between us, I ride the train, and flip through the pages and wait for the shapes of things to emerge.

Inch By Inch

Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of the Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in is now out, rejoining the abyss, the cave-like halls of nowhere, my mother’s ancient cold womb. When the stars tumbled out dancing like sparks hissing off the arch of a welding torch, that was my beginning too.
Just as a dragonfly was once a nymph that spent five rotations of the earth around the sun hunting in the deep aquamarine waters of the lagoon before becoming a winged predator that would live less than a month, my larval stage too was much longer than this phase of existence will be.
In my infancy, I was a star burning and swirling, drawing everything to myself, a different sort of predator of the deep, waiting to gain the strength and size necessary for my transformation, my moment to super nova and spread star seed through the curving darkness of the womb space, waiting for that seed to impregnate the terrestrial egg where, warmed by a foster solar entity, it would grow into the newest me, the me that here sits breathing oxygen and expelling carbon monoxide.
I have not yet reached completion, if such a thing exists, as I am still housed safely within the world’s shell, incubating, waiting for the next moment of acceleration to crack the cocoon with wings unfurled. If the egg does not crack then the chick will die before it is born… so I let it bleed out into the abyss…all my animal hopes for preservation.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago, that moment which lapsed, folding in on itself in quiet surrender to the ever flowing passage of time, of thought, a victim of an organizational system that is void of life, a mere mechanical apparatus for processing eternity, a factory for turning darkness into light, a star making machine that I have sometimes thought was myself, but is in reality only one function of self.
Deep self is nestled at the hub of the voyager called eternity, extending its tentacles in every direction, a living pulsing organism moving the blood of being through its veins. This lifetime, a fragment of the life cycle of a star is only a small side effect of the functioning of this vast entity. A little thing like white blood cells gathering around some infected tissue, a thing which happens within the body of a man without the man ever noticing unless the white blood cells fail in their mission and he grows ill and dies.
So this great play unfolds within the body of a titan that has considered us occasionally, but has never called us the crown of creation. This being in turn does what it can with the probabilities that dictate its nature.
I am dreaming. This was all a dream, this black blood spilling from my head into the darkness outside. A dream, the whole warm safe sphere before the ship’s hull was breached, that too was a dream. A dream that I danced like a prince among my whirling peers, glowing hungry for life and death.
Life and death. Motion. The crawling of a worm, inching its way through an unknowable matrix. Inch, Life, Inch, death, inch by life by death by inch, making its way, never knowing where or why, always going.
Would I un-dream any dream I ever dreamed knowing the fount would never grow dry? Knowing each one was an inch by inch by inch motion. No, I wouldn’t erase my nightmares nor my dreams seeing that they were just a motion like a dancer’s arm sweeping gracefully over her head, or her spasmodic jumping.
I let the beetles go their way, go wherever they can find a crack, a crevice, a hole to exploit. I let everything go to sway like the flora clinging to the inner wall of the small intestines.
I cannot know you, great titan, if I hold on, hide within my shell like a crustacean. I will know you as the river knows the sea, one body flowing into the other, waters exchanged.
Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of a Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in, now rushes out, what was out now rushes in. A new phase of existence. A train wreck., most beautiful, sublime, bodies spilled along the rails to ooze nutrients into the soil where the newest me will grow.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago. Like a dragonfly, like a star, living through dying, the pure motion of existence. Inch by inch by inch I am made new, again and again.