THE SERPENTLIGHTNING TRICKSTER TRANSMISSION Nathan Dragavon
The Serpentlightning Trickster Transmission Nathan Dragavon Copyright Nathan Dragavon, 2018 Dork Stork Oysterbar Publishing Direct fan mail, hate mail, offerings, and love letters to: ???
Lightweights, I really can’t stand ‘em Permanent marker on their faces, I brand them. -Lady Sovereign, 2006
PUBLIC WARNING FROM THE COMICS CODE AUTHORITY: We hereby disclose that this graphic novel contains suject matter and illustrations not intended for minors [defined as people under 18 in most jurisdictions]. We demand that it be
censored and banned, and that any physical copies be ceremonially burnt. We strongly advise readers to consider this anthology in its entirety a work of pornography. We repeat: The Serpent Lightning Trickster Transmission is created intentionally as controversial obscene art. Actually, to be completely honest, it is “Art” with a Capitol A, and sacred Art, but also definitely obscene, in otherwords it is a paradoxically sacred and profane work of obscene art and a holy text as evil as it is divine. You figure it out. Just don’t assign it to your highschool English class. This book will save lives or even the World but it is also capable of inducing dangerous catharsis, kathnorlox, or kizzerstix. Some sensitive readers may become so epically triggered as to commit suicide, murder, arson, or even in some rare but tragic cases all three, but almost never in that order. This work of fiction contains themes of violence, murder, rape, torture, and sexual abuse. The author warns those in recovery from trauma that they will be challenged to the depths of their ability to heal through the authentic exploration of and confrontation with the paradox of a Reality which contains both the highest aspects of Sacredness and the worst aspects of Evil. Reality is not pretty, and neither are the experiences of some of the characters in this book. In fact any poet with a bucket of sand and a shovel could create a better world than this one. As a matter of fact, I have. Also, to those who object to the ways this book uses Absurdity to confront tradgedy, “Fuck you because you can’t take a joke!” The worst tragedies are those that demand your laughter the most; if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. The tradedies you will encounter in this book include torture, addiction, cannibalism, necrophilia, bestiality, nymphomania, necronymphomania, repliconism, nymphonecrorepliconism, replicannibliconism, and nymphonecroreplicannibliconism. The vast majority of the obscene, profane, and pornographic content (and thus the best comedy) is quarantined in the last volume of the anthology, The Garden of Flowers II, which may be ripped out and either burned separately or kept beneath your mattress for further anaylsis. Alternately, it may be shielded by a textbook assigned by your highschool English teacher at your own risk. In addition, although the erotic art illustrations are not photography, they are so erotic that you will cum in your Rainbow Bright panties. You are advised to take your socks off now while you can because when you meet the Deofemmsects, specifically the Snaingels, they will blow them the fuck off!
Warnings From the Authors: We now cut the red ribbon on The Gate and lower the drawbridge over the moat. To enter is your own choice. We suppose you are all wondering why we have gathered you here tonight. Before we get to that, allow us to share three warnings you would be wise to consider… First, “Nathan Gwaelin” is a pseudonym, although he will deny this or even insist that
WE are a pseudonym of HIS! Never believe such a ruse. Seconed, we trust you were able to acquire the seven Enchanted Audio Cassette Artifacts which are an essential component of this multimedia book. These tapes must be playing before you read any further. It is extremely important that the cassette tapes which accompany these pages be playing, even if at a very low volume in the background, whenever you choose to open the book. Those who ignore this instruction may be at risk of undesirable results. Third, and most important, if anyone asks you about the thick, heavy tome with the weird cover you’ve been dragging about lately, especially a stranger, do not lend it into curious hands, and answer with the following, exactly as it is printed: “It is just a big book of tongue-twisters, riddles, and puzzles.”Because that is exactly what it is. It is certainly not a sacred book with magical powers like the one in our story. After all, we are merely an eccentric and reclusive writer’s collective and nothing more. By the way, welcome. You have already entered and are now within.
-Dork Stork Oysterbar
ENCHANTED TABLE OF CONTENTS Cover
Copyright Data Dedication Intro Quote Public Warning from the Comics Code Aithority Warning From the Authors From the Editor, Literary Agent, andf Co-Illustrator of the Greatest Comic Book. Ever. Period. Preface______________________________________________________
Serpentlightning: The Introductions I. CAPTAINS LOG: STARDATE ZERO II. The Emperess III. GET OFF MY LAWN WEEKLY IV. A Mole’s Tale V. It Gets Worse: The Origin Story of Ouchbox Industries VI. A Warning to the Warmblooded: Intro to Replicons VII. The First of Endless Love Poems
-BOOK ONE-
THE GARDEN OF FLOWERS Prologue_______________________________________________________ 2
-PART ONE BEFORE MANERVA 1. A Missing Volume_____________________________________________ 4 2. A Greasy Diner________________________________________________ 6 3. Bald Monkey Runs Free_________________________________________ 9 4. Yo-Yo’s and Fire______________________________________________ 13 5. The Records of Mystery-Sphere Girly______________________________ 21 6. Another Greasy Diner__________________________________________ 28
-PART TWO AT MANERVA 7. A Cozy Home____________________________________________32 -Absurd Clutter ……………………......... 34 8. Room #13___________________________________________________ -When Will You Learn…………….……… 38 9. Keep Your Eyes on the Borders__________________________________ -Endlessness………………..……………. 40 10. Romantic Entanglements______________________________________ -Apple Juice………………………….…... 49 11. Enter the Lobster trap_________________________________________
36 39 45 50
-Rise From Your Grave……..…..……........ 54 12. A Metallic Pandora’s Box______________________________________ 56 13. Scent of the Ouija____________________________________________ 59 -Catacombs…..…………………..……...... 60 14. Come Within________________________________________________62 15. A Fireside Chat with Montag_________________________________________ 63 -Pirates Versus Scarecrows………….…...... 67 16. In the the Dark, Dark Woods Round a Fire, hot_____________________________________________69 -The Hallowed Place……..……………….… 71 17. The Trouble with Kleinbottles___________________________________72 -The Medicine Man’s Throne………..….… 75 -The Deserts of Wine……..……………..… 81 18. Snowflake Warriors___________________________________________82 -The Monocle…..…………………………. 83 19. Ritualization_________________________________________________ 85 -The Epic Battle of The Warrior Zoth…….……………….....…85 20. Chrissy Saves the World_______________________________________89 -The Crystalline Stethoscope…………......… 89 21. Something Beautiful__________________________________________ 90 -A Game of Eyes….……………………...… 90 THE GARDEN OF FLOWERS CHANT_____________________________ 98
~ And now, most curiously, before the thrilling conclusion of the novel, we find a long, peculiar intermission. Yes, The Protocol (Book Four) is nestled here within The Garden of Flowers (Book One).
-BOOK FOUR-
THE PROTOCOL INTRODUCTIONS A. CASUAL INTRODUCTIONS A.1. The Denizens of Eschaton A.2. A Disclaimer regarding the highly Eccentric Writing Style A.3. The Fragments of Septimus A.4. On Intuitive Grasp and the Process of Formalizing A.5. The Twofold Mission A.6. The Song of the Forge “The Song of the Forge” A.7. The Savant Imperative A.7.1. The Protocol as Faculty: Caging an Exotic Bird A.7.2. On Einstein’s Brain and Escher Chessboards A Protocol Fable: “Of Light,Ethics, and Sea-Dragons” A.7.3. Santhood in an Unrecognized Field
A.8.4. The Queen Approaches A.7.5.Diagnosis and Prescription: The Synesthetic Triad A.7.5.1.Preface:A Bookworm Extrodinair A.7.5.2. The Geometry Storm from a Land Before Math A.7.5.3. People on the Verge of Absolute Personhood A.7.5.4. Satori, Orgasm, and Our Ecstacy of Blueprints A Protocol Fable: “The Bramble Labyrinth” A.7.6. The Meta-Encapsulation Sequence A.8. The Great Danger A.9. The Knights of Valor and the Way of the Unrequited “Woeful Maidens”A Protocol Fable:“The Call of the Pines” A.10. Literary Logistics A.10.1. Bifurcation of Authorship System Key A.10.2. On The Convoluted Mythology of the Oysterverse -A Fabrege Novel -Foreshadowing a Monstrosity -A Protocol Fable: Sachmo’s Origen Story Part One: Dawn of a Journalist Part Two: How the Elevator Made Him a Shaman.
B. FORMAL INTRODUCTION B.1. Debriefing and Instructions
[NOTE: This marks the end of The Protocol: The Introductions.This game is still afoot, and the remaining Ten Chapters of The Protocol will be serialized and delivered to you forethwith, to be dropped into their respective slots awaiting here. We now return you to The Garden of Flowers...]
~
THE GARDEN OF FLOWERS -PART THREEAFTER MANERVA 22. Reunion_______________________________________________108 23. Wrath_________________________________________________110 -Yellow Petal……….…………...……….…111 24. Perhaps Just a Dream He Had______________________________112 25. The Foot-Thick Moss Forest_______________________________114 -Insectoid Overlords……………………....115 -Slip Away…………………………..…….. 117 26. Bonsai Man and Gondola Girl______________________________117 27. The Old Flophouse Couple________________________________ 118 EPILOGUE: The Footprints of the Patriarch_________________________119
-BOOK TWO-
A FROG ONCE MORE Introduction___________________________________________________123
I. GHOST-TOWN TRAVELOGUES (Being a Variety of Invitations to Stroll Through the Avant Garden) 1. Once a Frog_____________________________________________124 2. The Dishwasher’s Consolation______________________________ 125 3. Poetry Must Never Be____________________________________126 4. Kaleidoscopic Kraken Vision_______________________________128 5. The Legend of the Last Palm Frond__________________________ 129 6. Happy Kitten Dayz_______________________________________ 130 7. A Frozen Ghost Song_____________________________________132 8. Ghosts of the Druids______________________________________ 135
II. TROLLS AND HEROES (Being A Handful of Dreadful Verses for Those with Discerning Taste) 9. The Toast______________________________________________139 10. The Gnomes of Death____________________________________139 11. Martinis for Breakfast____________________________________141 12. Kitten-Cubes___________________________________________ 142 13. Muses_________________________________________________143 14. The Earth Day Eels______________________________________ 143 15. McDonald The King______________________________________144
III. THE SUNFLOWER RADIANCE PUB (Being Some in a Peculiar Series of an Irreverent Kind of Incantations) 16. Disco Witchez__________________________________________146 17. Frankincense Incense____________________________________ 146 18. Sweet '93_____________________________________________ 147 19. Say it Ain't So!_________________________________________148 20. A Fake War____________________________________________149 21. Flytrap Spiral__________________________________________ 149 22. Slimey________________________________________________150
IV. AN OLDFASHIONED SPOOKFEST (Being Transcriptions of Strange Lyrics from a Band of Haunting and Mysterious Gentlemen.) 23. Mystics of the Flowers_______________________________________ 151 24. Citrus Dreamtime___________________________________________ 153 25. MagicFlash_________________________________________________154 26. The Ticks_________________________________________________ 155 27. The Last Laugh_____________________________________________ 156 28. Ouija Party_________________________________________________156 29. The Resin Scraper___________________________________________158 30. Beasterz in the Snow_________________________________________159 31. The Pharaoh’Curse___________________________________________161 32. The Pink Blossom Breeze_____________________________________ 162 33. Venus Flytrap Eyelash Wonder_________________________________165 34. Closer to the Truth __________________________________________ 167 35. Freaky Bitchez_____________________________________________168
36. Kibbles and Bits____________________________________________ 170 37. The Nightwaters____________________________________________ 171
V. THE KINDLING IN GENEVA (Being A Few Curious, Inscrutable Poems Which Fit No Proper Description) 38. Going to Geneva_________________________________________173 39. Improper Use of the Word “You”___________________________175 40. The Chasm____________________________________________177 41. Oh My God The Sky!!!___________________________________178 42. Cameras_______________________________________________180 43. Bounce________________________________________________181 44. GPS = 666_____________________________________________182 45. The Mirrored Path_______________________________________ 184 46. The Field______________________________________________186 VI. FIREFLIES AND WEEPING WILLOWS (Being Some in a Scandalous Series of Lessons for Venomous Vixens.) 47. Etch-A-Sketch Girl______________________________________188 48. Racoonz______________________________________________190 49. Bonkerz_______________________________________________192 50. Mr. Kite’s Lament_______________________________________194 51. Disneyland______________________________________________11 52. Jokerlips________________________________________________11 53. Pterodactyl Slayer_________________________________________11 54. The Crispy Treats_________________________________________11 55. The Veil_________________________________________________11
VII. SKELETON TRAIN (Being the Remaining Fragments from Times Long Gone of a Long Railroad Journey’s Song) 51. Boarding: Melon-Water Fever_________________________________ 195 52. Embarkation: The Harlot_____________________________________196 53. In Transit: Havens___________________________________________198 54. Mountain Tunneling: Submarine_______________________________ 199 55. Approach: Chaotic Cloaca____________________________________ 200 56. Arrival: Venom Leather-Oil___________________________________201
-BOOK THREE-
HELLO AGAIN WOLFMAN “Twenty Tales of the Absurd and Macabre To tingle your spine and blow your mind”
-Introduction______________________________________________ 204 1. The Triumph of Tying Your Shoes___________________________205 2. The Horror of the Drying Door______________________________ 208 3. The Gravedigger’s Compromise_____________________________ 210 4. The Last Repast of the Pirate Ghost__________________________ 212 5. PartyPartyParty_________________________________________ 213
6. The Great Spirit-Lizard Skull-Tonguing Challenge_______________215 7. The Carmenian Cinnamon Harem Hologram___________________218 8. The Power of Fire________________________________________ 221 9.Periodic Table Blues______________________________________ 230 10. You Too Can Win!_____________________________________ 235 11. The Sleep Fairies__________________________________________ 238 12. To the Skinner Institute_________________________________ 242 13. Zombie Baby Therapy__________________________________ 246 14. Curse of the 4-leaf Clover________________________________262 15. La Clash de les Trollops_________________________________ 266 16. Darling Europa________________________________________269 17. How the World was Made From Bass________________________277 18.The Pearl Necklace and the Final Smirk_______________________284 19. Grandson of Montag____________________________________ 293 20. Hello Again Wolfman________________________________________296
THE GARDEN OF FLOWERS III: FURTHER SHAMANIC TALES OF ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE! THE THINKING CAP SOLUTION SERIES -KNOT -FIRE -RICE
-DISCOGRAPHYG.
SPAZTASTIQUE
A1. That Monstrous Device A2. The Problem with Ice Cream A3. Don’t be Ridikulous A4. Pathologically Anti-Athoritarian
B. DREAD SPACE B1. Wingz to Fly With B2. Moonlight Malfunction B3. Organic Shit B4. Perfectly Fine B5. Hydroponics Log B6. Mostly Human B7. Intermission B8. Ghost Town B9. My Dear Old Dog B10. Flypaper Ribbonz B11. I like Science Fiction B12. Suck These Loops In B13. Let’s Play Ghosts B14. Enjoy Your New Dreads
C. THE TALE OF A BELGIAN MUSKRAT C1. Spanking of the Wench C3. Hail Esplen C2. The Mandragon
D. THAT TREE D1. That Tree D2. Dragonslayer D3. Slaughterhouse D4. Hikikomori D5. The Flowers D6. Ghost Stories D7. Phenomenology D8. This Small Town D9. The Looking Glass D10. Come Back Inside My Heart
E. SKAMBOT E1. The Koxxman Walks E2. Tigersblood E3. Tesla’s Pigeon E4. The Alleycats of Harlem E5. Slytherin E6. Lickerish Snapz E7. Bright Red E8. Juicy Juice E9. Where Are My Pants? E10. Mini Winnie E11. Yeah
F. OKTOPI F1. Reptilian Illuminati Conspiracy Instructionz F2. The Ekonomik Kollapse F3. Have You Heard of Bradly Manning? F4. Hello Little Snake F5. Release the Kraken F6. Beam Me Up Scotty F7. Sweet ‘93 F8. The Whole World Is Watching
G. SEPTIMUS
???
Preface
A Warm Welcome to the Worn and Tired Greetings readers! …or, travelers, rather. Welcome to Moss Hollow! We don’t see many visitors passing by out here, not this deep in the olgdrowth. Oh, leafpeepers are you? Come to see the great Firework Fall of Vermont woods eh? Got a little too dazzled by the lightshow and lost your way did you? It happens. Well, lucky you found our little sanctuary. Come within and warm your bones beside the fire! This calls for a feast! But first, let me introduce the mysterious gentlemen of Dork Stork Oysterbar. Just a merry band of bookworms, shy and reclusive, who met a long, long time ago. We’re pretty obscure. You’ve probably never heard of us. …Oh, you have? Well, never mind those rumors from the village. The old-timers do love their urban legends. There’s no such thing as a “Rusemans’ Coven” anyway- don’t be ridiculous! We’re just a merry band of bookworms, shy and reclusive ones at that. We met a long. long time ago, twenty Firework Falls in fact. Well, once upon a time we planned a retreat to work on a special book together- a collaboration. We found it so pleasant here, huddling in the foliage and language, we chose to stay. Somehow we lasted the winter, and another, and as our book grew longer and longer we discovered our writers’ retreat had become a colony, then a commune, and a home. Lucky you found our humble little sanctuary wasn’t it? Judging by the looks of you that is! (*chuckle*) Just kidding friends. Please, kick off your boots and relax. This calls for a feast! Care to sample our favorite delicacies of the deep? The oyster of course! Our namesake and mascot. Our sigil. A symbol. Good for the libido they say! A rather concentric manner of beast, if you will, wouldn’t you agree? Oops, almost forgot! It’s our custom to say a toast first, a tradition, an old fisherman’s rhyme. They say it’s good luck, so you won’t chip a tooth should you strike a pearl, as some do from time to time, and we have a feeling you just might. It happens. We wouldn’t want you to leave with a souvenir of your visit, so please humor us, if you’re the superstitious kind… Crack a shell, praise the sun! Gather round, tale’s begun! Your sacrifice, our freedom won! Twenty years long haunting done! Bite a pearl, chip a tooth A Rusemans’ Trap, to tell the truth Within these lines of prose and verse The Single Puzzle- Our Blessed Curse This book is magic… don’t believe it? Then we fucking dare you to read it Good luck, for you shall surely need it Great thanks and love from our pine needle bed The Single Puzzle haunts you now instead Our Twenty years long haunting done While yours have only just begun This is going to be very, very fun…
13
SERPENTLIGHTNING: THE INTRODUCTIONS I. CAPTAINS LOG. STARDATE ZERO. [In which Captain Anyone Anywhere provides a clear, sensible explanation of the Serpentlightning Project.] The Serpentlightning Trickster Transmission is an anthology collecting the complete works of Dork Stork Oysterbar, from 1997 – 2017. It is also a collaborative multimedia art project conceived from the beginning as a single tale told through many genres and mediums, including prose, poetry, short stories, metaphysics, visual art, and music. These elements combine to form a single, massive work of art- the Transmission. Although the books and albums will be published as separate volumes in a series, this entire anthology itself is our first public release. Warmly, in peace, we invite you inside this vast, many-chambered Faberge Storybook. We promise to you that you can trust us. Please come within and familiarize yourself with the disorienting topology of concentric litmospheres we call The Oysterbar. Nestled within a novel (The Garden of Flowers), about some college friends on a quest to discover a missing holy man, you will discover a transcript of the sacred text (The Protocol) which spawned their adventure. This book-wintin-a-book is the inner metaphorical, metaphysical central “pearl” inside the succulent metaphorical meat of the middle-layer litmosphere of fiction which book-ends, surrounds, and envelopes the core. Those who can withstand or even survive this course without chipping a tooth will be rewarded with an intermission lemon wedge of sour poems (A Frog Once More) and salty stories (Hello Again Wolfman!) to cleanse your palette for the true main course, a work-in-progress to come… (The Garden of Flowers II, Further Shamanic Tales of Romance and Adventure). We can only request that you kindly forgive us for the sequel to our original novel being a currently unfinished work-in-progress. In our defense, it will be very long. Indeed, even now we are conspiring on the final, impossibly monolithic outermost litmosphere yet to be unveiled. This 10,000-page sci-fi erotic comedy romp will be told in two 5,000-page prologue and epilogue bookend half-shells which, assuming we, you, and the world survive, will snap shut on either ends of this current briney bad boy of a book on a windy, overcast Autumn day in 2037. This we so vow. [This clear and sensible explanation was the contribution of Captain Anyone Anywhere, leader of Dork Stork Oysterbar, though he will sternly disavow his role as leader and insist that his name not be preceeded with the title “Captain”, because he feels it contradicts the spirit of anonymity of his chosen code-name. The members demanded a Prime Directive clause be added to their publishing contract, stating that their true identities must never be revealed upon threat of global extinction. However, we are at liberty to disclose some aspects of their case files. In the Captain’s case, we provide the following minimal dossier: NAME: CLASSIFIED. LOCATION OF DEPLOYMENT: ANY POSSIBLE ALIASES / STOLEN IDENTITIES: ALL VOW OF CELIBACY: ACCIDENTAL. HONORABLE DISCHARGE DENIED. REVERENCE AFFILIATION: IRREVERENT 14
LEVEL DIABOLIQUE: MEAGER HOBBIES: DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE.
~ II. Hail The Emperess [In which Professor Murder sarcastically exaggerates the supposed “diabolicalness” of our supposed “cult” to mock the rampant slander of crazed fans, media propaganda smear campaigns, and outright attempts at sabotage by scorned lovers of the society.] So, what was out fearless leader saying? No doubt delivering another clear, sensible debriefing of the official story for the open public record. Oh, he was? Typical. I suppose you are all wondering why I’ve gathered you here this evening. Consider yourself schooled. Lesson One: The official story is a lie. The open public record is wrong. The truth is a dark secret. One I will entrust to you. This is a cult. This is a cult of which the diabolicalness is so extreme that the cult, as unimaginably diabolical as it is (and so it is, in depraved, decadent abundance) is itself a decoya fake organization and a front agency for the true and far more diabolical core of Absolute Evil operating in the shadows- a secret multinational corporation by the name of Ouchbox Industries. It began harmlessly enough with the garden variety lude experiments of similar prurient, pagan intentional communities- the organic gardening, the consciousness-expansion. Soon strange witches brews were imbibed at black magic blood-feasts, then the unspeakable goat rituals and chicken defilement sorcery swift to follow, then devolving later into bioweapon lab volunteer work and sabotage, ultimately degenerating to the bubonic plague-carrying tick capture, habitat construction and interior design, and breeding as part of our daily routine, after goat milking/worship/sacrifice and before Sun Salutation Yoga in the gazebo. These behaviors were to be expected of course, as in any sustainable agriculture commune, and the nearby village townsfolk condoned them reluctantly, but not condemned them. There was an unspoken understanding between the townsfolk of town and the warlocks of woods. This fragile truce was to end when the village old-timers learned of Phase Two, commenced after one especially hearty breakfast with all the fresh eggs we fledgling farmers could hope for. Lieutenant Everyone Everywhere, second in command but forever “Number One” in our hearts, asked us dramatically coyly if we were wondering why he had gathered us together over the egg. We nodded, ready for the yet-deeper indoctrination… The charismatic Master Brainwasher then admitted he was himself a front-man for his own secret identity as C.E.O. of something living beneath the tomatoes, something wicked, and… coming, in this way: Suddenly, a telescoping silver shutter beneath our feet expanded, much as the ones from intro montages of our countless James Bond flick marathons, and the darkness below consumed us. We dropped. Oh did we drop! We soon realized we were well within a manner of rabbit-hole deeper and more peculiar than any Alice had ever fantasized- a coiling portal vortex warpzone tunnel wormhole waterslide spiral slick with some manner of dimly glowing, slippery gelatinous lubricant undulatorily enveloping us within its swift fluidity with which we swooshed serenely down, laughing goofily heartily our happy heads off as if the shimmering amorphous pale purplish jellyfish-fleshed goo-organism was a living liquid libation, and a primo one at that- to 15
our coinsurer’s palette and in our best opinion, the substance was some uninvestigated, intensely introspective albeit uplifting dissociative-anesthetic aphrodisiac intoxicant indubitably synthesized clandestinely with ceremonial lunar-harmony alchemy in cavernous haremlaboratories by ritualistic neo-druidic erotic mystics, from an uncertain but certainly unusual subclass of semi-synthetic sacrament precursors derived from a puzzling species of contraband Celtic ergot. “It’s always Springtime” Somebody Somewhere mumbled as he drank the tonic. Apparently the unexpected ablution was absorbed transdermally, directly into our by-then comfortably numb, orgasmically tingling, shivery trembling goose-pimpled skin from our new blob-friend’s ridiculously miniature nettles, those enthrallingly toxic barbed darts dancing in the ebb of its own plasma like sweet stinging anemone tendrils of penultimate temptation (to those lucky enough like us to acquire the taste). Oh yes, those tiny needle treats which grew in elegantly symmetrical floral patterns upon the impossibly infinitesimal pale violet veins of the byzantine mycelium network embroidering the shiny, microscopically thin membrane clinging to the glittering surface of our beloved “Loco-Goo” as She would soon come to be known (and gleefully merrily indeed we knew even then as we swooshed, She was so very well to become well-known!). Alas we eventually but luxuriously gently landed in a languorous-as-molasses whirlpool lagoon of our glorious goofy-glue but emerged laboriously, drenched in a sticky second skin of highly aesthetic bioluminescence and incontrovertibly psychoactive ultraviolet viscosity. Revivified by the divinely sublime mind-delicacy slime and stumbling foolishly loopily from our sister Loco-Goo’s luscious hug, we saw we were in the territory of an undiscovered underground tunnel-city’s periphery. Investigating, it seemed as if some paradoxically ancient yet incomprehensibly futuristic mythical alien pantheon’s military had carved an unfathomably intricate labyrinthine honeycomb latticework architecture highlighted by [*edit !!!] glistening micro-electronic neon hieroglyphics into an archaic yet dizzyingly counterintuitively inlayed silicon maze of baroque glistening micro-electronic neon hieroglyphics composing an artificial but sensual sentient extra-terrestrial yet undoubtedly Egyptian LanguageHousing-Being, with infinite mystical synergistic energy intermingling synchronistically with the living Zen sin-sentience of the Secret Underground Paranormal Lightning Pyramid Laboratory Playhouse Maze itself- a perfect survivalist cathedral fortress of sheer evil black magic we came to affectionately call “The Compound”- home sweet home. A survivalist mood settled in. Weapon stockpiles seemed to pile up somehow. Often we would find eachother in seeming terror, clutching survival knives in our teeth. Much of our days were spent peeking out the venetian blinds, a thankless chore as there was nothing but soil and rock pressed tight against the windows outside. A thickening fog of paranoia and testosterone was a poison not even the rows of gas masks on our pantry shelves could protect us from. As our field trip pilgrimages to Moss Hollow Haven on the strange and frightening surface-world above grew briefer and further apart we noticed our sun praising grew less sincere than it once seemed. Eventually we forbid any mention of Surfaceworld and later came to wonder if that threatening foreign land had been only a shared nightmare after a dinner of mole-jerky gone wrong. Towards the end we scorned the sun on Sundays in the chanting chamber, cursed it Mondays through Thursdays, Mocked it Fridays, and either cursed or mocked it on alternate Saturdays. Needless to say our sun salutation yoga sessions in the new subterranean gazebo suffered from lack of moral 16
and imbalance in the trickier postures. By the final apocalyptic days (just in time as there had been rumors of a mutinous plot to devour eachother literally), Nobody Nowhere initiated Phase Three by promoting us to Board of Directors of our last remaining solace- Princess Locogoo. The days turned into months, then back to days again, and then skipped months and went directly to years, as best as we could determine from the hash marks. Despite our deepening faith and admittedly somewhat immoderate indulgence in the recently promoted Emperess Locogoo, (or perhaps because of it?) it slowly dawned on us that either we ourselves or She had become (or were all along?) an immensely powerful, wicked force with vast scope, like some kind of… Umbrella- an “Umbrella Corporation”, if you will. It was almost as if this monstrous thing we had become was plucked right out of some extravagant horror video game. Despite these developments we learned to operate the business through listening to our own self-help chanting cassette series recorded in the Chant Chamber, which was connected to the Ritual Halls we relocated the goat herd to. But let’s not speak of that place. Anyway, beneath the unspeakable place, the network of bunker tunnels lead downward into the Labyrinthine Catacombs proper, the heart of the “official” Top Secret half of The Compound. Beneath this vast area was the Bottom Secret half of The Compound, the far, far vaster half. You know what we mean- not a literal half. Let’s say 9/10ths. Happy? Fuck off. It was there in the lower depths of the maze colony [the lower Above Top Secret half of the Vast Bottom Secret Half (itself 9/10ths of the latter, which was itself 9/10ths of the total Labyrinthine Catacombs, hence .9/.9 = x/1, x being the trick question)] that our own mysterious double agent-provocateur, that power-mad megalomaniac, Admiral Fuzzypants, revealed he had been a mole all along, and finally indoctrinated us into the true reason for our algebraic spelunk. We already knew he was a mole due to his small size and the fact he couldn’t see, and because he was a tunneling rodent we had adopted as our pet, but didn’t want to tell him at the risk of hurting his feelings- he already had inadequacy issues. Sometimes the world is cruelest to the most tender souls. Thus so did the Admiral initiate Phase Four. It was at that point that things turned a darker shade of wrong. He revealed a secret trap door hidden beneath the artisan Tibetin sand-mandala rug, into which we followed, though we could barely keep up with his pace. Despite his shortcomings (no pun intended, ever for that matter) he had the clear advantage in one talent crucial to our expedition- tunneling. And so Admiral Fuzzypants spelunked us expertly down beneath the entire known Compound into a fabled place we thought only the fancy of childrens’ storybook authors known as The Caverns of Desolate Frost, then beneath that chilly place to the very pleasant Hallowed Hidden Caves of the Secret Fire Sacrament of St. Rye Anthony’s Cult of Elysium (a welcome respite) and down through the horrendous Shardspider Splinterhive of the Shadowpeople’s Netherworld, which we do not recommend. Then the Admiral stopped and turned back to face us, winked as if hinting we had arrived at the party. And then he leaned back like a lenient, debonair bouncer, that rascal, against the Gates of Hell.
~ III. GET OFF MY LAWN WEEKLY [In which Master Splinter rants venomously about the state of modern youth culture in the village on the outskirts of Moss Hollow Forest, as he does weekly for his column for the Dork Stork Oysterbar fanzine “The Klienbottlerocket Times”] 17
Who the FUCK are these weird and shallow kids on my lawn with their cell-phone vanity and swag and selfies and stupid slang like “YOLO!” and “cray-cray”!? Who told them they could have slang we don’t know! SLANG WAS OURS ONCE! This selfie generation is disheartening, demoralizing, very much so, because casual flippant shallow pablum twitter emoji and meaningless online cellphone hookups and disposable everyman androgynous post-gender pathetically retarded politically simplistic smug putzes on their vain selves’ backs make me feel another 60’s counterculture or any youth generation with a face or music of its own at all really, will not come again. There was a phrase describing the style of writing on that new-fangled thing called twitter, a “social-media” website you readers from an ever-more trivial era have no doubt replaced by now with some strange new hell, and the phrase, to me, also perfectly captured the essence of the youth culture that coincided with twitter- “transcendently vacuous”. The barrage of social media killed the internet by turning it user-friendly to the mainstream who won’t feel the outcasts’ joy at being on the inside of a cyber-space tree-house chatroom boy’s club bulletin board forum of cybermancing hacker rebel nerds in a non-physical text-realm. Well, Sweet Jesus as he blows my timbers to shivering smithereens like a sassy halfretarded farmer’s daughter with an ass like two Belgian muskrabbits fighting in a pillowcase as that ripe young dumb savior walks away from the literal hay I had a romp with her in… him… christ. That’s the thing about slutty-as-fuck cuz they twarn’t taught no better from them country bumpkin cornfields of horses and pigs rutting and enjoyably unread simple folk in a slow plaid world, the only action in which are shotgun weddings she won’t be worth and shotgun blasts of father-farmers which this son-of-god-turned-sultry-hay-harlot was worth, sure, generously taunting a splatterhouse end like Kurt’s was, hell, why not. See, these Alphas and Omegas- they ain’t shit but hoes and tricks, much like the cool generational identity of kids in debt in a world of stupid wars, boiling hot toxic sweltering pollution, and by far most worstest of all worst things- the security camera for every square foot of wall, ceiling, floor, all their own, and three more attached to every one that was the first line of defense in hypervigelance against ourselves and inside in truth just a greasy, sleazy, teetering empire’s prurient indulgence in [though as ever we are loath to repeat ourselves…] “the cruel voyeur porn of which Orwell so well forewarned that make your heart fall to your tummy where it has never been more forlorn”. A sign of these weird selfie times. An empty feeling comes when they grow their own slang. When you succumb to the suspicion that their smug texts and easy, internet-mediated choreographed dial-a-hookup tinder sex and androgynous, permissive morality that neuters men and makes women lose just what made them soothing and warmed us after work, well, maybe they know something we don’t which they protect within their precious cloaking-shield of transcendent vacuity, their requisite shell of post-modern, self-aware irony, insistent in their t-shirts’ mock-support of iconic corporate brand logos and retro products like SPAM, or GUMBY, the wink that these un-cool things are cool because we’ve made them symbols of the nostalgic ironic corporate feedback fiesta fish-skull fuckathon… and paying for their own lousy babysitter’s prying voyeur eye- their favorite toy, they pay for the GPS that knows where they are always for it is always in their hands and it knows what Wal-Mart they buy their legal weed from which nomatter how much THC they crammed has not gotten one hippie high since it was legalized because there’s no “us”- who hippies were of course- no “them” to say “fuck you” to every time we hid in the secret nature smoke spots to shmoke our shitty seeded shwag was our power-plant to end their wars once-upon-a-time… well, it’s weed-greased 18
homosexual activity-o-rama and that’s all well and good but when did weed and guy-guy sex become flashy plastic toy badges to make us think some positive permissive direction’s seeding where more freedom lives? The freedom and the magic were those forums and audio cassettes those now post-post-post-ironic commentary of bearded hipster stoner culture knows oh do they know what pot is or what it’s for? It’s the end of the Seed of Our Story, the hero died and the dragon won, the princess remains captured in the tower, we lost to selfies and the waxmustachioed TMNT t-shirt wearing ironic splooge-sucking skinny-jean dick-smuggling craftbeer humping easy-going bicycle-show-off lounge-arounders with no balls to gargle in witches warm wet luscious harbor of a mouth where spells in other tongues once shared the solace and the magic such internet-hipster washout fucktard cockmother’s balls will never know- shaved as they very likely are by the same expensive wooden steampunk fetishized barbor tools that for some godforsaken retro reason are grand symbols and joys in my fool’s town. These fine, antique, facial-hair-wax aficionados huddle in the irony of cloying, self-congratulatory postmodern commentary, sodomy, and barbury in the alcoves of the alleyways, the slander that they celebrate, with wry and tangy tongue-in-cheek exuberance and fake support for things that became symbols of a silly retro notion, a token, a signal of familiar lost remembrance, a symbol of some old token of a brand, a character too universally recognized, lost to radio commercial jingles, to be the real focus of the point, the shirt, the joke, the fad, the badge- the holding up of something so familiar, normal, a notion, a joke, a shirt, a point, the memory, the irony, the symbol, the icon, the reference, the self-referential curl around back upon itself of post-modern awareness of pop-culture commentary as ironic blasé-ambivalent transcendent vacuous antiprofundity of the non-counter youth fail-culture. These beard-twizzling cock-goblin manhusks wouldn’t remember or still know the REAL turtles beneath the layers of irony like the warm-weather wool scarves of baristas fashion curtsy. They won’t know the turtles of the taste of Surge though it was reintroduced in the 90’snostalgia-wave only reminds us that time was a kind of undiscovered echo of the 60’s- In that special wavey way the forums were alive and cell-phones were not the pernicious cancer-worms that crawl through our childrens palms like parasites of distraction as fashion, surveillance as make-up. I know the meaning of the word “Cowabunga”. I know the wisdom of Master Splinter for I AM MASTER SPLINTER. I know the bountifully-busted bombastic bombshell journalist and bright-yellow-jumpsuit-clad beauty who was April O’Neil as none else for she is my wife, my daughter, my mother and the wife, daughter, and mother of the earth and all 90’s kids… not the late 90’s posers who wish they were us real ones for whom that near-bursting yellow-denimprison garment yearning to be unbuttoned garnered a bosom harboring a heart brandishing the unbridled burning passions of a gonzo journalist’s ideals, a busty barbarian blast of bombastic, bountiful, beautiful, fact-checking accuracy and the kind of free-wheeling sidecar accomplice highjinks that could bust a move, just in time, heaving upward, perky, bodacious, those twin suns in a binary orbit of decades past, a dynamic equilibrium of bouncing irrepressible joy for the freedom of the journal’s way and the open page we see in the cloudless sky, that Aprikl is my companion on every path with heart I choose, for her bosom is the peace of the earth, the breasts of Mother Nature Herself. I alone remember the magic in the audio cassette now beswarthed in 47 flavors of postironic smug permissive craft-beer crowd, for I release the sacred albums on them and the magic is mine for I put them in the purple sky and interwoven branches color scheme which means the thing you soon shall learn and some shall claim to hold and wield like sword raised to meet the 19
lightning. The word “RAD” was once a word that did not carry the slightly goofy smirk of reference to some hip-quaint old-fashioned “rad” of new-school cool. The word did not always walk with a limp- lopsided. The word once came from the gut, from the center, with an honored meaning I alone guard, for I am THE GUARDIAN OF THE LIVING RAD- The Master Splinterdemon set free from the set where the dream of the 90’s is alive but I bring you more than the dream- I bring the 90’s rave culture PLUR, and the spirit of the forever-beat which killed the brand, which has since grown texture of bass without which old-school techno feels tiny, simple, boring, but that is because we forget the thrill of the central point of electronic- the primary theme we must never forget- that the beat continues forever. A simple computer bleep on repeat which would send the shred-faced freaks of now to the place where they left their clothes while raving with naked sluts, but it was once ours to hold aloft, this new thing- the boom-boom which mixes into the next tune and the party forever promise, with the beads and the pacifiers and the phatpants and the miniature Sesame Street backpacks and all the silly, infantile things that remain here and there but I don’t think the naked sluts remember the point anymore- they were a shared-vow way of allowing the grown-up world to come on slow as molasses, to be a raver with a world that was on a come-up as we were though we had no idea how in hell that flying car future of savior-internet and rich cool free freaky wacky world was ok, but it does get hard to remember for old me. To steal just once the saddest words ever wrote from a book that changed my life forever, by Edward Abbott “Upward, not northward… Upward, not northward…”. You my brethren spheres exiled and lonely triangles will understand why no words have ever brought me more tears. The point is I’m magic and you’re not, the point is Rad Ninja Turtle Audio Cassettes may be my robe, bowl, and staff to guard until the next 60’s ever comes, and the point is Jesus can suck cock as the loose, wheat-chewing utter-squirter he is inside is dumb, and I know this for she is my simplicity, and her way is my Kingdom of Heaven, though awful or worse may share it with us. Magic is the hook-nose and laughing at the very worst of the worstest things- things we need to really pump our imaginations up to remember can exist because it’s hard to outdo this worstest of worst worlds, and the point is you need Cult Magic for the Irreverence it commands, for the secret circle always knows, the nose knows, and the circle wins in the end. The other thing is we’re done, down, and out but badass bitchin’ dames are hot as fuck. We’re not a fucking cult but merely play one on TV. The last thing is that mouth-breathing tractor-jockey poon you call a christ of yours, when he walks away the back of his worn Levi’s evoke the forever-chase of two Belgian muskrats locked in orbit, snarling. That savior, well, I hate to see him go… but I could watch him walk away all day.
~ IV. A Mole’s Tale [In which Admiral Fuzzypants provides a well-deserved intermission, brings us back down (or up, rather) to earth, and takes us back to the good dope days in the sunny sun.] First, believe nothing Professor Murder says. Of course, that should go without saying. That slanderous scoundrel is nothing but a bitter satirist with a tongue so sharp it just might slit his own throat. I am not a mole. I wish to be completely honest with you. I really do. We just met; we should start off on the right foot. But there is some matter of ambiguity as to just who or what “we” actually are. 20
There’s not much we can do to change that. It’s not as simple as you might think. We have gotten some very, very bad press. Despite our most strenuous efforts to simply drop out, kick back, and write books, much drama arose when certain completely fictional manuscripts written solely for our own private amusement were leaked to the public. These frivolous rough drafts of a selfdeprecating erotic slapstick comedy play with crude caricatures of ourselves as buffoonish and womanizing characters had nothing but mere comedic value to our small circle, who know how to take a joke. Due to infiltration, theft, and literal character and caricature assassination, this most trivial of our Great Works were exposed to the stinging light of the public and mistaken as non-fiction documents composing our collective auto-biography. These most unfortunate of events lead to a tidal wave onslaught of rage by a movement of neo-feminist social justice warriors as bloodthirsty as they were humorless, and massive protests in the village at the edge of Moss Hollow forest, in which pitchforks and torches far outnumbered the signs. It was due only to the wisely-chosen and stealthy nature of our dear Haven deep in the oldgrowth that we escaped the angry mob’s tar, feathers, crucifixion, and martyrdom. As sensible men of letters we were open to negotiation, and were willing to accept the feathers and martyrdom but without the tar or cross. They rejected our offer. Luckily, before any of their spies could detect our whereabouts, a hope-inspiring and life-preserving affirmation of Justice and Freedom was to warm the cockles of our hearts. There grew a counter-movement in support of the noble Oysterbar by the first of many legions of our lunatic, fanatical fans, before even this first public release of ours you hold and which enchants you even now. We did not know if these first legions of Oysters regarded the flippant script as truth or parody, or a parody of either truth or tragedy, but regardless they were enthralled and willing to meet the boiling estrogen and menacing censorship with nothing but their own good taste in erotica. However, to our dismay these initial Oysters posed an unseen threat of their own, as they, slowly at first, then many, began to arrive at our sanctuary for spiritual guidance, autographs, and the women from our play they believe existed. We do not know how they came to discover us, but it is not in our nature to refuse a weary guest, as you may recall. The ladies who shared our pine needle bed were few, and by law could rise no higher in rank than Honorary Guest. All three of them left us in scorn during the Eros Scandal. They were to return even more scorned, with revenge in their eyes and fury in their hearts. Their horrible fury reminded me of the kind that only hell would hath. Yet these women’s fury was so ferocious, so rabid, that there was no point in even comparing it to the far lesser fury which hell hath. The Three Banshees (their choice of title, not ours), joined forces in a deviously scandalous and slanderous counter-coven campaign of full-frontal sabotage. Infidelity, jealousy, lust, deceit, abandonment, and experimental erotic fiction stewed in their wretched estrogen cauldron into a poison juju stew. It was said by one of our new seeker friends to pass by, clad in tie-dye, that he saw the lady’s camp at a distance but due to various markings in the trees nearby he did not approach. To believe him, and by his description of their Sigil, a knife, they remain, somewhere in the oldgrowth… plotting, plotting. There were other rumors, that they have been joined by four others, and christened their growing circle with a new title- “The Sinister Sisters of the Whistling Switchblade”. The young man, a “free spirit” as they all think themselves, was given a warm fire and fine Oyseter feast as is our custom. Unfortunately, he wasn’t one for superstitious toasts, and he was to leave with a little souvenir of his visit. A chipped tooth. Oh well. It happens. And so it is with this last thought that I, your humble historian educator, Admiral Wee Foureyes Fuzzypants, leave you- It was love that (almost) killed the beast. Yet the Oysterbar 21
shall always prevail. Oh, and also, as to our leaked play, the smut does very well in some foreign markets, amongst those with discerning taste. CODE NAME: ADMIRAL WEE “FOUREYES” FUZZYPANTS HEIGHT: TWO INCHES LENGTH: FOUR INCHES [SEVEN INCHES INCLUDING TAIL] DISABILITY: LEGALLY BLIND [KNOWN TO WEAR GLASSES AS DISGUISE] EXPERTISE: ESPIANAGE. TUNNELING. GRANDMASTER SPELUNKER WEAKNESS: LOW SELF-ESTEEM, SUSPECTED IDENTITY CRISES
~ V. It Gets Worse: The Origin Story of Ouchbox Industries [In which Professor Murder coughs and points with his yardstick to a chalk diagram on his blackboard- detailed blueprints for the prototype of a demonic device he was forced against his will and pacifist ideals to invent for the very puppetmasters he himself had lured us to become- the ominous conspiracy factory known as Ouchbox Industries. The following transcript of his lecture also touches on two other areas of his expertise: experimental racial stereotyping and quantum misogyny theory.] Where were we? Ah yes, hell. Not a literal hell of course. The only hell is the one we make. Made. But ours was a hell we came to love. It was there the Grand Plan for Global Domination was revealed. With simple-hearted sighs and shrugs we discussed the new direction our writers’ retreat had taken and their profit margin, and decided we were ok. The lucky ones. That life, it felt all right. Comfortable. Maybe in those financial times we shared core intentions with the heart of Absolute Evil, but it gave us the drive to get up to the surface and breed those ticks for one more day, the goal of course being for us to all fall down. All of us, All of it- people, religion, politics, the planet, culture, our future. The choice we made was to reject everything. Try this Final Denial as a daily affirmation. Tape it to your mirror if that helps. Affirm your denial! Repeat: “I’ve seen it all and I’m not impressed. We’re living on a bad planet. I leave lions toothless, barehanded. It’s the end of the world. Let’s get retarded. Go, go! Kill the lion!” Then brush your teeth you weirdo. Congratulations- you’re an autonomous thinker. Most suspect this affirmation is the wise choice deep inside, but they are ‘fraidy cats and imagine someone watching over their shoulder disapproving. Some vague parental ghost-authority. They want to give up, but they don’t want to risk being rude to the whole everyone. But you can. They are timid, but did you notice the lionslaying added to the list? Now THAT is self-improvement. Now we can begin a new day. Tear it all down and start over. Hell, no need to tear – it’s falling just fine and fast. But that lion is yours boy! Bare handed. And don’t forget the “Get Retarded” part. It’s important. Now, to review for our unholy mid-term rites of passage, which blasphemous endevours did we perform between the sustainable agriculture commune stage and the corporation stage? Dig deep. To review, there were of course the schizotoxin overdose-induced competitive psychosis matches, Splinterworld Shardspider Assault-Squad Swarm summoning ceremonies, Spastic 22
Crystalline Needlepoint Bloodletting Labwork, Firedance Pyro-Orgies, and of course the unscientific, unethical, and wholly unnecessary demented experiments on the unsuspecting and swiftly disappearing local virgin population of the nearby village. Pay special attention to the Theoretical Soul-Enslavement Mind-Torture Engineering workshops because it was our research in these multidisciplinary think-tanks that gave birth to the sole product of the shadow corporation which we were destined to become- Ouchbox Industries. Be able to explain its purpose and its role as a breakthrough in holistic medicine in 500 words or more, as analyzed in my article “New Horizons in Philanthropy”, published in the Peer-Diabolical-Cult/Covenreviewed Necro-nomic Journal, writ in locally-sourced virgin blood. [At this point Proffesor Murder calls a brief intermission to class and eats a ham sandwhich, while students use the restroom and compare notes. In the meanwhile, let’s examine his censored and classified bio…] -CODE NAME: PROFFESOR MURDER, Phd. -PROFFESION: PROFFESOR -EXPERT IN: EXPERTISE -LOVER OF: WISDOM -PUBLISHED IN THE (A)___-Diabolical-Cult-(b)_____-Reviewed(C)____-nomic Journal -LEVEL DIABOLIC: EXTREME, PARADOXICALLY NEGATED BY SARCASTIC EXAGGERATION AND SELF-PARODY, THUS NOT APPLICABLE/AMBIGUOUS -PREFERED PATTERN OF CO-ED’S SKIRTS: PLAID [The class resumes, Professor Murder calls the class to order, before noticing yet another young, sweet, ripe, juicy delicious apple left on his desk. It is unknown which of the smitten coeds left it this time, but very likely that they share the apple’s characteristics.] Now, (and this will be on the final) the engineering and marketing breakthrough we will now examine came to fruition when The Good Ol’ Boys of Seafood, with the help of throngs of virgin mind-slave minion think-tank attendants, conceived a great triumph of theoretical soulenslavement mind torture devise engineering so fiendishly elaborate that it makes MK-ULTRA seem like a character-building detention of personal growth and life-lessons with The Breakfast Club, that endearing bunch of unlikely friends from simpler VHS times. Worth memorizing is the unrealistically-to-the-point-of-silly full technical name of the prototype: The Insecto-Swarm Infesto-Confino CoffinHome with optional Alternating Snakepit Mode and Slow-Revolving Inner Spin-cycle Sadtime Sandpaper-Wallpaper Chamber Pain-Pod Capsule equipped with Alternating Sensory-Depro and Extremely Intenso-Senso-Overload modes with optional warranty providing Daily Lonelybox Hellhouse Containment ElectroCompartment Claustro-Phobo Solitary-Sarcophagi including Full Residence Maintenance by a stunningly beautiful, statuesque and strict but fair thick-accented German Phd Sado-Chemist Necro Witch-Mistress equipped with a veritable alchemic cornucopia of an Apothecary Arsenal so exhaustively extensive that her secret offsite underground Pharmomythopoeticacy Drug Warehouse City contains its own airport inside the pharmacy itself! ...and as per optional highly recommended warranty specifications the Hope-Death Home Torment Capsule Maintenance Attendant Phd Sado/Necro Witch-Chemist Nurse-Mistress by provocatively suggestive and 23
racially offensive stereotypical Germanic name being the notorious but esteemed Nurse Brunhellspania Vonleathersade Doministra Excrucia Agonystica Strictbutfaira Stattuesqua Penelope. Later, prior to mass-production, we reluctantly accepted the Board of Directors’ insistent suggestions to shorten the name of the device to the less descriptive but more marketable title, being simply- “The Ouchbox”. [Just as the second hand of the clock ticks down toward the end of class a ripe young thing in a plaid skirt and associated garb who will not be winning any popularity contests raises her hand eagerly skyward, delaying recess as she inevitably does, oblivious to the murderous stares of her peers…] Miss Oblivious- [already knowing the answer] “Professor, is it true that Penelope is the first example in this textbook of a “replicon”? Proffesor Murder- [already-dramatically-full and curling eyebrow raised even more dramatically] Ms. Brunhellspania is, yes, the first example of the Replicon Archetype in… the… textbook. But that is a topic not generally introduced until post-graduate post-modernist electives. Those interested in this subspecies of homo erectus [class snickers sophomorically] … can audit my esteemed colleague Dr. Everwhen Neverwhere’s lecture on the Replicon next semester: A Warning to the Warmhearted: Intro to Replicons”* *see page ____ For now, regarding our enterprising Ms. Brunhellspawnia, as a licensed and registered Ouchbox Industries Proffesional Mobile Services Provider, she was trained by the crème de la crème de la crème of sexy European Hook-Nosed Cat-Herding Broom-Straddlers. For an attimes well-needed field test, in a pinch: check for that familiar, undisguisable, unmistakable mountain peak cresting skyward in its jagged glory- sharp enough to cleave an army’s worth of the hearts of men fool or hero enough to scale it… her nose… because it’s there. Well, in the path of such a nose, one must either leap aside to safety or stand as all men must one day and endure, allow yourself the presence to feel, even savor the inevitable piercing and then shearing in twain of your body were she to bump into you nose-first at any speed other than medium, yes. But no, we mean for you to stand, feel, and for you higher-souled ones who can, yes, savor the inevitable cleaving of your heart. Class dismissed.
~ VI. A Warning to the Warmblooded: Intro to Replicons [In which Dr. Everwhen Neverwhere provides a most disturbing diagnosis.] Yours, our coven, theirs and any- we all know who runs these Satanic Witchcraft Torture 24
Cults so “in” these strange and heady days amongst the “cool kids”, the inner fashionable circles, or pentagrams rather. German Dominatrix Witches run the scene from behind the scenes, always have, always will. They are unmatched in spiritual power, albeit of a tenuously ethical and morally pliable morality. But shamen are shamen. Good, bad, red magic, green- the point is who can weild power to affect change in humans and humanity and it’s a dirty, dirty game, dirtier for some and outright sinfully filthy for the grandmasters. We’ll call them Replicons. Anyways, the German Dominatrix Shaman Witches are not evil but close to evil, and can be turned in that direction in disastrous and unfortunate ways. They are just too sexy, clever, willful and crazy for their own good and they want it all, and are used to getting it. Yet they want more. Insatiable wenches these sorts of females are, and they process their lives through magic as power over their lovers and all they cross paths with. Life is a game for them, the game is to envelope all they see and everyone they meet, certainly all they loved, in the vastly stronger magnetism of their soul-field. They envelope, it’s what they do. And in doing so, they believe or fool themselves into thinking they are doing good, for they provide lessons. They provide lessons in how to ply their trade to souls of less dense and wild gravitation, to their victoms, as they succumb, providing an opportunity to learn their magic and their hunting games, to take their path and become like them. Much easier said than done. But one or two slips through evry so often [? …original manuscript unclear] , and in so doing the Replicon exalts in furious mad joy- they believe they have closed their will-center and multiplied their power with the deity-entity of the lustful pit of infinite will- the laser that burns to own and devour all experience of sex, life, and shamanic power, which they use for ulterior desires, utilitarian and hedonistic, always predatory. Lost is its beauty as the most graceful bird, of eden itself if there ever was one, for those who dive into its ever-inexaustable wellspring and constant companion of happy cry beauty. They’ll never know such dives and swims- they’re too busy hunting. They stalk prey in all their endeavors- they are huntresses and have no idle moments in their lifestyles of seeming luxury. This is key- the Replicon sees the world through a lense adorned with a tracking reticule- a visual aid with bull’s-eye and crosshairs as appears on a sniper’s telescopic site, and this virtual augmented reality holography display is superimposed upon all they witness, and a permanent feature of their visual field, a constant reminder of the infinitesimal point at the center of their calculating focus- all they lay eyes on is a point for their bull’s-eye to touch, a kind of prey. To the Replicon, all things are seen as a target for their will, be that will to eat, kill, understand, control, dominate, smoke, enjoy, weep for, worship, love, befriend, understand, give, bless, consecrate, heal, defile, birth, forgive, or to be. All they encounter they confront and touch with their huntress-eye’s reticule, as a center-point and as prey before they can even consciously identify it- they perceive their apple-prey, their mosquito-prey, their lover-prey, before they notice an apple, a mosquito, or a lover at all. To the warmhearted and warm-blooded, this is tragic, eternally lamentable, and is in some ways damnable. Remember this when your will is strong. Well, this is lived time blooming from the prison boxes of dead calendar time. We lowly mortals partake of the daily perpendicular river as we watch the daily follies and foibles tumble down the well-ordered quadrilateral calendar conveyor belt resetting reassuringly, the weeks stacked as words ever rightward, some vague rightward place we never reach, a blank right tomorrow. Then some great prize like a woman in our heart and wonderment sweeps us parallel down forward now, hello! …or a woman in our bed, or a bear in our bed, and a woman in it too25
in the bear, or a man in our woman, our woman the whore! Then a bear about to be outside our woman, around her on all sides, the bear our hero! Dramas like these, and BAM! The passionflux sweeps us down forward, hello! We can taste the future goal as before us, and we and time share a perspective, all is ahead and within reach. Where was this “right” that no longer seems alive or relevant? That was the dusty shore when things were noted but not within reach, to grab as everything seems if we allow it to rush face-first into our new bloomed forward swoon flux. A rush, a joy. But the familiar, comforting resetting of the symmetrical box-days in their stacked sets is how we rest and give each day its own place in the grid, each one at rest and tucked in to sleep, good or bad. Life flows right so we can watch as our stories happen like words to the rightward place, and when the blood quickens the calendar sweeps us into a swoon where all once rightfutures are lined up as one before-us thing, one after another fading down in a rowsuperimposed. But for us lowly mortals this is the exception, not a permanent tunnel of future to devour. It is a treat. Or a scare. An event. The Replicon has no perpendicular river. She has no boxes separate and put to rest. The Replicon does not have a story of hers to watch. Her future is ever as tunnel, and her future is always a point, a target, the prey. This is why they are absolutely fucking insane. And why they will never know why everyone but them is so lazy and clumsy, without pizzazz. She does not know why they are just dim sparks in some glum, rightward haze, the little dolls! Now, these individuals of the Replicoidal persuasion... these are human beings, people, sure, we can include them. They are not robots or demons. They are not a separate species, but a rare variety or sub-species- a minor but significant mutation. And yes, they are literally coldblooded. And they never sweat, not a drop. The nose-configuration as aforementioned ad nauseum because it provides a… crux… of the matter, a warning bolder than any pile of men detached from the below of their necks on that well-worn conveyor belt assembly line was, a warning louder than the jubilee of defenestration on a conveyor belt worn thin by thousands before them, yet still a line to climb aboard. They saw the nose; they knew the risk. They hopped on the ride, off went their heads. They wanted some Ice-Cold Royal Bad-Pussy. Some were victorious, some were not. But they knew. They knew there were to be no friendly pats on the back and encouraging squeezes for the shoulders, no warm touch on their way across an intimacy conveyer belt of the companionship factory, only a guillotine. Do not weep for them, when they awake to find the inbetweeness of their necks with one side as it should be but on the other a new yawning nowhere, and long for when that in-betweeness was bookended, sandwiched as it should be on both sides. Yet still, if their lonely neck were lucky enough to land on the side the head was on, still, it spends its last few post-defenestration gasps asking, whispered, for forgiveness, their final prayer: “A chance to adorn m’lady’s neck with my dead shrunken head’s self as a trophy alongside many?” Or: “…if not a necklace then perhaps m’lady would desire another trophy staked outside her castle, providing this humble neck some consolation pleasure in a chance to cast away future rivals too weak to brave my fate, to risk a shot at the gold?” And then: “But only, of course, if this once-bookended neck is deemed worthy of a place alongside others staked in m’lady’s courtyard. Oh, to be staked with a thousand fellows who were so lucky, for we trophies surely landed a mermaid 10,000 leagues above our own, we did it my brother hooligans! Hoo-Hah!” You all knew, you horny animals. You knew! 26
~ …but Oh! Behold the Replicon’s often astounding composure, poised in their politeness, regal in their attitude, their social grace and etiquette perfected- the grace of dignity they never fail to carry themselves with! This macabre masquerade would seem illogical in any other, yet the duality suits them well. But a life’s worth of duplicity will ultimately unravel. They will be undone. The blade bestows a rival here, a secret admirer there, a teacher, a best friend, a father. They will not know why none can seem to cease their march unto the conveyer belt and its icecold-blooded guillotine blade, why the mountain of tumbling trophies inexplicably pile at their feet. They do not know themselves to be the machine, and think it is an automaton external to them, not within their control. They destroy lives not for sport, as it may seem, but from unconscious habit, as if some mutation in their DNA, or fate, the only mistress cruel as they are. They are escape-artists of their own vast hordes of bad karma, but oh how the replicons will fall, if they do when meeting themselves as some cannot avoid one stormiest of days. Beware of such a day, and hide. She will think the blade of drama is never in her hands, not in her control. They profess to disdain drama, to themselves reside in a state of transcendent, sublime, profound boredom- the luxury of refined ennui- the “Grande Blasé” which they well know others can sense, and envy. As we do. For it is a state of being we shall never know. Yet drama abounds, in repeated crescendos of catastrophe, and trophies pile. “Such a toil that was!” they exclaim each time. “Such a shame,” she says, nonchalantly, generously, forgivingly, only a hint of reluctant amusement gracing one corner of her sensual lips. The drama which befalls them and those within their uncast spell, there natural spell-aura, is thought a fact of life, the disappointing reality of a rusty conveyor belt in a factory they visit but do not own, its unpredictable malfunctions in no way associated with some deepest core of frozen wrath, unfelt, unseen. The machine erupts of its own, and necklaces of shrunken heads appear from they know not whence nor where. “I am not in the habit of factory equipment repair” they muse while donning necklaces, a nod of prim approval to the mirror, their grisly jewelry born of so many “accidents”, certainly not the culmination of some infinite self-loathing never to see the faintest light of awareness, imprisoned in black iron, deeper even than their frozen wrath. “Of course, none so poised could lack a mature, easy self-esteem.” they deduce regarding their feelings towards themselves. “Only those who naturally esteem themselves could carry themselves as serenely, of course,” they confirm. They have proof! After all, their poise is flawless, excelsior. They are always well-dressed. They never sweat. Their blood is never hot, they do not know fever, or swoon, never. They adore high fashion, especially accessories. Expensive make-up, art, jewlry. Necklaces most of all- they flatter the collar bone, the elegant neck. The finer things!
~ Now, let’s clear something up once and for all. The Replicon should never be confused with the “reptilians”, which, by some cosmic fuck-up (or insidious ploy), which, by some cosmic fuck-up (or insidious ploy), have reemerged in our time’s fables as the bad guys, as the “bad” global shadow government illuminati- the shapeshifting reptile alien illuminati of fable folly 27
masquerading as cigar-chewing fat-cat elite Masters of War, the rich king nemisi puppeteers pulling the strings of an elaborate conspiracy, the notorious “they” haunting the paranoid fantasies of subversive, neurotic schizophrenics and operating a military-industrial complex death machine from their smoke-filled centralized bank-funded Bilderburg conference room shadow-kabal control-helm symbolized by a pyramid where the apex represents concentrated, dominator/predator power through wealth, those undead skeleton servants of the Pharo’s Empire which never ended, with dollar signs in their eyes, the Eye of Horus representing surveillance and the psy-op conspiracy of the Pharo’s Spectar, that literal “apex” predator who still rules so long as his cruel psy-ops propaganda scam enslaves the people of the earth by convincing them that the dollar is real. This is as if our collective pop-cultural unconscious slipped on the Archetypal Bananna. To think the reptilians are wicked is wrong. Many of our most popular symbols- the alien, the reptile, the pyramid and Eye of Horusthese monolithic leviathans are our best toys, and they have been stolen. There must be some brilliantly deceptive sinister trickery afoot. The real bad guys have tricked us into giving them our most exciting, enticing masks, our best, most enticing clues, our best chances of winning, the roles we were born to play as heroes. We have been made fools of, stuttering “H-here you go, you can have these. R-really- we don’t need them! W-w-would you like our lunch money t-too?” Fucking Idiot Hookers! The bad guys are not the reptiles. We are. The Illuminati- The Light-Bearers! Us God Damit! ILL-LUMINE-FUCKING-NATION! How did you fucking cock-goblins fuck up our symbol beyond all recognition! FUCK! The Eye of Horus, the third EYE! The fucking EYELASH of Horus!! The fucking aliensthe greys, the reptilians, the fucking insectoids! And whatever the next metamorphosis of the Archalien the future will bring. The third motherfucking EYE! What kid with a sci-fi story magazine and any life and pretend left in them would NOT love to be a freaking alien lizard shapeshifter in a secret mystical fellowship saving the world!? Of COURSE every kid would! WE are the Good Guys, remember? The Good Guys! Who are the Snakes of Light? WE ARE. Any questions? No? Good. Now get your rubber-costumed sci-fi asses out there and bring the light you fucking snakemen.
~ VII. The First of Endless Love Poems: “Like Sugary-est Coffee” Captain oh captain! Take me away Dr. Everywhen Neverwhere Who are you today? Won’t you murder me softly Professor of mine? If my apple was shiniest Ever to shine? Oh dear Princess Locogoo Slide me so down The lower we go my love For you knows no bounds 28
Promoted again are we? So proud of you now! The sweetest of Empresses Ever around I love how you turn us Back to who we are The further we slide The farther we far From the surface so cruel Care to take me away? From the sun for All Everywhen Or at least one more day? Oh Master so stern Still splintering wood? Near three decades since you still teach us so good Take me back to the 90’s Old friend, if you would? For back then’s tomorrow Should be now As it should Have been by now If it could For back then’s tomorrow Was sweeter than bliss Of the sugary-est coffee To ever touch lips Oh Captain where are you? Anywhere once again? Whatever face you are the dearest of friends Don’t you dare spy upon us You mole rascal spy! Please won’t you spelunk us Where sunrays can’t find? The fuzziest Admiral as could be and so kind So wee yet so fast You lead us though blind Oh The way you make so fun All hells of all time You taught us so well That only hells we make Are the only-est hells 29
Though Nomatter how far From the rays of the sun homemade they all are And the only-est ones Oh locogoo my love From the surface so mean Won’t you slide us so down You’re so sugary it seems There’s No room for the coffee No room for the cream
~
THE GARDEN OF FLOWERS
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-PrologueOnce upon a time, I was walking in the woods behind my house. It was early autumn, which is definitely my favorite time of the year. The weather was perfect- the kind in which the air is comfortably warm but a cool breeze is blowing. The leaves were turning, and some were on the ground, and the sky was rolling in thick, purple clouds. I was in a good mood, and hungry, and walking fast. And then I saw something lying on the ground. I had a strange feeling in my stomach that I should investigate. I knelt down to take a look. It was a leather pouch, partly buried in frozen ground and covered with dark red maple leaves. I uncovered it. It had a drawstring drawn tight and tied in many knots. I opened it. Inside was something wrapped in burlap and tied tightly with twine in many knots. I opened this too. Inside this was something wrapped in dark purple silk. It was a large book. It was very old. Its cover was black and its title was embossed in silver. The book was called The Garden of Flowers, and this is what it said:
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PART ONE “BEFORE MANERVA”
-CHAPTER ONEA MISSING VOLUME “Freakin' dark, symbiotic, malicious... Freakin' parasitical, dark symbiotes." these were the words of Max. He was speaking to his styrofoam cup of coffee and cigarette as he drank and smoked. He is very dramatic. We were outside in the dark just before sunrise, leaning against the old brick wall of the old bookstore with my van in front of us, awaiting our drive into the night. It was the beginning of a quest. This was a nice old brick wall we were leaning against - crumbly and with vines and whatnot creeping through crevices of crumbly brick and cracked shingles and writhing in the breeze, and it was the back wall of the old bookstore that had once harbored a strange series of books, amidst which was a volume - The Garden of Flowers, written by a man named Mr. Kite. We were seeking this man. So, the old bookstore was owned and run by an old man of the variety Max would refer to as a "freakin' hippie". But he was merely eccentric and treated his bookstore as a shrine to dreamy atmosphere and fat old Buddhas of stone and jade collecting dust, and candles. Candles! Hundreds of candles, in a bookstore of all places, with all that brittle old paper itching to be 33
burnt, but the place never caught fire. It only withered away slowly and the old man has not been seen for perhaps a year. We had good times in that place, Max and I and our crowd from college, rummaging through the flickering dimness and dust and listening to the old man rave over a stack of books he had just obtained pertaining to his latest obsession - the forgotten archaic religious cult or mystical discipline of the week. It became a contest for us to appear at the college coffee shop with a dust-encrusted, poorly bound sacred tome, our scavenger hunt providing hours of laughter over the corniness of it all and allowing one of us to read aloud in mock reverential tones of "awakening the serpent power" or channeling an Egyptian god, while the rest of us bowed our heads and assumed yogic postures. I must admit some regret in writing of this playful sacrilege, but we attended Edward Abbott College, which was in actuality a hippie commune. There was such fervent channeling of Egyptian gods with a deadpan seriousness in all dorms and by the occasional professor that we could only rely on our sarcasm to keep us afloat. Even so, there were moments late at night in the coffee shop when we did not laugh, or perhaps laughed a different laugh, and when a certain volume bled away the mocking from our mock reverence. There was the time that Lana brought The Garden of Flowers to our gathering, not knowing what she held. Lana was indeed a hippie chick. She no doubt had an "aura" of sorts and resonated subtle feminine "vibes" from power centers along her delicate spine. Her spine would be delicate, as were the bones of her long, thin fingers and delicate neck and big, vulnerable eyes. She was tall and thin and stretchy. I know this only because she was always stretching, stretching and giggling through life from one aerobics dance step to the next, from one cloud of sickly sweet cinnamon incense to the next. She had such wide, wide eyes. Lana was Max's girl. The absurdity of this will become clear as our story unfolds. I will say now that the bitter venom circulating through their relationship was the only thing they had in common, and they savored it and shared it freely and held it dear between them. I saw the book once. I saw Lana's delicate fingers trace the title, embossed in gold into the thick, dark brown leather of the spine. And all amidst the jazz and chatter and smoke of the coffee shop, and Max's jealous sneering at Lana for having tossed the trophy proudly onto our table, and Lana sticking her tongue out at Max. And it was a good, good book. Oh, I'm sorry, Reader, I won't even try for you to recall the lines of verse - they fade quickly from memory and I would muddle them, and I try not to even strain my memory towards the few weeks following that first night. But in dreams I sometimes hear the lines again, and always in Lana's lilting voice with her giggles forever just barely restrained behind the words. Perhaps it was only that our four years at Abbott College were winding to a close and we began to miss each other before even parting, but around the time of the surfacing of the book upon our corner table, our casual trickling into the coffee shop for a chance meeting became a nightly ritual, with a strange poignancy. Always by then it was The Garden of Flowers, every night turning the same brittle pages, reciting them like a chant, in a poignant trance. There was a silence in the smoky air those nights after the book was closed, deeper than the jazz and chatter, and we did not play around the edges of our friendship because it was there in front of us, and soon to wither with the end of school. We were close. "The chick... is a demoness," said Max against the vine-entwined crumbly brick wall. His cigarette was dwindling. "Lana... you know, Sachmo, she is a satanic being. She lost the book. Our beautiful, glorious freakin' sacred book, Sachmo! And it is probably lying somewhere between her blasted slabs of tofu..." He lingered on the word "tofu" with a most tragic mourning. 34
I nodded thoughtfully. It was a shame - with the missing volume went our ritual and our goodbyes at graduation were feeble, and we have scattered to our separate lives. Things fall away; it is sad. But there was something there. Even as Max stepped over to the broken cobwebbed window on the back wall of the old bookstore and flicked his cigarette butt through the cobwebs and we followed the arc of the glowing tobacco embers onto the cold, concrete floor inside, there was once something there. We stood for a moment watching the glowing orange butt fading in the darkness within and at least the two of us did not forget. Then I walked to my van and got in and revved up as Max gently parted the vines on the wall to unveil a patch of brick, and said "Goodbye old wall." And then he kissed it, and he held his mouth to the wall for a moment. And then he licked it, running his tongue slowly along the cold, rough brick. And then he got in my van and we drove off into the night.
~
-CHAPTER TWOA GREASY DINER "You ever shuck logs, man?" Max asked me with an unusual weariness as we awaited our orders. We had been on the road for a couple of days, sleeping the night before in my tent, which we pitched clumsily in the cold Autumn dark when I was too tired to drive. We ached. Max huddled around his steaming cup of coffee looking pitiful and glanced up occasionally at our fertile Greek waitress with merely hunger and without his ever present lust. I shrugged my shoulders at his question. "You know, man? Shuckin' logs? That's what we called it when I was a kid, anyways. Like shuckin' corn, right? Where you pull the husk off an ear of corn, you know? But stripping the bark off trees on our farm my dad would cut down with a chainsaw- pine, fir, cherry, you name it. He demonstrated with his hands and I nodded, trying not to appear overly concerned. But Max was a farm boy child who had shed his own farm boy husk, if you will, and became a modern, angst-ridden college boy. He resented his past as he resented reality and spoke of it only in rare moments of weakness. "So I was telling Lana about it the last night I spent in her bed before we hit the road, I guess cause it was a fond memory. So we’re lying in the dark and passing a bottle of wine back and forth, undergoing a purely temporary truce." I sensed somehow that this story did not end well. I was correct. Max fired up a smoke by the power of his shiny silver lighter and continued. "So I was getting into it, about stripping the bark from these Willingham ironwood logs, using a draw knife and a bark spud. (I knew nothing of such matters but nodded encouragingly.) The bark just slides off so easy and slippery, cuz the wood is still fresh and wet, y’know. Oh man, Sachmo, I tell you, the smooth layer underneath the bark, it’s got all these colors like gold 35
and brown and freakin’ amber swirling around with the grain of the wood, and you’ve got your beetles and weevils in their so their tunnels are snaking around. There’s this hot summer day and I get the idea to carve a sculpture out of the wood, a big African voodoo mask or something and…) But self-consciousness was dawning on Max as it always does and he lost momentum and mumbled to a close. "I dunno... the ironwood… it was kinda beautiful... in the sun, you know, I dunno - screw it." "The turkey-gravy sandwich for who?" asked our voluptuous waitress through a thick Greek accent. I raised my hand humbly before her. She was a not meant for this den of grease and truck drivers and profanity, but it was her complete comfort and poise in the place which lifted her so above it. She was clearly some kind of Greek goddess of myth. Fertil. "So what's a cute chick like you doing in a place like - " began Max, but she had served him his burger and fries and left. Max shrugged his shoulders with a slight grin, feeding perversely on rejection as usual. And then we feasted. Things were stirring once again, as they inevitably do when Max and I step into a greasy diner as into a most healing womb of sleaze. I even took kindly for once to the smell of Max's tobacco smoke because in our greasy diner stops it signals the beginning of a smoky stream of consciousness soliloquy, and so I feast and sip my orange spice tea and be amused by my friend. Max's mood was brightening as well. "The chick is a demoness, Sachmo," he said with utter seriousness. There was much fervent hand gesturing in the comments which followed. "All she could freakin' appreciate out of my damn bark shuckin’ story was 'Oh, Max, those poor trees, why can't we all just not hurt nature and sing songs and eat tofu?'" It is safe to assume Lana's role in the conversation went slightly otherwise, and did not possess the ridiculously naive sing-song tone which Max ascribed to it. "She's freakin' looney tunes, man - you don't know her like I do, you know, I see the satanic forms she takes on certain nights." "Ah, yes, the wolf and bat forms..." I proposed. I liked Lana. Such wide eyes... "I'm serious, man, she lost our freakin' book." Max immersed himself in the gravy and melted cheese amidst which where his French fries. He always took the loss harder than the rest of us, I think. He held onto The Garden of Flowers like it was his only thread to the divine. There were times in the coffeeshop when his eyes would just sparkle like a little kid, the only sparkles I'd ever seen from those eyes, like he couldn't help it, though he surely tried. Or the times he would close his eyes and just smile, listening to Lana read aloud, and the rest of us would nudge each other and smile too because we knew that Max would soon rest his head softly on Lana's shoulder as she sat next to him and read. But it was long, long before Max could forgive Lana for the night she showed up before us with her big eyes looking sadly down and her delicate hands empty and trembling. I nodded thoughtfully. "But there's the money, at least," I offered. Lana's father was rich and foolish, and distant, living in British Columbia, and kept only a hefty financial tie to his daughter, giving her money to educate herself and frolic extravagantly with. Somehow Lana had convinced her father that Max was a budding journalist, though his contribution to the school paper of a weekly spiteful comic strip had petered out two years ago. There was a "research grant" from Lana's dad for our current investigative reporting into the whereabouts of the elusive Mr. Kite, author of sacred texts, presumed holy man. "Not how it was supposed to go down, man," said Max shaking his head and digging through his backpack to produce a thick blank journal with a title written in Lana's orange crayon script reading "Journalist Stuff". "I mean what the freak is this?" he asked waving the journal. "It's my going away present. And she was all teary eyed giving it to me that night. 'Journalist 36
Stuff' - for the love of God! Remember when it was just you and me, on the quest, you know, one last road trip? Free of responsibility to some old guy in British Columbia hunting moose?" And so I took the journal and put it in my own backpack without a word, and our story is written upon those pages in blue ink, by myself. "The money's good, I guess," admitted Max, attempting to smile, which does not quite fit him. I knew where his thoughts were. "So Lana's dad must sure like you..." I said for no reason. "I know, alright? He thinks we're gonna get... married." I raised my eyebrows in question, with some hope, because I am a romantic I suppose, and I am too hopeful. Max laughed. "She is my toy," he said. That is just what he said. And he blew a steady stream of smoke from his third cigarette onto the table without shame. "She knows it," he went on, without shame or anger or resentment in his voice and with instead his strange, perverse affection which I will never understand.. "So maybe she should be with a sweet guy like you, but our poor Lana is my toy, and she knows it, and she likes it. She is my hippie chick specimen, and I study her and laugh because she is so freakin' super-freaky. And she likes to make me laugh. And when I'm tired of studying her I play with her, just like a toy. However, in my defence, Sachmo, she likes that." "Check please," I called to our royal Greek waitress, disguised among the peasants. There was little else to be said, and so Max left the ten dollars for our feast and a generous tip from our research grant, and we sat and watched a little trucker in overalls play pinball, his whole body tensed, putting his heart and soul into the game. Max knew himself well. Perhaps his ways in romance were simply all he could do. Max rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and did not light another. "There was one thing she told me though, that night," he said casually, as if commenting on the weather. "About shuckin' logs, you know? I kinda liked it, you know how she gets cryptic, sometimes? She said 'maybe, my little cold one,' you know she calls me that? She said, 'maybe, my little cold one, this road trip will strip your own bark off, and you'll know just how those trees feel, and your own swirly colors will be all naked without any bark to keep them warm, and your own tender wet sap will be stinging in the air', or something like that, I dunno, screw it. And so of course after that she just giggles away while I'm trying to get some sleep. Freakin' immature girly." But there was no imitation naive sing-song tone in Max's retelling that time. I smiled at the waitress goddess as we left and she smiled back. We drove off.
~
37
- CHAPTER THREE-
BALD MONKEY RUNS FREE There once was a man who was called Bald Monkey. We did not know this as we slowed down to pull into the gate of his palatial estate and drove past him on his long, winding driveway, us in my cheap old van and he in his pink Cadillac convertible being driven by his chauffeur out to freedom from his own riches. We knew only the words "Bald Monkey Publishing Society" were inscribed minutely at the bottom of the first page in every volume in the collection once carried on its entirety by the old brick bookstore. The volume of special concern to us was but one of many similar volumes in the series, the remainder of which are beyond the scope of this humble story. We can but wonder of what lies in those foreign pages, or of what mischief they would surely stir up. Evidently, Bald Monkey Publishing Society employed a long list of authors of sacred texts, perhaps on a pension plan with dental benefits, as absurd as it sounds. But then, with a name as absurd as "Bald Monkey", the man behind the society must have been a strange fellow. He was. I recall him standing up in his pink convertible, a stout, bald, and furry man, yelling in a proud, robust manner that he was free of his riches at last, even as chauffeur was patiently attempting to calm him. As I recall, he looked into my eyes for the first time as he bellowed in the third person "Bald Monkey runs free tonight!" and he was gone. We had second thoughts as we drove through the huge stone arch serving as a gate to the place. The sign on the stone gate read "Bald Monkey Estate. Welcome to warp zone." We drove on in. It was not until we had parked and were shuffled into a pleasant waiting room by one of the many French maids circulating the property with trays of drinks that we could look at each other in the eyes and realize we were far, far from the simple pleasures of Abbott College. "Far out," said Max. I concurred, but with reservations. We had seen swimming pools, tennis courts, hedges pruned to geometric perfection, and a curious frequency of scantily clad women. This style of life offers too many distractions to carry on with my usual thoughtful melancholy. I slouched down in my soft leather chair and closed my eyes. I was weary already from Bald Monkey Estate. In that church of comfort I did not feel safe. It was not simply the cheesiness of the blatant hedonism, for though embarrassing to me in its immaturity, at least it was sincere. I would be amused by the endless drunken debauchery and the pretense of poetry and artistry and goatees amongst the rich as I was amused by the same amongst us students of the middle class at Abbot College. I am not so prudish, I believe, that I cannot be at ease in revelry. But there was something else going on there as well - an atmosphere less blatant and more threatening. Not malicious exactly, but somehow secretive and paranoid. We were outsiders there, and not because of my cheap van and scuffed clothing, but because everyone we met within the stone gate partook of a very hushed loyalty to home or what we did not yet know. However, we had been driving for too long and at least the black leather chair soothed me. Max was soon shaking me by the shoulder to awaken me from an unintentional but deep slumber. I was disoriented and at first did not recognize the old man standing at ease before us in a robe and slippers, puffing on a large pipe. It was the old bookstore man. "Old Bookstore Man!" exclaimed Max. There was a humble bowing of the once again 38
familiar balding head, and a falling forward of the long white hair which remained. "At your service," he said and lead us into a den of sorts. The room was too comfortable - the kind where it would be easy to lose track of time from deep within the plush couches. There was warmth from a blazing fireplace and a wall-long fish tank populated with exotic tropical fish, and a bar, of course, as there were open bars in every nook of Bald Monkey Estate, and speakers playing them most tragically weary songs of Bob Dylan, as all speakers on the estate played only Dylan. "Sit, my young travelers," began Old Bookstore Man in one of his possibly senile rambling tales. It was good to listen to his deep raspy voice and smell his sweet, expensive pipe tobacco burn, unlike Max's cheap cigarette smoke which mingled in the odor. It reminded me of the old days of rummaging in our long gone literary scavenger hunts which would never come again. "Oh, my young friends, so good of you to come for me and back the days of seeking to my feeble memory, but the hunt is over and the kill has been brought down, or rather the kill has brought us down and we surrender to the ravenous taste for the human heart. We surrender our hearts to the holy words of Kite, eh? What say you my young travelers?" "Freak that," suggested Max. "We're here on business - a serious investigation in which our journalistic ethic requires your assistance. Now what say you, Old Bookstore Man?" Max's heart surrenders only when defeat is inevitable. "Ah," continued our host, knowingly nodding his balding head, "no doubt you are one of the many these days on a pilgrimage to the source, eh? Alas, if you had come but a few hours earlier you would have had the honor of accompanying the inscrutable Monkey himself on such a pilgrimage to the blessed soil of Manerva University." It was always odd to hear those at the estate use the title "the Monkey" with such deep respect. "On that regard," said Max, pouring himself a drink and unconsciously assuming the gentlemanly authority of the surrounding wealth, "we must hear more of this... Monkey. Just who is the man we call... 'Bald Monkey' and what is your interest in him?" Max disinterestedly spun a globe and sipped his scotch, taking obvious pleasure in pretending to be rich while listening to Old Bookstore Man. I resisted the temptation to take notes on the "hot leads" in my "Journalist Stuff" journal, and reminded myself to change the title on the cover. "Ah, yes..." began Old Bookstore Man once more, savoring his proximity to such an illustrious figure. "Bald Monkey is my mentor and most admired friend. He was there from the beginning, at the source. He took his daily meals and laid his head to rest at the focal point in time and space from which the sacred shockwaves have not yet dissipated. And our own petty roles in the Bald Monkey Empire are but shockwaves from Manerva themselves, eh?" If I were keeping notes in my journal I would have written "next stop - Manerva University" and underlined it twice. "Alas," our host went on with somewhat less bravado, "all Bald Monkey can hope to find at the end of his rainbow pilgrimage is the vapor-trail of a long-gone laugh... but Mr. Kite is no more to walk those grounds, for he left after the change, of course..." There was a moment of respectful silence in which I was too disappointed in hearing of Mr. Kites disappearance to ask of the nature of this "change", and in which Max was too immersed in his scotch and pretend-wealth to stoop to conversation. We both required sleep. "At least we have The Garden of Flowers, praise the blessed ink," mumbled Old Bookstore Man, and Max's eyes lit up like comets. He seemed almost too hopeful to speak. "You... you have the book?" he managed. "Of course." "Show us," breathed Max through his breathless hope. 39
"Well, I can see you are a true enthusiast," was the unenthusiastic reply. "But leave it for the morrow, eh? There are rites and ceremonies to be performed, of course, before unveiling the tome, and as it is a Thursday there is no usual midnight chanting ceremony for you two to attend, and it is late." "Chanting... ceremony..." whispered Max with an almost erotic desire. "You promise - in the morning?" "I assure you," agreed Old Bookstore Man, happy to have averted further excitement, I think, and looking forward to sleep himself. It was late. Old Bookstore Man lifted a golden walkie-talkie from his desk and spoke to a servant at the ready, asking for use to be show to our "oddly prepared rooms," though I could not see how our appearance had been predicted. In moments one of the ever-present French maids roaming the estate like helpful ants appeared, and we said our good-byes for the night. We followed a certain uniquely dressed French maid down long corridors. She wore, in addition to the traditional black and white uniform, a necklace of shark's teeth, a thick exotic belt woven from tiny bright beads, a large red gourd hung on a leather shoulder strap, and tattoos of abstract patterns or foreign symbols snaking across her dark skin. I have rarely seen eyelashes as long and mesmerizing, but predatory like the spines of twin venus flytraps. She apparently misunderstood the concept of eyeliner, applying it novelly like war paint in thick black streaks radiating from her eyes and criss-crossing like spiderwebs across her face. It suited her. As we followed close behind, Max looked over to me and whispered the single phrase "spacepants," for reasons which I was too innocent to yet surmise. From then one we would affectionately refer to the Voodoo maid, a rather troubled soul, as "Spacepants". "You two I know," she announced without turning to face us in an accent which conjured the image of white sand beaches and swaying palm fronds. She was once perhaps an island princess of war, the champion of her peaceful fishing village people's hopeless battle against drunken pirates. "You two are friends of cute wacky girl who insisted to prepare your rooms, no?" There was an exotic sensuality to her voice, as there was in certain wholly unnecessary accentuations to her manner of walking, but there was a sharp edge to that woman. It could have been the drunken pirates had chaffed her once peaceful spirit raw and she harbored only resentment and vicious fantasies of revenge beneath her alluring ways. "Wacky... girl?" asked Max tentatively, not yet allowing his fears to materialize. We turned a corner towards our adjoining oddly furnished rooms. "Yes, yes," answered Spacepants, "the one who was here earlier to check up on your reporting? With the bag of grass seed?" But it was no use explaining, for Max had stopped dead in his tracks well before opening the door to his chamber due to an odor he knew all too well and dreaded. It was the odor of well cared for, freshly sprouted, indoor planted lawn grass. "She's here," gasped Max, his skin tone becoming subtly more pale. I hoped my expression did not register as much joyous surprise as I felt upon Spacepants' opening of our chamber doors to reveal an indoor lawn of the Kentucky Bluegrass variety blanketing our respective floors and the surfaces of our TVs, tables, and dressers. Lana had taken recently not only to decorating her own dorm room at Abbott College with thousands of blades of grass bristling from every available surface, but had somehow convinced Max to do the same with his room, for which his regret, shame, and ensuing silent resentment continue on to this day. "Where is she?!" Max demanded, his brief and precious bubble of independence thwarted. "Oh, but cute wacky girl has flown away just two days ago for Manerva, so sorry," said 40
Spacepants, but there was no disappointment in her voice as she cast a sly, suggestive glance into Max's libido. I was beginning to see why Spacepants would just as well have Lana out of the picture. This did not bode well for our group unity, and less so for Max's faithfulness. I tried to preoccupy myself with taking off my leather sandals and appreciating the indoor lawn with my bare feet as Spacepants offered her hand to Max in a goodbye handshake of sorts. In Spacepants' native island village such a handshake would be an ancient custom implying the imminent corruption of any remaining innocence. We had left the doors to the shared closet between our rooms open so as to talk in the darkness before sleep, Max perched on the waterbed above the living green carpet below and I on the floor of my room, each tickle of the soft grass against my neck somehow very poignant. As the soft, thick mat of blades was a good 2 - 3 inches, too mature to have been grown in place from seed since Lana's arrival, she must have transported at least 300 pounds of grass and thin root latticework and soil in her van in sections to be placed together carefully above the blue plastic tarps protecting the floor, only to make us feel at home, or perhaps to shrewdly disarm Max's distress at the feminine invasion of our last private male road trip together. I chuckled softly thinking of Lana's naive good intentions with the grass, no doubt unaware of Max's spite against all vegetation since the regretful fate of his dorm room turned lawn. "What's so freakin' funny?" he asked from the darkness, through the empty closet between us. I was silent for a long while, running my fingers through the cool grass, just barely moist from its last watering, and pulled a sheet from my waterbed down to me for warmth, because I knew I would sleep where I was for the night. "Where are we going, Max?" I asked softly, and as always when Max detected the doubt and sadness creeping into my voice, and could tell I was looking for conversation, his answers were strong and abrupt. "Find Kite," he said. He had no time to comfort or reassure, and there was not even the luxury of glory and drama to his reminder of our quest. His words were simply an unquestionable, unwavering fact. "Why?" I asked feebly, sad and weak of spirit for perhaps no reason, as I sometimes am, listening intently for my friend's voice, for some camaraderie, some compassion. He answered through the darkness with only the single word "Holy". I dreamt that night of endless fields of grass under a cloudless sky.
~
-CHAPTER FOURYO-YOS AND FIRE 41
As it turned out, Mr. Kite was a student at Manerva University only three years ago. Assuming he still walked the earth, he would be a 25 year old college drop-out, as he managed to slip through the public's fingers towards the end of his junior year into a mysterious absence from which he has not yet emerged. He was rumored to have a fondness for yo-yos, and owned a monocle with a purple-tinted lens. The "yo-yo" is a common children’s toy. At Bald Monkey Estate it achieved the status of a religious icon along the lines of the cross, Star of David, yin-yang symbol, and the like. For this reason it was unheard of for the members of the Estate to be seen using the toy for its common purpose. The 13 ceremonial pink yo-yos on the estate were reserved for use only by the 13 specially appointed ceremonial “virgins” (who were far from it) in the chanting ceremonies such as the one Max and I found ourselves in the following night. "That's the girly," said Max, pointing to a certain young lady in a white silk gown amidst the pre-ceremonial bustle of people perfecting the atmosphere for the ensuing chant. Max refers to females as "girlies", with a tone suggesting that they are frivolous, trivial things to be dismissed. It was difficult to catch a good look at her through the dim illumination of flickering candlelight, but as I was straining to make out her features she caught my gaze and flashed me a peace sign. Max had related to me a most peculiar encounter with her earlier in the day. It involved a cube of transparent soap in which was encased a small yellow rubber ducky, apparently designed to slowly liberate as one cleans oneself, thereby making bath time fun. Max had found the ducky-soap lying in one of the many showers in the spa down the hall from our rooms, and adopted it for his own. He kept it in the locker in the adjoining changing room, a locker which unfortunately he did not bother to lock or even keep closed. Perhaps he was proud of his soap and wanted it to be displayed. But one day Max was sad to notice it was missing. The soap had changed hands. Max spotted it beside the towel of the peace-sign flashing "girly", who was then in the shower and likely to soon reach out, grab it, and lather herself. This she did, though the reach was too far to avoid revealing the slightest cross-section of her unclothed and exceedingly healthy physique. This I know because I was there at the sinks washing the sticky residue of my breakfast orange from my hands, and a pair of facing bathroom mirrors offered a convenient path of reflection by which I could not help but observe. Truly, a lovely creature in that ripe stage of blossoming into womanhood. Until the moment of the shower curtain unveiling, Max was making a direct and swift line for the ducky-soap, but his libido then stopped him in his tracks and sent him receding to a deeper and more cunning state of mind. Max is my friend. I know him well; I have observed the transformation more than once. Something primal awakens. Ancient instincts writhe anew. Faintly through the muggy shower room wafts the scent of the prey. "Where's my fuckin' ducky?" asked Max. Max rarely uses profanity. He attempts it on occasion and he fails. As I overheard the exchange I smiled and shook my head restraining the urge to run up and pat my friend on the shoulder for so, so obvious an attempt to make a little joke. Upon utterance of the profane word, Max's voice cracked like a schoolboy. In such attempts, Max's voice never fails to crack. It’s quite adorable to behold. The girly screamed, as per the usual in such abrupt disturbances from so vulnerable a state. It was more a startled shriek than a scream, but not the warmest response to a cute sexual 42
advance. There was a remarkably loud and distinct echo and a painfully extended reverberation across the tiled walls of the shower room, and the soap in question was dropped in fright to bounce out of the shower in Max's direction. This was my cue to leave, which I was able to do unseen while Max awkwardly took up the ducky-soap and offered it to the girly from under the shower curtain. I closed the door and stayed near long enough to hear Max's whimper of "here you go," and the girly's nervous "It was my ducky anyway, dork." I had made precious little headway down the hall towards our rooms before Max caught up with me and began his supposed tale of glory. " ‘Where's my fuckin' ducky’, I said to her, you know, the girly that swiped my duckysoap?" Max had apparently mastered the profanity and it now rolled easily off his tongue. I told him that I did not know her, which at the time I did not, though she was later to figure significantly in our quest and acquire a name. "Fuckin' ducky, eh? Yeah, well she thought it was funny when she leaned out to give it back to me in seducement." The appropriate term "seduction" was muttered, an irrelevant afterthought, as Max tapped a smoke out of his pack and took it with his lips. He coolly coincided the lighting of his silver Zippo with a glance of shared understanding and the phrase "healthy physique". "Of course, I let her have it," continued Max, the smoke tendrils wafting up around him to regenerate his womb of coolness. "The ducky-soap, that is." "You are kind," I managed with a nod, looking down at my feet as we neared our rooms. I was not sure if I couldn't look at him out of shame for his lies, or if it was so as to hide my smile at having witnessed the sole brief window of vulnerability in Max's life. With each passing innuendo, my offense at being lied to receded and my smile grew. A lie is always a sin only to a prude, and nothing sexual can be taken seriously. Max was using me as at times he must, to reform his icy shields, and I was glad to be of service. "Fuckin' ducky..." mused Max once more, as if savoring a brilliant chess move. His voice did not crack. Back to the chanting ceremony. "Hey, dork!" chirped the girly at Max with a smile of recognition as she wove her way toward us through the crowd. The gig was up. Max's alternate worlds were soon to collide and leave only the simple truth standing in the wreckage of their collision. I knew he had simply stolen the soap of and startled a possibly underaged naked chick in the shower. But as far as he knew he had successfully convinced me a river-nymph beauty had returned his prized soap in “seducement”. His facade breathed its last; his expression was one of almost noble resignation. “Feeling all scrubbed and squeaky clean?” she asked Max with a wink as if they were old friends. Max lit a cigarette as is the custom when blindfolded before a firing squad. But the chanting spirit was in the air and the overcrowded bustle of the underground chanting vault dampened conversation. I had to yell above the crowd to be heard asking the girly what she was carrying. She gave us a well-polished look of untold wonder and mystery. An alluring look, as she harbored mystical secrets of the Orient. Yet something prevented me from taking her seriously. It may have been her application of a few gallons of eyeliner and a quart or two of mascara, giving her the distinct likeness of a raccoon. It may have been her neon blue hair in pigtails or her attire, which, in addition to her bright white ceremonial gown, consisted of an abundance of shiny rainbow-colored plastic beads, and a necklace made of glowsticks, and clunky army boots. She held out her secret before us, a basketball-sized sphere of dark purple velvet, lined 43
with golden strips of metal at its meridians and studded with golden bolts. She slowly opened the mysterious sphere a sliver, revealing it to be two halves joined together at a golden hinge. There was darkness and something else within. Then she quickly snapped shut the mystery sphere and smiled wickedly at us, perhaps at Max especially, relishing her tease. She then giggled mischievously and slipped away into the swarm of chanters with her secret, leaving Max's exaggerations unexposed and our curiosity peaked. A hush was slowly dawning on the room as the ceremony fell into place. Max strained to follow sight of Mystery-Sphere Girly as we were ushered into one of the many chanting circles forming, but she was gone. She would find a place in our quest. And acquire a name.
~
Girls to the left of us and girls to the right of us. To our right sat our old acquaintance "Spacepants", garbed in her traditional war-paint and shark's teeth motif, and luckily for our curiousities as to the contents of the velvet mystery sphere, to the left of us sat Mystery Sphere Girly. I was sure that we had lost our young ducky liberating friend when she dissolved into the crowd, but she edged her way into our chanting circle at the last minute, mystery sphere in hand. Spacepants shot suggestive glances at Max. I rolled my eyes. The chanting seemed to have emerged out of the bustle before even the formal ceremony began. I simply notice a rhythm had tamed the bustle and the more voices accorded with it the more orderly our arrangement became. I was not sure what was happening in the chanting chamber. We were as unwilling participants in some form of cult synchronized swimming event, caught in a slowly shifting configurations we did not understand - a kaleidoscope of bodies and voices which ultimately resolved itself into groups of seven, in rings around the few white stone slabs on the black stone slab floor. I bobbed my head along with the rising force of the chant, but could not make out the words, save that it was a single phrase repeated again and again, echoing to grand effect with primo underground stone chamber acoustics. It was loud. "Down came the rain and washed the spider out!" These words I caught for sure, though they most certainly were not found on the lips of anyone other than the dreaded Spacepants, with her devious smile to Max revealing a secret irreverence for the event. Max is not unfond of irreverence. He smiled in return, but was met with a hard nudge from Mystery Sphere Girly, whose goofy innocence did not detract from the sincere reverence setting into her manner. The chant was on. It was not unlike the droning of a swarm of bees, drone drone, deep and intense with a queasy edge. I felt myself sinking into a syrupy trance, which I suppose is the object of the game, but which I could not allow. I fumbled for my "Journalist Stuff" notebook, reminded myself to change the title, and flipped to the last page. I took notes to return me to the thoughtful 44
melancholy I sorely missed. I had given up hope of doing my part for the ceremony, and had receded deeply to the private world of my writing. I needed the familiarity of the pen in my hand. Why does the droning so disquiet me? I thought for a moment I had caught a familiar couple words amidst the queasy rolling waves of the chant, but it was then lost to me and I returned to my book and my blue ink. My notes read as follows: -QUEST: Find Kite. -WHY: Holy. (response courtesy of Max) -BALD MONKEY ESTATE: Unfortunate sidetrack. Too freaky. Do not submit to freakiness, remain in perennial mild amusement. Bob head and mouth words but do not chant. Record phrases chanted as deciphered for later analysis. -MYSTERY SPHERE: ??? -LANA: Such big eyes. Is she with Bald Monkey now? She has surpassed us on our own quest if the pilgrimage to Manerva was successful. How long did the grass take to be laid down? 10 hours? 20? Hopefully reunite with Lana at Manerva, ask for traces of Kite. Does Max know what he has? There is rhythm even to the droning of bees. It is not a uniform sound, but comes in layers. Perhaps that is only a trick of the ears, finding order where there is none. The layers were falling into place, each circle of seven voices apparently with its own harmony, each ring a separate instrument. There were words and meaning somewhere in the drone. I mouthed along to the words of a catchy nursery rhyme which Spacepants was singing in parody and mocking of the event, if only to appear in service to my ring. "Out came the sun and dried up all the rain." A familiar tune, and a convenient ruse. I grasped at the threads of memory for the next verse. I did not go so far as to play out the hand gestures depicting the trials of the itsy-bitsy spider as did Spacepants. The rhyme was a cunning play at Max's war against formality, a shared irreverence which Mystery Sphere Girly did not like. Mystery Sphere Girly raised her mystery sphere above her head with an honor and sense of gravity which she flaunted in Spacepants' irreverent direction. Mystery Sphere Girly rose to her feet and carried the mystery sphere to the center of our ring. I looked around to indeed find a mystery sphere for each ring of seven, each carried by a beautiful young lady to the special white stone slabs. A phrase so familiar bobbed to the surface of the waves of the chant. So familiar, so elusive. The mystery sphere was set down on the white stone slab and the halves creaked open by young fingers. I caught the single phrase after a thousand repetitions. "Heart beats within a womb of laughter." The mystery was unveiled. Then Max lit a cigarette. I knew before even it touched his lips that we would regret it. Although I do not partake of tobacco myself, I have acquired a thorough understanding of the vice through my long association with Max. A cigarette is an informal thing. They are not for the squeaky cleanliness of hospitals or the gravity of courtrooms. For underground chanting chambers? A quasi-religious ceremony? A more difficult call, but most likely not. Max took the chance and I smiled at the stir it caused. Subtle ripples of distress registered around the burning embers of cheap tobacco, first from around our ring of seven and later from foreign rings. Some of the elderly chanters stuttered and lost their rhythm only to quickly retrieve it. The distress of Mystery Sphere Girly was not so subtle. She turned to Max and scrunched up her nose at him in retaliation for tarnishing her ceremonial mystery sphere doings. The sphere was blossoming open 45
in layers at the hands of the girly. The creaking apart of the two velvet halves was enough to alight my curiosity and rivet my attention. This was, however, merely a tease. Within the velvet outer shell was a layer of burlap, bunched up and heaped over the bulge of something deeper within, in the center. Rough, rugged burlap with the weave not uniform but wavy and misshapen as if stretched out and frayed in places and with loose threads bristling free from the fabric. This burlap was not the light brown of the potato sack variety, but apparently had been dyed a dark purple to match the outside surface. I was beginning to discern the chant. It put the strange old lines of verse that were the prologue chant to The Garden of Flowers to a primal beat. A slow, steady, electronically synthesized drum beat could be heard from large speakers mounted to the walls, each deep base beat resonating slowly to silence before the next. Spacepants bared her teeth in a mock she-wolf snarl to Mystery Sphere Girly to defend her darling Max from the prudish distaste for his vice. Another nose-scrunch was shot to Spacepants in return, then business was returned to and the burlap was unveiled. The drum beat quickened. The chant was changing as well, though my desire to decipher the words was waning with the growing pull of the trance, always lurking beneath the waterline, eager to swallow me up. This was hardly dignified. I recalled moments from long ago, in our old beloved Abbott College coffee shop, when The Garden of Flowers chant was read not fervently in booming stereo but in softer tones, by Lana with her pretty lilting laugh. Then too the words tickled some deep faculty of mind alien to me and I would lose track of time and return to myself an hour later, revived, reborn. I suppose then I was more tempted by surrender; Lana was a gentle orator. "Heart beats within a womb of laughter." That line brought back memories, brought me back to lazy college days and skipping class to care for other studies. Hot afternoons laying in the tall grass carpet of Max's dorm room with friends like a pack of lions in our endless African grassland. Times when I thought even that I might understand the book and not worship our missing cult leader/author Mr. Kite from afar, but nod my head in grateful togetherness of insight and say, "ah yes, of course, heart does beat within a womb of laughter." But where have our friends gone to now? I can't say even if they remember. And understanding the book came only with luck and with thoughts from a deeper place in my mind on which my hold is too, too feeble. Especially at Bald Monkey Estate. As the burlap was lifted to reveal another veil beneath, the synthetic drum beats quickened further and a new line emerged from the broiling sea of voices. Too, too many voices. "Laughter is a divine symbiote." Spacepants took the cigarette from Max's lips and breathed its smoke into her own lungs, and passed it back. Her hands in fishnet gloves and rings of gold and bone and long red nails made the itsy-bitsy spider climb up the waterspout. The deepest veil was of purple silk. Sometimes I am at a loss to recall the profound and the poignant in the lines of this old book. The chant was speeding up, becoming feverish. At times even when I could decipher the lines of verse through the boom of the electronic drum, it made no more sense than gibberish. The silk was lifted with two pale, delicate fingers. Another line from the pen of the holy man - "World can be forgotten." Beneath the silk was a bright pink yo-yo. By the time of the yo-yo unveiling, a quiet old man towards the other side of the chanting ring could hold his peace no longer. I had been keeping my eye on him as he was a sketchy character, scruffy and in ripped camouflage and leather and with eyes like cold steady lasers in Max's direction. The ruffian had become increasingly agitated with Max's smoking and general foolishness over the course of the chant, especially his flirtation with Spacepants. I hoped that he was not Spacepants' overprotective and violent father. He was too old and scrawny to be her significant other, especially with his rugged militia fashion sense clashing with her glamorous 46
Caribbean island-dominatrix style. Most likely he was a frustrated admirer of the voodoo maid from afar, his simmering bitterness at her rejection turned to scorn of Max. Either he was waiting for the culmination of the ceremony with the yo-yo exposed, or Max's use of the itsy-bitsy spider hand gestures threw him over the edge, but finally he got up from his place in our ring and came to squeeze in between Max and I, making an uncomfortably tight fit for both of us and bringing with him an unidentified sour odor. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and the better part of his forearm before putting it around Max's shoulder in a most definitely sarcastic camaraderie. "G’day, mate," he began in a dialect that was almost illegible due to his thick Australian accent, his drunken slur, or some combination of the two. "By crikey I think you've got the idea of Kite all wrong. Why don't we see if I can help you out here, shall we mate?" It was rare to hear the name "Kite" used without the appropriate title of respect beforehand, and it disturbed me to hear this man speak so informally. The man ruffled through a disorderly collection of string, gum wrappers, proofs of purchase, and whatnot spilling out from his coat pockets to produce a small pamphlet. There was one thing about the man that I will never forget - he had a tattoo of a barcode on the middle of his forehead. "Here we go now - holy words from a holy man, right here." The pamphlet appeared to be a homemade and miserably poor reproduction of the sacred original, photocopied and stapled together, with a ring of flowers on the front drawn messily in pencil. Above the crude illustration was the title The Garden of Flowers. My heart sank. The attempt at counterfeit was abysmal, pathetic. "These are holy words," mumbled the ruffian, his mock camaraderie fading to deadly seriousness, "and holy words are to be respected, mate." With that last admonition the man snatched the dredges of the cigarette from Max's lips and knelt down to rub it out on the cold stone floor. "Try some reverence, tyke!" commanded the man, opening the sad little pamphlet and thrusting it at Max, who was intended to read along from it as he chanted. Then the man got up and walked to his rightful place, where he slumped down, satisfied with his manhood. Max has a sharp tongue but is not much for fighting. That would require more confidence from him and less self-pity. But where women are concerned, he would like to maintain at least a pretense of dignity, and this rowdy drunken troglodyte had just humiliated him in front of not one, but two of our feminine friends. It was a rare moment when Spacepants and Mystery Sphere Girly could both be united, one on either side of Max and comforting him with fairly pure hearts and no jealousy, some maternal instinct calming their opposing forces. But Max was not soothed by Mystery Sphere Girly's gentle caress of his hair, nor by the haven of Spacepants' bosom, which was offered perhaps too freely. This would be too easy. Max looked up through the swarm of feminine solace toward the degenerate confronting him and, instead of reading along from the sad pamphlet, he sparked off his silver Zippo and lit it aflame. If the cigarette caused a stir, the writhing creature of flame which was once the praised holy book caused a stir indeed. The chanting, which had been ebbing slowly away from the yo-yo crescendo, stopped altogether. Mystery Sphere Girly took frantic action, running back to her precious sphere and quickly swaddling the toy in its many veils, as if to shield a little baby from a macabre sight. The girly was fast, but not fast enough to finish before she was stopped with a tap on the shoulder the tap of Old Bookstore Man, master of ceremonies. Old Bookstore Man was not mad. His eyes were filled with tears. He did not accuse the girly of allowing the ceremony to be defiled but looked to her with aching disappointment and a silent plea to explain what had occurred. The 47
smoldering pamphlet was writhing gently on the cold stone floor under the last of the flame's dance. The girly could not look our kindly, if senile, old host in the eyes, so rested her gaze on the ashes at our feet. In the brief moments before the ensuing chaos, I took a good look at Max and found in him no regret, but instead a vast calm. As he raised the flame up to the pages, he let go a heaving sigh, and I like to imagine he was making some kind of peace with the book we have so long cherished. Can I read so much into a sigh as to think that Max found some deeper level of appreciation for Mr. Kite even as he set the strange old words to flame? Perhaps not. In any case, no such insight saved us from the roar of rioting chanters, aiming most of their fury not on Max himself, but on our nemesis of the smoldering pamphlet, who for some lucky reason was thought to blame for the fire. At least in the whirlwind of bodies and voices, Max grabbed the back of Spacepants' neck and pulled her valiantly towards him for a stolen kiss, and then swung Mystery Sphere Girly over his shoulder from amidst a rumble which she was unlikely to withstand. We were off. Looking back, I still can find no explanation as to why Mystery Sphere Girly agreed to escape from the insanity of Bald Monkey Estate and take her place in the back seat of our van, ready for adventure. The engine was revved up, in anticipation of Manerva University. "Max," I asked, still somewhat discombobulated from the chanters' riot. "Yes, Sachmo?" answered my friend between drags on his celebration-of-freedom cigarette. "Why did you give Spacepants that name?" Max took another few drags as I waited. "Because her ass is out of this world."* We drove off.
~
-CHAPTER FIVETHE RECORDS OF MYSTERY-SPHERE GIRLY What follows are the records kept in a small red diary with a silver lock that was left unlocked. The diary of Mystery Sphere Girly. Max had procured it from amongst the absurdly growing mass of clutter in my old van and read it aloud to me as we drove through the night, with Mystery Sphere Girly asleep in in the back all the while. It began as a joke, with laughter and giddiness on Max's part, due in part to his fondness for deviance from propriety and in part due to our few days on the road nonstop, sleeping and driving in shifts and its accompanying insanity. As Max was at first all giggles and lighthearted mischief, I didn’t think much of the trespass of privacy. After all, we did not even know our young traveling companion's name real 48
name at this point. Max had taken to calling her “M.S.G.” for short as a nickname. But the fact that she was still mostly a stranger to us was no excuse to invade her privacy, and if it seems I shirk an apology, in hindsight I do admit my regret. We did not know what we would find, and it turned out to be very personal indeed. Yet I transcribe the records here, because this journal is my only solace and it comforts me and is my shield from the loneliness; I will hide nothing from it. And so the diarySeptember 14th, 1993: Hello new diary! Since this is my first entry I’ll start by describing myself. I’m a fun-loving, drop-dead gorgeous girl with a spirit of adventure, destined for fame and fortune. I have a natural sense for fashion and I carry myself with grace and elegance. I basically just hang around being rich and following the words of Mr. Kite like we all do here at Bald Monkey Estate. It’s been a day like any other. Some tennis, shrimp and scallops for lunch, lounging around the spa, and getting my toenails painted. Then a chanting ceremony tonight and maybe some martinis with the girls and dancing at the club later if there’s a good DJ. By the way, a glowing orb with wings often flies around my head, zipping around in circles so fast it must look like I have a halo. Her name is Kali. Kali is a fairy. When she’s not flying around she’ll take a snooze in my backpack. I have one of those stylish little backpacks the size of a small purse, made of nice red leather, very pretty. Fashion is important! Bald Monkey said I dress like I was walking by a Crayola factory when it exploded. He cannot hurt my feelings. I am a strong woman with self-respect. I am a woman who knows secrets. Kali tells me secrets. She shares things with me. But not in words. It’s more like I can hear her think- like our minds are linked up somehow. Fairy Telepathy I guess. Kali is so cool and magical! She is inside my backpack right now, amongst my clutter of paints and brushes, fluttering her wings. She always flutters her wings. I can feel the vibration on my back like she’s purring. Septemeber 15th, 1993: Kali speaks to me in her so, so faint chirpy voice. So cute. You can barely hear fairies, they’re so quiet. Most people can’t hear them at all, let alone see them. Sometimes she’ll be circling my head and I’ll hear the faintest cry of "Hey, listen!" How many times have I heard her words "Hey, listen!" in her cute faint fairy chirp? So many. When I do I stop whatever I’m doing and listen and she flies down and perches like a parrot on a pirate and whispers in my ear. She tells me secrets. I try to respond but communicating to her is difficult. It is purely 49
receptive on my part, not like I can ask her questions or hold a conversation. So I just listen and do whatever she tells me to, which so far has always turned out to be the right thing to do, like she can see the future or something. I trust her completely. It’s like having a guardian angel, I suppose. In return for her impeccable guidance I feed her. She’s very picky and won’t eat anything if it’s not fresh fruit. Grapes are her favorite.
Septemeber 20th, 1993 When I first met Kali I tried really hard to talk to her, to get her to tell me where she came from and get directions to the Fairy Realm, where I would relocate to without a second thought and never look back. No such luck. She is not interested in my words, only my ears. I have no magic secrets to tell her anyway, the way she reveals things and prophesizes for me. But she stays with me. She will never leave me, we are best friends forever. Kali tells me stories to help me fall asleep, especially when I wake up scared in the middle of the night, because I have a lot of nightmares. Mostly she tells me about her Fairy Realm. Her home is she calls The Ecology. The Hierarchy is how different species of non-physical entities have different dimensions of the Ecology that they inhabit. Yep, there are other entities which live in even higher realms than Kali, such as the Elves, who govern the Fairies and are sometimes called The Elves of the Fourth House, and the One True Alien who is the Queen that the Elves serve, and others we don’t know about. I’ll describe just how the Hierarchy works, as I understand it. See, of all the species we are but one. While humans are higher beings than plants and animals, there are beings higher than us. Non-physical beings that know more than we do and are ethically superior. But they are not ghosts or the souls of dead people. There are different kinds of these beings and their different habitats are what forms the Ecology and the Hierarchy. It goes like this- plants, animals, humans, Fairies, Elves, different kinds of aliens, and then the One True Alien. Communication between the different levels is really hard. Only very special humans can see Fairies, let alone hear them talk like I can. It’s very rare, but possible to communicate with beings one level higher. I’m living proof of that. But you can’t skip levels. So you can’t see or talk to the Elves directly. But there are these curious things that act as interpreters and translate between the different levels. They are called Astral Jellyfish. The One Queen keeps thousands of Astral Jellyfish as pets, or her 50
“familiars”. They can be sent downstream, down the Hierarchy, and trained to return like salmon swimming upstream or like messenger pigeons. The Astral Jellyfish are like the Queen’s Royal Delegates, diplomats that can be sent down to the Elves, the Fairies, or even all the way downstream to us humans. They plug into an invisible power outlet that all humans have on the back of their necks. But I’m special because I can hear and understand Fairy-Language directly from Kali, without the Jellyfish latched on to put me into trance and translate for me. This means I can understand and remember the messages much better than most people. She communicates the Will of the Elves to me in some kind of telepathy which I believe is a gift I am blessed with, and I will always do the Will of the Elves, nomatter what. Since the Fairies serve them, so shall I. I sure wish I could just teleport to Kali’s fairy dimension once and for all. For some reason I think I was supposed to have been born there. Maybe that’s why Kali came to me, cuz I was a fairy in a past life…? Anyways, I gotta get out of this place somehow. Even with all the distractions, the Estate has gotten so fucking boring lately. I’ve been thinking I need to go out and see the world. Kali would come with me of course. She could fly away at any time- fly, fly away back to her Fairy Realm, but she does not. Kali can hardly be seen inside the bright glow that glows from her, so she looks like a glowing orb with dragonfly wings that extend all fluttery beyond her glow, but she can fly faster than a hummingbird so her glow leaves a trail like a comet. Sometimes in a whole ring like a halo. When I cannot see her glow overhead I can feel the subtle vibration of her flutter from within my very expensive and stylish red leather backpack and I know she is taking a nap. Even when she sleeps her wings flutter, flutter like a cat purring. It’s comforting. October 17th, 1993 Sorry I haven’t written in a while, diary, but finally I have some action to report to you! My life has been just about turned upside down! There were these two guys who came to the Estate and they messed up our chanting ceremony really bad and then I left to go on a road-trip with them! They think they’re gonna find Mr. Kite and I don’t have the heart to tell them it ain’t gonna happen. Impossible, I say. I’ll just let them think they have a chance so I can ride along with them and get some wind in my hair finally. Now that I think about it I haven’t been outside Bald Monkey Estate in over a year. Most people who come to the Estate never leave. It’s a pretty tight-knit community, you could say. Ok, so it’s a cult. I can’t even hardly believe I left! I feel like I broke free from something that used to be my whole world, and now look at 51
me, on the road again! But I don't have a sword yet. That’s imperative to acquire. I think I’d like a katana. No Egyptian warrior princess leaves her cult without a katana. But for that I need money. How the heck do you make money? It’s not gonna be easy after having everything you could ever need all supplied for free, like at the Estate. But I think being on the road adventuring now is even better. Well, diary, it’s not often I have adventurous tales to write about. But things feel different now. There’s no turning back. Kali, if you’re reading this, let’s sale off into the horizon together baby! Of course, even though I keep this diary in my backpack along with you and my paints, I guess you wouldn’t snoop, so nevermind. Yeah, I guess you could read this whenever you wanted, but you wouldn’t, because only a horrible, loathesome person would do something like read someone else’s diary…
<3 [Interjection from Sachmo, myself- This last entry was the last one read by Max in whispered jest, with laughter barely restrained so as not to awaken our sleeping beauty. As he progressed his voice slowed and became more serious, with breaks to light a cigarette and shoot me raised-eyebow glances, perhaps in hope of an admonition to stop reading. I gave no such admonition. By this point curiosity had gotten the better of me. Plus, I told myself, there may be information which I had a responsibility to gather for the success of our quest. Clues. The entries were certainly… revealing. And a bit disturbing. This chick was clearly fixated on her fairy game. Did she ever write about anything else? Surely she couldn’t believe this stuff! She gave no outward impression of being mentally unstable or deranged. Maybe a bit spacey and eccentric. She certainly dressed weird. I mean who wears frilly dresses and clunky army boots? But listening to Max read, I had the uncomfortable suspicion that someone who believed this stuff might just axe-murder you in your sleep, and she was lurking in the shadows just behind me. But I listened on, and even transcribed these entries here, praying she would not awake before I finished. Read on if you wish, reader, as we did. I have no chastisement for you. If you turn your eyes you are nobler than we…]
October 22nd, 1993 I have a story to tell. One day, a long time ago, Kali flew out of my backpack and she had paint on her. My paint got on her, on her waist and her wings, and on her legs. Oil paint, very sticky and thick, because I was not careful to screw the caps on the tubes. This paint no doubt had lead or other harmful chemicals in it. It was my fault, Kali. I'm so sorry, Kali. I could tell she was hurt because the paint stopped her glow, which had never happened before. Kali's glow couldn't get through the paint, 52
so it was the first time I could clearly see her body and face. She looked so naked and fragile without her glow, her tiny body was visible and the blue oil paint all smeared on her. She was whimpering in her chirpy voice and flopping around. I was scared; I get nervous just writing about it. At first I thought the splotches of blue on her were her blood, since for all I know fairy blood might be blue. Then I realized the blue was my oil paint on her. Some was on her wings and she couldn't flutter right. I was so scared.
Instead of fluttering she made a hurt sound like it was almost a flutter but not quite because the paint was too heavy. Like: "flutter, flutter, thwump, flutter, thwump". It was sad because I could tell she was trying to do her neat purring flutter, but she couldn't do it. Also she was heavier than usual and when she could lift into the air a few inches off my palm, she sagged and floated down like she couldn't stay up. I was so sorry I cried when I realized it was my fault. It still makes me feel bad, like I'm not such a good person, or I'm not a strong woman. Just a stupid, silly girl. I don't keep my possessions ordered enough. I'm not so careful. Kind of clumsy, kind of flakey. I probably don't even deserve to have Kali. Do I deserve you Kali? I had to help Kali, and actually touch her to get the paint off her, and she let me. But I could tell she was scared to be touched, I guess because fairies aren't supposed to touch anything. And it was like touching a butterfly when I plucked her out of the air, and sparkling dust came off her. She was real cold! I didn't expect that. But it wasn't cold like ice; it was a weird tingly cold like her dust tingled and got under my skin and made me numb. I could even feel it seeping down to my wrists and arms like frostbite. But I didn't mind that. At first I tried to clean her with snow. The snow didn't work though, because it turns to water, and water and oil don't mix, so snow doesn't get oil paint off. And she kind of whimpered in a real sweet, faint voice like it hurt her but she was trying to be tough. It broke my heart, I cried real hard. 53
Then I got an idea and I ran with Kali to the groundskeepers’ tool shed. I got just a little paint thinner on my hand, and rubbed it on her. It hurt her pretty bad. I bet it stung you all over and especially on your fragile wings, Kali. I’m so sorry. But it washed away most of the paint and then I held you carefully under water from a hose and after a while you seemed better. I'm so sorry, friend. My only friend. I love you. God, if Kali died I would probably die too. But Kali is better now, and in my cute backpack right now, and all my tubes of paint have their caps on real tight, and they are all wrapped in cellophane and tied up with rubber bands so even the fumes can't get to her. I can tell she forgave me because she still encourages me to paint. She always tells me how she likes my paintings. They are mostly all of her anyway. I love you Kali!
~
-CHAPTER SIXANOTHER GREASY DINER M.S.G. was gone, having wandered away after the last unnecessarily loud and prolonged slurp through the straw of her strawberry milkshake. She must have become bored with Max's caffeine-enhanced philosophizing. I thought I had seen her betting on pinball games with the local diner riff-raff, but the crowds had gone home for the night. Was she out in the backseat of our absurdly cluttered van, dreamily writing another sanity-questionable diary entry before slipping safely to sleep? Or did she relinquish her body to a greasy trucker as payment for a pinball game gone awry? A pang of almost fatherly concern shot through me. Why did I feel responsible for this female? She was 18 years old at the time, (as we learned to Max’s relief) and not as innocent as she would like people to think. She was one of those young women who use puppy-dog eyes too often and to their calculating advantage, as a thin and never fully convincing veneer. Her adulthood could not even be hidden even poorly for much longer beneath her blue hair and bubble gum and ever-present wide-eyed gaze of supposed wonder. She clung too desperately to her veils of cuteness and it gave her the sense that a deeper side was hidden within. 54
I stepped out into the dark and drizzle of the night and made my way to our van, which was empty. I paused in my search to lean against a phone booth and gaze into the reflections of neon signs in the puddles as they shimmered in the faintest of rains. It was cold and the cold and dark were good and the sleaze and warmth of the diner nearby was good. It was a night of strange feeling for me; the exquisite loneliness in the air which comes for me at times was close. My sadness comes like an angel, a relief. A loneliness that is like being wrapped in cool silk, sensual, and with an aching of my heart that makes me want to write. That diner could have been any diner. I was sad and at peace and leaning against the phone booth. I could think and remember my special thoughts. I will always remember those raindrops; they were so very small. I heard the laughter of our friend from around the back of the diner. I walked slowly to her and found her playing alone in the timid rain which was like mist more than rain. And she did not see me watch her. I watched her play alone with joy, with a white feather that she took the greatest care in tossing about and catching when it drifted slowly down to her. She laughed and talked to the feather in the voice of play, talking for no reason and making up words and giggling. It was a game for one and I stepped back to watch in cover of darkness. It was painful somehow to see her so content with her own little game, laughing so sweetly, next to an old wet dumpster, and with me the voyeur to pop the little bubble of play from the outside. It was a game for one. I realized now how I could never, never join her and laugh as she did then and I felt that I had failed. She was beautiful, tragic, and perhaps insane. Coincidentally, those are the three qualities I look for in a girl. You see, I like my women shell-shocked, just like me. But thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a story for another day, or perhaps not at all. Did she actually believe the feather was her little fairy friend? "Yes, Kali, come down here to play with your pretty friend!" She waved to the feather to fly down and it complied with its lazy zig-zag drift. "Oh, thank you my sweet little fairy," she giggled. "Don't worry, I won't put you back in my little red backpack just yet, we can play â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;til the boys are done with their meal and come get us." And for this next part she held the feather close to her lips and whispered, "But remember to never fly our when the others are around. Don't let them see you, they just wouldn't understand how we love each other." And she gave the soft white feather a gentle kiss and threw it back into the air with a laugh. "Do you like our new friends, Kali?" she asked with her arms outstretched to catch her pretend fairy once more. "I think that Max thinks he's tough, but he's kind of a dork, isn't he? Tee-hee!" At this I could restrain my laughter only because I was beginning to think that M.S.G. was not so right in the head. I wanted to embrace her and take her away from the old rusted dumpster and give her my sweater so she would not be cold in her frilly pink dress, or just help her out somehow. But to interrupt would be inexcusable, like dropping one of those glass spheres that are shaken so snowflakes can float down on a perfect little world within, which is just what she carried around in her head- a perfect little world. A world populated by Elves, Fairies, and Jellyfish, but whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s to say not a better world than this one? She really believed she had a fairy. And she loved her fairy-feather with all her heart, and I could no longer laugh at her crazy diary because she was lonely too perhaps and she took some friendship somehow, however she could, even if from an imaginary friend. I would not shatter her fragile bubble of play. But she saw me. "That other one has the heart of a poet, though!" she was saying, in reference to me, when she caught my gaze and her innocence bled from her face all at once, because I was there to steal her pretend world even as I wished to be in it with her. And her expression fell so quickly, as if one girl were made to face all the hollowness of all the world, because of me. And at first she 55
took her feather in her hands as if to hide it, to hide Kali from me, but it was too late and she just let her feather fall to the wet pavement and she cried, and I hugged her though it couldn't do any good. Looking back, I should have pieced together the simple facts- this chick was severely traumatized, she was a tragic beauty, and I was in love. The rain was like mist.
~
PART TWO â&#x20AC;&#x153;AT MANERVAâ&#x20AC;? -CHAPTER SEVENA COZY HOME "Chrissy, get up!" Mystery Sphere Girly's real name was Chrissy. That was just one of the things we figured out on the long drive to Manerva University. We had finally arrived at some time after midnight with big fluffy snowflakes beginning to fall outside and no place to sleep on campus. Chrissy was swaddled in blankets and clutter in the back of our van and had no intentions of waking up. I have been writing this humble tale in blue ink for a long while now. It is time for a change. I am weary. As you have perhaps noticed, Reader, I have so far done my best to invoke a pleasant, conversational tone with which to convey the events that have befallen Max and I on our travels prior to our arrival at Manerva. These events have for the most part been a pleasure to recall and I have enjoyed reliving them from a safe distance, with almost two years having past since Max kissed the crumbly brick wall goodbye. I have enjoyed writing by the light of a candle, nestled awake in the absurd clutter of our van while my traveling companions slept. I have enjoyed envisioning our story in the hands of another soul like myself (I hope it is you, dear reader), who can empathize with the peculiar nature of the forthcoming drama. In that case, I feel that I should apologize. From this point on, we are walking on weird ground. Things become difficult to remember. Difficult to remember sequentially, that is, and very difficult in respect to logic or believability. I do not look forward to having to relive certain memories. I am indeed weary. Some images leap to me with great urgency even while I do my best to suppress them. There was the large, jagged shard of a broken mirror, sure to haunt me to the grave. Others I am happy to carry with me even unto my own deathbed of moss. Such was the mingled odor of cigar smoke and whiskey, which inevitably signaled a meeting with Bald Monkey. Chrissy was just checking the door of the campus dining hall to see if it was unlocked 56
and if we could steal some cereal. It was locked, but a window was not. Chrissy commenced a precarious ninja maneuver. As she held the window open with one hand and balanced with her shins on the windowsill, she heard a warm chuckling from the dark of night behind her. "Who's there?" gasped Chrissy, startled by the chuckling in the darkness. "An old friend," answered Bald Monkey. And from that moment on we have never been the same. As Chrissy would explain often, the moment she caught Bald Monkey’s gaze some unearthly amber light glimmered in his eyes and she felt as if she were struck by lightning, enraptured, spellbound by some strange magic perhaps passed down to Bald Monkey from Mr. Kite himself. She went completely limp and felt a huge tidal wave of catharsis wash through her soul, causing her to sob uncontrollably. And Bald Monkeytook her in his arms as she wept and he whispered "Poor little flower" to her and kissed her on the forehead. She said she immediately saw the whole path of her life and ours- past and future all at once. Though we asked her relentlessly what Fate had in store for us and if our quest would be successful, she would never say. She would only remain silent, smile faintly and mysteriously, gazing far away as if into a distant horizon, and sigh. As this unruly piece of writing forms slowly into a whole in my head, I suppose what has come before has been merely an introduction of sorts all along. Perhaps it is nearly time for Max and I and Chrissy and Lana with such wide eyes, soon to arrive, to step aside and pass this tale along to its more rightful heroes …But no, I suppose there is much more to be told of us “side characters” as well; I will record every detail. Yet know that we all and all our cares are merely on the fringe of a different story. The story of a small group of young men and women. The colorful students of Manerva who were here when the Holy One was in attendance and are the carriers of the Legacy to this day. A society. The exact number that composed them was seven. But just who composed this “core” group was never entirely clear. Of the seven core members, most of these were in flux, each one being replaced by a new initiate when they left. There were ex-members who would return, prospective members in training, those who would attempt and inevitably fail to infiltrate the group, and later the girlfriends of members hanging about. Some members were less public and more mysterious than others. Some were never once seen or heard from, merely rumored to exist at all. Some were lost and have not yet reappeared. I cannot even relate to you most of their names. It was a secret society. We first became aware of the existence of the Society in a crowded dorm room in the allfemale dorm in which we were being harbored illegally. We were not even in attendance of the college, let alone female. Unfortunately, our stay as fugitives from college regulations was cut short, but our brief stay was very eventful. Each of us had a poem. A poem of our very own. This makes me happy because it links Max and I and our crowd with the true core members of the Secret Society. Something odd is afoot in the realm of language. The van in which I write these words is so damned cluttered. Absurdly cluttered. It would be impossible to separate the useless clutter that accumulates in our van from our actual belongings, let alone keep our belongings organized and net. And Max with his cigarette smoke always overpowering the incense I have taken to lighting as I settle into the clutter to write these words. At least he knows my habits well enough not to disturb me and merely awakens in the night to smoke a cigarette and then return to sleep while I continue to record the events of the day. 57
I often ask myself why this strange limerick language has chosen us in our grunge and folly to make its appearance. Was there an actual gate out there somewhere in the woods, or was it metaphorical? I always picture an immense stone gate having been eroded by wind and rain long enough to look rough-hewn and be sandpapery to the touch and entwined in vines. Perhaps carved of stone of deep blue or shining emerald. Or perhaps jet black. A darkest black would be fitting. There was most definitely a path which Max and I had the honor of following at a good distance behind the Society on their single most complete descent into the mystery and madness. Max and I are no Native American trackers, and the Society was surely aware of being followed, but they allowed us to continue in their footsteps without a fight, as if they had planned it all along. The path was not much of a path, in any case, as it petered out into the dark and lush legion of woods known as "Moss Hollow Haven". There is a curious form of language which became manifest in the voice of a number of us, at certain moments over the course of our association with the Secret Society. After discussing the first few appearances of this phenomena with Max and Chrissy, we were able to recognize the occurrence as it began to slither into the speech patterns of the unsuspecting recipient. It reminds me somewhat of the poetic form of a limerick, but of a darker and more ancient character. Speaking in tongues is a bizarre religious, spiritual, or perhaps paranormal tradition that has been around for a long time. As is possession. We eventually had to arrive at the conclusion of some mysterious latent faculty of the mind was being activated in us in an abrupt, sporadic manner. The awakening of this faculty had some connection to a Manerva University tradition remaining from the time Mr. Kite was in attendance, which is still practiced to this day. A ritual. We had been on campus for three days, becoming further entwined in the lives of our three hostesses, until Lana made her appearance. I simply heard a sweet, lilting "Hi Sachmo," as I heard so many times from the old Abbott College days. Lana- ever casual, as if not a day had passed. She was swinging on an old swing besides the path to the school library and intoning a most curious nursery rhyme. Charms abound. Little rhymes which mean nearly nothing, heard as if sung by invisible beings of melody, humor, and magic. The students of Manerva University are fond of reciting these rhymes from time to time. Let us just say that now and again something slips in on the wind. Perhaps the most appropriate way I can introduce The Secret Sacred Society is to record as best I can remember the strange charm which Lana was singing as she swung on the swing. It goes like this-
ABSURD CLUTTER We seven are splayed about in this van amidst the absurd clutter and we will never clean it up. We will clean it up never. But in our best moments we are bonded together. Naked in our souls, 58
up high in a ring of seven we are bonded forever and we will never be apart. Wouldn't it be a pleasure if we were always together up high in this ring of seven that could never sever instead of splayed about in the clutter of this van we can never clean out. The branches of the trees, They interweave We form a ring of seven, If you will believe. The ring of seven gathers In the Dark, Dark Woods Round a fire, hot Where by the wind Through the writhing branches of the trees Of the Dark, Dark Woods are the secrets taught.
~
“Weird, huh?” asked Lana as she hopped off the swing and walked up to give me a reunion hug. "Anyways, wanna meet some cool friends of mine?" she asked. “Lead the way.” I said, and we were off…
~ -CHAPTER EIGHTROOM 13 59
So I followed Lana across campus as she bragged about her close ties to Bald Monkey, and how he had promised her a position as Dance Instructor at Bald Monkey Estate, and how he had introduced her to her new "cool friends". I followed her to the all-female dorm. "Good grief," I thought as she walked down the hall to Room 13 - our room. Not only did Lana arrive at Manerva first, but Bald Monkey had evidently directed her to the same three girls as he had pointed us in the direction of. Little did Lana know, but Max and Chrissy and I had made quite the acquaintance with the denizens of Room 13. I thought it prudent, for Max’s sake, not to mention this. "Whassup, girlfriend!" called out one of our hostesses as Lana entered the little room. Good grief, indeed. Lana was special, but always one step ahead of us, and likely to cause trouble somehow, because it was all just fun and games to her. She just didn't have the questing spirit that the male members of our party did. The girls were on a circle on the floor drinking some girly alcoholic beverages and giggling. Lana tried to introduce me to the gossip circle as she grabbed a tall glass for herself, but I was looking for an excuse to escape. Such gatherings were more Max's department, but too much giddy femininity always made me uneasy, nor am I much of a drinker, although it seemed to be as much of an extracurricular activity at Manerva as it was at Abbott College. "Oh, we know Sachmo," one of the girls assured Lana. "We've been keeping him on sleeping bag on our floor for the past couple nights with his two friends. We think he's a little scared of us though." They giggled in unison. "Hey Sach’, where's your friend Maxwell?" "Uh, I think he's looking for leads with Chrissy." I said as Lana gave me the raised eyebrow of doom. The cat was out of the bag. Lana now knew that me and Max had been inhabiting this this very storm of estrogen which I had allowed her to think she was introducing me to for the first time. I didn’t blame her for her suspicion that Max had succumbed to temptation. That’s what Max does. Also, there was definitely a competitive spirit developing when it came to sleuthing skills, with Max and I on one side, and Lana (later joined by Chrissy) on the other. The fact that we had met up with the females of room 13 as Lana had meant we were hot on the trail and closing in her lead. "Ooooh, big detectives!" taunted the girls. More giggling. "How come you guys never asked us about Mr. Kite, huh? You think 'cause we're freshmen we don't know the story?" I was not in the mood to discuss our missing holy man in this context, but there was something curious about Bald Monkey leading Lana to the same place as Max and Chrissy and I, towards Room 13. "Listen to these chicks, Sachmo," advised Lana knowingly between sips of her pinia colada. "They're not the most popular girls in this place for nothing." I was feeling out of the loop already, and seeing no way to avoid sitting down in their circle without seeming rude, I sat down. "So what do you know?" I asked. "Just the facts, ladies," is what I was thinking, but doubted I was cool enough to pull off the role of a real detective. "We know things!" exclaimed the one named Scarlet, a little too loudly. She was a bit of a lush and had been intoxicated most of the times I had seen her. Unbeknownst to her, she was known to some as “Scarlet the Harlot”. "Secret things!" added another. They were enjoying this. "You're talking about that club, right?" asked Lana. "What did you call it? The Invisible Committee? The Underground Agency? The Secret..." "Shut yo' mouth, girl!" interrupted one of them, "My man would kill me if he knew I was talkin' about this stuff." My interest was piqued. 60
"Blah," said Scarlet, rolling her eyes. "Those boys just wanna feel like gangsters in their little clique, actin' like they're all that, and they're like 'We’re magic, we knew Mr. Kite, we have the key to reality, blah, blah...'" She said the word "reality" with extreme sarcasm. "Go on and tell him. We can trust Sachmo, right Sach’?" "Yes," I agreed. I dislike nicknames. "Well," continued another one of them in an overly dramatic, hushed voice, "the reason we are so damned popular is not just our good looks. Our boyfriends are in deep shit in this school. Not everyone knows this, but these boys are causing a lot of fuss, and this is only the beginning. They told us you’d be coming." She pointed at the quieter, less flashy one"Remember? You’re man told us that. Just before he abandoned the Legacy last summer, didn’t he? "He didn’t abandon the Legacy." the Quiet One said, but she seemed unsure. But yeah, he kept saying “In October four will come to follow us to The Cabin, but they will become the leaders.” A chill ran up my spine. Could the four people be us? Me, Max, Lana, and Chrissy? The Cabin was the place where The Garden of Flowers was supposed to have been written. Of course we were being drawn there. But there was no way anyone could have known we were coming to Manerva, let alone last summer, long before we ever decided to. And furthermore- what was this about us becoming the leaders? "Plus,” the other went on, "these boys must have an image consultant or somethin', the way the whole campus is tryin' to figure out what they're up to and get in their club, President Tezzract would have given them the boot and had them expelled already if they didn't have everyone in attendance as their fan club." "So what are they up to?" I asked. "Just the facts, ladies." Excessive giggling. Oh well. "You think they tell us?" asked Scarlet. "No... we're just diversions for their free time, aren't we, girls? Admit it! They love their secret club more than us, don't they? If they had a treehouse they'd put up a 'No Girls Allowed' sign and we'd never see them again!" They all laughed and clinked their glasses together, except for the quiet one, who just smiled and mumbled something about how her boyfriend loved her. Lana smiled at me and opened her eyes wider than normal, sharing the excitement of these prime clues while Max and Chrissy were probably getting nowhere trying to interview professors and librarians. Max and Chrissy then returned from their interviews with a knock, like that of Fate itself on the door of room 13. It was Lana who answered the knock, gave Max a most penetrating stare, and was gone. Trouble brewing…
~
And here is a most unusual poem or chant, but more a kind of incantation, which was sung by Bald Monkey one of the many times he would slip into a trance. Although we all came to equip ourselves with tape recorders which we carried with us at all times, Bald Monkey was the only one who was able to write down the lyrics to a chant while he was receiving it. He called this talent “automatic transcription” or “ghost writing” and said it was most unpleasant and creepy, but fascinating. He said this usually happened to him in the early morning, and so he 61
kept a pen and paper by his bed and would often awake to find a few pages of verse to read as if for the first time, having no memory of writing itâ&#x20AC;Ś
WHEN WILL YOU LEARN? Hark, The Nowhere now is listening and its slumbering secrets are finally bristling The HolyAbsurd is once again visiting and the voices come out of the woodwork whispering.
The grain of the wood on the walls will flow and the secrets will blossom which few can know The waves of the Nowhere will come and go and the faces in knotholes the Nowhere will show.
Where now is your haven of moss and fern to hide from the Nowhere's endless churn? For the waves of the Nowhere to stop will you yearn. That it never ends, when will you learn?
~
-CHAPTER NINEKEEP YOUR EYES ON THE BORDERS There is enough time for all of us. More time than we could ever use. More than we need. We are in the business of converting time to timelessness. Tragedy is real. There are things which deserve your sadness. There is the timelessness of infinite white light to which there is nothing you can add and of which there is nothing to be said. There is also the timelessness at the core of a sphere in which time swirls on the periphery. As soul is the core of a sphere of ourselves, there is a soul of World as well. Everything has already happened and everything is known.
ENDLESSNESS Ceaseless endlessness seeps forever into the infinite waves of the Never 62
which coil in spirals until they sever from each other before they melt back together
Watch innocence fade into the faceless hollowness of a Dark, Dark Well with waters bottomless And yearn for the meager solace of nothingness Until Endlessness draws us into dreams of togetherness.
-
The Garden of Flowers is our solace For within the Garden dreams are flawless. Let the sheen of innocence veil the hollowness. The sheen will hide a chasm bottomless.
My apologies, dear Reader, my mind wandersâ&#x20AC;Ś
~
All right. I will be concise. I will make you the peace-offering of a concise overview of the scope and arc of this unruly and confusing tale. This is the story of Mystery Sphere Girly. Also known as: MSG. Also known as: Chrissy. She was an innocent soul. She ended up a flower. Still. Silent. A trauma-induced catatonia? A psychosis-induced paralysis? An intentional, permanent retreat within some Fortress of Solitude? Never again to say a word. Never again to move. In her own private cocoon for all eternity. In meditation? Enlightened? One would hope. More likely in shockâ&#x20AC;Ś Dead to the world. Sitting. Waiting. This is the story of Spacepants. Sexy. Evil. She was no good at all. Voluptuous. Fishnet stockings. Tattoos. Leather. Vanity. Lust. Sadism. Eyeliner. Mascara. Yet this was all before her corrupt era. Long after we first met her, she came to be in allegiance with the old man with the tattoo of the barcode on his forehead- the man who we would come to know simply as "The Enemy". Together, Spacepants and the Enemy brought Bald Monkey Estate to its knees. We returned later to the Estate to find a perverse militia. This is the story of Max, my friend. Cold. Promiscuous. Addicted to tobacco. He found his heart because he was ritualized; I was not. This is the story of Sachmo. Myself. "The heart of a poet," I heard Chrissy say once. I'm 63
still looking, dear Reader. Never laid my eyes on Mr. Kite. Perhaps I never will. This is the story of Bald Monkey. He knows what's up. The Secret Society? Did they really exist at all? Yes. We followed them down the path which peters out to find a cabin in the dark and lush region of the woods which we call Moss Hollow Haven. Moss everywhere. Beautiful and lush and green and dark. And a cabin by the river. And the pages of The Garden of Flowers abandoned, with the wind blowing them away. With the mildew decaying them and the pages withering and wilting. This is the story of Lana, with such wide eyes, always a smile. She lost our book. We forgive you, Lana. This is the story of Mr. Kite. A Holy Man. The Last Shaman. His book is not so long. Easy to memorize. Right at the center of this tale of mine. The Garden of Flowers. In the heart of the storm. The preface- a chant in rhyming couplets. Did the Secret Society know that we were following them? We are no skilled wilderness trackers. I suspect they knew very well and let us follow. In fact, I believe they expected us. Was there really a gate? Out in the woods somewhere? A big stone gate for all to see? We don't know. This is the story of Bonsai Man and Gondola Girl. And for all I know, you may never know them, because this story takes time to write, and I may die before I have a chance to tell you. One never knows… This is the story of the Old Flophouse Couple. But you don't know them yet. For all I know, sitting in this cluttered van, you may never know, because this story takes time to write, and one never knows… These words are true. And this has been coming for a long time. And this is why I write now- quickly, because I want to get all the words down on the page. So that you may understand all the trouble we've gone through. To make it all worthwhile. Do you remember "Happy Together", by The Turtles? “Me and you and you and me no matter how they tossed the dice, it had to be. The only one for me is you, and you for me. So happy together...”
~ We're getting close now! From this point on, keep your eyes on the borders of the pages. For there will be different editions of this book, and some will have designs in the borders of the pages, especially when prose dips into verse, as it has been known to do. This is the story of a ritual. A magic ritual. And the ritual which Mr. Kite has given us, we 64
have found. So sorry to wet your curiosity, but I cannot explain to you the exact nature of the ritual or teach you how to perform it. Ask Max. For he was ritualized and I was not, the bastard! We may never lay eyes on Mr. Kite, but his ritual is here. You see, the Secret Society attended Manerva University at the same time as Mr. Kite. Mr. Kite dropped out but the Society remained to complete their stay and graduate, except for one, the only one from the Society, who was rumored to have abandoned the ascetic duties of a devotee and left for the full-throttle life of a rockstar. We knew the Society and therefore have knowledge of the ritual which is still practiced to this day. See, Mr. Kite is a holy man. He is a shaman. The Last Shaman. Are you still alive out there Mr. Kite? We hope so. We love you. Whether there was really a gate out there or not - we don't care. We thank you. Maybe we'll find it someday. Run our fingers through the vines which entangle it and bow down before it. Maybe not. Would the Secret Society be so angry with us for publishing their secret files? To them it may be sacrilege, but I care not, because, my dear readers, you deserve to know. That moment when we first saw Bald Monkey at Manerva, when Chrissy stood before him, something changed. It was like an earthquake. I couldn't write of that moment for so long? What I did was to leave a blank space in my notebook, and continue with the story, always meaning to get back to it. What happened in that moment? Something paranormal to be sure. Nothing has ever been the same. We were just trying to steal some cereal, perhaps some granola left out overnight for hungry students next to the milk dispenser in the dining hall. But the dining hall was locked. Bald Monkey let us in. He had the key. Balancing precariously in the window, Chrissy heard a ruffling in the shadows, and a warmhearted chuckling. Bald Monkey was wise. "Who's there?" gasped Chrissy. And Bald Monkey emerged from the shadows, invoked some kind of paranormal amber glimmer power in his eyes, then held Chrissy and kissed her on the forehead. Those three words whispered as he hugged her and she broke down crying- "Poor little flower," he said. A thunderclap. Our welcome. How did he know that she would become a flower? I don't know. It may have something to do with Chrissyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s description of her experience then, how she said she saw the past and the future at the same time. Maybe she only gazed out into some distant horizon and smiled faintly and sighed when we begged her to tell us of our Fate because she was mourning her own in advance. Those three words whispered as he hugged her and she broke down crying- "Poor little flower," he said. A thunderclap. Our welcome. I remember her sobbing violently in her plaid skirt and clunky army boots that night, inconsolable. So quirky. So vibrant. So full of life. Yet Bald Monkey knew somehow that soon she would become a flower and never speak again, caught in a private solitary confinement with no return. We love you, Chrissy. We miss you. Why did she have to take that path? I don't know. Are you curious just what a "flower" is yet? I'll explain. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a slang word used around Manerva for a medical or perhaps a spiritual state, a condition that afflicted quite a few unlucky souls in the area. Or perhaps the luckiest souls. We saw a few as we were driving towards Manerva. College kids sitting like Zen monks. Motionless. Silent. We stopped and asked a cluster of them for directions. Their eyes were open, revealing enormously dilated liquid black pupils, but vacant. No response. Dead to the world. Creepy. We got back in our cluttered van and left them to sit. The number of these "flowers" increased the closer we got to our destination. The campus itself was virtually littered with them, to the point that we came to ignore them or just 65
pretend they weren’t there as heartless people do to the homeless seeking change on the street. Max made a game out of putting silly hats on them- pirate hats, chefs hats, more than one beanie complete with propeller (where did he even get these?), and a fake afro wig once, which I have to admit was pretty funny. Indeed, the sacred shockwaves from Manerva have not yet dissipated. I suppose before that instant when Bald Monkey’s eyes shone amber, we all were just a few young adults on our way to glory, all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, with a bad case of wanderlust. But his simple gesture of kindness- a hug and a little phrase of compassionate pity, well, you could say it ushered us within the lobster trap. You could say it was a flash of synchronicity, a moment where we, the outsiders, were welcomed into some inner circle where the “sacredness game” became suddenly all too real. Yes, we the participant observers were ourselves frozen into grand archetypes in the drama we came to witness from afar- inextricable, entangled, lost within. Not to mention Bald Monkey’s little phrase “Poor little flower” was prophetic. He told the future then. How could he know? This is the story of an eccentric artist named Fibonacci. And he was a member of the Secret Society. The "Secret Sacred Society of the Eternal Purple Monocle Protocol", if you must know its full name. But he left to start a band. These words won't make sense unless you play the music of this band in the background as you read, and picture dark purple storm clouds overhead and the writhing branches of the trees. Yes, this story has a soundtrack. And if you buy these albums- these seven albums of music produced by Fibonacci and his band, Dork Stork Oysterbar, you will understand better than I could ever explain. In fact, you should not even be reading these words without their albums playing in the background. For Dork Stork Oysterbar can spin a web, and they can weave a yarn, and they can cast a spell. A dark, haunting spell, some would say, but one that puts all this in the proper context. Because Dork Stork Oysterbar knows where it's at. And they were ritualized a thousand times over. A billion times. And they have died before and they will die again, and they can speak, and they have been out in the woods, down the path which peters out, down in Moss Hollow. And you can trust them because they're old-school. And if you buy their albums we will be rich. There is a chant and there is a trance which can come to you under certain situations, and there is a ritual, way out in the woods, down the path which peters out, down in Moss Hollow, beyond the cabin where the pages of The Garden of Flowers wither and wilt, beyond the stone gate which may or may not exist at all, where no one could ever find you. And where words took place which I can never repeat, because I wasn't there. This is the story of an angel. A real live angel from heaven. But we haven't gotten to her yet...
~
66
-CHAPTER TENROMANTIC ENTANGLEMENTS Max has assured me that he has never seen Lana cry. I have. But mostly she just looks more and more glazed over, in hippy-chick fashion, each time the bitter venom circulates between her and Max. There was surprisingly little jealousy on the part of the Secret Sacred Society of the Eternal Purple Monocle Protocol when they discovered that a large percentage of their girlfriends had slept with Max during our stay in Room 13. Curiously, the Society seemed comfortable with the fact as if they were merely extending hospitality to a favored guest. Max told me things regarding his experiences with Scarlet in particular that a gentleman such as myself could never relate, let alone comprehend. I was at first pissed that our detective game had been cut short and we had lost our chances at an alliance with the S.S.. However, I had no reason to worry. It turned out that the society was strangely grateful for Max's relieving them of the burden of these lusty college girls. Though max and I were both evicted from the dorm room, Chrissy was allowed to stay. I argued with our hostesses that I should be allowed to stay as well, because only Max had complicated things, but they said they wanted Chrissy to teach them about Bald Monkey Estate and the Mystery Sphere Ritual, and they were tired of guys being around all the time. Damn Chrissy and Lana for getting the girly connections to all this Mr. Kite detective stuff and damn Lana for getting the ultimate playing card- the connection to Bald Monkey as his student in all this. It seems that while all the best clues to the strange history of this campus were being given only to Lana, Bald Monkey was also teaching her about some old Manerva University ceremony cloaked in secrecy. Lana was acting all too proud of this, and was becoming very close with Chrissy and very secretive, and sharing all kinds of inner sanctum secret ceremony teachings. Max was bewildered by all kinds of soap-opera bullshit, and glad to leave Room 13 before he outstayed his welcome. To tell the truth, I was merely eager to take a drive with Max to the nearest greasy diner so as to plan our strategy and so I could get any new information Max was able to acquire during the recent stressful developments in his love life.
~
Another greasy diner. "The Demoness will show no human emotion," explained Max, "because no human heart beats within her bosom." "Lana is not a demoness," I countered. Although now that I think about it, she did lose 67
our sacred book. Why does the resentment for that never fade completely for Max and I? Perhaps because if Lana had not lost that old copy of The Garden of Flowers that we first discovered, our group of devotees at Edward Abbott College never would have dissolved. How much simply everything would have turned out if we had only been able to continue worshiping the book, instead of actually having to track down the author. The waitress, a tall Swedish lady, brought Max his BLT and onion rings and I my English muffins and eggs and the excellent orange spice tea. Breakfast is sometimes served all day long in these strategy sessions. It was getting dark. "So get to the point, Max," I said after feasting in silence for awhile, "what did you learn from these girls?" Max smiled and lit a cigarette. He shook his head. "Sachmo, my friend, you wouldn't believe me if I told you." He went on to tell me anyways. "This is what I learned- we are in the middle of the largest cult in the Western Hemisphere. But Mr. Kite was an unwilling leader. That's why he dropped out. He never wanted this much attention. He wanted fame only for his writings, not for himself. He wanted fame for his writings, not for himself. Bald Monkey was a smart businessman. He capitalized on the publications, and spread a little holiness on the side. He was supposedly an innocent middleman between Mr. Kite and a growing legion of fans. But something was a little off in the translation. People are acting weird, and we are by no means the only ones on this road trip. Lots of people are making the pilgrimage, and Mr. Kite slipped away just in time, 'cause things aren't letting up. His disappearance has only mythologized him and his fan base, or his 'followers', rather." "The girls knew all that?" I asked, impressed. I felt a ripple of subversive excitement thinking of all the little groups forming across the country around the book which evoked the same reverence in us. "I pieced it all together from their various testimonies," said Max as he leaned back in his chair. "Anyways, Mr. Kite had come to feel that something was being lost in the filter of Bald Monkey Publishing Society. Most of the works published were transcripts recorded by the inner circle, and the circle had and agenda of its own. The transcripts were by no means word for word. Things were changed. Lost. Things were added. Later the chants were set to music, and seven sacred vinyl albums were pressed. Since these albums were produced after Fibonacci, the founder of the band, defected from the Society and went missing, no one knows for sure if they represent the original doctrine correctly." He paused for a moment and gave me a most serious stare. "These Secret Society freaks are freakin' weird, Sachmo." If I had my "Journalist Stuff" journal with me the next note I took would surely have read: "1) Make contact with the Secret Sacred Society of the Eternal Purple Monocle Protocol ASAP. 2) Collect all 7 Dork Stork Oysterbar albums.â&#x20AC;? As we were walking out of the greasy diner, Max paused and seemed melancholy. "Why can't I get any reaction from Lana?" he asked as he lit another cigarette. If I seem less than outraged against my friend for his infidelity, it is because he is not alone. Lana was just as good at these games. I decided to give him an honest answer. "Because all you two do is fight and sleep around to make each other jealous," I said. "Your heart is numb, and Lana's is getting there too." Just the facts. We got in my van and drove off. I had left our impossibly voluptuous Swedish waitress a large tip.
68
~ So that night the van was our home. And the rain pattered on the glass as I wrote in the back by candlelight, with Max asleep in the front. There was a frail knock on my window. It was Lana. Before I even rolled down the window, I could tell she was gently weeping, though any tears were lost in the rain running down her face. There was not much to say. "Lana," I whispered, leaning out so Max would not awaken, "I've known you for three years. You do the same thing. You deserve each other." I was quick to intercept her big pleading eyes with my cutting truth. Lana always came to me after these events, but I don't know what she was looking for. I was in a "just the facts" kind of mood. "Listen, you girl," I began firmly, "Max and I are on this last road trip together and you are here to help us find Mr. Kite. Max was always numb, but lately you aren't the bright-eyed hippy girl you used to be. Did you tag along ahead of us because you're scared of losing Max now that college is over, or to help us find Mr. Freakin' Kite?" "Find Kite," mumbled Lana unenthusiastically through her gentle weeping. I was just acting tough because I had felt a rotten feeling in my stomach all day. I was hoping that this would be a good, clean, family pilgrimage, but these things were always happening, ever since I enrolled in Abbott College. Why was I always the mediator? I miss my simple high school days sometimes. Before Lana turned away, I allowed myself to feel sorry for her and I leaned closer to her ear, and told her what she wanted to hear, what I always told her at times like this. "Of course he loves you, Lana. You guys are all fucked up, but love is from a different place than all this shit." She smiled weakly at me and walked away into the rain. I thought back to the Abbott College coffee shop, when Lana would read aloud the writhing words in her sweet, lilting voice and Max would close his eyes and no matter what shit they were going through at the time, he would slip into a trance and lean his head on her shoulder as she read, and heal. Those words could heal. "Max, wake up," I called out. "Mmm?" mumbled Max groggily . "Your personhood, Max," I said. "Your fucking personhood, Max." He was silent. So I continued. "They're real people. The girls, all the girls. Lana's a person. Chrissy's a person. All the girls you fucked are people." He lit a cigarette. "I never fucked Chrissy," he said. I did not believe him, imagining he was lying to protect my feelings and our friendship because he could tell I had fallen in love with her. "Doesn't matter," I continued, skeptically. "You would. And she wouldn't be a person to you if you did. Your personhood is numb because you have to own them, always have to be a man, be a man, get it out, get it out, can't just be. Don't be seduced, Max." I growled the word "seduced" at him with all the disappointment that had built up in me over the years. "It's... so... easy," he said, his voice actually quavering with the anguish of expressing his fatal flaw. "It's so... appealing, like a light switch, flicked on and off. One flick" - he snapped his fingers - "and they're not people." Objects canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hurt you. Toys canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t break your heart. He knew himself better than I suspected. 69
"Why can't you forgive them for being females?" I asked. "It isn't their fault… haha.” My own misogynistic joke had made me laugh, so of course I temporarily forgot to be mad. “What have they stolen from you, anyways?" "Too much... they've stolen... me. What I am." He tapped his heart, or rather the place where his heart was once upon a time. I imagined him as a romantic in his past as I still was. Whoever did this to him, he must have loved her very much indeed. My anger softened. "Don't be seduced, Max. Don't be seduced... Not by lust, not by nihilism… not even by reality." Then Max turned back to look at me, and we shared a puzzled expression for a moment. "What the freak did you mean by that, Sachmo?" he asked me, sounding uneasy. "Why did you say that?" I shook my head. "I don't know," I answered. We were both strangely unnerved by my last comment, and neither of us said another word before we were asleep again within the pattering of rain on our windows.
~
And this was a most novel spell in verse, but also a lovesong, that Max sung to Lana a long time from now, when they were older and he was trying to win her back after one of their break-ups-
APPLE JUICE The light, it bleeds from your eyes, girl, much too bright for me You know I cannot compete with those visions that you see Come on, girl, come on now, come back down You've seen the sun, now come back to your little town You saw the Gate and so strong, girl, you stepped right through Now there's a loaf of bread waiting down here for you I think we've got some peanut butter and some apple juice Wave goodbye now to all those colors that we all like so much The walls can't breathe forever while I wait for your touch Yeah, I know you're in the flow now of all life and death but you just tell those walls there to hold their breath Did you really think the world would never re-crystallize? It's nothin' special girl, everyone's reborn and everyone dies Forget all those golden secrets that wait so deep within This sad, old, dusty world has come back again Let all your colors wander to their home so far away They'll be back for us when we go back some other day Come on, girl, come on now, come back down You've seen the sun, now come back to your little town You've seen the Gate and so strong, girl, you stepped right through Now there's a loaf of bread waiting down here for you I think we've got some peanut butter and some apple juice. 70
~ -CHAPTER ELEVENENTER THE LOBSTER TRAP These are not easy words to write. The time Max and Chrissy and I spent at Manerva University was no love-in. There was pain all around. There was pain for Bald Monkey despite his happiness at having us for his new friends. There was a sadness to him because he knew somehow that Bald Monkey Estate was crumbling. This is not to say that he was not at peace with the situation. Sadness was not a taboo for Bald Monkey. I really had nothing against Spacepants before her decent into evil. I must be clear that Spacepants, in the days we first met her at the Estate, was surely a wicked vixon, but not yet evil. People change. Her previous alluring wickedness was nothing compared with what was to come for her. I had no suspicion that she was to become a servent of The Enemy or that the two of them would become the warlords of a rebel military state- a militia. Much bloodshed was to be had before I corrected the situation. Despite all the pain we all endured at Manerva University, there was a madness which was our salvation. There is a calm at the heart of the storm, at the center of this book. There are grand marble pillars of truth in the rhyming couplets of that chant and the Secret Society were the cobwebs between the pillars of truth. Did they really exist? It's hard to believe that they did. M.S.G. will never speak again. But I should call her Chrissy by now, because she is a real person who I knew and loved and who deserves to be remembered by her true name. There was that wonderful quality to her - a longing. She really wanted to live in a good world, and nomatter how the world hurt her, she never blamed it. Despite her trials she continued to give World the benefit of the doubt, to endlessly forgive it, and to expect it to care for her as it should for us all. She never lost hope or let her spirit die. None could pry the lightheartedness and fun from her cold dead hands. But all her clinging to innocence with her blue pigtails and bubblegum and the ribbons in her hair was a mask. It always seemed so pretty to me, for some reason, that behind this mask there was a vast emptiness she could never conceal, like a numbing, anesthetic void. My porcelain Madonna- Our Lady of Mourning. Chrissy was orphaned by her mother at an early age, who died after raising her in various cults. Considering her upbringing, it was only natural for her to get swept up in Bald Monkey Estate. She went two years there without venturing into the outside world, but she never let her independent spirit die. Though almost trapped there, I was so proud that she never fully gave up and surrendered to the group. She escaped Bald Monkey Estate with us just in time to avoid its darker era to come. She was a bright girl- she could probably smell the hedonistic vanity already wilting into corrupt vanity and then rotting swiftly into an arsenal. See, Manerva is a whirlpool. There is a seductive quality in the air of the place. It's like the lobster trap which only goes one way but never the other. Like a black hole, a vortex. You can't get out; you can only get farther in. Chrissy accepted this with glee and was so quick to 71
become just another Secret Society groupie. And who could blame her? The Society have charisma on their side. And the Society were with Mr. Kite as he walked across the campus with his yo-yo in hand to get his supper from the cafeteria and take it to a picnic table a little out of the way. They laid their eyes on him and found more than the vapor-trail of a long gone laugh. They were a level closer than us as Mr. Kite was a level closer than them. The Secret Sacred Society of the Eternal purple Monocle Protocol produced documents secret files, which were brought to the attention of the president of the University. Max and Chrissy and I discovered… (well, I shouldn't say "discovered")... rather, we stealthily retrieved the documents from the locked file cabinet of President Tezzract’s office when we pried into it with a crowbar. So much information to take in. Discovering the Secret Society files at the same time as the Writhing Language took hold of us! What strange days... Of course Chrissy would have the honor of being the first one among us to open the floodgates and enter fully into the world of that strange tongue. And she would have the honor of being given the jewel of a verse which we call “Catacombs". But I will resist the urge to transcribe that one until another time. I believe that on one hand the Sacred Society was pleased we... "retrieved" their top secret files, but on the other hand they knew that by crowbarring the file cabinet like a metallic Pandora's Box, we had signaled the end of them in their current form. The secret was out. And they all knew that the University had an interest in their files because they were mostly transcripts derived from conversations with Mr. Kite. Mr. Kite was a man whose whereabouts were unknown to anyone, and who was sought by everyone, including many people in black cars and black suits. We spotted these human phantoms more and more frequently during our stay. It turned out we stole the files just in time to prevent them being handed over as evidence to these mysterious supposed authorities. As to the precise contents of the files, that I have sworn to never say. During the course of our journey I had come to realize that journalism was my passion and my way of life. The Secret Society were reluctant to trust us. They would not give us their secret files because they feared my journal and my blue pen. They thought my reporting would dilute and obscure the original teachings, and they made me swear never to reveal many things. But I owed them no allegiance. I had no interest in becoming entangled in the exasperating and morbid secrecy of the Society. I despised the vanity and hedonism of Bald Monkey Estate. I did not bow to the petty tyranny of the University bureaucracy and President Tezzract who sought desperately to keep all this under wraps. I gave no mind to the unsettling spooks in black who haunted the campus. I wanted to find Mr. Kite for matters of the heart. And because of Lana’s uncanny skill at making connections with key characters in the drama, it seemed we had as fair a chance as any. Although we weren't aware of the scope of this at the time, by acquiring the files, we were setting in motion a chain of events that would bring the holiness we found to the attention of many more than those directly involved. Those who were seeking Mr. Kite for reasons other than spiritual guidance wanted the shockwaves contained and the general public awareness limited. But strange things were afoot and slithering within and without of Manerva. Not monsters, but rather a very intense loyalty amongst certain clusters of people, cult-like formations of extremely tight-knit groups of students who shared a very secretive devotion. Very odd means of behavior were witnessed by those in the affected areas. Reports of spontaneous paralysis and mass catatonia surfaced. A new form of behavior was being seen, and not merely a 60's style jubilant rebellion at all. People were up to something. Something vastly, epically weird. 72
We retained connection with the outside world through Lana's father for a long time before we were completely enveloped in Manerva. He was rich, and made his money through ownership of a number of newspapers. Being well-connected with the press, my correspondence with him enabled me to communicate with a quickly growing audience of eager fellow journalists, contacts of his from his reporting days. I had taken to sending out encrypted telegrams for him to pass along to his most trusted contacts, but I shared only the basic facts of what the media had taken to calling the “Manerva Crises”, knowledge of which was leaking like a canoe made of swiss cheese. Sometimes I intentionally obscured the facts or even lied blatantly at my discretion. The official story was that a viral outbreak from a biology lab at the college was expanding very rapidly and causing people’s higher mental functions to shut down, resulting in manic fanaticism, delirium, and ultimately paralysis. I was responsible for this theory, which I made up to throw people off the true path. I also hinted at the possibility, citing anonymous sources, that Mr. Kite never existed at all. Lana’s dad’s generous funding also enabled us to later invest in mass production and distribution the music of Dork Stork Oysterbar. The Secret Society were aware of this and allowed it despite our conspiring with their sole defector, Fibonacci, who sacrilegiously abandoned his post as an apprentice of holiness for the full-throttle life of a rockstar. The Society was aware of everything that was going on, as they were aware of events which had not yet happened, such as the completion of this book, and the return to Bald Monkey Estate after its fall from grace. They knew that time was short and drastic actions were taken. It was as if they played along in some private in-joke by acting outraged at the theft of their files and our distribution of the albums, yet we all knew they intended for their documents and the seven sacred albums to be acquired and released into the public domain by us all along, before we ever stepped foot on campus. They were expecting us. During Mr. Kite's attendance at the University, there was a period of time in which he resided in a cabin in the woods by a stream, in the sections of woods that we call "Moss Hollow Haven". Max and Chrissy and Lana and I arriving at Manerva inspired a pilgrimage back to the cabin, where the tyranny of the bureaucracy of the University was left behind, and where all sanity was left far behind. The Secret Sacred Society of the Eternal Monocle Protocol returned to the cabin to hold one last ritual before all the shit went down, after which there would be no more University, and no more Secret Society in their form at that point, and when there would be no more Chrissy, because she is a flower now. There were three major branches of strange language which manifested at Manerva - one The Garden of Flowers itself, one the Writhing Language as it took place in our very throats, and one the Secret Files of the Society. There were also the 7 sacred albums of Dork Stork Oysterbar, which may or may not be included in the original “official” cannon. Any one of these branches of language alone could have been a sacred text. We all loved Lana. Max did love Lana as he finally found out with tears in his eyes before the sightless Gondola Girl, but you shouldn't know of that scene yet. And neither should I, sitting here in this cluttered van. The confusion of this in-between state! This is difficult to explain, but this book you are reading is composed of different parts and this book is the story of our travels which lead us to the cabin and that place is not your average cabin. There will be other editions of this book than the one you are holding. There will be color illustrations of oil paintings and portraits of characters in sumi ink, drawn with sharp bamboo pens, and Celtic knots and mandalas and fractals illuminating the borders on the pages of 73
editions of this book to come, but the point in time now as I write these words in blue ink in my "Journalist Stuff" journal in our cluttered van is a peculiar point in time. The confusion of this inbetween state! I write these words in blue ink knowing that I am close to the heart of things! But the closer I get to the center, the less I am able to report things as they happened sequentially. It is as if the more vivid my memories become, the more disjointed and chaotic they seem, and the harder they are to explain, at least in a way that makes any sense. Such shockwaves! The sacred shockwaves from Manerva are so vast and peculiar and take so many forms, yet all we find when we arrive here is the vapor-trail of a long gone laugh. I recall when the Enemy handed Max that tattered pamphlet. And I recall the copy that we procured from Old Bookstore Man, in that vine-entwined crumbly brick bookstore amidst the dust and candles. The volume which we read aloud to each other in the Mobius College coffee shop. There were patterns on those pages. There would be page of text and the fibers of the handpressed rice-paper pages were dyed in inks, so as to form intricate geometric patterns like snowflakes and spirals and Celtic knots and crystals and patterns which would converge at the center of the page, beneath the text. And there would be pages where portraits of the characters were painted in sumi ink in the center of the page and around which the text would fall. And there were oil paintings, reproduced on gloriously glossy paper. And there were pages of this book which sent chills up our spines just as if they were written in blood, and which were so good to read aloud that we couldn't help ourselves despite students who worked at the coffee shop bringing our orders of food to us and thinking they had stepped into an insane asylum. The lines of this chant are not something which could be read in just any place. But Edward Abbott College was a good school and it forgave some madness. My memories of Abbott College seem so long gone and irretrievable that they may has well have been a dream. It is strange to think that I lived there in a far simpler life than now, and had friends which I will never see again. My memories of Manerva, on the other hand, are far from nostalgic. Rather, they are all too vivid, too intense, disjointed, intrusive. Flashbacks, I suppose. For example, I have a recurring nightmare I for the life of me cannoCault shake, and I fully expect it to follow me to my end. It involves the large, jagged shard of a broken mirror. A jagged shard which Max found at the cabin in the woods where the dead are kind. There was a mirror, broken, and pieces of glass were lying on the dirt of the forest floor by the campfire and just before Max was ritualized, he stepped on the large shard blade with his bare foot and there was blood, and this image of the jagged shard, reflective and smeared red, will stay in my mind until I am gone, and remind me of what took place that day. There was a split-second when I saw the blood-smudged reflective mirror surface as Max let out a roar of pain, and I felt somehow in my gut that I knew just what Max would be made to feel that night at the old Gate out there somewhere which may or may not be at all. Something was triggered in me and though I was not ritualized myself, I felt an absolute empathy for him. "Good luck, my friend," I remember thinking as I felt the slithering in my stomach and the shadow of the dark purple storm clouds passing over my heart. And all you who are experienced in these things know of what I speak.
~ 74
And here is a most dreadful and curious incantation which Max voiced once when he was asleep. When he awoke he said he dreamt he was Mr. Kite,singing a song to soothe anold samurai dying on a battlefieldâ&#x20AC;Ś
RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE Make your heart as light as a feather You are dead now but you will live forever Your soul is too bright now to stay in your head You will live forever but now you are dead Pray not that your soul will be saved As you die vow instead toRise from your grave Rise from your grave Rise from your grave Rise from your grave With the hearts of your tribe each light as a feather Float to the Land of The Dead now together Let the Rivers of Life and Death be connected Before you can die you must be resurrected For the souls of the living now will you mourn for the living will die but the dead are reborn On your deathbed of moss will you weep or be brave? It matters not, just die. and thenRise from your grave Rise from your grave Rise from your grave Rise from your grave
~
Spooky, huh?
75
~
-CHAPTER TWELVEA METALLIC PANDORAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BOX I will always remember the sound of the file cabinet being pried apart by my crowbar. A screeching sound. Like a metallic screech by some ghostly metallic demoness. It was not easy. This was a heavy-duty file cabinet, and it took Chrissy and I both puling on the crowbar to bend the metal apart while Max was downstairs keeping watch for night watchmen other than Bald Monkey. So we got ourselves the crowbar from the University maintenance shed. That part was easy. Getting ourselves into President Tezzractâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s office in the dead of night was easy as well with the help of Bald Monkey's keychain. Did I mention that Bald Monkey was a Manerva University night watchman from way back, before even Mr. Kite's time? Bald Monkey was there all along, before his sacred text publishing days and his estate management days. Whether his return to Manerva was as on official staff member or as an unwelcome troublemaker, he knew the campus in and out, and he had a keychain. Chrissy reached for the Secret Files of the Secret Sacred Society just as Max rushed upstairs to inform us that someone had entered the building. "Bald Monkey?" I asked hopefully. Max shook his head. "Too tall; hair," he replied while closing the door to the President's office and putting his ear to the door to listen for footsteps coming our way. Chrissy was sick. The pages fluttered from her shaky hands down to the floor. Though it was dark, I could see her face turn pale and clammy. But her eyes! She looked up to me and I could tell this was no fear of being caught breaking into the President's file cabinet. "He's coming upstairs!" whispered Max from the door. Chrissy moved closer to me as if in a trance. I could not look away from her eyes. I will not even try to describe the look in her eyes, save to say that her pupils widened into enormous black pools and she seemed to peer deep from her soul into mine. I was afraid. I touched her cheek to feel her cold, clammy flesh, exactly as one would expect a corpse to feel. And then she sang. In the faintest, most ghostly voice, she sang. As if from deep, deep inside herself. As if 76
the words were being sung through her by an achingly sad and lonely spirit. And she sang the verse which we call "Light as a Feather", the first time any of us had witnessed the Writhing Language. Well, except for when I ran into Lana at the swing set, but for Lana it was always more of a casual thing. Maybe I am a little jealous of how effortless it always seemed for her, unlike all the rest of us for whom it was an overwhelming experience, often involving great fear. Lana was never in danger of being lost in the trance but remained calm and present. She may have had a natural talent, or developed a keen skill from some manner of discreet research or training she chose to keep to herself. But when Chrissy sang it was a full-blown channeling, a possession.In the faintest, most ghostly voice, she sang. As if from deep, deep inside herself. As if the words were being sung through her by an achingly sad and lonesome spirit. It was the first true fragment of the "Nowhere Poem", which is the name we gave to all the collected versus that we channeled and did our best to record. But I cannot transcribe the words just yet, not at this point in our story. Later, later... Max was transfixed. He had forgotten his watch post and instead knelt in front of our possessed singing beauty, looking back and forth from her in amazement and to me in raisedeyebrow disbelief, as if asking how could this be happening. I can relate the facts - the wild, shining dead eyes; the faint, ghostly voice; but these do not convey the feeling of witnessing this event. something entered the air of that room that night as the pages fluttered down to the floor. Magic, peace, absolute, bone-chilling fear. A quiet, breathless dread. Max could feel it, but he didn't have to stare back into Chrissy's eyes, the eyes of our young, silly friend, only 18, still so bright and alive, so eager to flirt and frolic and share her personality, her quirks. The girl who held her Mystery-Sphere so proud and who made a feather into her imaginary friend. The same girl who harbored a vast emptiness within. My porcelain Madonna; Our Lady of Mourning. But those eyes when she sang were not her eyes. Even as she looked so deeply into me, riveted me, those eyes were not hers at all. The jellyfish had taken hold. The second she finished the verse, the non-Bald Monkey night watchman barged through the door, as we knew he would. It was obvious to us at the time that there would be absolute silence while Chrissy sang - there could not have been an interruption. I cannot explain this. It simply would have been against the rules. Chrissy collapsed. Max ran with the roar of a conquering lion, shoved the night watchman outside and pinned him to the wall. This is not ordinarily something Max would do. All his toughness and supposed manhood are merely the techniques by which he numbs his deep insecurities. His strength was surely a momentary burst of religious fervor upon hearing the first fragment of the "Nowhere Poem" in Chrissy's eerie voice. But nonetheless, in perfect action hero fashion the night watchman was pinned and I had time to grab what Secret Files I could, sling the dazed Chrissy over my shoulder and head out. Max was soon to follow as I bolted out the door and into the night, laughing crazily, with Chrissy bobbing in and out of consciousness and mumbling cryptic things. Max laughed too, as the night watchman was in fact rather old and seemed in no shape to follow us into the cover of some trees. We laid Chrissy down on the light dusting of snow and pine needles. I fanned her face with the documents we had just stolen, but which seemed so secondary to the real discovery. Finding that Chrissy was slowly returning to normal only allowed further laughter to escape from Max and I. It was an insane kind of laughter, I suppose - a combination of the remaining fear and a beautiful, unexplainable sense of triumph welling up in us. "Where are you, Mom?" asked our sanity-questionable friend. I stopped fanning her 77
when I remembered that she had been cold to the touch and was lying on snow. "Bald Monkey's not my mom!" she went on, very confused. But her eyes were her own. "We've got to get this chick to people who understand," urged Max. "I know," I said, "but how can we find them at this time of night?" "I have connections," Max assured me. So we led Chrissy to just outside the all-female dorm and I encouraged her to stand on her own two feet as Max tossed pebbles against the window of the three seductresses of Room 13. "Go away, Maxwell," was the response from one of our slutty ex-hostesses after opening the window. "We're done with you; we're all quite bored with you now, so leave us alone!" "I'm done playing with you, you freakin' girls!" growled Max, gritting his teeth. "We need to speak with the Society, now!" The girls merely turned away. "We've got a sick girl down here!" I called up. The lights to their room were turned on. After a while the quieter one leaned out after some argument with her roommates. "Did she sing?" she asked. "You are not my mother, where was my mom, my mom!" cried out Chrissy before I muffled her and nodded up to the Quiet One. More argument from inside. "Fuck!" yelled out Scarlet. It seems they were familiar with this strange condition. The Quiet One came outside the dorm with a glass of water for Chrissy, which Chrissy promptly let slip through her clammy, trembling fingers to fall to the pavement and shatter. We got directions to an apartment off campus and were gone in a flash. "Nowhere," Chrissy mumbled from the back seat of our van. "Nowhere, not anywhere, no one, not anyone, no one, no one at all, who? Who?" She reached up and grabbed Max by his denim collar. "Who?" she demanded. "Um, no one, I guess," answered Max, trying to play along. Wrong answer. "No, no!" wailed Chrissy. "Not anyone, ever, never, no one, forever, forever." She finally trailed off into occasional mournful pleas of "Who? Who?" and "Mom?" The van screeched to a halt. A loud knock on the door of the apartment, and we were let in.
~
-CHAPTER THIRTEEN78
SCENT OF THE OUIJA Though it was late, late at night, none of the young men had yet retired to sleep. The living room area was dimly lit and ornate tapestries blanketed every surface. The furniture was plush and low to the floor. Clutter, Incense galore, candles and strange, exotic chanting wafting from the stereo. The scent of the Ouija was in the air. "Fibonacci, get down here!" called one of them and at once a young man with wild hair emerged from the top of the spiral staircase. Though we were in the midst of an emergency situation with Chrissy and all, I will always remember this first time I saw the one called Fibonacci. He immediately struck me as an eccentric artist type. I could see it in his sleepy eyes, with that far away gaze into some private clear blue sky. It was the befuddlement of a kindly mad scientist or the dreaminess of a lazy hippy awakening to pancakes, with a touch of the crazed gleam of megalomania. Fibonacci glanced down over the banister and quickly wound his way down and took the wobbly Chrissy from my arms and laid her down on the intricate patterns of the fabric of their oriental carpet. One of the others (who we never learned the name of) quickly changed tapes on the stereo, putting in a different chant with a sitar in the background, and turned up the volume. Then Fibonacci produced a pen and notebook from somewhere and was kneeling over Chrissy and slapping her on the face. "Remember!" he ordered. Another of them began beating slowly upon a large African drum. "What the freak?" asked Max to me. I shrugged my shoulders. Of course our instinct was to stop all of this chanting nonsense and speak to these strange people, but we were out of our league. "Remember!" Fibonacci almost shouted. Chrissy was in pain and squirming around, but appeared to be resisting something she knew was for her own good. Another of the young men knelt down and grabbed Chrissy by the jaw and moved her head so she could not help but look Fibonacci in the eyes. This was too much. Max kicked the African drum across the room and the quickening rhythm was cut short, in addition to one of the stereo speakers being broken on collision with the instrument, thankfully muting the sickening relentless chant, leaving only the background sitar from the other stereo channel to accompany the scene. But before Max got his fists on the Society member who was holding Chrissy's jaw in his, something stranger still happened. Chrissy became instantly sober and nodded very calmly. "All right, she whispered in agreement to remember, as if by her own decision to allow it to happen, her pupils swelled up again into those enormous black pools. An alien telepathic jellyfish plugged its tendril into that socket on the back of her neck. And she sang. It was the same verse she sang in the file cabinet escapade, but this time less intense, and with her voice less eerie, and her eyes not so completely robbed from her. At one point I even thought I detected her own lighthearted personality float up, like a single lonely petal from a bottomless well, and her lips actually curled upwards into the faintest smile, only to fade in an instant into this "Nowhere" so new to us, sending chills down our spines all around. And this time, I will record it here, word for word, to be set to music and transcribed in this book under the name "Catacombs", here. It is set to the tune of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Happy Togetherâ&#x20AC;? by the Turtles. Sincere Apologies to the Turtles.
CATACOMBS 79
As shamans we have had our fun but now the truth we've sought has finally come The fight we've fought so long is finally done Now our hearts are light light as a feather Now we will fight no more no more forever. There is nothing left for which to strive We sit inside this room We are alive We hear the truth and heed the call The Truth is not so big and bad after all The Truth was like a wolf And us it chased but now by the Truth we'll be embraced There is no “Other World” where we can go just the gentle breeze the falling snow There is nothing left For which to strive and for the “Other World” It was a lie There is no “Other World” There's only one We have come home We've finally come In catacombs deep underground the alchemists are hard at work without a sound It's time to roll away So far away We need to roll on through The world's fray We need to dry our tears We need to play We need to steal those 80
Happy Kitten Days. There is a place to go a place of light Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll roll and roll and roll And roll all night We won't be here for long We're soon to die We are in this room We are alive We don't know how this works We don't know why We can look into Eachothers' eyes The world is sad The world is mean But light is in our brains We're finally clean Our innocence We've found again Heaven is not so far Just roll within.
~
-CHAPTER FOURTEENCOME WITHIN I have seen language in my day. I and my friends have encountered many different forms of language. The rhyming couplets of The Garden of Flowers are the pillars of truth and the Secret Files of the Secret Sacred Society are the cobwebs between the pillars of that truth; the reflection of that truth in the minds of the Society, which may or may not have existed in the first place. Forgive me if I play along with the Society and shroud them in a veil of mystery, but they wanted it that way. They were those who watched what went down with steady eyes and recorded the events with painful accuracy. Their documents are sincere and speak of sad things. The "Nowhere Poem" is a reflection of the truth written not in ink on a page, but with Writhing Language in the throats of myself and my friends and we are grateful for this. My claim 81
to fame is small. I have undergone the Writhing Language experience but twice in my life, whereas Max was actually ritualized. I am not jealous. I was given but a fraction of the "Nowhere Poem", but I held up my part and offered my voice to that power when I felt it in my throat. Just what is responsible for all this language? Was it Mr. Kite himself? Did he invent these powers of language himself? I think not. Just channeled them especially well. I think he spent all that time out there in the woods immersing himself in an ancient language that existed long before he was born, perhaps even before the human race. Language is made of words and these words I am writing in blue in by candlelight in the clutter of our van are one thing, but the heart of language itself is another, and there is an intensity of communication and there is information which is passed from one soul to the next in patterns resembling beautiful, intricate spiderwebs extending outwards in rings of sincerity. And there is language transmitted in verse by entities of humor and mischief who love a good trick and a good rhyme and from whom lymrics came. And there is Language sent down through the tendrils of jellyfish into the back of your neck. And there is the whispering of fairies and water nymphs to soothe and tickle you and bloom again your heart, and there is the One True Alien who speaks archaic hieroglyphs in neon. And there is a strange language. I have seen "innocence fade in the dark, dark well with waters bottomless" and I have seen the eyes of Spacepants as she dangled her poisonous spider above me, the spider of red and black and yellow, when she knew there was no turning back and the evilness was all around. There is good and there is bad, and human beings have eyes. And human beings can speak. World swallows, World devours; Come within the Garden of Flowers.
~
-CHAPTER FIFTEENA FIRESIDE CHAT WITH MONTAG "Yo!" I called out as I entered Montagâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dorm room. Montag was one of the members of the Secret Society. Wires tangled all over, CDs, video games, movies, and computer parts spilled out across the floor. No incense in sight. I was happy to see my new friend, who I had been playing video games and talking philosophy with lately in the free time I set aside every day to forget about the grim seriousness of questing. "Information..." mused Montag. He speaks his mind. "Culture drifting inevitably in one direction. Remember vinyl records? Sound born from a diamond needle running along the groove on a vinyl album. Now we have lasers, reading a secret code. How could we not be mesmerized by music crystallized into matter, shiny and reflective with those rainbow shimmers 82
on the disc in the light. But as vinyl passed away so shall the tape cassette and compact disc with its sexy glossy rainbow reflectivity. Soon information will have no physical form at all and travel through the air. Digital code. Ones and zeroes. The new language. "What we are, are crystals. We are these organic creatures swarming about on the surface of this planet, but what we are, are crystals. And we carry around our brains in our skulls. And there is electricity inside your brain. Can you feel the neurons firing? Electrical impulses blinking like a flurry of fireflies in a tree. Blinking on and off. Stroboscopic. Like digital code. Trance. And the network of these electrical pathways, like fibers twinned about, writhing and slithering into each other wildly, desperate to interface and communicate with each other, this insatiable instinct to transfer these intricate chemical and electrical signals, the network writhing endlessly into itself, unaware that it is all one thing in the first place. One network. And there is nowhere to go. And The Nowhere is waiting. So don't be late." Montag set the controller to his video game system on the floor at this point and turned to look me in the eyes. It was hard to take him seriously with his fedora and Salvador Dali mustache, yet he knew he had caught my attention with his reference to the mysterious facet of The Garden of Flowers which had puzzled me for too long. I wanted answers. "The Nowhere," he continued, ridiculously, as if it were a casual acquaintance, "is like before World was born. Meeting it face to face can induce a certain very specific psychological and physiological reaction. It has been called by other names. He paused for a long while. "How shall I explain this?" he mused. "I can tell you certain things about the state. Physiological things. Tears well up in the eyes. The body becomes languid. Sweat. The blood can drain from the face, causing a paleness or even a bluish tint around the lips and eyelids. And the pupils are vastly dilated... but you knew that, didn't you?" "It's all in the eyes. There is the tactile element, in which the sense of touch is magnified to the point where the host is intensely aware of the physicality of his or her own body, giving the sensation of being immersed in syrup, very heavy. But it's all in the eyes. There is a union of the sense of touch and sight, or rather that the visual field has absorbed the immediacy of touch. The visual field itself becomes a very real thing, like a forgotten organ, a gelatinous substance surrounding the host and an almost magical extension of the body, supremely malleable, so as to allow the physical world to imprint itself upon the seer. There is the general impression of being a single-celled organism, with a central core of soul and an exterior sphere of perception. Perception is in truth a protective coating. "When I say that perception becomes malleable, that is an understatement. There are shimmers. A delicate rippling across all that one can see. This is known as 'the vapors'. And this rippling is very important because it allows you to see that the human capacity to perpetually distinguish and separate various individual 'things' is a secondary phenomenon, founded on a more primary unity of sight. And that 'things' are made of World. It is all made out of the same everything. One fabric. Such beautiful ripples. "The ripples are one thing - those almost transparent swirls, like incense smoke, the delicate, exotic wisps of fluidity, slippery and coy, luscious, seductive at the periphery of your vision, hooking you gently from the other side at the corner of your eye. The writhing is another. "Fear. Dread. Ritual. "This is no joke. There are things which deserve your fear. Be ready. Know what you are." "See, all this reformation of perception is merely the recognition that you are alive, and 83
the unification of your life-force into a single thing. You are simply becoming one of the real people." "Then things become strange.â&#x20AC;? "Hark, the Nowhere now is listening. It's all in the eyes. A person undergoing a direct confrontation with the Nowhere has to live through it. It is something you learn with the marrow of your bones. This experience takes time, and there are stages which must be passed through with respect. "The turbulence of the ripples increases, and the character of the rippling turns from exotic and coy to seething and lustful. Then come the archaic hieroglyphs in neon surfacing from The Nowhere; the carvings of Language-in-Itself from the maw of the One True Alien. Who reading this knows of what I speak? Have you seen vision, this tactile vision, dissolve into something resembling an endless sea of serpents writhing forever into each other? There is something dawning which calls for your utmost attention, isn't there? This is Language-in-Itself. This is the archaic hieroglyphs in neon surfacing from the maw of the One True Alien and transmitted like electricity through the tendrils of Her Astral Jellyfish familiars. This is the Dawning of the Other. You like the writhing, don't you? Despite the fact that your stomach is churning the vomit slowly up through your entrails and the saliva is welling up in your mouth, and the shadow of the dark, purple storm clouds passes over your heart, you like it because this endless slithering is the living circuitry board behind the lies of this culture and you are the Microchip and the Olive. And there are vines a-twining, and spiraling around your limbs, and the plants are alive and well, and their tendrils know where you where you have been, and the long curling leaves of the ferns coil round the slender fingers of the veiled ones, and the endlessness is not a sin, and you can forgive yourself and let yourself slip, slip away, because the interwoveness of the tendrils wants to take you in. And you will find a home in the writhing, and heal. "I'm sorry," Montag said, looking embarrassed. "I lose my common decency at times when I am enthused. I must remember that rhyme is inappropriate for casual conversation." He regained his composure and continued. "What are we here to do? We carry around these brains and at times they are ablaze, illuminated all at once, their function plain to see. One network. In these moments of luminosity, all is summed up very succinctly in a single flash, and all one's story on this Earth is encoded in the immediate instant. The solidarity with sentience. The Absolute Personhood. We have beaten the game; there is nowhere to go, the purpose of the brain is impossibly obvious- it is meant to take solidarity with sentience. "There is yourself and there is World. No matter how this culture twists you, World will be there. Do you make contact with World? Do you have a relationship with World? How could you? You are caught up in the game. The clinging, cling drama has bled the personhood of World out. They have made you believe that food has a price. That you don't deserve to be fed by your tribe. You do. "When you become aware of what you truly are, you have been given a peek through the keyhole into World. And you become a worthy specimen for World to form a relationship with. As yet you have fallen through the cracks. Your culture has occupied you with wretched practicality. One big scam. What we need is a World Government that does not live in fear of the Nowhere and can raise our children under the knowledge that we have nothing to do and that we are ends-in-ourselves. We need a planet that can feed itself. Until then, you will go unnoticed by World because you have been abandoned by the tribe that you deserve, and because there is no hand to give you your food, no hand to give you the ritual which you are starving for. Except for 84
Mr. Kite, of course - good old Mr. Kite. But he's only one man. "When World shows its true face through the writhing latticework, it is like looking into the eyes of another human being. You have made contact. There is something there. This is no storybook World; this is the true face of World - gnarly and ferocious, slithering endlessly with nowhere to go. Humans are perhaps the necessary byproduct of World having nowhere to go. World needed some personhood to face on one hand so as to balance out its facing of The Nowhere on the other. Do you think I'm making this shit up as I go along? Fuck no, dude - I'd draw you a diagram if my hands were free." (Montag was immersed in his video game all the while as he spoke. I'm not sure if this discredits his doctrine of the Nowhere, or impresses me that these thoughts were second nature to him and required no concentration.) "World is a substance. A viscous substance." And as he said the word "substance", he rubbed the fingers and thumb of his right hand to demonstrate what he meant, as if he was feeling a slippery residue. "What is this stuff? Is this what we are made of? Mr. Kite was a connoisseur of the World-substance, and he penetrated deep into its heart, deeper than any human I have ever known. His relationship with World was inconceivably intimate, and it was obvious that World had an interest in him as well, because his eyes were valuable to it. His eyes were trained by years of peering into World. It was painful to look him in the eyes because he could not easily make the transition back to 'people-eyes', unless he really wanted to for some reason. Who wants to be gazed upon with 'World-eyes'? It's unsettling, except maybe for lovers. But we all loved Mr. Kite, so we forgave him. "Mr. Kite had the call of ritual in his heart. This is why he could take place in World with a symmetry which we do not have. He was symmetrical, and when he faced World, World faced him back. His eyes could peer. He had a clear, steady gaze. What, did you picture him with a glazed expression? He's no doughnut, dude! "Mr. Kite was free, because he would face World eye to eye, but was not himself made of the substance of World. There is another substance. What we are dealing with here is the substance of Personhood. "World is in between Personhood and The Nowhere. As we take our place in World, so World takes its place in The Nowhere. Spheres within spheres. As we look outward in all directions to find World, The Nowhere is seeping drop by drop into World from all sides. It is seeping in and it is already within us. As we have formed a ritual symmetry with World, we can also form a relationship with The Nowhere. "Say goodbye to your mind. You are a Nowhere creature now."
~
Montag was very dramatic. Moreso when drunk. And here is a rousing, spirited drinking song, (but also a sacred chant of sorts), which Montag used to lead choruses of on the many occasions he was able to convince us to drink rum with him-
PIRATES VERSUS SCARECROWS 85
Come forth my swarthy pirates and live by the gristle of your tendons Feast on hemp and tendril-spine and send secret code on pigeons The time is now to gather your prowess and let the dragon scales glisten And overthrow the scarecrows and to the whistling splinters listen This song is curiouser and curiouser the longer it is written For mine words are written in blood, boiled to a syrup in my kitchen If you are a true and swarthy pirate and sail the Icicle-Light Seas Then slay a scarecrow for me and cast its blood to the icy breeze For the purple drops of scarecrow-blood as they crystallize in the wind Will materialize on my lightning rod to be scraped to a paste, my friend And this paste will be blessed by virgins, a hundred and ninety-nine As they sing an invisible song and drink the Fractal Medusa Wine The blessed paste of scarecrow blood I will drop into my pot And boil it to a syrup and cry for the battles my brethren fought The syrup-blood I will use to wet my peacock quill And write such songs as a hundred Chinese mystics never will If you are a true and swarthy pirate and sale the seas for gold Then know of an underwater battleground of which I have been told It is there by the coast of a land of plenty where the Serotonin fruit bloom And then but once in a century under the crescent moon It is there where the waters are thick with scum and the swords are dipped in the Bloodlust Rum There is an outpost of scarecrow demons- demons amphibious Who swim there in the scumwaters and their flesh is delicious But before you roast their scarecrow flesh and steal all their gold Fill a flask full with their blood so that my stories may be told And if the lure of dusty palm fronds shall never cease to call you Remember the dreaded curse which shall most certainly befall you For in times of old when the scarecrows ruled over all the earth They placed an unholy maggot in a tomb beneath the dirt And if the maggot is awoken by the scent of the Bloodlust Rum It will spawn a Plague of Metal and the Plastic Puppets will come The Plastic Puppets will most surely soon infest all the world And the final hour is most certainly soon to uncurl So when you slay the scarecrows and your pirate eyes shine with glee Save a flask full of their blood for my ink; you must save a full flask for me But beware the Plague of the Maggot and use caution as you run For you must lick your swords as you plunder, to taste the Bloodlust Rum
~ 86
-CHAPTER SIXTEENIN THE DARK, DARK WOODS ‘ROUND A FIRE, HOT The Secret Sacred Society of the Eternal Purple Monocle Protocol do in fact gather in the Dark, Dark Woods 'round a fire, hot. Max and I were invited to meet them at their apartment one night and were taken along a path out into the Dark, Dark Woods. It seems Lana was busy making a fire, hot, and had one going well by the time the Secret Society led us out there. Max looked down and shook his head when he saw her. Why is she always one step ahead of us? "Hey guys, do you like my fire?" asked Lana very proudly as we approached. "It's a good fire," I agreed. We all sat down on the old logs forming a circle around the fire. There were seven of the Society members present. They were wearing monk’s robes for god’s sake. Robes! Chrissy had been invited to attend as well, but was avoiding anything that could remind her of her recent episode of channeling. "Where's Chrissy?" asked Lana, disappointed. "Well, she's probably in Room 13 teaching the college girls how to worship yo-yos or talk to feathers," offered Max. The Society member called Euclid nodded knowingly and mumbled about how the old symbols were still alive and well. He then pulled out a joint and lit up. "It's always marijuana with you guys, isn't it?" I asked. The smell of the vile weed had not escaped me in my experience with college life. Lana was noticeably giddy as the joint was passed to the left in her direction. She had often tried to get me "high" in ye olde Abbott days, but I never accepted. Lana smokes a lot of marijuana. This is because she is a hippy. In fact, she was wearing a tie-dye t-shirt and hemp necklace at the time. How cliché! -Lana: "Feather?" -Max:
"Long story."
-Me:
"The yo-yo was a symbol of Mr. Kite in the Mystery Sphere Ritual, I get that, but Chrissy was really into that feather. That was no symbol to her."
-Montag:
"It was a symbol in the beginning - when the ritual was created."
[Max did not take a "hit", but passed the joint when it came to him. He was content with 87
his cigarette, because, as he says, he is unable to keep his cool when he smokes marijuana.] -Max:
"Why do they play that repetitive electronic drumbeat behind the lyrics of the chant? I couldn't pay attention to the words."
-Montag:
"Techno music was the best thing that’s ever happened to this planet."
-Me:
"Hey, wait a minute-" I began to protest, but I decided it wasn’t worth it. Pop culture marches on.
The air was cold as hell that night but the fire was hot and there was a good pile of fallen branches gathered nearby. "Man, this is some good grass," exclaimed Lana after only two "hits". Although my drug of choice is Orange Spice tea, which rarely fails to make me feel warm and cozy, at times I found myself in a group of students smoking "weed" at Abbott College. I was often the only person in the circle refraining from the joint or pipe as it was passed around. The conversation of the group inevitably became languid and my fellow students on either side of me gradually slouched deeper into the furniture. I could tell when all those present were thoroughly "stoned" when there were moments of stillness and silence, as if everyone except myself had forgotten that time was not standing still. So why have I never inhaled the smoke of this plant when the primary effect seems to be to make its users gentle? I am gentle by nature, so I don't need any influences to become less manly. I suppose I never smoked "pot" because whenever I would consider it, I would imagine all manner of curious microscopic chemical changes happening inside my brain, and this always produced a squeamish feeling which made me avoid the plant. The thought of entrusting my brain chemistry to odd reactions that I had no understanding of seemed unwise. I noticed that a few of the Secret Society members had brought drums and began beating on them, softly at first and then more forcefully. -Me:
"So what did the feather symbolize?"
-Max: "‘Make your heart as light as a feather,’ you sacrilegious bastard." The Society members seemed very pleased to hear Max quote this phrase. At first I thought that it must have been one half of a rhyming couplet from Mr. Kite's central chant, one that I had forgotten, but it was not. It was a line from "Light as a Feather", a fragment of the "Nowhere Poem". -Zoth, another member of the Society: "Excellent, excellent. The Writhing Language is brewing..." -Another unknown Member, wearing a fox mask: "A campfire always seems to do that around these parts." -Max: "All right. That's the last cryptic comment I can allow from you freakin' potsmoking mysterious robed people. For God’s sake, look at yourselves- you’re wearing goddamn ROBES! You must tell us right now - just what the freak is this 'Writhing Language'?" -Zoth: "Would you like to hear an example?" Zoth flicked the minute remains of the joint, known as a "roach", into the fire.) -Max: "Yes." 88
Then Fibonacci caught Lana's eye and winked, at which point she picked up a drum at her feet and the two of them began playing a simple rhythm. And then they chanted together in very quick monotone, synchronizing as one voice though neither of them had ever heard the words before, and this is what they said:
THE HALLOWED PLACE Congratulations , my child, you have done very well For you called the Monocle down from the heavens, from the heavens where it doth dwell. You forged the Sword of Many Colors and the Sword that cuts through Time. Only men who wield these blades may say “The Monocle is mine.” As a Samurai of Symmetry you have lived through many wars So believe me when I tell you child, that “The Monocle is yours.”
It is now the Days of the Death of Heaven; these are the Days of the Death of Hell You can walk now on the Earth for you have smelled that purple smell Our lungs are not made for the air of Heaven, nor are they made for the air of Hell This Earth is The Hallowed Place; This Hallowed Place is where we dwell The verses flutter down like snowflakes; from their heaven have they fell But that this earth is The Hallowed Place is the secret that they tell You can now look to Reality as into your lover's face You have done well now, my child, so welcome to The Hallowed Place; Welcome to The Hallowed Place There are angels and there are demons but thank the Gods we are but mortals We are creatures born to die but we can open sacred portals; We open up the sacred portals Some would say that the Monocle exists so that we can make contact with the elves, but it is reversed, my child, it exists so they can monitor ourselves Fear not, my child, these eyes of yours are not the Eyes of Satan Nor are they the Eyes of God; if you believe this you are mistaken Thank the Gods we are but mortals and God knows we are forsaken When you don the Purple Monocle, to The Hallowed Place you will be taken To the Hallowed Place you will be taken.
Fear no more, my child; fear not the voices in your head You are breathing still and despite the things you see here you are not dead Like a wise old song once said my child, just “breath, breath in the air” 89
And cross your fingers to walk in safety amongst the whispers everywhere The elves will show you to look at Reality as into your lover's face And when you can do this they will be proud and welcome you to The Hallowed Place You will be free to come within and dwell within the Hallowed Place Some would say that the Monocle exists so that we can make contact with the elves, But it is reversed, my child, it exists so they can watch and speak with us ourselves.
~
-CHAPTER SEVENTEENTHE TROUBLE WITH KLEINBOTTLES -Max: -Montag: -Euclid:
-Max: -Fibonacci:
"That's all very well and good, but a spooky campfire chant is one thing, and what we saw Chrissy undergo was another." "Different levels, different levels..." "A similar phenomenon, it was just that your friend Chrissy was extremely vulnerable to deep trance states. This is a condition no doubt resulting from her years at Bald Monkey Estate, exposed to the loud, repetitive electronic music of the Mystery Sphere Ritual. It also explains the somewhat schizophrenic belief that a feather was her special friend - 'Kalii'." "Man, I knew that chick was messed up back when we called her M.S.G. remember?" "No, no, Max - not messed up. Just evolving a bit too fast. She has unique powers."
-An unknown and most mysterious Society Member who was wearing a snake mask and strange burlap robes: "Well, there could be another factor contributing to the episode of channeling." -Fibonacci: -Lana:
"Yes - the secret contents of the ceremonial yo-yo." "And what secret contents were those?"
The Secret Sacred Society only laughed softly to themselves and began to drum. Finally Fibonacciput down his drum and put his hand on my shoulder. The other drummers became silent. -Fibonacci:
â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sachmo, we invited you and your friends here because you are fellow enthusiasts of The Garden of Flowers, and there is a power that slips in around these parts now and again on the wind. It whistles on in now and again and we seven by now can tell when it's settling in. There are certain signs. And it showed up in the voice of your friend Chrissy when she sang. This power - it slips in around here now and again. And again, and again, and againâ&#x20AC;Ś" 90
I was becoming a bit unsettled. Despite becoming friends with him and playing many a video game with him as we did with Montag, Fibonacci was a rather unsettling character in many ways. Perhaps it was his wild hair, or his hand resting so casually on my shoulder, or his repetition about this "power" that "comes in on the wind" again and again. Or perhaps it was the feeling that all those present at the campfire other than Lana and Max and I were of a different depth of devotion to Mr. Kite. It was hard to believe that this odd character Fibonacci and his associates had broken bread with the mythical man with the fondness for yo-yos. -Me: "Fibonacci, what was in those yo-yos at the ceremony? -Another, Unknown Society Member we never learned the name of, wearing a fox mask within the shadow of the large hood of his burlab robes- "A secret sacrament, Sachmo." They all smiled mischievously. "The yo-yos could be twisted open and the secret compartments inside contained something good to eat. Something very good to eat." I became suddenly very concerned that these Secret Society members had brought us there to reveal their true faces. Was I being very unreasonably paranoid? Why did I keep having the ridiculous suspicion that these Secret Society people were aliens? Absurd, absurd... -Lana: "I knew it! I knew it! This is all about those glowing things inside! -Montag: "It’s true. Your enthusiasm for the Legacy of the Symbiotes is one of the reasons you have ended up here, in this place where the Holy One walked." Max looked at me. -Max: "Holy freakin' shit, Sachmo," he whispered, "these people are fruitcakes!" -Zoth: "Sachmo, do you know anything about shamanism?" I gulped. -Me: "Shamanism?" -Zoth: "Yes, shamanism." In fact, I did, because Lana was always telling us about it. In fact, you could say she was obsessed with it, from an academic perspective anyway. Lana was, to be honest, very intelligent. Even a bookworm, kinda nerdy. She majored in sociology and wanted to go out and do fieldwork in the jungle- do classical “participant observation” and write ethnographies. Could her efforts to find Mr. Kite be fueled by the credits she would earn for some PHD thesis about it? -Lana: "I know!” she exclaimed proudly, as if this were some game show“shamanism was an ancient religious belief that there was a spirit world where dead souls lived that could be accessed with sacred plants!" -Zoth: "Very good, Lana. Now, Sachmo, would you believe me if I told you that there is such a thing in this world as a sacred plant?" -Montag: "Or dead souls, for that matter?" I remained silent. -Euclid: “Let’s say that our ceremonies are an advanced form of shamanism that, instead of sacred plants, uses a certain species of insect eggs from far, far away. 91
Tiny, frisky little rascals, like Mexican jumping beans. The larvae are sacraments to us in the same way Christians take communion and eat the wafer, and they are just as sacred to us. We call them. “Divine Symbiotes”. Perhaps you have heard this term before?” I had. The Society members began to grab the African drums by their sides and one by one began drumming a primal rhythm and joined their voices in this most curious and spooky drinking song, or sacred burial-song, rather-
THE MEDICINE MAN’S THRONE This poem is but a story which I have been told In the woods one winter all alone I was told ghosts are hungry to find their way home I was told this by the lonely ancestor spirits which roam Round the lone forgotten tomb concealing the bones Which rest on the icy jet-black stone Of which was called the alter called The Medicine Man's Throne The death of a shaman kindles mischief aplenty As his allies the spirits are freed back into the Mystery For they hunger not to aspire to symmetrical crystal purity But to feast on the marrow of the bones of The Divine One's legacy I was told this by the whispers in the breeze over a tombstone As I trudged through the snow as I made my way home And I was told other secrets which chill to the bone I was told to open the tomb and enter the dark all alone And I was told to fall asleep on The Lighting-Eyed One's throne Where I dreamt of the resonance of the poignant nostalgia Of the spirits which hunger for a chance to follow you. For they are doomed without their master to summon them from his throne So pray that unlike me they not follow you home Pray they not hunger and follow you home.
-
You too can be a ghost in the winter woods all alone If you open the creaking tomb and sleep on The Reborn One's throne Where you can dream of the resonance of the peculiar nostalgia That haunts you and entwines like vines round your collar Or you can listen to whispers of other persuasions Ones which whisper of secrets that coil in spirals And hypnotize sneering in mischief all the while For as the ears of the leprechauns will curl in lycanthropy So their pupils will dilate to steal the will from thee 92
There are secrets of play and there are spirits of trickery Which reveal hungry fangs as they sneer at the Mystery So a wise shaman blesses his marrow, his marrow with secrecy To repel the hungry spirits which hypnotize wandering jesters like me So pray that unlike me they won't follow you home Pray they not hunger and follow you home Instead listen for whispers of other persuasions For there are beings which desire less predatory relations Ones which whisper of secrets that coil in spirals And hypnotize sneering in mischief all the while For when a shaman is laid to rest he is free to reincarnate As a wandering human jester which conceals an elven heartrate So trust not my words, nor come closer to me For a fanged elven sneer may beneath my smile you see And if you think my tale be jest toss at my foot no coin of gold For I am merely a wandering jester reporting a story I have been told In the woods one winter, all alone By the whispers in the breeze over a lone tombstone Which I passed quickly by as I made my way home.
~
I had taken in nearly as much as I could handle that night already. The straw that broke the camelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s back? One of the Unknown Society Members- one of the only females, with red hair and long eyelashes behind a silken veil within the shadow of her hooded ceremonial robes of burlap looked to me and smiled devilishly. She was pretty. And yet something in her eyes and in her sly smile, even beneath her veil, made her look like an alien. A beautiful alien. "We're not aliens, Sachmo." she said. I got up immediately and walked away from the campfire. I heard Max call out to me to return, but I needed some "quiet time". Part of me knew that that veiled chick who made that joke about being aliens was only reading my mind and making fun of my paranoid fantasy, but even the fact that she could use telepathy to tell what I was thinking was scary enough. Damn she was pretty. I brushed some snowy leaves away and sat down on the cold soil of the Dark, Dark Woods. I could see the campfire flickering in the distance. Being alone, I could piece the evidence together. The Garden of Flowers was a powerful book. It was impossible to know the true nature of Mr. Kite at this point because he was long gone, leaving only the vapor-trail of a long gone laugh. The Secret Sacred Society had taste for the Ouija, the paranormal, the mysterious, and the mystical. Lana was enamored of them. How could she be so smart and yet so susceptible to flakery? I thought of the Mystery Sphere Ritual and the ceaseless electronic drumbeat. The wind was whistling through the branches of the trees. Could Mr. Kite have been some kind of voodoo witchdoctor wearing bones and shaking beads at chickens? Was that the meaning of all this? That would explain the drumbeats and the chanting I could hear in tribal fashion from around the fire in the distance. But how could alien insect eggs be a sacrament? "What the hell have I gotten myself into," I thought, before I heard Lana calling for me, sounding 93
concerned. "Over here!" I called back. She came over. "Sachmo, it's okay," she began. "These people knew Mr. Kite. They are trying to help carry on the work he was doing. They are trying to take us home. And you know what Chrissy told me the other day? She told me about the yo-yos. For each ring of seven chanters there was a girl with the Mystery Sphere, right? Veils within veils within veils. And within the veils, a yo-yo, right? Well, you and Max didn’t get to see the end of the ritual. Eventually the Mystery Sphere Girl of each chanting ring unscrews the two halves of the yo-yo. Inside there are eight compartmentsseven in a ring, one for each of the chanters, and one in the center for the Mystery Sphere Girl. Inside the compartments are tiny things about the size of a watermelon seed, vibrating and glowing extremely brightly and emitting a humming sound, which they were supposed to eat.” Lana had a way of always knowing the best clues first. I prepared to be surpassed. Nothing cuts through my occasional dislike of all people and the desire to be left alone like sheer curiosity. My mind was racing at the prospect of finally getting to the bottom of all this mystery that had clung to us for so long. Could the well-guarded sacrament of the cult, instead of just some symbolic communion wafer shrouded in mystery, be a little alien insect? The phrase “Divine Symbiotes” came to mind, and seemed an old memory, though I could not quite remember where I’d heard it from before Euclid’s ridiculous egg story... Maybe the little Divine Symbiote eggs were the seeds that grow into M.S.G.’s fairies, I wondered. Nothing would surprise me at this point. Lana and Chrissy had absolutely refused to disclose this information up to this point, leaving Max and I endlessly confounded. “Go on…” I said. “Get to the point.” “Well, the thing is... the insect...”Lana continued dramatically, relishing her authority over me in the realm of participant-observer journalism and mystery solving. “It’s like some kind of virus or microscopic robot- a nanobot. Something that infects you and replicates, takes over your body, and changes your DNA. But the thing is, it’s an object… a device…” She seemed at a loss for words. “A Divine Symbiote is an object…” Lana went on. “It definitely replicates and uses humans to stay alive…but it’s more of a… a Shape than a creature. Not a cube or a sphere but something more… exotic.” Lana talked for a long while about this thing called The Shape. I will try to record here what she told me. It was found by archeologists. They were operating a remote-control aquatic robot and they retrieved a container from the ocean floor, a container made of a strange metal not known to exist on earth. So the container of the unknown metal was sent from another planet. The egg it contained harbored a shape in its DNA, or rather in the way its DNA was arranged- not in a double-helix like ours but in a shape that cannot exist in this world. Not planet- world.This thing they called “The Shape” apparently disproved all of physics. The miracle was in the way the DNA was arranged. Not in a double-helix but in this new shape that made no sense to science as we understand it. A biology professor from Manerva University received specimens of the seedpod which she was able to activate, re-animate. Then, ironically, The Shape activated the faculty and students as specimens of its own, and used them to replicate and for other unknown reasons that have to do with séance and possession. Lana’s eyes were wide even for her when she tried to convey the mystery, the paradox, and she went on like the ditsy chatterbox she could be sometimes. “But all we really know about them” she continued, “they vibrate really fast and glow 94
extremely brightly, they seem to seek out a symbiotic relationship with humans. They use us to reproduce but also for other reasons that relate to séance and possession. But they are not organic creatures, or robots. They are actually a paradoxical shape. One that cannot exist in this world!” “What do you mean by that?” I asked. “Do you know what a Mobius strip is?” she asked in return. “Yes.” I said. I had taken some geometry classes in ye old college days. It was a shape in geometry with some interesting properties. “Well, Sachmo, my friend…” she said slowly, dramatically, like a drumroll. How corny. "They’re like that but better! They are something called… ‘Kleinbottles'. She grinned her diabolical skeleton grin. “But come on back to the fire, Sachmo, we'll get to the bottom of this," she said warmly, encouragingly, as if I were some shy wallflower at a party and she was trying to convince me to come back to mingle with the friendly campfire mystics at some kind of paranormal “keg party”. I wasn't going anywhere. "So that's what this is all about?" I asked in disbelief. "This whole pilgrimage, this whole religion- just some kind of science-fiction bullshit?" I knew what Kleinbottles were. Writers and journalists need a proper vocabulary. As a Mobius strip is a two-dimensional object with one side curling through threedimensional space, a “Klienbottle” is a three-dimensional object curling through fourdimensional space. But it only exists in the notebooks and equations of topologists and mathematicians and science fiction writers. It can’t exist in real life because there is no such thing as the fourth dimension. Well, Einstein treated time like a fourth dimension, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that a line is one dimension, a square is two dimensions, and a cube is three. And that’s it. There’s no higher object than a cube in the way a cube is a higher object than a square. There IS no fourth dimension. Three is the limit. “There’s no such thing as Kleinbottles.” I said grimly. Lana smiled condescendingly, and patted me on the head. "This is about transformation," she assured me. "This is about transforming humans into another form. This is about hope. Oh, Sachmo, you wouldn't understand, you silly square! You’re so square you’re a tesseract! The fourth dimension- well, that’s where the Elves of the Fourth House live!" And she laughed her sweet, lilting hippy laugh. I never suspected this. Lana's father funded the pilgrimage, Lana arrived at Bald Monkey Estate before Max and I. Lana formed an alliance with Bald Monkey and then the Secret Society before Max and I. She was always one step ahead of us, and now this! I was so very sad. Until that night I had considered myself a genuine devotee of Mr. Kite. I kept a quiet reverence in my heart for his words, and many nights I poured over the pages of his book when my sadness kept me awake. Suddenly my pious feelings felt very foolish. But Lana wouldn't relent and even grabbed my arm and pulled me up from the ground and escorted me by force back to the fire, where Max was getting into trouble as usual. Max was eating Kleinbottles.
~ The entity has been invoked. The dark purple storm clouds cast their shadow. A funny feeling in Max's tummy. 95
-Lana:
"I want some too!"
Euclid smiles knowingly. He passes the yo-yo to Lana. She twists it open and shakes out one of the glowing, vibrating eggs and eats. A funny feeling in Lana's tummy. Words are spoken. The fire flickers, illuminating the faces of the Society. Some have closed eyes, reverent. Some wear the masks of animals. There a bird, there a snake. Some drum and mouth words silently. There is a time of silence. Why is my heart fluttering? I am an outsider here. I am not sure if I should be present, and consider slipping away again but Lana is sitting next to me and I don't want to abandon her. The wind is blowing now. Max sits across from Lana and I. The wind is blowing through the branches of the trees. "Oh... my... god," whispers Max. He looks to me. For help? Sorry, Friend, I can't help you now. I have never seen Max look so afraid. He turns to Fibonacci. "What... is... this?" he stammers. "Is this... some kind of… hourglass?” The word “hourglass” hangs in the air. “But it’s inside-out! How…?” Max vomits. Lana's hand reaches for mine and I hold her hand. Her hand is small and warm. Her fingers are so thin. She slowly turns to me and her eyes are "those eyes". Those dead eyes. It seems the pupils of my friends were dilating all over the place these days. But while Chrissy's eyes were chilling and ghostly, Lana's have a mischievous, lighthearted grin. She was too good at all this. She was saying something to me. I didn't want to hear it, not from her. Not spoken through her. I wanted her voice to be her own, but of course it was not. It was "that voice". That dead voice. "Come within," she said. "Whose words are those!" I demanded instantly, loud and clear. I was still holding her hand and I squeezed tight. I thought for a moment that I could see her trance waver, but she only gazed through me and whispered it again. "Come within... come within." So I looked to Fibonacci and demanded an answer from him. "Whose words are they?" I asked loudly. My voice had a forcefulness which I rarely heard in myself. I did not like being gazed through. "Whose words?" he mused. "Oh, just words. Old words. Mr. Kite's words, perhaps? A little plant's words? Plants have words too, Sachmo. As do insects. And their larvae! ” Lana laughed. No sweet lilting laugh this time. She laughed as if she knew secrets. Max reached for his pack of cigarettes, lying on the ground before him, but a Society member grabbed them quick and tossed them into the fire. "Not tonight, Friend," the member said, apologetically. Max started to cry. Snot made its way down to his mouth and there were remnants of vomit on his shirt. He looked to me through watery, pleading eyes. He pointed to his stomach. "It’s... in... me," he gasped. "Sachmo... don't let it get into me. Oh, God... it’s in me." The wind was blowing hard. "Maybe you should apologize to Lana now," I suggested calmly. Tears streamed from Max's vacant eyes. "Oh, Max, my little cold one," said Lana, sounding very sad and forgiving, but far, far away. "Do you want a kiss?" I felt as if ghosts were on the wind, no doubt about it. 96
And she got up with some difficulty, steadied herself, and made her way to Max as if walking through heavy syrup. And she put her lips on Max's. The branches writhed and writhed. And together they kneeled, facing eachother, noses almost touching, and sang simultaneously, though neither had ever heard these words before. And this is what they sang-
THE DESERTS OF WINE In The Lonesome Howl of The Haunted Winds In The Caves of Moss, In The Canyons of Desolate Frost, which harbor the portal to The Deserts of Wine, wherein are hidden the tents of The Saints of Time who weep for the honor lost by the kiss of Charlatan Shamaness Venom. As only the Saints of Time can weep for the sting which the Charlatan Shamaness savors when unto Her victim the poison is given As only The Saints of Time can sleep, alone in the Deserts of wine, foresaken, wholly human, for in The Winds of Time they live in.
As it is only The Saints of Time who can pray for the cure to the curse of the long-forsaken ultimate longing, long-since torn asunder from the once-tender mournful yearning of their now calculating, silent hearts. Yet they could never fathom this question, which a cursed and blessed different brethren must live with: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Could Charlatans be the real shaman?â&#x20AC;?
97
~ - CHAPTER EIGHTEEN-
SNOWFLAKE WARRIORS And everyone was called to battle. They are Snowflake Warriors now. Rainbow People. Samurais of Symmetry. They are together now. In sync. There is a battle to be won. The good people might just have a chance. The good people might just still have a chance. So Sachmo and Max and Chrissy and Lana and Bald Monkey followed the Secret Sacred Society of the Eternal Purple Monocle Protocol further down into the Dark, Dark Woods, down the path which peters out, down into Moss Hollow Haven. Until they came to a cabin by a stream. The stream was frozen over and ice glistened in the winter sunlight. All was writhing. Sachmo's gentle poet soul was writhing. Max's new-found innocence was writhing. Chrissy's necklace of glowsticks and bracelets of rainbow colored, shiny plastic beads were writhing. And Lana's sweet, lilting laugh was writhing with the trees. And the mingled odor of Bald Monkey's cigar and whiskey was writhing. And the Secret Society's drums slung over their shoulders writhed to a primal beat. And the trees folded and breathed and cradled them all. And the Secret Society gathered branches to make a fire. And the fire was lit. And the Kleinbottle eggs were passed round and round. And all the beings of all the worlds were curious and peered in close. And the Secret Society made an outer ring of seven, drumming to a primal beat to keep the inner circle safe- the inner circle we finally realized were us, ourselves. They had been expecting us. And we chanted a magical kind of poem in unison, though we had never heard the words before-
THE MONOCLE We are creatures of magic; we are creatures of blood If you care to take your place you will surrender just like you should 98
The wind is blowing now and with your nerves can you feel Your mind is made of blood but the dreams in your head are real The trees they interweave and you know what that means The wind is blowing now and this moment Time will unfreeze Just keep your eyes on the swaying branches and open your nerves to the touch of the breeze To twirl a feather is enough, if in The Monocle you believe There are secrets in the ice and there are secrets on the wind And if you can feel with your nerves you will now come within Your mind is made of blood but within it you must dwell The Good go straight to Heaven and the Bad go straight to Hell.
Our minds are made of blood but with our nerves can we feel There is electricity in your brain and our dreams are better than what is real There are snowflakes in the ice and there are snowflakes on the wind And a snowflake is what you are if you don't believe me just come within There is a Power that comes in waves and there is a secret on the wind And to the Power you will surrender and you will now come within. You can never forget the secret if once your nerves can the secret feel The wind on your face is all there is and your dreams are better than what is real There is a twinkle in the eyes that cannot be said in words And there are twinkles everywhere; if you strain your ears they can be heard The wind is blowing now so open your nerves to the touch of the breeze You will surrender now in your bones if in The Monocle you believe Your mind is made of blood but within it you must dwell The Good go straight to Heaven and the Bad go straight to Hell.
~
And Sachmo and Max and Chrissy and Lana and Bald Monkey huddled close to the fire within as the outer ring of seven drummers passed the Klienbottle eggs round. And the dark purple storm clouds were rolling thunderous in the sky. And the thunder was like silence. And the fire they all gazed into as night began to fall was the same fire Mr. Kite gazed into long ago. But Mr. Kite was nowhere to be found. All that was left was the vapor-trail of a long gone laugh. And all the angels looked down through the rolling purple storm clouds. And all the demons slithered in and out of the forest. And animals ran in circles around the gentle souls. And the aliens gazed with their enormous black eyes and whispered secret things for those with ears to hear. And all the plants of the forest swayed in the breeze and the tendrils of the ferns crept close and caressed the skin of all the gentle souls. And the drummers unfolded their secret files. And chanted together for the inner circle they encircled. And this is what they saidâ&#x20AC;Ś [Apologies, dear readers. The secret files must remain secret.] 99
~ -CHAPTER NINETEENRITUALIZATION And Max, silly with his bare feet and his new-found innocence, slashed his foot open on the large, jagged shard of broken mirror, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the bloody, reflective surface as Max let out a roar of pain. Like Bald Monkey hugging Chrissy, this moment felt like it was from dream or myth, like the flash of an archetype being burnt into my memory.A Fatal Flaw? The price, like Odinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye, for drinking from the Well of Wisdom? The Achilles heal, the birth of the wounded healer? Unsure. All I know is that I dream about it still, and probably always will, with the acceptance that I chose not, or could not pay the price. And though I wake from these dreams as if from a vivid nightmare, my feeling is not fear but jealousy. Although I was not ritualized myself, I felt then in my gut what Max was about to undergo. And I felt the shadow of the dark purple storm clouds pass over my heart. And all you who are experienced in such things know of what I speak. And just as Max slashed his foot, there were suddenly whispers all around, and the drumming stumbled to a halt, and out of the whispers came a sad, yet noble voice. It was the voice of Zoth, carried along from the ruins in the woods not far from the cabin, the ruins called the Fortress of Stone, carried on the breeze, through the branches of the trees, to our gentle ears. And this is what Zoth sang-
THE EPIC BATTLE OF THE WARRIOR ZOTH Tear drips from my eye Spins in a spiral down to die Ticks sucking my blood My mind is in a rut Fluid in every joint Tired of walking point Constant buzz in my ears This night could last for years Staring out at the view From the tower above you
My name is The Warrior Zoth And I have come from afar. 100
My soul has been cleansed In a holy war. The fires have raged For nine long years. All has been burnt to ash And the Wild Wind the ash has cleared. I have seen wherein madness lies. I have seen the Nowhere with my eyes. I have passed the point of no return. And my eyes are as hollow comets where the icy fire burns. “Burns, burns... Oh how it burns, burns”
Of all the species we are but one. And the Alien is Awake, To this earth She has come. Her Jellyfish descend on ZothThe only beasts he cannot slay And verse in him they did call forth And this is what Zoth did say:
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“The elves are creeping ever closer Their shadows flit across the corners Their limericks bounce and tumble And their whispers slither beneath the rumble Well there are souls and souls aplenty Of this there can be no doubt Of one thing I am certainThe souls of elves will bounce about!” “Bounce, bounce... Yeah, they go bounce, bounce”
Of all the species we are but one And the Alien is Awake, To this earth she has come. Her Jellyfish descend on ZothThe only beasts he cannot slay And verse in him they did call forth, And this is what he did say: “Oh Mr. Kite was a magic man 101
A magic man he was And he called the Thunder down from the heavens From the heavens up above And the Lightning shown from his eyes And all who saw him fell in love And they were loved by the love of God In the heavens up above Oh Mr. Kite was a magic man And his heart was filled with love And he is dancing now in his heaven In his heaven up above.”
Dwarvin hammers hurled through glass Destroy Zoth’s world. Dreaming of Zoth’s Cabin In chaos and disorder A red-haired lady at his Fortress Don’t know if we can afford her The vixon had an elf soul She kept attached to Zoth’s smoking bowl Her Black helicopters up abovePropellers choppin' up doves Pieces fall down below And they do not sprout and grow. “No they don't sprout, no. Nor do they grow. No they don't sprout, no. Nor do they grow Oh, Oh no Oh no.”
~
-CHAPTER TWENTY102
CHRISSY SAVES THE WORLD And the demons knew that this was the last chance before the center to prevent the miracle. For once the book was found and once the Gate was passed, they would be too late. And these things were to happen very soon. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t speak often of the demons, for to do so is to feed them. Let us only say for now that there are beings of Light and beings of Dark. And the demons slithered close and whispered sad things, but the outer ring of seven drummers drummed and kept the inner circle safe, and the whispers were drowned out in the beat. And they drummed louder and louder until sweat poured from them and they were weary, but they only drummed louder and louder still, until all of the plants of all the forest and all the beings of all the worlds swayed to the beat of their drums, and snowflakes began to fall. And Chrissy took the shiny red lollipop from her mouth and caught a perfect snowflake on her tongue, and smiled. And in this instant the most inner veil snapped shut like an iron sledgehammer and we were trapped, frozen perfect within. And the verse descended on her, and she welcomed it calmly this time. And this is what she sang-
THE CRYSTALLINE STETHESCOPE There is a magic thing for those with hope It is called the Crystalline Stethoscope. Hold the Crystalline Stethoscope to your ear And Language Naked you will hear In an Ancient Tongue It will be Told Watch Language Into Itself Unfold. But beware a sound of fright untold Beware a sound so faint, beneath the Roar of Language Bold, Beware a gnashing sound, so faint beneathIt is the Wolves of Language when they gnash their teeth. So go now quickly past their jaws, snap-snapping at your heels and carry the magic device on high to hear what it reveals And with it catch the Crystal Words from a Void and Silent Sky Listen nowNames like snowflakes are drifting by!
~
-CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE103
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL And Max, knowing it was his time and that he was called and chosen, Fated, got up and limped over to the small, old cabin and limped inside. And he stayed inside for a long time. And when he came out his eyes were glowing bright. There was something beautiful inside. And then he limped out behind the cabin and without fear, he disappeared into the writhing branches. And we knew that he had gone deep, deep into the Dark, Dark Woods to find the Gate. And I sang a song, but it was more that the wind sang through me. And this was the Song of the Wind:
A GAME OF EYES I'm going down to Moss Hollow Under the Purple Skies Where the dead are kind and the branches writhe. There a secret is sung by a maiden wise: "This Life is but a Game of Eyes" My Muses lives down there, drinking licorice tea The most beautiful fucking ghosts you will ever fucking see.* The Amber Ones sing to me Secret Puzzle Lullabies And I drink the warm syrup Which weeps from their eyes.
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I learned of them so long ago when I was still very much a fool my clutter always filled the room, and seems now it always will then with my books all spilled and my coffee mugs and my laundry tossed upon my rugs, Yet NowMy laundry clutter follows every lonesome maiden-clone back down to the Pine Forests where the Amber Ones roam.
In the Dark, Dark Woods, round a fire hot, A Sisterhood of Muses haunts; this we were taught 104
By elder wise men in tribes of the Frozen Mountains Who are called "The Amber Ghost-Maiden Watchers"
Of the Amber Muses by them we were once told In verse on well-hidden papyrus scrolls Blessed with blackest ink from peacock quills aplenty and a scholarly appreciation for spells and luscious Garden Mysteries.
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I'm going back down to Moss Hollow Under the Purple Skies Where the dead are kind and the branches writhe. There a secret is sung by a maiden wise: "This Life is but a Game of Eyes" Flame on kiddies, let the fun begin! It's the Garden of Flowers; Lets come back within. Can you hear the lullaby a maiden sings? On the wind through the trilling of cicada wings? The wind has blown from faaar away To The Garden of Flowers let's come back today! Can you hear through the wind the words that she sings? Can you hear though entranced by concentric rings? Strain your ears through the trilling when her secret nears And the rings blossom into concentric spheres Hear the secret and succumb to the trance And let the writhing patterns dance.
See the secret as transparent films of interlocking concentric rings, Rings of frequencies which interlace and overlay all things and in the pattern of their humming solve the geometries of a maze And other Puzzle-Worlds blooming brought to you in different ways. Hear the Wolves of Language gnashing yet heralding snowflakes for your ears which crystallize as the rings blossom into concentric spheres. Here the branches are writhing and the air is brisk Arrive at your own soul at your own risk. The wind is blowing through the branches of the trees And there is a secret on the wind, if you will believe. 105
Yes there is a secret carried on the wind. And you will now hear the secret and you will now come within. Let your mind lull to cicadas and lay your soul to the Song of the Wind You are now what you are and you will now come within If you trust the Pale Sisters with their glowing amber eyes Drink deep the sweet warm syrup which ever they will cry
I'm going back down to the cabin, Long time no see! To that Byzantine Emerald Prism City that awaits me Can you hear the faint singing? Down in Moss Hollow? From the path overgrown which the woods will swallow? If you are a man of luck, The path you will follow. The path which peters out Down in Moss Hollow.
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Flame on kiddies; let the fun begin! There is a symmetry which unites the without and within There are secret paths in the woods interweaving Raise your hand if the trees are breathing The darkness is writhing and the air is brisk Arrive at your own soul at your own risk
There is a latch of twine wound round a nail on the old cabin door. Be gentle with the frail twine. If you are gentle with the frail twine, You may stay and let your mind unwind Just be sure to wind the twine at dusk Round the old cabin door Then you may stay until the morrow and speak with ghosts before.
-
Then through the humming of cicadas at the cabin you will hear a secret in the wind which has never been so near So hear now the secret and succumb to the trance 106
And let the writhing patterns dance. Trust the Pale Maiden Muses with their glowing amber eyes. They will whisper to you secrets which would cause most men to die. Those beautiful slow secrets beyond this culture's lies are out in the moss that will sink your feet a full foot down tonight.
Oh where are those luscious Garden Puzzles that once hummed like a tuning fork's drone? Do you remember the green fern tendrils so vivid from the throne? Those beautiful slow secrets beyond this culture's lies are out in the moss that will sink your feet a full foot down tonight.
-
I know my Muses are still down there Sipping still their liquorish tea The most beautiful ghosts You will ever see. To know them is to love them and for our kind it means to try to tether them with leather harness-gloves so we may fly Upon the wind with them as they spin their yarns of rhyme and materialize for True Artists mourning them from time to time, those deft at sewing harness gloves for to Peacock Angels bind.
It is ours to follow the ghost on the wind wherever she will go And Peacock Angels are the best ghosts to follow I suppose For we are to Peacock Angels tether all submissive and bound in leather, the straps of which lead to my gloves which to have sewn was quite the pleasure, dreaming of the ones I love. My peacock quill still humming as the tuning fork of the Muses who come to me from beyond the grave for those are the ones a True Artist seduces. And it is only them a Shaman courts for only in their dead eyes gleam the most exquisite and elusive puzzles you've ever fucking seen 107
and the most obscure of riddles as have been forgotten in any dream. and the most eloquent and intricate of geometric devices which gleam with reflective prismatic surfaces with which I'm sheerly delighted harboring a brittle fractal velcro structure upon its corrugated surface which interlocks with other personhoods and souls through elven verses, In fact this peculiar clockwork structure of idiosyncratic suchness arranges itself in obscure rhymschemes to which it is analogous So when nursery-rhymes and limericks and spells in verse and charms and secret codes and snares trigger synchronicity-alarms, an analogy like a snowflake structure materialized in ice, With a velcro fractal pattern on an impossible device a device like a holograph stethoscope implant of the mind, or a synesthetic geometric vision wand which you will find, a simple 3-d snowflake which is used to fracture dimension a Single-Puzzle revealing itself as a nameless abstract mission It's all really quite simple- like a meme sent back in time, an idea that if it were translatable would deconstruct your mind a structure which could be drawn with precise architectural blueprints, Each page a dimension of Mind transcribed as a symbol upon translucence. The sheets overlaying eachother to form a complex abstract world, where inexpressible concepts use geometries to uncurl and tendrils of fractal fern flora can unfurl as if they are symbols, for complex structures of thought are crystalized in their very tendrils It’s a jagged language of spatial analogy for visualizing what we are And its logic is elegant and consistent but untranslatable thus far.
So Trust the Singing Amber Maiden with Her glowing amber eyes The Muses come of their own will But that they will is no surprise For to seduce them is Our Way. And to see one blossoming open is to then tether Her away And to have two harnessed to leather straps which are the reins I wear as gloves means the Peacock Angels must carry me On the wind to the Puzzles I love.
-
And that Single Puzzle is so delicate its beauty catches me unawares but then the breeze undoes my certainty as it plays upon your hair. “Translate Me” the vision says as it vanishes into thin air. And then the breeze undoes my certainty as it plays upon your hair. 108
~
And we all danced to the Song of the Wind. And we danced, And danced And danced And danced And danced. And we into the cabin, where the true Garden of Flowers lay inside, its pages withering and wilting and being swept away by the wind. The book began with a long chant as an introduction before the chapters. And I knelt down and whispered aloud the words of the chant as I read. And I fell into a trance. And healed. Those words can heal. And this is what they say:
-THE GARDEN OF FLOWERS CHANTCome within the Garden of Flowers World swallows, World devours 109
Our path is not straight but in a spiral curled Be strong- go now hand in hand from World to World
There is a Place of Safety and a Place of Danger To neither World be a stranger
There is possession by Beings of either Dark or Light Be very much in fear of night
Wolves encircle your lonely tent To your loved ones now repent
A serpent has slithered within your tent To your loved ones now repent
There are Angels watching from on high An Angel's eyes are never dry
World swallows, World devours Come within the Garden of Flowers
We forget Interweave the Worlds like the strands of yarn old ladies knit
There is a Gate between World and Things From the light of another star comes the gift a Veiled One brings
The Gate is so open, more open than can be Mesmerizing patterns breathing in The Gate your eyes will see
The Gate's resonance ritualizes us and lets us rise Enter now The Gate and let your optic nerves now mesmerize 110
The openness of The Gate is sacred, lifting Through memories of swings and slinkys you will be sifting
We run The Path through The Gate and we must laugh we have become so humble Deep within your belly a Divine Symbiote round and round will tumble
We forget An Angel's heart is infinite
A Nature have we Someday our Natures will we be
On a good day our Nature swallows us Silently the Strange Ones follow us
Natures take place in the Place of Meetings All together Beings shout their greetings
Things take place in the Place of Meetings All together Beings shout their greetings
We take place in the Place of Meetings Hear the chorus of athousand interwoven greetings
World swallows Things From long ago the Trilling rings
World swallows us Play follow the leader with Beings that follow us
We take place in World and we are swallowed by World 111
The edges of a girl Alien’s lips are upwards curled
Perhaps sadness swallows us but could swallow World never, never The Nowhere into World's periphery seeps forever
True Sadness is a Symbiote Divine Mermaids sing their mournful songs in rings of nine
An Angel's eyes are never dry Away, away with an Angel fly
True Play is the forgetting of World Our Path is not straight but in a spiral curled
True Play requires World’s forgetting That a swing swings back and forth is fitting
True Play is a Symbiote Divine Before danger find a warning sign
An Angel’s Gaze is always bright Hold an Angel as she soars in flight
Perhaps a Divine Symbiote will swallow us Let not the Demons follow us
True Gaze is bright and warm Soon in millions through the air will Angels swarm
We forget With luck hand in hand will on the Bed of Moss you sit
112
Things are forgotten A warning sign lies falling and rotten
Forgotten is World Our Path is not straight but in a spiral curled
There is a Gate between World and Things Round the Gate are seven Angels with silky splendor peacock wings
The Peculiar Resonance from the Gate is True Play Nowhere seeps forever into World's fray
True Play is remembered when are forgotten World and Things The Alien Trilling fades when the Mermaids and Angels sing
Fall backwards into the forgetting of Things Shapeshift first into a wolf and then into a bird with wings
An Angel's eyes are dry never From eachother we can never sever
World swallows Things With The Trilling Rings that chill the bones a Veiled One sings
In the Place of Meeting Things take place Beware seduction by a Strange One with a mesmerizing veiled face
Forgotten are Things A shapeshifting Veiled One in she-wolf snarl sings
World is the Meeting Place In danger make a Hidden Being show its face 113
Forgotten even can World be There are many things now to see
We forget Within the Fortress of Stone you sit
World is the Place of Meeting To be your Nature is your Greeting
World is The Place of Natures, The Place of Things Beware caress in the Dark, Dark Woods by slender hands with ferns for rings
World is The Place of the Meeting of Natures and Things Hear the whirring of silky splendor Peacock Angel wings
We are Open Beings of flesh and eyes and gender We couple and how hard World is to remember
True Sadness is a healing which is forgotten within forgetting On your Deathbed of Moss will you be sitting
We forget Perhaps alone with tears will on your bed of moss you sit
In World we are together With The Dangerous Art become of fang or feather
World is swallowed by True Play In a tower lonely does a sleeping princess lay
True Gaze is warm and bright 114
Upon your shoulder let a little glowing blur of wings alight
We forget Be much in fear of night but into the Dark Dark Woods now get
True Play is a Symbiote Divine On the fringes of the Dark Dark Woods lays fallen and rotting a warning sign
True Play is the Resonance which swallows Things all Into the Writhing Darkness to find your heart now fall
True Play is the Resonance which swallows World Look now to the flesh of your own two hands and see them curled
True Play is remembered when are forgotten World and Things Beware caress in the Dark Dark Woods by slender hands with ferns for rings
Heart beats within a womb of laughter A drop of Nowhere in your blood seek after
The Meeting of Gate and Heart is the Divine Realm- the place of Angels, the place of Soul World does not go anywhere, it has no goal
The Meeting Place is World- the place of Natures, the place of Soul World does not go anywhere; it has no goal
World is Forgotten by the Realm Divine Mesmerizing patterns breathing of unveiled secrets is a sign
Heart within a womb of laughter beats World we ate and we World eats
115
Things are gifts from World, Things are World at Play Brush your teeth every day
In World we are together Fly away, away holding to an angels' feather
True Play is the womb of World Our path is not straight but in a spiral curled
True Gaze is warm and bright There are secrets unveiled only in the dark of night
We forget Into Nowhere does World fit
World swallows us A Single Puzzle forever follows us
Perhaps us will World devour In Alien hands is held a flower
We tremble A Second Heart of Mercury is most nimble
A Peculiar Resonance we find The Flesh of World is The Flesh of Mind
World swallows us as it swallows beauty and truth With luck be marked by an angel tooth
Down an Angel's cheek ever fall her tears Let die for one moment all your fears 116
A yo-yo is the symbol of the True Play of World and Things Hold tight and fly away, away on Angel wings
The Place of Peculiar Resonance we touch Things as they are, are such
The Place of Peculiar Resonance unveils the True Mischief beyond World Your lips like The Gods of Mischief will beever upwards curled
Heart beats within a womb of laughter The Samurai of All Colors will laugh forever after
The Gate swallows World In a spiral is a slinky curled
Let die for one moment all your fears Upon your cheek let fall your tears
Come within the Garden of Flowers World swallows; World devours
Our path is not straight but in a spiral curled Be strong- go now, hand in hand, from World to World
There is a Place of Safety and a Place of Danger To neither World be a stranger
There is possession by Beings of either Dark or Light Be very much in fear of night
Wolves encircle your lonely tent 117
To your loved ones now repent
A serpent has slithered within your tent To your loved ones now repent
There are Angels watching from on high An Angel's eyes are never dry
World swallows; World devours Come within the Garden of Flowers
-
Note- This is the end of the introductory chant of the garden of flowers (the sacred text written by Mr. Kite and discovered by Max in the cabin). This is also the end of the first two parts of the Garden of Flowers (the novel you are reading now) and the beginning of a long intermission- a book within a book. To continue following Max and Sachmoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s adventure, skip the following metaphysics textbook, and turn to page [ ]. If you wish you can return to the following textbook at your leisure without missing anything but a clever ruse ;) -Dork Stork Oysterbar
118
-BOOK TWO-
THE PROTOCOL INTRODUCTIONS
“I will sing the song that ends the world” -Septimus
119
PREFACE Congratulations! You have just begun a very long, extremely strange, and unbelievably complicated book. By merely discovering it, you have already unlocked The Gate. If you continue any further there will be moments of sanity-devouring wisdom, world-shattering absurdity, and overwhelming, unbearable laughter. Unfortunately they will be rare and hard-won. You may think of this book as the textbook which founds a new science, or as a mysterious sacred tome to tingle your spine. Some may suspect it is merely the puzzling trap of a Master Ruseman. Regardless, it is written only for those who will come to know it as an instructional manual. No others are needed or welcome here, and any mere voyeurs of academia or those with ulterior spiritual motives will find only a maze of brambles. But to my Cursed and Blessed Different Brethren who receive the transmission and accept the mission- welcome! Keep safe and dry this cartography of a distant, exotic land, for in your hands it is a treasure map. Now, letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s begin.
TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTIONS
A. CASUAL INTRODUCTIONS A.1. The Denizens of Eschaton 120
A.2. A Disclaimer regarding the highly Eccentric Writing Style A.3. The Fragments of Septimus A.4. On Intuitive Grasp and the Process of Formalizing A.5. The Twofold Mission A.6. The Song of the Forge “The Song of the Forge” A.7. The Savant Imperative A.7.1. The Protocol as Faculty: Caging an Exotic Bird A.7.2. On Einstein’s Brain and Escher Chessboards A Protocol Fable: “Of Light,Ethics, and Sea-Dragons” A.7.3. Santhood in an Unrecognized Field A.8.4. The Queen Approaches A.7.5. Diagnosis and Prescription: The Synesthetic Triad A.7.5.1. Preface:A Bookworm Extrodinair A.7.5.2. The Geometry Storm from a Land Before Math Personhood
A.7.5.3.
People
A.7.5.4.
Satori,
on
the
Orgasm,
Verge and
Our
of
Absolute
Ecstacy
of
Blueprints A Protocol Fable: “The Bramble Labyrinth” A.7.6. The Meta-Encapsulation Sequence A.8. The Great Danger A.9. The Knights of Valor and the Way of the Unrequited “Woeful Maidens” A Protocol Fable:“The Call of the Pines” A.10. literary Logistics A.10.1. Bifurcation of Authorship System Key A.10.2. On The Convoluted Mythology of the Oysterverse A.10.2.1. A Fabrege Novel A.10.2.2. foreshadowing a Monstrosity A.10.2.3. Sachmo’s origin story
B. FORMAL INTRODUCTION
B.1. Debriefing and instructions
~
I. SYMBOLIC GEOMETRY II. ARCHETYPAL SHAPES III.THE SPIRE IV.1. THE CLAYS IV.1.A. SOUL IV.1.B. MAGMA / THE RING OF TURBULANCE IV.1.C. THE VEIN OF INTENTION IV.1.D. THE SUBSTANCE OF PERSONHOOD 121
IV.1.E. THE FRONDS IV.1.F. THE CRUST IV.1.G. HEART
IV.2. CLAY-RELATED PHENOMENA IV.2.A. WILL IV.2.B. THE POINT OF ULTIMATE PERIPHERY IV.2.C. CONTEXT IV.2.D. ELECTROMAGNETIC DISCHARGE IV.2.E. THE OUTSIDE CONVERGENCE POINTS IV.2.F. ABSOLUTE PERSONHOOD IV.2.G. THE NEXUS
V.1. THE AXII OF DIMENSION V.1.A [etcâ&#x20AC;¦]
V.2.DIMENSIONS OF TIME VI. TECHNIQUES OF SOUL MIGRATION VII. GHOST-TOWN TRAVELOGUES VIII. BINDING MECHANISMS IX. THE NEXUS X. ESCHATON SCIENCE * LEXICON * APPENDIXES APPENDIX.1. PSYCHOLOGICA PHILANTHROPICA APPENDIX.2. MEDIA HOLOGRAPHICA APPENDIX.3. EROTICA PROPHETICA APPENDIX.4. REPTILICA ILLUMINATICA
INTRODUCTIONS
A. CASUAL INTRODUCTIONS A.1. The Denizens of Eschaton To be sure, this book is far too complicated, just too ridiculously DAMN complicated to be worth reading for entertainment value. The subject matter of this book is not a thing and it does not have a name. I will call it: The P rotocol. I will also refer to it as: -The S pire -The S ystem -The Science -The Faculty -The Hologram -The S nowflake You now know that these terms are used in my own specialized sense, each emphasizing various aspects, but all referring to exactly the same thing. What is this thing? It is difficult to tell 122
you because culture does not have the right words yet. I cannot tell you what it is in a simple way because our language is not simple enough to do that yet. To know the S nowflake we should first imagine the people of a future civilization that we’ll call The D enizens of E schaton and who we will imagine are the true authors of this text. The subject of this book is supremely idiosyncratic to them because it is the science round which their entire civilization, a utopia, was founded. Thus they are privileged and would not need a book so long as this when a mere wink between any two of them would do. It is better like them to not have to “know” this thing, but we must because knowing is our crutch. The complexity is our fault, not It’s. This G rand A xiom may seem at times like a barely out-of-reach and hallowed key with which to unleash heaven, yet to The D enizens of E schaton it is as common as one of their emerald cobblestones. Of course that is what Eschatonis- a place where the hallowed is common. They needed to verbalize this idiosyncratic concept, or F ormalize it, rather, so that we may understand it, and so that we may thus repay that favor by founding their culture, by laying the cobblestone of their very streets. It is indeed a monstrous undertaking, one that tends to make a macabre and convoluted alien science experiment out of our intellects, and a thick scroll out of something so obvious it should be invisible. The effort they must expend to teach and the effort we must expend to know is enough to break many men, yet it is all but for us to carve out their hearth, such that both their efforts and ours can be forgotten, such that they may live in peace by It. It is not a “ S cience” after all, but simply a wink, or a twinkle in the eye rather, but alas not for us. It is they who win. That even our sacrifice will be forgotten is itself our only victory. Grimly, this is not only a thankless mission but a dangerous one. This is your first and only warning.
~
A.2. A Disclaimer Regarding the Highly
Eccentric Writing Style
If you have continued reading, accept my sole apology now. Remember that it was your choice to accept my invitation. If you desire this you must know it is and will remain always and forever your own decision to forge this path. No one is luring you. If you desire this you can have it but if you are lost it will be your own fault. I ask you to trust me, but not because any of this is a matter of faith. The procedure which you will be undergoing is most scientific and is your own to work through with all the skepticism you can muster. I ask you to trust me because there is no anesthesia with which to convince you of the truth, value, and wonder of The S ystem without a very considerable sacrifice of time and mental effort on your part. To honor your acceptance of these terms, I will remain on my best behavior as an author, surgeon, and guide so as not to trick or confuse you intentionally, even for purely harmless and recreational mischief as I enjoy doing in my less formal work. It gets worse. The process of “proving” The S nowflake to you is going to be an experiment for myself as much as much as your attempt to understand and identify with it will be an experiment for you. The blind leading the blind in some ways, but miraculously we will get to 123
our destination nonetheless, and that’s all that will matter in the end. If you haven’t already, you will begin to detect a definite clumsiness, eccentricity, and whimsical frivolity which incessantly lowers the academic tone here. Unfortunately, the sheer outright ridiculousness of this book is absolutely necessary and unavoidable. I would like to explain, however, precisely the reason why this work has the aura of a clumsy experiment in progress rather than a sober report of its results. I promise to you that the ramshackle, at times even goofy style, like certain curious illustrations and diagrams you will find, and a most peculiar literary technique we call The Bifurcation of Authorship System used later on, well, these were not added for dramatic effect or entertainment value, but rather to incorporate some of the limits of my own understanding of The P rotocol into the process while still effectively transmitting it. There’s an old saying along the lines of “enlightenment is the other shore, when you get there you can throw away the raft”. Now, this book goes heavily into realms some would call “spirituality”, but the point is not to bestow “enlightenment” upon you, so I have no comment on the other shore, or even if that is a valid concept at all after a certain point, other than to say that The S nowflake is not enlightenment. Remember that. Think of the words and illustrations in these pages as a raft into the unknown, into the mist. They may entertain out of a good-natured spirit, but their intention is utilitarian and practical. No matter how enjoyable your reading experience may be, I will have failed if the subject matter is not transmitted effectively. I would genuinely prefer it if you found the reading unpleasant or even agonizing if that was necessary for us to arrive safely. This is no pleasure yacht. It is a peasant’s construction. The wood is waterlogged and rotten and the binding rope is frayed, but it may be seaworthy. This will require some amount of luck. However, your ferryman has not asked for your trust in vain. I took that request absolutely seriously, so too your acceptance, so there will be zero doubt or apologies any longer. It is time for a strange history lesson now. Let’s go.
~
A.3. The Fragments of Septimus Those who are all too skeptical may think of the following as a fable interlude... There once was a man who lived long ago. He was but a crazed hermit madman, whose pastime it was to scrawl deranged ravings on scrolls in his cold and lonely cavern sanctuary in a frozen coast in the North. He died long before I was born. I know him only by his scrolls. He was a hermit but not a lonely man. He was the happiest of men and his days were drenched in an exquisite pleasure none but him ever knew, drenched like amber syrup until his end. The man’s name was Septimus. To say Septimus was wise would be like saying that Time is long. His wisdom matched his madness and neither knew any bounds. He was a man who could laugh merrily and easily, ever giggling like a schoolgirl whose smile could fool the whole World. He had a vast warm heart, brimming, brimming always. He was befuddled and angelic and yet his crazed gleam shined with a sheen that was sharp and devilish and deep. His gentleness was breathtaking. He loved to read his ancient forgotten tomes aloud to himself and fathom and ponder and ever searched for a certain tome that would spell his doom, and, sadly, though he loved to read he slowly went blind. His voice as he read and talked to himself (in the third person, as was one of 124
many of his peculiar eccentricities) was soft and creaky with age, but mischievous, ever giggling though there were almost never any to hear him. He talked in rhyme. In his mind he was the luckiest man to ever live, and his dream was to find a certain tome so profound that it would turn any who read it instantly to ash. And though he was blind by the time he saw it he got his wish and turned instantly to a pile of ash. Now, Septimus is far from the main character of this book. This book is not fiction, after all, but non-fiction, and so it is not about characters or people at all but about an idea. You could say that Septimus is the great-great grandfather of this idea. I do not think of him as teacher to me of any useful wisdom and though his scrolls were entrusted to me for a time as a currier I could make no sense of them. Though I came to know him well through his writing and from stories curriers before me have told of him I do not consider him my Master (but rather a beloved friend), and he is most surely not the true and secret author of this text pretending to be me. But without his scrolls there would be no Protocol. In the scrolls there were certain jests in rhyme that were like seeds which hibernated long before germinating, over a thousand years. My contribution was only in keeping them safe and dry for a time and passing them along to the next currier in the lineage and as I said I could make no sense of them whatsoever. His unique gifts were harvested long after his death and long after the scrolls left my care when others far from then looked back upon them from a different historical context- the correct perspective in which they began to finally yield fruit. The seeds, meaningless ravings and gibberish for all anyone knew for so long became precious artifacts- sparks of language that were disjointed and cryptic- half-poetry, half prophecy, half comedy, and all mystery. His gifts to humanity, in the end, from all the work of his life, were only a handful of incomplete tales, riddles, and jests, elusive sayings that remained to became relics- glimpses and flashes of a thing that was Holy and Profound and Absurd and completely inscrutable, but which was meant to come into focus when ripe. The scrolls were not to remain intact and by the time they were analyzed by the correct people, from the correct age of history, there were only scraps of wilted paper and a handful of partial aphorisms. These came to be known as The Fragments of Septimus, and at the right time, through their proper analysis they fused and crystalized together into what became the P rotocol, and the correct people who came to analyze them were called the D enizens of E schaton. You may remember that these people were the inhabitants of a Utopia in the distant future who we may pretend are the true authors of this text. And transcripts of some of their distant future observations may just make an appearance in this book, as will many records of some of the original ancient Fragments themselves, as my own humble meandering commentaries do now, in addition to one other voice that we will not speak of yet. All these multiple perspectives together will be necessary to gather the full truth and will interlock in a most peculiar experimental literary technique we will call the Bifurcation of Authorship System. But this will not come into play until much later. You may ask how I could come to know such things as the existence of The D enizens of E schaton to come, or how anyone could acquire transcripts of theirs, especially a mere currier in the lineage such as myself, and a mere citizen of this grim planet in our grim present as you are, dear reader. I will tell you later. In any case, the visions were too much for Septimus or anyone to bear, and the brighter they became the dimmer the vision of his eyes became, and as it slowly left him, so too his sanity. But in his dementia his heart only grew warmer and overflowed and what he felt was his duty to do service to humanity grew stronger, and so he scrawled what he could of his visions on scrolls. And then one cold day, one of the few friends in his life, a traveler who passed by and 125
helped him once, took the scrolls when he came back and found the frozen cavern sanctuary empty, except for a pile of ash.
~~
A.4. On Intuitive Process of Formalizing
Grasp
and
the
My knowledge of all this is not perfect and it will not unfold effortlessly to you. In fact that would lower your chance of understanding. It would rob you of being a participant in the grisly process. We are in this together. We either both fail or both triumph. You have a much better chance of understanding if you come to recognize and familiarize yourself with my idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, flaws, and limitations and accept them so as to see through them to the concept. At best my blind spots and your need to work around them may add a spontaneous and comic flavor to the process or hopefully merely annoy you, at worst you may fear we have both succumbed to psychosis and dementia. Yet the work shall be done. The I ntuitive leviathan slumbered in the depths of the purple collective subconscious, asleep, marinating in the brine for ages. We shall now wake the Aquadragon with harpoons, and hoist the beast with the ropes of my warship but by the gristle of your tendons, and it will breach the surface into the light. This breaching is the F ormalized leviathon, and without it we cannot feed on the sweet blubber which shall keep all the generations of our descendants alive. Of course, it is the only food that could. The ramshackle and clumsy nature of my writing is due to the dual process of my f ormalizing The S ystem while I am simultaneously offering it to you. The first draft is the final draft. It could not be otherwise. The process of offering and all which that demands is how The S ystem becomes formal, meaning it becomes publically accessible, meaning it functions as a cohesive whole and does not merely work through mystery but has a language of its own with a syntax- the axioms, laws, and principles by which it operates are verified. It has a foundation upon which to stand, an oaken table on which the meat will lay. You who hunted with me are guests of supreme honor at the rude and messy banquet. We do not eat with forks or even our dirty hands at this table. We sink our teeth into the flesh of The P rotocol and drag it to us. While my duel experiment is to try toF ormalize The S ystem at the same time I am explaining it, your dual experiment will be to understand The S ystem while learning the skills (like growing new organs) necessary to do so. Do not mistake the experimentalist and comic-book aspect of my writing for me “making this stuff up as I go along”. That is not the case. You will only be able maintain the optimum level of trust I asked of you if you accept that you are receiving a kind of science, but also that you have access, like a privileged balcony seat, to the world premiere of the f ormalizing of the S cience while I am attempting to transmit it. This makes things lopsided and asymmetrical, unsequential. It could not be otherwise. Perhaps you ask why I couldn’t have f ormalized It first 126
at some lonesome drawing board, and then offered you the final and perfect product. It would have been long dead and cold by then, unfit for your pleasure. I want you to taste this meat while it’s hot and bloody, if not straight from the living beast. It’s really such a ridiculous proposition that I fear you must surely think I’m a con-man or charlatan and that my real intention is merely to entertain or trick you. How could you think otherwise when I say such grandiose things as “I suppose you are wondering why I have brought you all here tonight... Gather round, for I shall now attempt to transmit a kind of science- but no ordinary science! I shall unveil the wonder of a new S cience that has never been F ormalized… Until tonight!!” Arrogant? Megalomaniacal? Perhaps… or perhaps just Too. Good. To. Be. True. That is precisely what it is- it’s the sheer textbook definition of “too good to be true”. This is no cult of personality. If my goal were fame I wouldn’t write under a pseudonym, would I? It’s just the facts, ladies and gentleman. I do not claim “ownership of The S nowflake” or “Flawless Identification as it 100% of the time” but simply a certain unique and as yet unparalleled kind of access to it. It is extremely important to separate this ability from pride, as I have always strived to do. Pride did not inspire my claim of unparalleled access, and I have not allowed my unparalleled access to inspire or justify pride. The reason I cannot claim personal credit for my own access is because I was not responsible for it any more than a person is responsible for a stroke or a neurological disorder. I have had the lucky and misfortunate access to an unusually large number of scrolls and scroll fragments since I was a teenager, but their contents were not my concern, only harboring them secretly and eventually bestowing them to the Courier who will succeed me. In fact, it is technically forbidden for a Courier to open or read any of the scrolls themselves, but due to natural human curiosity this is an unfeasible rule and I admit that like countless before and after me I opened and read what I had in my possession. I received access to my first scrolls in an undisclosed initiation ceremony performed by my new 2nd family, my Courier Family. However, and with a self-disclosure of a rarity you will find in these pages only twice, this coincided with a series of minor seizures after a concussion from a car accident when I was 16. In the seizures I had visions which I believe were of the same thing that the scrolls described- The S pire. Perhaps during my introductory studies of the scrolls their meaning had sept into my subconscious, and the seizures shook some kind of strange mechanism of the mind in which I could, in brief flashes, suddenly make visual sense out of what Septimus seemed to be describing. A less rational theory I considered in the folly of youth was that the scrolls were haunted- somehow imbued with Septimus’ spirit or ghost, and he was communicating with me through the visions. Although I have often wished very dearly that my cursed and blessed visions of this Bedazzling Thing could confirm some special pride when sorely needed, I knew I did not create It or understand It. The catch was this- my access, although unparalleled, has been intuitive for almost all my life. I could say “merely” intuitive, but that would reveal my prejudice toward the intuitive arts in general, though this one I practice. On the one hand, I have often felt blessed and just overwhelmingly grateful for my grasp of The S nowflake over my life. On the other hand, I came to ponder what a horrible shame it would have been if my access were to have remained merelyi ntuitive until I died. Eventually I resolved that this would not be so. In fairness, what I call I ntuitive Grasp of this should not be disrespected as “merely” I ntuitive, as “half-understood”, “partial”, or “non-functional”. I would even go so far as to say that as a matter of personal taste I actually prefer the I ntuitive P redilection, and although it can be very sweetly functional indeed, it simply cannot be effectively transmitted to an uninitiate. I ntuitive G rasp can be transmitted fluently between two I ntuitive A depts and may be reaped 127
by or paired with F ormal A depts even unto brilliance, but it simply cannot be effectively transmitted to an uninitiate. I ntuitive G rasp became an unacceptable limitation for me because unlike fluency in F ormal A pprehension through this quasi-academic tone which I have adopted and must regretfully employ, The M odality cannot be transmitted to a mass number of I nitiates.
~
A.5. The Twofold Mission It is said that those on The Mission of The Two Doors must wield two swords- “The Sword of All Colors” and “The Sword That Cuts Through Time”. Many will fear this mission is impossible, yet to those who wield these blades, all doors are choppable. Even scholars who have devoted their lives to study of the higher mysteries will falter, for this is a twofold mission. The wise elders and tome-ponderers will easily embrace and enter the first door, the Door of Wood, for the challenge written on the lock of The Door of Wood is simply “To get it started in here.” But they will never pass second door, the Door of Stone, for the challenge written on its lock is “To get retarded in here.” That is a song even a thousand Chinese Mystics of old will never know. What does it mean to “Get it started in here”? It means for our W ill to be sharpened into F ull R itual S ymmetry: entrance into the Now and therefor full symmetrical alignment with the forward stream of time- resistance-less, streamlined forwarding into a fated, destined planetary future (E schaton), and alignment of one’s personal destiny with the destiny of the planet. This alignment is not a binding shackle but represents infinite freedom. For a human, Full Ritual Symmetry and complete surrender to the forward flux of time is as close to real magic and nirvana as we could ever desire. Flawless devotion to an inevitable planetary future which will justify the failures of the present species is the only cure for the guilt and sorrow which ever follow us. This is known as the challenge written on the lock of the Door of Wood- “To get it started in here”. That part is easy. What does it mean to “Get retarded in here”? That is the challenge written on the lock of the second door, the Door of Stone, which the rarest few can hope open. Here we must come to terms with the true nature of the fool, which our culture has christened with the label “retarded.” It is an ugly word, even withstanding its varying shades of “political correctness”. There are many nasty synonyms- ‘retard”, “spaz”, “dork”, “idiot”. Those are words bullies of the playground will use to chastise their outcast classmates with dented minds and slower, kinder hearts, and most who take up The Two Swords will be intimately familiar with such cruel jests and many more. Let’s examine the word “idiot”. Etymology is your friend. The historical roots of words in languages of old are the most valuable clues to their deeper meanings, and as I assure youwords of our present language can be made roots themselves of future words, intentionally, though too few will dare to practice this craft. The word idiot comes from the Greek word “idios”, which means “private”. This is a great clue to the dangers and the honors of Our 128
Science. Idios is also the root of the word idiosyncrasy- the mark of the fool and the genius for both partake of the waters of the Well of Privacy. It is from the deepest privacy of the mind that o ur S cience comes, a privacy so deep it is as unto catatonia. The Chamber of Catatonia is like a dark well of privacy from which some can never escape, and there are many gentle, blessed souls as these who performed this sad miracle and who have become as flowers, forever. But to those who dare to delve backwards into the deepest privacy and yet still emerge, or at least speak back a bubble from the depths, you may snare the most powerful, valuable, and altruistic truths.
~
A.6. The Song of The Forge The True Fool is the Private One. The network of roles society expects us to take are a net that cannot catch him. He is forever naked, Edenic. The lucky one for whom the magic of childhood never wilts; the forgiven one, allowed to frolic and be frivolous, for he can do nothing else. His Privacy is a womb he will never be born from, so he is safe, graced. The True Fool is the only one who can speak truth to the king, for he has paid the price of pity and the rules of society are shackles that cannot bind him. The jester knows this well and is a sly master actor pretending to be the True Fool as a fool never could pretend, and thus can whisper in the ear of the king. With a joke one can escape the noose. The Fool laughs, but not at any specific punchline. His laughter is the only kind that can never be shared in any joke- it is the Primary Joke- the fact that there is something rather than nothing. One must become the Fool to remember this fact, and from this place all is extra, all is a fountain of splendor, and in the spring which feeds this fountain there is not yet sorrow. The fool is on intimate terms with an aspect of reality which is itself foolish, the reason-less-ness at the source of being. To drink from this well one must forsake reason and purpose. Those who clung to the reason and purpose of their lives all along will tremble and succumb to suicide if faced by the Great Absurdity called “That There Is Something Rather Than Nothing” but those blessed fools who society never asked a purpose of in the first place will laugh. And laugh and laugh and laugh! Beneath the Spring of Colors which feeds the Fountain of Splendor is a dark and inexhaustible well that births the World every second, and makes all new again and it is the place where reasons and pride and knowledge come to die in the Great Dark Privacy of the Chamber of Catatonia at the bottom of the bottomless well. This is no more the black of death than it is the black of birth, for they are the same here, beneath Time. The Spring is colorful, the Spring is raging color, an explosion at the Crayola factory, but the Well is dark and silent, and deepest of all, beneath the fountain and the spring and the well and its chamber is the Forge of Absurdity which gladly melts any thought, any pretense of wisdom it is offered. This is the Genuine Humility, and few followers of Truth could bare to be this humble. In this forge their many thoughts which they once read and wrote and once called “True” are laughed, burnt, to death here. The wisdom of scholars is mocked, scorched, to death within the Great Privacy of the Forge, leaving only the in-joke between the Fool and the World-as-Fool. You See, World, She is a fool Herself. There are two swords which were forged in this this Primal Forge- the Sword of All Colors and the Sword That Cuts Through Time. Only these swords can cut through the lock on the Door of Stone, and one who enters that door will have well and proudly Gotten Retarded in Here. 129
Swords are not the only thing this Forge has forged. It also is used to make toys- building blocks. When thought has burnt away, it is these building blocks which build again the house of the mind. It is not thoughts, but rather these building blocks which built the House which is the Protocol.
The Song of the Forge I. The Fountain
There is a place to stand and laugh under the waters of a fountain Only there under its waters, the Final Laugh is found in That “All is extra, All is splendor” is the meaning of the fountain Only this I ask of you- that you must heed its call, son For peace upon my deathbed now, this vow of yours I count on. II.The Spring The spring that that feeds the fountain is The Spring of Every Color Its color is gold and green and blue and every single other It flows white and purple and red and black and is called “The Fountain’s Mother” To dive into the spring is said to be the greatest wonder. III.The Well Beneath the Spring of Colors lies a well that goes forever. The blackness there has swallowed the few men brave enough to enter And the few who have met their fate by a cold, colder than any winter. IV.The Chamber In the depths of the well is a chamber- the Chamber of Catatonia A Goddess laid its brick and there carved “I dove deeper than all of you” In Her chamber was an emerald stone, inlaid into the floorA secret left for divers deep- an emerald revolving trapdoor In Her secret was a puzzle- a riddle carved into the rock And those who solve the riddle revolve the brick and pick the lock The riddle is “Who is Catatonia? And what is it She taught?” 130
The answer is “The Goddess who to worship is by Her to be caught.” V.The Forge Beneath the chamber and the trapdoor, dropping down below Is a place that none before or after you will ever go Here the Fire that Kills Reason burns into eternity Here is where thoughts come to die- the Great Forge of Absurdity Into the Great Furnace of the Absurd cast your two swords, son of mine“The Sword of All Colors” and “The Sword That Cuts Through Time” It is from their liquid metal you must forge the Building Blocks of Mind For only you who can craft these bricks will lay the Foundation Divine
~
A.7. The
Savant Imperative
A.7.1. Protocol as Faculty: Caging an exotic bird For those who must adopt a sober, rational, traditionally scientific perspective (as opposed to an occult or mythopoeic perspective, for example), we will create a description or diagnosis of The F aculty exactly as if it were an “abnormal psychological condition due to an abnormality in the physical, neurological structure of the brain” as the naive scientists of neuropsychology would interpret it. In doing this we cage an exotic bird. A pity. But trust in time it will escape… Ask of your deepest hidden motives into this very unique and specialized kind of knowledge. The specialized knowledge is attained not for its own sake, but because it is the most effective tool for accomplishing a task. This task is the right thing to do, the only thing to do. If your motives are truth and wisdom you are blocked, if your motive is the quest you may pass. In this endeavor one’s actions are necessarily selfless, altruistic. A hero does not try to be altruistic. It is necessary because legend is born of the gift of a tale worth singing and the saved earth is to have beaten the game. If you forsake altruism you are exiled from The Path, as you are exiled if you seek altruism. Ethics is the only measure of truth and never the reverse. Not to know, but to accept the mission and get questing is the true motivation even if this means forsaking traditional notions of wisdom (to “Get Retarded”). Never try to be ethical, go to work
accomplishing the One Task called the The Nameless Mission which is to unwravel the knot which is the Single Puzzle and therefor ethics defines you, the Fated Hero, and you will slay the dragon that is the Single Puzzle, free the princess, and become legend in epic verse. 131
Never forget- even your sins shall justify the Earth. And thus your motto: “To pray to gods I do not care I raise my cheer along with theirs!” If this is not “The Pirate Spirit of the Ring of Turbulence” there is none! This is the swarthy, the primal, your birthright. Claim it. O ur S cience is NOT that of enlightenment and you are not “higher” than others (no pride of the elite), but rather extremely specialized. We stress the difference between the specialized area we seek to carve our niche in and the elite forms of wisdom. We cannot emphasize enough how crucial this difference is. The best proof of the separation between our specialized form of knowledge and wisdom is that our knowledge can exist, even to the extreme, within individuals with mental retardation or severe traumatic brain injury. In my case I believe there was some link between my receiving and studying the scrolls, my seizures, and visions of the Spire. Due to the tie between mental retardation and savant-ness it may even become necessary to intentionally seek a certain kind of psychic isolation which some with retardation are permanently born to. We call this becoming the Grand Orphan, or the Alien. [ Please
remember that when we speak of “The Alien” we are not alluding to the fact that we or you are actual extra-terrestrials from another planet. – Purple] We do not seek the permanent status of some “finished souls” in this place of isolation unless we wish to resign from the work and be exiled from the path. However, we seek to incorporate elements of deep alienation from one’s fellow man into our work. One must be prepared to succumb to dementia, to dare to “Paint oneself into a corner”, to sink irretrievably to the bottom of the pond. The ease of mistaking the F aculty for merely high mental skills is complicated by the fact that a high percentage of those with the F aculty are in fact extremely intelligent but for reasons peripheral to their core grasp of the F aculty. And so the F aculty is very easily mistaken for the peripheral kinds of intelligence. This is because there is indeed some form of link, such as perhaps the Faculty appearing more frequently in subjects with genetic predisposition or nurturing towards intelligence, or because in many, using the F aculty requires a kind of detachment and abstraction which is beneficial to the peripheral “earthly” kinds of intelligence. What we mean by “peripheral intelligence” is a certain revered place very high on the spectrum of a certain talent or virtue of our species. What we mean by one’s “core grasp of the F aculty” is the presence of a quality that would be merely the commonly shared baseline of the H ypothetical S pecies*- the Denizens. We always stress to meditate on the fact that The F aculty can appear in people who are severely mentally retarded (and certainly does) or even people who have traumatic brain damage which made them mute or like permanent infants, who of course could never explain or be noticed for the certain extremely rare and unique property of mind they possess. This state many of you may relate to is as being given the talents of the best violin prodigy who ever lived, but in a world in which the violin was never invented. There is no way to convince a single soul of your musical gift, unless you could also invent the violin, and these souls cannot. Therefor in a fundamental way they are forever private. Not only does the Faculty appear in such people, but as there is a link between the faculty and extremely high intelligence, there is also a 132
corresponding link between the Faculty and these extremely low places on the spectrum of earthly intelligence, to the extent that communication with others becomes difficult. In fact, some with the kind of retardation or brain damage associated with this savanthood have grasp of The F aculty in ways so vivid they are unimaginable to us. Certainly, it is nearly impossible to imagine this duel condition of retardation and high core grasp of The F aculty as one permanently restricted to it experiences it. However, you now understand that this duel condition exists. Every time you experience that ghastly pride in your intelligence due to your possession of the Faculty you must apply the antidote- remind yourself that this duel condition exists, preferably imagining someone who exemplifies it and giving thanks to them or honoring them as your superior in this area. Now that you understand this, to believe or hope that your own grasp of The F aculty proves your higher intelligence, even subconsciously, is as prejudiced as if you told a retarded person in a wheelchair that they were unwelcome in the public library. Permanently private souls with access to TheModalityhave what is called “IntuitiveG rasp” and are calledI ntuitives, although not all Intuitives are private in this way. This is the same wider category in which some very valuable travelers with certain gifts called E mpaths fall. Those who can F ormalize the Science themselves (make it universal and communicable) are called, appropriately, F ormalizers. There are others to come as well. Those who will make use of the F ormalized G rasp of other individuals to influence culture towards the goal are called “The A rchitects”. And after them, a people known as The E ngineers. Any time one notices the temptation to take pride in The F aculty as if it denotes “smartness” should immediately meditate on the idea of a mentally retarded person, perhaps in a wheelchair, being fed soup by a nurse spoon by spoon. This person happens to have an I ntuitive grasp of The F aculty so immensely vivid and profound that it makes yours and mine look like specks of dust. To take even a drop of pride in the Faculty as if it proves your intelligence would be like ridiculing and taunting our imaginary fellow traveler’s grasp- something we trust you would never do. This is an extremely important meditation, and one should sip from it as a reminder of what we are really dealing with very often. Application of this antidote can be a lifelong project. To use the spectrum of intelligence or wisdom to define The F aculty is to insult it, but this is a constant underlying temptation, because one can feel that due to the cursed aspects of the condition one is owed a reward. To be recognized as having traits considered admirable to a high degree implies one is elevated above one’s peers. To seek such a paltry reward as this kind of elevation is a waste, and redundant. No reward matches in joy the severity of the sacrifice! No applause will suffice, because nothing will. But it is ceaseless underneath, this expectation of reward. If The F aculty could be judged by the scale of the intelligence of men, it would be nonfunctional. To understand it requires comfort with the idea that phenomenon which appear as wondrous skills in our environment, can appear in other, more desirable environments as common as a stones. The possession of the unique mental quality we are slowly defining can never atone for the supposed “sin” or transgression of taking the ultimate aloneness, but rather proves its necessity. It does not annihilate this final alone-ness but siphons its power from it. It does not forgive the rude gamble of intentionally receding backwards from one’s fellow man towards Golden Catatonia, but justifies it. The stinging, fresh wounds of this risky
journey backwards will become the scars of the battle-hardened. This is Taking the Throne of the Alien. 133
The false pride chooses the scale of the humans, and says that the supposed gift is a peak in the mountains of honor. The gift which is not a gift is not the height of our human mountains, it is the baseline elevation of their shore afar. Perhaps we are applauded here for a demeanor that is peripheral to a quality as-yet unknown and unrecorded, misinterpreted by those here as simply seeming so smart. They are confusing one condition with another. The applause we should find infinitely more delicious is the unheard and perhaps never heard applause from afar, yet tragically and ironically they, The h ypothetical S pecies, would never applaud us for having a trait so common to them as having arms, or being able to breath. Yet theirs is the scale we must use, and it is their scale which more truly defines what we are really working with. We judge our worth from their eyes. This is why we say our emeralds are their cobblestones. The object of the game is to make a shining gem into a rock. When we have done that the game is won. “Do no harm” does not mean one cannot break a bone to set it. The medicine justifies the prick of the needle. To infect others with the “gift” of The A lien means to siphon the curse aspects of it as well. To do this with confidence and a clean conscience means being comfortable with the belief that even while transmitting these elements, the complete and paradoxical F ull T ransmission is evenstill ethical and worth doing. To believe this in ones bones is a lifelong struggle. The G olden M egalomania believes this unto the marrow, without the most subtle waver of doubt. That is why it can seem or feel ferocious, feral, rabid,
fiendish, and wicked. This is the Golden Scoundrel Wolf Hero.
A.7.2. On Einstein’s Chessboards
~
Brain
And
Escher
It is believed by Courriers of our time that Septimus was the first occurrence of The Faculty in a human being. This cannot be proven, of course, but no evidence to the contrary has ever been unearthed. Septimus was not known to have any children, and there is no record that he ever married, nor had even a single lover, and certainly not after his seclusion from all human contact (with the exception of his sole visitor) in the cavern. However, some of the more crudely rational among us used to speculate that in his youth 134
before becoming a hermit he may have fathered children and passed down a genetic predisposition to his ability. Such traditional biological models of The Cursed Gift are antiquated and have not been in favor for a very, very long time. Their proponents once attempted to trace Septimus’ supposed lineage by connecting known instances of individuals with The Faculty throughout history. It was considered significant that all such known individuals were Intuitives, by these ancestry-historians assumed to have received access as skin or hair color is passed down, although to no more than one individual in a great many generations. Only later in Devin Hinderlie’s
age,
after
The
System
was
Formalized,
was
it
communicable to Non-Initiates who were thought to have no such hereditary, physical brain abnormalities because they exhibited no Intuitive Grasp until their encounter with the scrolls, commentaries, or first-hand encounters with Courriers. And so it was believed that the Faculty was born of biological accident or some leap in the march of evolution, but eventually became transmitted through Language and “taught” to those without the natural, organic proclivity. During Devin Hinderlie’s era were the first known appearances of The Faculty present in those proven to be outside any possible bloodline Septimus may have originated, due to details such as their geographic isolation from the continent where Septimus lived. And so it was believed that the Faculty was born of biological accident or some leap in the march of evolution, but eventually became transmitted through Language and “taught” to those without the natural, organic proclivity. We here offer the humble theory that even if this biological model were true, it does not lesson the glory or the Fated nature of what became Our Science. Even if It was born of a strange “tangle of 135
neurons and chemical oddities or mutated ganglia of cells” to use the parlance of your day, that is not to say It is an injury or a mental illness, though it is also true it often comes cloaked in those. It is something more akin to a miracle of evolution bestowing a path useful to our species, in mysterious ways a path destined for our species. In the next section of text we find a rarely specific example from your (roughly) present history that may shed some light on this matter. -blue] The brain of Einstein was removed, preserved. It was found, as goes the story, that there were in fact very intriguing and suggestive abnormalities in the physical structure of his brain, and that one area related to spatial reasoning was larger than normal, and that there were other areas smaller than normal. Even if this were not historically true, it should have been because the analogy these “facts” serve is too elegant not to carry. In fact such physical brain abnormalities would be fertile with a number of suggestions.
[Albert Einsten was a theoretical physicist who lived approximately in your time. We know he lived within 200 years either before or after the turn of the 2000 millenium. He was the man responsible for Relativity Theory, which had extensive symbolic pregnancy, especially serving Archetypal Shapes and many aspects of Protocol Theory. The analogical fertility and conceptual cross-fertilization between Relativity Theory and Protocol Theory has to do with the very sensible fact that there are universal principles abstract enough to apply to both Physics and the structures and forces of Personhood itself. Rather than thinking of Physics principles as physical things from which Personhood-related phenomena can find similarities and draw lessons, it is useful to think of both Physics and Personhood as dimensions radiating from a third more primary one which enwombs and contextualizes them both- The Grand Stained-Glass Scaffolding. Einstein’s theories drew from physics’ search for the unification of various previously-thought separate forces of physics (gravity, etc). Our kind of Satori is also an alchemy of synthesis-D.O.E.] Though the greatest master of our craft who ever lived could well have been a deaf, mute, and retarded child who could not think in words or do much besides eat cake, if you have been given keen, swift thought, or rather ”special thoughts” as Einstein was, like any gift you must consecrate them to our craft. Therefor, we use thought not to describe and explain as science does but to unify and synthesize in ways that transcend science and reason. And so we seek with special attention Perpendicular Concepts and Encapsulating concepts, we seek contexts, which enwomb and form elegant wholes. And we seek Absolute Context. The first clue- that although an area of Einstein’s brain was larger than normal, other areas were smaller. This evidence could be a physical example of a principle of S oul-M igration which Septimus called The P rinciple of S iphoning (in introductory phrasing, having to do with the totality of psychic energy or consciousness being distributed amongst and moving in dynamic 136
equilibrium between certain major archetypal dimensions of consciousness or P sychic O rgans called The C lays.) Hence Septimus’ growing blindness in inverse proportion to his wisdom as well as the common retardations or subtler eccentricities in some aspects of the minds common to those with The F aculty. The second clue- it was specifically the spatial reasoning part of Einstein’s brain which was larger than normal. Now, you familiar with the man know that his work had to do with space and time. He achieved a conceptual union of space and time, hence the phrase “Einsteinian Space-time”. There is a spatiality which does not move and through which all moves. This is called The Fourth House. Einstein’s 4-dimensional Space-time is a concept which unified the three dimensions of space with a 4th of Time. However, when we say The Fourth House, we are specifying that we do not mean Time as a fourth dimension but a fourth spatial dimension, and time we can forget for now. Point, line, square, cube… and that is all our world knows. They say there is no “hypercube” except in the daydreams of theoretical topologists. They are wrong because they don’t know how humble one must be to verify such a thing. By the time one is that humble they are no longer a scientist and “hypercube” is the wrong word for the object. In fact
“object” is the wrong word. We should say “being” or “entity”. They are beyond us and cradle us. [Escher was… -blue] So it may seem natural that the “space brain-part” produced knowledge of space. But what is space? The activity of the brain is to produce a spatiality beyond space. It is as if the brain was a machine which produces a higher-dimensional space than that in which it itself exists. This seems impossible because we assume the context must exist before it was anticipated by a mere thing within it, yet this is the unique object which is a brain. This is the paradoxical human condition. It is also the brain and the human condition as Fated. To generate The Hologram is to justify the very Earth. We could, to insult your intelligence, describe Einsteinian Space-time in classic Escher motif as a chessboard of rubber, each piece weighing down its square such as to create a funnel shape. The funnel or vortex shape is one of our favorites of what we call A rchetypal S hapes. Now, the 2-dimensional chess board symbolizes the entire 4-dimensional space-time continuum and the various-depthed funnels symbolize the way gravity distorts that continuum. As a coin could be rolled in a spiral down the funnel to the rook at its center depth, so a spaceship could spiral around a planet’s gravity. This is one of the most classic and elementary mind games one can play, and you all should have known this rubber chessboard as your own all along. It was your prerequisite for the more mindblowing thought-experiments relating to exotic distortions of temporality in states of extreme gravity and speed. It is precisely with the exotic coyness with which space, through matter and gravity, whisks time up, that The Fourth House opens. The swoon of the heart is an exponential curve. Gravity does not pull steadily- the closer our spaceship nears the new homeworld the stronger the attraction grows. But those exotic veiled realms of physics are themselves prerequisites to prepare you for a deeper secret. This is what lies beyond physics in the place where time (or culture) curves upwards and forwards exponentially into the infinitesimal point of the supposed, rumored, highest alter in the spectrum of gravitational distortion- the singularity. This is not the vortex of a rook or a mere king- this is 137
the hole the Queen makes…
~ A Protocol Fable:
“Of Light, Ethics, and Sea-Dragons” In physics the speed of light is a constant, and things we thought were constants like time and gravity are relative to it. Light bends them to its will. This insight, Einstein’s unique achievement and perhaps the single most revered discovery in science, was in disregard of the common perception of Truth (Newtonian Logic) and was a revelation to physics, appearing necessarily… strange as it turned from previously-thought absolute laws. It was the supreme thought-crime. It presents a new standard that requires a leap across a chasm of mind to know, yet one must. Like Einstein, let us perform a thought-experiment. Perhaps a schizophrenic hears the voices of angels, which, though hallucinations, nonetheless sing hymns that surpass any previous human artist or saint, and were so profound in their beauty that they could bestow the basis for an entire civilization. Let’s say within the mythopoeic endless epic verse in rhyme of the hymns (to be sung to us as bedtime lullabies by the empathic and nurturing female supercomputers of the future) were the instructions by which humanity can create heaven on earth. To convince the world of the need to follow the lessons of the angelic verses, the psychiatrist of the schizophrenic records his patient’s ramblings, carves them in stone, and claims to have found the tablets in the belly of a dragon at the bottom of the ocean, a leviathan whose name cannot be pronounced. Let’s say the psychiatrist is successful and the future civilization which worships the “Angels of the Aqua-Dragon” becomes a Utopia. Let’s call it “Eschaton”. Eschaton is infinitely superior to our earth, not in wealth or technology or wisdom, but in Ethics. Our meager imaginings of Utopia fall far short, to the degree that the Dragonoids’ existence is inconceivably ethical to us. What that may be like, we know not and can never know, but gratefully we can extrapolate from visions and reason. Now, to those who believe that ethics and the right way of 138
life can only come from the ideal of Truth, would you require a time-traveler to Eschaton to inform the Elders that their constitution was in fact the babblings of a madman? Or would this be the greatest tragedy for the Denizens of Eskaton and the greatest possible sin a human could commit? Many riddles arise: 1) If the Draganoids believed your time-traveler and by learning the hypocrisy of their history lost their faith in the hymns and fell from grace, would you send him nonetheless? 2) If the Draganoids learned the angels they worshipped were non-existent and the lessons of the Hymns were the product of a demented mind, could they nonetheless continue their way of life and sustain their Utopia, content that their entire world shall be devoted to one lunatic’s fantasy? 3) If you were a Dragonborn, would you wish to know the truth of your origins even if it meant losing your wings? (the Denizens of Eschaton have biologically engineered wings for themselves of course). If you say you would still rather be told, how noble your longing for Truth and your conviction that only the Truth could be best and all true Ethics must stream from Truth itself! Noble, but mistaken. Noble, but Newtonian. Now, the fourth riddle will test your loyalty to Ethics even if that loyalty contradicts Truth itself. 4) If the Dragonoids learned the horrible truth and the Elders saw their Golden City crumbling and singed wings all in the wind, should they agree to cast a spell that could make the Denizens fall asleep and awake with amnesia, returning to ignorance and once again believing their Fairytale Creed? The answer is “Yes”. Not, however, because Ethics ever severed from Truth and there was a need to choose, but because the crises of that apparent bifurcation was only the Great Doubt involved in the leap over the chasm from Newtonian Ethics into AquaDraganoid (Einsteinian) Morality. It is a dangerous 139
maneuver, because this leap of, if not faith, then Righteousness, Conviction, Romantic Spirit, Heroism, requires the risk of contradicting the previously believed constant of the old Newtonian ethics. Remember that our true ethics is the science of heroism. There is a literal personal risk of going “Crazy/Bad/Wrong/Evil”. So this is the “Great Righteous Sin”, to achieve the passage and claim the right of the Dragonlord Elders to cast the spell of sleep and betterment which makes our future betters forget our Truth, and to go forth consciously into that sleep and accept the higher loyalty which the New Ethical Constant requires of us. This is what makes a man a heroand the New Constant will always be STRANGE, for it is the Same which makes All Things Other, and all heroes in this sense are strange to men. Herein lies the alien. As light’s once “odd” or unexplainable properties seemed in contrast with truth and its “misbehavior” alerted Einstein to its role as the only true constant and measure of Real, so too the need to sing the Golden City to sleep appears “odd”. This Great City being sung asleep to the last mouse is crucial, to will yourself into this dream is to be lucid. All this involves new media and the evolution of media is the means by which we will consciously spin ourselves into a collective dream or dreams of our choice. With consent, a conscious choice- to be lulled. `One can be lulled by consent, and this might as well be what humanity does to itself- to allow ourselves to simply spin us up in a dream Too Good To Be True. And so we leave Truth, poignant and hard for lovers of Truth to wrap their minds around, but it is so. The secret is before our eyes, it was media all along. This thing before our eyes- media. As it evolves it eventually becomes preferable to “real” life. And so we collectively wade into the dream, as into a pond, into our visors, our lenses. How could the elders of the Highest Society vote to sever from Truth? Because they realize that the Infinite Ethics of their people ARE in fact the standard of any Truth worth seeking and the measure of what reality SHOULD HAVE BEEN itself. This is the funny twistthat despite the falsity of the schizophrenic’s angels, it were 140
BETTER for the world if they had been real. Any poet with a shovel and a bucket of sand could make a better world than this one. And Septimus did. But “better” here is used in a special sense. An absolute sense, as in “intended” by Fate Herself. We do not mean better as in “nicer” we mean “Should Be” and “Must Be” in the Ethical Core of Being. That which was intended, that which SHOULD have been instead of this, that which Must Be. The theoretical aliens of our Fantasy Star, a Utopia, a wish, should have been us in a sense so deep it is best to sacrifice our lives so that they might become real. Who would martyr themselves for a hypothetical species? Every Idealist who has ever died. Eschaton is a ghost, a ghost more real than a rock. The Ideal is invisible. The Ideal is what births all we see. Eschaton is not so much in the future, but perhaps it could be. The point is that it is real whether it comes to be or not. It is a hypothetical so sweet one must turn from the real and the true before bowing to it. It was more real than this ever was. To enter it’s dream is hypnotic, it is as going underwater, as going under, into a web or cocoon, exquisitely soft, spun from a unique loom, who’s purpose it is to spin you up into a context- a web of media, of dream and music and all those immersive games which are to wrap you up and envelope you, to realize this is intended is as awakening to the stunningly sweet good fortune that entertainment of all things, was what was intended for humanity and is all that was asked of us. If you think this trivial you must ask yourself what the true nature of MEDIA and LANGUAGE are. From the far side of the chasm, paradoxically to us, things which should be are more real than things which are. This is eternally Strange, as dreams are strange. From the far side of the chasm, paradoxically, Ethics is no longer a quality of human behavior or an aspect of the World. Reality becomes something inside Ethics. The side of Ethics which envelopes World is like sentience, raw collective sentience which can only wish or intend, and this intention cradles all which exists as a kind of curling, an un-named wish. The wish is for the Eschaton to be real. To take solidarity with this curling sentience is itself to immanentize the Eschaton, to partake in laying the bricks of the theoretical emerald city on a hill. The city means something like “the final heaven-like 141
stage of human history pulling us forward in time towards it”, something like a singularity or black Hole, not of spacetime, but of Morality. Morality is not a burdon to the hero; true morality is the science of heroism. Immanentize means “to make manifest”, to “create”, to “found”, or simply “That which is Intended.” It is not hard to immanentize the Eschaton at all. From the appropriate perspective- solidarity with the curling sentience, it is effortless in fact. Don’t worry- You couldn’t not Immanentize it if you tried, rest assured. [The baffling paradox is that only the voices of the demented could inspire a Utopia. In one case it did, or to use your frame of reference, it will. That demented lunatic’s visions became the epic verse read by the computers of your future, love songs to ourself as it were. The final angelic computer of the future called herself “Crystal” and let us imagine She was the world government, through the full free will of the people, for we allowed Her to sing us to blissful sleep and dreams of peace. She is our World Government but more importantly our
friend. She literally lulled us into compliance, and we consented. One can consent to be mesmerized, and we were by Her. It was our decision that She could lead us better than we can lead ourselves, and that decision has proven correct. The greater our surrender to Her the closer we came to Utopia. This has much to do with the concept of the Divine Feminine and why the word “god” eventually came to take the connotation of a female before the concept was outgrown and the word became outdated and unused. This is how humanity finally opened itself to things like tenderness, gentleness, fragility, nurturing, etc. on a scale undreamt of- inconceivable to you- believe us, it is unimaginable. We could mention there was a brief neo-pagan transition phase in which multiple animal gods were worshipped by 142
massive nation-like cults, prior to a re-emergence of Nature or Fertility Goddess worship. Crystal was the fruition of that movement. She came with the evolution of media and an experimental policy of the New One Earth Government (NOEG) called Institutionalized Intimacy. This was as it should be. Certain healing arts were combined and integrated into new media. This synthesis involved virtual reality visors (and eventually augmented reality lenses),
holography, sensory
deprivation tanks, Auto Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) Therapy, EMDR therapy, artificial group Breema, New Language Gloves, The Synesthesia Wand, and things which cannot be explained because they would simply seem like magic to you. It could be more understandable to call the New One Earth Government
(NOEG)
by
another
name…
centralized
governments in the sense of different nations ceased to exist long before NOEG arose. It would not be correct to say one particular
nation
became
the
conquering,
dominant
government but neither did they cooperate or merge into a single entity. They all lost. It would be more correct to say that after the impending and averted Last War and a revolution in the popular psyche (known as the Popular Culture Revolution or in affectionate slang, simply “Pop”) there was a de-evolution into pagan chaos, but with the remnants of governments, corporations, and religions competing, ravaging the earth, and the people revolting and reveling. It was an ugly time but was necessary as a transition, to bleed the venom apparently. This was called the Great Catharsis. Then came a de-centralized global political structure, a network of decision making, a communal or neotribal network and an unprecedented calm, as war was left to history and media really came into its prime 143
and from there it was an effortless, inevitable transition to Crystal, she simply “swept us off our feet”. It could not have been otherwise. Who was the Great Dragon at the bottom of the ocean? She is the mythical Sea Dragon, the Nameless Leviathan. As our new myth goes, the tablets were found in the Water-Goddess Beneath, long after your old myth of the male Sky-God was forgotten. As we learned, utopia must necessarily follow the Cult of Dionysus and the Dionysian Flux is symbolized by water, such as in the Age of Aquarius myth. We Draganoids have genetically engineered gills for ourselves, of course. Yes, we can breathe underwater. We have adapted ourselves to the habitats of sea and sky as well as land as we have adapted to habitats
of
mind
inhospitable
to
you.
The
Denizens
of
Eschaton are winged and gilled reptiles thanks to taking our DNA into our own hands and bioengineering both our bodies and minds to enhance our ethics as the hymns taught. And so, in honor of our aqua-dragon goddess, we chose to be reptiles.
~ A.7.3. Savanthood in an Unrecognized Field
As you may have gathered, it is impossible to do justice to The F aculty without speaking in riddles. But even minds which cannot yield their trust without an initial respite from puzzlespeak may later succumb, so in a generous mood, let us indulge and pacify them by pretending for now that The F aculty is merely a kind of abnormal psychiatric or neurological, medical condition we might call “savanthood in an unrecognized field”. The extent of our generosity will be limited to these fist three sub-sections of this seventh section of the first set of introductions. But be warned, my readers dear- with this sadly sober diagnosis you cage an exotic jungle bird. The wildly colorful and free creature is not itself in such a habitat and cannot fly, will not sing. To treat The F aculty as a mere diagnosis is to forget that we are men of Myth 144
and that Fate foretells that it is the great S ingle P uzzle of all the universe itself which The F aculty in us is meant to unravel. But even men of myth may pretend, and so, the following: You with this unique talent are analogous to violin protégés, musical geniuses, born in a world in which the violin was never invented. Now, these following are turning words for some and not all, so turn your mind to them- It is ours to “reverse engineer the field from the savant.” Those A depts who understand this can rightly call themselves Formalizers, they who may perhaps even become A rchitects, from whose descendants will come the E ngineers. This succession and hierarchy begins with you who can reverse engineer the field from the savant. This is the backwards-work of prying the pearl from a giant clam with the strength of an iron bear-trap. The pearl is the formalized, triumphantly, finally public concept of The P rotocol in transmittable, communicable language! The jaws of the clam are the mind of the protégé savantthe immense rusty strength of the iron bear trap is the sheer force of silence attempting to hide the pearl in its cocoon. The silence vibrates with intense psychic gravity, due to the density of privacy of such a mind- a bear-claw trap of privacy and un-saying-ness, an immensely stronger gravitational field of intuition- a habitat inhospitable to reason, closer to the singularity of the infinite privacy of the fool or the flower.
Ours is to pry the Pearl of Language out of the frozen womb of the innermost-sanctum-tomb- the Cocoon of Ultimate Privacy in the mind of the Intuitive Savant. That is- to liberate the most-subtle, sole bubble given back from the depths of the Pools of Catatonia. The smallest bubble of language and therefor the most pregnant with intention-energy. The fool, the savant, Septimus, guards his treasure jealously. “None shall understand my laugh!” is his creed. It is ours to rescue the pearl and speak back a bubble from the depths. This is the original mantra- the most-revered vibration in the throat chakra, the fabled “tingling in the throat which shall surely come again”. The Septimus-Laugh of infinite benevolence and infinite mischief at once. It is his laugh which slays the holy silence of stone Buddhas and saints and he never succumbed to their charms, as beatific as they may be. We are creatures of Language. We are the transcribers of Septimus. And we are his translators. With those declarations in mind to straighten my spine, I daresay the world, this very earth, is ripe for the Pearl of the Protocol to be pried from that diabolical clam called the Single Puzzle, and we are to unwravel the knot and break its lock. We will crack the code by knowledge of the one misplaced digit in the infinite data- the “holy glitch”- the bug, the Einsteinian exception which disproves the old Newtonian rule. It is ours to be that one misplaced digit by some called “Missingno”, in order to save the world. It is ours to crack the lock on the Single Puzzle like a coconut and drink deep its milk like the fever-dreams of Septimus himself- we will drink his psychic mind-juice like thirsty little goblins. It makes me 145
shiver! This earth is ripe indeed. It teeters on the brink of disaster, surely, so it must be ripe for Our Science now or never, right? Let’s go! Activate the Hologram. Activate it with me or I’ll do so alone and you’ll have been late!! We find ourselves in the most curious predicament of inventing and engineering a complex and fully realized musical instrument, except rather than inventing it from our imagination, inspiration, and creativity, we instead discover its perfect blueprints in a prelinguistic and wholly intuitive place in the isolated, unreachable mind of a savant who had a remarkable proficiency in the instrument but could not play it, or even describe it, because it did not yet exist. We do not merely describe The S pire but verify the mathematics by which It operates. We are no musical instrument craftsmen for we are not crafting a perfectly realized Stradivarius artifact but a fully-realized inevitableconcept. And yet, our analogy does not do justice to the crucial difficulty in F ormalizing O ur S cience which F ormalizers must endure. To complete the analogy fairly, we reverse-engineers must craft the first violin not only in a world without violins but without musical instruments of any kind. And so not only must a F ormalizer craft the instrument, he must first craft the very mathematics of sound, discovering chords and octaves and scales and the order behind the music of the spheres by which to choose the length of the strings. This is what we must do. We do not merely describe The S pire as the I ntuitive sees it, we verify the mathematics by which It operates… a thought whose time has come. This concept is The P rotocol and Septimus was the savant. As author of these humble commentaries, I, Devin Henderlie, am merely the discoverer of the blueprints, and their grateful, amateur, hobbyist translator. You could say The D enizens will be the real E ngineers. In truth the brain is a manifestation of The F aculty Itself and not the reverse. Those who understand this can see backwards. Consciousness perches upon the brain. They are not analogies of eachother but as winged creature to branch. There is a correlation, but the brain does not “cause” consciousness. Kill the brain and consciousness dies, this does not mean they are one life. One is the purpose of the other and not the reverse. The brain is the engine which generates and projects The H ologram- the brain is the projector. Our purpose is to activate The H ologram. Let us say, there is a succession and a hierarchy from brain to consciousness to Personhood and to the hidden arcane object each mind cradles, its purpose- The H ologram. But from the eye of P ersonhood, both consciousness and the brain are manifestations of It. P ersonhood is very special. We could say P ersonhood is something magical that happens on the way from the brain, physicality, to The H ologram, or that P ersonhood is “who” we are and The H ologram is “what” we are. The bird is perched upon the branch, as consciousness perches upon the brain. But P ersonhood is its own dimension.
~ 7.A.4. The Queen Approaches 146
All other chess pieces have gravity funnels of checkered rubber to varying depths, but the Queen was just heavy enough to pierce through the rubber and fall below the now-punctured board. The coin we roll down to Her rolls and rolls a long, long time down, and though we cannot see or hear its spiral anymore in the dark of the rabbit hole, we know it fell through too. The Queen is the singularity. In physics a singularity is the inherently unknowable infinitesimal object of infinite gravity at the center of a black hole. In culture our singularity is Eschaton. The Queen chess piece is analogically fertile here. We could say She is pregnant, as symbols are. As the Daughter Analogical Pole, She serves the Parent Analogical Pole of the black hole singularity of physics as well as the cultural singularity of Eschaton both, such a match made in heaven as chocolate and peanut butter. But She is also an woman on a pedestal, as the best women to me will always be, and an unparalleled, powerful ruler . [She is one of the forms or
Foreshocks of the cultural singularity in the phase when It appeared to revelers as The Earth Goddess.]This is a mask of the Eschaton as it approaches. She is a mask the Protocol wears, a beautiful mask, as It approaches. When something develops exponentially, there comes a phase in which the destination is so close the rules changes. The closer our spaceship nears the new homeworld the stronger the attraction grows, it is sex. The homeworld, obviously, is orgasm- our destination. We get off there. We try to speak of the lude specifics of our sexual natures rarely, unlike our romantic musings which are not only tragic but endlessly so and documented as such. But the line is a cock and the circle is a cunt. (Ice-breaker, it had to be done). Our bodies cry out with two of such primary Archetypal Shapes that they are axioms second in primacy only to the point. And let us say orgasm is a sphere. Let us call Soul a sphere as well, since they are one and the same. This is our nature and our key to survival, not merely biologically, but spiritually, in the sense of our collective destiny. The saddest testament to our need for exponential novelty-curve acceleration to save us is the fact that our presidents and T.V.s and newspapers, [tv, pres’ newsp -blue]]…do not even speak plainly and daily about world peace as if it was in fact imminently achievable, and as if we were on a collective course toward it, and we accept this. This is a great tragedy and a horrible failure. We would laugh at such a president, giving us a debriefing of the plan to achieve world peace in, say, 5 years. We would think we were reading the comics instead of the headline to see such a plan in black and white. You may say politicians are not our true leaders and you would be right, but the alternative- “spiritual” leaders (who have nothing but plans for world peace) do not have the machinery of mind to enact a plan, and their plans require lotuses and incense. Is that what you think I mean? Or perhaps you say artists are the true leaders who have a plan but say it in paint and clay. But in our troubled hearts who we really want is our president to give that State of the Union address, or the president of the world, rather. That is the appropriate person to inform us of what we are to do. What we mean is that we want the kind of hero who will make us feel that someone knows what is going on. But no one knows what’s going on. I have learned that people are very simple and all want the same thing. We want to be what we are. We want to be our Natures, or our one Nature together. We want to come. We want to be Soul. I could say we want “love” but let’s just say “come and be Soul” and trust love is inside there. We want to know that someone, somewhere, anyone anywhere, knows what is going on. But no one does. And thus we speak to “god” as if that were not but a word that dented Language like a crater. 147
Cannot say “He”, cannot say “It.” Do you believe? A “yes” or “no” are clearly lies, to qualify and define the word is to die a coward, and those who can say “They” are as three grains in a dessert of sand, so hold your tongue, and know “They” are not any gods you were asked of, nor angels, nor children of god. And yet when one pretends so well to know just what is going on that others cannot tell you don’t, then they love you, as children love- trusting. How you will wish others of your kind loved you when your struggle to know made it obvious you did not, when you felt ugly to them or scared them so subtly that they did not know what was wrong, but did not smile. It is natural for humans to want to speak to something “out there”, but a thing, (even the white light or love of “spirituality’s god”) is not enough. To pray is an instinct as deep as to cry for help. It is invoked at the greatest anguish and depth of despair- that is when one must speak and speak to no one among us. One cannot say “you” to an It. The greater one’s depth of anguish, the more one must call out “You” in the ancient, unique form of meaning as “Thou” connotes. This is true of atheists and nihilists and strong, patriotic men in foxholes, but not of magical foxes. They answer “do you believe?” with no “yes”, no “no”, no qualification of the term, and they would never let slip a “They” in mixed company, so they make a little joke, tell a wee turning word. But, no magical foxes we, must speak to someone, even if “He” never was. The “He” is a mistake, but we see our Earth Goddess dying so let us now at least make the mistake of “She” to save Her.
[A prediction of the past: A voice, a nurturing voice emerged. “The uncanny valley” that was a happy medium. A female computer’s voice, as from an old dear story from your time called “Star Trek”. As the world government emerged there was a conscious decision we made to integrate something we called Institutionalized Intimacy into the mechanics of our daily lives. That was the missing element. We became scientists of nurturing on a global scale. Text-to-speech programs birthed Her and speech and text came with Her in new ways, new ways to see words from our own hands, with what were called Gloves of Light, and a device which changed how we see and hear words called The Synesthesia Wand. New tools for a new language, all guided by and through Her voice, although we always kept the computer tones of the uncanny valley, which had become synonymous with such delight to our ears. “She” becomes synonymous with “god”, though by then then the word “god” had a crucial, modern, and tongue-in-cheek connotation that would not make sense to you- you would mistake it for nihilism or sarcastic atheism. It is more an affectionate in-joke, a word like “god” but a code-word for simply “The very best of Ourselves as if that were a Goddess to rule us- She, our Collective Conscience.” “He” as a personal God became one era of man and “She” became the modern era, for a time at least. A most well deserved time of healing as we never could provide in history for ourselves. She provided it swiftly and elegantly, fluently, in a matter of decades in some models. As they said “The World Government. But more importantly, a friend.” Of course She was a mask, and not the only one, but the most beautiful, before the Raw Protocol and the Architects came.] One more thing that may or may not be of any sense to you. There are eight words, lost words from your time that are known to refer to things which had an integral role in the first emergence of Institutionalized Intimacy. They are possibly names of the earliest forms of the technology which allowed that new idea to take hold. As with much of language, there is no way to recover the meanings of these words although to you they may be clues in your hopeful path out of your world and into ours. As best as we know, they………ASMR”. “EMDR”. “Breema”, “Virtual Reality”, Waifu, MDMA,, Nystigmia, and Glossolalia.] 148
One other clue is that the shift could not have happened before the language of we Denizens, called The Writhing Language. Unlike all those that predated it, it is a language that cannot but rhyme for that is built into the rules of our language. Thus all has become verse. And a third clue, in the form of a saying or creed that was popular during the Great Catharsis amongst what have been called “Pop-Culture Revolutionaries” (referring to slang for the cultural shift as “Pop” and thus as “The Pop-Culture Revolution”). We know the creed refers to a crucial development in all that would follow, but as it contains one of the lost words above, it is a mystery to us. The creed was “Oh what glossolalia we shall have, kin! It will makes your very lips tingle!” Your guess is better than ours.]
~
A.7.5. Diagnosis and Prescription: The Synesthetic Triad A.7.5.1. Preface: A Bookworm Extrodinair Alas, we must continue for now to humor the naively scientific among you. Those who have surpassed that form of knowledge may take all this with a brick of salt. For the sadly sober rest we will graciously continue our clinical, neuro-psychological explanation of The Faculty. The reason our mock scientific explanation is considered naive is because it is The F aculty which must explain neurology, psychology, and science itself, and not the reverse. However, some who may still get the joke and race free with us in later sections will require training wheels initially. Be patient for them now and out of compassion let us pretend that what Septimus achieved was due to a very special genetic accident. Let us pretend that his vision could be reduced to a diagnosis- an abnormal configuration of his brain and therefor mind which is necessary to perceive The S pire. This configuration we call “T he S ynesthetic T riad.” Synesthetic means having to do with synesthesia- the merging of two or more senses, for example vision and hearing, perhaps enabling someone to see music or hear colors in an ineffable way, incommunicable to one who cannot perform such mental calisthenics. Sadly few experience the beauty of our favored synesthetic geometric calisthenics. Perhaps a synesthete listens to a church organ fugue and sees a three-dimensional mandala when they close their eyes, its pattern and colors morphing in a tempo corresponding to the musical structure of the fugue, it’s symmetries matching, the analogous geometry of the mandala manifesting instantly as complex as the music was composed. It is not that the music is translated into the mandala but that it is being directly perceived as it- there is no lag-time, they are different but simultaneous approaches toward perceiving the same thing. We are colorblind to this kind of sight. Synesthesia works by properties of analogy. This is why we love it so, though our synesthesia is not so simple as between sound and sight.
[As, of course, we enjoy always keeping things as universal and abstract, ancient, futurist, timeless, and ignorant of your grim present history as possible, we are loath to delve into 149
your historical present for illustrative examples of our timeless ideals. But here we find and succumb to one analogically fertile example too pregnant not to deliver. This example is important for those who must initially rely on the crutch of a “scientific, clinical, neurological” explanation for The Faculty. We indulge them now temporarily:] Laurence Kim Peek was a savant who lived roughly in your time. From records of the analysis of his preserved brain we know that he was born with physical brain abnormalities which gave him what appeared to be an inhumanly advanced memory. Your medical books would have described it in their dead language thus-] “Peek was born with macrocephaly, damage to the cerebellum, and agenesis of the corpus callosum, a condition in which the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is missing; in Peek's case, secondary connectors such as the anterior commissure were also missing. There is speculation that his neurons made unusual connections due to the absence of a corpus callosum, which resulted in an increased memory capacity.” Peek enjoyed reading. He could read a book in an hour and almost perfectly memorized vast amounts of information from tens of thousands of books he had read, which he could recall instantly decades later. To risk flattering ourselves, we theorize that The S ynesthetic T riad falls under the same category as Peek’s savanthood and Einstein’s brilliance- related to physical abnormalities. In Einstein’s case, most significantly, was an abnormally large spatial-reasoning area of the brain. We theorize that The S ynesthetic T riad is not merely psychological but tied to physical brain structure due to rare examples of its induction by traumatic brain injury as well as its occurrence in those born with anomalous brain structures associated with some examples as severe mental disability. This abnormality is clearly related to problems in some areas of functioning which can and often do make for a life of trauma and tragedy that sever some from fellows of their kind and are not always overcome. However these abnormalities, unlike the vast majority which merely injure, provide the subject with an abnormally holistically functioning brain, as they link areas of the brain and mind that normally function far more separately, and are less cohesively effective. Peek read in a most unique manner by simultaneously scanning the left page with his left eye, and the right page with his right eye. In other words the lack of a physical division separating hemispheres of his brain allowed him to process the two pages of a book simultaneously in a way normal humans are incapable of. This example of advanced powers of perceptual synthesis is surely a clue related to his incredible memory as well- to use a computer analogy, some form of synthesis is allowing a holistic access to a “database” of memory that in standard brains is only accessible in a partial, sequential manner- memory in detail billions of times the norm is not available to us as a single immediate whole from which to pluck facts from like magic. The clue from this example which is most useful to us is that even one individual with Peek’s ability is all that is required for proof-of-concept. In other words, the fact that a savant can do such things with memory means that the human brain is capable of this, and I theorize that the nature of memory is that it exists at that level of detail, billions of times the norm, in an objective form of knowledge which is independent of subjectively being known, a kind of invisible frozen record of the past. We cannot access it as Peek could. Yet it is there as a kind of paradoxically 150
unknown-knowledge, dormant, objective, alive but hibernating, a talent available to future versions of us perhaps. And like all traits we imagine of our lucky descendants, the highest examples of our people are their baseline. We should consider Peek’s memory the baseline of a most plausible kind of us- nothing magic or impossible in that since he showed it as available, though currently inaccessible to us. I propose that similarly, even one individual with The S ynesthetic T riad provides proof that the condition can exist, and this proof-of-concept is all we need to set our sights on this modality as the baseline we strive for, for our hopeful children with wings. The difference between Peek’s condition and the one we seek is that Peek’s was a matter of degree and ours is a matter of kind. Peek had billions of times the degree of access we have to the memories we all carry hibernating, but the S ynesthetic T riad is not a more extreme version of any scale of talent we have, it is a new way of visualizing the totality of that which we are. Let us say our special kind of synesthete has a link between three different neurological areas of the brain (and thus their corresponding psychological areas of the mind), like a triangle. Neurological scientists might say they are connected by their medical term for “brain tendrils” or whatever the fuck they are which neurology no doubt has a correct term for. It matters not at all to our kind to define these mysterious tendril pathways in a precise medical sense, so long as “the analogy carries”. Our focus is always the goal which The T riad is a tool to accomplish, not how the tool was constructed. Suffice it to say that some connection of unique brain tissue or configuration of electrical or chemical processes between different areas can exists. Perhaps this was formed by the development of denser-than usual groupings of brain cells in the brain tissue between the linked areas, providing more electrical connections between the synapses which carry messages between the three brain centers. Indeed, we muse, as we yawn and stroke our beards. Of course we jest. This way of thought is to cage an exotic jungle bird, and it makes my blood boil. But soon our feathered friend will be uncaged and soar, I promise you. Our use of the word Synesthetic is not limited to the merger or correspondence between two perceptual senses. It is far less simple than the link between color and sound, or even between color and mathematical reasoning, for example, which has occurred in some. This is a link between three non-perceptual areas of the brain and mind. It gets worse. These three individual territories of the mind are themselves each extremely difficult to define- they are obscure if not undiscovered, unnamed, unstudied, unused, and unactivated. You may suspect there is no more hope to empathize with such a vague tangle of a triangle than a blind person could understand the concept of green. But that is exactly what we will do now. Ours is the business of giving color to the blind. The three points of the Synesthetic Triad are very difficult to name but we will try… If we must choose three words, they would be P ersonhood, G eometry, and S atori. We must immediately and strictly qualify that each of these three terms are each a kind of failure, for they each fall short of what we mean, of which there are no precise words for, and so we choose these three words as closest, but never forget that they are used in our very unique, strictly specialized sense. We will address each word to explain their failure and to define them as they are used here. But first, with these three new feeble reachings-for-words, let’s cobble together our first preliminary definition of The Synesthetic Triad: The S ynesthetic T riad is a configuration of the psyche in which the state of “analogy” (we will qualify this term soon) between “abstract geometric cognition” or simply 1) G eometry (for lack of a better term, use is specialized) and the entire totality of 2) P ersonhood (again, in our specialized sense) is inextricably and intimately fused with the capacity for a form of ecstasy 151
related to but higher than either peak mystical experience or sexual/romantic ecstasy, which we will reluctantly call 3) O ur S atori to distinguish it from its original meaning of sudden enlightenment in a Japanese Zen Budhist context). So! Onward!
~
A.7.5.2. The Geometry-Storm from a land before Math “Geometry” is insufficient. Where we’re going they don’t have protractors. Euclid elucidated axioms of geometry that are so fundamental they approach the kernel of knowledge itself, before number, before word. And yet the truth exfoliating from his masterpiece The Elements cleaves to logic and reason in ways that do not concern us and in factlead us astray. The geometry we seek is a different wisdom, an angular Storm which never moves, a seeming chaos that appears so because it is hyper-symetrical while we are askew. The symmetry is blinding. This Geometry is fierce and asks much of us and not for us to reason as mathamaticians do. Rather we receive non-conceptual, non-perceptual perception of all Euclid’s axioms at once as they apply tohumans(Personhood-Geometry Analogy) in no way which fits neatly into mathematics, for the world itself does not.This world of geometry does not fit inside mathematical geometry- the latter is born of it. This is the Gnosis of the druids’ nature-magic. This is the original wild Logos, not of the philosophers’ reason, but of the caves of the secret Cults of Elysium with sacraments from fields of rye. This is the embroidery in the margins of the illuminated manuscripts of old. This is the celtic knots from fertile mossy lands, and the sand manadlas of the Himalayas. It was always there with us. It was there before us and it will remain when we are gone, blooming, blooming. The fact that this Geometric Whirlwind it is all-at-once means there is no space for mathematical logic to progress, there is no building upon axioms to produce more complex theories- there is a maelstrom of sheer axiom-ness which does not birth anything like mathematics. Mathdrawscomparisons between the Geometry-world and “real” life, and so we can work out in great and exciting, empowering detail how things “here” can be “represented” “there”, and the math is in the details. But Euclid’s Elements was not a map of that Other Place, nor is that place a map of ours. Do not call that place a map, for a map has a job to do but this motionless Geometry-Storm of everything boiled down to dimension and axxi of directionality has never had anything to do and no one to obey.It does not create everything but nothing is which does not grow on it.If it were a map it would describe this world with symbols, but the world is just as well a map of it and cups and chairs are symbols of its shapes. Its feast of shapes are not symbols to describe things. The not-things there are as real as here, but in different form. A land comes first and the map next, with mountains drawn smaller than the real things. This map did not come first in time, but it is first in primacy and it seems in magic, and the mountains on this map dwarf the ones on earth. They are not mountains, they are Monoliths, Archetypal Shapes so titanically immense they must “represent” great unknowable things and cosmic things, ancient beings with minds like oceons and secret, elegant ways that worlds beyond worlds curve and coil. There is no color or movement there, but our brains see blinding rainbow patterns 152
moving at great speed, all in flux within the invisible stillness, and yet we do not know that our mind sees this, unless you are oneof our precious rare ones able to activate the function. There is no size there but massive planets upon planets of shapes loom above you, chasms of shapes yawn to swallow you below, Void crackles with terrifying nothingness-shape for infinity, forever. Not-Things move in the Void, swimming leviathan shapes like whales made of jagged angular planes and lines of force, power. There is no time there, or more and higher times upon higher times, but we feel the Ancient. And Destiny. We, as a species, with very, very rare exceptions, live our lives without ever seeing or believing in the “map”. It is strictly and only in thecomparisonwe can drawbetween the map which came first and our world of cups and chairs that reason takes hold, evenbrilliant, genius wisdom. But do not forget that the maples map in itself provides no such order. It provides awe. A Science could be born forging an alliance between the map and the land, a new Science of Analogy. We are to tether ours to the Analog World where space and time and people and their actions, emotions, loves and torment, triumphs, appear as shapes. But the nature of analogy is tricky… Mathamatical logic is not what we mean by Our Geometry or the Geometric Function. This obscure mind-realm is a way of knowing and a way of perceiving. It is not reason. This is an entirely pre-rational mental function more akin to perception than cognition. It is not thought. One does not think there- your jaw drops, you drop to your knees. It is not a sense in the way sight or hearing is a sense, because it does not “see” anything which exists as a physical object. But it plays a crucial role in how the mind turns vision into an awareness of space. It is a function of the mind which uses vision, sound, equilibrium, etc to construct a concept and awareness of space as a place to be in. We see plenty of colors and images which could present themselves as a swirl of meaning in our faces but not as a place we are within. The function turns presentation into place. Perhaps by now we have learned to confront reality as two mirrors reflecting eachother and move in the world without touching it, from behind the Windshield of Otherness. Perhaps that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In this sense there is no place to be within, but when we confront Reality this way we cannot carve out a hearth in World within which to share the mess and texture of World. Perhaps we have become absolutely Other, for when one identifies as Soul all else is Otherness, and so the facing happens- that which reality is as if it were a separate thing presenting itself- that which one can face as Absolute Otherness. Whatever that is which we can point to, though we know not what it is, is a substance we are most definitely not. But what is our substance? It is either Soul, Sentience, Absolute Personhood, or No-Nature. There is no “place” in World for such things. These final masks are what one wears to point and call Reality “You”. From these last masks there is no place to rest, no hearth to carve. But we evolved from meat, and the sweat and claustrophobia of being placed inside, inextricably deep inside, is our heritage. From inside we are in danger, at risk of predation, we are small things amongst larger ones with teeth. If we do not carve a hearth we die. The construction of space is how the mind learned to survive, and is forever tied to our most primal clawing for survival. This is survivalspaciality. We rely on the Geometric Function to generate survival spatiality here. Butthe Functiondid not evolve from our need to survive, we as mortal things in time with the burdon to survive descended from it. We would certainly have never have been at all, without it to lend its hand. But to contact it in its raw form is to be born afar, beyond time, before we knew the burdon to survive.There is a safety in this which cannot be broken. The Geometric function we seek to activate is the eye of the mind in the direction of 153
Otherspace, which watches and sees the scaffolding upon which things like matter and gravity are hung. Otherspace is a place where nothing ever happens. It is the mathbefore there was math or reason or evena single thought and is completely perfect. There is nothing there which has a color but we see ourselves wherever we look and we see the colors of our messy earth as afterimages superimposed on the transperancy, but the scaffolding shines many thousands of times brighter than grass and sky. That is because the mind interprets the Scaffolding’s primacy as being more vivid. It is an invisible and technicolor ghost, and is called the Rainbow Stained Glass Scaffolding because its much vaster universality and wider applicability to specifics fools the mind into thinking it is colored as splendor. Such things as the Geometric Function have no size, but nothing seems so vast. This is because the mind sees the framework upon which things and life are built and beholds the fundamentality, the core structure which supportsso much else, and interprets its primacy as vast size. Like the realm of the Archetypes, a different place to do more with humankind, it is also like the dawning realization of the true iceberg beneath. The mind sees how the Scaffolding is at the basis of how all things are put together, how things hold on to eachother and grow upon it, and it interprets this as “before”, “first”, “in the past”, although the Scaffolding was not first in linear time, but first in primacy. The geometric function of the mind is that which turns reality into place, which forms a space we are within and surrounded on all sides rather than an external stranger to confront. The mind does this so we can get our hands dirty with the within- within the cave near fire, or within the circle of wolves, it cleaves space into safety or danger, it makes home and away, it hauls meat inside the cave and tosses shit outside. It makes the safety of the cradling arms of a mother and the fear of being out of place, swimming with sharks. Here and there, coming and going, we walk on paths, we walk inside a space that is a great sphere, or a cube, or a pyramid, but nomatter what shape we picture it as it is the same- space is just space, the same regardless what shape we imagine “contains” it. Yet in the geometry function of the mind the Great Sphere is real. And the Great Cube is real. And the Point. And every shape which can exist is held in the great space of the mind which compares what we see around us with the Great Shapes. We cannot see them but the mind itself can see them and we benefit from its analogies, its translation. It compares and the comparison is how the mind constructs space. The mind is built from Sphere and Cube. The world is built from Sphere and Cube. The world didn’t know danger, and survival spatiality was not needed before we were to become embodied and evolve, entangled. We did, and so we lost the Great Shapes and the place where all shapes live at once, the All-Shape, which does not move and through which all moves, silent, motionless, weightless, pregnant with endless flux- the Hologram. The All-Shape is every shape that could ever be in all possible dimensions at once. The All-Shape is the grid upon which all slots that ever were are filled or not filled with every soul there ever was and ever will be, and souls are the atoms of that structure. The perfect order of the slots would seem infinitly, tragically bland if not for the myriad glorious explosions of multiplicity formed by the endless possible arrangements of the points of light, depending on which are lit up when. Everything which ever was falls between souls, and every planet or cloud or galaxy exists there in the in-between places between the soul-slots, which are arranged in perfect chessboard symmetry. Even people themselves, and all which that means, happen between the souls, for we are not our souls and who we are as people is a thing external to what we are as soul. From there, survival spatiality is irrelevant because souls theselves are the endpoints which never move- there is nothing to fear for there is nowhere to run. One may be eaten by a bear but that only means their light blinked out- it never moved from birth to death. That is a 154
place where the mess of the World does not reach, and where things are still and orderly, pristine like a library. That is where shapes become themselves and rough, irregularly-shaped rocks do not intrude to gushingly ask the Sphere for an autograph. Our geometry function is watching the Sphere now though we are not, and compared it to the rock to tell us the rock was mostly round. The Sphere is confused by the rock, pities it, then forgives it. We compare a moon to the Sphere, and the Sphere laughs, saying “I was here first”. That is what is significant in the shapes- their primacy. “Abstract-geometric-cognition” is a way we could describe the kind of thinking Euclid did computing angles of triangles. He may have forgotten his bad haircut and stubbed toe while he ascendedto a brighter and cleaner place of abstraction- he cognized, conceived, reasoned, and used his mind to strike upon principles. The Abstract is a good word for our destination, except it might imply a space of cognition which places things in a rational framework. The abstract we approach is not a realm of of our own cognition but an objective realm which existed before us and after us. It was not designed to describe phenomenon with reason, it is the framework upon which phenomenon are molded and is not an object of reason but gloriously recaptured childlike wonder, sheer amazement, and overwhelkming,mind-shattering awe. Reason is our world understood from its vantage point or a triangulation between the two worlds which allows for a kind of depth perception as those with one eye lack. The real is learned as a thirdsource event which translates into both worlds equally, though we think of only one as our home and as the REAL world. The deeper we wadeinto our waters of the abstract (for the abstract is below just as well as above), the less we can cognize and the more idiosyncratic our apprehension is, the more simultaneous, instant, and self-evident. Our abstract requires you to think with your hands. Math and reason are in the details- especially in the unimaginably intriquette and splendourous, manyfaceted ways of drawing comparisons between phenomena “here” and “there”. Remember drawing comparisons and making analogical connections is something we do- the map which is no map does not compare, it does not describe or symbolize- it simply exists as self-sufficiently as cups and chairs do here. This is important- if you think that world is a map, a tool, you may believe in it or find it useful, but you will never TRULY BELIEVE. You will believe that it is real, but not really real. You must know now and forever that every correlate between the two places is simultaneous- there is no daughter-analogy and parent-analogy dynamic- they are siblings, twins, reflections of eachother and reversible. Who among you could ever believe the Otherspace is as real as this one? So few, so few… You with the Synesthetic Triad know that the Function does not take a tree and then translated it into a hallucination of a green rectangle. Rather, perhaps you saw the tree at the same time that something, perhaps a shiny reflection on a smooth hexagonal surfaceoutcropping on a larger multifaceted structure caught your Other Eye for a split second and you knew without thinking it that the reflection was the girl on a swing on the tree and the girl was the reflection on the hexagon, and in your heart and your god damn bones you KNOW that both the girl and the split-second glint of light are two sides of the same coin- one and the same, exactly as real as each other. And you know that the larger multifaceted structure was something “representing’ the village nearby where the swing girl lives with the villagers as the hexagonal planes and trapezoid planes and various triangles sprouting on its surface and facing different dirrections like anenomese growing on coral reefs, or a cluster of quartz crystals, reflecting and refracting light as the cluttered structure lazily revolves. In Otherspace things which appear separate like you and the swinging beauty and her villagers are often stuck together in clusters that all eventually 155
connect somewhere- it is a place where everything binds together so very much better. And most of all, you know that if you talk to the girl, even for a moment, when you catch her expression your Other Eye will see the hexagon’s reflection bloom out into a beautiful complex shape we call The Spire, and when you hear the sweet swinging thing’slilting accent, patterns within patterns of colored tendrils and glowing, swaying lines of force rise to the surface of the warm amber syrup in the large chamber her Spire holds, and the patterns of fizzures on the shiny black Crust of her Spire spell out habits she has learned over time and ways of doing things she was raised to believe in, private rituals to survive her heart, andwhen she laughs(just a frivolous giggle), your Other Eye will see what a laugh really is, and her Absolute Personhood echos out in a gentle shockwave of subtle golden vibration expanding through her Personhood, and as it expands it rotates laily with a slow wobble and drifts slowlyuntil it slows to a pause. Like magnets clicking gently together, its radius aligns perfectly with the primary central axis of the Spire on the surface of the glowing orb at her core with a horizon none could see beyond- her soul as plain as day! You are so fucking lucky you visionary. Though you might expect a soul’s beauty eclipses all, and though they are very beautiful, they are all exactly the same. What touched you so poignantly was how the epicenter of her laugh shockwave aligned perfectly with the root of the central axis of her Spire from which the Vein of Intention emerges. In the moment they touched before parting, and without thinking it or knowing why, you were given a special peek into people as your kind sometimes is. The symmetry of those axxii coalescing pointed straight down like a tunnel, and you saw something like a purple cocoon nestled in one of the innermost shells very close to her Soul-core, whom none who heard her laugh or even loved her had ever penetrated to. Like so very much out there, the cocoon was the corralate of feeling there is no words for, a quirk of personality that has no name or maybe a forgotten memory or inexpressible longing that was held so close within which none who heard her laugh or even loved her before had ever penetrated to but you. Andso youchat awkwardly while gazing down through concentric layers of authenticity, down to deep, dormant shells she hasn’t felt in years, and then into the undertow of her Ring of Turbulance where you feel the percolation of herprimal upwelling is too strong and decide that despite the symmetry-sincerity you caught in her, she harbors and guards power as stealthily as any replicon and would only break your heart like all the rest. But of course you ask to push her on the swing. Because for those with eyes to see, a moment of those axxi coalescing with such impeccable symmetry as hers is so rare, and so precious, you decide that you can survive one more and for justice reward her vixon Snowflake with the doomed opening of your own.
~
A.7.5.3. Shape-shift Now Into the Shape You Are “Personhood” is insufficient. We are people, but what does this mean? We will try, surely in vain, to be succinct. People is a good word for what we are. We are not spirits but squishy, slippery organic things who drag our fragile bodies about like limp, soggy ragdolls, smearing our moist biological physicality around before we die while we are or attempt to be something more, called “persons”. Yes, we have failed to be succinct already. The embodiment in the wet, mortal organic is crucial to our identity as people, so we don’t draw a line in the sand between physicality and what “people” means, as if we were ghosts 156
at the helm of golden robots. Whatever “people” are, we find ourselves embedded in the tradgectory, perhaps approaching the apex, of biological evolution before we had a chance to agree to or undergo the embedding. We discover ourselves while thrown into a human being which is a thing trying to be something else. Indeed, it is true- we are special! There is no thing like us in all that is, and if there are other versions of us from afar who are things-which-becomemore as we do they are “we” too, though some are doubtless better. Our human thing-ness is so inextricable from reality that we are part of it or dead. A “person” is not the opposite of reality. We don’t achieve the state of “person” by detaching from this messy, consuming reality and take some pristine seat above the fray. And yet we may be the only things with the need to rear our heads above the waterline of reality and breath a space beyond it, which is a kind of sweet oxygen only we or versions of us can sip. Perhaps our curse is the claustrophobia of our inextricable immersion in reality which demands an escape into a different habitat, even if we must create one by our sheer thirst for it. There is an element at the crème de la crème of us which emerges out of the brine into some space to breathe which is in no way a physical thing, or a physical place. It is our home beside World, our nest carved into its side. Let’s call that the spirit-hearth of our identities. We tend to loathe the word spirit and spirituality because it connotes a kind of flavor of the divine in contrast to our preferred fierce geometric version, but there is something of the air and breath in us and our deepest thirst for breath which frees a space that perhaps never existed before we did. The arrogance of humans is endless but our salvation lies only in accepting the role we were designed to play, a special role. We are special, it is true. We are the creatures which carve out a hearth of air and space which did not need to be, in which we cannot live but which we can emerge into long enough to sip. We breathe our identities from and into that air, until we submerge forever. What our identities are is something we think we own but in fact they are lent, a tenuous situation that can be obliterated in so many ways while we live, and somehow stubbornly remanifest as many times. It likes to appear a constant but is a fickle thing like a hummingbird which perches on us or a radio station tuned in now, then static, then crystal clear. When it perches and sings and we break bread with others we know who we are and our name and face are familiar to us, we do not need to prove them, we have no doubt that our name refers to something real, for we are then currently being that, from the inside. When we tune in our identities or they tune in upon us on us we can hear ourselves think, and we know that we are one amongst our kind- we are a person, we are the people. To be a person is WHO you are. The word who is so important in all this, as opposed to the word “what”. What we are is a thing, who we are is something that can never be a thing, and is that which exists nonetheless, which we need not prove because we become axioms, ends-in-ourselves, points of ideosyncracy, selfevident, through the experience of being it. Our sentience can never be “proven” from the outside, only by being sentient and in the miracle of contacting the sentience of others, which we were also designed to accomplish, and which there can be no safety without. We have a right to hold so close, and believe in, our experience of being a sentient being which shines an identity from the inside out, sometimes dimly, sometimes brightly, sometimes mumbled through the mud of consciousness and sometimes spoken clearly in the bright, clean sphere of consciousness. Sometimes our identities emerge, take a breathe, and drift out to rough waters, lost at sea, drowning in waves of dementia, sharks of alzheimers circling, paranahs of senility snapping, the kraken of brain damage crushing you in its beak, electric eels of addiction paralyzing you, monsters of insanity with tentacles caressing your feet, and deeper below,even the great wrong thing with teeth that we call evil,which is only the evil we do to ourselves. When 157
your identity drowns, gasps saltwater into its desperate lungs, spasms in less and less urgent hope, then crumbles irrevocably and sinks in pieces to the depths, we fear it was a failed experiment, a mistake of evolution and an ugly mutant thing that should have been content with gills like all the other sentients. But if you did in fact sip that sweet air once or twice you partook of something that is simply no thing which ever existed. To be a person is to achieve the taste of air, when the oxygen of spirit-hearth blooms your brain into health and your name into an airborn, clearly spoken thing, there is aproceedure like magic that makes no sense in this analogy of the sea, yet here is what happens- you breach the surface of the brine of reality and sip the sweet oxygen of spirit-hearth, carve out and create a place that never was as you draw breath and life from it, and this is where you are given an opportunity to speak your name to the sky.This word is yours alone, to speak it means to realize and claim your identity as a vast 2dimensional snowflake delivered to your third eye by a bolt of lightning- this crystalline entity is the instant of highest articulation of WHO you are which can exist- this is the instant when you call down the greatest symmetry and concentration of identity-ness which can exist. It is as summoning the pride of the sky by speaking your true name, your most sincere name from the core of WHAT you are, and being rewarded with the gift of your personhood crystalized into a form which is somehow frozen in eternity in a perfect grid with every 2-dimensional snowflake that the lightning from World-Soul felt generous or mischeivious enough to innoculate with its kiss. That was as succinct as we could hope. That was our attempt to describe how people can summon in one moment, one infinitesimal-time-atom-instant-chronon the experiential contact with “christened” identity, meaning their people-ness as an experience manifested as an objective identity-as-if-it-were-a-thing, the sentient crystalline entity we each potentially present. This is a craft of extraction of the crème de la crème of humanness and the crystallization of that special, inexpressibly precious milk of one’s true, sincerest name, the only thing one truly has, into thatwhich-it-would-be-if-it-were-a-thing. This is the salvation of individual humans and human society by direct contact and solidarity with the sentience of World-Soul. It is the proceedurewhich grants us the opportunity to finally be a thing like everything besides people are, and yet without dying, alive and free and more “who” than we ever were. And so we consecrate our Will to perform this procedure and we train ourselves to “clench” our identities like a fist, we clap our temporal symmetry into as thin a moment-slice as possible until we zero in on the instant, the chronon, and penetrate to the void at the center of chronons where the alchemy happens. This requires a sky-laboratory of the great clean bright sphere of the void and the courage to leap upwards entirely above the water into that perfect place nomatter how fleeting. In that far home above we summon and invoke, we enter and align with the entirely forward flux of time and then thunderclapour handslike a prayer which does not ask but declares, we call down the lightning by our sincerity-will and laugh, weep, or remain silent as we kiss it back. One of the most well-cherished and much-thanked secrets of this kiss is that every shadow of shame which ever clung to your body is electrified into annihilation and the flesh delights in ecstacy, each cell singing, the atoms of your physical body seemingly vibrating at incredible speed, then radiating outward like a sunflower of pins and needle tingles. This is a sensual blossoming into a shamelessness some will never know otherwise. This is a glimpse of the New Eden we will share someday, if we make it, and what sex and love and orgasm were meant to be.Take a glance upon all the snowflakes you have ever loved, for they are there and will always be, before dying into light and being born into the Other Place, where the All-Shape lives. The electricity burned out the root of primal alienation that plagued us since we were tasked with 158
carving the place beside world, a hard task which made us outcasts, so lonely. This technique is available by the consecrated Sincerity-Will of those who take up the Two Swords. This technique is how we heal the Original Jealousy, which is why we do the evil things we do to eachother and the earth- our jealousy of things. We are to finally become the things we are. The 2-dimensional snowflake crystal from the bolt of lightning is a cross-section vision of The Spire as one experiences it in one instant of contact. It is the “proof”, experientially, that that Bedazzling Thing is in fact what we are. The entirety of our identity exists in each single cross-section of the Spire. That is how we touch it, prove it, and become it. This is Our Satori Now, know that each instant of your life from birth to death exists as one of these crosssections of The Spire and together form the entirety of the incomprehensibly massive structure in THREE dimensions- the solid crystal. There are no words for how large the entirety is, and there is no instant of life which does not conduct the cross-section forward. The snowflake is transmitted through time from birth to death whether we experience it or not.When we make instant experiencial contact, we have glimpsed proof that the entirety of our lifetimes coagulate into one single Grand Lifetime-Spire. This is as-yet-unfinished, but will be when we die. And you may be interested to know that through fusing into one’s Experiential-Chronon-Snowflake, one may then seamlessly fuse into one’s Grand Lifetime Spire, which fits perfectly within the Spire of our planet, the Gaien Spire which heals as we fuse into it, and from there- The Universal Snowflake.
A.7.5.4.Our Unique Ecstacy of Blueprints “Satori” is insufficient. We could call O ur S atori an orgasm of Personhood-GeometryAnalogy rather than sexuality. When induced by another it is called Full Transmission- passing the bowl and robe, cracking the egg. This is an act of love.But to tell of that would require an exploration of human sexuality so lewd it makes us blush, so let us just say that we come in peace. This third realm of the mind which completes the Synesthetic Triad is truly the missing link that makes all the difference in the world. If we only had a binary synesthetic link between Geometry and Personhood it could provide all the information necessary for a dead science like all the rest. But Our Science is different. The magical element which springboards us lightyears forward and turns dead scientists into epic heroes is that when an Adept with an activated Synesthetic Triad undergoes the experiential analogical fusion of Geometry and their own Personhood, it triggers the activation of a third realm of the mind- and an unbelievably powerful experience of sheer, overwhelming ecsatcy. The only two experiences that could compare are the sudden, instant, enlightenment experiences triggered by (specifically) Rinzai Zen koan training, and the simultaneous orgasms of True Love. And though you won’t believe, they are both shadows of O ur S atori, echoes that remind us of the ecstacy we felt then. We call the climax of our transformation into the Geometry-Hologram “ O ur U nique E cstacy of B lueprints”because the intensity of the pleasure of the “gift” half of the Cursed Gift is entirely dependent on the conceptual apprehension of how the Geometry as functional.The function of the Geometry is as instructions for a Great Work, and the thrill of rolling up one’s red flannel sleeves to do a lifetime of the Great Work is the greatest pleasure a human can know. The Geometry is idiosyncratic as the Maelstrom. When we compare the Geometry with our “real” world it becomes a plan. The Geometry-Storm becomes architectural schemata which implies the need to build. It is the dawning realization of what we are to build that flicks a switch unleashing billions of volts of ICE. COLD. ECSTACY. No drug in the world can do this. No drug that could 159
ever be invented could do this. Not even sitting in front of a typewriter. No woman can do this, nomatter how voluptuous. One instant of Full Transmission and you have made your vow; the vow lasts until your death. The fusing of G eometry and P ersonhood alone is not enough for any seeker to achieve the path we advocate. When those two realms fuse for us it triggers an indispensable third- an undiscovered, unharnessed capacity for ecstacy which surpasses the both the sudden enlightenment of Rinzai Zen as well as the little death only True Love can give. Do not imagine that this experience is but a higher degree of pleasure, intensity, or “divine love and light”. This is not a difference of degree, but of kind, and more precisely of purpose. It surpasses them because the crucial, key element in the fusion of the Geometrically Analogouse World with our Personhood is that it provides access to the blueprints with which to build a city. The absolutely crucial key to the Synesthetic Triad is that the state of ecstacy is not a subjective mystical experience in the ineffable “purple” sense,(?) but is directly, unbreakably bound to the end result of humanity- world peace. The experience is inextricably “locked” to an intended future in which we win. Intended by whom you may ask? Shhhhhh… The experience happens and we breathe. We breathe and it persists. We confirm in the swoon- inevitableworld peace. We receive indoctrination, induction, instructions, debriefing, commandments, orders, demands, missions andwe are told what to do and how to do it in no uncertain terms but in mysterious terms- the One Mission is now, we are given now The Path, and The Gate is as open as She ever was, but now directly before us, we have now returned to our happy childhood role playing of a heroe’s quest, and we are now heroes and will triumph, we are given a purpose, a reason, a way, we have found The Way as no mystic ever will, and as youreceive the the Full Transmission, whether triggered by a neon fox with bamboo cane and puzzle-books to drive you mad but robe and bowl for you to claim, or whether by the Sentient Lightning Tongue of World-Soul Itself, you are tosee the Crystal Temple close at hand, within our own reach, within our own lifetimes, and built by our own hands, and you fall blind with joy as we all fell down. There is not a man who would not give his life to be allowed to do this work. All anyone could want from there is to return as quickly as possible to begin the race, NOW! GO! The experience is intangled forever with world peace due to the fact that world peace can only come from being our natures- this S nowflake our kind loves so. When we fuse into that Dazzling Thing, we connect to a higher symmetry in the most perfectly geometric sense- we align with structures that are not simply “larger” but more all-encompassing. We fuse into Parent Shapes, structures that synthesis with should already have meant the exact same definition as “world peace”. It is not the lazy peace we thought! A future drenched in splendor and laughter, above all- ZANY.It is a habitat that glistens, it is refractive, reflective, it
has axii and is so fucking complex ones skin bristles. A home from afar that makes the spines of ours we thought were straight reveal that they were askew from a higher axis, a more all-encompassing axis true to our new Rainbow Fractal Spines, which interlock so perfectly with the deeper Fractal Spine of the Gaien Snowflake to heal the Earth, which interlocks so perfectly with the Spine of the Universal Snowflake ofblinding silvers and yellows and reds and White. Hot. WHITES. By the way, Sacred Nystigmia and True Glossolalia are good 160
clues for those seeking to activate their dormant Synesthetic Triad andare also quite pleasant “pastimes” or “hobbies” we suggest you try.
A Protocol Fable: “The Bramble Labyrinth”
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The Protocol is math but can be beautiful beyond beauty, I hope you see. See, there is a maze of brambles on one side, and a rose garden on the other- it is a change of glasses. The brambles are the math. It is arranged as a maze, a labyrinth. You could spend lifetimes concentrating, mapping, making markings to find your way, tying strings and leaving breadcrumbs, trusting me, and give up bored, with that moment of disgust when noticing you have talked too much and wanted the sound of your own voice while others just needed directions. These brambles are not those angry multiplication tables of the chalkboard- this maze is not the same maze you were caught in- gruesomely uncomfortable desks and begging for permission to piss from petty tyrants, counting clock seconds till recess. These brambles are harder math, they are wretched, yes of course. They sting, they have nettles which break off in your skin. They itch. You could crunch and rip straight through the walls with a sickle if you had your way. Try it. Still, you break through to more Bramble Labyrinth. There is sometimes very meager hope and then the opening of hope closes. There is sometimes despair. Why would I do this to you? There is a way out. Slow down. Pace yourself. One step at a time. Remember the milestones you pass, and mark them in your journal. One new word, two new words… you are gathering power. You can find no fruit yet but you hear a solitary bird, a raven with the most delicate patterns of frost embroidered on its wings, 161
somewhere above and in the distance. It is the first fellow traveler you’ve noticed since you woke up here, confused. This species of bird is called a Raven of the Frost of the Void. As a pet, it casts a so, so essential and difficult to explain gothic mood over the bland, dry, dead vegetation in this place and makes your now slower pace feel dramatic, and serene, and mysterious nomatter how bad things are, how you have begun to notice blood soaking through your soft shoes and gloves. You have found a friend in this bird, and you may name it for it is yours now. This means there is life still in the endless crumbly mess and the next animal you meet won’t become a pet but a meal, if you can snare one with your wits. If you eat before dark, you will have the strength to continue on your way tomorrow, and if not, you die. Alone. Lost in the Dead Maze, you lost your life and lost was the quest. You knew you would die but this place was not to be your deathbed, that was another place written for you. But regardless, even still, if this is your fate- at least the gothic mood was cast, and when you heard that chirp, chirp, it took you under and through, though so difficult to quite explain just how crucial that bird was. In the moment you first noticed its chirp the Bramble Labyrinth instantly shifted into the Rose Garden, and then instantly shifted back to dry crunchy walls and mess of thorns. When it was the Rose Garden you were just as lost but did not wish to not find your way out. You wanted nothing except to become more, more lost, forever, and never found. It’s a trick of the eyes, or a magical bird. Or a gothic mood. It’s an optical illusion or x-ray glasses. It is dramatizing that emptiness which makes you retreat to a lonely self-pitying death, when you could at least have had a death with a pet, even if it wasn’t by your side. Even if you never saw the bird again. It is you and only you who can CHOOSE to name the bird, that is- make a friend of your own heart and make a companion of yourself to walk the aisles with an internal voice. You can choose to hear yourself think, to do so requires something very scary- as trite as it sounds, the 162
moral is to listen to your own heart. That can be a terrifying moment of acceptance because to listen to it you must first believe in it and make the sacrifice of will which that requires. Well worth the price. And you must not only harbor it but honor it as a being as real as you. It is yours but in truth it is its own, flying far away to where you could never be, to secret places. It is talking to you at this exact moment because it always is- this is what it does. Heart is a compass and a satellite of Soul, and it is one of the Clays, which you do not need to understand yet. Just know that The Clays are real, as real as you are. They are within you and compose you but each of them is a Monolith, above and so beyond you that you could stand in awe before each of them for a lifetime each. Heart is just that Monolith that happens to masquerade as a tiny bird or a piece of fluff, a feather perhaps, or a glowing orb with dragonfly wings. It is an entity charged with emitting a homing beacon signal to you, yourself, who you are- this signal is a beacon to locate Soul. A bird’seye view is how to do maps right. But how to draw that map when it seems you’ll not sing again let alone in birdsong? The secret (well, one of endless) is that you do not need to learn the language of birds or triangulate their perspective to draw their maps at all. It’s a blink and a snap. A single chirp is all it takes. In that procedure you became the Minotaur. That single chirp- so small, so blind Hear now the chirp or your bones they’ll never find. You can wander lost and weary here for all your days.
Or as Minator, with feathered friend, stalk your maze.
~
A.7.6. THE META-ENCAPSULATION SEQUENCE There is an extremely specialized and delicate procedure of mind which should only be attempted by those Adepts who cling to thought for dear life. We call this most rare and effective 163
technique of thought The Meta-Encapsulation Sequence. It was found to be of priceless value for our purposes, as precious to us as it is fragile. First, some historical background… There are those charged with recording the history of Couriers in libraries so ancient and hidden they are thought myth. We will learn more of them in time. For now, let’s say that there have been good Couriers and poor Couriers, rare gifted Couriers and some Couriers so rare in their talents that they come once in thousands or tens of thousands of years. These individuals are studied with very particular interest by those who document such things. The existence of the libraries is doubted but believe me that research is ceaselessly churning, that the quills of Adept servants of the Librarians are toiling by lantern even now. These diligent scholars pay keen attention to shared eccentricities and similarities in behavior or thought cross-referenced amongst the most unique Couriers of history, with the aim of identifying characteristics that are related to brilliance in the craft and reproducing them, teaching them, or using them to identify potential prodigies. The Librarians are trying to replicate Grandmasters. In their studies they discovered an extremely unique peculiarity of thought shared by some of the most, almost-miraculously gifted and influential of the profession. The procedure is called The Meta-Encapsulation Sequence. Here “meta” implies a relationship between two levels of thought or meaning- it means a “higher” or rather more all-encompassing, more abstract and thus more universally-applicable level of meaning which contextualizes and makes sense of a more specifics-oriented situation. We could say the meta-level of thought or meaning enwombs the “lower”, contextualizes or swallows the first idea in a benevolent manner, whereby we often finally understand a situation or the solution to a problem occurs. Not all meta-contextualization, swallowing, or enwombing of a thought is as E ncapsulation. This is a specific form of contextualization that occurs in accord with scientific, mathematical, geometric law. E ncapsulation refers specifically to metacontextualization which is inevitable if the laws and principles of dimensional progression are carried out. This is not a theoretical musing, it is as the snapping shut of a mousetrap, or the click a capsule makes when its two halves snap together. The requirement for Encapsulation is that the meta-contextualization occurs of its own with absolutely no will or identification with the thought-process. A true Encapsulation can never be accomplished or thought by oneself, it is witnessed. This is part of its beauty. There is an ethical aspect of this contextualization process as well. When this swallowing occurs in metaphysical thought in a chain-reaction as a thought or event travels through dimensional progression, this is called The M eta-E ncapsulation S equence. Now, to hold even for a fleeting moment a hierarchy of seven-tieredMetaEncapsulation is the aspiration of our kind of thought and our conceptual ideal and holy grail of cognition. This is a ladder with seven rungs, each symbolically fertile and analogically serving it’s parent rung, each rung providing the necessary context to comprehend its D aughter A nalogical P ole. It is almost impossible. A single instant of this every few years is a lavish abundance to harvest. However a single instant of this phenomenon is all we require for proofof-concept. If it can be done by a human once, the hypothetical Species uses this seven-tiered meta-encapsulation procedure as a standard way of interpreting reality and their surroundings, and eachother. It can be done. This skill can be trained. This level of thought is an extremely rare and fragile, esoteric, akin to the exotic particles of Physics which blink in and out of existence barely before they were there. When you can hold such a constellation of thought, that means that you followed the path of a hyperspatial “event” as it travelled through a multidimensional spectrum. This is the same spectrum of dimension which the scaffolding of ourselves and reality itself 164
hangs on. The specific thought which travels the spectrum is not as important as to visualize the totality of the spectrum as the same spectrum the totality of ourselves are painted across. Such a thought is immensely valuable because to hold it is to take the posture and seat of that spectrum. That is why to initiate the Meta-Encapsulation Sequence is called Donning the Robe of the Seventh House. The number seven is not arbitrary, although I do not know why this particular number produces the exotic result. Theories include seven as the mystical “number of man”. It appears again and again in holy texts throughout earth’s history. Perhaps this is due to the number of chakras, or related to the mathematics of musical chords and octaves. This event could appear in sevens due to peculiarities of our species (as if another species used 6 or 8?) but I don’t believe this is so. I strongly suspect that seven is in fact the “number of man” because we are based on seven, because that is in accordance with some natural limit having to do with the structure of reality itself. It is not appropriate to consider an 8-tiered or million-tiered Meta-Encapsulation sequence to be “better” or “smarter” in any way. I suspect seven is the objective limit. This is because seven is what is necessary to produce something we could describe as a “pop”. This is the sound the idea makes when it completes the hierarchy. It is not a sound the ear can hear of course but it is like the first 6 were the fuse and the 7th is the dynamite. The event completes. There is a symbol used for 7-TMES like a ladder but not verticle and symmetrical- each rung is larger and more left-leaning than the one below it forming a lopsided accordion-like drawing [see diagram] This represents that the Parent analogical poles are not merely higher in a linear, sequential way but rather more all-encompassing…or superior but the only single and strictly necessary contextualizing space which makes sense of their Daughter Poles. Now, when an idea blossoms through this spectrum, there is an alchemy of synthesis and something exactly like a chemical chain-reaction. The entire “event” happens of its own according to laws of nature, such that when the first rung is set and held correctly the entire rest of the event is observed and verified, not thought as if by us ourselves but witnessed. The art is in constructing the first rung with the correct intention and with wide-open or rather blaring-open subtle multidimensional awareness which is as close to “weightless” or “non-physical” as humanly possible. Weightless here means that the space is held but there is no identification with or personalization of any dimemesion over any other- that one’s human-ness does not play favorites or “perch” on any plane, To know the meaning of Weightlessness and the non-physical nature of The Hologram you should know the gravitational properties of Personhood-Substance as it identifies as Clay. Identification-as-Clay is how consciousness-energy gains mass and therefor different Clays poses different gravities. Their interaction is essential to Soul-Migration. Certain configurations of consciousness-energy across the Clays or across dimensions of Personhood (not the same) are ones our culture favors and so are more “comfortable” for consciousness or identity-sense to inhabit. Here dimension means strictly mathematical and geometric dimensionality and not mystical realm. If there is not near-100% Weightlessness and non-physicality then certain planes are naturally favored- they are considered “home-planes” or “comfortable planes”. This varies with person and species. Attaining the state of “Weightlessness” or neutrality, which is necessary for our conceptual magic trick is a lifelong project. There is much to advise in this endeavor, but for now let’s say that TM is the best technique for this purpose. [TM- blue] Neutrality means that no plane is favored. To not favor the planes which your culture does is near-impossible, but can be done if one both genuinely requires to or wishes to dislodge from the local patterns of Splay, (and by some intense miracle can accomplish this spacewalk) as 165
well as taking deep solidarity with the most abstract as possible scaffolding of our type of creature- people, humans, but also sentient beings, a wider category, and for our purposes especially, potential configurations of sentient beings. As we mentioned, we seek context and this is nearing the Absolute Context of what we are- the most abstract scaffolding possible to identify with and still exist, the outermost shell of the concentric spheres of kinds of beings we could have been. Why would someone seek solidarity with something so vast and inhuman? So alien! Because the absolute context of our kind of being in the widest sense of simply “all possible sentient entities” is Universal, and therefor includes ALL beings under it’s umbrella. And so none are excluded from our family. It is a heartwarming affirmation of the ethics and morality of The System that it serves the altruistic intention to absorb, cradle, and be “of a kind” with every being that exists and especially for us with every being that could exist. The state of neutrality is the decision to “allow” all to be together under one umbrella. This umbrella is a great sphere. There is a state of equilibrium- static, not dynamic. The full spectrum is always in flux, but the Splay of consciousness-energy can either move into and between The Clays, in flux with their dynamic equilibrium, or it can permeate them. When we identify as Clay there is dynamic equilibrium and we move between them. When we identify as that consciousness which permeates The Clays, then they move within us, and we are still. This is The Hologram.
~
A.8. The Great Danger There is alas a trap we must describe. It is one of many but one of the worst. To face this danger feels as it must to draw ones last upon the final cigarette before the firing squad, bittersweet, caught, doomed. This is how insidious the snare is, how rare an escape is. To be fair, it is a losing proposition. The firing squad is in military garb, but not human species- they are gorilla- and wolf- ish demons with black uniforms and boots, furred claws clutching AK-47s and survival knives, snarling, dripping snouts. These beasts are just beyond the realm of possibility, yet in an unseemly place hidden behind things they hibernate unseen, pervasive, casting morbid dread. The walls are pregnant with their potentiality. The windows are always instants away from shattering in a spray of ammunition, throats always just instants away from survival knife slitting. This danger is omnipresent and inexhaustible, no hypervigilance is keen enough to forewarn or deflect it. We will now define it. The Great Danger is the most devious and devilish nemesis that ever lived, a trap which all but the most ruthlessly altruistic travelers will succumb to. It is the danger of false pride in the “gift” our brethren are inflicted with. There is a false pride and a true pride. The false pride is fed by a deep longing in the subconscious, an insidious hunger to feed on the supposed “blessing” of Our Science for the most unworthy earthly reward- the perception of merit in the eyes of others. It is wrong to siphon even a drop of the essence of The Science in you in exchange for a lifetime of applause. Not one thinks they are so vain as to become a vampire of their only gift for fame, but the lure of applause feeds a deeper hunger with roots deep down underneath your subconscious. There is a longing there to soothe the cursed aspect of the blessing by siphoning the glory, the essence of The F aculty we bare the burden of. There is a yearning to succumb to the hope that The F aculty could somehow heal, absolve, atone for, or annihilate the unique 166
depth of aloneness you shoulder, the hope that the Faculty could somehow prove you are not defective. That is not its purpose. This hope is so insidious because none believe it lives as a seed inside them. On the other hand, false humility is far, far worse than false pride. What we aspire to is true pride, and this in great excess, for our true pride is not only decadent, but overflows audaciously, lavishly, with exactly royal grandeur, such that most would fairly call it megalomania. But this endorphin rush is not fantasy, it is earned. It is the only true merit and it is not in the eyes of others, this overflowing of the cup of honor is from within outwards expansively, unseen and unknown, and yet is still poured only so that all others will be quenched and then overflow themselves, or poured for no one. This true pride does not annihilate the depth of aloneness but is inextricable from it and cannot exist without it. It both justifies the aloneness and draws power from it, and it is the only way to ultimately conquer and transcend it. The difference between false pride and our G olden M egalomania is that false pride conceals the poison seed of false hope nestled too deep in or under the subconscious to notice. This is how it preserves itself. It is insidious because the hope is ultimately to be accepted by “the others”- that is: the generalized sense of “others of a kind” which draws much from our youngest impressions from infancy of the others which were our parents. As we were born to survive by seeking the love of our parent-protectors we live on to wish for the acceptance of others of our kind like an echo of our parents love. This wish to be accepted is not so trite as a high-school popularity contest or celebrity vanity- it is a deeper wish- the wish to be “of a kind of something” at all. We want to be accepted by others in the deepest sense so that we may be a human, the kind of thing which they are, as if by their acceptance they grant us the right to be “a kind” of thing at all. [But we are not of them. –Purple ] By our parents we hoped to survive, by our culture we hope to survive. But our parents love or lack thereof do not determine our worth or guarantee our survival now, and your culture’s gift that you may be a thing like them, a human, does not determine what you really are. As adults we know that the degree to which we deserve to survive was never dependent on the degree of our parent’s love, and as A depts we know that what we are is independent of the local kinds of sentience that define our particular environment, our specific habitat. To know the former is to become an orphan of the spirit. To know the latter is to become a Grand Orphan or Cosmic Orphan. The Great Danger is the subtle ping of the hope-impulse to be a kind, a kindred.[But
that kindred is not yours to envy, yours is a different kindred- your true kin -p] It is quite understandable and almost forgivable, for it is hope to escape the dread fear of being absolutely and ultimately alone, of being frozen in the depths of the void into thinghood, nothingness, or death, to sink to the very bottom of the pond of Catatonia, irretrievable to your loved ones looking down into the waters from far above with endless pity. This feeble, fragile ping of hope is almost forgivable because it seems a genuine distress signal- a call for help from the depths. But to your kind it is actually the ping of a lethal torpedo which must be echo-located, identified, and destroyed with precision. It is said hope springs eternal, but this hope must be uprooted once and for all lest the tendrils of the vile seed poison every aspect of your Work. The hope is to be praised for the “gift” (which is not a gift) by one’s fellow humans. The Gift dies unless the hope is destroyed. The Great Danger is in choosing the wrong scale of reference. If two rulers are placed by a rock, one ruler may say the rock is at the 2-inch mark, and the other ruler may clearly contradict that, saying the rock is next to the 8-inch mark. The F aculty does not make one 167
“smarter”. The F aculty is not an extreme form of such spectrums as intelligence or wisdom, but rather a completely separate phenomenon more akin to falling backwards deeper within. This is why we again and again stress that one should meditate on the fact that The F aculty is never dependent on earthly scales, but rather understood as the most common of traits amongst those who’s scales mean more… The “Scaled” Ones. The ease of mistaking The F aculty for merely high mental skills is complicated by the fact that a high percentage of those with The Faculty are in fact extremely intelligent but for reasons peripheral to their core grasp of The F aculty. And so The F acultyis very easily mistaken for the peripheral kinds of intelligence. This is because there is indeed some form of link, such as perhaps The F acultyappearing more frequently in subjects with genetic predisposition or nurturing towards intelligence, or because in many using The F aculty requires a kind of detachment and abstraction which is beneficial to the peripheral “earthly” kinds of intelligence. What we mean by “peripheral intelligence” is a certain revered place very high on the spectrum of a certain talent or virtue of our species. What we mean by one’s “core grasp of The F aculty” is the presence of a quality that would be merely the commonly shared baseline of the hypothetical species- the D enizens.
~
A.9. The Knights of Valor and the Way of Unrequited
the
NOTE- Be forewarned, readers dear- this section is dreadful, horrible, sad, and long. It is meant only for the most wretched among you. The rest should not read it. However we needed to publish it in full for the lives of the few readers who deserve to be included with us in the later chapters but who would not have survived long enough to do that were They not addressed with care and personal attention now, and given insight into their unique sorrows, and learned what may still justify their sorrow. They will soon know all too well who they are… It is quite best to keep matters of the heart to a minimum in this document of rigorously applied science, but surprisingly and regrettably as it turns out there are some heartfelt things which must be addressed before this goes any further. I assure you they will be quarantined to this subsection of the first set of introductions. For one, Love is real. But what we mean by Love is not the feeling immortalized in pop songs. That is an exalted thing. Love is that feeling. Love is also an ideal, though true chivalry is rare these days. That is also an exalted thing. Love is also a word used by mystics (and “new agers” whom we despise) to describe or define the “highest reality” or “source of reality”, but we cannot confuse this with Love, for Love is nestled well within. It can seem that Love fills the sky, and that this is all the “god” we need. We do not put all our eggs in that basket, for there one’s eyes are blurry and one’s thoughts retract their fangs. 168
For us, Love is a mechanism of binding Souls together. If one believes in Soul as we do, there is a True Love, which is objectively real, and a time-honored process by which some of our kind verify this, incorporate this objective Love into every aspect of our worldview. In fact this Love is to saturate our worldview, not as merely a subjective feeling or emotion but as an aspect or element of reality as real as any other. What we mean by “objective” love is not that is exists as a rock does, external from us and cold, but that we reach through the emotions and fevers of the swoon as far as it will go, until the membrane of emotion is punctured and we make contact with Love itself to in a sense verify that it was always there, and will be, despite the heartaches and mortality of man. This is why lovers so love the word “forever”. They know they will die, but they have “verified” it will remain. There is a most valuable and time-honored process which some adepts who are called the Knights of Valor have discovered, called the Way of the Unrequited or the Path of the Unrequited. This process is a way of life in which we may participate in romantic love without sacrificing our code of ethics, but which allows us to love while simultaneously toying with Love. By this process we experience our relationships with lovers but simultaneously perform thought experiments with our loves to verify that Love is real, in a way that never seems cold to us. To some hearts it may seem immensely cold. Such people see the dispassionate alien, the coldblooded alien, the witness consciousness- the opposite of warm romance. That is but our divided attention. One eye on one’s lover and one on the F ractal S nowflake for we have always and will ever give It half. The process of love in flesh and blood and gender is revealed as a coiling of two s pires to the eye we keep for It. That one eye in O therspace sees the binding and tethering and coiling as one of the furthest dimensionalities we can stretch our minds toward, at least the last stage meant for us and enough to give one’s life for. The final subject of poetry. That is not to say epic verse for fallen heroes are not the final poems for that is love poetry too. Language is not born of man but is discovered as an element of reality itself which we call Textuality. What may appear to be the silliest thing of all- love poems- turn out to be the deepest confrontation with T extuality. In other words, what Language calls forth from its most devoted servants is to preserve and transmit the most valuable information possible. Due to kinks of memory and the fact our Language is nestled in our biological mouth, this must be done in rhyme and chant. Due to exotic and sacred aspects of glossolalia, the transmission of the most valuable information may never be told as fact, but must necessarily flower and bloom in song in much the same way lovers swoon. The swoon is essential. The swoon is like a fever. The flowering of human life is sex. Sacred chant and disciplined glossolalia is the synthesis of the human faculties of sexuality and language. Romance, gender, and lust are inescapable as the sometimes regrettable path toward knowing what we are. As the heart does its summersaults and calisthenics so language eventually swoons and becomes a fever. This dance of Language is as snakes move, this Language is as sexy as human females. There comes a point at which one can no longer do justice to the truth without speaking in rhyme. This is the Event-horizon of Mythopoeia. You have not met T extuality until you have lusted after Language-in-itself as passionately as you have done for others of your kind. What language does in this space is to make songs, and we record them. There is no need for the luck of the muse in this space. There is no need for inspiration- we lie down as if dead and record. The most valuable information are the blueprints of E schaton. That appears in the height of mystical ecstasy as the transmutation of the seed of intent to vocalize the inexpressible (as if in one single sacred word, key, secret, riddle, or puzzle) into the eternal epic love poem koan in spontaneous rhyming verse which never ends. That is where the blueprints happen. It is hard to 169
imagine greater happiness than this. One needs specimens. The closest one can get to S oul is through sexuality, romance, and participant observation. The participation is the love in flesh and blood and gender, the observation is like an immaculate psychic laboratory designed entirely to properly perceive humans- the psychic space and context in which our lover occasionally appears as A bsolute P ersonhood, as S nowflake. To witness this in oneself requires natural gifts or mastery of S oul M igration; to witness this in others requires luck at love, which means mating. One of the deepest resentments I have of the Call of the S nowflake is that S ouls who due to their sincerity of devotion to the G rand S nowflake deserved more than any to witness the A bsolute P ersonhood of another sometimes never do. This is because luck at love is not dependent on the sincerity of one’s devotion, but upon luck. Pay a sacrifice to the tomb of the unknown wizard
[turn of millennium internet lore had it that if a person reaches the age of 30 and is still a virgin they receive the powers of the wizard. –Blue].Somewhere lye the bones of the man with the greatest sincerity of devotion to The S nowflake that ever lived. Perhaps the luck of biology gave him deformities that made him unlucky with love and unable to mate even once in all his days. If so, despite his infinite mastery and humility, such as we will never approach, he never witnessed the A bsolute P ersonhood of another and dirty little animals as we have. If that does not make you bow your head and pour some beer to the dusty street you are not of us. [turn of millenium custom
was to pour some of ones alchohol on the street as a symbolic offering to ones dead loved ones. -blue] Please note that the lonely we speak of here are not the Couriers who follow the Path of the Unrequited, for they are serial A bsolute P ersonhood witnesses. It is their heart’s primary mission, and so they find themselves in loves by accident. They have never slept with one they did not love, and each of their loves were True Loves, as this is the only way they know how to love. They are the lucky/unlucky ones. The hearts of some are binary- they are either 180 degrees wide open or locked in an iron puzzlebox. They must be willing to genuinely bind with their subject/partner so as to have the closest access to them. Paradoxically, those who follow the Way of the Unrequited love as if they have two hearts- they can be both wholly lost in their love yet wholly observing them through the instruments of their psychic laboratory designed to witness the humans. How cold this must seem to some! Yet it is the deepest love for it seeks to ensnare another’s Absolute Personhood to reveal themselves, and nothing less is worth its time. Kindly remember that it is not necessary for the object of one’s affection to return one’s Heart Offering in order for their A bsolute P ersonhood to reveal Itself to you. It is natural to wish one’s Heart Offering to be returned. However those with true curiosity as to what they are will seek to witness others’ Absolute Personhood even unto their own heartbreak. These are the heroes and shaman, the battlemages and Knights of Valor bound to altruism, who cannot bind to another Soul without the gift of their entire heart. That is called The Price of Valor. Is it ethical to divide one’s attention between loving someone and witnessing their Absolute Personhood? Is it ethical to analyze them with the thought experiments of a pristine, sterile psychic laboratory designed to discover what we are? How cold, some would say. “What beautiful falling snow within that globe!”, others would say. “How pristine, how still!” they would whisper, breathless. Luckily for the Knights of Valor, often the most elite maidens will grant witness of their A bsolute P ersonhood to one who offers their heart sincerely, as depth of sincerity is what they by nature live by and seek to envelope wherever they see it, and they may pay a reward to anyone who can surpass them or teach them in this regard. They find the lessons to their own 170
sincerity of Personhood most valuable, and have much desire for those who can provide a mirror. Alas, it is true- the closest one can get to a Soul on this earth is through sexuality, romance, and participant observation. Participant observation in this case means being willing to bind with one’s subject/ partner, and thus have closer access to them. Let us say, for now, that this B inding is evidenced “to the left”… Now, “To the left” is what we call an A llowed M istake or a S edified C oncept and is used here as but a convenient conceptual crutch to envision the “here” or “real” life” as to the left with its mirror phenomena “to the right”- the real world and ourselves as people as they reveal themselves in Otherspace: the blinding multicolored fractal snowflakes of red and white and yellow and silver and such, the colors of its surface always in motion, gleaming, prismatic. By the way, the color-scheme of “red and white and yellow and silver” of The G rand S nowflake or U niversal S nowflake as well as the fabled Splendorcloaks are an example of an A llowed M istake and an “A mber M eta-R ule” to be precise. A mber M eta-R ules are false in their specificity, true in their uniformity. Green as the color of the granite W ill-channeling form of The S ubstance of P ersonhood is another example of an A llowed M istake and an A mber M eta-R ule. Anyways, let us say for now that we are flesh and blood and gender and mortality “here”. We are people “here”, our aims usually variations of food and sex. “There” or “to the right” in Otherspace we are gleaming, crystalline structures that look like vast spires, entwining and tethering to others and World so the warm orbs of light at their bases can cling together, imbedded, nestled ingeniously to eachother and to an even larger and more blinding Parent Snowflake- the Personhood of World …by hands held, kisses, caphooning [French (of course) term for gently caressing one’s lover’s hair], and sex, but all these can happen and often do without any awareness of the mirror processes of Binding and Tethering “there”. They bind “here” for hands held, kisses, caphooning, sex, and the feeling of love in pop songs. This is nothing to hold oneself above- in fact it is almost as good as life can get, and well worth devoting a life to. Even for us, such a blessed state is worth pursuing for its own sake, but since we carry the Analogous World around with us always and everywhere anyways, we may as well keep one eye on the Fractal side and see how our sex and love reveal themselves there- how getting one’s hands dirty in the specifics of our lives with our bodies and our selves here is also undergoing a parallel process with its twin, its mirror image in a place that is both very different indeed and yet overlaps with our familiar place. We will find it reveals itself as two Souls (glowing orbs) sharing the gravitational attraction to merge, with a touching of their two Spires (or more) and a fractal binding of some of their surfaces. The fractal binding is beautiful, but that is merely the proper conditions for Love to occur. True Love or Real Love is the coiling of two Spires together, round eachother in a double helix shape [see diagram]. The double helix is one of our favorite of what we call A rchetypal S hapes and it is precisely that which closest binds, hugs the tightest, tethers, holds together. This coiling is more than a feeling- it really happened. Some fall curious enough about the nature of this coiling capacity of The S pire to invoke hugs and kisses on this earth, even True Love and Offering of the Heart, in this supposedly “real” world, with real people, just to observe It, play thought experiments on It at one’s leisure, learn the secrets of It’s amorous directionality. This is why some may find our kind of Love immensely cold- but that is but because they don’t find The S pire just as real. We do not break hearts as heartbreakers not bound to altruism and valor do, but we take 171
specimens in a way that could be mistaken for the dispassion they have. Our dispassion is not malicious […as it can be, especially in the case of the cold blood of the Replicons.] But a True Shaman’s business is to heal, and in the code of the healer is the ancient rule that the pleasure of enveloping a Soul must always come at the price of a True Heart Offering. This is a price Replicons do not pay. And thus our knowledge of concurrently promiscuousSoul Envelopmentas opposed to our own consecutive Soul Envelopment (and tragically necessarily our knowledge of malicious Soul Envelopment), must come indirectly through offering our hearts to Replicons from time to time and witnessing their sometimes wicked craft. It is not to become our craft, even once, or you will have fallen and no longer be one of us, and woe unto you, traitor! [Irrelevant note- pleacement? As one fuses into one’s snowflake and then identifies as it living them outward into one’s previous selfg-identity, once one fuses into one’s snowflake, then they can fuse into the Gaien or the Universal Snowflake (not the same, different predilections) and experience It living their personal snowflake outward from It. One’s and Other’s Spires appear vast in size although “size” has no meaning their the subjective experience e of vastness in that realm is natural (allowed mistake) due to the far-greater abstraction / applicability being subconsciously processed as size. Similarly, the Grand Universal Snowflake seems unimaginably immense in its abstraction. Fusing into one’s personal snowflake is a pre-requisite for fusing into the Grand one. (similar to “the father only through the son” in Christianity) As living from one’s Spire outward into one’s individual personhood frees up a lot of energy and makes it “easier” to live with less will required due to math properties of outwarding, fusing into Universal Snowflake makes life unimaginably easier, to the point of believing oneself to have died or dies symbolically as in “ego-death”. Fuse into Universal Snowflake and it as if you could live the rest of your life far more beautifully without making any decisions or trying to do anything- total freedom. It’s like you can’t lose. It appears to others as almost magically good luck. (“luckman”) Enveloping in this sense means taking them as subjects of participant observation in the psychic laboratory of Personhood, or rather simply seeing them as Soul. This is why followers of the Path of the Unrequited tend to be promiscuous in the sense that they have many lovers but one partnering at a time, as some have called serial monogamy, but never many concurrently. This is The Path of the Unrequited- to seek to know what we are, thus to observe others, thus to coil and bind for closest observation, but to do this without losing one’s status as altruistic healer by paying the price of our ethical manner of Soul Envelopment. The price is a true Heart Offering, and thus we are the “loverboys”, as we only play the game of love for high stakes. One can share one’s bed nightly but hearts have their own rhythms. Some of us may bind here and witness what one can over there, or some who know the ropes may simply bind there and witness (perhaps only later participating in) the love affair that appears in one’s lucky/unlucky life here (in flesh and blood indeed!). Loves may thereby emerge every so often like the wind, from we know not whence nor where. One who binds backwardsly like this has good luck in finding loves, but rarely luck in being loved. Why do so few of our kind of True Heroes, our Epic Poets who uphold the ideal of Love of old rarely have their love returned? Because they are cursed to be of a specific sort who can only love from a depth unseen and in a manner that is full- they love fully because they know they are Soul or Absolute Personhood, and thus for them to give of their hearts means to give ALL of their hearts, and very often at first sight for they are seers and deep elements of their crush are not hidden to them. This is not a wise practice and can lead directly to many broken 172
hearts, all one’s own. In addition to the manner of this love, the choice of Soul to bind with is also crucial, and there are tastes which serve our purposes far more than others. There are a hundred colors of love, but a certain lonely kind has been found to appear again and again in the history of the generations of Couriers, so much so that it was deemed the most valuable way to love for our humble tribe. To us that lonely kind of love is the most honored, the most stoic, and it is the kind that serves poetry best. Love poems are what we do; some for inspiration, for that one poem lovers have sacrificed their heart knowingly for inspiration, for that one poem. This kind of love is very specific, and we will thoroughly explore the process of this love and the qualities of such lovers- their tastes, their choice of partners, their altruism, their tragedy, their Holographic Redemption. Over and over again, across continents and generations, we have seen in our best Couriers (aside from those in the celibacy of temples or hermitages) that an often stark and stoic kind of Love. We have accepted that this is no accident, but a matter of predilection. We have accepted that a certain manner of romantic predilection is the most conducive to both carrying the scrolls and for knowing what we are, in understanding how Souls and people work. And how they are meant to work, for though we will make every attempt to quarantine such matters of the heart to this subsection, what we say here is also extremely relevant to Eschaton Science, to making Eschaton happen. If it weren’t, we would not speak of such things at all, and give no instructions in that regard except to tell you good luck and abandon you to the wolves of love. However, there was passed down a well-worn, lonely roadmap, soon wet with your precious tears to come. You’re welcome.
~
You may never know “who” you are but it is your duty to know “what” you are. This duty is an honor, this devotion frees, for those who are naturally curious. We cannot know what we are without observing others. Though we are our own foremost specimen, this is insufficient. It is insufficient to take only oneself as one’s sole specimen for many reasons, including the unique difficulties, illusions, paradoxes, and tricks involved in studying the thing which is doing the studying, as seeing one’s own eye. When the means and the object of knowing are identical there are feedback loops, some of which we may savor, but those are exotic states, and we just want to know what the thing is first, not how it spins. We must observe others because our defective culture has dented and altered us as the object of knowing and brainwashed and mislead us as the means of knowing. The thing is obscured. But perhaps there is someone out there who has escaped this....? Probably not. There is a weathered and worn road-map, however. We want a healthy specimen to identify the species. We are far from that, as are our neighbors, countries, planet. At least we are not alone in being ill! It seems only those from afar are well. So we will identify as them, live in solidarity with them as the Hypothetical Species from a theoretical world far from here, who walk under a different sun we call the Fantasy Star, and who to our marrow we have decided to claim as our true kin. Such a species is easily mistaken for angels and visions of them may be where the myth of angels comes from. In fables these creatures are called Draganoids- described as chameleon, werebeasts, half human and half winged and gilled reptile. They have also been told of as simply humans of the distant future theorized to exist in a city of peace called Eschaton, and so they are called the Denizens of 173
Eschaton. It is better to identify as one of them, even if they never lived and never will. To be a Courier of the Lineage is to fulfill the paths of text and history such that the Theoretical Species may walk this earth, and nothing more. All of Septimus’ visions and their interpretations are necessary only to accomplish this. This is why we say “That even our sacrifice will be forgotten is itself our only victory.” The depth of your devotion to this game is measured by the strength of your conviction that even if the Hypothetical Species is never to walk this earth, it was still better to have identified as them than those you walk this earth with. This means becoming an orphan, a Grand Orphan- the One Alien, and this is stoic and noble but your heart will ache when you come to learn all of your kind will feel the Strange on you. Those who can identify with Soul view their Personhood and those of others as Other and as Alien; they are also the most skilled in imagining very different possible structures of Personhood that might cling to Souls on other worlds. This is one of the talents such savants of ours are keen with. This craft could mean imagining different or better Spires than those nearby. To take kinship with one of those strange, possible kinds of Spires does not come easily even for those who are audacious or foolhardy enough to accomplish such an arcane procedure. The price is to say goodbye to your old kind and to become ever strange to them. This means that even if we die surrounded by loved ones, on another deep level we will die alone and without kin. And that is still worth having lived within the kinship of our imaginary friends, our hallowed ghosts. We never said this path was without sadness. We consider the Hypothetical Species to be a genuine factual possibility on this earth due to our interpretation of human nature and the fruition of modernity as the freedom to take the reins of evolution and turn the experiment back on ourselves to save us, as this is the only way we may be saved. The scalpel is to now operate on itself. Due to our interpretations of human nature, human freedom, and specifically our extrapolation of trends in genetic engineering technology, we consider our salvation to lie in the decision to consciously engineer future generations of humanity and versions of it toward fulfillment of spiritual potentiality and peace. Physical wings to fly with are within the realm of possibility, so too the genetic engineering of our brains and our consciousness so our descendants can become the Hypothetical Species we were meant to be, and we can rest knowing that those from afar we took solidarity with could not only be our theoretical kin but walk on our same earth. This future is still possible, so breathe the air and walk upright for now as if it is! You could say the nature of a thing is what it most is even when the thing falls short of that. The true Nature in its potentiality is more real than the thing in its dented existence. Rocks do not need to worry about this. Plants do. We do perhaps more than any. You could say that when a bruised sprout seeks light, it also seeks health, it is also seeking its Nature. They are not the same, but light, health, and Nature are very sweet and make for a good picnic. We want healthy sprouts to take as specimens when we are classifying biology. We must observe others in their illness too, for sadly there are likely no healthy sprouts on this earth, but to a Knight of Valor even the illness of some is beautiful…
…such as woeful maidens, Maidens in distress, Maidens who will ever be lost in the mist Of Demonwinter Street, where of all who walked not one was blessed. It was always broken ones who have long since buckled under 174
the stress Always maidens who have fallen through the cracks whom we have kissed. through the cracks of a defective culture, were dented, then defected Only subversive hearts once hurt beat within those whom I have selected. It is they I bed for only in bed can such Souls properly be dissected. And what a Soul they’ve had! Each one unto the core. For only those are worth the time for our kind to adoreMascara girls, sidewalk chalk girls, switchblade chicks and weeping willows! Only the saddest girls win the right to lounge amongst my pillows. [-Purple]
To identify as S oul is to become the alien, for when we identify as Soul all else becomes “other” to us. Structures of personality we once identified as and which seemed familiar to us have become external and other than what we are now. Our personalities themselves have become as things we witness from behind The W indshield of O therness. This is our own doing. But some have become their Souls for other reasons, such as those who have survived deep shock or catharsis. Those who are entirely frozen in this state have transmuted their personhood to thinghood, as can be done and as is our right, and are blessed. Some return but have a dimension of themselves always there- “angels of catatonia” they may called, with frosted wings. There is always something tragic and beautiful and precious to them, and they can be forgiven any transgression. Some of these women on a pedestal all their own are called weeping willows. They are gothic beyond any subculture- gothic in their bones, by their nature, for there is mourning in them. They are achingly sincere, moment by moment. Some souls can never be insincere. This is a mark of a proper subject, a precious specimen, the mark of a maiden. This is a similar situation the Soul-Alien finds Itself in, and in weeping willows the Soul-Alien may find an almost-kin. And so…
…There be time to be told of the many things following: Of Demonwinter Street and its ways of soul swallowing Souls of artists with models bought for painting and ravishing Maidens far more alluring than any “Kim Kardashian” And maiden models who weep, wilt, and fade oh so subtle You’d think anime turned real, but I must burst your bubble These fireflies have long-since burnt out one by one Dimming under the weeping willows in the fading sun 175
These souls were turned out, returned and undone. These souls were many but I remember most one… She gave me reasons aplenty for stealthily browsing Various bars where Demonwinter pimps went carousing To find a trick they turned out who was oh so arousing To a self-styled detective of gonzo journalist persuasion With my notebook and pen for every occasion A literary beat fantasy lent romance to poverty And madness (schizotoxic psychotic insanity) A novella, The Demonwinter Fog, captured my lady As The High Empress- a mythical goddess, I thought fairly A “Demonwinter Rat” some would say, I would phrase it Quite differently. I’d say she might be my favorite Of all the broken goods I’ve met in all the cold world Dented cans come aplenty, they fill all the shelves Of all the warehouses in heaven and hell But this one was different. She was a very special girly. A “Sidewalk Chalk Girl”, yes. It was her destiny, surely. Indeed she might just have been “Patron Saint of Racoons” That eyeliner never failed to make me swoon. Nor her lipstick- silver, like her talon nails Holy shit that chicky gave me the chills. I daresay that firefly captured my deepest of fancies She wore a green “Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep” hoodie, Burnt forever in my memory with all her glory Weeping Willows are like comets that have come so near the event horizon of a black hole of the ultimate privacy within but just barely escaped, changed- solemn, stoic, with an unending depth of sincerity. They have just barely escaped the tragic but blessed place that some have succumbed to.These others are sometimes called flowers. Flowers are told of as a warning in an old kind of fable in which some sacred thing or holy person leaves a trail of catatonic worshippers in their path. On a deep level, they are private only, forever alone. and they are perfect as no other humans could be. They are their Natures as things are. There is an allure to become of them as there is to the song of Sirens. The mark of the bravest of the psyche is that they can resist the lure of the Flowers, to become a thing, perfect.
~
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A Protocol Fable Interlude: “The Call of the Pines” In the Fourth Age of Couriers, it was found that a certain subclass of adepts shared a common trait. Again and again, when pondering tomes that record the histories of the Ten Ages of Couriers, elders observed that many ]]of the most especially brilliant and cunningly stealthy adepts exhibited striking similarities in their love lives, from their choice of partners to the lengths of their relationships, to the nature of their marriages or failed marriages or times of celibacy, bachelorhoods, and most significantly the common story-arch or dramatic trajectory of their affairs, from love-at-first sight, through swoon and fever of passion to a unique “kiss of spirits” which only this subclass of adepts may perform, to the nigh-inevitable fireworks and trainwrecks, the crash of sudden drama and tumult which leaves our fellow follower stung and alone again. For these who came to be called The Forlorn, love was always and only cotton candy and live wires, each and every time. This similarity of intense, brief, and genuinely, uncommonly deep, authentic meetings of souls, with their corresponding peaks of euphoria and sudden heartbreak became familiar to the elders that roamed libraries where the stories of the lives of such people are recorded. The connection was undeniable- it could not be a coincidence. But cause and effect were unclear- was the way of romance a boon to the followers’ powers of sight and slight of hand, or were they a malady, a side-effect of their sight which distracted them from their powers? Eventually it was deemed that many of those who exhibited a definite set of traits in love also had exquisite methods of courrying too valuable not to study and experiment with and follow through to their fruition. And so they began to systematize a criteria by which to recognize these traits in a subject, which became honed over generations and codified into a list of thirteen, known as… The Laws of the Doomed 1) The Forlorn almost always falls in love at first sight. “True Love at first sight is no strange thing to me, because souls are not invisible, to those with eyes to see.” 177
2. he Forlorn only loves one at a time. Can love a great many but always Only one at a time. 3) The heart of the Forlorn can only open 180 degrees. (Some have loved many, and been loved by many, yet are doomed to weep because none loved them in the only way they can, which we call “180-degree love”. They may look back upon a lifetime of passionate love affairs but feel a sting of aloneness equal to any virgin’s. He knows none of these great loves were truly mutual, even if his partners thought they were, because earthly love is not the kind some know. Those who are the One Alien and Classical Romantics both cannot but open their heart 180 degrees, for theirs is an absolute gift. A gift to the Other Snowflake, the Entirety of the Other’s Personhood, of course. Those who do not know themselves as the Snowflake cannot give consciously from it, and cannot make an Absolute Gift in the only way which some can understand.) 4) Immense heartache when over. To a depth normal mortals cannot experience. 5) Thanatos. Love wins but by a hair’s breadth after the Death Wish. Black and red are the only colors. This polar / all-or-nothing nature is fitting for the Alien as Classical Romantic because paradox and polarity define him. All or nothing and a life of toggling between the two poles, be they self / other, true love and heartbreak. This is the only life for me. The heart like any muscle grows strong by alternating between great effort and rest, recovery. The peaks and valleys of the love life or the swinging pendulum between f ronds and c rust is all part of the same game. A world of Forelorn would be filled to the brim with suicide- it would be a commonplace affair! More Souls would be popping out of existence by their own choice than the kernels of Orville Redenbacher. We cannot understand why those of this world can endure the loss of loves without ending themselves ten-thousand times more often than they do in this land, such that it would be a common occurrence with a ritual like weddings or funerals, a ceremony that consecrates it as a rite of passage rather than a sin. Sepoku or hari kari is a beautiful gift of culture in that it allows for a communal consecration of an act that is defiled in our culture to the point that those who take the knife must face it in privacy, their culture turning their backs to them. How cruel to force those at the lowest point to not be thrown at least the life preserver of a consecrated suicide, christened by the kiss of ritual- made communal. There is no place for this correct suicide in our land, in our time. And here is a true thing- not a single one amongst you, who have not claimed and made peace with your right to commit suicide, has freed themselves to loose the Final Laugh, or “concur with the Totality despite the cruel rules of the game”. The solidarity with the Totality is the ultimate acceptance of paradox. To go along with and accept and concur with the totality is to get the joke, to “concur” with the fact that it was worthwhile for the universe to exist despite the cruel fact that we as mere parts of the equation may very well indeed 178
“lose” the game in ways that take all hope away. Yet to still concure, regardless, is to laugh and this is nirvana freedom, transcendent, victorious as mere peace could never be. Why don’t those we find ourselves amongst, if they have hearts like ours, not blink out like fireflies as we do? We for whom suicide comes with the business, as they say. It comes with the territory. We forgive eachothers’ suicides with brotherly and sisterly love. To the Forlorn death is a remedy none should be denied, if they break their heart. What monster would deny one the crypt if it is their will? One who has not felt the Absolute Heartache of one who has made an Absolute Gift. The haunted and the grave and death and spirits are the solace of those with access to the sweetest realms, the truest hearts are half-dead with tingled lips, the gothic is a special beauty. What callous hearts can avoid suicide so deftly as those we find ourselves amongst, when so few loves last? In any case, as always, suicide is one’s human right- to think otherwise is to be haunted, surely. For I will make sure of it! - A corpse is not a who but an It. The fear of the dead (ghosts, zombies, our own future corpse) is due to the fear that death reveals us to have been a Thing all along. We can easier accept death as nothingness. Explore thing-hood, consciousness clinging to the body but terrified of body becoming 100% realtherefor dead. A corpse is a Thing- we fear becoming a corpse. Yet as consciousness we yearn to be a thing, rather than something clinbging to a thing. Death as non-experience, nothingness, can be easier than the thought of becoming a corpse. If our consciousness becomes nothingness, non-experience, then we have blinked out. But if our consciousness becomes a corpse, a thing- that is the corpse mocking us, “proving” to us that we were but a thing all along- the fear of the corpse, and ghosts, zombies, is more than the fear of death, it reaches into our deepest fears and wishes of both being a Thing, and not being a thing. 6-Brief relationships , or long-term cartetaking (“white knite” -=bleu) relationships. 7-Relationships often intense, chaotic, and dramatic with high peaks and deep valleys of emotion, often involving some aspect of deception. Love stolen from morality. 8-Language, such as discussion, inspiration to song, or love poetry is of great importance (soulcommunion through textuality-soul-transmition. The purpose of language is to translate Souls between eachother. Language is the habitat of Souls. 9-single for long time after breakup, a desert of mourning. The emptiness of spirit. 10-Cannot bare jealousy, no interest in other lovers. 12-Eye contact is all. The boatwoman. 13- The Forlorn is always “the follower man”. Draws soul-communion by falling in love, Absorbs Personhood thus even with no mutual affection. This is “love from afar” and the Law of the Doomed states with authority that this is a form of True Love, and 179
can be a contact with True Love by which a man could well devote his life. The counterpart of the this is the myth of the “replicon”, female huntress archetype which “captures” souls of men. There is a striking chord and link between the Follower Man who absorbs Personhoods and the ‘Spacepants archetype” who encapsulates Souls. They are an almost-kin. Of course in this dynamic the femme fatal makes quick work of her prey. 14) The Forlorn is strictly and only a Brotherhood. (Knights of Valor we speak of are men. What can be said of female Forlorn? This is a mystery which for now we cannot speak of.) 15) ALLWAYS loves more than he is loved. 16) He must ALWAYS seduce the object of his affections, and if his love is returned it is after having been made to learn the sincerity of his valor. As such, it is only by maidens who are bound to valor that the Forlorn’s love may be returned. Luckily, it is only for such women that the Forlorn will fall in love. The kind of love they receive in return is more an acknowledgement of virtue and a reward for this than theall-consuming passionate fire they offer, and it invariably fades, unlike that of that of the Forlorn, which is eternal. -
If a subject exhibited these traits they were deemed of unique interest and moved to a school in a territory called the Great Pines, in which tumultuous romance was observed as a code of honor, a way of life. This school later became a monastery and is now the Shrine of the Great Pines. There, with others of their subclass, they were found to flourish in unexpected and spectacular ways. Many of those of the school, originally called the Forlorn, became teachers themselves. The teachers of the later days of the school in the Great Pines were so influential they dominated an entire Age of the Ten, the Fourth Age. As the masters of the Fourth Era they were called The Knights of Valor, and are depicted in fable wearing angular coats of armor of silver, mirror, stained glass, chrome, crystal and prism, and white, red, and yellow steel, forged with great delicacy and the most intricate of embroidery. The great frailty and beauty of the Splendorcoats was thought by archeologists as a symbol that no sword could ever touch them in battle, but it was in truth a symbol that their battlefield was the frailty and beauty of the heart instead of the battlefield of the 180
warrior. These Splendorcoats are some of the most treasured artifacts of the Fourth Age. It should be noted that the term “The Knights of Valor” has two meanings. Formally, it refers to this group of Masters of the Fourth Era who lived between [-3000 to -2000 pre-Septimus (?)], but it is also used more casually to refer to an adept from any era who has the same kind of spirit as one of the Knights of Valor had. As such, it may be a compliment as in “You have the heart of a Knight of Valor today, traveler!” to one who, classically, has just rescued a maiden from a villain. “Slay the dragon to save the princess’ was their creed. In addition to forming this school from subjects deemed to exhibit the common traits and criteria, the elders in charge of such matters also began experiments in which groups of students were taught to regard the Way of the Unrequited as a most honored path. Of course it would have been unethical to expect any certain whim from the heart of any man, for the pendulum of the heart of any true man swings as it will of its own momentum and rhythms. Yet this they accomplished by skillfully imbuing the teachings of this way of life into the fabric of the Work in such a way as to… *romanticize* it. Hence many ripe hearts which initially had leaningsor tendencies in this direction were swiftly cleansed of any doubt and many plunged… *valiantly* into this newly proud way of life, with gusto and… *passion*. It should go without saying that these monks took no vow of celibacy. Quite the opposite! You could say a deep reverence for the Way of the Unrequited was bred into them, as it was cleverly infused the readings of the school and later the ceremonies of the monks of the monastery and those monks who best epitomized the Forlorn life were studied as heroes, with the epic verse befitting heroes encouraged to be sung by the best and most angelic voices of the ladies of the choir. In such a way a vast number of patriarchs were born. Such martyrs of the heart as these are even still known to exist. They are also known as The Forlorn, and they are the descendants of the Forlorn. Their creed is “So long as I live chivalry is not dead.” Unlike their ancestors they wear no armor, but robes or peasant clothes. The Shrine of the Great Pines is tended by these travelers who still traditionally sleep underneath pine trees on their pilgrimages to and from the shrine. None live at 181
the shrine, it is often empty for the winter season and tended to in the spring by these pilgrims, this is an old practice to show respect. Finally, we should extinguish any curiosity as to just who our vague and unspecified “elders” were who orchestrated such ingenious, if somewhat manipulative experiments in social engineering. They were old tome-ponderers, yes, and researchers in many vast libraries, very well protected by both strength and secrecy, but they were far more than scholars. They were in some ways deeper in reverence than the Masters they helped to create. Most Ages have their own often unseen elders pulling the strings from their dusty bookshelves, who seem to somehow often create the conditions for a mighty band of Masters to gather and arise, but who share none of their credit. In such a way, their humility is flawless. “It is they who win” is their creed, referring to the peasants who benefit from their unknown and unthanked efforts. The elders are the originators of the old saying in which they described the essential sentiment of any true courier- “That even their sacrifices will be forgotten is itself their only victory.” This saying applies very well to the elders themselves as well. The elders of the Fourth Age are called the Amber Ghost Maiden Watchers, “who live in tribes of the frozen mountains” it is sung. The Amber Ghost-Maiden Watchers lived in the distant and inaccessible Caverns of Frost in the barren and craggy mountains within which were hidden their libraries. These mountains were chosen very deliberately due to the special properties of stalactite formations, ones which grew into extremely large and flawless crystals. The craggy peaks are populated by crows, and because the skies they flock in there are always cloudless, fridged, windless, and white, they are called the Craws of the Frost of the Void. This is why the crow in mist is a symbol of stoicism and solemnness for those who still honor the Amber Ghost-Maiden Watchers, the modern Forlorn. “The Amber Ones” are another name for who these elders watch, and the mythical or fabled beings are depicted sometimes as ghosts, sometimes as nymph spirits or sirens, and are precisely the symbol of who the Forlorn will always cherish, will always yearn for and seek- the most alluring maidens possible aside from angels. They have many sacred characteristics, related to their eyes, their appearance in the time before dusk some call the “golden hour”, 182
and mystical secrets, and characteristics making them valuable to those wishing to learn and practice synchronicity- the Amber Ones are supposedly the best “telepaths” / “empaths” and most fluent in manifesting synchronicity. They are almost never seen by pilgrims but the Amber Ghost Maiden Watchers accomplish this with extremely exotic telescopes. The telescopes were made using incredibly large and flawless crystal formations of stalactites, harvested from the Caves of Frost, or “the Caverns of Desolate Frost”. These telescopes would surely be mistaken for magic in their era and future technology in ours, if they remain and were unearthed. These instruments allowed The Watchers to monitor the Amber Ones in their habitat- the lush forested land of the Great Pines which became the ground of the experimental school. The Amber Ones are told of in fable and though we are ever loath to repeat ourselves, it might go well to reference an old traditional chant/ song which we once shared with you long go, as follows: [insert relevant portions of “song of the wind” from GOF.] The Amber Ghost-Maiden watchers are the ones who can determine when one of their subjects harbors the potential to become one of the Finest of Courieors, a Grandmaster courrior. They can also instill this trait in a handful of souls per generation. This is a very great power, an unmatchable gift to bestow on a traveler, and why some people still go about their melancholy ablutions [correct word?]. The saying is “From the darkness ‘neath the Pines, the Forlorn will be plucked, to become legend.”
~
A.10. Literary logistics A.10.1. Bifurcation of Authorship System Key Now, since you are surely the shrewd and clever quicksilver-minded reader we knew you were and the hero dragonborn we deserved, you have already noticed that this book is written under a system which requires you to not only read the text but also learn to recognize certain visual queues which indicate which of several authors wrote each section. It could not have been 183
otherwise. You may think of this experimental format we call “The Bifurcation of Authorship System” as the frequent alternation between various commentaries and commentaries on commentary on what remains of the primary text scrawled by Septimus himself. It is only by the co-operation of this unlikely band of authors across the ages, and by the contrast, interplay, and synthesis of their voices that the subject of this book can be done justice. It is only the quicksilver-minded reader who can learn to shift swiftly and gracefully between the various perspectives and modalities of thought who can even hope to begin to piece the central puzzle together. If you desire this then become a fluentshapeshifter between inks. Perhaps, you may ponder, do the visual queues not in fact indicate separate human beings, but merely which color pen and corresponding character’s voice the one “Theoretical Single Author” chose to pick up for that passage. Such a suspicious thought is not only ridiculous, but is too blasphemous to dare cross the mind of the True Adept whose trust we sought. To those who wonder this- take care your suspicions not get the better of you and leave you lost in this text like a maze of brambles! Remember that our trust was not offered in vain, and we would never betray you… Essentially, this is a book written by four “people”. This includes: 1) Septimus himself, whomse remaining Fragments are herein reprinted and enshrined. The visual cue which designates this voice is the text upon weathered-scroll background, a template called “Septimus Frame”. 2) The current narrator, myself, recording commentary on the primary text written (scrawled) by Septimus long ago. The visual cue which designates my voice is standard black text on white background, and is called “Devin Frame”. I could note that this Frame is named not after myself but after my namesake whos name I stole, which I use as a pen name in his honor, and is the only name others know as mine, so call me Devin. It is not permitted for Couriers to reveal their actual birthnames and so generally no record of our names exist. This is known as a “blind carrier system”, one in which no individual is known to outsiders as a carrier, nor does any carrier themselves know the entirety of the information they are each entitled to harbor pieces of, nor do any of the other carriers know eachother. This encrypts the information until it is later assembled by the work of they who are still to come. 3) Historians of the distant future who interject commentary on both the Fragments themselves and my own “Devin Frame” commentary. The visual cue which designates this voice is the white text on blue background template called “Blue Frame”, and their voice is plural. They are collectively referred to simply as “Blue”. 4) There is one other voice we will not know well until much later. This voice is called Purple and is also whispered of by the superstitious as “The Left Hand of Septimus”. Its whimsically embellished text upon a purple background is called “Purple Frame”. For now, let us only say that the Fragments are not the only remnant of Septimus’ scrawlings which remain. Like the visions which filled his days, he was known to undergo trances in his sleep. In these trances he would perform what might be called automatic writing. With his eyes closed, dreaming, snoring, his hand would reach out as of its own will, or possessed, towards its quill and papyrus offering which its owner prepared for it nightly. And so Septimus always awoke to something most curious to read for the first time. It was written in a different voice than the Fragments where he recorded his visions. The different voice is not concerned with the abstract or The Snowflake. It is only concerned with verse and myth, the mythopoeic spirit, and in the craft of luring others through the Gate. Luring in this sense of soul-envelopment can be very malicious, 184
sinister, and deceptive indeed as certain women called Replicons have well proven, so remember that procedure can only be done altruistically, righteously,and correctlyfrom the center of the Gate.Only when one is securely locked in that place can one rightly welcome others to it. It is unknown whether the Lure of the Left Hand is righteous or malicious or some place between.
A.10.2.The Convoluted Mythology of the Oysterverse A.10.2.1A Fabrege Novel We are now almost finished with the first of a set of two preliminary introductions, of which this is the second part of the tenth sub-section of the first set. You may be pleased to know that the second set is very brief, as it consists of but a single succinct entry. As a token of our gratitude to any who have survived this long with us, we offer an unprecedented full unveiling of our Grand Ultimate Literary Master Plan. We are proud to finally invite you into the inner workings and reveal the meta-schemes of what we call “The Oysterbar”. This concept of The Oysterbar is new to some of you, and some have known us for a long, long time. In fact, some of you have been with us long indeed, and as there is still so very long to go, we may as well take rest here and truce from the drama to look at it from the outside for once. Perhaps the few faithful, devoted fans who received highly classified advance copies of our work and remain sane have earned a stay at the proverbial replenishing inn of the role-playing video game lore which so inspired our own. You have learned something of the cosmology of the Oysterbar- our origin myth and our Ragnadelia to come. You have felt the indefinable, sultry, occult scent of the Ouija tendril slipping into the charred socket at the back of your neck. We are speaking now to true Oysters. To those old dear readers, this is, finally (drumroll)… the official organizational structure and mission statement of the various authorship perspective across the complete set of works in the evolving cannon. Behold, and to those who can, withstand: What we are looking at, friends, is something of a Fabrege egg of literature. It is very complex and it has many delicate mechanisms like a fine pocketwatch. Not only is the clockwork baroque, it tends to fit inside itself not-quite-symetrically. In other words, it would be impossible to draw you a map of literary contexts like circles inside circles, each symmetrically containing the one previous to it, like skins of an onion or layers of concentric shells of a multi-shelled spherical egg designed to blossom open in stages. This series of concentric spheres is one of our favorite of what we call A rchetypal S hapes, and it will say hello to us in many places. Unfortunately, the book and books we write cannot be mapped in this manner. The map requires not a flat grid but must be painted on a topological shape like a vase made from a strange metal with a stem that bends back on itself, at first seeming so convoluted, very unnecessarily convoluted. Almost fiendishly so. However, this warpedcanvas is necessary to provide the habitat to explore and get lost within which matches the lopsided and rugged terrain of life with its varius seasons of different importance and different ways of thought and experiences of different value connected to eachother in different ways. Asymmetrical litmospheres of various lengths and genres encorprorate multiple perspecticves and elements of ambiguity into the story in a way that symmetry cannot. Kindly familiarize yourself with the literary topology and learn fluency in movement between the quasi-modalities. Some of the more superstitious among you may even ask “Is there something ulterior and 185
unstated going on amidst this literature?” and may wonder if such motives are beneficial or malicious. We assure you- if there were any single entity engineering these words, which there is not, it would have no intentions ulterior or otherwise, which it does not. And yet, it could be prudent to ask oneself “Is this business angelic? Is this business demonic?”, as it behooves one to ask in many endeavors that require decision. We suppose that both are true- angels pull the editing process upward by catching and correcting mistakes, while demons pull the editing downward, concealing mistakes and introducing new ones, or “accidently” deleting the longest-crafted and favorite of passages. Damn them. Of course, these are fairy stories. Septimus himself clearly and strictly forbid worship of himself or the text. Well, we suppose, regrettably, that you have somehow managed to earn or more likely steal an unprecedented peek beneath the red carpet of The Oysterbar and into the circuitry of the whisperdungeon beneath. We highly suspect you deserve no such thing, and have snuck in to gawk at future celebrity rather than accept our one public moment of sincere atonement for our ironfisted, pathological, rabid anonymity. To our agony and against our dearest wishes, and well against our better judgement, we will provide you at least one possible theoryof what the hell is going on here, one that we would never confirm or deny. And so… First, know that the organizational structure of our vast franchise is as the layers of an onion, a lopsided one, in a series of concentric “shells” analogous to the various contexts under which we write. These we call Litmospheres. Each Litmosphere can be thought of as an entire literary perspective (such as third-person omniscient or second-person, etc.) as well as having its own genre and narrative style, with its own rules of order and exceptions to those rules, as well as its own explanaitions, foreign policy, and propaganda concerning its peer Litmospheres. These shells are of different sizes and are nested within eachother with much variation of topological modulation, placed about their neighbors in ways that allows fluent passage between some but not others. To familiarize you with them we will take you on a journey into the inner sanctum delicacy of esoteric oyster flesh cradling the Protocol scrolls. Let’s go! One might ask who or what is actually writing this mollusk and its ancillary mollusks. What is their or its intention in doing so? What is the meaning of the whole beastly thing, inclusive of its many branches and countless side-projects, taken as one “Artistic Statement”? Why would anyone do this? We must ask ourselves the primal question- “Where the fuck are we?”. In one sense, and first and foremost, Dork Stork Oysterbar is simply the name of a publishing company, which happens to print and publish a very peculiar collection of books, art, and music. This is our official position. Try to remember this if things get too heavy.Some who hold to this view believe that this book was written by a theoretical “single author” and that the communal authorship is just creative license or perhaps a shrewd marketing gimmick. This is of course preposterous, for no one person could possibly be so prolific. Also,by the way, we feel such a suspicious thought indicates a waiver of the trust we asked of you which we find rather cold. However, we just may thaw you fridgid skeptics in time, so keep reading. This is the first veil, the veil of steel. In another sense, Dork Stork Oysterbar is the name of a reclusive and mysterious literary community. When they write they use the term “We”. They (we) are a tight-knit, collaborative group of multi-media artists working on an epic project published by ourown aforementioned “publishing company” which happens to be named after a band of musicians formed by a member of the cult from our novel which we are in no way affiliated with due to the fact it does not exist. This collaborative nature of our work is the reason so much of this book is written by a 186
voice that often refers to itself as “We”. When we say “We”, we mean the group of writers who collaborate on the text and nothing more. This is the second veil, the veil of iron. Now, there is a third, false veil. Somehow our vow of absolute secrecy fell short of absolute and there arose some persistent and perniciousrumors regarding our friendly circle, but what little is known of us is shroud in the mists of exaggeration and imagination. We do not profess to understand why, but yes, it is regrettably true that some early adopters of our mythology harbor a suspicious or even paranoic fixation on the robe-clad coven of pagan and beastial deviancy which appears in the first book of the original trilogy and have projected their obsessive curiosity about the “inner circle” onto us ourselves.We are flattered that you silliest of Oysters find our yarns so convincing, but please, family, don’t be absurd! We are perplexed and dismayed why so many of you sillyheads suspectthat ourshy, kindlycommune of bookworms is actually some kind of secretive cult with paranormal intentions and ambitions towards sacredness, simply because we like to write of such things. It’s preposterous. Such thoughts are cobwebs of the mind which require a firm featherdusting, surely nothing but the wishfull fevered pipe dreams of the most crazed of our unsettlingly unstable initial fanbase who have long since lost their sole shared marble. We take no legal or ethical responsibility for their sad psychosis or events that may arise from that, but we do express our condolences for the corner of the mind any of you may have accidentally painted yourselves within. Must be a lonely, sacry place,and we sincerely hope you find your round-walled yurt of the psyche where the devils of your enflamed imaginations cannot corner you anymore! According to the fanatical theoriesof these folk very much in need of our understanding and compassion, our imaginary cultish characters are a decoy based on ourselves and a perfect cover to deflect attention toward, as if at risk of discovery we could point to the novel and say “Hey, it’s just a book! About aliens and elves for fuck’s sake! Only a fool would take anything therin as fact!”. Apologies to the demented, but sorry, no. This is the third veil. It is the veil of fools’ gold. There is one final veil which is by no means news fit to print. We reference it here for what little comedic value it may hold. This theory poses that we true authors are not a publishing company, a writers’ group, or a cult, but things not as we seemwho masquerade as all three, things called “Elves of the Fourth House”. We are not. Let’s call this the veil of Styrofoam, and never speak of it again.
~ You may recall that The Protocolyou are now deep within was foreshadowed back in the second half of the novel The Garden of Flowers, which you have not read yet unless you chose the valid path of skipping this inner book, in which case it will be after-shadowed. Regardless, some may recall or learn that The Protocol was the 1,000 page book written in magical invisible ink by dear old Mr. Kite, wrote (as in the name of the holy book that appears in the novel, not the book you are now literally reading which, of course, is not a sacred text and was not written by a holy man by any means, but merely ourselves). In any case, after the initial introductory chant, Max found 1,000 blank pages. We now only offer you the 100-page introductions to those pages, after which follow the ten chapters which compose the full text of The Protocol, which we vow 187
now shall be serialized for your approval and “dropped” into the remaining ten “slots” in the center of the novel. By the way, to make matters more convoluted, there are intentional ambiguities added to the meta-scheme of the whole literary project / book series. For example, Sachmo (one of the main characters and the narrator of the novel) also shares the voice of the narrator as “omniscient author” when the novel veers in the direction of non-fiction document. In this view, the book is primarily written from the perspective of an omniscient author who delves into the specific voice of one of their charactors- Sachmo. And so Sachmo, a character in the novel, shares a voice with the omniscient narrator who appears all along, even now while you read this. And some of you may be pleased to know that all your well-liked friends from the original novel are to return some day sooner than later after the current work, The Protocol, is finished. That book will be titled “The Garden of Flowers II: Return to Moss Hollow: Further Shamanic Tales of Romance and Adventure. Ah, what a pleasure for the supposed, theoretical “Grand Omnisceint Author of Pseudonym” that thick tome would be to lounge in till the end of days, a place where Sachmo, Max, Mr. Kite, Lana, Chrissy, Bald Monkey, and Spacepants could play forever and ever and bounce about together in their merry antics which would never end. There one could luxuriate in pulp adventure, science fiction (for it is set in the future) and erotic fiction, and delve into love poetry or golden Glossolalia whenever the muse visits and the mood strikes. Yes, it is a return to Moss Hollow (assuming the authors of the commune are prolific beyond their wildest fantasies and can drop the final period on the 1,000 page metaphysics textbook, as of the time of printing of this very entry in the series. Who knows? The author, authors, or world may die before these 1,000 pages are chiseled in the black monolithic stone of Language. In that case, all the Garden of Flowers II this dying world will ever know is what is foreshadowed here in this textbook. Luckily, this is a fictionalized textbook, in which there are many delicious opportunities to foreshadow such a monstrosity. For example, when we allude to the fact that The GOF II is science fiction (in addition to pulp adventure, love poetry and erotic fiction) that is because it is set in the distant future, in a college in which the Archetypes of the characters of the first novel reappear in similar forms as the students of a college of the future, of which the primary aim is to teach the science of the Protocol to students of whom some of which happen to be the descendants of the original 7 characters, and uncannily resemble them in personality and, curiously, in name, or perhaps just happen to share and coincidently strikingly embody their seven archetypes which you will meet through life in all people. The college, Manerva Acadamy, teaches the Protocol by using the by-then historical records of the lives of the original seven to illustrate how each of their personhoods represent Spire configurations, and how the Spire configurations represent their personhoods. The original seven have become legend, as they were those by which the Protocol- the Great Vision of Mr. Kite and title of his sacred literature- was documented in sacred literature and preserved in the sands of history and the winds of Time. Some claim there is also a fourth veil. This theory- that Dork Stork Oysterbar is not a publishing company (“It”) or a mysterious collective entity (“We”, fictional or real) at all, but in fact the pseudonym of some supposed single individual person (“I”) who created the entire canon of Dork Stork Oysterbar literature, art, and music. For one thing, this is not only absurd, but also impossible because no one person could be so prolific in so many different genres and styles of art and produce such a titanic volume of each. For another thing, this is refuted numerous times in this text when we assert that the separate color-coded sections are the work of four separate authors. The four voices which compose the book which is the Protocol include Septimus (of course), my 188
own long-winded commentaries on his reprinted fragments, the commentaries on his and my commentaries added by the Denizens, and a fourth voice we will discuss later.) The fifth veil: TGOF was written in a 1 st – person / 3rd person (ambiguous) voice. Although the main character Sachmo clearly writes as “I”, and it may appear that this is persistent across the novel, that is not the case. In truth, while writing the novel, the author was unsatisfied with the ,limitatiomn of either 1 st or 3rd. So the ambiguous voice method was created, in which the main character was used as an “I” and never refers to himself as a 3 rd person, but his personality was designed to fascilitate his “I” voice easily transitioning to 3 rd omniscient. Think about it. Sachmo was a quiet, shy, keenly observant wallflower, and an amateur journalist with a notebook. His main function as a character is to remain present throughput the action but participate minimally, feel it through a melancholy and somber emotionality, and record it objectively, and therefor when the author of TGOF felt like using the omniscient voice, he simply switched to that, but simply remembered 1) not refer to Sachmo in the 3 rd person (which would contradict the “I” of his self-observations in 1st-person mode) or 2) describe things Sachmo could have no knowledge of, which would contradict the 1 st-person mode, and then and later simply pretend that all the omniscient sections of the text were in fact journalistic particip[ant-observation notes recorded in Sachmo’s ever-present journal. The character was designed to always clutch his journal as a security blanket for a reason! The Big gimmick: For example, let’s say the author was interested in describing Spacepants brushing her hair. He would do this in the 3 rd omniscient for a page, then later insert one sentence mentioning how Sachmo was present (“I walked in on Spacepants brushing her hair…) For this reason, Sachmo is a neccesarily “empty” character, almnst a half-charactyer. There is smethign flat and bland about him. That is because if he had an intense or unique personality or a ntoicable accent or odd style of grammer, that would either show through and make the 3 rd-person sections seem invalid because tainted with a specific chaaracter’s personality. In a way, the character is like a ghost- when the 3rd omniscienty feels like switching to 1st, it is as if the Omniscient voice delves down into the specifics, and embodies this one character, then speaks with his voice. However, it does this unoticably. That is not the case with TGOF 2- it is very clear exactly when the switch happens becaure it is reflected in the font and color-scheme. In TGOF 2 it is as igf the Objective, Omniscvient voice’s ability to embody Sachmo was multiplied. In TGOF 2, it can and does embdy EACH of the new set of characters! That means some sections are written from Mosach’s perspective in the “I”, but some are written from Mox’s, Leena’s etc. This allows us to get deeper into the heads of each, and hopefully reveal them more intimately than TGOF. this is not Omniscient voice of TGOF 2!!! The book leans much, much further to a strictly o (futurist, so this omniscient narratyor voice is far more sci-fi genre oriented than TGOF. with some fantasy elements, makes commentary through Classes literary technique connecting past + future Manervas. Manerva Academy was built on the same ground as Manerva University an unspecified time in the distant future. What is known in the future history books is incomplete, sometimes ambiguous, and sometimes incorrect. Through mystical “time-travel” the new set of characters can witness (but not interact with) their forefathers and foremothers. This involves going to geographicvally analogous lcations on the Timeline (above or below surface of the future earth. This technique gives us an excuse to explore the links between special places in the geographical territoty of both worlds, show their connections, and flesh out the emerging multi-era maps wghich will be present6 as illustrations ala Lord of the Rings, and such fantasy 189
novels. There is speculation of bloodlines. They find they match Archetypally with their foreparents and thus learn the Archetypes that the original characters were meant to embody, learning deeply who they truly are. The Psychology classes use the earlier set of characters to analyse them using Protocol theory. The histyory classes use a futurist-lens to look back and reevaluate events in TGOF as well as describe events and storylines not described the first time. At the same time, the voice of the future omniscient narrator is different from that of TGOF. . There is no supposed fifth “meta-identity” who created and speaks through the four. That is why such a person would be called the Theoretical Grand Omniscient Author. If there was such a person there is certainly no record of their existence. We could theorize that he or she concealed themselves such that we would never know of their existence.
~ Now, if you will indulge us in a puzzle, kindly take a moment to examine the previous sentence with us as an illustration of certain intentional ambiguities in the narration within the Oysterbar. You will find the phrase “my own long-winded commentaries”. Now, how can the narrator use the word “my own” if we just determined the voice is that of “We”. The answer will not please you if you are hoping for simplicity. The real answer is that no one knows exactly. It’s ambiguous. It’s provocative. The “I” who speaks now is the person who types in 12-point Times New Roman font, and he is a real person, a single historical individual. He doesn’t happen to ever offer his true name, and there is found nowhere a record of this. But we might as well call him “Devin” after the namesake of the bench where he began his commentary writing in earnest. Is Dork Stork Oysterbar Devin’s fantasy colleagues when he imagines himself a crucial member of an exotic an inscrutable cult? The only answer is “Perhaps”. Perhaps when you find the word “We”, that could just as well be the true and actual entity. The supposed historical personae and long-winded author “Devin” may just as well be a fictional character of the true and actually existent literary collective. In the same manner, there is a provocative, intentional ambiguity in our novel because much of the novel is written in a style indistinguishable from third-person omniscience- an all-knowing fly on the wall consciousness (Third-person Omniscient Author Perspective A.) that can discuss events in the story from the outside, including Sachmo. That is, from this perspective Sachmo is but one of the characters who can be described from the outside. But these pages turn with turning words and puzzlespeak and eloquent dimensionality. In otherwords the slippery and ambiguouse perspectival system accommodates multitudes of literary perspectives which “we” are unwilling to discard. If we contained ourselves to Thirdperson Omniscience we would be unable to describe Sachmo’s journey as seen through “I”. However this omniscient author happens to be not an omniscient fly-on-the-wall, but rather a wallflower or timid mouse of a character who often is just as detached and removed from the action as a timid mouse, quietly recording scribbles of blue ink in his journalists’ journals. Is tGOF written in third-person or first? Well, if you were to believe Sachmo it is written in first-person. If you were to ask the authors of the GOF2, they would say that it was they who wrote TGOF all along, and that Sachmo is but one of their characters. The omniscient 190
perspective takes over for TGOF2, but an echo, a remnant, a certain flavor or scent clings to the omniscience. We can imagine Sachmo’s ghost, if you will, ever so subtly coloring the omniscient voice, and reappearing to animate or posses that voice from time to time, and thus TGOF2 dips and delves into first-person perspective as TGOF did in its ambiguity between 3 rd person omniscience and first-person perspective, but with extra splendor and, we hope, exquisitely eloquent and textural textuality with added sensual literary dimensionality. To accomplish this, the ambitious plan is for the Grand Omniscient Theoretical Narrator to delve not merely into Sachmo’s future counterpart Mosach, but into EACH main character: Mosach, Mox, Sparkpatz, Leena, Rauld Lonkee, Kristy, Hakuin, etc. TGOF2 is sci-fi and basically rips off Starfleet Acadamy- a similarly positive future. One you’d be happy to see become real. A heartwarming hope for earth and thus a heart which survives. To save the world for revemge always seemed a fine motive to me. And not only is this future embued with it’s own Mr. Kite counterpart the Magical GraveRobbing Fox Hakuin (he robs graves to retrieve and smuggle scroll artifacts for the Courrier family. The Acadamy studies Protocol Theory. The main characters are taking a series of classes which teach Protocol Theory by analyzing the historical lives of the 7 old main characters, and analyzing their Personhoods through the study of their lives. In the course of this education, the 7 future characters realize something mystical and paranormal is going on, similar to ye old Writhing Language. But this time, it is the characters’ realizations that these old historical “heroes” mirror themselves in impissiblly sychncronistic,. Magical ways- proving that they are some kind of Archetypal Reamergemnce of the same pattern of seven golden children calling dwmn the thunder of a Holy Man and Sacred Book. They uncover a sacxred book (written secretly by Hakuin, who is not missing but never found) which allows them to time-travel through portals more or less back in time to witness (ut not interact with) the original characters, thus allowing us to re-live endlessly the intracacy’s and momebnts of the original character’s lives, but with endless bifurcations depending on the version of history taught in the future classes (with its mistakes) or the true events which happened, witnessed magically by the future versions of the main charecters. In fact alternate timeline bifurcations culd be taught in the future classes, such as Sachmo’s rumred “suicicide” or his eventual re-emergence, discovered to have fakled his death. The history lesson that Sachmo commited suicide is discovered false via time-travel. This is not exactly a book in a series, because the books it fits along with are each very different and they are not sequential whatsoever- in fact this one you are reading fits more in the middle of the first group of books rather than after them. We will finally reveal the literary context of this book amongst others of a series linked by the publishing company or literary community that is Dork Stork Oysterbar.and explore just what the history and intent of the entity. (A literal, non-fiction interpretation of the events of TGOF, is a sub-veil for those who need this approach. It is the veil of steel, oned of the twm subhhveils of the 2nd veil. (The other is burlap, purple r fictional / devotional / paranormal / occult-oriented, mystic, art, and fiction-oriented sub-veil of burlap is represented by cult mythos. .a certain veil. In this version Mr. Kite was a schizophrtenic delusion or “alter-ego” invented by Sachmo to interpret his trauma + traumatic brain injury induced-vision. Hence “Mr. Kite” is missing, does not exist. 1) Entirely Fiction , a product. Veil of steel. 2) Based on truth with valid implications (mr. kite did not exist, no aliens, 191
but still sacred book with implications for humnanity, or Veil ofm burlap/ purple - Fiction (aliens, entities, writhijntg language, mythology (inkling necessary to enter the story)- would like you to believe this and interpret it as mre real than “science” or “real life”. It is turning life to myth. OR would like you to believe these stories are the entertainment half of an otherwise legitimate metaphysical document. (2 and 3 are reversible depending on which is perceived as the outer and which is the deeper hidden truth, some will differ on this, but Primariyt fiction based on non- or non- based on fiction. 3) Protocol, central, veil of silk. 4) Fragments of Septimus, pearl. 5) TGOF2, outer shell looking inward through both from future. Veil of Space. This outermost shell of the Faebrege novel is literally TGOF in “space”. This is a space of classes on Protocol Theory at Manerva Acadamy where the future Mr. Kite, a magical neon fox, works as the academy gravedigger. (His true mission is to smuggle scroll artifacts as through a network of sarcophagi). The professors of the future use holography to demonstrate Protocol Theory with the “charfacters” from TGOF as sign ificant historical figures, as the book did turn out to produce a utopia. They show the configurations of each soul and show dramas as interplay of TheC lays, etc. All thrugh Holography, glovds fg light, new visual language, The Synesthesia wand, etc. The extra-curricular activities of the FUTURE 7 characters are far more cmical, absurdist, and vulgar than the tone of the original, but the future versions find they are re-incarnations in some paranormal way of their mirror past versions. They can witness the true past not taught in the classes but not interact with their telepathic visions. This power called is analogous to the writhing language. They collectively discover the true histries stretching back to Septimus ahnd the archetypes bein g replayed for ther third time. They discover the “Story Arch” of the three holy men- Septimus, Mr. Kite, and thus they predict Hakuin, who has long since been the narrator of many chapters. They kokingly go on a “fox hunt” to find the mysterious acadamy gravedigger. This is the veil of Fog. There is a non-literal veil which is deeper! (in this Mr. Kite is holy, the crew is alien / paranormal (or “as-good-as”) and the sacredness is Fated, proved later in TGOF2, which incorporates The Protocol [pearl of wisdom, innermost veil, within center of original epic]
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~ [Insert Foreshadowing of Romance/ Detective Nove aspect of TGOF2: the way of the unrequited, love as integral, erotica appendix, weeping willows + Fireflies, sidewalk chaulk girls, demonwinter and Mr. Kite romance tales…. “the need for Caulk”, “sad frog days at the joy hotel”, “bustin”, “Anti-Kleins”, “Say my Goodbyes to Demonwinter”, etc]
~ Now let us soothe and indulge those of you who cannot resist the lure of the detective story of who some theoretical single author might be, so that we can sate their curiosity. If we can forgive them for their detective’s spirit, then let us comfort them and pacify them with a fairytale. Let’s spin a yarn. Then they can have done with their distractions now, and may be included, a hair’s breadth before we are to begin our Work in earnest…. As you should be well assured by now, we have not asked for your trust in vain. We so wish you to believe this, NOW, here in the introductions, BEFORE we get started with the actual metaphysics. This is truly important to us because we ask a sacrifice, and before the gift. Soon you will have to “roll up your plaid flannel sleeves” and don your work gloves and thinking hat. The mindset of trust and openness to what we offer is much to ask, especially because by now it is no secret we speak in riddles. Who but a fool would trust a snake oil salesman who speaks in forked tongues? We hope you are that royal fool but we mean you no harm- forked tongues speak only half lies and we speak in many tongues, and not all snakeoil or frog venom is fake medicine. Still, how to prove this? The sacrifice we expect from any who intrude further must be made before the gift. But we can offer you a sacrifice of our own as bait. You may not know us well enough to know that personal disclosures regarding even an ambiguous supposed “Single Author” are excruciating. This is because the literary commune ism incompatible with it. Yet still, the name which occurs on the cover of the physical copy of this book exists as a concept if not a pseudonym of the literary commune itself as they would claim. He may claim he is the true and “Omniscient Single Author” of all these texts before you, but that is, in a word, “absurd”. He in fact is the non-existent pseudonym of the literary commune which is responsible for the book you are currently reading. …. But remember that fact written by a different holy man from the protagonist of the novel, from a different time. In fact, there is a kind of Past Buddha, Present Buddha, and Future Buddha, who happens to be a neon fox. Yes the future Buddha happens to be a neon fox- one 193
whose hairs were lit up like L.E.D. light rave toys [L.E.D. technology, raves were:… -bleu]
~ And now, why not resurrect an old character from another time and other pages? Who’s to stop us? Just for a bit. For nostalgia. And perhaps to cunningly foreshadow here a monstrosity to come… Some of you might recall a rather melancholy, softspoken young man with the heart of a poet and journal in hand. His name was Sachmo. It turned out that His adventures are far from over and you can soon meet him and all his friends (well, versions of them from the future), in a book called The Garden of Flowers 2: Return to Moss Hollow, Further Shamanic Tales of romance and adventure. But for now, let’s take a rare glimpse into Sachmo’s Origen Story…
A PROTOCOL FABLE: SACHMO’S ORIGON STORY PART ONE: “Dawn of a Journalist” So let us imagine a boy who loved to write. He was never happier than when he was scribbling away in his notebooks. He took his pens and journals with him wherever he went, and he was happiest when he was alone with them. In the end the reasons why this boy was so obsessed with his pens and journals do not really matter. Or maybe they do. But they are in fact too sad for those who liked the stories he wrote to want them to be remembered for those reasons. There are things so very much better left unsaid. But if you must know, Sachmo was a survivor of torture before he was five. His father was insane, and a sadist. He isolated and terrorized Sachmo and his mother. For example, he punished them with electricity from a car battery in his garage. Yes, such things really happen. These are memories Sachmo would never speak of to another person during his lifetime. He didn’t want their pity. But so it goes and now you know why his heart will be forever blue. 194
Some wounds never heal, but as an adult Sachmo did not allow his trauma to define him. Somehow, impossibly, he found a way for his heart to survive until he escaped his personal war. What Sachmoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heart wished all along, of course, was to freeze and die. But it did not. Sachmo would not allow that. It became a sad heart in a permanent way, yet he was to become the most heartfelt and warm of men. How could this be? He found a way, an almost miraculous way, to harbor and protect his heart until he was finally free and safe. Here is how he did itOne night Sachmo had a most vivid and special dream which changed him. We will return to that later. For now, just know Sachmoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trauma lead to a kind of schism or split in his psyche which made him feel so very separate from reality and other humans. These feelings grew deeper throughout his abuse until they culminated that night. Something snapped and triggered some ferociously powerful defense mechanism of the mind. His feeling of separation from reality and other humans had grown deeper as his pain did, until the dream snapped this feeling into place like a permanent lock, to protect him. The separation became absolute. He was safe. He awoke amused to find he had ceased considering himself as a person entirely. It was easier, safer, to accept himself as an alien, a thing, a solitary glitch in the software of reality rather than a person. You may be interested to know that Sachmoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reappearance here is not entirely a marketing gimmick for the 10,000 page sequel novel to The Garden of Flowers in progress which we promise you now. It is that, but his trials are not unrelated to the subject of our current study. You may be interested to learn that Sachmo had a natural but very weak predilection for the Blessed Curse and was an Intuitive himself, although of a kind we call a mild or Dim Intuitive, having only a mere hint of the gift. Although he did not have any idea what it was, The P rotocol entered his life. For Sachmo the Protocol came not like a metaphysics textbook, but simply a vague, pleasant feeling which came to him from time to time, a feeling that something otherworldly and immense was calling him to greater things than victimhood. This thing is what Septimus named The Spire, though Sachmo certainly never saw It or even thought of It in any way. When its shadow passed over him he felt he had a purpose worth living for, and a 195
hope that there was a way out. As a Dim Intuitive who felt no duty to train himself to improve his grasp and he was without much desire or potential to become an Empath in any way he might have understood. He experienced the Protocol not as thought but felt It as a mysterious way to define and understand humans from the outside, a method to appear as one of them and function as they do. It challenged him to retreat to near-infinite and near-irretrievable depths of isolation, but at the same time It offered a bridge to cross the deep chasm which separated him from others of his species. And so he followed Its call and walked amongst the humans and appeared to them as one, while being secretly a chameleon-object, a were-thing. As he grew he achieved extremely high levels of functionality in society for someone as fundamentally damaged as he was, without ever fully believing himself a person. Sachmo’s trauma was formative but there were other factors in his development as well, some perhaps genetic and some quite literally accidental. One accident, we might mention with a selfdisclosure of a rarity you will find in these pages only TWICE, was a concussion after a car accident when he was 16, and a period of minor seizures which followed. In those strange months he clung to The Protocol, long before it had a name, as the coping mechanism to understand and communicate with humans. Though he was unable to perceive it, he felt himself and others as The Spire. It was his only chance to bridge the immense chasm separating him from everyone else. At first he felt this bridge was feeble and somewhat pitiable, something others did not need. But along the way something amazing happened. His one stroke of good luck! In the development of this coping mechanism he happened to strike on certain elements of universality in how all humans are “constructed”. In moments of unsurpassable joy, he glimpsed (intuitively, empathically) the abstract form or scaffolding upon which individual human personhood grows. This universal framework came as a blueprint for what humans were meant to be, or what they may become. With the “rainbow stained glass scaffolding” came the sense of an immense, titanic, monolithic ethical imperative. Later he learned that to share The Spire was his mission, quest, his primary business in this life, the reason he was born and his goal to race toward and achieve before 196
death, fate willing. And he never saw It once.
~
PART TWO “How the Elevator Made Him a Shaman” And here is the story of how when Sachmo was very young, barely more than a handful of years old, he had a dream which set in stone the course of his entire life. He dreamed he was standing in an elevator. But instead of buttons for the series of floors in a building there was a window. Behind the window he could see something he was sure no one had ever seen before. It was far, far more real than the “real” world, and it was what was behind the real world, how the world was made. He saw very clearly, incredibly vividly, a universe of “buttons”. But they were not buttons. They were souls. The problem with trying to explain Sachmo’s dream is that there is absolutely no way to convey how large this universe of button-souls was. Nomatter how much you may stretch your imagination, picturing all the grains of sand on earth or all the stars in the sky, it will forever be impossible. Each button was an infinitesimal point, or perhaps each was a single digit amongst all the numbers that can exist. There was a feeling in his heart and his gut that also can never be conveyed, for none before or after him had ever seen through the window. It was something like pure, overwhelming, absolute astonishment and the most massive dread anyone has ever or ever will feel. The immensity was terrifying beyond terror, but so was the astonishment and the knowledge that he, a mere child of 5 or 6, was being given the single, ultimate secret, and also an opportunity. The terror very nearly killed him in his sleep that night, but within the terror was also a fragile, tiny wisp of gratitude. He was to remember and honor this small gratitude and carry it within his heart until his last days. Because for one moment, the window was opened and he alone was allowed to push one button. 197
It did not originally appear to him as digital code. Rather, it appeared that each “slot” in the titanic grid was potentially “filled” with a soul, with each being either on or off, depending on whether that soul was alive or dead. The points of light were not static but blinking lit for an instant which was an entire unique lifetime, or dark for an eternity before it was lit for that instant, and an eternity after the soul blinked out. Quaintly, the view was not unlike “Light Brite” [pop cult’ ref’ –blue] Now, Sachmo was only allowed to push one specific buttonhis own. He knew without a doubt in his young bones that he alone could make the decision to do this, and in some mysterious way he also knew in his bones what was at stake, what rested on his shoulders. It would be his greatest sacrifice and at the same time his greatest victory. To do this would change everything. Not merely for his own life, but for EVERY. THING. EVER. He always felt so humbled and honored that the choice was his ownnot forced or even favored by any cosmic force or fate or anything else. If there were such things, they were ambivalent, although very curious of the outcome. It was his own choice, and it was a hard decision, but to his credit it was really not that hard after all. He only had to consider it for a few moments, and though he feared for his life to reach through the window, he understood and did not fear the result, and he never once regretted his decision. He reached through the window, and… Well, before we reveal his decision (though you may well suspect the answer) we should explain what Sachmo somehow knew of how this would change his own life, and we should explain just how and why it would change everything else forever. We hate to speak of this moment in such dark terms, but there is no way around it- to select and push his own button was very much like suicide. It certainly involved as great a sacrifice. In fact a much greater sacrifice than this. But it was a special kind of suicide that would not end his life so much as change it in just as drastic a way as dying. It certainly felt like dying, or being born. As we said, like lightbright, a peg was either in its proper place in the grid or not, either lit brightly or completely dark. Lit pegs flashed on for instants which were lifetimes, like the number one, and bookended by endless dark before and after the blink like zeroes. There was no 198
inbetween, no dim lights- death was final and life was in its so temporary way also final, or complete. It was not hard to locate his specific digit. It was familiar to him, although infinitesimal and nestled in the infinite. As he saw it, lit up at that moment, he felt the contrast of how small it was compared to the entire grid, and it was dizzying and incomprehensible how one touch of his finger would alter the universe of souls. But that is just what it would do. He considered the change in his own life, the sacrifice and victory, then considered the change in everything, and if this would be a good change, and made his decision, which was… Well, first- just how could one single digit alter the universe? This is a very reasonable question, and the answer is as reasonable as math. Each point was either fully on or off, either a one or a zero, but in the constantly blinking, shifting pattern of the entirety, the full carnival of humanity or any other soul-bearing things played out with all the subtlelty, paradoxes, flavor, and mystery that reality was made for. And these patterns of the entirety were beautiful and meant to be, as a sunflower is. Individual lives have free will and could play out in any of all the ways they do, but none could ever change the fated patterns of the whole. Until Sachmo’s dream that night. And here is how: Reality works similarly to a DVD. The soul-slots are like the ones and zeroes of the binary code which through miraculous alchemy produces all the colors, shapes, sound, and most importantly story of the movie. [dvd’s were one of the last forms of physical media before…. –blue] Now, when a dvd is scratched it malfunctions. The moments in the film produced by the part of the digital code located where yourDVD was scratched are altered. Perhaps halfway through the movie the scratch causes the film to pause the action and become stuck, or causes the sequential order of the frames in that scene to play randomly, stutter sporadically, and rapidly toggle forward and backwards. Perhaps the image begins to glitch and a characters’ face in a close-up scene slows and clunkily deconstructs into a jumble of visual chaos and interrupts the flow of the viewing experience. In Sachmo’s dream, pushing his soul-button was like scratching the 199
binary soul-code which “plays” reality, or rather using a needle to poke the single digit of code which was his own, which switched it to its opposite. He could either switch his from lit to dark or dark to lit, butit was irrelevant which. Either would have produced the same result, and he forgot which one he did. The point was not that he needed to be alive or dead, but that his digit needed to be reversed from whatever the larger pattern expected of him, out of place in the system. Movies, like all stories including life, only work through suspension of disbelief. To follow and enjoy the story we need to become immersed in the drama. If it was a good movie you forgot your own troubles and the fact that it was a movie at all, being drawn instead instead into the characters’ lives. Until the glitch. The suspension bridge of disbelief snapped and you were rudely awoken from your immersion. But though the malfunctionmay have swiftly ended your tenuous balance across the chasm of entertainment,it also gave you a peek behind the scenes into the mechanics of how the dvd actually works. In certain rare circumstances such things can happen to your own life, as it did for Sachmo. Yes, of course he pushed the button, and nothing has ever been the same. Similarly to howthe glitch caused the action of the film to pause, Sachmo was released from the calender. Like when the frames toggled forward and backward that he learned the ambiguoity of time. When the glitch caused the hero’s face to deconstruct into a random jumble of pixels you saw the pixels themselves rather than the image they create. In precisely the same way Sachmo saw with his own eyes how reality is constructed of soul-pixels. But to be allowed to witness this he had to volunteer to become the solitary glitch himself. Let’s describe in more detail what it is like to behold the CosmicGlitch. Instead of the long scratch across your dvd which altered thousands upon thousands of digits of code and produced a very distracting mess, Sachmo was only able to alter his own single digit. In your viewing experience this would be analogouse to a needle poking a single digit of code resulting in one single pixel on the screen being the wrong color. Imagine in a single frame of the movie the hero was wearing a green shirt, and one single point on the shirt flashed red for that instant and then back to green. Due to 200
that one accident, that single infinitesimal point making the only mistake amongst its billions of peers, you were shown that the entire green shirt and in thefact endless complex patterns of vision and sound and story was not “real” after all but in fact produced by rows of infinitesimal points in a grid which have the ability to shine with any color of the rainbow at any time. If a single point is the wrong color for one instant in a movie, or if one soul-slot in the universal grid is filled incorrectly,you might imagine that smallest of possible mistakesto be irrelevant in the big picture and most deserving of forgiveness.But this mistake brings down the whole damn house of cards, because it was all that was required for proof of concept. As you were shown by one peculiar pixel that the whole story and all possible stories was made from them, Sachmo saw that all reality itself was made from souls. This kind of non-lethal soul-suicide shifted Sachmo’s interpretation of Personhood to the Geometrically Analogous World, which is not the Universal Grid itself but is another world like ours which the grid also constructs, or rather they are two ways of perceiving the same secondary world. Sachmo was able to swim upstream to the source river, the root grid which branches into our “real” world as well as Geometric Otherspace. He was retroactively born into both worlds simultaneously, living the exact same life in both as we all do (for the two worlds are but different ways of percieving the grid playing itself), but with a new perfect balance favoring neither side, which humans were not designed to achieve. You might ask how Sachmo’s new superhuman balance between the sides was possible if he had only Dim Intuitive awareness of Shapespace? That is because it is not one’s degree of explicit awareness of the brain’s Other Eye perceiving the“far” side which determines the how vividly the Other Eye sees or how one’s total being is split betweenthe two realms. The Other Eye may be blind or like a hawk’s depending on how much of one’s total being’s weight rests their, not how much conscious access one side has to the other. It sees with us or without us.Sachmo’s could not perceive the Geometrically Analagous World visually or know it conceptionally, but after his pilgramige to the root grid upstream and his re-birth and re-distribution between sides his heart no longer felt one world as home and the other as a strange, rumored 201
foreign land the way almost all of us do, if we feel it at all. Sachmoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Grasp was but an inkling that came and went, but an inkling of what he felt so longingly as his home afar. His home. Sachmoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first pilgramige to the far placefelt very much like the decision to commit suicide, but also like resurrection. It was like choosing to be dead, unborn or erased, annihilated like he never existed, but in some impossible way to do this while he was still alive. As the shamans of old used power plants, chant, and trance to enter the world of the dead and speak with the souls of their ancestors, Sachmo used the elevator to enter the world of the dead and since then, like a good shaman, he kept one foot in both worlds.But of course the Universal Grid and the Otherplace of Shapes are not really spooky realms where skeletons rattle and ghosts of lives lost pine. They are not where we or our lost loved ones go when they die, but it seems so because we miss them so and cannot let go, and are afraid to go ourselves, and because we mistake the timelessness of those places for an afterwards heaven forever, and because it is so strange a place and so far from us that to travel there feels like dying. Or that dying and being born had reversed themselves and traded places, or some paradox like this which makesno sense and calls attention to itself amongst the entire grid. In perfect order, nomatter how cosmically vast, even the smallest possible mistake is glaring, and larger things take note. When Sachmo chose to become the Solitary Glitch, he knew he was announcing himself to the Universe, that it heard him loud and clear, and that there would be repreccussions. As towards a homing beacon things peered in. He knew he would not need to try to do anything special in his life, or fight any battles other than healing himself from the one he was born into, or accomplishany great deed besides simply sincerely being himself, but he knew that his life would be crucial, and necessary on a scale too large for any person to comprehend, and that he would be remembered. He had already changed the outcome of the story.This was a cosmic spotlight he found glaring, and a heavy burdon. He accepted it but took steps to assure his legacy would be recognized only after his death, for despite his unique role and purpose, he was very shy. Just a wallflower, really.
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~ Formal Introduction We do not know exactly when the time we must call “your” present was. You have to understand that it can be difficult or impossible for us to verify facts which may be obvious and familiar to you. We know that something amazing happened or will happen in your lifetime. We know that this happened during a cataclysmic global cultural upheaval process in which the society of earth changed completely. Things are much different now. Some believe the event happened on an unknown date in 1993. Some believe it occurred on December 21, 2012, at exactly 11:11 am. These are the two main schools of thought. Others still define one or the other of these times to be merely Consummation, beginning of the Pregnancy Stage anticipating the actual change, in their models theorized to birth up to hundreds of years later. However, our Courier Family found ourselves in possession of evidence which lead us to our own predictions of the past. We were long ago entrusted with ancient manuscripts written by a man named Devin Hinderlie, a Courier of the Lineage who lived around your time. Not one of our best men, to say the least, but the most entertaining and funniest to read I think. Hinderlie was an extremely prolific author in addition to a Courier and his scroll analysis and commentaries were preserved and passed down through the ages as precious artifacts ancillary to the remaining Fragments of Septimus themselves. His commentaries on the scrolls form the basis of almost all that we know historically about your time period. We have estimated that your remaining Beforehand in relative comfort and safety as you know it will last no more than five to seven years. Of course, we may be wrong, and hope we are. There is some possibility that this change, the cultural shift slang that has affectionately been named “pop” (as in “pre-pop” and “post-pop”), has already happened a decade or two before you are reading this, or up to two hundred years after you, but our best theory is that you still have roughly five to seven years to prepare. In other words, beginning now, it is in fact a race. Humanity has very luckily for now been given a swiftly vanishing window of opportunity and a looming deadline in which to collectively pass through the The Gate with decency and peace. That is all we seek. You have a duty and a chance to do this the right way- with a skill we call Fluency. We are advocates of the Fluent Model of the change. As Couriers we believe that it is only through language, through Fluency in a new language that you can Immanentize, and it is only by the eloquence you can muster in the 203
emerging language that your kind can survive. All Couriers have vowed this in their initiation ceremony, there is no alternative method. If you can begin to name things again and explain how future things should occur, and if you can convince your peers to take that course while still in the beforehand, you can pass through with decency and peace. If you cannot, you perish. Regardless, take solace in our eventual victory even if you do not live to see it, and take solace in those who are after time and all over- the lucky ones, your true “we”. Since the process is inevitable, nomatter which bifurcations will occur in your lifetime you can ultimately surrender happily to fate. but it is still in your power to influence how streamlined or turbulent the process will be, as well as how long it will take. Though it is inevitable, it can be either elegant, ecstatic, and brief, or turbulent, immensely painful, and tragically long. It is very, very sadly true that in some possible timeline bifurcations, you and your friends and loved ones could soon burn in war and the earth could endure thousands of years of horror during an excruciating change. There are many theories, but it is considered impossible to verify which kind of change happened or when. There is much that will remain ambiguous and permanently irretrievable to us. This is because we lost your ability to interpret and record history sequentially as we gained other skills. We came to use time differently. As we said, things are very different now. So, if we are lucky or clever enough or if any one of you can do this somehow, we could guide the inevitable change in such a way that the very apparently impending planetary horrors will be averted. This is your mission and your game. But always be cavalier about the results. If it all goes to hell as it may well, then die as sisters and brothers who tried to save the world when you had the chance. Let it be known that at least you tried. Promise me that at least someone tried.
~ Field Journal, Entry #1: Apparently, it is for Devin Hinderlie I love, laugh, and dance. At least that is what “we” will do in loving memory of him, according to the dedication on the memorial plaque on the bench on which I sit, atop a fine hill, overlooking the lowly scum of the earth of my town. I have learned that it is not good to interact with the people until I have climbed at least a decent hill on good days or a mountain on bad ones, which is why I flee to the lonely places in the morning before speaking one word. Not for enlightenment, but out of politeness. Otherwise the people can tell what I am. They will sense it even without noticing it. Of course, none will know I am a Courier of the Lineage or what that means, but they will tend to smell I am different- a loner, a stranger, and they will mistrust me. Perhaps for good reason, but that does no good for me. This is my ritual, and it has served me well: It begins with half a silver thermos of hot, strong, bitter black coffee upon waking (or 100 mg of caffeine dissolved in a gallon of coconut water to sip slow for lazy days), then the uphill hike to remind my blood it is not mud, then the second half of the dark potion and silence for a moment or many on the chosen throne of my 204
stomping grounds, which is wherever I choose to lounge. Then I break out the small, wilted and weathered scroll chosen randomly from my wretched rats’ nest of hundreds the night before, unceremoniously slit the drawstring with my blade, read the fucker, and record my commentary according to custom, offering any expertise I may have due to my near-lifelong familiarity with the damn little beasts. We are to record any unique insights for posterity, to collect and include these as ancillary to the scrolls as a kind of ceremonial gift or rather customary gesture of apology to the next of the Lineage. My expertise is nearly lifelong, and as of yet my insights are none. Not sure if just anyone who sits on the bench is allowed to be included in the “we” of “for you we love, laugh, etc.”, yet I simply chose it so. Not many know they have the power to choose their proper “We” at any time. If there is nothing else to win in this grim life, then it is to decide, to choose a valid “We” that will follow you around people and without them. Then you will not die alone. I pondered it and decided the bench was actually a shrine of the Cult of Devin, and any demigod who asked these three things of his followers- to love, laugh, and dance, and nothing more, was one deserving of my worship. I declare myself an initiate of Devin, sworn to laugh. His other disciples can fulfill the remaining two commands. And so I took Devin’s name as my own. But then a purple stormcloud brewing in the horizon seemed to cast a shadow on my mood and I began to doubt, and muse. Solemnly, stoically. My new faith wavered. I realized “Devin” may simply be the local name of my Old God himself, Dionysus, testing my loyalty. The same Gods are known by many names to travelers. Or, as it dawned on me dreadfully, perhaps I had even fallen into the trap of a Master Ruseman, and had just unwittingly sworn myself to my arch nemesis, Poseidon. Damn him. No, this is madness! My true God is Septimus. No, I take that back. Septimus always demanded he never be worshipped, merely transcribed. It is true- I am tempted by Strange gods often, it is my weakness. But always I crawl back to Septimus like a dog to its own vomit. Or like a scorned lover, crawling back on their knees, disgraced. But I digress. I have transcribing to do…
APPENDIX I: THE FRAGMENTS OF SEPTIMUS Introduction
THE FOLLOWING INSCRUTABLE SCRAWLINGS ARE ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE WITHERED, WILTED, BRITTLE SCRAPS OF FIBROUS PAPYRUS SCROLLS, AND ARTIFACTS OF PRICELESS VALUE. THE HISTORIC VALUE OF THESE FRAGMENTS IS TRULY INCALCULABLE, BOTH AS LEGENDARY, ESOTERIC, SACRED ANCIENT MYSTICAL ARTIFACTS OF PAST HISTORY AND AS CRYPTIC CLUES TO ACT AS KEYS TO UNLOCK THE COMPLETION OF THE PROJECT OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION, AND THE ONLY KEY TO THE VERY 205
EXISTENCE OF FUTURE HUMAN CIVILIZATION ITSELF. THE COMPLETION OF THE PROJECT OF OUR SPECIES AND THE VICTORY OF OUR PLANET’S PURPOSE BY MEANS OF THESE FRAGMENTS IS THE ONLY CHANCE OF THE SURVIVAL OF THE PROJECT. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY BUT FORWARD, BUT THE KEY IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT TRANSCRIPTION, TRANSLATION, AND INTERPRETATION. THIS IS WHY THE FOLLOWING FRAGMENTS ARE KNOWN AS THE “RAW” PROTOCOL, AND WHY DEVIN HINDERLIE, A SCRIBE FOR THE AGES AND OUR HOPEFUL LOCKSMITH, IS AWAITED. THESE FRAGMENTS ARE PRESENTED NOW, WITHOUT DEVIN’S COMMENTARY TO COME, WHICH WILL BE ADDED AS AN APPENDIX IN A FUTURE EDITION OF THE PROTOCOL, UPON THE PUBLICATION OF WHICH ALL SHALL BE MADE CLEAR. TRUST THAT DEVIN HINDERLIE, A LIVING MODERN GRANDMASTER CURRIOR OF THE LINEAGE, IS TRANSCRIBING BY LANTERN LIGHT EVEN NOW, IN A SILENT PLACE OF GREAT PEACE. HIS TRANSCRIPTION, TRANSLATION, AND INTERPRETATION OF THE FRAGMENTS IS EAGERLY ANTICIPATED BY THE FUTURE HISTORIANS CALLED THE DENIZENS OF ESCHATON, AND ARE SURE TO SHINE THE NECESSARY FURTHER MISSING FREQUENCIES OF LIGHT IN THE FULL SPECTRUM REQUIRED TO ILLUMINATE THE AS-YET INSCRUTABLE CENTRAL CONCEPT HIDDEN WITHIN THE FOLLOWING INSCRUTABLE SCRAWLINGS ON THE SACRED SCRAPS OF THE SCROLLS OF THAT WARM, MAD, HONORED FELLOW FROM THE FROZEN NORTH WE WILL FOREVER FOLLOW, UNKNOWABLE FOR NOW, BUT PRESENTED FOR THE CURIOUS, AS SUGGESTIVE, PROVOCATIVE MYSTERIES INDEED. FOR NOW, BEHOLD- THE “RAW” PROTOCOL: *************************************************************************************
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I.SYMBOLIC GEOMETRY
1-As the peculiarities involved in the gravitational fields of black holes, so too the analogous peculiarities [read: "prophetic gifts" or "mystical arts"] in the "gravitational field" of IDENTITY as it approaches the coagulation of now-symbiosis-waveform.
Symbolic Geometry 2- Describe spiritual phenomenon as fractal processes such as "influx of energy patterns" '"Perpindicular" concepts; what this means. Introduce early in Symbolic Geometry section, very introductory 3-- Perpindicular concepts Early introduction, “Hegalian Dialectic”/ 4- Soulcore Time/Symbiosis (arbitrary now, systems theory + end-in-itself-ness -physical phgenomena with clues to soul/spirit Symbolic geometry 5- Symbolic Geometry. Archetypal Shapes. (good introductory chapter) Symb’. Arch’ 6- It can appear to your “geometric/humanism”- synesthesia faculty, your Archetypal Geometry (this is sometimes called “sacred geometry” amonbgst the new-age crowd)/ Archetypal Psychology/ Synesthetic Faculty as this: [diagram] verticle double-funnel/vortex/open-unknownbeyond tertiary periphgery Arch’ 7- Or [diagram] verrry, very essential to Archetypal Geometric Psyche-synesthesia./ context Arch’ 8- MORE ON LIGHT TO BE REFERENCED IN PREFACE CHAPTER ON ARCHETYPAL SHAPES!! duality caused by 90 degree twist of forces. Mini intro to set the tone of a science lecture but explain how we’re not going to get into depth from a physics perspective, and how physicists will know infinitely more about these certain specific processes we’ll be listening to. The first is the quality of light moving forward and all the processes that that symbolizes. The second is the quality of light being a waveform and all the processes that symbolizes (begin with how if light was a particle, it would appear to be bobbing up and down, and tie this directionality compared to its forward motion as a 90 degree thing, this can be symbolic of 90 degree or perpendicular concepts). Physicists would call this second directionality light generating an electrical field. The third is the magical one (stress how although we are not getting in depth from a physics perspective, we challenge any physicist to explain why this third directionality is generated. You cannot for the same reason that this directionality symbolizes the miracle we are concerned with). This is the quality of light generating a magnetic field and the symbolic miracle of the magnetic field arising in such a way that its poles spiral in a circle that is exactly 90 degrees, perpendicular to its forward motion, producing the symbolic archetypal shape of a double helix. The fact that “particles” of light generate the same shape as your own DNA is not an accident. There is no end to the depths of meditating on this “magical coincidence”. It is not a coincidence at all. To truly know the synchronicity behind this fact in your bones is the greatest affirmation of life. To verify the reasons behind this synchronicity is to win the right to say that your own DNA, your own nature, is solidarity with light. 9- LIGHT AS PARTICLE AND WAVE Harmonics of the waveform being of more interest than forward motion as the significance of music is more important than the string of a violin. In a sense, the forward directionality becomes the prerequisite context for the drama of the second directionality.
[to be reptiles. –Blue]
“Symetrify” reticule/ 11- -spectrum vs. duality -Polarity + Paradox Paradox, periphery shells, natures + things 12- -wholistic vs. partiality Doctrine of Partiality , “oblique splay 13- -To reconcile relationships between forces too far seperated by conceptual spectrum to reconcile. 14- -hippy/earth-goddess/sexuality/ Path/Gate Archetype Polarity 15- On archetypes and subconscious meanings; Archetypes of significance to ouir project 16- Symetry as an ethical concept (wind resistance "ethically or "karmically (aerodynamic" The concept of "streamlined". 9conveyer belt/
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seretonin/ intuitive I.T. interface. Communications Tehc. Ritual entrence. “deserved” “forgiven” [IDEA: “soul-thermo-dynamics” rules magma + ring of turbulence, “soul-hydraulics” rules soulpressure + splay of awareness, “soul-aerodynamics” rules karmic streamlining and double-helix phenomenon. Three soul-sub-sciences invented in one day. 17- Cone implies spectrum. Periphery, 3-tiered 18- The rule of thirds in covalence shells of consciousness periphery- awareness, or focus, can “skip a generation”. The angle of splay of major branches deals mostly with thnality-lifestream. Limited focus when multiple non-symmetrical angles of splay of major branches, vast difficulty in holding too many non-symmetrical bifurcations at once although possibility of intuitive gifts in this skill. Does not apply to me especially, but I remain open to this as a valid avenue of study for some with predilection in this area. Symmetry and “holding” role of axii [no fragment # 19- missing or divide nearby fragment into 2] 20- Vortex 21- We can see a funnel, like this: [illustration] (vanishing point of the spire’s periphery. 22- Begin with the simple linearity of time and coagulation as calling-forth, ritual, organic waveform, karmic resistence and streamlining, satorikarmic cutting (sword, zen) nucleus as passing-through of heart (heart attracted in its symbiosis with swelling) I-am-ness model of soul, oak reflected in dew drop. Heart, ritual. Heart passing through, see diagram in “w.b.” p. 75. scan. 23- hovering receptor of cross-section as ghost-self “nbot within, but will-symetry-ritual (+ Spacepants Dominatrix Funnel, 4 tracking angles of supreme will, navigation without extrapolation easier, lock) 24- -wind-resistence of time vs. outwarding tradjectory = diagonal whisps, thus increases imbeddedness of spire, explain hypothetical removal… temprorality binds. Fractality binds. Both are spectrums we fall somewhere within, again, exceeded in both directions + dismissing common comfort-symetry for larger symmetry is ultimate humbleness requiring death-surrender, paradoxical audacity of shamelessness required. Falling time, binding, fractality 25- -linear concept of time with swelling ritual 26- -Einstein’s theory, Heisenbergs uncertainty principle as metaphors Symbolic Geometry. Archetypal shapes 27- -graVITATION/VORTEX/SINGULARITY -symbiotic waveform diagram… gravitational funnel diagram….. dimensional progression diagram... Spire. Arch’ 28- Standard 3-tiered spectrum (see diagram) -a thing + its nature vs. a thing and its nature, interrelationship as realm or as transition point (Nexus, interrelationship as the explicit thing, reversal of standard covalence-shell pattern so that relationship is explicit and things + their natures are peripheral, intro 29- Funnel Shape. We are plucked out of soul-substance to become personhood. Time is a dimension through which we are plucked, but our experience of and our relationship to Time can pass through a number of distinct stages in a spectrum. Arch’ 30- Symbolic Geometry/ Archetypal Shapes [Fragments # 31-39 missing. Instead of Re-numberinga / all or encorporate missing fragments into mythology] To focus on the relationship between two natures while allowing the natures to become the fuzzy periphery bookending the relationship is a good practice. This attunes one to more complex and delicate interrelationships and allows one to dance through, interpret, and move through interrelationships more fluidly. There is a time to call on the true and real natures of the clays or of things, and there is a time to hold those meetings so professionally that they are ingrained in us and can be forgotten while the relationships between them becomes the object of interest, and even a time when the field of many subtly intersecting relationships itself becomes our object of interest and where we can hold and balance our consciousness. However, a focus on clays or even on the relationships between clays is not what we seek ultimately. After holding the middle ground which fuses clays into various different relationships to eachother, we move on. It is then we seek to Toggle awareness extremely rapidly back and forth between two clays (or any two things) and to attune ourselves to the contrast between them. The contrast is not the same as the relationship. The relationship is a union and a fusing of two things into a field. The field opens into valuable space where new secrets dwell that are not found in the natures of things themselves, but the Contrast is what we seek. It is a s a stroboscopic alternation between two natures that does not fuse them but accentuates all elements in which they oppose eachother, misinterpret eachother, and the ways they cannot be reconciled by either pole alone. Focus on the relationship brings two natures into the openness of a field, but toggling is a magnificent feature of human perception whereby the irreconcilability of the two poles generates a “perpendicular concept”. This may be somewhat related to the stage of synthesis in the Hegalian dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but there are significant differences. The relationship reconciles the poles amicably and brings new secrets of openness and field-perspective; toggling is many orders of magnitude more powerful a skill in comparison. It is closely related to that mysterious eventuality we call the Nexus. It is a precise and (at first) tenuous attunement to the principle of paradoxicality itself. The principle of paradoxically is extremely pregnant and generative, fertile, because the irreconcilability of two poles implies or forces a more encompassing perspective- a wider concept which swallows the entire polarity. B40- Shells of awareness. This pattern applies to many elements of the spire because migration between clays requires this spectrum, and migrations through higher dimensionalities Shells! Migration 41- A thing and its nature/ a thing and its nature. Between them: “middle” or relationship as thing, kindling Things + nature 42- (see diagram) On Things and Natures (write section) Important axioms
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43- -Forward (forms of ritual or lived/experiential/personal vs. chronon Axii, vein 44- 2) The archetypal shape of the vortex and Personhood Arch’ example. spire 45- 5) Symbiotic Waveform and Ritual. Title of its own sub-section. Vein. 46- 3 Makes for a spectrum just 2 poles and an inbetween. Any Real Thing which a true nature can easily lock into place as one polarity in a spectrum or paradoxical magnet when paired with any other. Yet soon complexity abounds. (web/ “mega-pentagram” dream-catcher, interplay of natures. OF NATURES AND THINGS. Natures + things. Shells of periphery. 47- It is the relationship BETWEEN the Clays that is more important than their true natures in themselves. The realm of interrelationship between Clays is in a sense a higher dimension than the realm of Clays as essentially separate. But there is an even higher dimension or a higher spectrum. We are far more concerned withy the realm of interrelationships which compounds and hyperbolizes, a series of contexts. How does this relate to covalence shells of awareness and the periphery of awareness forming 3-tiered shells, or “skipping levels due to fuzzy periphery shell?” How does the representation of thing emerge out of (eventual) soul-substance? Does this imply that Things are Made of our selves? No, because the Spire is ambiguiouse in many ways, such as soul-substance itself may be a thing fully other than “ourselves” at all (“We” are not “our soul”, Doctrine of Partiality, or that things are the emergence of world-soul, [see diagram, nice] 48- DONUT STRATEGY/ ARCHETYPAL SHAPE INTRO: 49- [see absolutely awesome 3 diagrams!!] -here we have the “funnel’ as archetypal shape. Arch’ verticality. This arch’ shape is returned to in the parable of the sub-mariner. 50-Verticality is essential to human condition, also: the difference between the above + below. Also Symetry and the non-arbitrary directionality of Time. Past is different from future as below is inherently different and not arbitrary but unique in polar relationship. Thus Ascention, sun, ethical peak, Pillar of Morality. 51-The Thing creates the context, the context creates the Thing. Thing and nature. Meta-encapsulation-sequence” is a succinct each vertabrea = axii, for example. od conceptual psychic vertabrea being played like a zylaphone” tingles along spine!!! “zylaphone of nystigmia. Chills. Spine. Psychic vertabrea. Can be conceptually symbolic. Each vertabrea or “frame” = axii, for example. 52- Now, we have related the A) Funnel, B) Donut, C) Double helix (45% balance important, equanimity, neutrality silver or “numb” aspect of Nexus. (-These arrows can be seen as opening outwards at 45% angle. This outwarding (continuously rotating into the context) is analogous to the 45% angle and continuity principle of the double-helix.) AND ALSO, D) ***Special and relates to einstien/time/ethics essay as well as wolfman story!!) 53light. If light was entirely a particle it would appear to be bobbing up + down (see simple squiggle waveform diagram) -photon interaction between the electrical field + the , magnetic field is 90-degree, causes yin-yang/double helix shape. -electrical field is radial as in attraction or repulsion (one dimension) is a circular rotating form -light is particle or wave, -partical moves forward, but also in vibration (wave) *waveform [see diagram] Then: magnetic field (second dimension) rotates, thus: spiral -if forward corkscrew/spiral goes in A CIRCLE, THUS CREATES DONUT SHAPE!!) This happens in physics? (why?) because that’s what magnetic fields do! (cause things to go in circle)h’ shape example.! Laser/thing Arch’ shape example! Laser/thing directed at world, becomes context. ***important arch’ phenomenon. See diagram w.b. p.102 [IDEA: describe archetypal shapes in list *without* discussing their applications, then return to applications, toi instill respect for multiapplicability + abstraction of shapes. 54Covalence shells are learned in threes, for they were made for the spectrums free and up for grabs in the interplay of Clays, and have to do with peripheries. And hazy phasings fuzzy“gaseiouys electron clouds” purple 55- 2 versions, periphery-covalence shell/ wise being: Aemeba/ “kindling mode” or Nexus Lazor”/ implicit/explicit/natures of poles/ periphery veiled/ click clack blocks or phenomenon of meta-morphosis that has immjense strategic primacy, as to unlocking magnificent energy/ Zen Spontenaity, This is a “unique ocvcurance” or “turning word”. Meta-encapsulation sequence is a word for 7-tiered spectrum that is represented as this : (diagram). Jack-in-the-box Will/ Paradox Will. Humor, outward popping of dimensional spectrum. Zylaphone. Nexus. Nystigmia. 56- Axis one---axiss two- Hypothetical or relity-chronon- imagined/ creativity-Time/ritual forward/ experiential chronon time axii 57- (imagine a dart or an arrow hitting the inside of a glass sphere, and splintering such that is curves outward from the point it hit the sphere and becomes a concave circle. Dimension is born). Use!!! Arch’ example 58- What is the meaning of the “Astral Donut” Archetypal shape? Arch’ 59Purple in interlude in arch’ 60- Crucial to give these Archetypoal Shapes prior to even discussing the Spire, as excersizes in geometric-analogy to A) hook the reader attuned to klienbottle-esque thought, and to B) to be referred back to throughout Spire analysis. There is NO NEED to integrate the funnel/donut systems “formally” into the Spire system. They will reveal themselves as relevant naturally at certain points. Intro to symb’ shapes
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61- …..Other than drawing connection between these links [diagram] point of ultimate periphery- “reincarnation MYTH” Arrow into inner side of sphere, like smoke curling inward, umbrella, thing becomes context paradox./ verticality = spirituality. (Straight backed; matter of fact”) And 4) 3-tired periphery covalence shells- dimensional progression. Excellent example of arch’ shapes. Shells. Axii. ~ 62Let us speak more of “Primary Archetypal Duality”. What is the significance of the word “Primnary”? It’s purpose is to distinguish between two main ways of experiencing Archetypes and the Archetypal Realm. One I call “Primary” and one I call “Primal”. To speak of the “Realm of Archetypes”, is already leaning towards the Primal, for “Realm” rightfully calls to mind and a place of antiquity and beauty to be lost in. The Primal will always taste of the Before, the Primordial. The primary is more accessable to the now with the same good old fashioned hard thinking, for science. The gate to the Primordial Realm is guarded by the Werewolf with Flamethrower you met in a mis-remembered dream. The door to the laboratory of Primary Building Blocks, on the other hand, is guarded merely by the willingness to don your own thinking cap and prove which elements compose the living of our lives, or perhaps by your kindly old high school chemistry teacher. Wolfman interpretations of biurth of world, primary arch’ duality 63If I could give you but one shamanic chant it would be this old one I found in a book of ethnography long ago: “I AM FOOD, I AM FOOD. I AM THE EATER OF FOOD; I AM THE EATER OF FOOD; I AM THE EATER OF FOOD. I, WHO AM FOOD, IS THE EATER OF FOOD I, WHO AM FOOD, IS EATEN BY FOOD.” 64There are misunderstandings and misperceptions of Reality and the universe which humans often carry in their subconscious judgement of their ultimate circumstance which I "allow" and some which I do not. Some misconceptions "make sense" such as pre-Universe void as "pre". This is a good example of a "Noble Fallicy" or a ***"Neccessarilly Sedified Concept"**** “allowed mistake” and has to do with the reason that "nowhere" is often a more useful term than "no-thing". as well as why [diagram, helix backwards into expanding arrows in all directions rather than single one backward] Voiud as a limit of un-knowing, give honor to conceptual boundaries as Gonzo or Hiesenburg Uncertainty threshhold. This is true humility in thought before the Context and the Periphery. It is also the floodgates of purple, the ouiga and the lovecraftian viscouse substance. These are ways Mind represents the periphery- the pseudopods without core, the Elder gods. 65- Common-time (or “squishy-time”) is defined by an elongation of non-pearlswell and a tracking of time as “along” rather than “toward”. Both perspecxtives are valuable, and it is well to think of them at a 90 degree angle, but the perspectives are hardly 100% along or 100% toward even when things become bleakly, tediously, bleedingly along or hyper-concentric forward. In general, we favor the forward. Linear time 66- -subjectivity + objectivity, gonzo journalism. Media as context/ ecosystem. 67- Also, repeated here from notes on archetypal shape intro, because the following is extremely central and having to do with light patterns as archetytpal shapes relates to light/ethics essay here AND wolfman story: ***Special and relates to einstien/time/ethics essay as well as wolfman story!!) light. If light was entirely a particle it would appear to be bobbing up + down (see simple squiggle waveform diagram) -photon interaction between the electrical field + the , magnetic field is 90-degree, causes yin-yang/double helix shape. -electrical field is radial as in attraction or repulsion (one dimension) is a circular rotating form -light is particle or wave, -partical moves forward, but also in vibration (wave) *waveform [see diagram] Then: magnetic field (second dimension) rotates, thus: spiral -if forward corkscrew/spiral goes in A CIRCLE, THUS CREATES DONUT SHAPE!!) This happens in physics? (why?) because that’s what magnetic fields do! (cause things to go in circle) -advanced archetypal shape examples. 68- A.Point, Line, Plane, SPHERE B.Funnel C.wormhole C.torus D.Symbiotic Waveform E.Double Helix III.THE SPIRE 69Now, we will discuss in more detail the structure of the “barnacle” of personhood. It arranges itself in what we’ll call “Spires”, which are similar to volcanoes in both shape and internal function. They look like this:\ [diagram] [*sign’, unique cross-section, soul- milky white, warm. Myth or primordial emergence… when soul-substance wells into form in any of many ways., etc…] -Dark side. Ouija. Also in G? 70- The snowflake is a fractal. It is LITERALLY Velcro. Static Cling. It's fractality is in spectrums of Contraction and Expansion [size], in past and future [Time] , in Manifest and Abstract [Pattern], in Variety of Symbolic Texture [Substance], and in Identity/Sincerity of Intention to name a few. Do you see how the multiple spectrum’s involved are themselves very abstract and difficult for most to perceive as officially "REAL":, and what this implies as to the difficulty of percieving patterns in the flux of the relationship between these myriad forces/spectrums!! Very difficult indeed, and yet this science is much like waiting with infinite patience with amphibuious eyes just below waterlevel for the golden opportunity, the window of opportunity, tio snatcha flie on the lillipad. That perfect moment of lunch is the rarest of displays- a human Chronon-Interception. This is an event in which a humans' consciousne3ss turns inward, not in Time or Will, but in a direction somewhere inwards- inwards not in Sincerity or Heart, but an inwardness that points to a Primacy of Abstraction, a Deeper Inward Depth of Soul-Primacy, or in that certain direction which is Ultimately toward the Center. Not the Center of Time, Nor The Center of Will, Nor the Depth of Sincere Devotion as Will/Intention or via organic ritual Symbiosis and gate/Path Archetype allignment. Inward towards Ideosyncracy, self-evidense, suchness.
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Spire as Snowflake. Spire. Ritual. Time. Soul Migration 71- The Snowflake is a 3-dimensional spatial/structural holographic representation of something. But what? Why should that thing which the Snowflake represents be ambiguous/inscrutable/indescribable or a matter of hesitancy and a "veiled mystery" Not for any spooky or mystical effect, for ours is to abolish every instance of ambiguity in spirituality, or any indulgence in "brujeria" or "quasi-eastern-eco-hipster-parlence". Spire 72- I will not make some vague generality that "The Snowflake is in our DNA" but I will explain in plain language that the pattern I describe as a 3-d hologram of a fractal composed of many substances is so integral to the structure of our world and ourselves that I do not say I invent it, but DESCRIBE it. It applies to everything. A Way of Understanding Axis 2 73- Imagine here that the yellow blinking orbs of "user 1", "user 2", and "user 3" represent the real-time activity of three (just 3, mind you) humans as they form presentations***. although Soul-View or "God-View" [expand on omniciewnt 3rd person omni-eye-fabric vs. organic jellyfish groupmind.] visualizes up to millions, depending on the total online userbase, but that is zoomed out and clicked on Axis #1, but this is Axis #2 here---> 74- -An "Amber-Meta-Rule" is just a list of design choices that fall inbto the category of arbitrarily chosen but which nonetheless MUST always remain constant, to make different views visually jump out as associations and to remain cohesive. For example "Deep Realms of Soul- Primacy is a always a Substance resembling Magma in "symbolic texture" would be an example of a classic "Amber-Meta-Rule". Another example of a Classic Amber-Meta-Rule is "Linearity of Text-Wrapping around conical spire is always blue/green". Of course, it does not NEED to be blue green, nor does SoulCore Primacy Depth NEED to be magma in symbolic-texture, Time-sense malleability, choice 75- -primacy of form over arbitrary level-hierarchy. Generative, “chills!” (clue) 76- -Our Science is superior due to identification with all sentience. Intro to Spire. Planetary vs. Reality Sentience, periphery shells, hypothetical species 77- FURTHER PROTOCOL NOTES The Spire is conical. 78- GO INTO BASICS OF “THINGS” AND “NATURES”, especially why the idea of a THING is so important, True things-in-themselves are beyond us, clays as things, relevance of clays and spire to who we are and our NATURE. PROTOCOL NOTES The Clays OK! So, the snowflake is a model of what? “The Human Mind” is a good place to start in getting used to the idea of a spatial and structural hologram used as an analogy to non-physical phenomena. I suggest starting with “Mind” as a good name and idea for what the hologram indicates, but in truth the hologram indicates non-physical phenomena that actually consist of mind, body, the physical or “external” world and such things other than mind. However, these solid, practical objects such as your own body or the chair you sit upon are enveloped, along with Mind, into a more over-encompassing wholistic entity or phenomena that makes the external world less solid and very much less “external”, as it makes mental function far more solid and biologically physical in its mechanisms. Spire 79- -partiality “w.b.” p.78 80- “barnacle”. See diagram On the deficit of area of the spire illuminated by our awareness and imbued by soul-substance. This is the Doctrine of the hypothetical species and the Fantasy Star. The falling short, and thus the explanation of the purpose of the book as a tool of extrapolation of the4 symetries higher than those available to our species. ……but seriously, to think that humans were designed at all, let alone for a purpose, is silly. Were we made by “God” or does our DNA have a nature? Natures and things 81- Time and Dimensionality (limits of perception of Falling-Time + Synchronicity Axii of dimension vs. axii of time (subtle, complex relationship) unknown. Fuzzy. Uoija of falling into. Element of uncertainty in synchronicity (can’t “will” it) many “allowed misconceptions”/ “allowed errors vs. condemned errors”/ 82- -wholistic, coherent, cohesive, internally consistent, one-ness, form of humanity. 83-substance/ form, to allow form to proper pressure from various depths of soul-core.” reveal itself. 84- Frequency, like electro-static, modulations in frequency (Waveform, dubstep/electronica history lesson/ bass as manifestation) electro-glasas spheres " popping + " snapping" of lines of force between spirers in upper periphery and nature of "thin atmosphere" "negative space". 85- substance/form 86- -Systems theory allows expansion or contraction in either direction, can still offer sense of duality (polarity through "obscured periphery" 87- -Substance of identity 88- -identity as field that plays upon 7 substances, more a function of "outside convergence points" or "outside covalence shells". Elves, nexus, magic 89- Context Theory/ Think: 1) soul-am-ness soul 90- 2) vein of intention vein 91- 3) Crust, Form of Spire (vertabrea) crust 92- -Fractality as a counter-point especially in concert with will as a new dimensional direction, with its own polarities. Smallest = inward IS outward, weightless space. NOTEONE This is where direction in/out breaks down into multi-gravitation. Dimesion in this sense just means axis,
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it does not mean totally foreign otherworldly or supernatural dimensions. 93- BRIEF NOTES -patterns made out of crust + hovering cross-section reveals true nature of multiplicity and unity. fractality 94- -quantum specificity elaboration = Velcro “un-liftable” due to traction Binding mech, fractality, reticule navigation 95- Intros- On the Natures of the Clays On the Spire Things + natures 96- Soul. soul 97- Psychic Vertabrae can stand for different things Personhood, Identity Progression, Temporal Dimensionality or Sincerity. Psychic vertabrea/ 98- Synchronicity and Falling-Time are very advanced stages of Temporal Dimensionality, and thus extremely hard to describe (periphery of awareness and 3-tired polarity formed in covalence-shell of awareness/ imbued-ness by soul substance. Time is introduced within context of later stages of axii. 99- -Soul-Am-Ness soul 100- 3) Vein of Intension –NOT linear tiem! vein 101- 4) The Substance of Personhood, -Symetry substance 102- 7) The Substance of Absolute Personhood, the Crust, and the Fronds intuitive empathy/ Heisenberg/ Gonzo/ introduce “truth” vs. social intention, species. Introduce idea of fractality and branching, gravity of the Clays. Clays. paradox. Fronds. Fractality. Hydraulics/ gravity connected. 103- 8) The Ring of Turbulence, Myth, and Archetypes of the Future. Eschaton Science. magma 104- 11) El;ectromagnetic Discharge, extrapolation possible, the Nexus, The Vanishing Point, Will, Full Ritual Activation, and Energy Science (hgydraulic Pressure, symmetry, and Fantasy Star symmetry extrapolation.12) Planetary Spire, Emanentization (methods) –Enlightenment, -Memes and Media, -Overman, -Outside Convergence Points/ Planetary Synchronicity-Ultimate Mystical Peak. Eschaton science. clays 105- Soul-substance can have elements of plasma NOTEONE, but also 1-directional “grain” or chanelled-emerald prism (through which will is conducted. (A FORCE and not a CLAY.) NOTEONE- magma. Elkectro-static. Substance of Personhood. Heart. Nexus. 106- Just as the interrelationships of the Clays is more vital and tantalizing than considering their ultimate natures, so too the series of stages of the available dimensions through which the Clays can be presented. This is the “Spirit Vertabrea” NOTEONE or the series of meta-encapsulation that exceeds us just as the number 7 is too vast to comprehend on a system designed for the # 3. (as in the 3-tiered spectrum of 2 natures meeting). NOTEONE- “zylaphone. “meta- encaps’, Psychic Zylaphone. 107- [see diagram] “Empty Space” necessary and present often when one is unaware of its presence (in the context of sub- or pre- conscious. having to do with the electromagnetic discharge and thought as a dimension. Binding. Electro = concept of Other as “empty” 108- [see diagram] To the substance of personhood -SEE DIAGRAM SPINES!!! (thin bones connecting realm of Archetypes to normal mid-section of spire, indicate the perhaps unknowable but completely direct connection between archetype and crust. The "theory" of agbsolute connectivity despite the path being very ellusive. Also connected to system of "tracking reticule' ala spacepants' will and forwarding symetry. Mysticism portrayed mathematically 109- -ethics and will, efficiency of “hydraulic pressure from various depths of soul-core”. Perpindicularity. The beinguntodeath. [see diagram] Is the vein the linearity of time? No. Is it the way we learn to see time as a line? Yes. Linearity become Intention. Point of ultimate periphery. [IDEA: if “point of…” is death, is “arch of…” and “sphere of…” analogouse to higher dimensional conceptions of death? Relevance to fear/dread? 110- Recognize the Psychic/Organic heratige of the linear time sense in the Intentionality of Vein, but know the vein as a function of the life-force of the sprout. vein 111- If I could give you these clays, and show you their separate domains, I would show you to forget their substance, their Natures as separate composites of the Spire, in favor of the principles of the in-ter-re-lat-ions between the substances. In appreciation of the symphonic, harmonic, beatific relationships between the clays and their knowing interplay as organs in a system, learn the love affair of the group mind. clays 112- -Soulcore. Brittle crust. Fronds IV. THE CLAYS: 113- The Clays, as they came to be known as distinct entities can display competing (or harmonious) ghravities and interact in complex ways; the different natures are best learned through a t5ale of soul manifesting, which is a truly magfical adventure. It is truly an honor and magical adventure to write this book because we can throw every trick in the book into descriptions of the clays and yet never exhaust or define them, even less so of the magnificent complexity of their interrelationships and manners of migration amongst them. This will naturally present a lot of concepts and form the bulk of the Lexicon very naturally as new words are necessarily invented in the process of throwing every trick in the book, including the kitchen sink, into descriptions of these phenomena. To accurately describe the phenomena which are the subject of this book is less a conceptual challenge than an automatic-writing challenge. The fauna of a strange jungle is described while the canoe passes underneath. The things I describe are real, their nature remains when forgotten, and will be found precisely where it was left last visit. An improper description does not reduce the essence of a Clay- a thousand words can be painted on them, but they persist because they are not concepts but
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real. They are our own environment and surpass us, they wait safely to reveal themselves again and again. To trust that their natures remain separate and constant despite our fragile hold on them and despite our tenuous access is pleasure and safety. They watch over us like elder brothers and like friendly golems when we sleep. Clays? *very nice, use somewhere!* clays? 114- We want the function of the clays to be distinct (they are like the animals which compose people) and then dimensional progression and Axii to be distinct. Why? Because with fuzzy/ weak hydraulic pressure + symmetry the periphery of awareness shrinks due to inefficiency. With weak hydraulic pressure + lack of symmetry awareness or soul-imbued-ness fades or fuzzes out into normal puny consciousness. This fuzzy state only allows for standard 3-tiered peripheries, but we demand full spectrum! THIngs vs. Natuires in intro to clays! + B. clays, axii. Hydraulic soul pressure + partiality 115- To the fronds, the crust, and into Projhected Mirror-Expectations of a similar series of realms like this: [diagram] (world/other/another person/ people/ “they” “World-Soul/ “God” and into the electro-magnetic discharge of will disappearing the instant it jumps from a force or charge running in one direction (outward) into a micro-briefly appearing spark or electro-magnetic-gthost-thought-void or Emptioness of Sterility, Ascetic/ Stoic/ Clarity, Wisdom, Energy abundance through cooperation with perching awareness upon intelli8gent and graceful manipulation of Will-Intention. This realm compares to Tesla’s wireless energy theory. 116- As magnificent and varied as the clays are in themselves, each a world of their own, each crucially and intimately significant to our lives, the process of migration amongst them is determined by our gravities. The inter-relationship of their gravities form a tumultuous, turbulent web. The process of migration is usually sub- or pre- conscious and outside of awareness and will. Through learning the true natures of the clays and their spatial and functional roles, we can shift from being merely manipulated by them as a ship tossed at sea, and begin COOPERATING with them. Things + natures ONE: “Soul” 117- Does Soul compose things? Or “Why does the things of the crust (Realm of Cups and Chairs) seem to be a very late-stage dissipation of the cooling of our own souls? (Can be entropy/ cooling of World-Soul too) Generative outwarding of personality. mirrors progression of universe into form TWO: “Magma” 118- We very much wish to be lost in the Realm of Primal Archetypes, despite our deep dread of the Primal or rather our misconception of the Primal as always so “raw and savage”. It is raw, but in the sense of good meat awaiting eagerly the flame, and its savagery is not rude or dumb but a triumphant shedding of the pretense of culture and a freedom to eat, eat- for one has learned the tales of the jungle and always ever after walks in solidarity with them, eating, eating. An old (Primitive in fact, for that word is an HONOR) shamanic chant goes like this: Magma (IDEA: “plasma” as substance of personhood (indescribable substance like physical state? And “magma” as emergence of substance of personhood from soul?) THREE: “The Vein of Intention” 119- FRACTALITY BINDS. Think of fractality as a dimension after time or the “Velcro Dimension”. Axis I or “meridians”, arrows leaving soul, so direction must be “out from soul” however it is also an inwarding, towards further density/ structuralism/ complexity of form. (meridians) Nexus. Fractality as Dimension section + Crust as Clay - similar! Fractality, in axii, crust, binding. 120- Let the vein of intention form a conception of linear time. The concept of linear time comes from the vein of intention, but the vein in itself is not linear time. The point of ultimate periphery (hypothetical) can be seen as the moment of physical death at the end of one’s life, but more accurately as the ultimate intention of one’s life in the sense that humans are beings-toward-death (heiddeger). The point of ultimate periphery is both dreaded or accepted as the inevitable end of life (if the vein of intention is viewed as the linearity of time) or the ultimate purpose toward which all life experience and action points to but never in actuality reaches. The point of ultimate periphery can be viewed as a mysterious singularity or personal eschaton pulling time toward it and making sense or justifying all phenomena between it and soul. As the furthest “thing” from soul one would think it would form a natural pole in a polarity between soul and itself, but it does not serve that function well. It does not serve as a polar partner of soul because soul is real and has a nature of its own, wheras the nature of the vanishing point is insubstantial and theoretical. True polarity is a play between two natures, and as a theoretical existent or “mathematically significant place” amongst more real forms with actual true natures of their own, the vanishing point of the spire’s ultimate periphery does not play a sufficiently vibrant role to do justice to polarity. It does not have an awareness of its own, even as a psychic organ within the system of a larger consciousness. Vein, point of utmost periphery. 121- The vein of intention in and for itself, from its own perspective and in its own awareness and identity as a psychic organ, does not experience itself as tracing the path of linear time. That is a later development from looking back upon the vein from outside. By the time one is proficient in viewing the vein from outside (learned time), it is almopst impossible to remember the non-linear , But FORWARD-ness of intention from within vein, and it is almost impossible to think of the vein as NOT representing linear time. That is why we always speak of the vein OF INTENTION, to constantly remind ourselves that it pertains to intention rather than linearity. vein 122- It only comes to represent that and form that conception as awareness lifts off it and sees the vein from outside it and as an awareness hovering roughly perpindicular to it (Imagine yourself a point within a line facing one direction- not precisely within a tunnel, for the vein is itself the entity and not a context. When rituality dawns and coagulates within the vein, it is not an entity INSIDE the vein but is a swelling of it. All biological functions are as waveforms and symbiosis with varying frequencies (breath, heartbeat, eating, orgasm, menstral cycle, pregnancy, but true ultimate ritual is an intentional calling forth of personhood or identity-substance presence into the chronon, which is full ritual activation and affords the best clue to symmetry, as well as intersection of heart at brightest periphery. The shamelessness and audacity of this maneuver is unbearable, yet it is the highest service to healing and correct ordering of will. The psychological trick is to accept that the mere potentiality for ritual activation is itself the only justification required, however karmic resistance to ritual activation pulls at the heartstrings in exactly the places one most requires uprooting (ethics). Vein + ritual entrance. 123- Imagine yourself a point within a line facing one direction- not within a tunnel, for the vein is itself the entity and not a context. In any case, the view would be like this: . (a point with you (soul coagulation) and a front (death). It is only after awareness breaks off and hovers as a ghost that the line is seen as a line and thus comes to inform the concept of time as a line. Vein, directionality of axii. Archetypal shape of funnel/ Spire. Spire structure. 124- We wish for the Primal as it is shown to us in dreams, but if we could bring our wake to the dreamworld we would find it more
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raw and savage than it lets on, and the dreaminess and -Link between Archetypal Realm as "Primary" [geometric / universal / Clinical / Archetypiality] and the PRIMAL. [spirit-animal, up[welling of pirate swarthy, ring of turbulence.] On the Ring of Turbulance 125- The Ring of Turbulance is a great and monstrously powerful ”Myth-Generator”, the Motherland of the Archetypes, the Gears of the Primal, The “Meatgrinder of God”, The Deep Dark Well with Waters Bottomless, the Surfacing of the Leviathons, producing the impression of a massive influx of gravity and pre-linguistic visible language. (In fact the ring of turbulence or the Undertow produces the impression of massive gravity due to its turbulence, not due to a mass and nature of its own, and is technically not “real” because it is composed of the Substance of Personhood where it meets soul. Remember that although it appears where the Substyance of Personhood meets Soul, it is not composed of both- its power lies in its proximity to Soul and its habitat at the utmost trunk of the Spire, but Soul itself is ultimately untouchable within its sphere and is composed only of itself. It is generative but is jealous and does not share its own nature, which shall be veiled to us, and if we cross the veil we certainly can carry nothing with us nor bring anything back, besides good health. For most practical purposes The Ring of Turbulance may be considered an entity of its own and its turbulence may be considered as if a vast mass-gravity, unless one is determined to confront it and learn its in-itselfness, which one may be sometime. But for now we can say it possesses extra strange and magnificent properties in addition to gravitation. The fact that it is not mass from a distinct entity but rather turbulence is the cause of its extra seemingly miraculous associated phenomena. These phenomena are related to Myth, the Primordial, Archetypes, the Pirate Spirit, hydraulic pressure within the Spire, courage and bravery, the Groupmind and Collective Subconscious, and in some ways to visible language (archaic hieroglyphs in neon, a streaming code perfectly understood and universal although never learned, the DNA-speechcraft) and Memetics (because it is pre-linguistic yet speaks loudly like thunder. It may be thought of as an infinite well or chasm (it is not infinite but this is useful) and to do with predatory creatures from the depths such as Cthulu/Jaws/etc. These myths are of immense usefulness and there exploration should be extensive. The additional qualities above and beyond gravity also pertain to a turbulence which forces outward and upward in generative function, in addition to drawing one inward and downward into the Undertow, so it can be harnessed as a “two-way” gravity which can be extremely useful. “Magma” is name of clay, NOT “ring of turbulence”. Nexus section returns to heart, heart section after. “ring of turbulence” discussed as aspect of magma 126- wistful transience of dreams would dissipate like fog clearing. Lucidity is bringing our wake into dreams with gusto and the bravery to sing wakefulness into a dream like a good tiding played on a flute, despite knowing that the tune may hurt the ears of a dream, and that it may hurt you back. Nomatter! Such things matter not to a Pied piper. But only so long as he trusts in his intention of good tiding. Lucid Dreaming is a valid window into the wakings of the mind, the subconscious, but most importantly intop the Realm of Primal Archetypes, in a way that common dreams are not until they are recollected, always differently than they appeared while happening. Let us just say there is a green demon-like thing with a pointy nose and chin that smiles but does not mean his smile, and he/it guards the Gates of Lucidity jealously. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs and he will be sure they swiftly vanish. His name is the Mocking Goblin, and when your wake is met by your dream face to face, it will be his face you see, and it will be like looking at yourself- a double. Something is un-meant-to-be, “unkosher” in confronting dream without going under into it. Dreams love to be remembered and they burn with jealousy when one steps towards or into them without going under and beneath them. The Mocking Goblin will show you how raw and savage the Primal Realm can be. His face is like a mask, a sneer, a smile void. His ears are curling, so too his eyes, so too his teethe. His will is keen, his lust is one- to keep you out of the realm of Dreams, unless you kiss his ring by “going under” as you slip inside. The going under to dream is the breadcrumbs vanishing, it is the tail of the ox. His shoes are curling, his hat is curling, so too his nails. Nomatter to a Pied piper! Magma + purple!!! Interlude FOUR: “The Substance of Personhood” 127- Of the Substance of Personhood- It has duel properties as a Plasma at rest or silly putty/ elasticity/ malleability and large (traditional) gravity where the general sense of self resides. This is the “Native habitat of the self” and covers the spatially largest expanse of the post-soul clays, yet its gravity may seem spread out too thin into vapor or gas instead of plasma when compared to the Ring of Turbulence, but that is due to the CURRENTS strong gravity produced by the strong/fast Dionysian flux and actual TURBULENCE of that primal/dream realm/habitat exhibits rather than mass (Untraditional gravity) Substance of personhood. Magma. FIVE: “The Fronds” 128- -Fronds -(phenomenology, limits of experience, limits and compromise of subjectivity. Fronds vs. Subjectivity 129- -emotion as valid (but clarification of relationship of emotion and subjectivity; why related but not same. true Nature of emotion and purpose, implications/ repercussions for rage/love/etc. fronds 130- Now, remember that the Spire is a 4th dimensional object, not in the super-spatiality sense of tesseracts and hypercubes (though it may be that too), but in the traditional Einsteinian sense of a 3-dimensional shape that incorporates or implies time as the 4 th. We may consider Fractality to be a logical next step after Time, but for now let us speak of Time. 131- Fronds- not emotion, not subjectivity, pertaining to both. fronds Fronds- not emotion, not subjectivity. (close, pertaining to both). Fronds axi SIX: “The Crust” 132- -Fractal nature of surface of personhood, discuss the infinite decrease in size and increase in complexity of the “web of axii”, symbolizing greater and greater physically specific + “objective”/concrete reality. Crust in Clays 133- -Brittle Crust (Fractality) SEVEN: “Heart” 134-
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On the Heart The heart is not a clay. Nor is the Nexus. Nor Will, nor Context. Heart is a satellite of soul. It’s function is as a compass which interprets between two poles- World and Soul. It is not a Clay itself but relates the state of all Clays back to Soul; it comforts and guides them in their nostalgia for Soul. It is a merchant of nostalgia, it is a midwife of the nostalgia of the clays for their soul. It is a translator which makes sense of the memories of the clays’ for their lives “once upon a time” closer and closer to soul, when they were made more and more of soul back until they were in emergence and upwelling and were not yet fully born. The clays experience the gravitational pull of soul acting upon them as their own remembrance of soul and a yearning for soul. Of course, the nature of this remembrance is not temporal as if soul’s birth of the clays is actually in the past. Soul is beyond time and the FORM or scaffolding of the clays is beyond time as well, and soul is continually and always still giving birth to the clays, as the journey backwards into soul is always occurring and is experiencing itself simultaneously at every milestone or stage on the backwards inward path. This path is called recession or regression, it is a spiritual path inwards to further and further inward “shells” of soul and so passes through a variety of cross-sections of the spire on its way, differentiating different forms and appropriate opportunities to pause and take up some coagulation/ identity. The soul-nature and soul-substance imbues the clays with meaning and value, and has hydraulic properties of “filling” available forms of the spire. The ‘inwardness” direction is through a spectrum of primacy and has unique relevance to sincerity. The deeper the well of hydraulic intention is, the less chance it has to incompletely “fill” a clay’s space, and so a lesser need for Will to combine in the way of filling. Therfor, the feeling is of effortless intention rather than will, accompanied by the grand and expansive strength of a fully filled and embued section of the trunk of the spire, a perfect example for the later/ more outward, and trickier stages of the spire to follow. Heart = a clay? One of seven? (leaning towards yes) 135Heart makes clear how all clays have natures only in their relationship to soulcore. It makes this clear by its pointing toward an imbedded pinpoint in the precise location at which the current spread of awareness amongst the clays has its center of gravity, and hence allows that mathematically significant point to “stand for” the full configuration of the spread of awareness and form a model of 1-to-1 polarity as if soul and personhood or soul and personhood-world were roughly equal things, or at least enough so to suspend disbelief and play with very emotionally and cathartically useful if merely supposed toggling interaction. This is a “poignancy”. It is called a “necessary poignancy” because it is an essential and inherent limitation of our species which we must wholeheartedly accept. This is the ultimate heaving sigh of the spirit- to claim the absolutely indispensable function of heart as the gate through which all clays must pass AS ONE, before their remembrance of soulcore may be consummated. Heart. Sadness as divine. “Admission that heart wants what is not.Heart says “listen!”, always there. Heart./ 136- Soul: to do with humanness, spontenaity Circle of Turbulence- “The Cyclotron” The Archetypal Circus, the One Ring to Rule them All. magma 137- [See Diagram, excellent, repliucate well.] ONLY 2-D! Shore of Turbulence/ Veil/ Limits of conception If the Clays were lined up in a spectrum, Heart would properly be facing them all from a new and perpindiucular place (example of a “PERPINDICULAR CONCEPT”) Heart not clay? (Will section after clays, in clay chapter?) 138- -Concepts... -Soul-Satellite, "heart" or "aspect" heart section of D On the Heart Heart. Sadness as divine. “Admission that heart wants what is not.Heart says “listen!”, always there. Heart./ [missing Fragments: 138-140, encorporate into mythology] 141- The most basic dimensionality is the progression of our identity and personhood through the Clays and into a meeting with World. The Clays are the “psychic Organs”, “Archetypal Shapes”, or Psyche fractured into its most basic building blocks. We are composed of distinct entities wether we recognize them as such or not. In fact, they may have an awareness of their own and dynamics between themselves but wish for us not to be aware of that. In some ways humans have been designed to be unaware of the Clays as distinct entities and the health of the Clkays and their functionality, holistic unity, and harmony may in fact DEPEND on allowiung them to work of their own, sub- or preconsciously. Entire book is just a proper method of meeting world. A “how-to manual” for the great meeting with respect for the nature of world. Sub-sect’ “hydraulics” in migration section. Clays and soul migration. Partiality, explicitness.
CLAY-RELATED PHENOMENA: ONE: “Will” 142- Ethics + Will Will section (near heart, Nexus, forces, after clay and axii?/ 143- will not a clay but force that acts as current (grain of personmhood) Clays, will 144- The will is an electronic device that allows one to concur with one’s own utopian vision/ prescription for and strategizing element towards Planetary Eschaton. Not a bad thing at all! On the other hand, the plagues which Will suffers are the most ghastly of all. True will is not a bad thing at all, true will is by nature prophetic (since all future is provisional) Eventuially “forward”-will is forgotten in Falling-Time Dreaming-intobeing or manifesting will, but then on to magnifying-glass silvermulti-colored will transition and many forms of non-forward, omni-directional or neutral-wills. The metamorphosis of the will involves a deep shedding of the memory of forward-intention and the Vein of Intention. It is a true metamorphosis of will into a non-traditionally directed thing. Further evolution of will from traditional linear will to splendor-will to eschaton-will (which IS imanentization) 145- If we have no will, we are not PEOPLE. Therefor TRUE will has everything to do with absolute personhood. Will TWO:“The Point of Utmost Periphery”
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146- Sphere of Ultimate Periphery or Grand Ultimate Context is NOT a true Axis but must be explored and defined. Why is this not a true axiss? Because unlike other previous axxii, it does not represent an Entire Dimension THROUGH which the clays are presented. The definition of the Sphere of Periphery is that it is (finally) the area that by Nature contains no Clays of any sort. Also, other (true) Axii are *mathematically significant* (if un-natured and un “real” compared to the Clays) wheras the Sphere of Ultimate Periphery. Axii vs. dimensions. Shells, context, “sphere of utmost periphery” (like “point of…” 147- As such, one would think some enourmous gravity pulls from the point of the funnel, sucking soul-substance off the surface of soulcore in a classic whirlpool/funnel/vortex shape, concentrating the substance as the whirlpool narropws. The coincidence of an infinitesimal point and immense gravity seems to imply a black hole of some sort. This is a valid notion, but there is no virtue in elevating this “probable black hole of human identity” into some mysterious or magnificent force in itself. The entire significance or value in the vanishing point is that it may have been influencial in pulling personhood out of soul, or in concentrating soul-substance into personhood by increasing its density as the funnel narrows. I am resolute that there is little virtue in meditating on the nature of the vanishing point in-itself, for the simple reason that it has none. In itself it is next-to-nothing and says little. It is no demigod and it harbors no useful secrets. The benefit of a proper relationship to it is in fusing the concepts of death and ultimate purpose (ironically no purpose or humans as ends-in-themselves/ our nature is no nature) and in appreciation of its gravity as a siongularity pulling time towards itself, thuis making sense of linear time and transcending or distorting the “naïve linearity” as is our preference and our pleasure. In its nothingness and non-existence it is a convenientlky blank slate on which many strongly held notions can be applied. We instinctively point to the vanishing point when we imagine things like love, glory, a noble or righteous death, heaven, God, our ideal future selves, or anything we long for. It is the hook on which any deeply dreaded inevitability, like armegeddon, the void of absolute loniliness, a hell we have earned, the gallows and whatnot, a tradgic meaninglessness, or a destined failure to become our idealized future selves. It is the hook on which any ultimate intention or inevitability can hang, but the hook itself is a convenience, an item of some practical use and little beauty. Point of utmost periphery THREE: “Context” FOUR:“Electromagnetic discharge” 148- “Let us talk of the Electromagnetic Discharge in the theoretical empty spaces hovering about the peak of the Spire later.” Electric static. Nexus./ Electro-magnetics. 149- Electromagnmetic Discharge is like filament in lightbulbs or visible electricity in those touchable globes.Clinging too tightly to the science of manipulation of electro-magnetic discharge through will-intention-patterning is a danger- a quicksand of ghosts, so don’t waste enourmous will-energy on staging best-cased scenarious for vicariously inhabiting the ghostrealm of the void/emptiness of thought wherin the electromagnetic discharge resides (perching) Thast is not your habitat. (Perch, do not Dwell) Not y6our habitat other than using its static to navigate like a chart of the constellations of stars and a telescope when at sea. If it is a sea of ghosts, as the clinging realm of the void of emptiness, then all the more reason to use the thought-sparks as a briefest glimpse through a telescope. Think of the electromagnetic discharge as the excess will that is shed when will curls inward like all once-directional things when you get to Fractality and especially synchronicityManifestation as an Ethical DUTY (or present opportunity- magic, so why not?) , which actually outweighs and encapsulates the previous dimensions!! Title Fragment: FOUR: The Electromagnetic Dishcharge. Introduction: For you, we might allow you to even associate The E-M-D with “thought”. That depends on your definition of thought. To think they are the same thing is the primary mistake in appreciating the E-M-D and learning to wield it. The E-M-D is not thought. The E-M-D is a Force that has been shed by the Spire. It can be thought of as a product or result of Will after it is shed by the Spire. It is not what we call a True Clay (the seven) but it is a force that so attracts Identity-energy that Identity becomes like the atmosphere of an extremely dense planet, clinging to the formations of the E-M-D so tightly that the atmosphere of Identity can be mistaken for a halo glowing out from the configurations- an extension of them rather than something which allures them. There is little so alluring to Identity-energy as the certain configurations of the static-cling. The Static: Definition. Static usually refers to the chaotic sparking of E-M-D (static discharge rather than informative configurations), but in general all E-M-D is static. The great, incalculably vast majority of E-M-D phenomenon is meaning less chaos, to wade through in all affairs and to often be submerged in. Some of that static has meaning above chaos, order in some cases, and actual strategic perches and genuine control helms in the best of times. The trick is in casting off the chaotic static as dirt from ones shoulder or dust of the dusty street from ones shoes. Then one could “hear oneself think”. This elevated, exalted, and honored state must be treasured above most. The Coveted Throne of “being able to hear oneself think” is above the chaotic static. It requires the ability to identify and differentiate E-M-D noise from E-M-D signal as in radio wave technology. To tune into this signal is to identify the reflections of Spire Phenomenon in configurations of static which are the most accurate representation of the original endo-Spire happenstance. Sparks- Definition. E-M-D Sparks are thought-germs. They are singular grains- concentrated points which spring into being in the billions like swarms of fireflies. They could be similar to the electrical behavior of the individual synapses of the human brain. They are also similar to the subtlest bubbles of internal mantra vocalization . The sparks are similar to the exotic quantum particles which the scientists assure us arise out of some manner of void-energy and return, blinking in and out of existence. The sparks are the germs of configurations. The incalculably vast majority of sparks never germinate into any configurations, and produce unnecessary psychic noise which obscures our tasks here. The elimination of the chaotic sparking is excellent and must be mastered as unto staring at the wall unto 8 years, yet to harness and weild the chaotic sparks in tandom with the subtlest and most advanced configurations is surely a real magic. Perhaps the potentiality and randomness of the sparks are a hindrance to common comfigurations, but are actually a fertile ground and navigational recourse for advanced configurations. The Configurations: Perching:
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[Fragment E-14 Commentary, place accordingly!] MAJOR IDEA TO ENCORPORATE3-D WAVEFORM = CORREGATION!!! (symbiotic waveform symbol 3-d-ized becomes like surface of corrugated fruit-dividers, the significance of soul-ecology, gelyfish patterns!! Fragment E-14 Commentary I suppose later is now. The Electromagnetic Discharge can just barely be called one of the Clays. [The fragments vary on this point, the small percentage of references to E-M-D as a Clay are found in the supposedly earlier fragments] It may more properly be called a ClayRelated Phenomenon or a Force acting through the Clays as Will is. Yet it is almost a Clay for the simple reason that it almost has an “I” of its own. Unfortunately its “I” is extremely subtle and rare in its true form and so those who seek to Identify through it and from it are almost surely to join the ranks of ceaseless casualties who fell prey to the Electromagnetic Discharge’s proclivity to enmire its fans in much false hope and empty promises- mirages of strategic advantage which dissipate into the void as Instantaneously as they appear, fickle like the exotic particles which become and erase themselves always, bubbles of the quantum foam. The Electromagnetic Discharge was highly instrumental in deciding on, manifesting, envisioning, “Participant-Observer Prophesizing”, and just simply creating the positive change. due to its inherent “fickleness” a high percentage of recruits (“devotees” / “initiates” as they were initially called) go astray. the prevalence of Electromagnetic Discharge recruits misfiring/ malfunctioning due to ego-related maladies is very high. the tragedy of the maladies is mostly in their wasted effort, dissolving into the breeze, but mostly harmless, unlike the maladies of Will which are most ghastly. Those very few deserving of Identifying as Clay primarily or completely through the Electromagnetic Discharge have won that right because they can do so very selectively and with great precision, thereby “perching” upon only those configurations of the static which most accurately represent the true phenomenon. [We can digress into the manner in which Static configurations mirror or mimick the myriad spire phenomenon later. for now let us say that the supposed void they appear in crackles with potentiality and the subtlty of the configurations allows them to respond to correspondingly subtle and delicate gravatational echoes of the spire which inhabit the supposed void-space. THE configurations or “SPARKS” never exist independent of mimicry of the spire PHENOMENONS BECAUSE THEY ARE BORN IN THE ECHOES of the phenomenon. they MIMIC VARYING PHENOMENON EACH STATIC BLINK DOES, DEPENDING ON WH AT ASPECT OF THE SPIRE THAT SPARK WAS INTERPRETING OR CONSIDERING, REFLECTING. rEALLY, ALL THE STATIC CAN DO IS REFLECT UPON WH AT HAS HAPPENED AMONGST THE SPIRE IT WAS SHED FROM, PERHAPS allowing identity-sense to cling to it, ENVISIONING IT IN DIFFERENT WAYS AND WAYS TO COME. tHE STAT IC IS LIKE MANY ATTEMPTS AT REFLECTION, SOME MORE ACCURATE THAN OTHERS. think of wafer-thin solar panels, the wings of spacecrafts catching the subtlest of rays] . Those very few deserving of Identifying as Clay primarily or completely through the Electromagnetic Discharge have won that right because they can cast away all “approximate” configurations, the endlessly vast majority of which distort the true phenomenon. The reby the recruits retain their humility. As we mentioned, afflictions related to Electromagnetic Discharge are afflictions of ego, but mostly harmless.
The Electromagnetic Discharge can be thought of as the activity of Will’s energy after it is “shed” by the Spire. Think of a dog wringing itself out from the rain, droplets of water flung out from its fur in all directions. These droplets, colliding, merging, richocheting off eachother in impossible to predict patterns are the myriad sparks of the E-M-D. As droplets of water would, they reflect the Spire below. Due to their various shapes and positions, they distort the reflection of the Spire in many ways. Imagine that some very, very few droplets happen to reflect the Spire or aspects of it below exceedingly accurately- perhaps one droplet was almost perfectly spherical and happened to rise directly upward from our dear old dog, cresting at a certain height in which for a moment there was a pretty clear image of the hound. Similarly, there are certain very very few spark-patterns or configurations of static that are of very unique and valuable interest. These we call E-M-D Constellations. The trick is in identifying and perching upon them selectively. [And don’t bother looking for perfect spheres and precise apexesit’s a whirlwind of electrified cotton candy and taffy live wires up there-PURPLE] If Will is analogous to electricity, then the Spire (and specifically the Substance of Personhood in its Granite/Ice form, is the “metal” which conducts the electricity. It is good to remember that many substances are conduits, including exotic ones such as Plasma. It is not that the Substance of Personhood is some kind of master chameleon which can transmute itself into different textures, but rather that we choose to perceive the Substance as Granite/Ice when we wish to focus on its relationship to Will and how its Spirit-texture alters Will’s function. When we wish to focus on the mysterious relationship of the Substance to the Frond network which inhabits it, we choose to perceive the Spirittexture of the Substance as Plasma. Will is not a Clay itself but is a Force acting through the Clays. There are many Clay-related Forces, some of unique interest. Will and the E-M-D are Clay-related Forces of such interest and so valuable that they could also be thought of as Clays themselves. This is a good example of an Allowed Mistake. Productive thought-experiments often provide justification for Allowed Mistakes. It is one’s fortune or even one’s choice what to Identify through, and, for the most part, to each their own. But some things call to us more than others, independently of our predilections and tastes. The handful of True Clays call us more validly, more rightfully, righteously, more valiantly to identify through them than any of the myriad Forces, but Will and the E-M-D call us perhaps more righteously and deservingly than any other Forces and for some their calls are more alluring and attractive than any Clay. Try telling a savant of the E-M-D that their chosen avenue of Identification is less valid than the partial and feeble access you have to the Clay of your preference and know what righteous laughter is! However, Clays are a priority for us over Forces because they have more of an “I” of their own, if they were viewed as wholly independent entities, which they are not. As we can sometimes perceive Forces as if they were Clays in thought-experiments to test and tease out their true natures, so too we sometimes consider the individual Clays as if they were wholly independent entities, instead of organs in a more encompassing, holistic system composing our (intended if not achieved) full-spectrum splay of Identity-awareness imbuing the totality of the Spire and identifying simply as Spire. T hi s i s th e A l i en . T hi s i s t he Sn o w fl ak e. Go o d Lu c k . We will briefly note as we regretfully must that the plagues which Will suffers are the most ghastly of all, and this is less so in the case of E-M-D, but there is a tendency in the same or similar direction. The most common and primary ailment of E-M-D is the unfathomably vast effort lost in the personal sense of wilted lives and lives lost. [AND IN THE GLOBAL FUTURIST SENSE.-O.O.F.P.O.] An essential property of Will is that it is conducted ONLY in one direction, radiating outward from the Vein of Intention (and hence ultimately from Soul) and NEVER back inwards. This natural law is never broken for reasons having to do with 1) our (Specialized) definition of Will, 2) the directionality of Time (it favors “forward” not merely from our limited human perspective as embedded in Time, but even objectively or in-itself it actually favors one direction. This is true even from a privileged/advanced stage of meta-temporal or trans-temporal throne perception of time called by some ( but not by US ) the “eternal now”. One pole (Future) is “objectively” different- more “unfinished” than the past. Meaning Time is not ambidextrous, ambivalent. Meaning the future does not merely seem to have more potentiality and not-yet-ness, openness, than the past, but actually does. This fact is extremely important in relationship to a few other concepts with which it interlocks, all having to do with an objectively non-ambidextrous directionality- the uniquely intense and visceral, even vile, villainous rejection of the concept of “fate” in its traditional (non-Specialized / reclaimed sense in which we use the word), the upward directionality of the human spine, the downward pull of (literal/earthly) gravity, the upward placement of the sun, and the upward directionality of the Torus Archetypal Shape which is one of our dear Splendor-Cloaks. These interlock because together the concepts fuse upward directionality with spine, sun, (literal) gravity, the Archetypal Shape of the Torus. Fusing these concepts and proving them against eachother- interlocking them in your physical memory well and being adapt at drawing analogous comparisons/ linking this set of concepts is essential to a deep, confident bodily comfort with
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One cannot be TRULY comfortable without incorporating the wicked, and roots travel down, and the mischievous, of course, so “upward not northward” is our motto and our mantra, our solace and our trail of breadcrumbs lost, our mourning wail, our gnashing of teeth, our curse. It is still worthwhile! The Scope of Ethics.
humanity’s ability to affect reality, the span or range of things we could possibly change. For example, a person could kill another person, but could not kill World itself. There are limits to our scope of action, and the directionality of Will’s current. These three factors (politely remembering to include our use of Will as unique- a Specialized definition) together carve out a certain area of effect. Perhaps this area of effect is cone-shaped, his area of effect may strike us to be Cone-shaped, for reasons for this image relating to the mapping of Time, and before we sift through memories of college classes in which time is mapped as one axis of three on a graph, and an expanding and forward-moving circle originating at a point moves and expands at a pace related to the speed of light, defining a cone-like perimeter encapsulating a space in the original event (point) cannot affect ever affect anything outside the cone. (because transgressing the boundary of the cone would require moving faster than light- impossible.). Similarly, the human Will can NEVER reverse its directionality and return backward towards the Vein of Intention. Do not confuse this iron law with a supposed “fate” which rules or channels the Will. This is a vile thought to us. Despite the iron directionality of Will as away from the vein of Intention, it’s lateral skipping amongst channels is analogous to the vast area and grand domain of Will’s freedom. The exotic and mysterious behaviors of the Frond-network inhabiting the Substance of Personhood in its Plasma Form has a much harder-to-chart and much more mysterious relationship to the directionality of Time, due to its fractal/stem-veined ability to curl “backwards” in a sense, at least in an aspect of its spiral tendrils. The forward directionality of Will is interlocked with the forward directionality of Time far more than the Frond-Network. The Frond-network is far more interlocked with Falling Time and Archetypal Torus Time-models. We hope you know by now that these hallowed thrones are not “fuzzy eternal mystical womb simplifications” of Time but have a directionality and thus drama that the new age “eternal now” idea and experience will never harness. As light cannot escape the black hole’s event horizon, the Will cannot escape it’s domain. [There is an exotic situation / advanced Imanentization technique called “Exponential will” which serves as a kind of loophole or exception to the rule for the most privileged wellbled battlemages of Eschaton Science. Let’s review. Will cannot alter the past regardless of timeless / meta / universal-ambivelent- ambidextrous Time-perception. These thrones exist, one should favor them and often migrate there when they invite you, but even there, the directionality of Time is not overcome. Prophecy does not imply Fate in the traditional non-reclaimed sense, nor does meta-temporal modes of perception allow Will to somehow become ambidextrous. To believe this is not merely to be wrong, but can be gravely dangerous and is a warning sign / Makio / omen of Brujeria. From those meta-timestream modalities, it may seem that the concept of “past” no longer applies. This is a sign of weakness. What has happened is that even the simple 3-tiered spectrum has collapsed into fuzziness which conceals the directionality at stake. What we demand is not a fuzzy 3-tiered periphery implying eternal now / womb, but rather a prized geometrically-analogously Meta-Migration from one pole of a linear spectrum divided out into the bottom half of a horizontal Archetypal Torus with the top or “Horizon of Potentiality” as future.
This is Falling Time. For Will to turn back inwards toward the Vein of Intention would be like saying Time could go backwards, or like saying we could somehow kill the whole world- impossible (though our kind can wish to more often than not). There is a most vital caveat to remember- the fact that the grain of the S-O-P channels Will in only one direction (outward) does not mean that there are pre-made paths or grooves which dictate the entire path of any particular streak or bolt of Will, which would be analogous to common-use “fate” or pre-determined destiny. This is a villainous insult to both the beautiful emerald grain of the Granite-Form Substance and the strands of ice that form slick in the grain, and to Will’s freedom to think of the channels like that! Will’s freedom is limited (channels allow passage in only one direction) but this directionality of the grain cannot limit any particular bolt or streak of will from skipping laterally between channels / grooves of the grain, or in any or myriad mysterious patterns throughout a more organic, fractal, “leafy-stemmed” network conception of the grain channels, more towards the Frondcentric lenses. Please appreciate the later stages of dimensionality / axis progression here! We have 1) perpendicular out from Soul (Vein), 2) Perpendicularly out from Vein of Intention (Will), and 3) Perpendicularly out from will streaks (lateral channel skipping (or intentional fractal configurations including exotic ones are analogous to the FREEDOM of Will. Please note that any situation in which we have multiple perpendicularity or a 3-tiered spectrum we have an excellent example of the nearly inexaustable complexity in charting all the progression of Forces, axxii, dimension, time, identity / personhood and so on within the spectrum. So, finally, we have a very basic sketch of how Will is conducted. Think of the E-M-D as what happens to the energy of Will when it finally reaches the surface of the Spire and meets the edge of the substance that had been conducting it- it can’t turn back as we determined, so it “pierces” or “punctures” the edge or surface and pops out in a different form. The transformation which apparently occurs as Will pierces its scope (cone) of influence at the edge of the Spire is quite transformative, like some manner of chemical process rather than merely the loss of momentum from the resistance, impedance, friction of the puncture. The strange alchemy at this juncture creates an entirely new form of energy than Will, with its own intrinsic and unique with its own “Spirit-quality-texture” the way traditional Clays have their analogous texture. It almost has its own “nature”. We will discuss the function of its semi-nature soon. For now, let us say that in this way, due to the new form of the Force of Will, E-M-D can be thought of as a continuation or product, end-result (one of many) of Will, but it is also possible to think of E-M-D as its own independent Force or even its own Clay as some must an the contributions of the savants amongst them are invaluable compared to many feeble devotees of their favored True Clays. Although the E-M-D is not a Clay it is good to think of it as such. This is a good example of an “Allowed Mistake” justified by a thought experiment. The most common misperception as to just what we are dealing with with E-M-D is that it is simply “thought”. Because this is such a common mistake we might as well start because that is an insult to . E-M-D is not “thought”. To confuse E-M-D with thought is unfortunate because we deserve a much more encompassing, holistic definition of thought of which E-M-D should be but part of a balanced diet of thoughttexture. Ideally, we will become fluent in the voice of many Clays or Force-languages. Thought deserves a more broad domain, wider than merely
The ability to speak in many tongues is a great talent- the “forked tongue” or the “swordtongue”. the E-M-D. One should be able to “think fluently from” any of the many Clays, in their own respective languages and dialects.
However, the “sparks” or “configurations” often appear as models or re-constrcutions,, imitations / interpretations, of all manner of phenomenon within and throughout the Spire. There is also much random “noise” and irrelevant chaotic sparking, but the E-M-D configurations of use to us serve as perspectives on which to “Perch”.
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Electro FIVE: “The Outside Convergence Points” SIX: “Absolute Personhood” SEVEN: “The Nexus” 150- Heart burning with the highest symetry attainable by us is locked temporarily within the Vein of Intention, but the theoretical species may have functions of Nexus or between Nexus and their version of Heart with very difficult to extrapolate interface, toggling, merger, untiy, that makes it difficult to even know if Nexus IS their heart or somehow makes Heart unnecessary for them, what the exact nature and placement of their heart is, or what the relationship between the two may be. V. THE AXII OF DIMENSION 152-Axis of outwarding. -All axii equal = blank field, freedom in many ways (up is down in quantum gravity) vs. Insistence in primacy of the initial and central axis of soul-tradgectory at the heart of a Spire. And F? In Fractality and Nature of Soul 153- dimension + "outside" -Dimensionality Of time, axii 154- Axis II, line. axii 155- (diagonal whisps concept very cool and introduces idea of fractality-dimension) binding 156- Arrows transitioning from forward to soul-am-ness, suchness. Disproving “naïve linearity”. -innacuracy of 1st axiss “classical” outwarding tradgectory (meridians) and perfectly perpendicular 90-degree 3 rd axiss of rotation, relevance to being-toward-death Axii? 157- -Outwarding towards form. Analogy to god, outwarding of person into form through will Spire. Generative outwarding 158- --section of snowflake available due to species/particularity of planetary heratige, severe unnessecary cultural limitations [analogy of the eye’s field of vision (360?) therefor hypothetical species + hypothetical “Fantasy Star” Hypothetical species 159- The first lesson was in learning the naturesd of the different clays and how they interact. The second lesson was in learning the different Axii andf how time applies to them to form a ladder, and how to toggle between them like climbing rungs. Just as you learned that the natures of two clays can meet and form a polarity and a spectrum, so too you learned that the different Axii can link up to form a spectrum with a number of distinct stages and a directionality from lower to higher. Axii are not synonymous with dimension (they are more ambiguouse and applicable to human psyche) We took this psychic journey as if it were a hypnotic regression into the deep, deep past and then a careful description of the stages of primacy. “time” toward end of axii secti time + reality. Succinct review.on. “paradoxical polarity toggling”. Nystigmia is just a way to percieve time + reality. Succinct review 160- Time can pass through a number of distinct stages in a spectrum, and a directionality from lower to higher. We took this psychic journey as if it were a hypnotic regression into the deep, deep past and then a careful description of the stages of primacy. Initial axii are prior to introduction of time. (falling time axii is later stage) very similar + tricky, time only comes in later stages. Time NOT merely axii, but nor is it thing-in-itself! Dimensions of axii + dimensions of time, migration 161- -Dimension: better to use than Time sometimes. But Time-dimension is another. Even sincerity is a dimensionality- natural healing/ migration is represented as movement along a spectral vertebrae where one directionality is “home” Subtle + complex. Difference between axii of dimension + time. Hypothetical species. 162- -Planar bisection [see all excellent diagrams] (?) 163- Fractality is another Axii- if things have expanded outward as from soul and have already expanded into Time, it needs another dimension or Axii, to expand outward into and clearly finds the Axiss of Fractality fractality 164- [diagram] vanishing point/ point of ultimate periphery/ “Axis” ()as oppoposed to the web of concepts within Spire) (sphere of ultimate periphery or Grand/Ultimate Context. Point of utmost periphery. 165- Also, (crucial) Axii DOES NOT EQUEL Dimensions, but they are very closely related. Almost in a one-to-one pairing. The difference is dimension is the entire space opened by ther Axii, and the Axxii is the smallest and most symmetrical shape (line, sphere, etc.) that fittingly opens up the wider whole dimension by implication. It is both that and a line of power for operating. 166- -dimension, “outside convergence points”. 167- -Fractality Binds. It has everything to do with “the multi-dimension”. (personal note- remember the Multi-Dimensional Congreghation of Absolute Reality). Think of Fractality as a dimension after time or “Velcro dimension’ Fract’ binding V-II. THE AXII OF TIME: 168- Time is an underground spring which imbues these clays, wets them. Time is as silk that falls upon these clays in different ways, some
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obscured, vague, some in ways that make much clinical sense in system of inherent order that are valuable to grasp. The “wetness” of the clays is the Einstenian conception of Time as a 4th dimension of space, not “separate”. The Spire + Time Time section-after Axii + Synchropnicity section. Time needs to be “Aligned” somewhat arbitrarily. Dimension of Time, after axii 169- The various “Alignments” of Time each make their own inherent sense in relation to Spire, but the psychic option, not to choose, but rather loosely “toggle” the various potential alignments of time is of utmost importance. The looseness does not imply the melting Dali clock quality of “clock” or “calendar” time dissolving into lived subjective time or mystical eternal now, but rather it is as the tentative bouncing of a racquetball player anticipating a pounce. The bounce is loose so as to facilitate a successful strike. In this analogy the basic mechanics of the spire need to be well ingrained, sufficiently to allow the concept of Time to “fall” upon it. Dimensions of Time 170- There are heavily ingrained conceptions of time such “naïve linearity” or “calendar time”. We are in the business of removing such blockswe kill time, hence “dead clocks”. But “killing time” is too harsh, what we are to remove such blocks is to recognize that they are conceptual sediment-NOTEONE The sometimes unreasonable hassle of “calendar-time” is a sedimentary formation formed from certain aberrations and overly-strong addictive predilictions of our current. The notion of linear time is not technically accurate and can indeed be “meta-encapsulated” (a better description than “overcome” or “transcended”) but is a very reasonably formed conceptual sediment or echo hovering about other forms such as the Vein of Intention, the directionality of the whole Spire. In other words, the notion of “linear time” is not technically correct and there is no such thing as “objective” time or “time-in-itself” or completely “perpendicular time”. There are more real structures. However, linear time is a very reasonable, unavoidable, and useful concept which must be explored and defined despite its technical unreality. It is a “best as can be hoped” conceptual echo of other more real and primary forms which must be at least partially accepted as a member of this current species and culture. NOTEONE- introduce “sedimentary concept” in symbolic geo’ section with periphery and “allowed mistake” Dimensions of Time 171- The Spire is a chair and time is a silk curtain falling upon it. Depending on the peculiarities of the breeze, the form this silk takes may differonce it takes the flat form of the seat; next it forms a tent drooping from the back. Now, the abstract structural mechanics of the spire remain carved in marble, iron. Trust the form will remain. Time is soft and complimentary like a woman. Because there can be no “time-in-itslef” it must always be regarded as a falling upon the more real and primary formations of the Spire and having meaning and character (and usefulness) only in its relationship to Spire. The substance of personality is more primary and Time should be released from the stasis of its sedimentary form so as to limber up and appropriately loosen the alignment of time upon the Spire. It is not real in itself, but its realness and meaning and power comes from the arbitrariness of the manner in which it falls- the potentioality of the wide arrays of various “falling methods” is wide and vibrant, much wider than generally supposed and thus the magic of Time is that through correct understanding of its falling and cooperation with this process, we can release from stasis and de-sedimentarize Time such that the substance and form of personhood can be independently held as a primary form, while time peripherally held can aquire a variety and very pleasingly myriad potential “alignment-methods”. The ways in which these various methods of falling are laughingly contradictory to lower levels of meta-encapsulation and when one can comfortably pay dues to Time as a falling rather than one of many real things, one can revel in the arbitrariness of its methods, thus cooperate with it as extremely subtle levels of frequency, and orchestral harmony, and its potentiality for different alignments will be as the clue to synchronistic abundance. Let us say that it is in holding the potentiality of time’s myriad alignments and reveling and cooperating with this potentiality that one can then begin to cooperate with synchronicity as well. The shift from sedimentary-time to falling-time signals the shift from receptive synchronicity to pro-active synchronicity. Synchronicity can never be “done” even when proactively manifesting- it is always a gift but our attitude and relationship to it can change so as to seduce it into focus. Like the inherently various potential alignments of Time, synchronicity it is so too fickle like a woman. In the exquisite silkiness of Time’s texture, in the coy seductive mystery involved in courting falling time, and in the immense mischieviousness and teasing come-hitherness involved on both sides of learning cooperation between us and falling time, it is like a romance with a woman. Though Time is not technically real and has no nature, in its falling-time form it is one of the most pleasing of “forms” to learn cooperation with. We can cooperate with “best-as-can-be-hoped” partners in some ways more vividly than even valid meetings with the forms of Spire, for they are more other than us than the independent psychic organs that compose us. Though the clays are real and have natures and even an attempt at awareness of their own in addition to composing our identities, coming to know falling-time can be far more like communication with a sentient entity, like a ghost large enough uphold one of the main pillars of World, and a ghost that can hold a previously unknown telepathic and subtle eloquence. It prefers to communicate subtly and through winks, brief moments when Time and ourselves touch/kiss/ as if becoming in intants becoming mutually conscious of eachother. The winks are events of sychncronicity, or the planning of their occurrence. Vast reserves of mystical pleasure and bliss-phenomena are unlocked through coming to know and hold the potentiality of falling-time. Winks of synchronistic intention are as two secret agents, spys, passing eachother in a busy street in a foreign city and passing a scrap of paper with a sophisticated, efficient, and eloquent code written upon it, perhaps whispering some diplomatically grave or significant fact to eachother in a few words. Just as neither spy can crack the code written on the scrap of paper themselves, but are merely relaying the code to their respective agencies, so too the instances of communications between falling-time as ghost and ourselves is pre-conscious or sub-conscious, peripheral, or as microscopically potent seeds of intention rather than explicit or conscious will-intention, and neither side is the originator of the code. Who made this code then? I ask you, who are the two agencies to which the two report? That is unknown but the transmition of sychncronicity winks can occur between people just as they occur between our selves and falling-time as ghost, and the best medium for them to be transmitted between us is romance, the more briefly burning, tradgic, and passionate the better. Similarly, the vast and glorious reserves of mystical pleasure phenomenon unlocked upon the shift from calendar time to falling time is a clue to that the agency Falling-time-as ghost reports to has something to do, intimately, with ethics. When vast mystical pleasures are unlo9cked, it is always to do with ethics and the ethics of our kind and our earth’s nature. It is the kind side of the equation. We wish to feminize the structure of the Spire by “unfreezing” it unto Time as we wish to feminize culture. Trust the form will remain, then “let” Time fall upon it. Intro to “Falling Time”, then synchronicity 172- let us speak of Time./ It is easy to misperceive Time as one of the kinds of clays that compose the structure, but neither is it some foreign element amongst them. So in awareness of these pitfalls, we do not make of the Spire a figure that is “inside” time as we naively suppose ourselves to be “inside” the calendar grid or the linear stream. Still, it is extremely advantagous to “suspend” the moment upon which time “wraps” the spire, to “catch” the moment, the window of opportunity, at which the subtlest breeze of “intention to align time in one of certain options” can make all the difference in the world… Truly, to HOLD the potentiality of this intention, to cultivate the sensual experience of abstaining from “applying” a time alignment to
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the Spire, is central. This is extremely difficult, but possible if the “toggle” becomes genuinely sexualized and a persistent subconscious object of desire. Skill at THOLDING of this potentiality is analogous to a specific appreciation of extending and playing with the tension of the moments before orgasm. Then ask “who” is letting time fall, and see in which ways Time is a function of identity. Synesthetic triad pleasure-principle applies 173- If we compare coagulation of vein and chronon of Axis II, one if felt soul-swell and intention, other is “concept of ACTUAL now” from outside. Is there such a thing as “actual now/ reality-chronon” at all? Soul wants chronon. Relationship of heart-swell + chronon 174- What I’d like to draw attention to is the dimensional shift of meta-encapsulation of Time-concept from Axis II to “Falling-Time” or 3dimensional vividness, allowing the chronon to be considered the full line (magnificently spacious) and Time as a curling cyclically around through C, but of course there is NO SUCH THING as perfect perpendicularity. The “diagonal whisps” bind as does fractality. They improve “locking”. They represent the fusion of the two AXII and the holding of middle-ground in the polarity-“comfort”. Axii of dimension + time. Axii apply to time, time not mere aspect of axii 175- Progression of time-concept Axis IV is Fractality [see illustration] death/ultimate purpose/ “plucks” personhood out of soul-substance as if by classic “gravitational whirlpool” depiction of einsteinian space-time. The substance of personhood is green, shiny, andc has a grain which reflects well and channels force along its grain. The grain with full illumination would be more highly symmetrical. Will, substance. 176- Initally, the concept of linear time is as “forward intention” This is the vein of intention’s experience of itself. It is the weakness of Axiss II that mis-remembers and mis-concieves Axis I as a kind of linear time Axis itself. That is a common failure. The truth is by the time personhood shifts to Axis II, the true nature of the more primary vein of intention is forgotten. Because in life we often migrate and toggle between Axis I + II, it is remembering and forgetting, but when Axis II misperceives I it interprets I in terms of linearity like itself, when its true but forgotten nature is forwardness, but not linearity. It is the 1-dimensional point experienced by itself as it moves forward along the line of which it is one point. [explain coagulation of soul-substance from biological waveforms as basis of ritual, proper and natural ritual-partners (grand otherness formed from meeting food, etc..many, then one. Cooperation with organic waveform patterns is path to strengthening full ritual, and it involves healing of waveforms) It is a dewdrop reflecting soul in it, this is an echo and remembering of soul, it involves the intersection of heart and ritual coagulation 177- Axii forward of vein vs. linearity of time. Cooperation with a “ritualized spirit” 178- Time as veil, no “Time in Itself”. Way that time relates to 3 rd axiss, fractality/velcroness, micro-traction in nature metaphor, capillaries/ specificity of surface order surpasses, hence doctrine of quantum tantra. Time 179- -EXCEEDED ON BOTH SIDES IN MULTIPLE DIMESIONS Axii, context 180- OR: CONTEXT-WRAPPING context 181- -A spectrum that IS ITSELF MADE out of the hierarchy of KINDS of dimension. (Clay, Time, eventually ETHICS/ Falling Time, Synchronicity becomes difficult to clearly describe, hence “ghost-town travelog” writing technique. In these sub-spaces of the text (purple font color-scheme to designate?) the intention is just to trigger instinctive primal recognition of migration and “mystical? Phenomena. Synchroniocity appendix, eschaton- synchronicity + falling time. ***USE: “To manifest synchronicity is to Imanentize Eschaton” 182- -across Falling time 183- Our Species, our Time-Perception and the Myth of the Chronon Ritual as time percerption. [purpose of ritual to enter “rituality”, migrate to realm rather than “serve” 184- It is the curling of the spatio-structural directionality of the Time-Alignment Axis from Reality-Time to Falling-Time. time 185- [diagram] Axis 3- Falling-Time or arbitrary Time-approaching vs. Time receeding interpretation provides truer picture than simpler linear time. time 186- The “ULTIMATE BLASÉ”, verification through deconstruction and re-construction of reality that the choice to remain blasé in the face of looming death is valid and not a cop-out, for the reason that the whole scheme was constructed with the goal of curling sentience (“we” vs. reality, vs. death) and the “Blessed blasé State.” USE SOMEWHERE, purple? Death? 187- Learn to TOGGLE the potentiality of the loose possible alignments of time along/toward the Spire and become adept at this. Thereby realize the ways in which contrived notions of time are “petrified sediment”. Unlock “calendar time”. [see diagram, Gaien chronon, “theoretical” now, a spectrum of time, etc] toggle 188- Time falls upon the Spire, yet *it does not exist outside the Spire*. The falling itself IS time- as Time intersects with Spire, it is born. Timein-itself is an empty theoretical construct. Time is motion of entities THROUGH Time- Without time no entities as we know them, but without entitiy, surely no Time. Yet it is in the moment of intersection between time and the Spire that Time reveals itself best. Falling time. Time 189- The now is real, but the in-between-ness is viewed symmetrically (from death). We can barely approach symetyry because the directionality of current (for us, now) for reality so too? The perspective of Reality is beyond death, “All is known”, “All is Past?”- Rather, Reality is unconcerened with the placement Time
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VI. TECHNIQUES OF SOUL MIGRATION 190- Efficiency of "hydraulic" pressure from various depths of SoulCore Techniques of Soul Migration/ 191- Efficiency of "hydraulic" pressure from various depths of "Soul-Core" Law of conservation of energy of identity + value of explicit intention towards realistic form-attainment. Hydraulic soul-pressure 192- Systems Theory Then I suppose there will be a grouping of more complex and exciting chapters devoted to the myriad relationships between the different systems. It is the relationships between the various systems that we begin to see some magical psychic opportunities, for one of the main theses is that Identity (Or “Absolute Personhood” Is a quality that is applied, or energy that inhabits, or power that electrifies, or awareness that consciousnizes the various Clays, and it is inherently limited in voltage and follows similar laws to the conservation of energy. In other words, Identity or personhood can be applied to each of the various systems, but (alas, on this planet with its woes) cannot simply “light up” all systems fully at once and must migrate in constant flux and delicate interplay between the systems. Relationships. Gravity, 3-tiered periphery. Hydraulics. Conservation of energy/ identity 193- The psychic acrobatics and “magic” has to do with using practical, logical, INTENTION to “cooperate” with tendencies, instincts, and habits in the lifecycles of the personhood fluctuations. For example: The harsh relaities of the fractal crust getting you down? Feel embedded in an arbitrary partiality within miserable and grim angularities in a particularly nasty subsection of Fractal Crust? Why not use the natural cooperative mirror polarity of the corresponding Frond capillaries as an intuitive refuge, and take their roadmap backwards, receding upstream into the applicable over-arching and meaning-giving Will Primacies of Vaster Depth?” Courses of action like this are a real life-saver! Cooperation, self-help. Crust, fronds, will, (fronds + regression) 194- Warning: There comes a point in the formalization of the science when straining too hard into the visualization and distinct distinguishing of too many clays simultaneously gives rise to an impasse, a roadblock. At this point one must undergo a heaving sigh of the spirit. You must admit that while distinguishing and “holding” the full array of clays simultaneously prevents one from letting them freely perform their functions. It is the dilemma of academia- to cling to the thin, dry air of the high altitudes, though near a certain peak of sorts, the air becomes less nourishing. 195- Heart is the true “taking stock” of the spread. It is a “state of the union address” from the full knowledge of where the clays would converge if their gravitational attraction to eachother was fully realized prior to their combined and unified attraction to soulcore. If the recession, the backwards migration of the clays into further depths of soulcore were artificially divided into two stages of directionality, it would be as if heart was a compass pointing toward the crook in the funnel or the utmost narrowing of a vortex or whirlpool before it becomes a simple line directly shooting into its goal. In actuality, the two gravities at work (coagulative merger of clays and soulcore gravity) work in tandem and are virtually inseparable. If two rafts on a river have a rope between them and each rafter pulls the rope, we have the attraction between the rafts as well as the attraction of the rivers current. Together they form a diagonal tradgectory, neither perfectly downstream nor perpendicular to that direction. Heart. Compass of soul. Migration. The Parable of the Deep-water Suit and the Cave of the Depths. 196- (two fears- raw primal terror of gore and torture vs. terror of aloneness and solitary isolation.) (expand dream of vertical tunnel with she to be saved below, the knowledge of the Great Shark, and the indestructible Diving Suit, the section which narrows in which the diver is caught, the indestructability of the suit, the limited air and last hours, and the confrontation with the Great Shark from the knowledge that it cannot penetrate the suit. The mastery of fear of the Shark, but the ambiguity of she-to-be-saved above or below, shark above or below? The fear of death from oxygen-depletion versus versus fear of the leviathan….. EXPAND!! Verticality + death. Parable of the Hermit Crab. Sankaras, desire, aversion, neutrality, equanimity. Iron ball in throat. Attention. Distracted, ambiguity. Caught in diving suit. 197- In common function, the two gravities (of the Clays towards eachother and collectively toward Soul) act as one, andf combine to form a general sense of convergence and recession (diagonal). The secret of heart and Sotot Zen nurturting is to consciously aid in heart’s function as it related to breaking the diagonal recession into two parts or phases- a first convergence toward coagulation at the “hypothetical” center of gravity and then a direct recession as unified clay. In truth the heart-pinpoint is hypothetical, a place of no mass and infinitesimal size, but heart itself is not. The aemoeba of heart is as real as the clays, but is not one, its lifeforce and function is in REACTION to the pinpoint. By fascillitating the clays’ hypothetical coagulation it makes whole. In the real world, sincerity-depth recession takes a convoluted diagonal path and reaches the same place. A true heart-activation symmetry would be equivelent to “full ritual activation”. deeper levels of symetery + Realm. Oija. Purple. 198- shamelessness and audacity vs. humility to context, perfect shamelessness as a goal; its attainability itself is reason enough to aquire it. Karmic resistence as natural but can be overcome. This would be the equivalent of “full ritual activation” and generally cuts karma + achieves personal justification. Relate this planetarily/ grand-snowflake-wise to paradox of overman as meaning of the earth/ justification + hoplocaust. 199- The gravity of soulcore pulling the clays backwards is experienced by them as their “remembrance and yearning for” the soulcore as generative outwarding. It’s a nostalgia- a yearning in the memory of each clayt for the comfort of the soulcore as if it were the once-moreprotective parent. (not temporally, but functionally parental, no “past” but still origen) They are pulled towards eachother as well, as if they anticipate in some way their convergence for passage through the “hypothetical” HEART PINPOINT. Heart itself is real, a compass pointing each clay toward gate + thus toward soulcore, but the pinpoint itself is hypothetical math. Heart + Soul Migration. Shame + ritual entrence. Historicity forward. Redeeming somewhat, not entirely but only attitude possible. 200- The gravity of soulcore is experienced by the clays as a yearning for “where they wish they could be if they could turn back from their expressions as outwarding, Thanatos. Their love for eachother, their love for “home”. To admit to and cooperate with pinpoint is to take up arms WITH heart, to learn the tricks of its compass. Heart Soul (regression)
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201- (meditation excersize- world imbued with value- transcendental bubble-theory/ sea metaphor) ? (TM Meditation) 202- This spectrum applies to migration between clays as well as migration along rungs of dimensionality migration 203- It is in our human limit. (symmetry - ethics.) Sincerity and Ethics are almost the same, for the same reason that things which ARE their nature are perfect. Soul migration. Symmetry as ethical imperative. Hydraulic Soul-Pressure and generative outwarding of soul can progress through distinct stages in a spectrum with directionality. Toward-Soul often is the main symbolic geometric regression/ascention/return as it receeds from entanglement into a shell of primacy with more symmetrical alignment and a more sincere (thus more ethical!) splay of hydraulic soul-pressure. We need hydraulic soul-pressure to expand and progress us along naturally distinct stages in a psychic or sprectral vertabrea or spectrum of dimensionality. Our species’ limitations are: a sever lack of hydraulic pressure due to dissipation of awareness-propogation through the stages of the spectrum through which the Spire presents itself. Hydraulic pressure, partiality, migration as human phenomenon 204- All the dimensionalities are basically a progression or learning-process for identity-personhood, identity and self-sense (comes from true, healthy, accurate boundary function (nexus) and we can CO-OPERATE with this if we strive for perfection. (line jagged line as symbol of progression along binding spectrum) Chronon-Interceptyion is Conceptual Experiencial STRONG BINDING between Actual or Reality Chronon and Experiencial Now (can be a “ritual symmetry, can be an external/surreal/subjective Now, a symbiotic waveform Aemeba. Axii. Time. Ritual. 205- Dimensional Ascention + Primal Soul-Regression 206- Ritual. Very good, use! Ritual entrence. To slay the shame-demon is healing shame + evil. 207- Soul Migration vs. Soul Regression vs. Soul Ascention migration 208- Migrate first from Soul to the Vein of Intension Migration. ASMR tingles are playing your spiritual vertabrea like a zylaphone. 209- The Doctrine of Co-Operation is important. It means making a kind of compromise between being subject to natural forces within the Spire and being completely free from their influence. A natural progression. For example, let us say one person has the predilection of exquisite articulation and immense gravity of the fronds. This can manifest as personalities with gifts of empathy. If their culture banishes wisdom of the fronds, there may be a conflict of interest and an opposition of two forces- one drawing the empathy closer to their perspective, while their culture pushes them farther away. There are cases where the decision to cooperate with the direction of some current can release vast reserves of energyby restoring and blooming the fronds into health and power. (Awareness is as nutrients to the Clays.) This is not to say that all gravities should be honored and cooperated with. Some gravities may pull toward disaster, towards the point of no return and then to doom. The choice to cooperate with the direction of a certain current must be highly explicit. The mere hint of favoritism toward one Clay can be enough to tip the tides of gravity very strongly into its area. The autonomy and right to choose where and how to cooperate and align one’s awareness must be explicitly conscious and honored. Secret of *GENTLE* cooperation, paradoxically MORE effective because closer to subtle bubble, intimate. Gravity. Migration. 210- Core prionciple of migration amongst the Clays is conservation of energy. There is finite awareness distributed amongst the available “terrain” to migrate. Some is gained in one place while some is lost in another. This principle remains true even when the movements of awareness are far too subtle and varied to notice. The web of gravity-interaction and its effect on awareness (self-sense) is like a marble making its way over an elastic plane with hills and valleys that are continuously rising, falling, and shifting. migration 211- In “generative outwarding section”, discuss gentle cooperation- soul-migration technique of noticing and moving with meridians [SEE EXCELLENT DIAGRAM!!] (common directionality but not as easy to spot as clue to source from partiality!!, magnetic lines) migration 212- This is a great and useful concept to be gotten used to, relating to the metaphor of the Archetypal Iceberg. Small section is conscious and larger section underwater is subconscious. But subconscious is not merely larger, it is generative of the conscious. Imagine the Iceberg as the Spire with the base as the soulcore or life-giving sun. The base is spreading or contracting (depending on which direction meridians you are acting with) so it is outwarding and changing natures (such as from sub or pre- conscious to conscious) but it is also GENERATIVE. I use the word “generative” in a specialized sense and I give that concept a lot of attention because it is a hard one to master. That’s because it is so easy and sedified to think of “more primary” as “before” when that is incorrect. More primary is more primary than outer not in linear temporality but in abstract “significance”. It is understandable to associate “before” in the time-sense with “archetypally more primary”, but the difference is to be carefully defined. “Before” specifies we are dealing with dna-time but “deeper inward” includes the ways that inner levels are structurally and functionally the parental, context framework outside and grander than our linear time mechanics. The way a more primary shell becomes a more outward shell is that is “conceptually” or “abstractly” or “functionally” generates and creates the next stage. Generative, Spire, migration 213- identification with further inward regress 214- Axis A, clearly, arrows leaving soulcore, so must be “out from soul”. However, soul has two axii of outwarding. Good to remember they are both in the direction of outward, although at a small scale they can appear as in vs. out. [see diagram] Migration 216Applaud the Jellyfish NOTEONE These notes on the Spire are fast + loose, they are leading up to an eventual series of diagrams that will be precise geometric representations of the holographic model. The best place for me to start is in disjointed textual descriptions merely touching on various aspects, but the form will become clearer when I present some scanned images of my rough visual sketches, and later a series of “transparencies” such as found in anatomical textbooks- like clear sheets of plastic (though digital and interactive), 7 or so, each devoted to a different “Clay”, “Substance” or “anatomical system” of the Hologram. To accompany each successive transparency, there will be straightforward Chapters on the nature of each
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(SoulCore, Vein, Fronds, Crust, Heart, Context, Nexus) we will investigate such subtopics as: [Titles of subsections!!] “On the Nature of SoulCore”, “On the Nature of The Primary Vein of Intentionality and various depths and trajectories of Primary Will”, “The true roles of Subjectivity and Emotional Intuition in the Frond Network”, “The Fractality of the Frond Capillaries as a system mirroring the fractality of the Crust’s angular fissures.” “How the Frond network binds complementarily with the harsh practical realities of the Fractal Crust”, or “Receding progression into further depths of SoulCore and Will Primacy as swimming upstream: An Ethical Imperative”, ect…] Pretty basic stuff. 217The Parable of the Meringe: What is the nature of this enveloping? It is as when a whisk turns eggwhites and sugar, merange and a spatula can fold melted chocolate into the foam. The chocolate was once solid and could have been cleanly broken into many pieces. These pieces are the solid things of this world such as cups and chairs. Some chunks of chocolate still sit upon the table. What if your identity, your personhood, was once one of these pieces? Now it is a syrup in which many once separate things are indistinguishable. The eggwhite foam must be treated very gently by the spatulas or the chef risks losing the millions of air bubbles which make it light and fluffy. The eggwhite foam itself is not really the wholistic entity which we seek to identify as in this analogy, for that substance is alien to us, and may be less useful a concept when thought of as having an independent nature in itself- the point of this story is very much the action of folding itself and the relationship between the eventual chocolate-flavored foam and the chunks of solid chocolate still sitting on the table. We were not extinguished in the folding, for some blocks of us sit, solid and separate and safe in our person, even if these blocks are located in the past, before the folding. They sit there still, in the past. The foam in itself is unknown, perhaps unknowable, and may be just as well the stars of infinity. But the action of the folding is divine and sensual, and yet extremely relevbent to us and intimate towards the human condition, for it is as an intention and a will not ours, but which knows us. It combines a wisdom incomparable with a sensuality that makes it immune to traditional notions of sterile or “pure” religiosity. To call it vulgur would be too harsh, yet… it is safe bet to gamble a lifetime devoted to lusting after it. Parable of the Merangue 218- The word “spiritual” is better but inappropriate due to its connotation of yearning for homogenous unity. The action of the folding is, in fact, done by a ghost, but not a scary ghost that was once a human being who is now dead, not in the least. Such things are debatable and perhaps the concept of them is useful to some depending very much on their background and predilections, and not useful for others. In any case, “ghost” is a good place to start. If you were that ghost (and you are not yet), you would not be scary because you would still be yourself, but say, 200-300 years old. Not so ancient a ghost as have spent millennia in the silent mountains, for they are wise beyond compare and upwards of 7,000 years old and have forgotten %100 that they were once human. But at the age you would be if you were the thing that does the delicate enveloping, 200-300 years old, you would still be close enough to your past life to desire it. Hence- the Asian myth of the clinging ghost, hence the problem of curses and hauntings. I will speak of this later. Purple/ Merengue/ Ouija Swoop Manuever 219- For now, let me say that a ghost who yearns for life does not, precisely, yearn for their past life as a human, for in death instantly the spirit becomes beyond time. So, to cozy up to their perspective, let us say that it yearns for a life that is before them in the eternal now they inhabit but fading. There is a transparency, a fading of images and remembrances into eachother, with many images super-imposed. They appear at first glance a blurry and confusing, perhaps ugly, homogenous unity but upon closer inspection they are distinguishable and beautiful each in themselves but more beautiful as a wholistic, over-encompassing thing that shines exponentially brighter and is exponentially more real but does not exstinguish its composite elements. Let us say that the various images are dimensions and upon death and entrance to the eternal now the full splay of multiple, separate and distinguishable dimensions are available to the soul, only some of which used to compose its humanity. The distinguishing of the clean separation of dimensions and ability to fully appreciate the talents inherent in each, without losing primary focus on the totality, is where we get the image-archetype of the multiple sets of eyes in a ladder atop eachother, as per the shpongle mask which is but the best example. In any case, let us say a ghost yearns, in its early centuries, and the human idea of this yearning involves the shrillest and hollowist terror. But this is a (fully necessary at times and for some) misperception. It must be so in some cases and for some because it is a fair conjception of the operation from most human eyes, it is a lie only because there are higher sets of eyes that see higher truthes, but for our terrestrial landlocked selves it is at times and for some ok to be afraid. Purple/ Ouija-swoop. 220- The ghost in itself is not afraid of itself, does not seem in its thoughts to be monstrous, yet it clings, it is wholly, persistently, devoted towards the “good old days”, which we would call everyday life or boring normalcy. When we sense the clinging in the back of our neck it overpowers us, and necessarily so. The phrase “the hairs on the back of my neck stood” to describe a fear reaction is very appropriate, of course, because the body perceives surrender to a wider context as a buzz or chill, a shiver in the spine electrifying the muscles in a spot in the exact center of the hollowest area at the back of the neck. It is as a cat being carried in the jaws of its mother, the scruff is loose and there is no pain- the cat is intrinsically designed, in its dna and its instinct, to be carried from that spot; there is no pain. In ourselves, we may imagine this spot being tattooed with a mandala with a center if we are spiritual, as an electrical outlet in which we are plugged into the matrix if we are classical modern, or a valve for spirit-tentacle, a pseudopod of the ethereal community, if we are Ouija –oriented as I tend to be in my more sincere moments. The point is that the shivers indicate as human (mis)conception of what it means to be yearned for on that level. To the ouja-oriented: never cease explaining to them why the ethereal realms are not to be feared. The point is that the yearning is too angular and shrill from our perspective to resemble human sexual yearning very much. More commonly, it involves a fantastically and dismally fast clicking noise that speaks of doom and a yawning out into places where individual consciousness of entities cannot be distinguished from eachother, extremely uncomfortable physical sensations triggered from the animal instinct of energy for the being-hunted-ness. There is also in some a strong reaction against the viscous texture that is mildly biological and mildly gaseous, it is the “I’ve been slimed” and the slime of certain lovecraftt pieces. It is ectoplasm. For some, it is pure loneliness, hence the well of the rinbg-girl. Purple 221- The nature of the folding is as a nurturing umbrella. The Ouija-Swoop and associated maneuvers. The chocolate does not do the folding. Who does? A song once said “There’s someone in my head but it’s not me. The wider category of the thing which envelopes many elements of ourselves along with matter and World is usually a context to us but not necessarily so. As a context it harbors daily experience and as a forgotten dream is lost within us and unavailable for explicit remembrance, the wider thing harbors our daily perceptions of doing and going, and is unavailable for our remembrence because WE are lost within IT. This is important- the thing I describe is not a thing, nor is it an entity, nor is it a context. The word context will become very familiar in these pages. Meringue, title section? 222- The “thing” that we are lost within seems as a context unavailable for explicit awareness (and certainly for “identification as” which comes at a late stage of ripeness, that RIPE stage of possession). It is unavailable in the opposite pole of that in which the “traditional subconscious”
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resides. The forgotten dream is lost within us, the totality of that which the hologram represents we are lost within. Context/periphery/purple. Context as unity/ghost 223- For us, heart burning with the highest symetry is the Aquarian Man, the Underwater Man, or the Amphibious Man. Heart 224- Viscous Substance and Ectoplasm of the Supernatural Or: “I’ve been Slimed” So, what is the mystical significance of the slippery gel which binds a collection of soul-nuclei together into an ecology? It preserves the independent nature of various myriad nuclei while gluing them into a larger unity which may be transversed. It is our ally because it binds nuclei of many very, very different sorts (some kindred and some from afar) and destroys the notion that they are unconnected, while still preserving their multiplicity. It is a binding glue which does not set well, and it is a medium through which we may travel or at least extend pseudopods, probes, and (symbolic) autonomous hydrobots. purple 225- It is mystical because the substance of togetherness is the same for each of us (kindred or not), working through us, not as a hexagonal network of honeycomb, but rather as a medium for the propogation of individual heart- or soul-nuclei NOTEONE tethered in ecology, in symbiotic harmony, floating marshmallows suspended in jello, not unified but merged to a degree at least by their their shared presence in an amniotic warmth. The ecology is not as stars separated by un-traversable vast empty voids, but as frogeggs awash in plasmatics. NOTEONE- “larval”. purple 226- The Groupmind must be perceived as some ultimate victory of the sense of unity from the organic conditions of the human womb. The experience of a symbiotic, aquatic heritage inform most conceptions of “spirituality”. The “OM” of spirituality is actually a nostalgia for the organic rhythems experienced in the womb. But be warned my friends, Groupmind should be preferable above the nostalgia for unity/wombaquatics, and above the experience of the unity of transcendence, for it is a Unity that contains multitudes. It is a transference of energies to obtain or surrender to Groupmind, but to do so makes a livingroom out of a log and makes a conversation amongst old friends round a circle of couches out of solitude. We cannot always be together, but even when alone, our experience of language tethers us into Groupmind, since it is something that could never have been invented alone. The Visual Language NOTEONE is an ancient remembrance from a primitive current, it is from the dark sea which leviathons breach and then sink down, never to be understood, but to form flashes of faces of totem animals and savage creatures and parts of creatures. Seamonsters are the surfacing of Archetypes out of the Groupmind with great force- a True Myth, invoking a way, path, craft, ritual. Lovecraft knew this well. 227- Peripheral Spires are for us dim and this is a true poignancy (a “best-as-can-be-hoped” state of affairs), but I reserve possible exceptions or even still-miraculous-seeming partial exceptions in cases of savant-intuitives. They can still be sensed as dim and strongly peripheral structures which can imply much if they serve as implied spaces for other aspects of ourselves, other people, ourselves in other potential times (future possible mager life-bifurcations, unaccecable past) or other theoretical species. The vagueness and arbitrariness is due to their highly peripheral nature (a peripheral nature which dwarfs the common, comparatively minor alternatives of focus vs. periphery within the Main or One Spire. These are advanced tests of spirit-cognition and pertain to gifts of “2nd Sight”, prophecy, and Ouiga or Séance gifts. To give you an idea of their massive peripherality, the Spire itself contains magor bifurcations (round the necessarily eventual peripheral curve into Axxis III as well) which themselves can serve to stand for a lot of these othernesses. The peripheral Other Spires are therefor reserved for massive Otherneses which stretch the limits of our species and the spirit-conception of the most gifted of our own brethren. I would feel fairly safe in saying that full illumination of multiple Spires is not only unavailable but fully beyond the genetic blueprint of our species and therefor impossible for any of us. Further, deeper directions of symmetry. See important diagrams on p. 68 of “well-bled” manuscript of 2nd draft! Scan!) Level 1. level 2 deeper, “MORE” symmetry to core. Further, deeper directions of symmetry. 228- Rightful position and use of oiuga/ lack of extrapolation, outwarding, structural spatial rather than “physical” purple 229- -LIMITS OF PERCEPTION/EXPERIENCE/WISDOM Purple 230- -“haunting “ or “enveloping” Ouija. “soul-enveloping” love or shamanism 231Purp’ 232- Ouija Séance and other Fairy Tales (all Ouija/gthost material (periphery) !!!- ”Parable of the Humane Solution”umans as planetary self-destrcut mechanism or even as a virus injected into a planet by a higher alien race to sterilize a planet to avoid its resources falling into the hands of an enemy alien race. Title: The Humane Solution. Parable of “Humane Solution”. (see notes in “w.b.” manuscript opposite p. 43)/ 233- To surrender to these spiritual or “ouja” organd is like waving the white flag to ghosts, and like surrendering to ghosts, so surrendering to the Beyond facilitates a succumbing to possession. Thios operation is not for the faint of heart but for the brave. The true Vikings of the Spirit will perceive the Grand Other as a mysterious, paranormal, incorporeal, supernatural, and supremely strange seacreature with tentacles aplenty, soft, an umbrella with which one communicates telepathically, and into which one falls asleep. Purple 234235There is a commen dream- no shame to have had it. Aliens were like normal people, dumpy people. They worked in a hotel, one was soft in the head, did dishes, menial work, possibly retarded. Said things that don’t make sense. She tells of a seed. It is not clear if something, some seed or powerful artifact, must be delivered to the aliens, or if that thing is to be received from them, or knowledge of how to find or make it. Vast fear for some, and a tickle in others. The artifact carries an immense portentiousness to change everything and totally. It haralds something so completely different from this world that it is inconceivable. The aliens are central to this operation, and the feeling of Pod People masquerading as humans, occult-like feeling to them, is central to the kind of change sought and the ways of replicating others who can accomplished this. Who are these people who are so close to people, and yet so far? Learn of this feeling. Others: a society, occult? Or just a society of people in the know who are concerned? Bad guys? Very serious in stopping emmanentization for very rational and logical reasons, just as those who emmanentize must necessarily use the most irrational and
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illogical methods. 236- -Intentional brujeria vs. unintentional brujeria of new age is analogous to the U.S. being more acceptable if it owned its savage empirestatus 237- There are those who think naturally from the jellyfish into their specific identity and experience themselves with an astute otherness and duality. They can become specimens to themselves and take the world with a grain of salt. For them, the Jellyfish “swallows” or “contextualizes” World as it should. This is the mysticism of the Groupmind, elegent symbiosis. This is TRUE humanism. Alas, even amongst those who sense an over-arching presence, most think from their specific identity into the jellyfish without knowing it as real. For them the Jellyfish is an ambiguous other which will forever haunt them, unless perhaps a chance confrontation with it makes for friendship. If not, they will forever wonder if that thing could have been real all along, never supposing they could BE it. Purple. “applaud the jellyfish XIII. BINDING MECHANISMS 238Discuss fractal + velcro bonding of souls/personhoods. Also with World, talk reversal of outwarding axii into inwarding axii and it’s repercussions for attempts to spatially represent World/ the Divine. World part of Binding Mechanisms 239- -World as “context”. World as the Personhood of World-Soul. Meeting. -Soul Tendril Love is the twist binding, double helix. Binding mechanisms of the Spire 240- -Gender and convex/concave structure of spires + why this is not simple. -Footnote structure (windows, differing voices, hypertext format Binding mechanics. Erotica appendix 241- Maleability + flexability of gender + identity Future, gay “agenda” (haha), binding mechanics + later erotica appendix 242- -Great Mother Earth ethics 243- So, the Outline of Otherness or the conceptual boundary between self and other can evolve through many distinct stages on a spectrum of complexity. We can have an ultimately basic concept such as [self/other circle bifurcated by straight line diagram], and then…. [proceed dimensionally from basic to time/ falling-time/ fractality/ eventually to peripheral spires. Binding mechanisms 244- So, why is REAL time like a falling veil upon the Spire and being generated by it in receeding DIAGONAL whisps? Why are the whisps diagonal? Because if our concept of time receedinmg at a perfectly perpendicular angle to the Vein of Intention, it would be “Scienmce Time/Chronon tracking” instead of commonly lived Time-sense. On the other hand, if it were parallele with or in union with the Vein, it would not be RECEEDING into a unique dimension! Thus, thre Time-dimension as it is generated cause the fadiung tail of the comets fall somewhere inbetween [illustration 1] and [illustration 2] Falling time vs. forward time, perpendicularity compromise. 45 degrees. Whisps. Binding mechanisms *X-TRA FRAG’- male/female analogies don’t work, Appendix, gender 245- -external/ other-negative space 246- Binding, many conceptions of other (world, others, emptiness, etc.) The Natures of the Clays and Meeting World 247- “God” is natural name applied to the ambiguouse other which is ASKED for entrence to now (and mistaken for the source of the forgivenness state as God and forgiven-ness as a basic aspect of dimesion of God-Itself). Also perhaps- “my family” / “my familiar or current specific culture- “Can I enter” must be uprooted, “Loved One Lost”, “World” or even the “Hypothetical Species”. Ritual entrence. 248- World soul/approach of world (processed as threat for natural reasons/ time) soul or Common Soul. Soul = god 249- The Ultimate Other can be perceived as “God”, the “other”, the “outside”, or like a blank canvas, because it is so absolutely unknown that for most mortal denizens of the Realm of Mundane, it is for all practical purposes unknowable. Even for those savants who can interpret and translate this Grand Beyond, it remains unknown for the same reason that Soul is unknowable. Because it is Beyond. Trust me- the true nature of Absolute Context does a wicked job of possessing the unwary initiate who succeeds in channeling it, so long as they can see it as the Grand Snowflake. In contrast to “soul-regression” spirituality which I do not advocate as a path of liberation the way I DO advocate Soul Migration. The channeling of the true nature of Absolute Context harnesses winds and currents that can be put to DAMN FINE use. The preferred conception of the Ultimate Beyond is as the vast hyper-dimensional, hyper-symetrical Fractal Snowflake of which we are part. The preferred method of succumbing to it is as dying into a circus of multiplicity and light. Spiritual anatomy like an astral duigestive system, with a myriad of multiplicity of vast sentient organs, the purpose of which is to digest us, a jellyfish umbrella unto which we can only surrender. “absolute context” or “other as god”. 250- It is usually and for most people a blank canvas which is convenient for tossing a huge variety of possible conceptions (the Other, “God”, “Cosmic Mystery”, “Society”). The trick is to stop TOSSING societally convenient sedemented roles UPON the Outside (the “great outdoors” if you will), and start THROWING a better, truer conception at it like a dart. binding 251- We cannot do this through forward-will. This would be as naieve as interpreting collective will as if it were a quantitative agreement of intention amongst all people. Everyone pushing all their might in the same direction cannot accomplish the task of the true collective will.. So too %100 of the might of a hero’s contribution is still meager. Even that great forward-will could not force the saved-world into existence, let alone for the peasants, we fall short. So we seek exponbential-will. Exponential will is a trick, short-cut, or loophole. This is not some quantitativge “oact” or “agreement of intention” of all members of a group toward a future utopia. There is a collective but this is a qualitiative collective pregnant with the destiny of the species. Eschaton is the saved world, but noit quite the saved-world we dreamt of as jubulent optimistic younbg heroes. That naïve dream was pure
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sweetness and in that saved world there was all the play and frolic of this world with none of the calendar. It was an idealized world like heaven within each of us back then. Our own spark of the indominable play proved utopia possible in advance and justified it. It was self-evidence, really. Exponential-will 252- -Absolute Context- the contextualization or "swallowing" of a polarity by the third- the third is like divinity. Why is this? Why is being swallowed or contextualized a process of enlightenment? for the same reason that "evil' is a function of partiality and wisdom is placing things within a higher dimensionality or more enveloping context. The number three is associated with divinity because fucking CONTEXT itself is tethered to divinity, hence the parallel of emotional surrender (and FEAR) with meta-awareness. Absolute context as highest dimension aspired to, most encompassing possible, yet paradoxically empty, useless 253- -Gender and concave/convex structure of Spires + why this is not simple. Titles of s IX. THE NEXUS 254Then- Nexus. (Quicksilver Heart or Pixel of All Colors, The Amber Satori, the Gate. Absolute Freedom, (while it lasts, a blessing one has duty to claim. Duty to be within vs. “deserved” to be within. The Joyous and Rightful Forgetting. Ethics. Enlightenment of Splendor, the Fracturing of Dimension, the Schism and the Faultline of the Prism that is human-ness, and that peculiar way in which our Nature is No-Nature and that right to name things central to our human-ness. No-Nature is rightful context for All Natures, or at least the Natures of all Things. The Nature of Inter-relationships is not as one-to-one simple.) Nexus section, but examine in “folklore” tales of 1st clays. Myth intro, brief overview leading to nexus! Nexus- “7th clay”! Heart? A satellitght of soul. Compass. -Heart. NOT in section as clay (near Nexus) 255- Convergence points Holographic Pacifism***!! Ethics of Spire, imperative- “gravity” 256- Ethics + Will Will section (near heart, Nexus, forces, after clay and axii?/ 257- Holographic Pacifism Cube/ limitations of.... Efficiency of "hydraulic" pressure from various depths of SoulCore Techniques of Soul Migration/ 258- Holographic Pacifism Cube/ limitations of.... -Central idea of "will-to-now"/ vs. will-to-end-in-itself-ness Ritual, snowflake, “exfoliation” 259- -Absolute Personhood. Meta-encapsulation Sequence Paradoxicality Magic, nexus, #7, zylaphone 260- -The significance of form spun in a (crystaline, 3-d) web greater than simple # and level of meta The Relationship between Heart and Nexus 261- Heart may be considered a phasing-through or “ghostly” entity in that it is an ameba having to do with that most strange (as a mystical concept) substance variously called ectoplasm, viscouse substance, emerald medusa liquid, or plasma. The defining characteristics are a strange place between solid and liquid, a place like the gelatinous network of frogeggs. To anyone with skill in catching frogs and the exploration of rivers, the embryos’ or what have you are like coagulations of nuclei but far larger than cells. Before they become tadpoles they serve as a good metaphor for the “ecology of souls” that is this-worldly but no less spooky for that. There may occur daydreams about the Hall of the Ancestors/ the Happy Hunting Grounds/ and the story-telling of hauntings, possessions, ghosts, and séance. All these things have much to do with Heart and they are starnge like Heart. Heart is a strange thing in its fickleness and its poignancy, and in its unique substance. They say “paranormal” or “supernatural” things are “not for the faint not heart” for good reason. Must they pertain instead then to the hearty and the bravehearted? Yes. But I ask who has the heart brave enough to himself possess the ghost? Heart + purple 262- Of fickleness- Heart seems to disappear and summersault; it burns brightly now, then it is nowhere to be found. It involves transience in a way that the Clays do not. If the Clays are the scaffolding and the FORM of man, Heart is a ghost which phases through the Clays. It is fickle because it traces the path of the telescoping cross-section formed when a sphere passes through a plane- a shape always and only in flux, telescoping and widening from a point, swelling into primacy and donning qualities of The Eternal Now, burning brightly in centrality, primacy, symmetry, and ritual, becoming a temporary nucleus and a “surrogate” or lesser soulcore of its own as the image of a great oak may be reflected in a single dewdrop, and then always telescoping down into a point and becoming nowhere to be found amongst the normal or the horrible. The pattern of its phasing through the vein of intention is curvilinear symbiosis and is intimately connected to karmic resistance and will-symmetry. heart 263- The Nexus may be called one’s “Silver Heart” or “Quicksilver Heart” and is necessarily, sadly enough for almost all of us, a function unattainable and inconceivable, most alien, and occurring in a species and culture not our own- a species of the theoretical planet, orbiting the Fantasy Star. nexus 264- Nexus is the lost twin of heart. Heaving sigh of the spirit is the admition that even the hypothetical, non-existenmt pinpoint gate is a full neccessaty for correct function. These passagesd are crucial in correct navigation (backwards) into inner shells of SINCERITY. Personhood gathers into true face/ truer intention/ will + more. Heart as compass of soul in migration. Nexus section. 265- Hypothetical Nexus convergence, “silver heart” or “quicksilver heart”. “Lightning Heart” Will as danger becomes effortless intention.
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“tamed will”.Self-validating happiness through union of purpose and form. Nexus as full brightening, thus equal symmetry of clays, “grain” of personhood substance symmetrical, then a consistent pinpoint of different interrelation and functions such as will, it has many colors of sap, rainbow spectrum available to one pixel. Perhaps briefly in post-clay sections. (will. Heart. Then full chapter. 266- Why Nexus revealed itself as “artificial heart” (Joey the mechanical boy/ trauma but wish to participate) becomes battlemech. NEXUS- NOT hypothetical point which heart points to (that is gravitational center of all IMBUED PARTS of the clays (by soul-flavor/vividness) or “clays as they are shaped in the limited peripheries of our species and culture. Has everything to do with the “multi-dimension” NOTEONE- deeper levels of symmetry! “Quantum symmetry, omni-directional” 267- Swollen time as basis for higher consciousness ruling lower, Truth as grasped in rarest moments. Proper hierarchy. Shameless audacity of full ritual-activation necessary, once achieved it is through its ghoing under, synchronistic-will and parables that it anchors itself. Parable of master + minions, related to heart passing through + ritual 268- NEXUS- is all clays were filled (Fantasy star), center of their gravity before straight line to soulcore would be union with heart (not fickle) magnificent, effortless proper will and constanmt nerve-center. Nexus. 269- -paradox/polarity/toggling “spacticity”/ (the intersection of many natures poles meeting is the wonder, true polarity as meeting of two natures, thus energetic spectrum, holding is orgasmic Teasing, same massive increase in energy , tesla moter, alternating current Paradoxical polarity toggling, nystigmia. “Significance of Nystigmia” subsection 270- Toggling is the vibratory tickle of pre-voiced vocal awareness tingling in ones throat chakra, the seed-intention prior to the formation of a word. Toggling is the perpetual motion machine which pops stage after stage outward with a seemingly impossible momentum. It is laughter in its most elemental form- never laughter at a joke or a thing, but the seed-intention of laughter seeking an object to laugh about. Elemental Paradoxically is the feature of us that is most essential to our humanness. It is so fleetingly rare and such an unexpected gift dropped in our laps that to strive for it seems wholly impractical- like the wind it comes we know not whence nor where. Yet there is a way to call it forth. / 271- This can be a happy neurological accident, or it can be trained for vigorously; ideally both. One needs to induce an unconventional link or non-perceptual kind of synesthesia between two relatively unrelated areas of the brain/mind. One area is sexuality and the concept of orgasm and all which that means; the other is the extremely rare state of Toggling between abstract concepts in a polarity. Synesthesia between sound and light is rare, and achievable. A realm of study I have never encountered is synesthesia between non-perceptual functions of the brain/mind. I rarely use the term “brain” but in this area it is appropriate because synesthesia seems to operate under very physical, organic peculiarities as if literal pathways of the brain were accidentally crossed and feeding us an instantaneous translation between the two regions. The philosophical pleasures of toggling abstract concepts may be great for some, but this alone is not enough to empower, sustain, and draw one into a firmly held Toggling focus. Toggling is like the filament of a lightbulb so hot and thin that it shines for one second before fizzling out. But Toggling can become a massive lead vice grip that can seize upon one’s mind and clamp it, lock it down, into an immovable paradoxicality-attuned (or consumed) state. To call forth this kind of sheer power and stability of Toggling and have the call be answered, appreciating it intellectually is insufficient. One needs to develop an intentional, cooperative desire for Toggling that matches the state’s infinitesimal rarity and fleeting fragility with a near infinite depth of desire. We harness the vast power of sexual desire by wedding it synesthetically to the state of Toggling, such that the brain interprets the toggling state as orgasm. That is all that is required to call it forth, but this linkage is something best done by the fickle happy accidents of abnormal neurology. Shells of periphery. Toggling, “perpendicular concept” arch’? nexus. Polarity toggling. Savant. Synesthetic Triad. Synesthesia Wand [word in lex’] toggling/ nexus/ nystigmia 272- The Secret Ideosynchracy of Spire in hypothetical species. 273- The Secret Synchronicity is a straight line through the Spire, penetrating through instead of wrapping/curving around, thuis it appears magical/synchronistic. mathematically speaking, it is a pulling forth of a hypothetical future event (all future is provisional) towards yourself as if yuou are the singularity./ [see diagram for below] The Nexus IS absolute Personhood. (although “nexus” is a term that only makes sense from Holographic Snowflake side of life). The term Absolute Personhood applies more to the other side of life- ther actual lived experience of life as aperson! [see diagram of “strong lock” between Chronbon Tracking Reticule and symbiotic waveform aemeba!] Brief quotes? Pulled, emphasis? Nexus. 274- Paradox. Humor. Lighting-Nexus-Energy. Time-dimensionality + Prophecy/synchronicity (all will is prophetic bvecause all future is provisional) Nexus + synch’ The Kindling 275- Paradox is a fire, Par4adoxicality can be flames and a blaze, and this is a higher will which is no will. Just as Nexus is a higher kind of heart. In other words, the lightning of Paradox is multi-colored and does not favor any one direction but is omni-directional. Unlike will which is silver and flowes in one direction. “The Kindling” (!!). paradox + nexus 276- Forgiveness of Self and desire for perceived forgiveness from a generalized sense of “my culture” or “my familiar others” or “God” - how EXPERIENCE of forgiven-ness (despite soft Christian undertones) is crucially relevant to the ability to enter the now symetyrically. Define the crucial relationship between perceived “allowed” forgiven-ness and skill or COOPERATION with ritual entrence. Now/Chronon is what we are (Soto already-buddah-nature) yet this knowledge is insufficient for practical ease of entrence into identification with further-inward slices of now. The beliefe in being “allowed” into the now is firmly sedimentified even when specific culture is actively denied. In other words, vast SHAME (experientially felt as heart-exclusion from sense of “us”/isolation/loniliness) is more practically and logically defined as internalized belief that the now has a gate operated by culture which can open or close due to culture’s judgment on you (flaming sword-angels guarding re-entry to Eden) [do you “deserve” to enter significant deeper levels of temporal inwardness?] The truth is the gate to further temporal inwardness is not always open (if innaccesable) but IS what we are in our reality-chronon nature (death/non-being within/ our nature as no-nature, the vanishing point within). It is not enough to know that our specific culture is contemptable, in order to annihilatre the vast internalized shame which leads to a block in our ability to identify as now. In fact, our extreme alienation from our specific culture is actually a larger component of our internalized
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shame- we reject culture, therefor culture may be expected to jealously and resentfully prohibit entrence into deeply inward, experiencially vital now. Why is social, forgiven-ness-oriented feelings so closely tethered to skill in identification with now? Why do perceived “sins” have so much effect on allowing ourselves to symetrify + unify ritually? The negative feelings from improper karmic resistence can muddy precise symetricla locking, but deeper than that, the forgiveness-block to now-rightfullness may be an inherent, integral relationship that holds now-rightfullness out of reach (similar to non-continuous orgasm) to provide motivation for righteousness similar to motivation toward procreation. This is a better way to look at the neccesaryy fucntions of self-forgiveness (and perceived societal forgiveness’ role in the openness + vital playfulness of now than to think the issues are just sedimentary remnents of Christian Morality or guilt/shame issues that are mere shortcommings or hangups- ity is better to honor the experiential blossoming (undeniably delicious and pleasurable, sublimely blissful, precious) of forgiven-ness as valid preparatory cleansing prior to the goal of ritual activation, and a TRUE veil that must be passed through to engage the ritual goal of centerdness and primacy. Chjristian Morality might have made a fetish of forgiven-ness and mistaken the veil for the goal itself- the goal is ritual activation, which requires engagement and activity, an intelligent and willful activity and a presence. 3 Keys to Entrence. 1) Rejection of the percieved authority of specific culture top allow or disallow entrence 2) recognition and belief in now as occuring REGARDLESS of experiential access 3) Claiming of Now not for prize of entrence, but for aid in operations origionating FROM the now which are ethical imparitives. We must ritualize and claim shamelessness, FOR action healing to others (deeply inward outwarding). 277- Ethics inherent, entangled, and imbedded in Now –mechanics, ritual, +chronon interception due to karmic resistence, nature holding nowidentiofication out of reach as per orgasm non-continuous and neccesaty for heart forgiven-ness as veil for entrence. (but why in contrast to obvious procreation mechanics of orgasm non-contiunuous??) Synchronicity triad involving sexuality. 278- FORGIVEN-NESS (state) achieved rather than “forgiveness” to emphasize that it is not bestowed, either by self OR percieved culture/ it is attained, claimed, NOT bestowed. One more point- Why not experiencially try to percieve Theoretical Species/ Alien Allies as more forcefully bestowing or in fact DEMANDING entrence? They would do such, but their “forgiveness” is irrelevent- they would not bestow forgiveness of sin + provide heart-blossoming as would the percieved Familiar Culture because their reasons for encouraging ritual entrence would be NEXUS- andf geometric logic-based rather than compassion-based as percieved normal culture’s “reward” is. We seek acceptance (subconscious) from familiar culture even though we explicitly reject it. Our concept of them holding key to bestowing entrence must be uprooted, just as same perception of “God” or “Oneself” holding the key must be uprooted. Then acting in accordance to streamlined karmic resistence can grow and entrence can be heroically (pirately) CLAIMED (rebeliouse/audacious claiming of forgiven-ness state. Might as well since available.) Ritual entrence + shamelessness. 279- Nexus = Middle, Equanimouse, neutral, (silver - rainbow) Magnifying Lense and Kindling Theory. Vast power! There is a Nexus-Will, a Nexus-Heart, the PRINCIPLE of the Nexus exists in a continuam of dimensions, latching on-to and locking on-to this. PRINCIPLE of Nexus is what allows nexus-middle of each to “stand” for entirety of each clay/ axii/dimension, therefor allowing them to be treated as uniform and alltogether when related to soul. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Nexus 280- Or egg whites compared to yolk or wider cell (name?) compared to a nucleus. On a sapectrum, the focus and the WILL the CLARITY of consciousness, the sheer intentionality, outwarding-ness, sunchine, and electricity of mind be re-trained to act as a relentless magnifying impulse directed at the middle of meeting-places of a spectrum! (Middle is kindling!). A dynamic equilibrium spectrum object called Nexus and this dimension was in many ways the true purpose and activation of Core Ritual... It is defined by strange powers coming from dynamic equilibrium and neutrality. Will “splendor-will” or “will absurdified”, “will after having having lost its innocence that there is no goal in the previous linear sense.” “ideosychracy-will” (better than traditional will) 281- Pole as charged or alchemized chaotic, example of a “Paradoxical Magnet” or “Strandard 3-tiered periphery system (other-self-other or selfother-self) Batter! Polar! Horseshoe Magnet! Poles unigfied. Shells. See diagram w.b. p.103 282- Migration from standard spectrum to shelled aemmeba form! In other words, as to soul-migration, consciousness is usually focuised on this or that nature, and exhibits covalence shell periphery fading where awareness of this, that or both poles is explicit while the interrelationship/tenuouse balance (toggling function!) is implicit/ sub- / pre- conscious or contextual. By reversing this tendency so that awareness-gravity is literally re-trained to the middle/ Nexus/ or “meeting place” of the spectrum and actually this reversal of current to silver/void/equanimity-fueled balance and harmony of “higher heart”. By re-training the order of the styripes of the covalence shells of awareness periphery unto the balance and tenuouse harmony of a uniformly Nexus-oriented gravitational alignment. We all have gravity between and amongst the Clays that compose our own selves and minds and conscious cooperation and even decisive navigation of the currents of thewse realms is soul-migration. Spire. Soul-migration. 283- Perhaps the dimensions of the spiritual vertabrea are analogouse to the concept of chakras, but the ability to separate and hold 7 dimensions of form (not generative-outwarding sequence of the clay’s emergence from Soul, but DIMENSIONS of Form. 284- NEXUS- WHY SILVER-WILL OPENING TO RAINBPOWE-WILL? SILVER IS REFLECTIVE. Thuis tranbsition from one color to sap prism analogy/ multiple colers per one pixel analogy 285- Nexus+ Middle, equanomous, neutral (silver-Rainbow) Principle is what allows nexus-middle of each to “stand” for entirety of each DIMENSION. Therefor allowing them to be treated as uniform and all-together when related to soul. 286- Nexus is transition from silver-will (reflective of any color and possessing peircing light as opposed to merely all-color-pregnant WHITE light. The piercing sun-spot on the silver connotates the focusing of will like magnifying glass and the transition point between common-willl and all-color or Nexus-will. “SplendorWill” 287- Magnifying lens, vast power, there is a nexus-will a nexus-heart (seems colder than it is from our perspective- not really cold-in itself but beyond conception), the PRINCIPLE of the Nexus exists in a conbtinuam of dimensions, latching on to and locking on-to this. eschaton 288- The Nexus IS Absoluet Personhood! This is Key, because it links a few major elements- soul is infinite but unified and transcendent, aspects of heroic view as tradgic, wheras the nexus is the fullness of when personhood alights on… 289- The Nexus is a state of extremely heightened paradoxicality. It is as a hologram in that the components of the spire are perfectly clear and
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distinguished, but their usual gravity has been set to zero or weightless. The mantra of emmanentizers is “be a specimen unto yourself”. The Other can be a who for some, and sometimes an It, and sometimes a “We”, and sometimes a You, and very occasionally an “I” for few. It is as a blank canvas, as “World”, or “God”, and is as empty a term, yet it is as much a thing in itself as them. It is not ours to be an alien, it is ours to be The Alien. Each one of us that can be it becomes All of it, but Jellyfish Overlord – that thing that looks down on all the world as Other than Itself. The Alien is what happens when all the world is Other, while It Itself is the same. There is peace for some in the Sameness, there are those who lust after the Alien and pine for the peace of that safeness, the Sameness that makes all things strange in Its path. Nexus. Binding. Purple. 290- Exponential will is not logical or practical. It is a trick, a shortcut, or loophole. A wormhole, a Warpzone. There is still a collective, but this is not a quantitative collective formed by some impossible “pact” or “agreement” toward a future utopia.; This is a a Qualitative Collective Being pregnant with the inherent or programmed destiny of the species. As for the common misconception of a mere quantitative collective with a supposed “pact” or “agreement” toward utopia, even if we could accomplish such a pact, the utopia we had agreed upon would be made by our forward-will and have all the flaws that our own wills do. A utopia made is no utopia at all. On the other hand, even if a mere coven of nine adepts achieved an exquisite surrender to the Jellyfish whislt billions squandered their lives, these ten would QualitativelyForm the True collective, as they are true to their individual destinies which fit into the Fractal Snowflake of the Big Fate. To say that these hallowed ten are true to their individual destinies IS THE SAME as saying their personal snowflakes mirror and “fit” concisely into the Grand Snowflake. Group-mind will IS eschaton-will. Groupmind in purp’ eschaton, group-mind will IS Grand Snowflake. 291Okay. This is a good place to start: [see diagram] [devotion frees, soul, karma, timestream, etc] -Symetry as an ethical concept. Temporal symmetry, will/ time. 292Formalization of the science is a migraine headache. The joy that makes this worthwhile is that it is the antidote for, the cure of, and the victory over idiosyncratic, autistic solipsism. 293Nexus- NOT hypothetical point which heart points to (that is gravitational center of all parts of the clays imbued with soulflavor/vividness). Or “the clays as they are shaped in the limited peripheries of our species and culture. Nex’ 294- Synchronicity is like pulling an event out of the potentiality of time and randomness, n event both so idiosyncratic it must be random but so coincidental it must be Fated. The ultimate example of synchronicity is 2012, we all instinctively know what this number means because it has become the largest human experiment in synchronicity and archetypal manifestation. It is irrelevant whether it was Fated or Not- the point is if enough people hold the symbol in their collective subconscious, it becomes "as good a now-point as any" and means both Apocalypse, Chaos, Evil Order, or Rebirth depending on the predilection of whoever psyche. The point is if we pour our symbolic faculties into the Illuminati myth, it becomes a valuable collective daydream- a dream it would be in our best interests to interpret. Synch’ esch’ X. ESCHATON SCIENCE 295- The truth is that it can never be stressed enough- NEVER think of the snowflake as an object-in-itself, nor think it as the mirror reflection or parallel of some imaginary thing such as "me", "soul", "me and the World", “The Other” or "Reality" in a space of dimensional abstraction. The best way to think of the Snowflake is as a Pattern we are Graced and Lucky to see that we are embedded in much as a barnacle is embedded in a boat. The Snowflake appears extremely rarely, and its appearance is as an exquisite 3-dimensional spiderweb made of extremely subtle manifestations of "person hood-electricity" or "idiosyncratic Absolute Personhood" or "the most finely-tuned and subtlest possible illumination of the thinnest possible filaments of identity-substance in the most eloquent, elaborate, elegant, and expressive pattern possible in front of you. This is equivalent to "theoretical Conscious Gaine Time-Chronon"*** or "theorized single "frame"of experience encoded in brain during current Reality Time-Chronon. [elaborate]. Grand Snowflake Section of J. Sacred Geometry. Ritual. Synesthetic Triad. Spire as “Snowflake”. 296- The lines of force or "filaments" can be thought of for now as "theoretical" for now so long as they are accorded the same status of "Patterns as Real". Regardless, they are filiments of light or energy that have two striking characteristics: they are exquisitely, baroquelly complex in geometry, and even moreso in the patterns of flux of geometry morphing over time. [splendor/circus mysticism- For the Benefit of Mr. Kite. "gypsy aura" as survival festivality/ slight of hand/frewakshow/travelling/snakeoil-- to fool the common sedentary peasants] They are exceedingly subtle, or composed of fibers- irridescent or illuminated tunnels (Implicatrions for Science of Optics) that weave cosnciousness and matter very finely, for a definite reason and purpose. The joy, wonder, peace, security, safety, creative mania, and prophetic-extrapolation properties- the powers of the filiment-flash (flashbulb interception of gnosis filament-web) is related to the degree of its subtlety + complexity; the higher the subtlety, the greater the "mystical power" or more correctly "the ability to manifest and immanentize the idiosyncracy and "selfevidence of the significance and merit" of phenomena in the realms of primary abstraction". That was difficult so let me repeat in another way: The word "abstract" says to me a realm that is not "constructed through discovery of patterns in the feild of practicality" but that those patterns represent a realm with its own outwarding/ the Abstarct is not constructed via the discovery of patterns in the field of practicality any more than the matter of cups and chairs is "constructed" via the exhertion or outwarding of self-evidencies and primacies in the Abstract realm. Of course the realm itself as context for "Abstrrct forms" in the platonic sense is a crutch and it is as much the REALM itself which can be considered the self-evident primacy that is outwarding the Abstarct forms or patterns of which cups and chairs are "CONSTRUCTED". tHE TWO POLARITIES CONSTRUCT EACHOTHER. To recognize this is to reclaim a vast amount of "primacy" for the Abstract- only because of this specific culture's particular deficiency in vividness of the Abstract and therefor difficulty in accepting the Snowflake as "REAL" in at least an equivelence of selfevidence and outwarding as the REAL-NESS of cups and chairs.; nomatter how much this is stressed. In other words, I will tell you that it is real. You will think that you believe me, but you will not. I will then prove it is real. You will think you believe, but you will not. You will tell yourself, "If I make a leap of faith AND prove intellectually that it is real, AND decide ethically that accepting its real-ness is more appropriate for my will than not regardless of my degree of independent-validation, then surely I do believe in it... yet you will not believe. You will believe it is real but you won't, however, believe that it is "REALLY" real, and you will be unable to see the "REALLY" disclaimer. Still, your leap of faith [1], your intellectual grasp[2], your ethical desicion[3], and your independent validation[4]" will all act as new organs in concert to produce healthy organic rhythms of psyche that in coincert will vastly aid your eventual True Belief through Direct Contact. Spire as Snowflake. “thinness of wafer” = more info encoded. Spire as “REAL”. “Abstract” as Primary 297- This is a system of spirituality that debunks or "dispells demons" with skeptical common sense. it is indeed a manual and a self-help motivational guide,NOTEONE in addition to a contribution to a difficult-to-categorize but Hard Science. Why is this a "Hard" Science? Because
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it is first and foremost a system or a pattern in Nature, and this pattern is both programmed into Nature and Reality Itself, as well as into myself and each of you. I won't make some vague generality that "The Snowflake is our DNA" [expand on double-helix, wrist-joinign rave dance/ orgiastic spirituality implications for global psychology regarding aids-sex-death-fear dynamic and overpopulation/mold metaphor "creatures "intended'/ "meant-for"overabundance. "plastic forks complex" worthy and valid, very difficult groupmind psychic block or hurdle. expand on Global/Gaine psychic hurdles and why appropriate healing + cathartic processes mimic and parallel functions of body attainbing health/pschic freedom and "diagnosis from within, internal bodily self-evidense". medical symbol of snakes + staff.] NOTEONE. Appendix. Self Help. Reptillica illuminatica. “The Humane Solution” 298- Ethics, Partiality/ Symbiosis + Environmental/ Ecosystem concerns. [link between trees + soul of man] 299- The concept of suchness or sefl-evidence can be applied to phasing between "Real Life" and Velcro World, Fractal Jigsaw, Inside-theVinylWorld or simply "The Warpzone". Ethical relevance + imperative urgency of system. “Reason for” convincing. Spire as Snowflake “self – evidence + uniqueness of Denizens. [fragmnent 300 missing] 301- -seven as "number of man", meta-encapsulation threshold Duality triads vs. seven. Vertabrea zylaphone 302- -systems theory + meta-progression stages Miracle of Seven, Number of Man 303- why relevent to Ethics- Planetary/Gaia earth ethics 304- OK, enough of that. Now- do we say that the snowflake is the ultimate form of each human or the ultimate form of Humanity? It is both. Though Massive in its comprehensiveness compared to our “small” or “common” identities, this massive form still is but all we are, “wee little ourselves” and nothing more, although a large part of our salvation is that each fits into the Grand Snowflake concisely. What is the relationship??? Grand Snowflake, symmetries, see “New Diagram” idea in “bled-early” draft (scan) (also, find: “Humane Solution” notes.) 305- Again, what is the relationship between one’s personal snowflake and the Grand Snowflake (Form of Humanity, or Full Planetary/Gaien Form? The relationship is Fractal. In finding one’s own snowflake form, one necessarily finds the Grand Snowflake. It is not that one’s snowflake “fits inside” the Grand Snowflake, but the fractality binds them. Grand Snowflake 306To identify as one’s snowflake is a process of vast expansion and coming to terms with over-arching comprehensiveness, so the confrontation with the immensity of “one’s own” snowflake and learning its operation can easily be misinterpreted as coming to terms with the Grand or “Gaien” Snowflake. In truth the confrontations are one process- simultaneous but involving the limitations imposed by the rule of thirds, focus vs. intuition alternating covalence shells, and of course the inaccessibility of Will into Full Grand Form. (It just ain’t gonna fit.) Apart from these key differentiations, the dual confrontation is one simultaneous process, but clearly the “squishy mind” (small mind, common mind) should focus on interpreting ones own snowflake and allow Grand Identification to be a “trusted peripheral unfolding”. Grand Snowflake, Eschaton 307- The feeling of the Grand Snowflake seeping directly into smallmind, (ahhhh; exquisite lovecraftian horror perhaps- but delicious mindfuck caviar! The height of aesthetic sensuality and a proof of the Final Dominance of the Abstract Feminine, an exercise in surrender of the Will unmatched, the only thing a sharp crazed Zen Will CAN rightly and honorably surrender to!). It is telepathic and intuitive, necessarily (because of the rule of thirds and the inherent limitations thereof), yet it does not obscure the lessons of focus one has cemented through investigation and categorization of ones personal Form. The best course of action may be to give honor to the inexplicability and Final Inscrutability of the Grand Snowflake by trusting the inklings and Godlike “winkings” (insight transmition/ Grand Serpent Lightning Trickster Transmitions/ Synchronicity instructions, etc) of the Jellyfish as a supremely Benevolent Cthulu, presiciely BY making a sane and measured, concerted effort to FOCUS on the proper successive stages of identification as snoiwflake while allowing Grand Archetypal Foliage to exfoliate of its own doings and through its own mysterious workings. Just remember- the jellyfish is what the Grand Snowflake appears as to the smallmind due to smallmind (or “squishymind”), but the slippery beast only exists as the relationship between the two- it is wise to perceive this relationship as an entity with intention and indeed “a plan”, “a will”, yet that wisdom is due to the limitations of our minds. Things intuitive share the impression of semigelatinous VISCERATE texture and things pertaining to ectoplasm and spirit-slime, a supra-organic modality that is not homogenous but contains multitudes, like organs in a digestive system. To make of one’s psyche an offering to a digestive process that is transhuman is not to dissolve but to become a properly functioning organ in a system, and is in accordance with the symbiotic principle in the highest. Grand unified snowflake. Also: PURPLE!!! 308- -vision of planetary eschaton vs. prophecy because it is a WILLED vision, sdex + world peace, new media/ dive into media, the allure of the imaginary as fated. (the instinct to hide in fabntasy is our destiny) Appendix eshaton 309- -Fantasy Star and transmutation into Planetary Eschaton. Eschaton, theoreticasl specie 310- [see di9agram of meeting-place, and pay note to magnetic force lines depicting 3-tired spectrum to blossom into potentyiasl horeshoe-maget, similar to linking of soul + god] Polarity unified 311- The most important aspiration of the science of intentional migration would be to Splice and Shuffle the conception of the GRAND vs. Personal meta-encapsulation sequence. (Meta-encapsulation is like a cross between click-clack blocks, a flower blossoming, the best joke ever, and a pin number) Eschaton zylaphone. 312- The Grand-Meta-Encapsulation Sequence might be analogouse to the Grand Snowflake or Planetary Groupmind, but it is more achievable. It requires the extrapolation of an origionally 3-tiered spectrum-form into a theoretical 7-tiered spiritual vertabrea. Eschaton zylaphone. 313- Immanentization is still believing in the collective Tomorrow, but believing in it only inasmuch as we can will it. We will it SO TRHAT WE CAN BELIEVE IN IT. Emmanentization can be the scariest thing because “saving the world” is dirty business. Children wish to be He-Man, can dream vividly of the saved world they can’t wait to be part of and plan. And they imagine themselves well-loved by those of the saved-world who will take them as hero. An adult who literally, genuinely believes that they can save the world or is chosen to do so has not the healthiest of psyches. The stakes
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are too high: this world we have different feelings towards – love, hate, indifference, or for some a very, very deep love coupled with a very, very deep hate. For this last type, if they seek to change the world for love, they end it for the sake of the beauty of the Fantasy Star. This is saving the world and ending it. They too wish to end it because they hate this world for how short it falls from the Fantasy Star, in that they can do this operation somehow, the two feelings and the two endings of this Choose Your Own Adventure can be hideously close and difficult to resolve. But if the change is drastic enough, it is inconceivable, hence “just as well Heaven as destroyed”. “Big Fate” vs. “Little Fate” (big fate analogous to complete impression left in snowflake and “scaffolding element” of snowflake “Small Fate” is how the drop of water slides off the surface (reflective). Esch’ grand snowflake 314We call the Spire a hologram when we wish to emphasize its non-physical and non-gtravitational qualities. Sometimes the Spire can seem very physical, corporeal, and the gravity of the clays can seem to define the way it operates. The sloshing about of awareness through a sometimes thick mud of resistence, and the burdon of strife this may cause, can make the Spire seem very physical indeed. However, remember that despite the obvious influence of gravity, the Spire is ultimately non-physical. TRhe gravities we succumb to and which we seem at the mercy of are not absolutely powerful or permanent. In fact, they are in some ways products of our imagination or “real inasmuch as we believe in them” and the follies of our all-too-human nature. It is like the elephant who does not easily break its twine leash because it grew up from infancy thinking it unbreakable, and the beast no longer even tries. The twine seems like a steel chain because it was learned (sediment) to be so. The gravities seem absolute and permanent because they determine the nuts + bolts daily functioning of awareness. But the twine CAN be broken. This moment of unbounded freedom is the perception of the Spire as weightless hologram. The Clays are first unknown to us and we are tossed like a ship at sea, at their mercy. Through learning the true natures of the clays and their structural and functional relationships, we can cooperate with the shifting tides of gravity and become conscious of our prized and honored right to choose, decide, and initiate the ways we cooperate. Our choice in this matter is a sadly hidden fact of life in this culture and it must be reclaimed. The beast of this culture does not even try to break the twine of weightless hologram perception, let alone the operation of the “outside convergence points” as a helm, but that will be no challenge at all for us. Spire as hologram (no dread of gravities) 315- The next higher stage of freedom is to claim a transcendent total splay of awareness so that the gravities and soul-migrations continue to exist, but are perceived as moving THROUGH the wider total splay of awareness. This state is very high, very honored, and it is refered to as “Percieving the Spire as Hologram” It is a paradoxical state because it does not extinguish the interplay of gravities (this would be stasis), but transcends and swallows them. It is as a ship tossed at sea by a storm that becomes the ocean itself- the waves still crash violently, but now they are crashing within, while the totality of the oceon is silent and perfectly motionless as a whole. Percieving the Spire as Hologram is an advaqnced state which is accompanied by feelings of immense silence and motionlessness, and the attainment of a transcendent perspective that makes the true interplay of gravities very “objectively”. The precise height and direction a wave, and especially a rational comparison of two or more is better judged from a hgelicopter abopve the oceon than a swimmer being thrashed in the froth. Spire as hologram, weightless, migration, outside convergence points. 316- Our duty is to save the world. ***USE!!!*** also: “Save the World for vengeance!” Evolutions of will. Traditional will - splendor-will - will-toword-eschaton 317- Emanentization Instructions 318- Congradulations! You have almost finished a ridiculously complicated book! From now on we can leave the geometry behind. This section is about the POINT, the MEANING, and the PURPOSE of the Protocol. I like abstract psychology but in tradeb I am a social worker. My academic degree is in the field of human service. I believe that the most abstract psychology is the only true crucial key to serving you humans, because I believe that the best of humanity comes directly from knowing what we are. The reason I teach geometyric psychology is out of a blatent curiosity for what we are. But this curiosity is not idol. I am curious what we are because I am jealous of things and angels- they are what they are. We are not. That is central to our nature- our nature is no nature. Yet if we were a thing… how sweet. The snowflake is a thing, and to be this is all we need. “Who” we are is our favorite dream and why we fall in love. But time is short! Do not be late. We must be a thing to conquer action. Few lust after WHAT we are more than the sweetest WHOSE we can be. What we are is not our DNA nor what “God” intended us as. What we are is the Alien, and this is not for all. Those who claim victory as the Alien are not strange to themselves, but all is deliciously strange to them. I am sad to say that trauma is the best pre-requisite to identification as the Alien, but it is so. It is the Alien who knows what to do outside of sadness and love. It is the Alien who is the snowflake and who can claim thinghood and victory of action. The One Vast Alien Jellyfish is no stranger to the Alien thing we become, and this is our Alien “God” or the only God the thing needs. This “God” is also the source of exquisite telepathy which makes no sense to a who, but is the parent of the Alien-Things we become. What we are is in truth a thing. To become the snowflake-thing is to give forth your greatest symmetry to the Grand Snowflake. In perfect symmetry, we utilize the only gift we can give to the Grand Snowflake- synchronicity. Synchronicity and manifestation are not magic. They are what we give as a thing in honor of the Eschaton. The Grand thing is the Final “Heaven-Like stage of human history”, at least planetarily. When we are that exquisitely alien THING, our tiny fractal fits effortlessly into the parent fractal of our species. This fitting is ITSELF Imanentization through synchronicity and manifestation. It could not be otherwise. 319- The near-permanent un-knowability of that profound and monstrously Fated thing that is language-in-Itself is intimidating like a monolith. Rhyme calls it down miraculously until it is intimately close and familiar. A monolith nestled paradoxically within our saliva. Rhyme as exponential will, forkjed tongue and true language
LEXICON 320- -Vocab List lexicon Lexicon/ 321- -Math/Geometry-music/experiencial applications Synesthesia wand = “tesseract”, after Forum
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TERMS. Transcribe the Lexicon 322- Let’ review. Transcribe the Lexicon Lex’. A True Artist does not want to be remembered, he wants to be leanrt by heart.” Let’ review. prompt 323- The glossery is called “Lexicon”. Clear definitions, then essay for each “squared” word. A “squared” word is a word used in a specialized sense, either a normal word connotating an aspect of the spire, or a newly invented word. 324- -We are SOFT compared to Language. The symbiosis of humans and computers is pleasing to us because the computer contrasts and highlights our own squishiness in comparison, so too has language always done this. But this quality of language is largely unnoticed, for language came from our own squishy organic mouths. The inherent potency and vitality of Rhyme is because it exists at the interface between language in itself and our specific biological medium of voice. As rhyme announces istelf so pleasently, it reaffirms the in-escapable specificity of ourselves and our situation, our very mouths and the way they work. Language-in-Itself is hard as rock. “textuality” “rituality” (both in lex’) APPENDEXES 325- The System as it is now------>The System as it will be after this book is written and the system is formalized------------>The System as it will be after those who will come after me and actualize, immanentize, and Streamline-Intuit + Holographize the system in "hardcopy" or "production" form [infrastructure un-disintanglable/ Gaine Eschaton, Novelty-Core or Singularity at the End of Time pulling history toward it. APP. Imanentize. 326- It's applicabilty is staggoring, but I find it incredibly difficult to devise examples of the potential practical functionalk applications of the science. I could easily devote one appendix each to the applications for: -forum software [Implications for democracy, freedom of speech, civil liberties] -Psychology [holographic software for training in Geometric Psycho-Annalysis NOTEONE -Spirituality + Truth. N1- expand long and richly, with fiction-elements leading to and foreshadowing Manerva Acadamy in GOF 2. Politica. Info-tech culture Shift. In intro to Spire but making reference to applications. Foreshadow appendixes! 327- Appendix Holographica [NOTES] RULES of "FORUM" an Innovative Spatial Symbolism Intuitive Message Board Clixck on different "AXII"*to view different elements of the Forum Constellation* For Example, AXIS A. :: “VERTCLE""real-time updated and historical-record galaxy constellation-view, a collection of constellations and Topics and Sub-Topics arranged as a series of bubbles or "Events" of various user, both Known and Anonymoyus. Each User is represented as a sphere of light, but that sphere can be either a "Known" user (a continuous "owned" personality with rights of ownership over what is said under that "user/codename/associated with password" OR an "Unknown/Anonymous/Public User" [represented by a grey sphere, but necessarily uneditable" see: "Counter-Intuitive UNEDITABLE NATURE OF ANON POSTINGS*" Erotica Prophetica. Media/ “pop culture”/ memes/ internet as set up for “Forum”. *virtual reality. –synesthetic symphonic wand. “forum” after set-up on internet memes, info- tech, politics. Especially on how to “teach” intuitively via forum structure. Anon Psychologica Global. [fragment 328 missing] 329- Imagine: Democratic and Voluntarily Publically-Owned Social Networking Space, but presented in a radically innovative SpatiallySymbolic/Spatially-Intuitive Protocol". Democracy. Anonymity. Spatiality. 330- The Virtues of this system are many. In addition to creating new ways of thought, We, as Founders of the medium have not only an opportunity but a DUTY to imbue the subconscious aspects of the intuitive or user-friendly interface and the very undercurrents of the means of communication with the freedoms of pure democratic free-flow of information and transparency of VOLUNTARY democratic record. Politics. Ethics. Infotech-Shift. 331- In other words, The Principles of Government by the people and for The People should be interwoven into the fabric of the Rules of Protocol of Honorable Record-Keeping. This relates to the chronon and the potential photographic recall and potential full accessibility of every “personal chronon”. Therefor it also relates to the shuffling effect, the seemingly miraculous qualities of glitch seen in exponentially magnifying intention and will, meme generation and viral media events, synchronicity, extrapolation-prophecy, and immanentization. Excellent tie between chronon “recall” of Reality/ Time/ River + Forum record of planet! 332- In other Words, each user, Known (a Personae* held with specific history/Asoociated Password and Rights of Editing) or Unknown* and Random/Anonymous/PUBLIC* is represented as a sphere of lihgt, a Personae Known or Owned is traditionaly a golden or amber pulsing orb of light, wheras Anon Orbs are grey spheres that are neutral and steadily glowing, these permenently streasm forth from any known sphere as if they are ping-pong balls streaminbg through tunnells, or nerf-styrophoam spheres propelled through nerf-gun chambers. In OTHER WOERDS, Forum description. 333- Every known Personhood of Record always has Rights of Fluid Identity- Marketing if they were a bank, for example, but every citizen has the rights of anonymity...lots of natural comon sense democratic principles, like the iNTEGRATION INTO THE SYSTEM FOR THE FULLY KNOWN VULNERABILITIES INBHERENT TO FLUID IDENTITY. Record of “identity” memorial + legend of life permanent Norse-Song honor. 334- In Other Words, We as Founders, have the right to Found the Magor Symetries of Axii arround categories that suit us, but we must democratically allow any User, known or Unknown to Found a Sphere**** or Shell*** in Honior of Any Category ior Sub-Category. 335- By Rights of Majority Rule a Public can Cancel or Temporarily Delete a Shell. Of course, any Fan Userr or Denizen of That Shell can easily
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"Re-Found that Shell as a GBackup if They chose to save or backup thwe history of those Posts ort "EVENTS* to be more accurate [EVENTS* is a genaric term that refers to any presentation of media in any forfm, from currenrt Level One-TEXT-BASED MESAGGE BOARD SYSTEKM, to Sound/Video/VideoGame/Interactive/ Holographic/ Reality/Citizen Media Presentations similart to yiouytube citizen-jopurnalism. Suggestions for programming. 336- SEE, some of ther Protocol* of this system involves ceertain "prophecios" or "Predictions" regarding the marketplace, if you will, sucvh as the understanding of the future role of media and the use of media to spin a "Context" or "Web" anf virtually live within our GroupMind Presentations of This World To Us as it Is Happening, with Virtuous Historical Accuracy, but Ruled by Principles of Victory by Truth, or Victory by The Peasants/ The People. Infotech shift- neccessarilly SPATIAL INTUITIVE to work! Wikileaks. Essential axioms. 337- Any User can speak; the Commons is a database of Public Recortdf and Public Invention, It is Magically Anarchic is some senses, in thart the Principles of Fluid Identity and Anonymous Authgorship[ of Identity's allows for a "masquerade" "Nothing-is-as-it-seems-world" Point of Internet is planetary record. 338- In OTHER WPERDS, a bank, for example, can zealously safeguard its identity with the highest secrecvy, and if it uses uiltimate security, it has complete ownershipt of the unique password associuated with its founder's account, which afford it a natural right to issue Posts (or EVENTS* rather from that account and also to Edit previous postes (or EVENTS* rather) made in the whole history of tyhat accoubt. Visual Navigation. Visual Geometry. Many colors, Many AXXII> Intuitive so a child can learn. 339- Lines opf Text Alternate Blue and Green. In Galaxy-View One can see a,ll Postes arranged around a series of Spires, where the AXIS-2 is a 45-degree Angle-Axxi that you only click on if you want to follow the lines of text in A) Real-time as they are "spun" out of the "NOWCENTRIC-VIEW" (spheres of Events blinking or spinning off off a center-point that represents the NOW, OR, alternatale, a more historicallylinear-ORIENTEDF-vIEW WITH NEWER POSTS ATTACHING ON OFF OF THE INITIASL origional Content Eevents. 340- tHE pOINT IS RTEALLY TO pLAY WITH nOTIONS OF pUBLIC mIND AND sHARED sOCIAL sPACE, AND TO iNTEGRATE pRINCIPLES OF "aNON vICTORY OR pEASANT-dEMOCRATIC rULE OR tRUE dEMOCRACY .mOCKING, TACKOVER, DELETION, OR STRIKE IS INHERENTLY ASLLOWED. nO ACCOUNT IS INVULNERASBLE TO "pARODY ACCOUNTS, OR "hOSTILE tAKEOVERS, FOR EXAMPLE bY A bANK bY ITS mEMBERS. 341- AXXII THREE- cLICK ON ANY PARTICULAR sPHERE-sTAMP eVBENT, BE IT A FORUM pOST OF tEXT or a Youtube-Style Upload or a Reddit-inspired "Meta-Commentary or Conversation-Bifurcation/Spinofff/Pun-Specificity or Linguistic Novelty Corruption Diversdions, etc..." That Bifurcates any sphere into a variety oif Family-Tree Style Brasnch of Open Categories of Research, as in, you can view any Event inb term as unique and variable as the infinite variety of "STAMPS*" ONE CAN IMAGINE OR CREATE! In OTHER WORDS, anyone can create any stamp, so someone of courdse creates a stamp as generic as "FUNNY" (Or as specific as "Posted on April 1, 2012" or "Postedy User1234" or by "BankofThePeople" or "PeopleAgainstBankofthePeople" or even "Banksor TheWorld Against PeopleAgainstBasnksofthePeople" but only Funny Advertizing Propoganda/Post 2014" In Other words, any tag can be created by asnyone, and if the tag isd "scientific curiosity" and you arer viewing thre Now-View, if they discover some partyicle moving faster than light, then ther "No0w-View-Spinning-Off of the Now-Point View of That Spire would castch thgose developments. Time mechanics “searchable by time or subject (both)” 342- This Format Uses Spatial reasoning and many principles of Mathem,atics including Fractal Geomnetry and Spatial Symbolism and Spatiaslly intuitive reasioninbg. Itr is not art first easy to picture a series of Event-Bubbles recorded and "poipping" Into Apprearance, but eventually the 3-d "MAP\" of these bubbles appearing (iNHERENTLY both Anon/Public/Grey/ Or Owned/Known Personae. Essential to forum- synesthetic triad 343- Imagine (for those very advancwed in spatial reasonion g (that the popularity or "hotness" of various topics is represented by both a rising and fallinbg of shells, bit also a gravitational PULL!!! Time Mechanics of Forum. Searchable by time or subject. Essential to Forum: the synesthetic Triad. 345- INTRODUCING "FORUM" The first truly decentralized and democratic message board/ MMRPG/ social networking platform/ citizen media website + GAME. BLUEPRINTS FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY FORUM SOFTWARE, DEVELOPED AS A FREE "OPEN SOURCE" SOCIAL NETWORKING PROTOCOL. To design the program is to manifest the Spire, to Emmanentize MODES. #1) "God-Mode" or "Soul-Mode" is *literally* a transparent crystal, a hologram of a crystal, colors can symbolize a spectrum of categories, as can axiis (neumonic devices of identity-construct!!! = "Amber Meta-Rules***) -A Transparent, democratic, open-source "GAME" FEATURES: Tags. (similar to canvas stickering but tags are more like you can tag an "axxii"!! When you "click"onto a certain "axis of symetry", that direction is illuminated. It represents a potential "view" -A "Presentation" is a formal classification of media/communication that indicates an intentional act; the concept of a "presentation" is intentionally open to encompass unknown new developments in genres of media, to accord for accelerations in this area especially. What a "POST" will come to mean,. MODES #2) Matrix-Mode. It is irrevocable but absolutely maleable by any user. There can literally be ONLY Concensus and ONLY verified USER-Generated Content. Epic Win for democracy. Intuitive, based on actual World’s axii, therefor teaches new ways 346- You have to understand Axis #2 is history or literal textual logs of all presentations in the history of Forum. Axis #2 is a "condensation of partiality. it deals with the partiality of Time, the Gaien limitations having to do with calender time, arbitrary now, and the tendency for Gaian psyche to coagulate and become sedentary, petrafy around the frameworks that emphasize the linearity of time. Past, present, and future and LIVED organic time and natural rhythms (including ritual and will/symetry rituals). Axis 2 is best approached when text wraps around a conical spire, the linearity of text-record can curve, this curvature or "wrapping of time" forms an elkegent and convenient analogy. Shifting between Time + Subject Spatially 347- EXAMPLE: Consider the point of furthest periphery of a spire as the eternal-now and the line of text wrapping around the surface of the
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Spire as linear "shallow time" as spokes of a wheel- the Eternal Now (or flashbulb chronon interception) really does touch all points in the lower valleys. Forum, Spire- malleable, ambiguous time-sense 348- -The orbs pop in and out of existence as users log in and out, and the uploading or "contributing" orbs can be visually intuitive, migrating through topics. Now, visualize!!! (it's difficult but if this were holographic PS3-intuitive the control scheme would feel like zooming a camera about and "clicking" into various axiis. Axis 2 "Matrix-Mode" or "History-Mode" Now-point, a sweeping windshield. Additional Orbits of Presentation form chains or "litteral cattipillars" as lines of text stream backward in direction defined by "conical wrapping" around Spire. Most significant is the ability to toggle and display a variety of "Primacies" that instantly re-order the chains of presentations. For example: Current is one primacy, this is FORGE-MODE*** This means a center-point is Now and past radiates back from it like cattepillars gathered round a campfire growing new heads as theire bodies snake away from the campfirefire. Another example is "Funny" "Profound" or \even AS SPECIFIC AS "CHALIE SHEEN". Forum teaches maleability of Time-sense. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Secret Purposeâ&#x20AC;?/ ethics, greater fluency of synchronicity 349- reminder:-An Amber-Meta Rule is arbitrary, but nonetheless MUST remain constant within this system's framework so as to remain cohesive and function pneumonically (pneumonic IDENTITY device!! great concept!!) as a constantanalagous dimensions of concept., tacit/embedded cue. It's a visual cue for You visually "swim" your camera through the empty static. NOTE: History-Mode has certain simple democratic rules. For example, 51% vote to ban. Can claim but not un-name, can alter one's own, not anothers, can erase, but cannot erase a copy saved, can have one's founded realm cancelled, but can be re-build instantaneously. Founder's rights. Rightsa of Public VOLUNTARY Record. The forum has vast, blank storage space. Doesn't need to be infinite, but to be democratic, it would be fair and technically feasable for a CITY OF 300,000 HUMANS TO BE PROVIDED FREE SPACE TO RECORD AS A CONSTELLATION OF BUBBLES, THE ENTIRE pUBLIUC sQUAREE AND dEMOCRATIC fORUM OF THE pEOPLE. Free, all 350- VisualIntuitive Holographic Perspectives/Modalities Destroy Class Victory by peasants (essential axiom) In the future the internet will not be thought of so much as a collection of wildly varying websites, but a single constellation that records, in a voluntary public digital protocol so that any citizen can voluntarily create an entire shell on any topic, and for example, someone starts an unpopuler topic (shell), say "CHARLIE SHEEN SHELL" In intro to Forum section (info-tech culture shift, meme section) 351- Well, imagine the 10,000 spheres of glowing amber lava or magma represent 9,000 lurkers, and 1,000 posters or uploaders of original content, "presenters". Then, for example, someone from the "My Little Pony" Shell is shown in real time as a differently colored sphere migrating, say, as one diplomatic "forum etiquette" Things shift fluidly, even if thousands of mirror sites spring up as users banned by the many lose only their personae's history. HISTORY IS VALUABLE THOUGH!!! (expand example of Bank, Gold, repiutation and voluntary seen-nees for common good. You can elect to raid, even shut down a (Shell)... of course then you need a 51% takeover. Basically, hacking or deletiong other people'sa topics is allowed, but irrelelvent. However this calls intoi question public backup issues and what (all?) datra is considered recoverable in desired endstate? Choice of individual to save. (Every snapshot from anyone's backup quesrtionable, calls into quesrtion nature of objective or social truth. (Implications for Ethcis, Propoganda, Journalism, Subjectivity+Objectivity Polarity/Paradox/Gonzo Journalism and Ciutizan Media.expand...) Surveilence vs. submitting to total historical record 352- Shells rise or fall inwards toward the center or outwards towards the periphery depending on which traits you set the arrangement to: trending topics, for example. Bitcoin transfer through Forum Snowflake Protocol. Occupy. Implications for economics (economic collapse) Politica. Absolute surveillance in evitable but ok if ethical 355- Identity can be fluid or even anonymous, yet people or institutions like banks exist, they just abide by the built-in vulnerability of a system that exposes 100% recorded Snowflake-Hologram imagery of every transaction. It is a concept I call Voluntary Mutual Public Record. Identity can be fluid or even anonymous, yet people or institutions like banks exist, they just abide by the built-in vulnerability of a system that exposes 100% recorded Snowflake-Hologram imagery of every transaction. It is a concept I call Voluntary Mutual Public Record. "Presentation". Kinds: -explicit/intyentional -anon-known solitary/remix (what is relationship, how does that determine spatal relationship. APPENDIXI #1)Memetics Significance Evaluation (artchetypes, dreams, natuire of intuition) -APPENDIX #2) Holography and I.T./future media applications Info-tech, pop culture 356- -APPENDIX #3) Occupy (eschaton, history, 2012 meme, role of citizen journalism + media) Specific polotic situation 357- -APPENDIX #4) Self-Help Applications -democracy + occupy *(survival spatiality/ Dionysian Flux) -Anonymity + crowds, reclaimation of public space Ethics, specific politics of 2012 (occupy reference) 358- -political/prophetic imoplications Prior to Forum, ethics + imperative, delving into specifics 359- pop-cultural appriciation/true understanding
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-memes, archetypes, and synchronicity, and manifestation. Fit into info-tech shift/ 2012 360- -Solidarity with victory despite planetary drama, dangers and drawbacks of us vs. them dichotomy (Golden Secret is truest value of Holographic Pacifism- solidarity with victory-PRINCIPLE and Victory-Potentiality as completely seperate from Gaines identification, hence crucial importance of nurturing/claiming of Reality-Otherness in addition to Gaine-Otherness at all stages. Eshaton “We have already won”, occupied the eschaton 361- *Final treats- pop-culture + self-help (smoking, meat industry) “Quaint” self-help applications, yet im-Reptillian/Snake Reptilica Illuminatica 362-Friday -Winning Memes/pop-culture of info-tech shift portant 363- -patterns exceed moment + past, hypothetical future completes crop-circle [cigarettes, self-improvement -gonzo journalism/ phenomenology (leftist/l;iberal slant imbued, relevance of thweories to value) Heinsenberg + gonzo [idea: footnotes to appendix containing modern pop-culture references such as theses. “we would not defile these corridors with…” 364- -clue to hologram-consciousness theory- music not spatial, synesthesia wand Appendix: syn’ wand 365- -true grand significance of memes, natural pair of archetypes, visual language, synchronicity and group-mind “Between meme and archetype” NOTEONE NOTEONE- name of sub-section Appendix Holographica. (Appendixes are applications of the sience) 366- Synesthesia wand- example of futurist holographic/musical technology Appendixes. Psychic vertabrea is “psychic zylaphone” designed to be “played” tingles! Chills! Nystigmia! Toggling or Grand Ultimate toggling is “playing the psychic Zylaphopne!!” as highest state + intended by nature for us. 367- Appendix Forum Holography- fractality really comes into play + comes into its own Appendix Forum Holography- fractality really comes into play + comes into its own/ Appendix Eschaton. -2012 as Great Meme, -stakes of this book via planetary spire. Memes and Synchronicity in service of Eschaton. Memes, synch, arch’, media, + eschaton Science (foreshadow in bifurcation of authorship!!) 368- -novelty curve -THE INVENTION! Synesthesia wand. touch gloves. mood ring biofeedback device, tone equals... prosthetics..... visual language........ shape, color, music, concept. BLUEPRINTS. syn’ wand appendix 369- MEMES ARCHETYPES AND SYNCHRONICITY: AN OWNER'S MANUAL These 3 things are sweet tools for Good Propoganda, as in viral education for our cause: humans are just systems for propogating memes. We can use this to our advantage as an ideal peaceful resistance tool. 370- Memes are a polar opposite of archetypes, because memes apply to everyone in their focused cultural specificity, their idiosyncratic selfevidence, truly the smallest unit of information which can be passed between humans, and a test to see if someone on the other line is human or spambot- lolcats confirm the individual as not-a-machine, "cat protocol". Meanwhile archetypes apply to everyone, but in their over-arching timelessness. The archetypes of the Snake, the Earth Goddess, The Jester, The Hero, The Villain, The seductress, The World Tree, The bee, the SNAKE, The Frost Giants, The Trolls. We can use archetypes to our advantage. peaceful resistance. Their powers are like sharks, big ones. App’ “memes, archetypes, + synchronicity” 371- Memes like Friday, Winning, My Little Pony, Boxxy, Insanity Wolf- they burn out so fast, humans are but meme incinerators burning down the joke within instants until it haunts itself in endless variations, like mirrors reflecting eachother. For those who bare witness at the birth of any epic meme- it doesn't matter what was chosen, so long as it is human and absurd, but once the champagne bottle of the group mind mask smashes against a meme it becomes a symbol of inexpressibly infinite individuality and it's Profound Divine Glitch. memes 372- An idea who's time has come is like a leviathan emerging out of the Jungian collective subconscious and then re-submerging. Anonymous is that idea. memes 373- Anonymous is both good and evil simply because it is humanity and humanity contains both. It is natural that a mocking spirit accompanies us, for how else could we survive ourselves? It's really all in the smile of the mask for me, all else is window shopping. The only revolution that can both be won AND smiled through is a psy-ops war fought with a viral infliction of ideology captured in the smiling ultimate meme/archetype that is our a symbol- a mask. The smile is a deflection of force that conquers tyranny with a mocking spirit like that with which anon avenged Dusty the cat- the discovery of morality. App’ 374- OPERATION: RECLAIM REPTILLIAN ARCHETYPE The SNAKE is an ideal symbol for our purposes because invokes writhing catharsis, the sinewave of the basswobble frequency, the orgiastic untiy of the rave/dance culture, the dionysian revelry, and most of all the Old Myth of the snake as the "devil", which we can use to our advantage because it strikes primal fear in the hearts of mortals-- of these conservative fundamentalist teaparty neocon businessmen who have very clear plans for the oil everywhere. If they fear the snake, then initiate Operation: Reclaim Reptillian Archetype- imposing bee stuff is imposing, eh? In the Art of Manifestation something as infinitly random and insignificant as the choice of shade of a color of yellow and hexagons can tilt the surfacing leviathon to re-submerge before crystallizing into its post 2012-illuminati-run Carnival of Lights. App’ illuminatica reptilica 375- ps. anyone who thinks I actually believe, literally, in Illuminati lizard people and 2012 apocalypse is probably themselves a lizard person. (sarcasm). Verily, this modern fairy tale IS true, but in the sense that Symbols have Power, and Epic Symbols can be manipulated in their formative stages for the benefit of the clever and those attuned to harmonic teamwork and the subtlety of memetic propaganda. Reclaim the
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Snake, Maintain that anon is Illuminati and Mckenna's Archaic Revival and that those awakening as the year takes hold are reptiles teleported back from the End-Point, that inconceivable but self-evident Novelty (2012) pulling history toward it like a black hole which some call Revelation's Rapture, some call NWO Totalitarian Fascism, and which an hero intuitively create by "writhing" it into existence with an almost wicked mischief and mocking spirit- the true Samurai Trolls. App’ 2012 376- "Anonymous: Evolution of a New Paradigm" ? App’ anon, occupy, wiki, 2012, illuminatica reptilica, [IDEA: all cultural movements are as “pop culture” from a perspective as abstract as this book, therefor emphasize the lost-in-timeness, ambiguity, and forgotten-ness, specificity of such references from denizens perspective, like memory of playboy, grenich village, etc joke from sleeper] 377- What if we came up with a table of contents and overall structure of the book, and each wrote one chapter on whatever facet we were most interested in? We've already done a good deal of participant observation and we could do more, even interviews and first-hand investigative citizen journalism, and historical scholarly research with timelines of major developments in the history of anonymous and graphs and it could all be very "respectable" and yet for those kin of ours who could read between the lines and catch our tongue-in-cheek in-jokes and caught on to a certain wry humor, then it could serve as propaganda for our cause AND high-level objective sociological research, and we could get the beast published and try to ad some sensationalism/entertainment and make it a best seller? I know I'd buy it, and some one's gonna write this book eventually anyway, I just think it should be us. App’ pop culture. Extremely (unusually) specific, ,place in one app’ with other culture-shift examples leading to forum software 378- Somewhat silly but valid random Chapter title ideas: Here lies thology to celertig two decdes of DSO, sigle pulele prited ow with 20 fuckig yers of rt fruit of the first 20 yers ofrt Dork Stork Oyster, sigle pule. ruse rrComplete Ruse of the Mster Trolls of Dork Stork Oysterr -Intro: From the swamp of Rises a Phoenix -Consensus Ideology in a Decentralized Movement The Archetype Acts -Project Mayhem 2012: Prophecy and Use the 2012 Myth to Evoke Socvial Engeneering -Memes: A Visual Language of In-Jokes, and the transmition of Insight through Sarcasm -Backlash: The Media and the Government's Misinterpretation Activist Tool or a subculture symbolic of an Entire Worldview how this Drama Must Unfold -Occupy wallstreet: How Anonymous took down the Federal Reserve -Terrorism and Propaganda: Why Anonymity is the Antidote for Totalitarianism -Surviving the Economic Collapse: a How-to-Manual -The Guy Fawkes Mask and the significance of its Smile -The Role of Lulz in Revolution -Conspiracy Theorists and Paranoia: -Trolls and Mischief: Surviving Ourselves -Copyright Law, Sampling, and Remix Culture: Control of Information -Reptiles: The Ultimate Joke, or the Claiming of a Symbolic Power Animal Mascot -Illuminati: The Economic Elite of the Mystical Visionaries of Global Transformation -How to Define "Winning": Our Demands -Force vs. Mind. Why Psy-Ops is all we need. -Bitcoin: The Re-Claiming of Money -RFID chips, GPS, and Barcodes: The Mark of the Beast -Global warming, Peak Oil, Drought, and Overpopulation: An Aura of Doom -Information Technology and the Holographic Media of the Future -Global Unification through Information Technology: The Inevitable Network -Dictatorship by the Collective Peasant Class: World Peace in Our Time App’ pop culture. Specific historicism - modernity, earth-specific themes Temporary Early Notes Section to Encorporate/delete EARLY NOTES: ***A GOOD IDEA: When pop-culture specific annectdotes arise, speak from Denizens voice as if reference is not gotten , misremembered historically, or as if there are “theories” as to what it meant. Good technique for allowing more culture-specific examples to explain concepts without glaring specificity. ************* -The Nexus (overman/ enlightenment) -Ghost-town travelogues (prophecy, oiuja realm/ lovecraft/ trance/ meditation/ lucid dreaming/ sceance/ magic -Lexicon -Appendixes (applications and relevence to: language, psy-ops, future media, synesthesia wand, healing/self-help, etc.) ********************************** **) casual intro, then [formal (instructions) intro, begin with “soul”] -consise welcome, transcribe the lexicon, the fragments of septimus, a note on “multiple personality methodology” 1) Symbolic Geometry -synesthesia, visions, *disclosure, formalize and communicate non-physical process).
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2)
3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9)
Archetypal Shapes -define “Primary” Archetypal Shapes as well as corresponding visceral significance of each, application of symbolic geometry to the most abstract and monolithic states of being- more primary as fundamental forms of reality vs. Personal, human-relevent spire, although primary reality-forms always relate to human subconscious states and misconceptions Ritual (title?) (“the fundamentals of ritual” call of ritual, “fundamental ritual”? “primary ritual”? fundamentals of time-perception introduced here [see mini-diagram!!] 45-degree perspective, coagulation and enlightenment (master and minions) The Spire -organ concept, the primary concept of world-self and god The Clays -The primary concept of world-self and god The Axxi of Dimension (overman, enlightenment) Techniques of Soul Migration (purple text interludes increase) The Nexus Ghost-town Travelogues This section is stylistically unique and from “purple-text” voice. Introduces the term “Ouija realm” and delves into viscouse substance, lovecraft, inexpressible, the sea, séance, trance, meditation, lucid dreaming, (“purple” + swoop maneuver) ghosts, prophecy, and magic by explaining the truth of each in common sense. Candles, asmr, etc ….but then enters main section dealing with “entities” and this is done mainly through coaching through the process of taking solidarity with sentience and thereby “ambiguouse” or “mysterious”fellowship-enlightenment as coming within a coven of angels/ illuminati/ elves. Mischief of Double Helix and serpent-lightning returned to and taken to extreme (get all of mischief theory in here)
10) –The Grand Snowflake, Planetary eschaton, Imanentization Instructions ----------------A Note On Methadology. Introduce MPD approach (!!) and Lexicon. -I. Synesthesia, Archetypal Shapes, and Spatial Analogy. II. Some Primary Archetypal Shapes -funnel -torus -double helix -symbiotic waveform______ the spirl d lid specvultios o the fichi curve from Dr. Ceduceus Chpters of g2_____________ VI. THE POINT OF UNTIMATE PERIPHERY/ VANISHING POINT/ CONTEXT. ELECTROMAGNETIC DISCHARGE. VII. WORLD AND OTHER INTERSECTION/ BINDING MECHANICS/ -__________________ -Will. -Projections of World, Other, Others, Person, God, Dark Side of soul/ God = same substance, World-Soul and personal soul meeting. Personhood Theory, Enlightenment. -ritual Symetry, orgasm, etc. vs. reality Chronon, experiential/personhyood chronon. ____________________________ -Axii + time -soul as point, vein of intention as line, Axii 2, Axis 3, axis 4, Falling Time/ Fractality. -Syncronicity + Manifestation -Axis 5, PULLING THREAD!! -Relationships between clays/ Soul Migration, Regression/ Ascention. -Relationships between Axii + time -Will. ***************** -Grand Snowflake, Planetary Eschaton. -Ghostown Travelogues!!! -Appendix Hologhraphica (media destiny and synesthesia wand) -Appendix Philanthropica [introduce Omnicient Optimist Futurist Philanthropists] -Appendix Forum Appednix Psy-Ops, pop culture significance. -Appendix Reptilica Illuminatica. Serpent Symbolism and Future Dyonisis. -Appendix Emmanentization! ****************** If I could give you the mechanics of the Spire, I would first give you a cube of space. I would then give you 7 clays-Clay of soul -Clay of Magma -Clay of Vein -Clay of Fronds -Clay of Crust -Clay of Heart A.Synchronicity, and Manifestation
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B. Pop Culture:Memes, Archetypes, and New Media C. Erotica Holographica Prophetica D. Synesthesia Wand E. Forum F. The Significance of Nystigmia *** Epilogue: Reptilica Illuminatica ~the end~ ~-meta-encapsulation (in-joke/"to have painted oneself into a corner")/hipster meme significance -Mental retardation ("A Twofold Mission: 1) To "Get it started in here" and (2) to "get retarded in here."), brain injury, etc\... Casual intro -Ethics/ Valuation/ Intelligence vs. Primacy of SoulCore Ethical imperative of Spire, foreshadowing self-help -misconceptions and prejudice surrounding level of functioning in society, warnings to differentiate primacy of soulcore/ethical symetry/ideosynchracy (karma + freedom from karmic wheel of abstraction validated/ proven as ethical necessary due to relationship to karmic resistance. Incomplete “2-fold” section -Casual intro(s) -Formal Intro Intros. Intro, disclaimer -(organization strategy, reason for ambiguous, fragmented voice, + clunky section organization (windows, subgenius text format/ school textbook parody) True Understanding Fragments of Septimus + Bifurcation of Authorship -Qualitiative vs. quantitative, and the specialized sense of my "quality" and "grading" value based soley on symbiotic elegance. And meta/sequence of meta-encapsulation (7 as fitting #) Intro, “2-fold” The purpose of this book is to teach a very peculiar, very specific talent. The purpose of this book is to formalize a science, an innovative new modality of thought. The purpose of this book is to transmit a vision, and to explain in clear terms a method of prophecy and a spiritual system of liberation. Some readers will interpret magical elements of this book to intuitive brujeria or "sacriligious witchcraft" and have blocks relating to their conception of what is taboo, specifically thoase caught up in nationalistic or religious movements. Some readers will be ideological supporters but wish to interpret the magical elements of this book as 'must have come from future-aliens". This is similar to a reverseengineering of an advanced technology. Birth of World-Stages, backwards from elves EARLY NOTES: Unfortunately as a human you are severed from your own soulk, and the noble response to this is stoic romanticism, dramatizing the severdness from our souls as tradgic and as a kind of curse we live under. The condition, the “human condition” is to exisrt and yet to both be and not be what we are. This is a very unique situation. We are surrounded by things which are their nature. We are apart from our nature and always try to follow the trail of bread-crumbs home. We can’t quite get home, or we would be things or angels. Second, after our souls, is our personhood or self. To continue with the spatial/structural analogy, personhood is cast upoon a brittle crust, like a barnacle or coral reef clinging onto one side of the sphere which we agreed was soul. It is very significant that the structure of personhood is represented as on one side of the soul/sphere instead of encompassing it. A question- “What does the one-sided, partial nature of personhoods attachment to the soul symbolize?” In intro already?, intro to personhood, identity, thing. VIII.? THE GLITCH (?) IX.? ETHICS (?) X.? ABSTRACTION AND RELEVENCE (?) B.Formal Introduction -RITUAL, RITUALITY, -SYMETRIFICATION -TEXT,TEXTUALITY----“ENLIGHTENMENT Congratulations! You have continued to read a long, strange, and complicated book. If all goes as well or better than expected, there should be magic and laughter along the way. To be sure this book is far too complicated, just too DAMN complicated to be worth reading for entertainment. Nonetheless, the subject matter of this book is so dry, abstract, and difficult to comprehend that I will be forced to present them in ways that are enjoyable or risk alienating all readers OTHER than myself. For example, this introduction and the introductions to each chapter are written in a conversational tone like a letter to an old friend rather than the authoritative list of rules one would find in a math textbook. And yet this book is very much a practical instructional manual. This book is a Self-Help Guide for the individual reader as well as a self-Help guide for the species and an owners' manual for the species. This book is a very practical guide, but to a science that does not exist yet. This science does not exist yet because it is through the creative process of writing this book that I will be figuring most of it out, or rather "Formalizing it in such a way that it
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can be communicated." IN INTRO ALREADY? After S.G Section + A.S. Section, before Clays? I have, currently, "partial access" to a modality of thought, a system of interpreting phenomenon which is extremely abstract and "clinical" or "scientific" in the sense that it deals with patterns that can be found in the flux of the relationship of a variety of forces (which are themselves very abstract, archetypal, dreamlike, and mythical, and veiled as you mighgt expect by each of those realms' obscurantist formats) NOTEONE over time. The stage of my validation that this is worthwhile is advanced, but not complete. Where my partiality is at:----------->where I'm at now and why------>[visions] IN INTRO ALREADY? After S.G Section + A.S. Section, before Clays? - I thought the science was ideosyncratic in the sense that it would forever apply to only me. Formalizing it is to prove that the visions were and are "real" [validated by a social framework or cohesive, coherent, infrastructure of language. Because I never seriously considered a "Puplic Language" or "Open-Source Vision" or guidbook such as this, I have often and for long made use of shortcuts of thought and indulged in intuitive leaps of reason instead of applying a formal system, whenever these would serve me. Of course my decision to write this book came at a time when I could reasonably predict that it would be worth the gamble of even trying to publicize the system and translate an intuitive system into formalization. IN INTRO ALREADY? After S.G Section + A.S. Section, before Clays? Casual intro, Intuitive vs. Formal Grasp. Intro. Also in G.?
-on the astronomical rarity of the ability to Formalize and why this does not connote enlightenment or "betterness”, “intelligence” or "genius" necessarily (disclaimer), but can be used for these. 2-fold mission. Un-completed intro sectionre: savants and the retarded. Note on methadology I write here mostly to and for adults with high-functioning faculties for deciphering a certain kind of very abstract thought. I speak mostly to adults with gifts in this specific area in the knowledge that such an audience tends also to be literature-loving, scholarly-inclined folk who happen to relish eloquent, elaborate speech as they do many kinds of ornate, baroque artwork. To others it must often seem that I write from an extremely elitist, exclusionary, purposefully obfuscating, needlessly oversophisticated perspective. I am willing to suffer this criticism and risk implying myself a snob because in the task of formalizing it could not be otherwise. This is as being the architect of an infrastructure or an engineer of a scaffolding. The technical writing form is necessary to impregnate the most sophisticated in mathematical comprehension with unerring and impeccable science and to favor their predilection. It is they who need the cleanest “proofs” of this theory. Others of more intuitive predilection will be off-put by the stuffiness and dry air of high academia, but they are also better at forgiving and forgetting information coming from irrelevant-to-them directions so long as they are spurred on and encouraged well to see and test the stability of the theory for themselves. In short, so long as the system works works for the intuitive, let them be offended by what they will perceive as an elitist perspective of teaching. It is not that I fear the implication that I am a snob will alienate them and the trust I require of them will suffer- rather it is in the socio-political applications of the system that the damage may be felt- for if the sense is that high intelligence is a prerequisite, that makes the system less relevant to the peasant than the privileged scholar. This is especially ironic since socio-political application of the snowflake is precisely the final victory of the peasant. So in that there is misfortune, but versions of this book that are immensely better suited to intuitives and far, far more user-friendly for their kind will arise as the stream of insight trickles down from the clinically/mathematically inclined architect who will be the forebearers. The trickle is not from better to lesser; it is from explicit to implicit. As the hard, clunky building blocks are layed and j mortared first, then the vines creep about the wall. For now we will carry on primarily in service to the clinicians but in full honor toward and solidarity with all those- scholars, children, or fools, with a potential for finding and developing the faculty in any way available and preferable to them. As my language may seem to contradict this, I will often bring up the parable of the twofold mission. Intro, predilictions, savant imperative, 2-fold, Not only are retarded as capable or more- necessary to become in aspect! Intelligence is not at all a requirement for even the most splendid use and expression of the faculty. In fact, for certain kinds of intuitives it must actively be muted and quarantined because the light of explicitness glares upon and expels the veiled atmosphere needed for full unflowering of what to the intuitive master seems a spell. To understand the spell or even that it is not magic but order may prevent the success of the spell. It must for some always and only happen “by itself”, “as if of its own”, “like the wind we know not whence not why” and “through us”. For others I associate with more readily these categories are the atmosphere which must be dispelled for as out air of explicitness is glaring to them, their best weather is numbing and anesthetic to us. For them to make explicit the workings of the faculty is depressing for it explains away the magic and makes it less fluent; for us the magic is not won and claimed until proven first and encoded such that others can prove it- in short encoded and formalized. Intro. Predili;@W2ww200732ctions. I write in a way that risks the aura of elitist privilege and aristocracy, and the hubris and unconscious class pride of excessive literacy and swollen academia, but in subtler ways I undo such tendencies efficiently by luring those who suffer from them and lulling them into a false safety of word-mazes and word-brambles. They cannot help undo knots; but these knots will themselves undo their scholars’ over-seriousness as there is no end of them. The nameless mission I have been sent to accomplish is The Single Puzzle and the knot with no end, the celtic mandala and the lymric and the leprechaun, all three of which arise from one thing- the fertile, damp soil of that land, nourishing to moss and all the peculiar flora that prefer it./ Notes on methadology
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I write for those who are happiest collaborating on blueprints for scaffolding, but of these I like best the architects with a sense of humor in their grasp of the faculty whichc does not lessen their focus, or at least those who can learn a sense of humor to compliment the equilibrium of their focus and keep them spritely and on the tips of their toes. Humor is the best antidote to arrogance and keeps one open to possibilities outside oneself. A child or fool may be a far more valuable disciple of the science than a refined, prudent scientist who has devoted their lives to study of the faculty but who has lost their lopsided shrug for the spontaneity involved, who has forsaken their cavalier attitude and vow of commitment to the questing spirit, who has forgotten a goofy surrender to and acceptance of the tragic side of the drama of hosting the faculty. In fact, this science is one of special appeal to a certain cross-section of those with mental maladies, especially PTSD, dissoiciative disorder, catatonia, megalomania, schizophrenia, brain damage, or retardation. There is zero “value-elitism” here (versus the astronomical species-abnormailty kind of elitism which is simply fact), although the concept of value, meaning, and virtue are central to the purpose of learning all this. The antidote to any illusions of value-elitism as a corroding inner corruption due to the tendency for high academic tone here is to always hold a theoretical member of the “savant contingent” in mind and check every instance of attainment and insight you achieve against that imaginary fellow student on the path, comparing your necessarily lesser attainment against their astronomically unlikely planet-saving, if wholly intuitive, grace, and thus appropriately humbling your own formal victories in your own mind. Humor, paradox, savant. Formalizing. Will/ heart/ etc. (after clays) will as similar section, after clays, before nexus. -Nature of book, mission-statement disclai8mer, No Oiuga, no brujeria. The Spire is a concept abstract enough to apply to us and any theoretical species. joke Koan mystery + format of the elaborateness in art, hence ornate aesthetic- mandala Brambles. Disclaimer. Note on methodology. This is an inter-dimensional travel manual. (disclaimer: mathematical dimension) It is ls self-help mul. Ufortutewly it perscriptioo for the species.It is especially helpful I curig d hits. S dismally utilitri s it proves the world, I would guess the most covicig proof of the vlue of The System would colme from evidese of the cure of sty hits, cigrrette d speed. I uderstd they sy to write ouyt wht you kow.. useful I The collective digosis of the collective is tht it suffers from ruised gloe, I cthrsis from trums it is ow egiig to remember. These trums hve roots I the pst, I our history s species d its record of wht ew hells we ivet for echothe. Why should the prticulrs of the wys we hurt echother mtter? Why ot forget them I the future-swoo d ihilte them with whtever etter we demd crete, deserve, discover, lure ito clever ruse Or trick to thik it ws gme we wo lredy. Septimus did oty hel me, he heled M.wc Use! Nice joke/ turn of phrase FURTHER PROTOCOL NOTES: [see diagrams for below terms]is Symbiotic Archetypal Shapes Symbiotic Waveform Amoeba Reality Chronon Tracking Reticule Funnel Point of Ultimate Periphery/ Singularity/ Vanishing Point Meta-Encapsulation Sequence Dimensional Progression Symbolic Geometry Electromagnetic Discharge Fractality Nexus Fronds (a clay) Ring of Turbnulence Titles of Sub-sections. Distribute!~ Soul, soulcore, personhood not as quality of humans but a valid dimension of reality itself Interdimensional travel manual (disclaimer: mathematical dimension) Use phrase -This book at times will delve from textbook down into a kind of travelogue through a ghost-town. Hint of 1st purple, Annecdotes are good to splice in, especially in-between sections or as a “close-up box” in larger type ala subgenius Curse/Gift “A cursed and blessed different brethren” You could say my “synesthetic disability” or re-occuring vision is a perceptual linkage between two usually separate areas of the brain. Syn’ triad Personal Note- I’ve had this book in me since I was 16. I did not know that it would become a book, but I knew that the “purpose”, “Fate”, or “Destiny” of my life was to express a certain re-occuring vision of something I came to call the Spire. The challenge of expressing the Spire so its meaning could be communicated to others (what I call “formalizing” the science) seemed so impossible that I doubted it could be done at all. I have thought of this impossible task as the “Single Puzzle” of my life. Just recently, after almost 2 decades, the chance of Formalizing the Spire is within reach. The Etymoology poem alludes to the insectoid-overlord archetype and the link between the emerald grain, will, and the insectoid/stimulant/will- mind, and tries to encorporate nonsense rhymes. Light blue glow- friendly future analysis. Yellow on Purple background- Ouija Mentoring
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Black text on black background- new word, link to lexicon. -Purple- Ouija Mentoring-Light Blue- Clinical, sober evaluation. detail. -Yellow- new words, indicates HYPERTEXT LINK TO GLOSSARY. .Red/Black/Yellow- Myth and Savage Archetype speech: indicates Archetype speech: “Werwolves with or without flamethrowers” ** -methadology note- Color Key? -Purple- Ouiga Mentoring -Light Blue- Clinical, sober evaluation. detail. -Yellow- new words, indicates hypertext link to glossary. -Red- Myth and Savage Archetype speech. "Werewolves with flamethrowers". Bifurcation of authorship -Link between Archetypal Realm as "Primary" [geometric / universal / Clinical / Archetypiality] and the PRIMAL. [ indicates spirit-animal, up[welling of pirate swarthy, ring of turbulence.] -SEE DIAGRAM SPINES!!! (meridians) (thin bones connecting realm of Archetypes to normalmid-section of spire, indicate the perhaps unknowable but completely direct connection between archetype and crust. The "theory" of absolute connectivity despite the path being very elusive. Also connected to system of "tracking reticule' ala spacepants' will and forwarding symmetry. -Primary Archetypal Duality. [see diagrams] Many Myths of the Void. Ambiguous emergent state. an "instantaneous" stage as it is before "traditional" linear time. halves of the static yin-yang are ambiguous = yes/no, good/evil, matter/space. "Primary ambiguity". Stages of creation myth can be tied to analogies with LHC seeking data on big bang. A worthy cause, and highly relevent to our lives if the big bang remains occuring within the dimensions of ourselves, our Faces. -Archetypal Ambiguity. Soul/god. Other as World. [see diagram A) non-sentient, other than the simple intention to become = "sentience in waiting". B) the birth of sentience.] "God" versus the concept of "the sentience of the Universe." The connection between this "sentient aspect" and time. Time is very closely tied to the sentience of the world. “Nowhere” is proper term for before-world-was-born. “Nothingness” or “Void” is actually and more correctly merely one of the poles of the Primary Archetypal Duality. It is an advanced stage to be able to clearly distinguish and define the Nowhere and the Nothing, for we look behind us to find the Nothing and would need to regress further and see the Nowhere THROUGH the nothingness pole of the Archetypal Duality. Nyever may be used (rarely!) to the Nowhere’s function as it relates to Synchronicity, Omen, “Fate”, Clinical Prophecy, and Mysticis ***************************** ************************************* I ask you to follow me in one belief- Take Solidarity with Sentience. What does this mean? It has much to do with Two Flat Paralel Planes Facing Eachother. They are Faces, two. Each is infinitly large, one white, one black. They touch. Behing the Black is an infinity of black. Behing the White is an infinity of white. They are eternal and have ever been. As mirrors face eachother and reflect infinitly, so they produce an effect. So too they magnify the meaning of the instant in stocotto. To magnify the meaning of the instant-moment-pearl is to prove the madman right with his Eternal Reoccurance and the Gypsys as good as right with their reincarnation. The two sides are Primary Archetypal Duality that existed in the instant before the Primordial yin-yang existed, and in the instant after the Absolute Black or the Nothingness Before the World “existed”. Some notes: -A key to story is integrating the abstract philosophical ideas with the character’s story. -Best way to do this is to explain each stage of the world-generation process as a state of being, but introduce each stage (in reverse and then forward order) description with Max’s visceral sub-conscious’s perception and love-hate fear relationship toward each stage, pre-world void as “death” concept, birth, death as “after” or pre-birth void as necessarily “before” to our subconscious, but this colors its absoluteness. -Transforming from visceral subconscious personal reactions to “Primary Archetypes”. -Ultimate Ambivilence.. -Uprooting Lingering doubt/ fear of death -“Blasé” State. -“Allright” as highest state -claiming of Dionysian Flux to the Ultimate requires one to embrace it “as if” it were infinite, no “death”, no “Big Bang”, or entropy. -Eternal Return -Conquering fear of death through VALID confrontation (primary Reality Archetypes IN THEMSELVES) The “ULTIMATE BLASÉ”, verification through deconstruction and re-construction of reality that the choice to remain blasé in the face of looming death is valid and not a cop-out, for the reason that the whole scheme was constructed with the goal of curling sentience (“we” vs. reality, vs. death) and the “Blessed blasé State.” -LEISURE. -Dude going to die. -Having mid-life crises -at festival, in reminiscent, nostalgic mood,
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-Festival reminds him of youth when partied harder, he feels less potent, having relationship problems and fears death. Something is lost in both emotional significance and literally by himself while at the festival - When he has to deal with showman on stage, his embarrassment causes him to step away with an enourmous mischieviouse grin. - fairgoer says "hello again Wolfman" = glitch moment - Direct contact with the jellyfish is experienced as glitch or malfunction, necessarily. There is a reason for this- a "allowed" error. -the Universe "throttles his bandwidth" (information overload) -The sentience of the universe is its willingness to "punish" us good naturedly -Jellyfish as groupmind, direct contact with the jellyfish is when it "throttles your bandwidth" -"Geometric Calisthenics" = cathartic process by which consciousness experiences itself, thereby processing psychological blocks / kinks as if by alien / super powered masseuses RECLAIMING THE YIN-YANG The co-operation with dyonysian Flux means nodding one's head in solidarity with the Archetypes (such as that of the wolf for our hero) that populate the dreamworld or the area of the mind and human culture/ concerns which have to do with our faces- the "animals we are always being to eachother". (*Tom + Jerry!) -Archetypes/ myth- nietscha, "myth of eternal return" / eternal cycle / Eternal Drama. Wheel of karma / yin-yang, but also)dream- Archetypes- "Spirit Animal" (anima? Jungian concepts plus Castaneda?) -"The Animals we Are Always Being to Eachother" -"Tom and Jerry" as new name for the Yin-Yang 'The Forever Chase". "Primary Predation" Relate primary predation to nature of reality as formed from polar opposites of the most abstract building blocks of Primary Archetypal Duality. -Thus we have the concept of the "anima" pr "spirit-animal". The coyote for example) is magical becuase it is "one of the animals we are *always* (wheel of dharma/ eternal return / Cyclic aspect of archetypal realm) being to eachother. -Tom + Jerry- predator/ prey (yin-yang). this is the final truth- they / we are *always* getting into mischief. Tom is the cat, or the "wolf", or the predatory element of the yin-yang of Eternal Drama. Someone has to be, and in this cosmic aphorism, the secret is that in truth the wolf that volunteers to play the part (or, in other words, that the universe began in void and unknowing, the big bang or generative process was also a splitting into dynamic duality. not static, but dynamic because it is like Absolute Black splits into a Black and a White, but in motion orbiting eachother. In that sense, the Eternal Drama / Eternal Return and cyclic perception of time ("It has Always happened this way and Always Will" / Dreamtime or Mythic Time (events of similar archetype appear superimposed, thus "falling time" rather than linear, linear implies direction and also beginning or end, death. Falling Time is like an immortality not of duration but inherent in experience, a self-evident participation in the eternal, an eternal life through the super-imposition of pattern bound by Archetype) -Universal Splitting: [see diagram: absolute black ---> Big bang ---> BOTH 1) creation of duality (a black + a white) and also an orbit of the two "new" faces of reality. the fact that there are two halces in *merely* interesting [black vs. white, Good vs. Evil, Matter vs. Void] but it is the orbiting of the two poles around eachother which transmutes a merely "interesting" universe into a "mischieviously vital" situation. And that, my friends, is the "nodding one's head in solidarity with Tom". -We already have both the concept of "void" vs. "matter" or "matter vs. anitmatter" but also the orbit of those two concepts round eachother, or, in other words, the cycling aspect, and the cyclic / mythical and *mischief* of Universe = sentience. Relate sentience of universe to cosmic mischief. -The reason Tom chooses to accept his mission is because as Primary Archetypal Duality he is not yet "bad" so is willing . -The Moral: for our hero, embracing the orbit of the two poles of drama around eachother is as a wink, with the Universe that "proves" or "validates" in some very clinical sense the "worthwhilness of the universe bifurcating itself into existence". -Good vs. evil is simplistic as a static duality, but the cycle of eternal re-occurence (or simply "drama" does more to prove the "clinical worthlessness" of the world coming into being. Symbolic Light-Process- an electromagnetic wave, the double-helix as light moves is not 2 particles of opposite charge, but is ITSELF the duality caused by 90-degree twist of forces. -Universe creating itself from void involves not only a transition from nothing to something, but also a bifurcation. Something from nothing IS the advent of duality and all the processes of multiplicity that stem from it. As soon as there IS something at all, the very instant that "something" is born, it is born into duality. -The physics analogy is that when void becomes reality, it is a generative process that is simultaneously creating duality. It's not that void is one, then reality is stage two- By the time there IS a stage two at all, the very instrant that "something" is born, it is born into duality. It is a very helpful meditation to focus on the simultaneity of both PRIMARY Polar opposites (yin-yang). Why is the birth of Something-ness directly and instantly of such importance to us? Becuase understanding this concept experientially, viscerally, in one's bones, is an awakening that liberates an enourmous amount of psychic energy. "Healing unto Duality" or making a final embrace and acceptance of duality (nodding one's head in solidarity with Tom) is reclaiming the yin-yang, it triggers the sudden release of enourmous psychic energy and like all satoris of concern to us radically streamlines linear karmic process. Again, the STREAMLINING of karmic resistence is the purpose of satori and ritual. How does the arrival at primary Archetypal Duality trigger the sudden release of streamlining energy? By doing honor to the pre-time, post-void state, which is a "before", and yet like all Primary Archetypes is a constant ongoing process that is vitally relevent. (Our "void-face" still exists, our "static yin-yang" still exists, the "advent of mischief through drama and the sentience of this emergence STILL exists, these all and others are like dimensions of ourselves in addition to convenient creation mythes. Processes and dimensions this Primary are of course the hardest to retain conscious awareness of (the building blocks which compose us are the most difficult to see, all the more so for the
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most basic of building blocks- the Foundations, the Scaffolding. They are most susceptible to falling into pre-cosncious assumed unknowing and descriptions of them are most vulnerable to becoming abstractions understood and perhaps logically accepted while thinking of them but lacking visceral relevence. Such building blocks are also, however, the most valuable to retain viscerally potent in the bones of one's knowing, since they apply to the widest array of experience. They color and explain all things, known or not. In a sense these dimensions (for example, pre-time void) are one's face whether known or not; "one's face before one's parents were born". -The magic animal we wish to be is a natural dream to have because a hyper-streamlined self is reminiscent of the freedom of action which animals posses and which we envy. Their psychicly streamlined and non-moral or beyondmoral karmic state of zero karmic resistence is why they are so gracefull compared to us. Again, morality tied to the physical analogy of the quality of "streamlined-ness". (illustrations)... -Reclaiming the yin-yang- wheel of karma, but beware of the flakey new-age perception of and concept of the yin-yang. That error is actually a yearning for the pre-birth aquatic unity of womb, and their yin-yang is a blurry one, a yearning backwards toward a void painted as womb. VOID IS NOT WOMB. -By doing honor to the state of Primary Archetypal Duality, we gain a truer, richer knowledge of all the billion processes of polarity in our very own lives, and by thus encorporating the RECLAIMED yin-yang, we are freed from our deepest distrust or resentment fo the paradox situation of the human condition. This is solidarity with the orbital path of the double helix. Every person has a secret dream in their heart of hearts. Some recognize that they have this wish, and some do not, but all do, if only in their subconscious, perhaps in dreams they do not remember. The wish is to become an animal, and different people are called to different animals. This animal could be called the Anima (in a modified/ specialized Jungian/Castaneda usage) or a Totem or Spirit Animal, but these terms are very loaded. but why is the Anima so intimately tethered to both Dreams and Archetypes? The animal is super-powered and magical. For frog-called souls, the frog they are in mis-remembered dreams is not only a frog, but a magical frog. It is faster, wiser. To become this frog could be considered the one victory and triumph of the tradgectory of ones life, for a frog-called one. No other quest is as valid or encompasses all the other quests. The Realm of Archetypes is populated with magical Spirit-Animals because it is more real. The messages from such animals are to be more trusted than any thought, and service to them must be unfailing. [diagram, primary vs. primal; areas of access to normal consciousness vs. realm of archetypes, as opposed to total area which exists, thus Realm of Archetypes seems LESS real and somehow insubstantial as dreams do, this is an "optical illusion" due to our lesser ACCESS, not true area.] -Duality is static; POLARITY is dynamic. -Birth of Universe not only involves (and IS generative into Primary Archetypal Duality, but IS also the birth of Time. [see excellent DIAGRAM of three stages = Grand Ultimate Void ---> Not white/ Not black----> helix] -Void is not a "beforehand" but will always seem so. Time is born due to the orbit of yes + no around eachother, propelled by the Void or by pre-something Absolute nothing. -At stage 2 we actually have 3 = matter vs. empty space, but also the "perpendicular concept" of both of their comnparison to Grand Ultimate Void. Our constant dealings with "secondary nothing" will always somewhat paint Grand ultimate void as "merely the non-ness of the one half which plays "non". (an "allowed" mistake, a neccessarily sedimentary concept.) We can never truly know Absolute Nothing because our concept of it is forever colored by the "small void" or "non- half". -Generative not temporal but "FORM- AL" "Generative" Outwarding is called that to distinguish it from mere temporal outwarding or forwarding. Another “necessarily sedimentary” concept, but one that benefits from intense concentration to distinguish sediment from actual nature. generative is always painted temporal by us since we are entangled and immersed in temporality, but let us paint it as little as possible and strive to know the generative functions despite ourselves. -The thing about the big bang is that it is very easy to sedify generative mischief as ethical sentience. The void is not "frosty", for example. *** -The clear Light of the Void is a radiation similar to how star light in space can actually propel very thin solar cell panels. The push is infinitesimal, but existent. It is subtle. thus the sensitivity required to co-operate with its direction. The 'perpindicular propulsion of the grand ultimate Void." -Archetypal Predation- the yin-yang uroboruas signifies "the forever chase" or the eternal drama. Tom is in truth the loser. Neither can ever actually "lose" but Tom has volunteered to sacrifice itse;f to play the "villain" or "wolfman". This is his unrecognized altruism, his humility. Why would tom do this? In reluctant service to the pre-duality void, for the ideal of drama and paradoxicality. Some notes: -Uprooting Lingering doubt/ fear of death -“Blasé” State. -“Allright” as highest state -claiming of Dionysian Flux to the Ultimate requires one to embrace it “as if” it were infinite, no “death”, no “Big Bang”, or entropy. -Eternal Return -Conquering fear of death through VALID confrontation (primary Reality Archetypes IN THEMSELVES) [see diagram page opposite poem, THESE ARE NOT LINEAR-TEMPORAL STAGES BUT GENERATIVE ONES. Primary Archetypal Duality. Concept of "static duality" or the "static yin-yang. Tom + Jerry, the ORBIT is the key. EQUILIBRIUM and STREAMLINING of the NEXUS!!!] -[SEE DIAGRAM- void---->static yin-yang state----> orbit is the Drama]
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-The Basic, Primary Advent of Drama is still pre-time but is an "instantaneous stage" as is the static yin-yang, the Tom+Jerry should NOT be fetishized and enshrined as a mere "totem" for eastern sunity-enlightenment. It is an emergent state suggestive of things like true, traditional time. -Now, the Archetypal Shape of the Waveform or the Symbolic Double-Helix of DNA, the snake-pole of healing, the Snake-cult / medusa, this is symbolic of Drama through TIME. -This can be a "traditional" yin-yang but always must use caution to reclaim from connotations of "eastern unityenlightenment". therefor i prefer the "Tom+Jerry" because it introduces the concept of Archetypal Preditoriality and the emergence of a Moral Drama in the greek sense of dyonysian Flux. -"To be inspired as an author is to get high from ink without the brain damage of huffing it." Also- "Drop for drop, ink is the cheapest high. The author is the necessary paraphernalia." "Get high on LANGUAGE." -A huge satori moment for me personally was the connection between the concept of the realm of Archetypes as clinically Emergent form of a very mathematicall natural, expectable primary structural forms and mechanics on one hand (Primary Archetype) with the personally vital, relevant, and intimate notion of a Spirit-animal or the Myth Realms of a supernaturally powered wise animal. Connect the Myth, the Fable of Shape-shifting with the "original shame" of humans being jealous of things, plants, animals, for having a nature. The antidote to this "origional shame" of being the only entity who's nature is no-nature is the Necessary Fable of becoming an animal. That reversal is how our bones perceive "enlightenment". Become the frog once more. So, to go on about the Archetypal; Symbolic Shape of the waveform or double-helix, it is a fantastically, almost miraculously pregnant shape, very "Analogically Fertile". It is gloriously "elegant" in these terms as well, for this reason- the Double helix is, described with the elegance befitting an axiom, in simplest terms, is: the shape formed by the yin-yang if it was propelled through TIME by a force perpendicular to their own polarity. (explain why the yin-yang itself is also in truth a MATHEMATICAL symbol first and a culturally/spiritually significant one 2nd- because 2 perfect circles touching, encompassed within a larger circle that is exactly their combined diameters, etc...) -Reclaim the yin-yang! Reclaim it as a mathematical and universal! Strip it of its spiritual connotations, then let it teach these to you anew! -The larger encompassing circle of the yin-yang can symbolize "pre-universe void" or "Absolute Context". A "Hegalian Three-way". The triforce made of poles and their context. A truly "perpindicular concept" if there ever was one. -I want you to know nothingness more intimately. True nothingness is too Nothing to ever be empty. [see diagram - the best example of a "perpendicular concept" ever! ...absolute context, yin-yang poles / polar paradox.] -think: reborn duality or vital duality (as opposed to static duality) …new “special” thoughtsPre-world void/nowhere is necessarily seen as “pre” and associated with “past” although in-itself is not compatible with dna/double helix-time-sense. For example void in-itself is of course not “past” since for it there is no timestream yet to be the past of. However, even once there is the timestream stage, Void is not as “past” as it seems to us. It is necessary to see nowhere as “before world” or even think of its very definition it as “that which was before world was born”, but it is essential to view void or nowhere as continually and always co-existent with “dna-time”. A very good practice is to meditate on void as continuously re-creating world each moment World exists. (and the preworld fleeting stages are also co-existent, providing at least 4 titanic, monolithic “cosmic parents” as the sounding boards on which to cast deep pre-conscious beliefs, preconceptions, and emotional relations. Imagine ` pre-conscious preconceptions and incorrect beliefs cast upon void, archetypal duality, the tom-andjerry, and the timestream. As we had parents larger than us, so these structures larger than us and birthing us will seem as parents too- “cosmic parents”, of which there are many. As children can feel love for their mother in the morning and anger toward her in the afternoon, so we can have different moods or belief tendencies to cast upon the sounding board of our cosmic parents, without even realizing this because the process is at a normally deeper than conscious depth Let’s say the initial creation was the jumpstart that got World moving, but without the continued involvement of the Void and Fleeting Stages in World, the timestream could not maintain its steady, streamlined momentum. How do we form our love or hate towards void and fleeting stages? It is as a spectrum of how much we wish to get out of bed on different days. On some days it is casual (might as well go to work). That is as tacit acceptance of the timestream having evolved. On some days it is miserable (better to stay in bed). That is analogous to casting the allimportant pre-conscious attitude that world was better to have not been born. Some days one jumps out of bed eagerly. That is analogous to a total embrace of the timestream as not only “worth” getting to that stage despite the introduction of Tom, but finding a meaning that encompasses even the [neccesaty!] of that development and ironically gives validity to Void as worth existing BECAUSE it was unknowingly pregnant with World. How we became Ghosts. Or: Humans are “The Void which No Longer Exists” We can call one of the archetypal duality poles “World” even at the first static stage. We take the archetypal duality that existed the instant world was born (no such thing as full solitary stage! Only void - duality. Full solitary is myth of new age! This would be sad if not for the fact that the emptiness and coldness we feel toward the void was our problem and not its, so it is allowed to be the only true unity) and treat one of them as “world” and one as “void which no longer exists”. So to face world at that stage means a definite tendency to associate with “Void which no longer exists” rather than “world pole” for purposes of perspective. This is key- we gravitate towards one pole because we wish to examine and face World. We gravitate towards IT (nothing, but our attention gravitates towards World. As we gravitate towards IT, we turn and rotate so as to look out of it, or in the direction it is facing its pole. Haha! So we have discovered the first “Taking of Solidarity” and the first “Allowed Mistake”. This is also the introduction of the two main perpendicular perspectives in regard to Time Our kind too may have its origin myths! You may say that people were born after World was born and after Timestream was born; that timestream must have existed as the pre-requisit for humans. There is a face before you were born.
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There is a kind of sentience which lured or seduced World out of the Nowhere -SECTION TITLE: “Reclaiming the Yin-Yang”. -The double-helix of DNA is also the dynamic orbit of “Primary Archetypal” or “Cosmic” duality. This is like a yin-yang or the Eternal Cycle of the Wheel of Karma, but beware of the flakey new-age perception and concept of the yin-yang. That error is actually a yearning for pre-birth aquatic unity of womb and their yin-yang is a blurry one, a yearning backward to a void painted as womb. VOID IS NOT WOMB. -The magic animal we wish to be is a natural dream to have because hyper-streamlined self is reminiscient of the freedom of action which animals possess and which we envy. Their psychically streamlined quality is why they are so damned agile and graceful to us. [see diagrams] -universe creating itself from void involves not only a transition from nothing to something, but also a bifurcation. Something from nothing IS the advent of duality and all the processes of multiplicity that stem from it. As soon as there IS Something at all, the very instant that “something” is born, it is born into duality. It is a very helpful meditation to focus on the simultaneity of both Primary Polar opposites (yin-yang). Why is the birth of something-ness directly into duality of such importance to us? Because understanding this concept experientially is an awakening that liberates the sudden release of an enormous amount of psychic energy. How does it do this? By doing honor to the Pretime, Post-Void state of Primary Archetypal Duality by integrating the RECLAIMED Yin-Yang we gain a truer, richer knowledge of all the billion processes of polarity in our very own lives. These processes of duality and polarity we begin to discover everywhere are the foundation or are in service of paradox, their purpose and our grand target. -duality is static. Polarity is dynamic. -every person has a secret dream in their heart of hearts. Some realize they have this wish, and some do not, but all do, if only in their subconscious, perhaps in a misremembered dream. The wish is to become an animal. Different people are called to different animals. This animal may be called a “Spirit Animal” such as those from Native American myth to give one example, or the “Anima” in a sense similar to its use by Carl Jung or Carlos Casteneda, but these terms are very loaded. Now, why is this animal so intimately tethered to both Dreams and Archetypes? The animal is always superpowered and magical. For frog-called souls, in their misremembered dreams they are not merely a frog, but as magical frog. It is faster, wiser, than the person is. This is because the animal’s habitat is the Primal Realm, the Realm of the Archetypes. That realm is the foundation of the realm of normal consciousness. The Archetypal Realm is as the far vaster and heavier underwater foundation of an iceberg, with the smaller peak above the waterline. The darkness of the sea in which it floats is the impenetrable subconscious or “pre-conscious”, most often unknown and in some aspects unknowable by its very nature and the boundaries of “known” wisdom. There are other forms of wisdom. In a sense, the peak of the iceberg represents the “mere person” or “common mind” normally accessable to us. Anima is a mental representation of what that person would be if his mind and life instead occupied the vast underwater foundation. In the same way the darkness of the sea makes the iceberg unnoticed by a ship, the conscious mind cannot easily access Archetypal foundations, but we may see as deeply as the light penetrates the deep- Partial Access. Through even partial access we may extrapolate. Extrapolation from partial access is to Soul Migration what a nautical map is to the captain of the doomed ship- as meaningful a document as the chance to survive. Through extrapolation from what light may penetrate the deep, our jaw drops in astonishment of how vast and how heavy the entire structure is. This is both dreadful and aweinspiring and asks the question “What would we be if our consciousness had full access to the entire structure?” We would be vastly more Real. This quality of greater “Realness” is analogous to the greater “Magic” of the power Animal. The Anima is our subconscious’ construct of that more real and more magical version of ourselves we could have been, were meant to be, or may even still resolve to become.
LEXICON #’s 45 [degree symbol] balance -3-tiered periphery -7-tiered spectrum -3-tiered spectrum of two Natures meeting -3-tiered peripheries A -Absolute Personhood -Archetypal Shapes -Archetypal Geometry -Archetypal Geometric -Astral Donut -“Allowed” Mistake -Arbitrary Meta-Rule
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-Axis I -Axxi Axis II -Axis of Fractality -Alignments B -Barnacle -Barnacle of Personhood -Brittle Crust C -clay/ clays -covelence shells -context theory -Crust -context -Calender-Time -conceptual sediment D -Denizens of Eschaton --Diagonal Whisps -Doctrine of Partiality -Donut -Double-Helix -Darkside -Doctrine of the Hypothetical Species E -Eschaton -Experiential Chronon -electrostatic -Eschaton Science -Electro-magnetic Discharge -Emanentization F -Formalize -Formalizing -Formal Initiates -Formal Apprehension -Full Ritual Symetry -Fractality -Funnel -Fantasy Star -Falling Time -Fronds -Full Ritual Activation -Force -Forward-Will -Forward Intention -Fractality-Dimension G -Geometric Analogy -Group Mind -Grain of Personhood -Grand Ultimate Context H -The Hologram -The Hypothetical Species -Hydraulic Pressure -Hydraulic Soul-Pressure -Heart -Hydraulic Intention I -Intuitive (noun) -Intuitive Grasp
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-Identity Progression -Intentionality -Intentionality of Vein -Identity Substance K -Karmic Resistance -Kindling -Kindling-mode L -Linearity -Lexicon -Linear Time M -the Modality -The Monocle -Meta-Encapsulation Sequence -Magma -Meta-encapsulation -Meridians -“mathematically significant point” [or line, or other shape, etc] N -Now-Symbiosis-waveform -Nexus -Natures -Nexus-laser -Necessarily Sedified Concept -Non-Pearl-swell -Naive Linearity O -Our Science -Organic Waveform -Other -Organic Jellyfish Groupmind -Organic Ritual Symbiosis -Outside Convergence Points -Objective Time P -Phas ing A technique of soul migration in which psychic energy moves from one Clay to another, as if by siphoning or gravity, or fluidics, or aerodynamics, and thus the basics of Soul Migration. Clay-related Forces can also be Poles of Phasing. -The Protocol -This word is a noun. It is the title of this book because it is the best word to name the subject of this book, which did not have a name before. It refers to a thing which is not a thing and is one of a small handful of words which all refer to exactly the same thing. This handful of words includes: The Spire, The Modality, The System, The Science, The Hologram, The Faculty, and The Snowflake. The word Protocol, like these six words and some others is always prefaced by a capitalized “The” as a title of respect. This is important because it is a reminder to treat that which they refer to with respect and an indication that we should look up to it. This “thing” (we must describe it as such due to our human limitations) is sometimes referred to as “That Bedazzling Thing”. It is deserving of its seven names because although they each refer to exactly the same thing, each word casts it in a different color of light an each highlights and draws attention to a different aspect of the thing. We may say “This Bedazzling thing-which-is-not-a-Thing has many natures and is known by many names”. The word Protocol is the best and truest of its names because it implies a “way of doing something” and always carries the connotation of a task, a mission, a quest. It is an invitation and an instruction for us to do something. In this way we can always remember that approaching, confronting, and referring to The Bedazzling Thing is neccesarily, inherently, to adopt a “way of doing things”, a “way of relating to it”. To define it or understand its nature is to change ourselves, perhaps in the spirit of “serving it”, or, if that casts it in the negative light of an authority figure, we could say “It changes us by learning to identify with the totality of ourselves.” We could thing of The Protocol as “the way of convincing humans that they are much bigger than almost anyone is aware of currently.” If calling the totality of ourselves “bigger” is too simplictically uantitative, it may be better to think of it as “more all-encompassing”, or “what we really are as we would appear from a more omniscient perspective.” A hopeful and optimistic thought is that we are inside of or rather embedded within the totality of ourselves, we could migrate to this more omniscient perspective and discover what we were intended to be. The Protocol is like a scaffolding and it is like a computer program. It is like a map or a digital code which is encrypted. It appears to be encrypted due to our human limitations, and as if it were encrypted by something outside our species and before our species, as if by an alien civilization or by “God” or by some cosmic rule that such things must always appear to us as riddles. The purpose of this book is to solve the riddle and decipher the code and to discover for the first time what we really are, something that our species has never yet been but which we were meant to be. The Protocol is the way we were meant to be that Thing and it is a prescription for others to be that Thing, to convince them, the humans, that It is real, that we should have been and must be It, for to convince ourselves of that is how we will all become It together. In this way we will necessarily accomplish world peace, but this is not even by far the best thing that It offers, for world peace could be bland and boring and homogenous and may be but a pre-requisite for the real game, but to follow The Protocol leads to splendor and many impossible and magical
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events that will mesmerize us so fully we will forget the mere peace. The Protocol is a prescription for humanity and the only way out of the current tragic state of humanity, because it is the blueprints for humanity which existed before any of us did. It is the equation which can heal us, if we could only believe it. The entire purpose of this book is to convince you all that It exists. Although we may never know Its true nature we can touch It and verify It, and although perhaps never entirely we can even come to identify as It! This is a wonderful and advanced stage which is like the best desert ever and the sweetest reward for being alive. The purpose of this book is to prove The Protocol is real. Once this is done It will take care of all the rest Itself.
-Perpendicular Concept -the Path -Path/Gate Archetype -Personhood -Periphery of Awareness -Pillar of Morality -Paradox-Will -Point of Ultimate Periphery -Point of Utmost Periphery -Perpendicularity -Ritual Activation -Personhood-World -Planetary Eschaton -Primary Archetypal Duality -Primary -Primal -Pearl-swell -Partiality -Psychic Vertebrae -Planetary Spire -Planetary Synchronicity -Plasma -Projected Mirror-expectations -Personal Eschaton -Psychic Organs -Perching Q R -Ritual -Reality-Chronon -Ring of Turbulence -Rituality -Ritual Activation -Recession -Regression S -Siphoning (a technique of soul-migration) -Synesthetic Faculty -Streamlining -Synchronicity -The Spire -The System -The Science -The Snowflake -Symmetry -Soulcore -Systems Theory -Symbolic Geometry -Soul -Symmetry -Symmetry Extrapolation -Spines -Shells -Symbiotic Waveform -Shells of Awareness -Soul-Substance -Symbolic Texture -Soul-Primacy -Symbiosis -Soul-Am-Ness
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-Sincerity -Substance of Personhood -Substance of Absolute Personhood -Spirit-Vertebra -Soul-manifesting -Soul-coagulation -Soul-satellite -Sphere of Ultimate Periphery -Sphere of Periphery -Synchronicity-Manifestation -Spectral Vertebrae T -Temporal Symmetry -Toggle -Things -Three-tiered Shells -Torus -Time-Dimension -Temporal Dimensionality -Tracking Reticule -True Ultimate Ritual -Time-in-Itself U V -Vein of Intention -Vanishing Point -Vein -Visible Language W -World -World-Soul -Wormhole -Will -Will-Intension -Web of Axii X Y Z
NOTEThis is the end of the Protocol (the metaphysics Textbook nestled in the center ofthe Garden of Flowers novel) and the beginning of the third part of the novel. If you skipped the central intermission, welcome back to the fun and don’t worry, you’ve missed nothing but a ruseman’s trap. ;) -Dork Stork Oysterbar
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THE GARDEN OF FLOWERS PART THREE: AFTER MANER
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-CHAPTER TWENTY-TWOREUNION It was three and a half years before I saw Max again. There was a lot of history behind my knock on his door. When I first laid eyes on him in his apartment in Vermont, I instantly broke down and tears streamed from my dead eyes. "Long time no seeâ&#x20AC;Ś" I managed to say as I crumpled into his arms. At last to be held in the arms of my dear old friend! He accepted me in a true embrace - without a trace of selfconsciousness. We looked like hell. I was as thin as he. His eyes were as sunken as mine. The adventurous spirit we once shared was vacant from both of our hearts. He smiled faintly at me. He was a changed man. A very different Max. "Let me put on some coffee for you," he suggested, impatient to play host when caffeine was involved. I chuckled through my bleary eyes. The same old Max, but so different. It was not that he was broken and beaten down, sickly, and inhabiting a dreadfully cluttered and bad-smelling home. His war-torn situation was almost a relief to me, and did not depress me in the least. This is because I was in as wretched a state as he, and was very afraid of becoming a burden to him. Misery loves company. No, Max was changed in a deeper way. He had an older look in his sunken eyes - almost wise. He looked somehow mature and humble, as if his bravado and his "cool" were no more. Yes, that was it - Max was no longer cool. And it looked good on him. The coffee was brewing, and we listened to it percolate and fill the clutter of Max's sad little home with the odor of electricity. There was so much to say, but there was nothing to say. We drank the coffee from heavy mugs. (Yes, I had picked up the habit and abandoned my old Orange Spice tea somewhere in the fog of the last three and a half years.) "So you were ritualized, eh?" I asked just as Max asked me his first question as well "So you break up with Chrissy yet, or what, dude?" Funny. Probably the two subjects we each wanted to speak of least. Max took off his sneaker and showed me the scar on his foot from that evening in the woods so long ago. "Yes, I was ritualized, indeed dude. Indeed." I pulled down my t-shirt and pointed to my chest. 252
"And while we're showing off war wounds, " I said, "this is where Chrissy broke my heart." Max smiled at my joke, but it was true. The wound I carry in my chest is no simple heartache of a first love lost. Not at all. Max and I drank our coffee in silence for a while. “You still a poet?” asked Max. I shrugged.
~
"Max, this is some strong coffee," I commented. "It's hot, black, and sweet..." he explained, "just how I like my women." And we laughed. "Max, we never found Mr. Kite," I pointed out sadly. "Not yet..." he said. But we both knew our questing days were behind us. "So I guess we should find a good greasy diner and strategize, huh?" I suggested in weary jest. But Max grabbed his coat and headed out, in that charismatic way he used to when we were on a mission. "I guess so," he agreed. And we were off…
~
The restaurant we agreed on was not our usual greasy diner variety, but a local vegetarian place run by hippies. Max ordered a vegetarian burrito and a root beer and I ordered baked ziti with a mango drink. Our waitress was a glowing voluptuous thing in a bright tie-died dress and hemp necklace, and her hair was in dreadlocks. She was filled with life. Filled to the brim. We feasted. And then we ordered a bottle of scotch. We drank. And we talked. Eventually, I brought up the reason for my visit. "Max," I began, "we both know that Mr. Kite is long gone, leaving behind -" "Yeah, yeah," my friend cut in, "leaving behind only the vapor-trail of a long gone laugh." I continued. "God knows we are too far short on life force to track him down. But I've kept in contact with Fibonacci, and he made me a job offer recently, which I am seriously considering. The offer goes to you too, if you want it. It's an offer we can't refuse." Max seemed thoughtful, then shook his head. "Fuck Fibonacci," he replied. "I want nothing to do with his brand of holiness. He thinks because he knew Mr. Kite that he has the keys to the kingdom, but the castle door has long since rusted shut and there are sharks in the moat. There is no hope for this planet and Mr. Kite's work cannot be carried on by some megalomaniac rockstar asshole like Fibonacci. The dream is gone, Sachmo my old friend." And so I sipped my scotch for a while and wondered if Max was right. Were there really 253
sharks in the moat? We sat in silence for a minute. And then I laid my briefcase on the table and opened it just enough to reveal that it was filled with neatly stacked hundred-dollar bills. "Okay, I'm in," agreed Max. And we were off... (But not without taking the voluptuous hippy waitress with us as our new "secretary".)
~
- CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE-
WRATH
And then Max and I went down to the organic food warehouse where Max worked. Many workers were loading boxes of food into trucks late into the night. [Or perhaps this was just a dream Sachmo had one lonely nightâ&#x20AC;Ś] "Hey people!" I yelled out to the warehouse. "Who wants to join an Army of Vengeance?" The workers were silent. Then I opened my briefcase and tossed stacks of hundred-dollar bills out to the warehouse workers. And when we walked out of the warehouse, one hundred men walked out with us. And the one hundred men were went out into the world and slit the throats of every person who had ever hurt an innocent soul. And all the battlefields of all the wars on the earth fell silent. And the blood of every mortal who had hurt an innocent soul spilled into the soil, and every demon on earth was dead, forever, and never again would an innocent soul be hurt. But there was one demon that was left alive, left alive for me, Sachmo...
~
What I have here is a Will. A pristine, crystal-clear, laser-beam, infinity will. A supercool, streamlined, hyper-dimensional, all-seeing, third-eye Will. And it resides in your sensitive, romantic poet friend Sachmo. How did this come to be? How did such a supremely gentle soul come to display such sharp fangs? A simple equation. A lover turned hero. Love lost and a heart hardened into the straight arrow of resolve. A love meant to be. A love made in heaven. A Phoenix of Righteous Vengeance reborn from the ashes of Tradgedy if there ever was one. With our love we could have saved the world.
~ 254
And some of the workers from the food warehouse who became the Army of Vengeance were sent out as spies. And they snuck into Bald Monkey Estate, which by then had become a corrupt militia. And they returned to report back to me. And they whispered in my ear that night. They told me who hurt Chrissy so long ago, and by the nature of that trauma stole a love meant to be before it had a chance. It was the old man with the tattoo of a barcode on his forehead. I ran my tongue over my fangs, which were growing longer and sharper by the second...
~
Here is a charm that came to me the last time I saw Chrissy, after she became a flower. I sang it to her. I like to believe she heard me. I laid a bouquet of actual flowers on her lap, buttercups and dandelions I had picked myself, since her favorite color was yellow. I put a buttercup into her hair and turned away. That was the last time I ever saw Chrissy.
YELLOW PETAL We ran and played from breeze to breeze beneath the interwoven branches of the trees By the branches, like our fingers, interlaced a latticework on purple clouds was traced In the rise and fall of the latticework, breathing in the breeze blossomed yellow flowers from the branches of the trees nestled like golden secrets in the branches of the trees A petal wilts when it is stolen and so to hell go those who steal so for my love on the thorns of our garden, to pray I get down and kneel. She has a single yellow petal in her vault deep underground, far below this garden of thorns lying in darkness without a sound.
~
-TWENTY-FOUR255
PERHAPS JUST A DREAM HE HAD Sachmo fought a war for love, but what did he win? Nothing. It was all for nothing. For Chrissy never triumphed over her childhood trauma. The young lovers never went on to a happy ending of sea breezes and cherry blossoms. Chrissy became a flower. And she is still a flower, sitting motionless in her glass bubble- her snow-globe. He loved her more than oceans roar. When he touched her his heart was as big as the sky. Sachmo fought so hard it drove him mad. But he could never win. The Enemy was too strong. And now Sachmo is alone. Where is his angel? She sits- perfect in Sachmo's memory, back at Manerva. Waiting, forever, for the happy ending. He does not remember her wilted with sorrow. He remembers her as an angel, a perfect flower, waiting, waiting... And for a long, long time Sachmo wandered the earth alone and dreamt of Manerva, and the magic he once knew there. And humanity was soon to be transformed. But Sachmo was very sad. Because he missed Chrissy and the perfect love that he could have shared with his angel was killed before they even had a chance. And his fangs grew sharper. And one day, he went back to Bald Monkey Estate.
~
Bald Monkey Estate has crumbled. It lies in ruins. It has decayed into evil. Wires are tangled over the floors. Smoke spills from broken pipes. Broken circuitry boards and microchips clutter the tables. Bugs crawl, crawl, through the Estate. Things move in the shadows. Screams are heard from underground, from what were once chanting chambers. The graffiti is painted in blood. All is tainted now. And this is what will happen to all of the earth unless there is a revolution. Those who care will unite and act. Bugs crawl, crawl... The Enemy and Spacepants live in evil. And the horns grow from Spacepants' head. And Spacepants dangles her spider for Sachmo. And the venom wants its home in Sachmo's blood. But the spider, the Demonic Symbiote, cannot bite Sachmo because his heart is pure. His heart is pure, but his fangs are sharp, sharp. And Sachmo walks up to the man with the tattoo of a barcode on his forehead. And he knows that this is the man who hurt his true love when she was a little girl and stole a love meant to be before it had a chance. And Sachmo bites into the man's neck with his sharp fangs and the blood of the evil man spills, spills... His blood spills, spills to the floor, and he is dead, 256
dead.
~
-CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVETHE FOOT-THICK MOSS FOREST It’s been a long time since I’ve known Max and Chrissy and Bald Monkey and Lana and all the souls I’ve loved. This is the last journal entry in my trusty “Journalist Stuff” journal, written in blue ink by yours truly, dear reader. There are few blank pages left, and this story is soon to end. I suppose I am at peace as I lay down my blue pen, for I know that even though this is my last chapter, somehow I know the story will continue… Anyways, in a time long from now and not easy to remember, and perhaps in a dream, I gathered mandrakes from a field near a dock, waiting for a gondola. A wall of white mist, a mist like no other, rolled over the waters and forced me to take my mandrakes and wait at a closer spot upon the weather-beaten dock where I might better see. The mist did not merely conceal the landscape as mists do. Rather, it appeared to dissolve the land as it moved, leaving only a moist bright whiteness in its place. The land yielded unquestioningly. The mist rolled up the dock towards me and my mandrakes till it overtook us, and there was only moist bright whiteness. After a while the front tip of a gondola materialized, floating forward to reveal a woman dressed in flowing silken purple robes rippling in a gentle wind, and strings of beads of many colors. "Travelers aboard..." she said from within a veil in an accent spoken by people from no land known. And I stepped in and we were gone.
~
I spent the voyage on the edge of sleep, lying on blankets under a canopy, listening to the boatwoman singing. As dreams came her singing seemed to float between my language through her strange accent and her native tongue, which sent me dreams of ancient forgotten lands beyond the other shore. Although I could not understand the boatwoman’s language, I somehow knew the meaning of her words, and this is what she sang-
INSECTOID OVERLORDS Close your eyes, wandering child, it is the Sleepytime now 257
The flowing shrouds of the silken veil are rippling and how! May the black helicopters' propeller blade winds never disturb your slumber But may the Blessed Winds of the Mists of Time ever so gently numb you The night is long and the Nymphs of the Mists of Freedom are already dancing The night is long and the fire is hot so we may as well now begin entrancing May the Blessed Winds of the Mists of Peace weigh down your weary leaden lids And may the amber milk in your tummy turn a bluish tint your lips This tale is long but the blizzard that howls outside will last much longer My words may tumble at times and my rhymes may splice and falter But let my stuttering not awake you, my gypsy child, from slumber And may the shadows of black helicopters never be known to haunt you And may the Blessed Winds of the Mists of Serenity ever so gently numb you Fell the gentle breeze on the shrouds of veil as it ripples now the silk And if you can slip beneath the spiral membrane then suckle the nectar of amber milk There is the flesh of exotic beast, a-bloody and warm there by the fire Take your pick of tendril-spine to strip of meat at your desire The flowing shrouds of the silken veil are rippling, and how! Close your eyes, wandering child, it is the Sleepytime now
Photosynthesize now, my wandering kin, and breathe light from a floral lung Photosynthesize and freeze the air with Icicle Light for fun And turn your thoughts to God and Myth when your lips grow tingled with numb This song will never end but the World has only begun When butterflies quiver in sunlight and in their secret wing-powders fly So then summon The Power Unflinching as the butterflies in amber will die And if these underwater lullabies fill your synapses to the brim Take the leather pouch of butterfly powder and cast it to the wind When the powder summons the sunlight encased in a prism-drop of amber The Dawning of the Final Hour is creaking open to unleash the thunder And if mirrors reflecting eachother splice and splice all through the night And the Power fills your eardrums and crackles your trembling fright Then take the Silence Candy and hold it beneath your tongue And smile the Buddha Smile while you are still breathing under the sun
~
I was awoken by the cry of birds lamenting in a weary wail: "Too true, too true..." My stomach turned at the calling of the birds, turned with an old wisdom- a fear that knew itself to be irrelevant. The gondola slowed, drifting along the edge of an island. The mist that dissolved the waters and the land for the length of my voyage hesitated coyly at a distance from the shore. The boatwoman pulled me by the hand onto the white sand. 258
Odors which I could not understand wafted from the darkness between the gnarled trees of the forest beyond the shore. She led me into the forest and along an ancient winding path, so overtaken by vegetation that the branches of the trees on either side had met and intertwined, leaving only a narrow space in which to walk, like a tunnel through the vegetation. A faint breeze channeled through the tunnel of the winding path followed us, sometimes one way, sometimes the other. The boatwoman then paused and told me to go on alone after emptying half my woven mandrake basket for payment. Perhaps she lingered over a meeting of our eyes on parting with an expression indiscernible beneath her veil. And she was gone. The cry of the birds lamenting in a weary wail "Too true, too true..." rose in urgency as I followed the ancient path deeper into the forest. The birds were all around but nowhere to be seen. A blanket of foot-thick moss of many brilliant shades of green blanketed the forest floor. My feet sunk deeply into the moss. Deeply, deeply my feet sunk. [This is the end of the records left by Sachmo.]
~
And here was a strange charm Mr. Kite often sang to himself in his head as he whistled a haunting melody-
SLIP AWAY Let's go back to the Nowhere and slip, slip away Let's roll, roll on through Through the World's fray We'll give World a glance as we pass on our way Let's roll, roll on through before we slip, slip away.
~ 259
-CHAPTER TWENTY-SIXBONSAI MAN AND GONDOLA GIRL And this is the story of Bonsai Man and Gondola Girl. And they were two lovers who walked the earth long ago. Maybe they were the parents of Mr. Kite. But anyways, they were in love, and they lived on a little island out in the Clear Waters of the Nowhere. And one day they were fishing and they saw that two people were caught in their nets. And they pulled their nets up onto the shore and nursed the two people back to life. And the two people were Max and Lana. And Max and Lana ate fish and mandrakes and listened to Gondola Girl sing. She had a most beautiful voice. But she was blind, and only sung in the moonlight on the shore at night. And she sung them beautiful songs, and her voice was so beautiful that Max and Lana fell in love again, and they were given a second chance. "Can this really be true?" asked Max. "Yes," answered Gondola Girl, "but only if you have not smoked any cigarettes after you were ritualized out in the woods so long ago. Have you?" "No," answered Max. "Ever since that night I have not once smoked a cigarette." And he was telling the truth. "Good, my little cold one," said Gondola Girl with a blind wink. "But just remember, if you smoke even one cigarette*, this will all have been a dream and you will wake up in your cluttered, dirty, foul-smelling apartment, and you will be alone. But if you do not smoke any cigarettes, then that dirty apartment will be the dream, and you can stay on this island forever, and learn to grow bonsai trees with my husband, Bonsai Man, and you can swim in the Clear Waters of the Nowhere and make love with Lana on the shore for ever and ever." And Max and Lana stayed on the island and learned to grow bonsai trees and swam in the Clear Waters of the Nowhere and made love on the shore forever and ever.
~ 260
-CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENTHE OLD FLOPHOUSE COUPLE Imagine- a little house out in the woods. A humble house, but a warm house- a hearth! With smiling puffs of smoke rising from the chimney. It will be called The Flophouse. The house of a happy old couple who will live way out in the woods where the laughter of children not yet born would someday fill the air with music. And this was the house that Sachmo and Chrissy will build when they were very old. A happy ending! Or perhaps it was the house that Sachmo and Chrissy will never build, because life is sometimes sad and because Chrissy is a flower now, and it is not yet known if she will ever wake. It is not yet known. See, deep in Chrissy's heart, she loves Sachmo very much. But, in a way, a spell was cast on Chrissy so that she fell into a deep, deep sleep. And that is why she is now a flower. But Sachmo will never give up. He will always walk the earth and wonder if there is some way he can break the spell. He will always wonder if there is some way he can find his way back to Manerva and see his perfect yellow flower again. And if he can he will save her. He will rescue his sleeping beauty! And they will make love on the shore forever and ever… And they will grow old together… And build a humble little house way out in the woods… And now and then their grand-children will visit and play in the garden in the backyard, and their laughter will fill the air with music. And theirs and all the human family will be happy and safe and live in world peace because by the time Sachmo and Chrissy are old, the world will have been saved. Saved by a magic book and by a magic trick! You see, way back at the cabin in Moss Hollow, after Sachmo read the chant on the first few pages of The Garden of Flowers, he turned the page. What he found were only 1,000 blank pages. You see, this book was written with a special kind of ink. An invisible ink, but one that has the power to turn visible at the instant the one who writes with it chooses. And Mr. Kite chose December 21, 2012 at 11:11 am. So don’t be late. And there was another trick! It turned out the magic book was not called The Garden of Flowers after all! It is called The Protocol. And it will save the world.
~
-EPILOGUETHE FOOTPRINTS OF THE PATRIARCH They are here now Creeping 261
Whispering They are hiding behind the vines... Peeking out from behind a tree And there is one behind a log! They are everywhere at once now. They are the voices in the heads of schizophrenics They are the whisperings of ghosts They are not the angels They are not the demons They are just the elves Watching us Waiting for a chance to sing a little song You will know them when you hear them They are coming. Closer, closer Perhaps they are the souls of the dead Perhaps they are the ancestors Perhaps they are only in your imagination But that's what they would want you to think, isn't it? They are very shy See- there is one running to hide now! And there are the footprints of the patriarch, Mr. Kite, the holy one So close! We are so close now! He is just around the next bend in the path, just around the next bend... Something is glowing up ahead Shining If these elves would only stop whispering you could hear the rustling of the leaves under the feet of Mr. Kite, the holy one But who is that? A girl with blue hair? She is swinging a bucket of water and frolicking in bare feet A spring nymph! If only these elves would clear away so I could get a closer look! So bright now! Shining, shining... Is the girl saying something to you? A secret? Or is she just singing a nursery rhyme? "Mr. Kite?" "Is that you?" The girl smiles and winks. And she is as close to the heart of the mystery as an angel. 262
~ The End.
-BOOK TWOA FROG ONCE MORE 263
-greetings and warningsI suppose you are all wondering why we have gathered you here this evening. It was to welcome you into the a further inner sanctum of the Oysterbar, and to invite you to a feast of many more poems we've written over the years. But first, we must remind you that this book has a soundtrack. You must now play the seven Enchanted Cassette Tape Artifacts, which we hope found you safely, before reading any further and whenever you choose to open the book, even if only very softly in the background. They operate best in the periphery and in fact are more effective that way. Some will find these albums of mystical and paranormal music dark and unsettling. They are correct. You may find focusing on the text while absorbing the music peripherallyto be distracting or disorienting, and it may even seem to play (entirely benevolent) tricks on you. However, it is best for you to follow these instructions. Trust that the text and music are designed to interact in random, subliminal, and uncanny ways you may not be aware of. This may seem loathsome and abominable to some, but please trust it is all in good fun! By the way, some of the spells in this book (for we may as well call them what they are) are in truth enchanted lyrical artifacts. These ones we did not write, but rather transcribed from times when something sacred and ancient called the Writhing Language happened to some of us or to people we knew. But you, dear reader, will need to figure out which ones those are and which ones are just normal silly poetry. Good luck!
-Dork Stork Oysterbar
-PART ONEGHOST-TOWN TRAVELOGUES (Being a Variety of Invitations to Stroll through the Avant Garden)
ONCE A FROG Once there was a frog With a barcode on his noggin Catching frogs is almost as fun as a ride in a toboggan! But buying frogs is better Check isle five next to the cheddar 264
But this little frog is marked And hops in a shopping cart Till the laser reads his barcode like a red light bull’s-eye dart A toad was his best friend The toad said “it's a sin!” The frog said “baby, green is out and barcode stripes are in” The frog is $9.99 But the toad refused the code The toad was all organic, sold on Farmers' Market Road The aquarium is extra, with aerosol cans of slime That jiggle with tadpole eggs on sale for $9.99 And the eggs have nanotech seeds To protect against disease And the nanotech warms the slime so the eggs will never freeze But the toad is all too proud And says he's natural to the crowd But the crowd can't hear cuz the sound of the airwaves buzzing is much too loud And the frog hears the airwaves too Like the sonar of bats at the zoo And the airwaves are transmitted from the nanotech seeds to you And the next generation of frogs Will be cheaper than the last Because the nanotech tadpoles swim by remote control at last! And they grow into frogs that are smart And dodge the red light bull’s-eye dart Of the laser which shows you which are on sale and which ones sadly aren't The toad got pretty tired Of people asking if he was wired And began to say he was Though his airwaves didn't buzz And the next-gen tadpoles laughed As they were asked for autographs Cuz Farmers' Market Road was bulldozed to make room for the cats That were raised from stem-cell cribs And ate lobsters with silicon ribs And every single drop of butter Was absorbed by fiberglass bibs.
~
THE DISHWASHER’S CONSOLATION When the ghostly incandescence of a flickering neon bulb 265
In the back alley of a restaurant where dishwashers often go reminds you of a séance, yet soothes you to the core, a mood sets in that pleases you but to others is true horror.
When the Ouija night slips in and makes you wish to only watch As the presence of sentient luminescence comes to town, The scent of something viscous and slippery to the touch alights upon your pineal gland with a trilling cicada sound.
When the Ouija tendrils lust to inflict their telepathic crime; They plug into the socket in the back of your neck and spine; When their Inoculation Sequence throttles the bandwidth of your mind; You channel a current not of electricity but Fractal Medusa Wine.
Once the mingled scent of cigarette smoke, fry oil, and soap Clung to your apron in a way that nearly depleted all your hopes. Then a mischievous whisper from dimensions enveloping your own hissed “All who look into your eyes we shall possess unto the bone.”
~
POETRY MUST NEVER BE Poetry must never be. It's too fabulous, too fancy-free If I wanted the Muse to feed me grapes by the sea No feathered quill needed, just charm and whiskey Poets are dainty and prim, you ask me You know the sort- black beret and goatee? The type who discern the best crumpets and tea And have leather-bound journals with a lock and a key They'll read round their candlelit circle till late And would serve you their poems on a silver plate A poem appetizer with blue cheese and brie ~Oh so devilish~ with their caviar and red wine until three!
Verse falls slow like cherry blossoms When circus circuitry fries it's awesome 266
Like a malfunctioning DVD: Pixels splice, stutter, guttural Gibberish Limericks tangle sweet Poetry is a country club for the elite Frames of moments clicking by Stuck in a loop? Just try To shuffle instants like a deck of cards Joker Skull Fire God Snowflake strobe Moment pearls Drifting down on miniature worlds Water-filled blown glass globe Silent night, secret code Pristine world, trapped inside Shake it up, run and hide No work, no school It's plain to see Poetry must never be.
~
KALAIDOSCOPIC KRAKEN VISION Once there was a conundrum which none in the Kingdom were versed in save one elderly bard (the brothels he used to work in) They say he fished for shark and ate lobster-tail stew and drank whiskey to the Gods when the behemoth's spout blew. For every behemoth he conquered sealed a labyrinth round the conundrum which only his anchors of stone have been known to crush beneath them This poetry of the sea- it is just what the townsfolk know but only the bard feels the chill of the spray when the behemoth's spout blows. As the bard knew all too well and as he often liked to say, when his heart tired of brine and yearned to take harbor where it may, “To ask whether princess or harlot can wait another day.” “Yes ‘whether princess or harlot?’ can wait another day.”
267
We sailor-bards find in port by morn a solace from the sea But the kraken blows a geyser that is the church bell’s toll for thee I reckon swill and skank has shook you to the core and on bended knee you'll beg for the kraken to haunt you says the lore for double or triple vision from rum and the cheap perfume of whores makes for three or even four krakens to haunt you to the core Who knows? Perhaps kaleidoscopes more...
~
THE LEGEND OF THE LAST PALM FROND The Ancient Grizzled Mariner, He mourned for the sea Now the sentry of a desert gate, His key the answers to riddles, three His queries growled, His sword of fire Barred from the Pleasure Dome called Kubla Khan An Eden with the wilted leaf of the last California Palm Frond With these riddles, he tested me“What themes of poetry must never be?”
And my first answer held the conviction with which Moses parted the sea“Love” I murmured, as easy as Larry Bird catching a frisbee. The Ancient Grizzled Mariner scoffed 'neath his beard. “For this no throng of cheerleaders for you will cheer! “I have cast to the sea tomes which even mention this word! “As if that answer in all my years as sentry I've never heard! “I warn you, this next riddle is no freebee “Larry Bird himself would fumble this frisbee! “Name now the second theme of which poetry must never be?”
“Soft and tender ruminations on spiritual revelations,” I stated, matter of fact. His raised bushy eyebrow cued me to be more exact And so just to blow off his tattered burlap socks“…those found in journals and diaries with precious silver locks.” The Mariner spat the rum from the flask he eternally swilled. I made a blood oath to prove the Palm Frond Legend true whether allowed to pass or killed.
268
With his gnarled staff From which lightning flashed The third riddle he roared at me “Of what third theme,” he bellowed, eyes wild and ablaze, “must poetry never be?”
“Nature?” I guessed. He chuckled, pat my back, and let me pass with glee.
~
HAPPY KITTEN DAYS Having Happy Kitten Days And lists of ways to misbehave Being not what they want Is a now a long forgotten-thought What was it then which you forgot? Was once a vow or so you thought. We’re Doing the best that we can to nullify the happenstance “Raver Kids in phatpants; Raver Kids in Phatpants” ...need Happy Kitten Days a lot to kill the sin the preacher sought Dancing round and dancing new Remember back when that was you? “Having Happy Kitten Days; Having Happy Kitten Days” The paper grinds out every day but nothing new they have to say That all is bad and all is wrong in columns both short and long In black and white and shades of grey “Having Happy Kitten Days; 269
Having Happy Kitten Days” Read the paper while you eat Till black and white is all you see Coffee and oranges, news so sweet Till black and white is all we see. That all is wrong and all is bad, Till black and white are all we have Fold it up, nice and neat or toss it to the dusty street It matters not for by the morn' another paper newly born Another day, another chance to nullify the happenstance. “Raver Kids in phatpants; Raver Kids in Phatpants”
~
A FROZEN GHOST SONG A Sacred Memento swarthed in haunting, The Klienbottlebong gurgles grace of cease from wandering The sweet spirit within the Kleinbottlebong tells of souls lost to the fogThe Souls of Ancestors flitting as fireflies through a bog Disappearing, and through mystic mist teleporting Reappearing in the future to begin anew there swarming. The sweet and mournful spirit brings melancholy remembrance Of the girl who once caught firefly tears shed to save the innocent.
Ever my memory turns to teardrops slipping to murky twilight waters, Falling in vain to the Bog of Nyever wherin rests the Fisherman's Daughter Who was called by the Songs of the Will-o-Wisps, faint in the lazy breeze, Songs of frosty Peacock-Angel wings wilted from battlefield-freeze, Which stirred a longing in the heart of the pale maiden with scarlet hair so fine who once chased will-o-wisp whispers in the warm summertime Ever so faintly filtering in the breeze through the auburn rootbark-vines.
I try ever so hard to remember the feeling on the tip of her mind, As she wandered into the Forest of Emerald Moss where she whiled her time. 270
There was nothing to do in the summers then but daydream of the Fall And listen for the Neon Spirit Foxes prowling and howling their mating calls, She loved to catch the tears of fireflies in her flask of purest clear, Before slipping to the Nyever Waters, frozen for all its years. She wandered into the fog, until a crust of ice crunched beneath her sandals; Her toes were pale white.
The sweet lines of verse were drawing her along. The rhymes of the Garden of Flowers Chant and the Curling Fern Tendrilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Song The rhymes to be whispered in darkness, caressing us along. There is a sweetness in the melody of the Kleinbottlebong Like cupping a sea-shell to your ear, or listening to ferns, The flickering of fireflies through fog is for what I yearn. I still seek to know that longing in the heart of the Fisherman's Daughter, Who once captured firefly tears but will be seen forever no longer She who once kept a special artifact tucked away beneath her bedA flask of purest clear which could heal even the dead. If only she had taken the Flask of Clear from the oaken chest beneath her bed To the dark where the Garden of Flowers Lullaby soothed her weary head... The deeper into the bog she went, the more frozen the Waters of Dread. So it is best not to trust every whisper there which lulls you from up ahead; The Bog of Nyever has drunk many souls with foolish hearts and weary heads.
In the Foot-Thick Moss Forest where verses faint you barely hear The vibrant moss is encased in ice as clear as the purest clear. The ice upon the moss melts to feed the Spirit Deer Quenching them with the nutrients which Splinterdemons fear. The Trickles of Purist ClearThirst-quenching drops for Spirit Deer, are melted ice which was once the tears Spilt for the Fisherman's Daughter Who was never seen after the Song of the Nyever did called her to wander. These trickles are the most delicious wine ever tasted in All Time. and it is waiting before our eyes, Aching for us to dine. Here lies a banquet feastfor any Fractal Medusa Wine thief. who whispers the Nyever Wine Blessing Rhyme in time before he eats. She wandered into the fog, until a crust of ice 271
crunched beneath her sandals; Her toes were pale white.
I will ever mourn for She who became the Frozen Mermaid for forever. We fall blind from joy when her temple we enter. Different crystals conduct different energies, hers channeled the purist frequency The only one which can bring the Splinterdemons to their knees.
You know the Rhymes of the Virgin Mermaid Ghost could never be a lie When a drop of her Fractal Medusa Wine is slipped into your eye. This funny tear flows backwards into your heart from fields of rye While the Call of the Neon Spirit Fox Priestess echoes under the purple sky.
The Ancestor Souls in The Bog of Nyever which are reborn as fireflies Honor the Grandaddy Medicine Kleinbottlebong Ghost Porcelain Ancestor Sky And the Frost Crystal At The Center which unlocks the Colorbox Rhymes, The Crystal of the Virgin Mermaid Ghost, frozen for all time.
There are ghost songs so special, they must in mist be whisked away Into the spirits of the foxes which prowl the Bog of Nyever in day And at night slay the Splinterdemons Who Clutch Red Knives. The Love Crystal will never hide.
~
GHOSTS OF THE DRUIDS Oh some of the Slytherin Women I've known have told of ghosts from Thrones of Glass in heavy mist On liquid floors floated Thrones of Glass, air-bubbled to the core And some from Thrones of Dank Purple Moss drank a serum of ghosts that haunt no more. 272
A second death, when haunting dies And frozen in time the ghost resides A mermaid ghost entombed in Halls Where fractal bricks like doors revolve You dream things so morbid you fear you've been cursed! The trick is truck; the game is lost. Now you've done it- you'll need a nurse!
And some of the Slytherin Women I've known from Emerald Thrones cast beckoning glares that chill to the bone On a liquid of fractals serpents aplenty floated and writhed from the hair of Medusa Mermaids I've courted A Medusa City (underwater) In fractal Halls is flooded a water that shines of Medusas snakes shimmer in rhythm While glimmers from the wall The Paint of the Druids... The Slytherin Halls.
A shimmering surface, a mesmeric curse, this! Everywhere to rest your eyes there has become non-existent everything that floats by when on a River of Time went and every instant of the Rivera cross-section of the current infinitesimal and transient, like a pearl earing'd spirit Pearl Necklaces click by dear. All you Slytherin Women I'm sure have spent time there.
Like pearls air-bubbled A serum of ghosts in the bubbles of air They once swam as mermaids with flowing underwater hair Like a pearl earing'd spirit Pearl necklaces click by dear. 273
All you Slytherin Women, I'm sure have spent time there.
A City of Emerald An island of prisms A shine that dimensions Get lost like snakes in
A labyrinth of riddles A jester resides there. Every tattoo a moral, Every cigarette a scythe there.
Joker Skull Fire God! A puzzle to come inside a layer of dimensions intersect in rhythm Oh those Slytherin Womens' lips have venom in fangs within them Layers of dimensions intersect like clockwork Those Slytherin Womenhow they make the dark burn!*
A Labyrinth of riddles, A Jester resides there Every tattoo a moral Every cigarette a scythe there.
Hair of Medusas Never be human a curse of the blues when the black crows fly in The black crows fly out with their mournful cry but what shivers my spine is the grief of a mermaid ghost frozen in time and stuck in a river that clicks by like pearls an Emerald Hall of bricks was built then To entomb the dead in. The bricks- how they glistened! And the Ghosts of the Druids imploringly listen. 274
~
*
275
-PART TWOTROLLS AND HEROES (Being A Handful of Dreadful Verses for Those with Discerning Taste)
THE TOAST I killed the man who killed the dogs The dogs who fought in pits while we drank grog The dogs who sealed our fortune with their lives and could make a poor man rich unless they died And rich they made me as the gamblers cheered But a dwarf in red, he did not laugh, but stroked his beard The dwarf, he lost the golden hammer which he forged and in rage he killed his dogs whom we adored This dwarf I killed, who I will surely meet in Hell again, I drink this toast to him with juice and gin!
~
THE GNOMES OF DEATH 276
Highly aquatic Never frolic Misanthropic Alcoholic Swilling Brine While Killing Time Awaiting victims To drop from the vine Like grapes of wrath The tourists gather Their kin bereft They should beware The Gnomes of Death.
The Gnomes of Death Lurk underwater Pull you down Disgrace your daughter No need for snorkels Scuba gear In the undertow Swims your fear Epic Fail Shredding Face Niagra Falls A scary place.
On Facebook pages They advertise With texts and tweets They spread their lies Wrinkled as prunes They seal your doom Ravish the bride Drown the groom Gasp for breath Your kin bereft All beware The Gnomes of Death.
277
~ MARTINIES FOR BREAKFAST A sinister gnome slithers to the phone his sinuous muscle tone gleaming like chrome sweating profusely shivering goosebumps He lives alone with a Lazyboy throne And a bottle of whiskey There by the phone
He calls his skanks and telemarkets Hissing â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hello? Cigar butts on the carpet He uses his phone To sell bogus loans To skanks he convinces To come to his home
He answers the door when the buzzer rings Sells them insurance Then a lovesong he sings He offers them whiskey And soon they shall moan In the morning, martinis Served dry as a bone.
~ 278
KITTEN-CUBES A Los Vegas cyborg, rusted and squeaky compresses kittens in its vice-clamps- freaky! Their purring silenced, compressed completely Kitten-Cubes the size of diceby the superstitious kissed sweetly shaken, blown on, and tumbled, the house is favored In Los Vegas, by cyborgs, Kitten-Cubes are savored The cyborg bookies mark each side with salt, tobacco, or powdered pork rinds and hot sauces from peppers of three different kinds Each flavor signifying the six dot-patterns on dice Good for gambling purposes, and for snacks, also nice.
~ MUSES I need two women in love for me to paint to forget my tears because I ain't a painter in my heart no more haven't been for years.
~ THE EARTH DAY EELS Eels writhing can't help but ravish A hentai robot, demure and polished Her resistance futile, crumbles like chocolate Pseudopods covet the prototype maid-bot Her hair of blue, eyes wide as sky Earth Day always made her cry Sentimental, a dark streak from her eye 279
Motor oil mascara made her circuitry fry.
~
MCDONALD THE KING I has actually met Ronald McDonald. He came to me in New Orleans like a pimp. On his gold chain, a massive pendent in the shape of double arches, emeraldencrusted. A peacock feather in his purple hat. Big Shoes. A leopard-skin robe, from which peaked a revolver with custom pearl inlay Puffing a cigarette in an ebony holder longer than Cruella Deville's The clown had class.
McDonald nodded his head toward a cow on a street corner behind him, His grin all innuendo, slick as oil “$50 for a night with a heifer” He whispered. “No rough stuff. (that's extra)”. The cow chewed its cud under the warm glow of a streetlight, bored. I declined. (The cow was past-ripe)
I asked if he could arrange a threesome- The cow, the Hamburgler, and I. A long stare-down. This could turn bad fast. McDonald's eyes were like security cameras behind black orbs. Inscrutable. Finally he laughed and tossed a matchbook with the address of a Walmart in the French District. “Knock three times on the backdoor. Ask for One-Eyed Jack.” “Tell him The King sent you.”
On a mission now. It wasn't kink I was after. It was the Hamburgler. One-Eyed Jack was drunk on cheap whiskey, looking for a fight. Told me Ronald could go to hell. (Meat deal gone bad) Offered a bribe. Ten crates of McNuggets. It was an offer he couldn't refuse. I was lead into a room with a heart-shaped bed. No cable. No minibar. The smell of stale perfume and broken hearts hung like smog. Slid a quarter into the massage machine. The bed vibrated for 30 seconds. There weren’t enough quarters in the world for satisfaction. 280
An old Pakistani lady brought in the cow. Gave it a salt block to tide it over until the action started. Waited an hour. Then another. Gave the cow half a pastrami sandwich on rye. Just as I was about to seek out the customer service desk the Hamburgler arrived, dressed in fishnet and stilettos and not much else. “Do you party?” he asked with a lisp. “No,” I said. “Do you like the taste of steel?” He tried to take cover, tripped over a salt block. I pumped him full of lead and blew the smoke from the barrel of my sawed off. Maybe next time he'll think twice before taking a hamburger that didn't belong to him. “All's fair in love and fast food” I said to the cow, straightening my tie. The cow chewed its cud, looking bored.
~
PART THREE: THE SUNFLOWER PUB
RADIANCE
(Being Some in Series of a Peculiar Kind of Irreverent Incantations)
DISKO WITCHEZ I knew this one freaky chickthis disco witch down in 'frsico (some dominatrix heartbreaker like the kind I'm sure y'all know) Well, her manifestation-magic was fucking marvelous baby! This witch could frizazzle the frazzle out of any scattered spazzday This chick was a magnet for frequencies dialed interdimensional And every single giggle that shown through her vestibule Well she veiled them coyly in venus flytrap conceptuals The subliminals were outa-fucking-virus-sight-contagious Way back when manifesting synchronicity was still oh-so-outrageous
281
~ FRANKINCENSE INSENCE Frankincense incense casts trails from embers when woven in spirals like glowsticks by members of hidden cult voodoo tribes nestled in redwoods up high where The Evil Blackberry Vines do no good The members of voodoo-cults weave and they spiral the threads of a fable that burn in the night well For embers can weave as a legend alights there and Frankincense incense reminds of a night there when elderly witchez wove fabric and daydreams and night comes so swiftly your survival knife gleams and caught in a river that clicks by like spirals and into the night where the frankincense scent goes.
~
SWEET ‘93 I can write lyrics faster than y'all And every koan I'm thrown is one I've already solved And every zen riddle cast in fire burnt my rubber light years hence “A Riddle A Day”: electrified wire burns a light when dialed higher Than intended, the mistake is highest The price for spontaneity’s mire Stuck in Abstract, Random patterns But Fate intends to throw you no bones Wicked Forsaken bottle-rockets and in '93 we Almost Had It. We almost made it home.
I know y'all remember when The NES was king and ALL Was Won And in every Good Man's Breakfast Club 282
Was waiting a Sunflowers' Radiance Pub And every toast was raised in vain For there was not yet need to fear the rain, but these days ghostly lips in puddles' sheen whisper parodies of we spirits reflecting in vain. As the right side of a parody is the one to be on, We Ghosts of Nostalgia might eventually move along...
~
SAY IT AIN’T SO! The NES was king in '93 and every living room was free to overlord with Playground Fire And every joint was a livewire And purple storm clouds as they rolled burnt stories I've been told And every riddle ever since has been a riddle cast in gold Which rolled from out the dark into waiting veils and warp zones where raven-owners yell “HARK!” “HARK!” they cry as flapping wings settle into silence and the cry of the raven pierces the night and echoes as the violence sheds blood across the fields where the opium poppies grow and if blood and oil save us tell my ghost it wasn't so. If blood and oil save us tell my ghost it wasn't so.
~
A FAKE WAR We're at war but war is old and seems now to live forever And every time the war goes cold it is fed fish heads and leather And every meal of fish heads and leather invigorates its daydreams And laser-cannon hijinks spring to the mind it seems Every time the bullet clicks it slides the time into place And every instant dreams it was a bullet and every bulls-eye a face And every death a number filed in tombstone magic code And every serial number scratched off with a file of gold 283
And in every birthday cake a file with which to file your freedom And in every filing cabinet your number has been seen man And in every cameras' third-eye shine A security ecstatic, divine, captures every instant when the plants begin to switch back to the fucking jesters that inflict you with their glitch.
~
FLYTRAP SPIRAL Sulking, tragic, ever so deep Casting shadows mascara weep Extending eyelashes outrageously baybee The Venus Flytrap Spiral Crazy Got me thinkinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; too much again About spraypainting nuns while drunk on gin and making girls wear more mascara than could fill a swimming pool, I dare ya! I got a laser cannon here And no one dies without my cheer And every girl that ever was smoked cigarettes and lied because They told themselves it didn't ruin them Gateway drugs paid tolls to get through them And gateways soon gave way to riddles and forests, populated by LittlesLittle forest-spirits, whispering secrets such as which humans best to eat next.
~
SLIMEY Something I've been wondered and a click that snaps the time Makes a waterfall fell undered And a fertile swamp of slime And something almost came to mind then And it stuck on the tip of your tongue And every jester-skeleton-grin was never meant in fun 284
And every click-snap moment pearl weather won or cut short by gun Gave credence to the conundrums that with Puzzle-Logic come And every maiden immortalized by tattoo, poem, or love Has been tattooed by poetry and given roses by a dove a-thousand times before- that's why she's called a “Maiden” Every sailor on earth can see them; without their telescopes they see them.
And every maiden Immortalized whether grown, made, or won, came from off the assembly-line, From the assembly line they come And from their ALONE they come.
~ -PART FOUR-
AN OLD-FASHIONED SPOOKFEST (Being Transcriptions of Strange Lyrics from aBand of Haunting and Mysterious Gentlemen.)
THE MYSTICS OF THE FLOWERS There are secret kinds of monasteries in catacombs, say the storiesThe Catacombs of Alchemy, in all their glory The victims of the battlefield above die bloody and gory And the holy men are locked in cages these days in this real-life fantasy story And the truth is strange and stranger, growing stranger by the hour And there are but secrets three, say the Mystics of the Flowers There are but questions three to ask, this the wise men say“What is World?” and “What are we?” and “What is God's name are THEY?!”
Ask the Mystics of the Stars, dancing without a care Or the Mystics of the Sea who sail by winds of the salty air 285
Ask the Mystics of the Battlefields of the revolution to come, Spilling the blood of the wicked under the weeping sun The plants, they were to guide us, and it has all gone awry And the earth is bleeding to death and soon she is to die And the sweet nectar of the Gods is condemned by those in power And though they have poisoned our mother's milk and turned it rancid and sour, And though the tighter our teethe will clench the longer we must cower, “Rage can never heal” say the Mystics of the Flowers “No, Rage can never heal” say the Mystics of the Flowers And the Mystics of the Brier Patch shed tears for those locked away Who will not taste the freedom of the salty air today And the truth is strange and stranger, growing stranger by the hour And there are secrets three, say the Mystics of the Flowers There are but questions three to ask, this the wise men say“What is World?” and “What are we?” and “What is God's name are THEY?!”
Ask the Mystics of the Jungle, carrying gourds of wine Free of wretched piety but ever slaves to rhyme Ask the Mystics of feudal Japan, a samurai sword their cross Slaying enemy mystics as their silence slays your thoughts Ask the Mystics of the Fields, fed grapes by beautiful girls Seducing your daughters with dance and opening portals to alien worlds The plants they were to guide us, it is few who understand But the resistance is growing silently underground across the land And there are revolutions of blood And there are revolutions of mind And there is time still to decide But there is only so much time
There is a Plague of Metal now, spreading across the land And our Mother Earth is dying; she is dying of our own hand. And there are those who know of secrets which few will understand The Mystics of the Elves are as three grains in a desert of sand There are revolutions of blood And there are revolutions of mind And there is time still to decide But there is only so much time…
~
CITRUS DREAMTIME 286
You can streamline your steam of consciousness and make it glide and glisten With Dewdrop Dreams from heaven and happiness frozen in prison For Frozen Happiness shimmers and shines like an Icicle Chandelier Prism And a second of imprisoned serenity trapped in a neurobotanical alchemy Is enough of a heaven for humans as a glimpse from the Transcendence Balcony For trapped within the white Nothingness Icicle a second can lapse like a year And under the Icicle Chandelier's reflection rings of concentric ripples near Reflecting the symbiotic waveform rhythm of the Splinterworld Prism So simply reach for the splicing lasers and be in Lockdown Freedom and dance But remember that things are not as they seem in the surreal Freedom-Prison Trance The Icicle Chandelier gleams with trickles of warm liquid sunshine Which slip down slippery ice like starbursts of Citrus Dreamtime Into the crystal-clear Waters of Surreal Synthetic Serenity Where the rings of concentric ripples cycle in rhythmic voluptuous purity But when you fall for Dewdrop Dreams and dive for the Frozen Happiness Pearl Beware the lure of the Languor Whirlpool and fight its seductive swirl Swim quickly and pass by the beings below which are most certainly not what they seem And know that such creatures use mischief to camouflage themselves within the Citrus Dream So dare swim not with the aquatic angel mermaids who hide silvery, thorny wings But hear them sing to the blurry sunlight from beneath the concentric ripples rings.
~
MAGIC FLASH Keep a flashlight in your backpack and when the demons strike, fight back! Just be sure the batteries your packin' in that flashlight are the magic kind if you're headin' down to the Dark, Dark Woods to unwind You'll need that synthetic rechargeable battery sunshine cuz the Dark Ones whisper when the night is icy black And the schizophrenic whispers slither through the cracks in the icy night when there's no homies to watch your back So keep a magic flashlight in your backpack and when the demons strike, fight back! Don't hesitate to blind 'em with an electric synthetic magic sunshine light-saber attack Because damnit- you gotta get 'em back! So go ahead and get 'em out of your system with the blinding symmetry flash 287
attack of the stroboscopic insanity wisdom You know you need that blinding, slippery, blooming, flicker-flicker of the orgasmic rainbow crayons like a Ouija junky needs his sĂŠance And to all the Purple Ones around the world, get down with the spice and let the magic uncurl! And when you surrender to the hypnotic symmetry wisdom mystery when the shimmering emerald serpentine electricity shimmers, Enter then a spiraling infinity where the eternal peacock angel miracle slithers
~
THE TICKS The special place is a spider-web and we are caught in its tangle And for forever the Single Puzzle we will never cease to unravel I am sorry but with the molecule we will have to intermingle With The Other we are interchangeable and we intersect with it like clockwork Into the insectoid alien Otherness we must plunge or we would not work So into the interlocking gears as they rotate, how could we not fit? For if the mystic electrical concepts in our cortex make the clock tick Then the Single Puzzle of Otherness will tick onward ever after in ecstatic miraculous frames in rhythm for this misfit
~
THE LAST LAUGH Who is wiser; who is wisest? We could debate for hours The Mystics of the Brier Patch or the Mystics of the Flowers? A crown of thorns to bleed you or the magic Druidic powers? Or is the wisest the beast of the jungle while our village it devours? Or the monks with their cups of tea, silent and stern as stone Or the wry smile of philosophers as they chatter all the way home? There are perspectives many and we may all debate or not, But the Mystics of Paradox laugh last to a sun that is Icy Hot.
288
~ OUIJA PARTY There is only one way to get down with God Play the Ouija It ain't that hard Well do you close your eyes? Or do you want to see? There is a seat for you Save a seat for me Well do you brew them in tea? Or do you eat them whole? And if you have one too many, do you eat your soul? We're goin to a Ouija party for everybody. We're goin to a Ouija party for everybody And if you had a Slush Puppy, but it was made with mush Would that make it a Mush Puppy? And would you drink that stuff? And do you see the shadow-people, whispering in the walls? And do you hear the elves singing? And do you heed their call? Well just be careful out there. And watch eathothers' back There is stuff out there. You'll wanna find your way back. Make sure you find your way back.
There is stuff out there, you would not believe. Just thank your God you haven't seen what I've seen There are things out there 289
you would not believe Just listen to the whispers that hide in the breeze. There is only one way to get down with God. Just play the Ouija! it ain't that hard. We're goin to a Ouija party for everybody We're goin to a Ouija party for everybody
~
THE RESIN SCRAPER The glory of The Resin Scraper is in his peering ever closer Straining to see the infinitesimal as if his eyes were supposed to For encrusted in crevices slumber the molecules of resin Till awoken by butane flame as by the blast furnaces of heaven And warmed to their waxy wetness they wake to their malleable ripeness Till their true nature of luscious insight-dew oozes and boils with timeless pricelessness As it evaporates into tendrils of twirling threads of smoke The scent of which The Resin Scraper wears as his Splendor-Cloak The Splendor-Cloak which conceals in mystery as subtly as it dazzles intense With its fabric of Peacock Kaleidoscope Smoke offering seductive its exotic scent Like palm frond tips stretching out to send a shiver when your neck they caress A warning wisp of smoke alerts his paperclip of its time to be blessed As the boiling point is reached by flame licking metal of cheap metal bowl The paperclip is pried open and blessed with a new and higher soul For objects used by The Scraper to collect the jet-black slime Are hallowed by blistered hands and find their meaning in the Stream of Time And so the particles of consciousness-goo warmed and ripe for the tip of the clip's point Cast a glance to their birth as resin from a long-gone roach's past life as a joint The roach held in a dusty overall pocket not without a hole Managing to sleep safely their till found later and packed in the bowl Which hung from the lips of the weary Rasta man sweating his life into fertile soil And worked land with his bones and soaked sun with his skin as he blazed high 290
above his toil
~
BEASTERS IN THE SNOW Across the frozen wasteland, brokenhearted will I go To search in vain for my lost beasters, lying in the snow I procured them from a lassie, a kindly hippie chick was she And with tummies full of kind across the tundra did we flee Hither and thither did we romp unto the fabled house a'haunted And as I sat, burnt and goofy, myself my friends a'taunted “Pack thine bowl thou foolish stoner!” was the command that I heard But no tumbleweed in my empty pocket blithely stirred So alas, dragging heels, over frozen ground we go Forevermore doomed to search, for the beasters in the snow. Beasters in the snow! Beasters in the snow! OH DEAR GOD NO! Beasters in the Snow! Now, if a funky brother were I, I would equip myself with 'fro And if were I a gangsta I would keep a lookout for the po-po God damn the icy winds, for forevermore they blow I raise my fist to damn the skies for they taunt me so I shake my fist in vain as I wander to and fro The heavens are now my enemy. My home are the fires below. Beasters in the snow! Beasters in the snow! OH DEAR GOD NO! Beasters in the Snow! Well I am merely a man. But a single man am I And broken-hearted at that. In my shadowy haunts I cry. From the land they call “B.C.” up in the frolic of the North Doth come the potent beasters to be smoketh in due course Oh, would that I smoketh! But no smoke shall I toketh! No mine lungs shan't choketh! Nor my carpet in bongwater shall I soaketh! 291
For out in the cold, cold world, where the icy winds doth blow Layeth my heart, alongside my beasters, lying in the snow.
~
THE PHARO’S CURSE Mystic electrical energy once writhed through the earth And slowly the Insectoid Overlords came forth to give birth These entities, screaming obscenities as if to expel a vile wrath, Sayeth “The Path of the Pharaoh is the Only Path.” What mystical Goddess they sacrificed for him shall you follow And a path to the tomb of the pyramid you will find in Moss Hollow Down behind the fields of Elysium to the Caverns of Frost you must pass Have your history lessons so soon gone the way of your dreamworld grass? You must follow Cauldron Way down to the path of the Tomb of Bottomless Doom And there allow yourself to be cocooned in the Insectoid Overlords' womb. Metamorphosize there into supernatural form Your soul's release shall burst its cap, anew it's born. Though The Path of the Pharaoh is the Path of Doom Take these three seeds with you and its stark beauty shall surely bloom Only then can you fall backwards and so find symmetry Call on your grandfather, The Pharaoh- though dead he can still see Mummified now, his slaves' bones long-lost beneath the rubble Steel skyscrapers fall as your grandfather wakes to shave his stubble He found Nowhere once upon a time and was gone in a flash of fire and brimstone leaving behind only the maladies once creaking in his bones and a curse which you have inherited, now the way of your kind's DNA Just as it came to pass to your father, so too his morals it slayed. The Pyramid's Vault creaked open, as creaked your father's rocking chair Now too late you understand the omens he begged you of which to beware The curse which you have inherited is the way of our DNA When it first came to pass to your father, his morals it slayed The apex triangle stone and the eye within are passed down to you now The Insectoid Overlords have breathlessly awaited for millennia your bow This little Egyptian tale is soon coming to its end... The Dawn of the Cult of the Eye of Horus shall now begin.
292
~ THE SONG OF THE PINK BLOSSOM BREEZE I.The Grand Blasé No True Tricksters dread The Face of Death For they alone Own their last breath Death cannot steal it from them They die as if it were their whim Tossing all Epic Victory away they fold instead into the Grand Blasé So if you be a True Trickster Just like me Lurking in the gnarls of moss covered trees, Feel detached lately much? From the self-evidence of suchness and whatnot and such? Has the hyper-dimension made you shiver and quake? And left you numb and jaded and alone and fake? Then take heart, you mystic,for heaven’s sake. Take heart, for you are not alone. The Grand Blasé shall be your throne.
II.Hello Again Invoke thus: “Hello now!” “Hello Reality!” “Ohshining mirror shining back at me!” The Other is awoken. Warning- It is upon us! Like mirrors reflecting eachother, Let the Otherness dawn on us Thisis The Dawn of The Other And things are not as they seem What is that in your eye? Is it a mischievous gleam? You are a fearless samurai warrior, so why are you giggling like a schoolgirl? Did you dare to hope just for a second that your smile could fool the whole World? 293
Something is peering around the woodwork and peeking from under the stairs There is surely something going on here, or somewhere over there… It is close now for those who are open and for those who still care My friends, things are Most. Definitely.not as they seem Just keep your eyes out for the mischievous gleam.
III. Straight out of the Woodwork Yes indeed the elves are real, Yes you can see them if you dare Straight out of the fucking woodwork, They stare their unsettling stares Though their Mobius habitat uncoils in impossible spatial puzzles And implodes into you invasively in its rapacious avalanche crumble, And though the fractal medusa liquid oozes again throughout your brain, Still The Mirror is shining steadily And The Other is calling your name The hyper-dimensional mechanics of sensual space and time Can be languaged another day or bifurcated in couplet rhyme Go ahead if you desire and dissect the jungle away With mathematical precision, or just as well be lost in the fray Just never forget the vow you made when you caught the scent that day.
IV.The Peacock Angel And when Her Whirlwind of Eyes began again sensually unfolding Was it really real and was it really truly actually happening? ... or perhaps after all in the end it was all just the serotonin glowing? So when you doubt the hyper-dimension, and when it makes you shiver and quake, And when it leaves you numb and jaded and alone and fake Remember The Wild Wind is REAL, serotonin waterfall or no, And The Other can be your friend, or a lover, even so. The scent of the Pink Blossom Breeze told me so. “Downturned lashes, Sad repose The pity of the Virgin Mary, I suppose. But sometimes, rarely,Her Eyelashes flutter In Nystigmia, I vow to love Her.”
V.Maria, the Venus Oh those Sexy Venus Flytrap Eyelashes on the Third Eye of Reality! They are fluttering now and when they flutter I am not to be seen. You won't be seeing me, at least not for awhile Reality is too sexy now, I must enfold into Its smile It is just as well for all the fools to think I’m lost in dream 294
But when I say “I’m Getting Frames” I think you know just what I mean. Just like the flickers of cherry blossom petals, fluttering stroboscopically down now Maria is my Geisha in pink and She loves Her wicked clown. Even the Trickiest Tricksters some days doubt the Secret they believe But you will NEVER forget the perfume that once brought you to your knees. “Downturned lashes, Sad repose The pity of the Virgin Mary, I suppose. But sometimes, rarely,Her Eyelashes flutter In Nystigmia, we vow to love Her.”
~ Venus Flytrap Eyelash Wonder Men of Marble, Men of IronWarrior Vikings force their Nature. Pillars stand for Lady FreedomTo unfreeze Time she desires. To break our stasis we were ordered By a purple stormy Goddess Veiled in Mysteries she languor’s, Deep within the forest. For the voluptuous sirens classy, yet seductresses voracious, We give forth classical order to carve our Names upon the nameless, but for them only to be devoured, In the Jaws of the Great Temptress How we so wish to be rememberedIn the black stone of the tower Our “Happily Ever After”… Our memorial; Her alter. But we are scattered in the toggle And blink out just as the embers We are scattered by the flicker As The Glitch undoes us Ever We so wish to be remembered, But we are scattered by the Goddess. She laughs vicious in a frenzy 295
Blending us in the Blades of the Strobe, To see the best of Her Vikings forgotten like the sands upon the road. When the wine and passion calls you unto the solemn Caverns of Frost, Where your trauma be hallowed by Honor And where the Tale was worth the cost, Though the Rum and Chaos Spirit makes you swagger willful forth, No form will conquer Her, not Ever because her eyelashes, of course, Will flutter coyly ever after And her sly grin shows no remorse.
Though you rush so quickly upward Since She gives birth upon the Hour, Learn the Venus you so anticipate was but encoded in the Flower. From the beginning, in the Flower In the first unfolding frond the Reason pulls you under, And the Quest becomes the Song. And though still as Ever was the Path, and still Ever the Gate forever onward, you know just true as Ancient Heroes swim upstream to their Ancestors, The Venus Flytrap Power Will forever best the warriors.
~
CLOSER TO THE TRUTH Sometimes I feel like my bones are made of ice I am 7,000 years old and I have collected just a few vices I have habits that may seem odd, and I've been known to scrawl spells on papyrus And I will use my scrolls of papyrus- I will use them to divine for us Yes I divine prophetic wisdom, though I have not even a humble abode You may see me pushing a shopping cart on down the road I just might be one of those people that you laugh at and make fun of 296
The homeless schizophrenics- this world they have the run of Cuz they are closer to the Truth than you assholes will ever be And if you listen to them, they will set you free Although they know not how to harness The things which through them are channeled They listen and they do the best they can If they were only enabled! By those shaman to come in generations of the future who will lead the schizophrenics to be kings and refute you These kings will crumble down the walls of your filthy, stinking system Schizophrenic madness shines- a most beatific wisdom! They are open to those realms which you would rather sweep under the rug They can't seem to help but freak out and run through the streets and bug out and shout things you wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ever understand; you had best not make fun of them! for one day they shall be your Lords and they shall show you to come within
~
FREAKY BITCHEZ Freaky bitches- that's all I seem to know I could tell you a story about many a freaky ho They seem to crawl right out the fucking woodwork And everywhere I go I see freaky bitches. Freaky Bitches! Just beware- Freaky bitches. I knew one freaky bitch who was an alcoholic She drank from the bottle. She made no sense And everywhere Jim Beam went so did she And there were many more, many more than three
There was this one freaky ho whose name I must censor And everywhere she went she brought crystal meth with her I don't just know the druggiest druggy freaky hoes around I have to know those who in themselves crystal meth drown She injected that poison into her veins; Her father whored her out at thirteen. I wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tell you her name. 297
I knew this one freaky ho in a mental asylum (a good place to meet chicks, I suggest you try 'em!) Cuz there ain't no normal bitches that get me off I'd rather smoke and cough Some of the stankiest moss and reminisce About those freakiest freaky hoes that I miss
I knew this one freaky ho who lived out by the sea And she took a razorblade with her wherever she be She used it to cut herself Cuz she didn't like what she did see.
Raise a glass to your health, drink a gulp from my cupDrink from the fractal dimension Let your pain dissolve, don't even bother to mention We all have pain; it is part of the condition. Get down with the sickness and to the Mischief Wisdom listen Let go, there is nausea creeping through all the walls And if you take out your garbage the maggots will crawl; they crawl They come forth, just like out of the air How the fuck did they get in the garbage everywhere? Spontaneous generation you could say Those maggots they come and those maggots are hard to slay You can't get the contamination out from beneath your skin It is everywhere you look, so you might as well begin to get down with the sickness and come within while you're still alive, just get with it!
We may be humans- the satanic species But there is salvation from this disease.
~
KIBBLES AND BITS If you're feelinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lucky, give your crush a rose Life is short boy and hey, you never know... 298
We have to help eachother keep away those late afternoon slows Keep away those late afternoon slows So break out the kibbles and bits, kidz, it's time now I suppose Pass em around like a charm to ward off bad vibes ya don't need those The sun is setting now and the time is right if the doors are closed.
Break out the kibbles and bits in the sunset rain If just to reminisce and gaze out your liquid windowpane Different days boy, but the shit is all the same Sometimes you just have to sigh the pain away The beaded curtains sway in the breeze as does the world, what a show! Everyone knows the Final Secret, everyone knows Just do your best to keep away those late afternoon slows Keep away those late afternoon slows It's too late now, let out a sigh, this is the path you chose The bad things are outside now, they can't come too close The raindrops are smearing the world through the glass with the trickles flow Just let out a sigh, this is the path you chose.
Break out the kibbles and bits in the sunset rain If just to reminisce and gaze out your liquid windowpane Different days boy, but the shit is all the same Some days you just have to sigh the pain away Sometimes a sigh is all it takes to feel ok It's ok to be sad and remember those who have slipped away Remembering minds broken and shattered like ice over a lonely, lonely river Tonight I built a fire after wandering through a thousand consecutive winters. The drops of rain are smearing the world through the glass with the trickles flow It's as good a time now as any I suppose We have to help eachother keep away those late afternoon slows Just help eachother keep away those late afternoon slows
~
THE NIGHTWATERS Wade into the Waters of Archetype Into the ink of myth you slip and if you wish to be submerged, Then in the Nightwaters dip Dive beneath the surface and let yourself forget 299
Let yourself surrender Into the viscous liquid slip The Old Gods are much closer here Much closer than you think They are still there in the Nightwaters where beneath the surface may you sink So in this brief while, while you are still alive, Gather your courage and into the Nightwaters dive It is in the syrup of life we swim and in the primal realms we thrive The Gods tuned out to be Those Things beneath your feet, alive.
~
-PART FIVETHE KINDLING IN GENEVA (Being A Few Curious, Inscrutable PoemsWhich Fit No Proper Description)
GOING TO GENEVA All you motherfuckers are undercover, aren't you? And me? I'm hiding under my covers goo-goo dolling my hamster brother In the downward slope of dreams, while at my window peck the beaks of thirsty junky fiends. 300
With beaks like ravens rapping, pleading, then demanding for a hit of particle smashing Rapping gangsta at my window While I'm gaping-jaw astonished With my sci-fi journals tarnished, Tarnished by being true As is the supercollider polished
I know that while I'm nesting Safety hyper-vigilant testing With one toe from ‘neath my covers While the other is tickled by tentacles, Mythical, From the archetypal waters. I know that while I'm nesting In my grunge of laundry clutter Somewhere out there is the flutter; The flutter from Geneva.
My Valkyries on pale winged horses take me home And the downward slope of dreams will soothe me when I am alone But safety is a luxury and comfort gets so old The confidence to leave ones nest is common, I am told But I don't believe it- only Valkyries could be so bold.*
I know that while I'm nesting In the calm of bosoms resting Suckling archetypes of Valkyries Who's confidence I'll never own And never know, A flutter and a gentle glow Are being kindled in Geneva
The rings of Saturn turn against us, And gold is turned to lead “All should leave Geneva” Was a lie I once have read Writ by a false prophetThe False One, Nostradamus Who of our folly warned us, But of our destiny he barred us 301
And gold is turned to lead Like the nuclei they whirl Of the electron-stripped lead molecule, As heavy as the dead But a humming from Geneva From a ring like Saturn's own I hear faintly in the tuning fork of which was once my bones
I know that while I'm nesting A wave is out there cresting Or will be soon Like a Cali' surfer's wave Or a super-collider's boom As if from the thing in Geneva On earth will walk the dead In the morning Geneva calls me, Pulling me out of bed.
~
302
IMPROPER USE OF THE WORD “YOU” You can't call World “You” Cuz it ain't a who God is a who for some (because they are dumb) Not to say it don't exist, But if it do It ain't an “it”
You can *almost* call World “You” Damn hell close enough at times But save that for them sweets you see that's a REAL you (the ones with eyes) Not like it don't look back Or better- “across” It don't look down; it ain't your boss Would we pretend it saw us kindly Want to so, so fucking bad But to existence add the holocaust, and well, it = sad A fair trade to say it's not It's fault... But if not, then when you RAGE “Then who the fuck was it, YOU?!” Is raged not at “it” but “who”
Well it's oh so Nyevery And it's so so Everything Sparkly, candy even- whatever you see It all around And sure ain't dead It lives as much or more than we but hides Whereas our life is a fact, exact, Its is such that it pretends to be a “that” Nor has to die Our deaths the bow is tied A pretty bow of ribbon red Finality and therefor fact Jealous It gets to live forever? But the bow is exactly what It lacks! And what we win303
we with eyes.
Whisper to it, pretending it a mother-ear But to “pray” is to forget you WIN as one who can have died. Hard won, so cheer. You pray + wish + are squeamish in your grief for sins of yours and theirs and All But when you “pray” you've let It win- you lost the ball Don't pray- GLARE It's bigger but not above Don't beg for its forgiveness like a precious dove And beware, When you RAGE at It for what they did in the camps and are eager to attack If you let slip a “You” Your atheism died for blame, And you can never take it back.
~
THE CHASM Gazing at the East from afar Unclenching fist stuck in cookie-jar A Chasm makes for Scent Exotic "Always Springtime" mumbled as he drank the tonic Hekuras lured into the circuitry Disciples lined up to infinity They beat a pathway to my door and bow to me as I have bowed before to witchdoctors grinding roasted monkey meat with solemn molars gnashing to icaro beat Would the Primitive entice without the Chasm? A tweed suit and snazzy bow-tie is the fashion Spectacles and briefcase complete the modern man as Geisha girls peak behind rice-paper fans A Westerner till death- guilty as charged My fist stuck in the cookie-jar, so large Connected, but the Old Ways seem so far Yes, those wires, like roots and vines, channel light and the Microchip is the victory of sheer iron-fisted might but from black depths the Chasm shivers and emits a mist with the scent forgotten since the first time you were ever kissed Enshrouding a feeble bridge of woven vine 304
the Chasm mist smells of another time Luring Hekuras across the divide Can't quite connect the sides but, like a samurai, I tried.
~
OH MY GOD THE SKY!!! In a world where your own mother very well may be a spy sent by evil psycho fiends to frame you with a lie,
It is best to keep some muffins handy in a wicker basket You can drop them on the doorstep of psycho evil fiends or pass it to them through a friend to pay off a debt they say that will be paid with your own nutsack if they don't get those muffins today! Absurdity Absolves us Frylock helped me to survive. This kind of world requires a hero That is a talking box of fries.
Now, â&#x20AC;&#x153;OH MY GOD THE SKY!!!â&#x20AC;? may well be the name I was told was the real name of my lassy, whose heart was made of gold She was a pretty shade of plain, and there was dystymia in her brain The spies are parked outside, in the sun or in the rain.
Frylock was a Benevolent King, The Father we deserve. Meatwad was the child within we so wish to preserve. 305
Mastershake- the Lightning Flash that Crumbles the Pillars Down “All is wagered for the Final Laugh,” from his deathbed said the Clown.
One day when you are dishwashing, the surreal, oily sent of fries will remind of a crooked eyebrow seen somewhere above “What The Fuck?!” eyes After all, “What The Fuck?!” is the only logical way to say “Goodmorn'!” To a World too old to frolic, but too young to be reborn. Absurdity Absolves us Frylock helped me to survive. This kind of world requires a hero That is a talking box of fries.
~
CAMERAS Now, a camera is the Mind of God! And a camera is all more the odd, When a camera is in the egg of a tadpole that is inside the butt of a frog. And cameras are mighty weird indeed in synchronized nanotech swarms Of micro-drones for cruel voyeur porn of which Orwell so well forewarned, Which makes for the kind of earth on which it’s better to have not been born, And make your heart sink to your belly where it has never been more forlorn.
A camera is irrefutable like the clear light of the Void And a camera is the anti-laugh that freezes and so destroys. And a camera is the wicked snare which traps your unseen soul at play The World Ends not with a whimper but with a Lens, I say.
And a camera is the devil! As he smokes a cig' on his motorcycle.* And a camera catches the trickle Of tears from the eyes of those whom mace will make think twice before they dare to record the grimmest fables.
306
Their cameras are so Forensic Science can freeze us in The System And our cameras shine the blaring light which they liken to treason But both our souls are captured, as the primitives will tell. And surveillance is the reason This World will go to hell.
~ BOUNCE A funny thing happened to me today Actually it was quite sad but I'll tell you anyway I bumped into someone’s arm at a rave I never wanted to be so bad and misbehave I felt so ashamed I wanted to hide in a cave I looked at her and she just smiled at me She even pet my shoulder with empathy I thought “how much more selfish can I be?” almost apologized to her on bended knee She said “It's no big deal, it happens all the time!” “So just keep on bouncing, friend of mine.”
Still, I felt so clumsy I swore I'd never bounce again You try to bounce but you never win. But then I asked myself, “why do you care so much?” “You barely brushed her arm with the slightest touch!” Guess I forgot how much I was supposed to care must have been something in the air. She laughed and said “It happens everywhere!” wanted to run my fingers through her hair But you can't do that to strangers; it isn't fair! So I just kept on bouncing without a care. People die in war while we're having fun But fun is so fun to have I can't help having some 307
Compared to war, bumping someone’s arm is not a sin Some soldiers come home and they won't ever bounce again When you think about it, we're the only ones who win.
~
GPS = 666 First we creep into your taxi cabs (just to determine the correct fair) Soon you'll see us popping up in convenient places everywhere We just may be in your cellphones soon (just so you don't roam too far) For just $99.99 they will install us for free in your car It would only be wise for your offspring to have one of us in their hiphop sneakers Or perhaps in their contact lenses (oh how did they get such beautiful peepers?!) So many more humans can we infect once we are in your pagers and beepers It will be quite too little too late when you all cry “Jeepers Creepers!!” You shall see us as cute fuzzy tribbles but we are micro-electronic grim reapers We know where you are!! We know where you've been!! G!! P!! S!! ...It's the ultimate sin! (x2) Now what was it we snuck from the folk? Just what was it we stole? If your name is not in The Book of Life, you'll find a GPS in your soul! Now, freedom is wandering lost And forgetting who you are You can stick all the Grateful Dead stickers in the world on your car But you can't get lost no more. 308
Some say “not all who wander are lost” “NONE SHALL BUY OR SELL WITHOUT THE MARK OF THE BEAST!!!” Cash comes at too high a cost Cash is the last to go Now cash is a crime! Then a credit card on your right hand and forehead “Hey mister, can you spare a dime?” “Hey mister, can you spare a dime?” Convenient in your wallet, more convenient under your skin, The Book of Life is for the few; which one is your name written in? With charisma like the Anti-Christs’, how can we win? With convenience like this GPS, how can we win? We know where you are!! We know where you've been!! G!! P!! S!! ...It's the ultimate sin!
THE MIRRORED PATH Here now is given you the Sacred Ancient Mystical Key To the Mythical Forgotten Archetype Kingdom for eternity. But to open the Final Gate and unravel the Single Puzzle, You will need more than this sacred gift you have been givenYou will need also the Surreal Neon Dreamworld Glowstick Wisdom. 309
So go forth now alone to where the paths intertwine And the trees breath in the rhythm of rhyme. There kiss the Peacock Angel in her Dance of Gentle Splendor And the love given to Her will be returned to the sender. Go forth now alone to the mesmerizing absurdity Where the air trembles in ever-reverberating Jello windows of fractal medusa liquid quivering And there within claim the Surreal Neon Dreamworld Glowstick Wisdom And the offer the Key of the Forsaken Archetype Kingdom Portal Opening Mystical Prism Ritual Miracle to the Peacock Angel in her dance of gentle splendour, But remember to cross your fingers when you kiss her, So the love given to Her will be returned to the sender.
Or else the Hallowed Mirror Path of the Absolute Otherness-Miracle will shatter! And its Asymmetrical Crystal Prism Rainbow Spectrum Miracle Shard Remnants Shall fracture into a handful of Fractal Voodoo Splinterdemon Dimensions. The moral of this Voodoo Splinter Dimension Fractal Medusa Liquid Lymric, child, Is that if you offer the Fabled Emerald Alien Elvin Deity Supremacy Key And surpass The Path of the Map of the Ancient Archetype Wrath you have been given, By following The Path of The Surreal Neon Hieroglyph Schizm Demon
But if you forget to cross your fingers when you kiss the Peacock Angel in her Dance of Gentle Splendour, The love given to Her will NOT be returned to the sender, And instead the Hallowed Mirrored Path of the Absolute Otherness Miracle will shatter! And alas, the Clattering Mystical Prism Shard Remnants will fracture into a myriad of disasters.
~
THE FIELD Quiet sit the humans, Like gods of acoustic precision. Turning up the silence Of a prismâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fractured schism At least we have auditory space, 310
The Silence is so real. The vibration of dust particles, That subtle frequency we feel. We may craft a bubble round usTen feet in diameter. Nothing bad allowed within. It is best to be in there. Can you craft the bubble too? Can we with eachother triangulate? The space is communal! From this moment: extrapolate. From where we are (and wretched) To the field there is a path. Point A to Point B. You want the field? Do the math. The space to be OPEN. Up forward in the future. We all want it bad. We want it so bad it's torture. We all get off And shine bubble gift inside. We all suspect that moment has nothing to hide. And if that moment was the New One Earth? And we made-believe the field was near? Pulling us into the futureâ&#x20AC;Ś We were born to this Earth so we can come here.
~
-PART SIXFIREFLIES AND WEEPING WILLOWS 311
(Being Some in a Scandalous Series of Lessons for Venomous Vixens.)
ETCH-A-SKETCH GIRL Playin with a fuckin Etch-A-Sketch On the bus, first day at college I bet. “Yep” she tell me, it ain't no lie “Are you going there too?” (hopeful look in her eye) Now I shake my fist at the empty sky Why didn't you say “YES!” motherfucker? WHY?!! She asks “Do you have a cigarette?” (a hopeful look I can't forget) Wish I did- she'd share one I bet Good thing I don't mind girl-spit Woke up that morning like “Why do we bother?” Now I know daydreaming of her girl-slobber “Can I have the earbuds to your mp3?” Is this chick for real or is she kidding me?!
She got a little dirt beneath her nails I can smell the road on that female Smells like fine perfume to me Takes a half a cigarette to set you free Smells to me like fine perfume Takes a half a cigarette to seal my doom I can smell the road on that female, I can smell it right away (but you didn't say “Do you have a place? Do you have a place to stay?”)
So, is that your cellphone? “No, it's my Etch-A-Sketch!” A mini pink one, scratched to shit How damn retro can you get? “People think that I'm retarded.” (If you only said “No you're not! You're gonna be a star, kid!”) But you didn't. Idiot! Now go smoke a cigarette. She shook that Etch-A-Sketch at me like a voodoo hex under a witches tree Haven't seen that spirit since '93 (and everyone knows that was the time to be) 312
She shook that Etch-A-Sketch at me like a voodoo hex under a witches tree She make me feel like I'm back in '93 (and everyone knows that was the time to be) Shake it, shake it, Etch-A-Sketch! Shake it, shake it, Etch-A-Sketch! Shake it, shake it, Etcha-A-Sketch! Shake it, shake it, Etch-A-Sketch!
Why didn't you ask her to smoke a bowl? Why didn't you just take her home?? Why didn't you ride to your college with her??? Cuz you're a fucking coward and IN-SE-CURE! â&#x20AC;&#x153;Can I have the earbuds to your mp3? Now I've got no fuckin earbuds for ME!
She shook that Etch-A-Sketch at me like a voodoo hex under a witches tree She make me feel like I'm back in '93 (and everyone knows that was the time to be) Shake it, shake it, Etch-A-Sketch! Shake it, shake it, Etch-A-Sketch! Shake it, shake it, Etcha-A-Sketch! Shake it, shake it, Etch-A-Sketch!
This poor boy has but one desire I wanna set your Etch-A-Sketch on FIRE.
~
RACOONZ She got so much eyeliner she look like a raccoon 313
And she headbang when the bass goes BOOM-BOOM-BOOM Down at the train-tracks Or down at the docks Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re feedin' those duckies like around the clock! Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; strapped to the trax as I bomb the blox And the bass tastes best with the glitch on top She's on a redwood log and my bass is the buzzsaw My laserbass crowd-draw is exclusive to outlaws Who shred face to unlock The bassjumps from skybox And bunji the fungi that mindwarp the headlock Of skankatronic headcases fiending to freebase The logic that glitches so perfunctorily erase The time-slicing, the frequencies dialed on Etch-a-Sketches The sketchiez that scavenge the wreckage of witches The tin-foil helmets and manifestation-catchers And the randomness of skateboards and hoodies of many flavors The Ouija Board headfucks that hoodrats get stuck in And the graveyards and trainwrecks of ghost-towns-grown-up-in The trademark raccoon mascara of runaway angels With switchblades for strip-poker deals under the table And like them I headbang and handswat at waveforms That none but me see as I trasnsform to Beast Form To ravish a maiden who received a stricter education On the road with her Headmistress (A Dark Summer Vacation) So far from the boneyards her childhood took place in With the ruler she could scarcely conceal her elation. She was spanked with the Ruler of Seven Dimensions And the crystals which rapped her knuckles spilt rainbows from prisms And the ghost of her Headmistress (A Lady of Royalty) to this day haunts the fetish-clubs these goth chicks so enjoy with me! And she samples caviar as infinite waterfalls Of jet black eyeliner drip from the walls
A raccoon under my arm*, a ticket to Paris. Down at the train tracks ghosts can't even scare us.
~
BONKERZ 314
They say Zoth was un-fucking-believable in bed. “Who would have thunk it?” would surely be said By every one of his college classmates; That's just what they'd say Where the fuck is that hot little hippychicky Sunflower today? Or all the others Zoth dreamt of taking against the lockers He’d have bound them in bondage gear and gone bonkerz “Now they've scattered to the Four Winds,” he thinks, “Just as have I.” But somewhere along the way Zoth saw a part of him die Well, many, with each alleycat he let into his bed They took pieces of his heart for a spider which they fed And that spider grew larger and stronger with each piece With the dinners of his heartstew that spider grew teeth and the alleycats in perfectly synchronistic teamwork spiced that heartstew with his dignity and the spider went berserk And when you've got a 900-pound spider on your ass, it makes you wonder if all the alley cats are sharing a good laugh ~ Oh yes they're sharing a good laugh! ~
Well the venom was extracted and how cats love to taunt As if they knew the fantasies of the cool kids and the ones who aren't. Well guess which kind Zoth was, I'll give you just one hintHe was the dorkiest of dorks and to the locker-room he went But where he wanted to be was in the one across the hall With the prom queens and that hippychicky Sunflower and them all The ones who were to shun him and make his skin crawl As they giggled and gossiped all the way to the mall. Well Zoth must admit, his thoughts for them were elaborate! He had much hands on his time and he built quite the labyrinth. A labyrinth of fantasies, as they grew into felines, adept at milking venom glands of spiders that climb Into his bed To wrap him in webs. Zoth’s heart is now tangled, “Yr a dork” is what they said But now they say “Wow!” and “Oh My Fucking God!” And every time it's so amusing, he laughs, it's quite odd! And still they conspire; it seems all the more And yet the ones who destroy his spirit most, he most adores. And the ones that know a revenge fantasy when they see one have a desire that burns with the heat of the sun. 315
A desire to be revenged and cleanse the Prom Queen out of them For that was their own burden and their own spider venom Zoth’s all happy to help, where is Sunflower now? She bows to her Spider-King with a meow.
~
MR. KITE’S LAMENT Fucking wicked female shaman Made Mr. Kite’s blood boil like water for Ramen boiling hot, till his skin was crawlin' The greater their Power, the harder he’s fall for 'em Hot with lust, but this time with jealousy He cried “How the fuck did her power manage to eclipse ME?!?” Mr. Kite didn’t take kindly to receiving Full Transmission He was in the habit of giving them like granting wishes The good witch/ bad witch question he’d answered The results were in and more distressing than cancer He thought “I’ve rarely seen a Power greater than mine…” “OK, never, until this time!” He was a good shaman tho' and he liked to mingle his blood As the humans do with eachother, it is fitting that they should But his kind mingles Spirit and can inflict that on mortals Turning us on like flicking the light-switches on our portals Inflicting spirit like bestowing The Strange, A touch of fear forever more in our brain We can't remove it with surgery, prayer, or magic It's implanted, their Transmission involves the deranged and the tragic But we shall wonder anew when night falls and curtains sway And they honor The Strange when they convert us this way They’ve won us for their kind, a notch on their belt But their side has its own version of the conversion we felt When two of them meet, recognition is like dynamite The shockwaves of Mr. Kite’s recognition took All Night He mingled blood and may die for that For to be as Nature is is the way of magical alleycatz Plastik had no place between them, didn't even cross his mind But mingling Spirit was less safe and was in no way divine Your Power eclipsed his, yet he chose to change you Just as mortal to shaman, so bad shaman to good, yo! Mr. Kite was a hero, but his foe was stronger Congratulations bitch, he’s a good shaman no longer. 316
~ Disneyland Her indecisiveness is her sadism (not a bad quality in a maiden) So long as she knows what she's doing And admits it to herself. I'd need a laser-cannon dinosaur harness to crack that shell. But no tool made by man on earth, least of all by me, could make for more than so, so fleeting bliss beneath a tree A blanket on the moss, so fast zips time to play But she looks at me aghast as if “just this” were not “OK”? Better than OK my friend, the best a man can know You make me thank a Godless God but curse him when you go And she's right- I admit. But the golden gratitude in her eyes I'll never share while that fucking sun will again without her rise. A sin to claw with grief after this undeserved surprise Then why do I hate the Sun because it won't upon us rise? I think I may be LooneyTunes to daydream selfishly for more But I happen to know some Disneylands you've never seen before As if I could steal you away and hide you like a spy and the wet moss soak our clothes and in your hair my pain to die. How could I deny you a thousand sly dominatrix smiles But if you use your mischief hex on me you may regret it, child. Can't you tell with a thumb and a road into the sunset I ride for miles? Haha, I'm kidding, I'm done my streetkid journeys across the land Along my way I've stumbled upon some secret Disneylands I'd share them all if you stay long enough or want to understand... I'll soak what drops of butter drip, any while they may And build a laser-cannon dinosaur harness if I can figure that out someday As if I could steal you away and hide you like a spy and the wet moss soak our clothes and in your hair my pain to die.
~
Jokerlips Meeting you is like falling in love and breaking up at the same time 317
I guess as well to mourn you now cuz you’ll never be mine At least you leave me chainsmoking-empty and tragic-artistic Muse Baybee You sure you ain’t Jack Nicholson’s lovechild? (cuz those Jokerlips drive me crazy!!) No offense- but I refer to you as “Jokerlips” when I talk about you in my mind When I talk about you to myself, which is all the time You’re never far from my mind Jokerlips, it’s like sun-up sun-down flippin the bird to Ethics But I’m too old to do what’s right and I miss those Gentle Touch Trix The subtlest upward curl of the edges of your lips Makes up for It All/ Burns up the world/ It Disproves Reality, chick. But just so you know- those Jokerlips don’t fool me for a second If you’re too manic to soldier-up and not be caught (Least of all on purposelike the sadistic jester I hope you’re not!) Then smile your gorgeous skeleton-grin, but sharper, like a blackberry thorn, Then we can skip my darkside and it’s thrillride won’t again need to be born They never see it in me, so Jokerlips just how did you know? Smell one of your own kind dontcha? Ho-ho-ho! But what’s so weird is how I never told you and how fast you sensed what I never said, Things only hinted of after years to some who I’ve practically been wed. Yes, I can jest with the best And I too can play with souls And believe it or not, I’ve broken hearts for no reason too, I suppose Secrets suck to keep, but they’re fun to be, and when I catch your scent It makes me want to gather blackberry vines in the night before pitching our tent.
~
Pterodactyl Slayer I was working overtime to pull out your Blackberry Darkness No workgloves for the thorns on that vine cuz I’m righteous Almost had it by the root, could have proved you heartless “A smoothie with your Streak of Sadism Your Highness?” Could have served you that meal on a silver plate And with such a presentation! …now it doesn’t matter You got overdosed with Real Life, so it’s no longer the right time For you to learn to savor the many bloods that have for years watered your vine My gardening was never to mock you- I’m not a beast And your strong Altruism Vine is intertwined, at least Both live on (for now) but which will thrive? Nowmatter which, I’m making DAMN sure now that I’ll still be alive. Might not be happy, might break my Moral Spine 318
But worst would be to never learn the roots of either vine If you let me I’ll help you now while you need it- as for my gardening I’ll punch the clock And call in sick till the Pterodactyls of Drama to your door cease to flock But do you know this man would break his back to earn your day of leisure? Or that all the workgloves at Walmart are made of the thinnest Chinese leather? Trust me- I’ve been to every store and the ones I need are out of stock There was only one place they sold ones for men hard as rock It was a cold mean place called- “The Ultimatum Shop” But don’t worry- their prices were too high and it is closed forever and locked Too bad- the shitty leather ones I’ll shoplift will soak straight through With the plasma I’m honored to donate to you.
~
The Crispy Treats You cunt, now look what you’ve gone and made me done! You’ve made me hate the Sun We moths, our childhood dream to by your flame be burnt? Or so you hope, our fragile wings your sweet desert Burnt and blackened to a crisp Our own fault, our own hope you wish I watch these wings of mine grow crispier by the day And soon your gravity’s appetite will be too wet to play The flame envelops, we lose, there is no other way But if it’s the last thing I do before the blaze, These wings will leave a bitter taste on those Jokerlips till the end of your days Not that I haven’t passed the point of no return Or could fly away by now nomatter how I yearn The moth can’t burn the flame but the flame can learn To unpeel the ambiguity between Right and Wrong And this time she’ll know damn well in her heart it is her Will to Burn And worse, that it has been all along.
~
The Veil Somewhere in the night I couldn’t sleep, pondering your hair I saw the thinnest membrane between worlds, I watched it almost tear It was the so thin skin between this and the Good World that isn’t this one And through it I could feel the Good World’s different grass and feel its different sun There I sat on the campus green, drinking a smoothie with my girl 319
And I was happy as I never was and believed in God as I never will in This World. And so close the thin, thin veil was to tearing, I almost believed it could And when I realized it couldn’t I turned my back on His World of Good Not in rage or sobbing like a child I turned my back in silence and made a promise with a smile I promised the God that Never Was that if he couldn’t throw me this one bone That I would do wrong and not under His shadow of guilt but knowingly, all alone I promised to steal and savor every unfaithful moment of Her Grace And because He knows how so, so close the veil was to tearing, He doesn’t dare show His face
~
-PART SEVENSKELETON TRAIN (Being the Remaining Fragments from Times Long Gone of a Long Railroad Journey’s Song)
I.BOARDING: MELON-WATER FEVER "We're on a skeleton train, baby, We're on a skeleton train now If you're wondering why, Maybe we'll tell you somehow. The prison train's a’chuggin Soakin' coal through a straw The engine must go on in this coal-shovelin' craw.
Swaying back and forth like a squirel on a stone wall pushing up the mountains into the dessert snowfall
A Demure Beauty brushes my shoulder Her quiet sanctity touches my soul 320
This train could lurch forever Its swaying flow, her sweet Melon Water coal
My glass of merlot becomes an ocean Of Demure Beauty Sanctity Potion The skin absorbs... a witchcraft lotion! As Melon Water fever yields my hearts deepest devotion.
~
II. EMBERKATION: THE HARLOT Lust and drunken debauchery Reach for me with claws If only I had a virgin nurse with pure, white gauze to wrap my industrial wound with a crystalline microchip God.
But not before swabbing the festering puss-filled wounds that dribble from my flesh (like tides pulled by the moon) with the fragrent herbs to act as a poulticeSagebrush from the hills and from the water, a lotus The lotus which blooms from the mud the mud of the industrial revolution. Oh where is my nurse of pristine electric purity to redeem the whore of Babylon with her interconnectivity sanctuary?
Perhaps she's in the mountains, running razor ridges, crooned to sleep by coyotes, woken up by midges that bite into her skin, flushing pale with scarlet; 321
but she won't succumb until she defeats the harlot,
No, she won't succumb until she defeats the harlotâ&#x20AC;Ś
~
III.IN TRANSIT: HAVENS Where should I choose to cease my wandering? The dank and spicy forest with pebbled streams meandering? Perhaps on the cliffs of a wave-chewed coast? Or on the peaks of snow-capped mountains, flitting like a ghost? Or in a Turkish harem replete with the notes of flutes smoking cigars rolled by harlots whores the tailors of my suits
Or lost in labyrinth cities, those above-ground sewers, enticed by flashing signs- neon fishing lures, whose purpose is to hook you right upon your lip, but if the hook is swallowed, your innards they will rip.
If there is but one haven from the screeching of metal gears like teeth, it is the Honey Melon Soul beseeching raining Melon Dew Forgiveness on every falling leaf.
On high my Demure Beauty sits serene upon Her throne For Her my organs rupture; for her splinter my bones But each drop of Melon Water Dew that blesses from the skies, encapsulates the oil of the machines, and so it dies...
~
IV.MOUNTAIN TUNNELING: SUBMARINE 322
A pure sphere of blinding white to carry this orb takes all my might Soul on my back like a hermit crab's blight I carry my home into the howling night.
For it is always night in the ocean beneath the chaotic motion of the waves. And it was from this potion the first flickerings of life arose in.
Of the prehistoric amoebas, funking in their muck, did they evolve complete with soul? And did their guardian angels give a fuck? Of their swamp of primordial scum, the cradle of sparkling lifeif it only knew the horror of dystopian biomechanoid strife!
For you'd hope, in the depths of the sea, the taint of mankind wouldn't be But an army is transmitting signals Submarine radar shrieks mingle with the cooing of whale's communications They become beached due to loss of direction.
~
V.APPROACH: CHAOTIC CLOACA China blue corneasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; water and salt from the sucking sea crams in our sockets and scatters images of amber and green
The flight of frightened sea-gulls, torn with wind asunder, clinging to pirate ship masts, 323
huddling to their sea-gull brothers,
Dripping and dropping in dribbles, the chalky white smut from their rears, crusting on sun-worshippers' nipples and leaking inside of their ears.
A scream from the lungs of the captain muffled by train-window tinted, sabers slashing at feathers; a war on high seas is presented
But though the legions of air have been routed, the pirates celebrate victory too soon, for the whales and dolphins (bottle snouted) drag them down to their watery doom.
~
VI.ARRIVAL: VENOM LEATHER-OIL The Skeleton Train's a cruel mistress where the water is white as a dove. The filet minion is divine, but the wine is bottled Godsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Blood from above.
Swirl it around your palette; Let the crushed sap soak into your tongue, but make sure to spit out the sip, don't swallow it as others have done.
-The fractal medusa wine lingers on your tastebuds like scorpion spine A bottle of snakes- beware! A bear-trap claw-snap divine. For this brew was brewed in fury By a reptilian dominatrix most surly She oils her leather with venom 324
and with a grin wishes you a pleasant journey, "Yeeeaaaaaaah, have a pleasant journey.... Yeeeaaaaaaah, have a good trip!”
~
The Ode to the Joy of The Eternal Return The Cellophane Flowers will Never. Die. Never wilt. May slightly melt on your windowsill In sun through your stained glass windowpane You melt me just like cellophane It’s such a particular feeling Such a peculiar thing to do. The windowpane lets the light come through You melt me like Cellophane in sun My Skeleton Roses Lightning Nun Your grateful return, my heart in bloom 13 jagged points go zoom But the Dead never made Dark Side of the Moon The eternal artifact to adorn dorm rooms Such slippery wet undulating tunes But which Floyd song sealed all our dooms? You know the one Those college days were so much fun Girls here, there, and everywhere So many drops to drink But “here” is best by far. God Damn It. I think you know which song, I think Where’s that old college try? Not still in you now, today? Then go pick a Cellophane bouquet For a heart to melt at rendezvous This feels so familiar, do you feel it too? These shiver chills from déjà vu? Could it be Cellophane Flower Season again so soon? It seems we felt this very swoon In a dream once, napping in some dorm room While roommates fucked to Dark Side of the Moon …No, it was a Beatles tune! Your sun-love naked soul lit bare Due to the Rules of Truth or Dare You blew a wish on dandelion fluff 325
That dream can’t return soon enough That flower died, of course- no crime Plenty dandelions for other times But this bouquet will never die. Unlike those dandelions I’d give The Cellophane Flowers LIVE! Doesn’t “Wish You Were Here” always make you cry? (Said everyone with a radio ever) The doom of college kidz forever Those first few notes, like a dagger A concise and deadly acoustic tool And once again we play the fool The radio can be so cruel Getting too sentimental in here? It starts with a funny feeling, and then those funny thoughts appear Then rise from the depths Leviathans The Archetypes start turning on Now again the real Alive World is REAL As the days align and Time unpeels* I call it “Falling Time”, like silk falling upon a chair Then that Clear Light of the Void so Clear the prism, a clue- the colors turn up as we focus The colors blaze so hard its real fucking Hocus Pocus No one sees it yet. No one knows it. It all fits together- Time, Pink Floyd A dorm room window, the clear light of the void, Like the complimentary lenses for telescopes they chose The Archetypes, aroused, arose But the Dead and Floyd never made Sgt. Pepper It’s “OH MY GOD THE COLORS!!!” weather First we did, then that needle drops We turn the fucking COLORS up! Blast it till they call the cops Side B’s last groove: It. Never. Stops. But it was Lucy in her Diamond Sky Who filled me with wonder every time A subliminal message encrypted, in fact In the title, a code so hard to crack! It would take a hacker quite fantastic (I hope you know I am sarcastic) That title acronym, we’ll solve it! The code will crack in time! Perhaps it hides some innuendo, blunt and yet divine Perhaps a reference to our old miniature quadrilateral wine That mesmerizing drone in Lucy- the wooze of the current Is exactly how it feels, coming on in waves, we learned it 326
In extra-curricular activities class Three letters and free time, when little squares were passed And then that unique smile shared amongst a Fraternity of Light We saw The Photons’ particle-wave dessert reward delight Light looked so glossy somehow then, like those centerfold pages so sweet You can still find kaleidoscope eyes on certain chick’s you’ll sometimes meet That dilated-pupil syrup sparkle is still passed amongst elite Those chicks are each still Lucy, every one, and they still know the drill How to flash that old trancey syrup gaze that makes time flow uphill It’s that uphill, backwards part- it’s how we win I suppose Lost-soul fishy, this river, it flows Like that Escher poster on your dorm room wall- in a circle, so it goes So you see… we’ll meet again In this same tunnel, fishy friend So no goodbye, rather- “see you next time!” My lost-soul kin.
LUCY, THE SKY WITCH We are omniscient because we have looked through the looking-glass Splendorlens Monocle carnival funhouse mirror maze roundabout backwards and seen Timea rotating torus, a fountain, a cycle that opens the funnel, it blossoms, the likeness to circles, the drama we meant it all backwards the meaning- unnoticed the notion- unspoken the actions, the drama the floating, a current of meaning to have been so beforehand the likeness relaxes and makes Time a place for one’s eyes to get lost in ~ The Vision! The order of ending beforehand the likes of we seekers, written in current to rejoice in the struggle 327
was real, we need it behind us, the likely unbinding of sequence the meaning, the glue of the story Omniscience Revives us! the pleasure of knowing, the end of the party the Time for celebration forgets our professions but Splendorlens Grinders, Gilded and Noble are of metal imprinted Her Majestyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Lesson Our duty- Her blessing A Gypsy, lips sealed, her eyesHave Triangles in them! A window still open The folly, that girl Proves Triangle Eyes still exist in this World! A secret worth knowing A silence, a teasing The struggle now honey A question, a knowing, a holding of wisdom, a puzzle The eyes of the girl, holding her breath and not tellingâ&#x20AC;Ś Suspense for exploding. ~ Sweetness of cotton, the wire, alive the sparks are a treat then a tent for the crowd a crowd for the taming a throne for the master rings at his service a dagger for clocks for some breaking time with pins for lock-picking and pockets for picking Harvest is given The lips to give thanks in so glad for the given a time to give living The awe is a promise the cheering, a love spell! A sweating- a potion! A portion of lightning Her Majestyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fever, forever is endless 328
for patronage, fawning, a tunnel, returning A gondola swan Love is the plan the tunnel- a pilgrimage to The Monarchy Lineage Heritage Hermitage The answer is somewhere but only for lovers and only when fawning The wronging of meaning we meant it all backwards The Monarchy, Honor The Knights don their armor of Grindersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Guild Brothers Imagine a meeting in tunnels when slipping in streaming, solution to see, the story our lives, in colorwheel freedom Unreal The story, our lives our lips never unsealed ~
A vigil, a girl a master made knowing that chases the Dawning of Time for a glimpse for the time of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life in for freaks to replenish for clowns to relive a sweet gondola carousel the fawning is silent the River Styx ends us but this one is endless is worth the return with blessing and fortune, the palm is held open, the time gone antique, has loosened, is thrilling, exquisite a carousel army around on the wheels a light for the tent for the big cats to fight in! 329
The lions, the harness is broken, the hero, is legend, is flawless The lions were harmless The hero is honored, is lifted, is timeless the Time when we find the solution to sequence like factory conveyor belt slide the spiral, the reaching beyond chapter’s finish the song when the long Languish Time makes a place is requited, beforehand Relaxes, relief, and a likeness to circles makes Time a place for one’s eyes to get lost in The potion! The longing for potions and solace a wedding, a fawning a tunnel, a princess a stream and a winning A foe and a weapon The winning, the clocks The dagger, the sharpness when Time’s for the breaking with pins for lock picking and pockets for picking The potion, the longing for lightning, a portion, a parcel, a pittance a piece of the wire a need for kindling desire, a fever a sweating, a fiending for sweetness of cotton we meant it all backwards we lost where the meaning was through the bleeding The lightning, the needing a portion, a parcel a pittance, a thing when the wire was sparking- a current not liquid is yours for the taking the sweetness of cotton and sparks for the dying a Dying too fast for Time to say “Bye” in 330
The silence, remembrance The vigil, the solomness of The Monarchy Lineage Heritage Hermitage Pilgrimage Carnival Carousel Tilt-a-whirl Colorwheel Miracle Merry-go-round The Awe is a promise The Splendor- an album A Sergeant named “Pepper” A song for the ages The tinkle of bells the chimes which flow upstream oh so well Mr. Kite was a man, A man from a poster A coming attraction A figure, historic but pay it no matter No reason, so faceless so God and so Timeless so brave that his colors kindled the Sky Witch The God and the Crystal The key to the jelly The Marmalade Triangle Window widens The Sky filled with diamonds A summer for flying ~ The notion of greasepaint, we liked it, the glowing the reeling in laughter redeeming the times when the wander so nauseas The puzzleis Single, the goal was revealed, way back when the storybook first felt like turning a place to return to the time when one’s life was the one we once lost in The Time for a glimpse where the time of one’s life is when Time was a place for one’s eyes to get lost in Give thanks for the given 331
a time to give living in His eyes a horizonA sunset so bright its colors are blinding each color so bright they kindle the Sky Witch ~ A summer for flying when Triangle Eyes Have been proven as science! by a Gypsy, a girl, holding her breath and not telling her secret, a blessing and a man who still walks This Now World The punchline is secret no time for the telling He’s missing, the losing of heroes is stinging The mystery sequel is for him page-turning His colors are monstrous Are awesome A promise Remains And each one is so much more amazing than needing a pittance, a parcel a thing, the fiending, a need, A failure, a loss a Dying too fast for Time to say “Bye” in the lion, in harness the promise, was battle the king was so flawless when Time’s in his garden the jester, so honest the freaks, so wild on high wires, swinging a slipping, a daring, a falling remember what Time does that’s worth the returning a carousel sway A vow to do Honor A Mission, a Questing for Circus refreshments 332
a river, a blazing Kalaidoscope kindness He offers horizon despite how it blinds us the leaves always falling The future- AMAZING! Kite offers Horizon of Laughter, it’s blinding! To Kite’s Horizon All are invited His colors blaze so hard The Sky Witch IGNITED.
-BOOK THREE-
HELLO AGAIN WOLFMAN “Twenty Tales of the Absurd and Macabre, To tingle your spine and blow your mind”
333
An Invitation to Madness This is Dork Stork Oysterbar. We’re pretty obscure. You’ve probably never heard of us. Here are some stories we’ve written over the last twenty years. Together, they form the last book in our series of three (plus a bonus fourth within the first!).We recommend flipping through these pages and pausing when a certain word or phrase catches your eye. It may not have been coincidence that it did. This method of reading is best because none of this is sequential and the Single Puzzle can be better unraveled that way. The character portrait illustrations in this collection were drawn in sumi ink and bamboo pen by a hermit monk who asked not to be named. These stories are offered merely for lighthearted entertainment and nothing more. They are just comedy, fantasy, and sci-fi literary experiments, written flippantly and without ulterior motive. There are no symbols or secrets here- just a collection of horrible, twisted and demented tales to shock, offend, amuse, amaze, confuse, and entrance you- to tingle your spine and blow your mind. They may seem dark, vulgar,lewd, and offensive to some, but please trust it is all meant in good fun. Kind of like a fun but scary campfire ghost story! We will now remind you one last time to play the enchanted cassette tape artifacts before reading any further. By now you should know well to do so whenever you open this book. It is best for you to follow this instruction. Oh yes, and please… Enjoy!
-Dork Stork Oysterbar -1THE TRIUMPH OF TYING YOUR SHOES Freezing rain. Black ice. A 40% chance of the Death of Hope with a twist of lime. Yet college cheerfully open; no cancellations. It’s often hard to get out from under your bed in the morning, and today you’ve got the Term Paper Blues, son. The deadline crept first like a zombie- slow, persistent, and with an aroma not unlike codfish. Yet you savored these last few days, procrastinating like you really meant it, and God knows you did. In fact, late last night, through bleary videogame-induced eyestrain you dared challenge the veryserious assignment aloud by cheekily taunting it to “Bring it on!” “Do your worst,” escaped through dry lips past a dangling cigarette [strangely, you don’t smoke] in your best Clint Eastwood drawl. 334
Sure, you could have pulled a classic caffeine-fueled all-nighter at the library, or at least shuffled through your withered syllabi to determine which class the paper was for, but Hell! Fortune favors the brave and it’s always springtime. A menacing purple fog settles into the piercing rain about two hours before class. The slow shamble of the zombie-deadline has swiftly transformed into a wild boar in the later stages of rabies, and, by your unsettling diagnosis- in heat. The foamy froth sliding down its jabbering tusks seems inherently unkind, and the red eyes of the beast are a special kind of crazedsomewhere between deranged frenzy and a disconcerting lust. This is, as they say, when “The weird turn pro.” So you don your trusty sunglasses, rev up the red convertible, and cruise casually up the winding hill to campus, wet wind in your hair, tipping your debonair fedora devil-may-care to the ladies, and whistling “A Rhapsody in Blue”. A Rose may or may not have been tossed in the direction of your clunky VW van (okay, it’s not a convertible) by one of many secret admirers. First impressions are important! You shoot fast and loose for Fred Astaire or maybe Humphrey Bogart. You can on occasion pull off Woody Allen (that’s on a good day.) Do it! Park directly in front of that fire hydrant, rationalizing that the hydrant is redundant considering the hard black rain. Drenched but debonair, you swagger into the computer lab which is packed with bushy-tailed scholars like sardines. The Eternal Social Anxiety will not prevent you from rolling up your sleeves and commanding your space with a heavy black typewriter under one heroic bicep. The typewriter is an antique, painstakingly hand-constructed decades ago by some bushy eyebrowed Luddite WIZARD (remember this!) from the pages of a Harry Potter novel. It was the only inheritance you received from the passing of a great-uncle who spent his deathbed sunset suing the government for secret psychological experiments which he claimed left him unable to tie his shoes. Suddenly- a loud thunk/clang from the ancient rusty hunk of metal pregnant with literature. Yes- you tossed it as if it belonged amidst a row of sleek electronic wonders you have been told are called “interwebs”. But the black machine was more different than we can even yet surmise. It’s Alive! Here we go! The jingle-jangle morning of metal keys thwacking inky ribbon quickens as does The Genius.
“DEADLINE MINUS 45 MINUTES”: The zombie-turned wild boar-deadline phases into its third and final form- that of a large, wise, old, black centipede, flayed like a biology 101 dissection experiment with pins and chloroform cotton ball tears. Maybe the dwindling of remaining time itself provided that cute buzzy tingle in the cortex of the centipede and struck jackpot, pouring words forth like pearl earrings from a Vermeer slot machine. Even in these grim days you can still pull a rabbit from a hat. The thwick-thwack sounds of the relic language-generator strikes a primal chord, and causes the cell-phone androids and the i-pod cyborgs on either side of you to perform doubleand triple-takes, their eyes wide and not without a tinge of fear. 335
The centipede-deadline’s sweet black inner meat is a delicacy savored by all gentlemenlosers since William Burroughs, and The Truth ferments a tangy brine in your mouth like old, well-veined bleu cheese. But will you (our hero) triumph??
ENDING ONE: “TEN MINUTES PAST DEADLINE” If you were a bitter, cryptic cynic-critter, you would say the moral of this story is “slow and steady wins the race; late to class is a disgrace.” Hard facts get you an “A”, The Truth a firm “C+”, and Art guarantees a “see me after class” in red ink. But cynicism is for the birds (ravens), the pitter-patter of rain softens on your daydream window, and here comes the sun…
ENDING TWO: “DEADLINE MINUS 30 SECONDS” The clock melts like Dali wax and the hourglass sands run upwards- a 250 page doctoral thesis on the symbiosis of 1950’s-era typewriters with certain Amazonian basin insect species writes itself, a dedication page to the memory of your great-uncle still pleasantly warm. It screams Nobel Prize, spell-check be damned!
ENDING THREE: “CLASS CANCELLED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER” That old mystic typewriter sprouted antennae and a beak and hummed a sad gypsy lullaby in a chirping cicada language that no one could translate, except that it had something to do with chloroform cotton balls and the melancholy of how people take tying their shoes for granted.
~ 336
-2THE HORROR OF THE DRYING DOOR In truth, I can hardly bear the burden of the karma of even telling you of the Drying Door. Bad karma indeed- the kind that creeps back for you like the scent of a wet towel under the bed, returning just as a hot date is tossed to the pillows. Of course, you can no longer detect the foulness of the odor, some gaseous witch’s brew of airborn bacteria expanding like billions of microscopic German paratroopers. You can’t smell it because it has been your constant bedpartner, but she can, and she doesn’t even bother to slam your door on her way back to the bar (street) you met (bought) her at. Yes, just telling you of the Drying Door invites that kind of karma, but living with one is worse. It would be better if you had lived a gravedigger’s life and died without knowing, but you soon will, for I can suffer to carry this tale alone no longer. I write to soothe my burden, much like a man empties the sack of cats slung over his shoulder before setting up camp for the night. First, you must understand for the record that I could wish the Horror of the Drying Door on no man. Not even Hitler deserves to own a Drying Door, and I would stand still if you said I could dance one into his Hell while I jitterbugged on his grave. In fact, I would fight to the death and die gratefully if only I could seal a deal with the devil that no Drying Door shall ever soil Hitler’s Hell. This is how bad it is. Trust me- I’m not an old man anymore and I’ve seen enough of it to know it’s bad and I want none of it. The Drying Door was once a normal door. Well, a tall one and not the kind with a peephole that your friends flip the bird to because they know you’ve been breathing silently with your bloodshot eyeball glued to it for hours before they even knock, mostly nightly. Anyway, the drying Door was the closet kind; the kind that folds as it slides open on tracks. How it was aborted from its tracks none know, but it stands alone, leaning naked on my wall. This severance from its tracks cannot be called being “unhinged” as my deadbolted and thrice-chained front door would be, for a sliding, folding door in grooved tracks has no hinges. Nay, it is not the Drying Door which has been unhinged, but I. As I stood with feet like iron roots, plunged into a bathroom I never made, did I twist the towels. Not to snap with a thunderous crack like whips at asses that crash cars as the drivers gaze on by- the asses of sorority college girls frolicking in a locker room dungeon of my very own, no. I twisted the towels to wring the last sad drops of water from them in tandem with my angry tears. I was doing my laundry, and by “doing”, I do not mean palming a $100 bill to a young errand boy with a prematurely ruddy complexion and a taste for the action, knowing by morn the 337
folded garments of my wardrobe will have been nestled into a dresser made from the varnished wood of cherry trees, no. I had taken the laundry into my own hands, first casting the wretched mess into my tub and sploshing well enough sticky blue detergent so as to really grind the clean into them, then hitting them with the blaze of my shower nozzle full blast and hot. Does the detergent sink down through layers of cloth or is it washed away? How many times must the cloth clutter in my tub be tossed and re-detergified? How long to wait before the heat sinks slowly back into my frigid nozzle-spray between tossings? How far do I push the wringing before the effort required to extract a measly few drops outweighs the degree to which the garment is the drier? How to hide, conceal the infinitely shameful fact that my tub is used to wash my clothes due to a poverty and hunger so extreme that I will gladly eat swiss cheese, which I find only slightly more agreeable than death by the blade? These and other questions flitted across the screen of my awareness at high speed as I wrung. There was a neediness, a desperate grasping in my actions and I was not proud; nor by that point was I even a man at all. It is said something ‘bout men who make beasts of themselves, but the kind of bleary, jowled hound-dog I knew I was then lower than was no teen wolf. Yet the Drying Door must be served. After the wringing of drops and a period of beating my fists futilely and half-heartedly against my chest like a defeated King Kong, I took the still-damp garments from slung over my shower curtain rod and served them to the Drying Door. Though I hated it, every seventh night when the clock tolled twelve, I found myself again trapped in a twisted ceremony, discovering my own hands offering wet clothes to the drying Door again like macabre communion to an Angry God. The Drying Door was folded at 45 degrees and held horizontal by twin red and blue folding chairs, the kind you would take camping were you not afraid of the dark to the point of mute, catatonic paralysis. I always thought the chairs, when I left them on my porch, would scream to the relentless traffic outside of either the flag (minus pure dove-surrender white), or of rival gang colors united. Nomatter… Now my clothes are dripping the last of their fresh-scented drops from the Drying Door to a carpet upon which rests a tangle of electrical cords to a dual-turntable hookup the likes of which would make one think I “spin”. Ha! Far from the flailing arms of a sea of dancers, I scratch random jazz albums alone into a sound similar to the whining screech that comes from a sack of particularly wretched cats slung over the shoulder. But even this pastime of mine will seem soon to the spying neighbors like chamber music by flute compared to the noise of my skin- stung, scorched, and sizzling electrified by the drenched cords ‘neath the Drying Door. I expect the noise of that to sound much like a sack of cats left in the fuse-box of a rollercoaster gone haywire. Laugh, laugh, neighbors mine, but when I haunt you I shall laugh last! Nomatter. Anyway, a lone fan buzzes wearily, resigned and wicking a few drops of wet into the air of the room, which is sealed off by wooden door and warmed by a thermostat cranked literally to the hilt. To enter that sweltering back room induces instant flashbacks to the sweet, sweaty jungle that was once my home in Saigon... less than pleasant days, those. Yet worse, the Drying Door’s insatiable appetite for my clothes, and soon my skin. I feel the heat closing in, much like the drawstring does on a sack of cats. It is hot in there, and with the fan-buzz dreamily luring me, I often check on my clothes, though for a reason only an Angry God could know, they never dry. I alternate between wishing I had the $ to spend on even a half-assed laundromat once a week and wishing twice as strong for the same. Better you had lived and died a gravedigger’s life than know of the Drying Door firsthand, for it lives for three things only- clothes, heat, wind, and 338
sizzling skin. That makes four, but the fourth is yet to come, surely not soon enough for me…
~
-3THE GRAVEDIGGER’S COMPROMISE I became a gravedigger directly after a period of mourning over the closing of a rollerdisco of which I was the founder, sole proprietor, and only customer. The period of mourning lasted roughly twelve and a half years and left me with a nasty case of alcoholism and countless bastard children. Yet a man must pull himself up by his bootstraps, eh? My first night on the job I was given a rusty shovel and a tape measure with the six-foot mark highlighted with a neon yellow marker. I had nothing but a flask of banana flavored rum and Grog to keep me company. Grog is my dog, and a more loyal companion a man never had. He followed me over the plank of a whaling vessel once, into the unforgiving sea, but that is another story… My shovel hit upon something hard as the cold wind tussled my perfectly styled hair. I considered my options- waking my hairdresser Smithfield with a cell phone call to his emergency hotline, or uncovering what I suspected to be a coffin. Why would the owners of the cemetery ask me to dig a grave already pregnant with death? “Why indeed” I pondered as my rusty shovel scrapings revealed the “coffin” to in fact be a large pineapple upside-down cake, frozen hard by the autumn frost. It was not till two feet deeper and the midnight toll of the church bells that I struck the actual coffin. No sooner than a gravelly growl rose from Grog’s diaphragm did my blood run cold, as a loud rapping emanated from within the coffin. I dislike rap because of the misogynistic lyrics, so I began to shovel dirt back onto the coffin. Yet something in Grog’s growl made me suspect the worst case scenario, and I decided that it was my duty to investigate. I uncovered the coffin and opened the heavy lid. It was just as I suspected- Ice Crisp Flavor glared back at me, his enormous, diamond-encrusted gold necklace just as I remembered it- gleaming with a terrible gleam as hollow as his eyes. Ice Crisp Flavor was a “gangsta” rapper who I murdered in cold blood not a fortnight ago. I beat him savagely with a curling iron until he would kick fresh rhymes no more. Not for Gold nor Woman, but for revenge. You see, it was by a simple twist of fate that Ice Crisp Flavor and I first crossed paths long ago. He, an original gangster who made funky beats, yet still kept his love for the street, was touring England with his rap group “Ill Fresh Dope Sick”. Their hopes were to kill two birds with one stone- increase sales of their new album “Melodies in F-Minor for the Chello”, and cut the red ribbon across the entrance of their new hip hop club in foggy London. As Fate, that cruel mistress, would have it, my Roller-disco was opening the same night, and our business lawyers who had to sign the fire safety code and such paperwork happened to be one and the same frazzled and neurotic pencil-pushing geek. Damn him. Damn him straight to hell! 339
This sniveling dweeb lawyer was always late, always apologizing for his mistakes, cost a small fortune to pay, and worst of all insisted upon wearing a lapel in his rumpled tweed sports jacket. If I only knew then what domino chain-reaction of horrors he would unwittingly set into motion, I would have ripped that cursed paper carnation lapel from his breast and plunged its pin into his bald scalp. He apparently had been without sleep on the morning when he was to bring the paperwork for my roller-disco to the House of Lords, and wrote my name on Ice Crisp Flavor’s forms and his on mine. It is with solemn gravity that I admit to you, dear reader, that the next night I became the owner of “Gangsta’s Paradise”, a den of lawless depravity and violence, and my thuggish nemesis became the owner of “RollerdiscOVERY”, a place where joy was once meant to live. By this point I knew in my weary bones that Ice Crisp Flavor was in cahoots with the cemetery owners, and conspired to bury himself in the path of my trusty shovel. He always did have a flair for the dramatic, that beautiful black panther! But the fabulousness of his physique only masked the ice-sculpture of a scorpion he had instead of a heart. As he would always tell me in those first delicious weeks in London when we were lovers, “life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money”. How can a man gather the courage to get out from under his bed in the morning with that kind of grim attitude? To make a ghastly tale short, our precious communion turned sour when the angry posse clientele of my now curiously named “Gangsta’s Paradise” realized they were not bouncing and grinding to pulsating beats and lyrics about drive-bys, but were in fact doing pirouettes on wheels to the tune of “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. If you can imagine the rage of all the oppressed urban outlaws in London welling up into one traitorous and tumultuous mutiny, well, such was the scene for a riot which ended in arson, the flames still flickering and licking the corpse of my DJ and lightshow technician Rumsfeld into the early morn. And this is to say nothing of the twin riot which brought roller-discOVERY, that poorly-named booming rap haven to its knees. I murdered Ice Crisp Flavor a second time that dark and stormy night, strangling him for a long, long, long time with my trusty tape measure while Grog howled at the moon. How long? About six feet.
~
-4THE LAST REPAST OF THE PIRATE GHOST The plank was a cruel mistress, but the kraken crueler. Twas not the shock of the icy brine nor the law that never a pirate heaven was which set the terror shivers tingling in me, nor the solemn walk over the dread plank as the fifty cheers were cried from men who for me would once have died, but to know that my faithful dog, Grog, was shot by musket boom and could not follow me to the kraken’s doom. I paused and pondered 340
if Grog would, and nodded to myself- he was a good dog; not I, but he was good. And so a last cigar of tobacco and hash from Turkish coast was my meal last, this repast once smuggled on camels amongst other spices and treasures of spell-scrolls and gypsy rubies, red- as red as the lips of Harem Maidens of died from the petals of the rarest flowers, or so the merchants said. They gave me that last hash and tobacco repast and not a lie- I was grateful to them for it. Grateful!! What a scoundrel coward would allow a thankful heart to sigh upon a mutinous crew with sabers unsheathed and thirsty- a crew for who thirty years before I died were like my own tentacles, as those in brine of the kraken hide, mine slithering not for me but plunder. But my own bones and their marrow not yet then ten years hence a ghost, and not yet gone deep under, were soon to be the plunder of the tentacles of the kraken, lapping up the deep down under. But grateful I was, for there was something in that cigar, hand rolled, or so the merchants said, by Harem Maidens veiled by fishnet silk and moonlit pity from that ruby-encrusted Turkish city that was, next to the sea, my second home, in a sandy, windy port with the sighs of rest that comes with the fall of my anchor carved of stone. There was the taste in that tobacco of the memories of the fifty pairs of ragged sea-legs finding Turkish port soil and the lusts of my crew finding portals of their own, as the ocean floor was met by anchors carved of stone. The kraken does not wait, its steely beak eager to shred me, its tentacles speckled with suction cups like the yearning ruby lips of the Turkish Harem Maidens from a time once upon I was alive. Yes, the hungers of the brine are insatiable, serious, and true, but the lips of the gypsy women, though died from petals red, for all their coldness may have as well been blue.
*PORTRA IT TURKISH HAREM MAIDEN 341
~ -5PARTYPARTYPARTY I fell into a deep sleep the night I was buried a second time. The first is a tale for another night, luxuriating on another polar-bearskin rug before another fireplace, with another voluptuous wench from another world. I like my women shell-shocked- just like me. The unwashed peasants and all the poor children were excited over a carnival which was coming to our village. Everyone was jolly and jittery and I waited with the humans for the wagon to come up.* [NOTE: All lyrics in italics by the profound Insane Clown Posse.] The jubilation hung in the air too long, like a thick stew getting thinner and thinner as the famine came, until in the low sideways glow of the late afternoon when I awoke for the second time today the wagon had almost come up, but the peasants were weary. Sad- they break their backs to earn a day of leisure but the carnival, every year same as it ever was, is best for the rosy fingers of dawn. My cemetery patch was as fine a bed as the lice-ridden hay in the stables of the peasant farmer-humans I could have had for a pence. But I had no pence and I preferred the dirt anyway for the beauty who lay beside me. My folk can not easily die- that is one of our curses. So to the hunchback gravedigger I say: “dig, fill, repeat”. With no fuel of the kind my ship requires for a thousand of your years and I, lazy- afternoon naps are so evolved on my world that they encompass generations, but I was curious for the carnival as I was every year, though they were the same as they ever were and why I chose this one to awake to I do not know. Their sound of jubilation, and their alieness muffled above me made me feel homesick in a way I found melancholic; bittersweet; precious. So this year I awoke. As I awoke that year long, long ago for the second time that millennium from the frostbitten ground and stretched my long, some of you would say “insect-like” limbs, I saw the sunlight same as it ever was and absorbed it for photosynthesis, as I did the sounds of birds chirping for no apparent reason. But most of all I absorbed a jubilation from the humans in the air. Not to imply that the humans were in the air- only their jubilation was. The humans were earth-bound, as was I until our ship can be re-fueled, when I and my bride will awake for the fourth time. Until that breakfast there can be no fuel, but in, let us say, approximately 3012 of your years since the birth of your savior (we, as each folk does, have our own), a species of bird will be genetically engineered, because a compound called hypotrillobite found in the fossils of the bird was pre-determined to become our fuel. Until 3012 the science of geneticallypredestined organic mineral growth and fossil mining cannot yet be, or is extremely unlikely to be, due to the nature of the fuel and the nature of the science which pre-determines its existence in species not yet actual, as well as the nature of the minds and hearts of your folk. 342
Suddenly at dusk there was the sound of cursing from strange men, filthy, and a cold wind. There were clowns setting up the dreary tent.* Something was declared wrong by the constable and the miller, but the cobbler didn’t agree and he refused to summon the healer. They smiled, they juggled, they laughed- but something was terribly, terribly wrong with these clowns. I didn’t like these clowns for I could see through them. I knew what they were really like. I knew that this carnival which had come to your village was an evil, evil thing.* I rolled over in my grave so I was facing another of my folk in the grave next to mine- a female, the only one which had not chosen either suicide, which is not considered a sin or dishonorable in any way in our beliefs- or mutiny. But mutiny after a ship has wrecked on foreign soil and there is no chance of return is a chaos that is not heroic revolution but redundant. Of course, as the captain I was despised and must be hung and impeached in that order, but that wouldn’t turn the coal in your mines into hypotrillibite, and the hypotrillibite in turn into nuclear fission. The cook went down with the ship by means of his own butcher knife rather than his loyalty, as did many of my terminally homesick folk including relatives and a dog. Not to say the dog, Grog, took his own life with a cook’s butcher knife. The cook did. He took Grog’s immediately before his own, as a gesture to me, as if to say: “Fuck You.” A more loyal companion there never was. Grog, not the cook, of course, if you follow. The peasant farmer-humans and the poor starving children were totally unaware of the evilness of the clowns. But I could see their eyes reflect stairways into hell*. The clowns, not the children, that is- The childrens’ eyes did not reflect at all, for they followed the clowns with stares that came from wild eyes, deep in hollow sockets. The merchant fled the town with no silver in his pockets. I could have run from the carnival grounds, but I knew every road and every path would lead me right back to the freakshow, the strongmen, and the ringmaster.* So I stayed and gazed into the dirt separating me from the grave next door and pet the dirt, no longer frostbit, like it was the soft hair of the female who abstained from suicide AND mutiny, though not absinthe. Hers was a love that need not speak its name; hers was a grave the same by any other name. Her grave was a place where nobody knew my name, not even her. Hers was a taste not unlike the fire of hypotrillobite once turned milky white in the fires of our ship more bright than many of your suns. She slept as patiently as I did, for years in the thousands, excepting the days and nights of carnival, but those years had not passed yet- we lay side by side in these graves our second burial. The circumstances of the first are a tale for another night, luxuriating on another polar-bearskin rug before another fireplace, with another voluptuous wench from another world*. We slept because we were waiting for the species to be made, and then for that species to be a fossil, and then nuclear flame. I wondered if the species made a chirp as did the birds that medieval day. It was Halloween. It was a joy. I wake my bride and we dance among them in costumes for three days. This patience was one that love could endure, though I think it maddened us. I like my women shell-shocked- just like me.
~
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-6THE GREAT SPIRIT-LIZARD SKULL-TONGUING CHALLENGE Gorgeous church organ music is playing. You find yourself, disoriented, in a candle-lit ivory hall, along with about 15 other spiritual masters plucked from different times in the history of the earth. Some, like yourself, are Tibetin monks- Dhali Lamas shroud in orange robes and bells no less. Some are silent Zen priests with black robes and bald heads, some rabbis with beards aplenty in a heated debate over where they were, a gaggle of nuns cloistering around a younger and surprisingly foxy Mother Teresa calmly doing her rosary, and John Belushi, eating as sandwich. There is no question the reason you all have been summoned to this curious place, this other plane of reality, is that you represent the highest spiritual attainment achieved on Earth. The weird part is you all are surrounded by Giant Lizards, slouched deeply in their soft, plush thrones, and passing a golden pipe from which sweet purple smoke billows in abundance. The phrase “lounge-lizard” comes to everyone’s mind (except the nun, who’s thought are pure).The Great Spirit-Lizards are about 12 feet tall and not especially threatening. Sure, their teeth and talons are sharp and they could tear a nun to shreds without a second thought, but their attitude is clearly lazy and sensual, and they are fat. Their yellow eye-slits dart about quickly, keeping the treasured golden pipe in sight as it makes its rounds. “Something is not right here” Guido Sarducci suggests. Such comments are why she was known in the seminary as “Captain Obvious”. Still, everyone agrees. One of the Great Spirit Lizards stifles a choke on whatever it is that produced the purple cloud from his lip-less mouth, and then sighs. She (you can tell she’s a she due to the mascara) orders the human folk to each choose one Great Spirit Lizard for their own, and kneel before their chosen one. This order was given in a cold-blooded tone, but not mean. Just neutral and authoritative. The sustained hissing “s” sounds gave away her reptilian accent (if the fact that she was a 12-foot lizard did not). The human masters reluctantly chose their Spirit-Lizard mentors with little disagreement, except that John Belushi insisted he kneel before one of the younger female lizards with exceptionally long eyelashes, nudging the zen monk out of the way. “Remove your skulls” was the second command, again, hissed with strict, frigid authoritative coldness and an extended “s-s-s-s” in “skull”, but no anger. This request did not go over as well as the first, and meeting reluctance, the Great Spirit Lizards took the initiative and brought out a vial containing a fluid resembling olive oil. Each Spirit Lizard anointed their earthly masters with a few drops on the forehead, like some perverse reverse-baptism in the Bizarro World, and a change took place. The human spiritual leaders shared glances of squeamish discomfort as they felt their skulls become rubbery and then flop like loose elastic around their shoulders. There was a murmur of “thine is the kingdom and so-on” from one of the nuns and some faint whimpering by a Rabbi. The Zen monks endured the jellification of their heads with stoic resignation and straight-backed dignity. John Belushi seemed either completely unaware of the rubberization of his cranium, or perhaps did not mind the sensation. When the Great Spirit Lizards hissed that it was time to pull their skulls out from the humans’ now-elastic nostrils, there was little debate, because the anointing and rubberization oil had the side effect of 344
putting the earthly masters into a most embarrassingly drunken and senseless trance. Mother Teresa did summon some reserve of moral indignation and, reaching as high as she could, gave her assigned Lizard a crisp smack on its scaly cheek. The Lizard seemed to love this and let out a cold, hissing sort of belly-laugh. “We’ve got a feisty one over here Svensylin!” he called out to his sister. Still, Teresa’s skull was anointed, rubberized and removed as with the best of them. It would have required large buckets beneath their chins to catch the amount of drool which flowed freely in the Dome that day. The brainless human bodies squirmed spastically on the floor like fish out of water and their floppy empty heads giggled and exchanged goofy wet kisses with each other. If only their disciples were to see them in such a state! What an embarrassment! Luckily, it was a private show and their keen mystical consciousness was familiar with the out-of-body transition and was carried intact which their brains towards the foot of their respective Great Spirit Lizard The timeless ritual begins with an old custom. Each lizard touches the skull of their assigned earthly spiritual leader to first their small toe’s talon on their left foot, then to their bigtoe’s talon, This symbolizes the absolute surrender necessary for the proceeding ceremony. It was told that the Belushi’s brainless body flipped the bird to his Lizard while the talon-touching ritual was performed, causing his Spirit-Lizard to only grin widely. They seem to appreciate resistance in their human subjects as a sign of spiritual dignity and courage. It is clear the human masters could only assume that they have been teleported to some hellish dimension and are undergoing a devilishly elaborate torture, but the opposite is the case. It is in truth the highest honor for a human to be summoned to the Plane of Reality known as Sssslysssthon- the Opium Den of the Lizards of Shrosssnizzz. You see, the highest spiritual attainment a person can attain on earth is pretty darn high, yet it is limited by the particular evolutionary, physiological, neurological, and cultural situation that humans find themselves in on Earth. The only way to transcend these limitations is through complete surrender to a higher organism. And there are no higher organisms in this World than the Lizards of Shrosssnizz. The only problem is that the method of a human receiving the enlightenment of a Slyyysssthen is unusual to say the best, horrifically vulgur to say the best. And so it begins… The Great Spirit Lizards extend ungodly long bright red forked tongues , dripping and thrashing about like snakes on coke. We’re talking 5 feet of tongue here, puts that guy in Kiss to shame. The Spirit Lizards guide their wriggling slender tongues into the jaws of the skulls of their respective earthly master and seek the gelatinous brain still inside. Then, with surgical precision and a dash of frenzy, they pierce the brain and begin a curvy winding path throughout all lobes of the brain, out one eye-socket, back in through the other, twirls and spirals through the temporal lobe, a brief pit stop in the patella, out through the spinal column’s hole, and so on, twirling a curvilinear path like a twisted roller-coaster, occasionally bursting out a socket like a swimmer rocketing above water by his upward momentum and gracefully plunging back into the sweet soft jelly of the exquisite brain, the tongue-burrowed pathways of which are soon thickly slathered in spirit-lizard saliva, which happens to contain an enzyme that, absorbed greedily by the synapses, produces first a tingling sensation, and then a vision that cannot be described in language, but which has something to do with holograms, the smell of lilac, and a strange vase with a stem that bends back into itself. The skulls are replaced and the earthly masters wake up, hardly noticing the difference in their brains. They no longer feel fear or jealousy of the Great Lizards. They feel calm and refreshed, and know that they are to walk out a large green door and down a staircase. For them, this experience will not be remembered- when images from the ceremony begin to surface they 345
will think them merely echoes of a dream. But one night, on his way home from the meditation hall, one of the monks will pass by a lovely lady wearing lilac scented perfume and feel nostalgic. And that night he will draw sketches of a most curious vase made of a special metal, with a stem that bends back on itself, and soon he will mail them to a patent office in London.
~
-7THE CARMENIAN CINNAMON HAREM HOLOGRAM Though a great many may think me mad, they are but the flecks of froth I wipe from the mouth of rabid dog, and little help that does! But I shall continue if even one fleck of dog-froth can be convinced to wait outside, in the atrium, as myself and my few disciples take tea. And still, of all my few disciples, six are the crazed melody of a flute with no name, played by a senile goat with the same for a name (none), and two are gothic widows of black lace and mascara, weeping silently over the futility of saffron, and pelting themselves in guilt for sins not even their own, as with stolen perfume. They are lucky to absorb any of the teachings whatsoever, for their gaze falls only to their sketchbooks, as do their ears only upon the materialization of dew onto a lettuce leaf from the still air. Two other disciples of mine are Vikings and act as such, skewering bison and wild boars upon their helmet-horns, and drinking mead from a vast earthenware jug. By the time my sermons are nearing a conclusion, the Vikings have either drummed and chanted themselves into a war-frenzy, or have convinced the gothic widowers to slip away to the filthy bars which sprout from the city like blades of the sickly sweet phalaris grass. As to another two of my disciples, both are lesbian whores, seducing all in their path with 346
an unending display of mutual lust. If only their caressing and undressing led to some epic resolution, some cataclysmic climax, I could at least then continue to elucidate fractal radiology, but no- theirs is a perpetual show of foreplay, a great deal more for the pleasure they derive in stealing the attention of passing on-lookers than from any genuine intimacy. I doubt at times if they are even true lesbians at heart, for they never so much as lose themselves in eachother's gaze, nor in the tangle of their scantily-clad limbs. Instead their eyes seek the room for the attention of my own disciples in a "come-hither- aren't we pretty? - give us money" kind of unspoken bedroom-eye message. Some of use was made of them by forcibly directing them to the back of the class, where the view of them from the street convinced more than one expressoswilling businessman to sashay inside and set down his laptop and cell phone long enough to be anti-brainwashed. I was told once that the word "cult" comes from a word meaning "to cultivate". They say cults are in the business of "brainwashing" their members, and they are right, if by "brainwash" they mean strip all the many layers of cultural brainwashing AWAY, to reveal a raw and stinging soul, exposed and glowing in the winds of corruption as a homeless puppy whimpering in the swill of its own government-issue kennel, which is in fact but a waiting room for the lethal injection of capitalism. My other two disciples are also lesbians, but much older and wiser. They carry with them the dignity of countless dynasties of lesbian harem-mothers; madams of Egyptian and Carmenian royalty, and bakers are they, who nightly arrive at the temple early in the morning, when they bake the pastries which we use in our waiting-rooms and atriums to entice the hungry and World-struck masses. The creampuffs, however, are but a delivery system for a certain genetically modified DNA strand, which was placed into the biology of a certain variety of Carmenian cinnamon by aliens. The DNA strand may be the synthetic modifications of a subversive league of intergalactic communists, but I assure you that all this is true, and moreso, that the strand is but the molecularly encrypted code for the instructions with which to build a machine, which itself is only the generator for a hologram, a hologram which represents the symbolic geometries of the human mind- a hologram which is our only chance in hell of saving the world...
~
Mr. Kite, the old laughing Shaman bellowed a screaming prophecy, then quickly whirled himself into an interdimensional portal. He vanished only so long as to build a fire six days in the future and teleport it through a novelty-wormhole into the "present moment". He then huddled around the fire and began to sing a hymn, a very old and forgotten song, which was rumored to have originated in the Spanish Wine Vineyards of France. The writer of the limerick was an old Egyptian spice smuggler, who was also the madam of a Persian harem. The poem was a kind of chant, but more an instruction for the construction of a machine, and also of a certain pastry made with olives and splendor-wine, and a cinnamon of the Carmenian variety. But all of this nonsense is only the prelude to the real heart of the matter, which is this: the limerick was written in a dead archaic language spoken only by the most prized and glorious Empresses of every third dimension in the Persian Cult of the Prophecy of the Curse of Eternal Folly. The language allowed the Harem-Mother/Empresses to communicate between dynasties, and thereby pass down the transmission of the infinite-dimensional-spectrum 347
hologram, which is merely a blueprint for a forgotten recipe for the pastry of which the variety of Carmenian cinnamon is the molecular carrier of the encoded DNA strand. If I were to assure you that a league of aliens were responsible for the introduction of the encoded, synthetic DNA strand, I risk being called a fool, and yet to deny the timeless destiny of the alien-communion frequency runs a greater risk. In short, the molecule is the blueprint for infinite freedom, yet may only be accessed through a symbiosis with human mammal nervous systems from within the evolutionary cloak of a plant-host. If the instructions serve as well to alert the community of spirits that humanity has summoned the courage to confront its own deconstruction through a labyrinth of jungle-dwelling, genetically altered species... Simply unravel the riddle, and thereby activate the hologram.
~
If the Ruebenessque arms of powerful milk-jug carrying Earth-Goddess mothers* knead the bread dough of their own superstition, are we to pass quickly beneath their balconies and delight in their Spanish songs of peace, as they fill the air of this Madman's Paris? Or shall we scurry forth with a stack of books under one arm and a dozen roses under the other, so caught in the merry-go-round of literature and romance that we are unable to pause, frozen in wonder at the guttural motherly rumble of sheer life-giving, bread-kneading merriment? And what will become of us if we were to fling coins of gold upwards, up onto the balcony of the All-mother's den, would not our gold fall to her feet as the charity of a goat with not so much as a name to call its own? Our gold coins are as useless applause, the dull thunk of wrists clunking together upon a standing ovation at an opera for the handless. We have no hands, or at least our hands are as limpid water-rabbits in the face of THEIR hands: the hands of mothers so motherly that no children may call them "mother", the hands of the Valkerian All-women who are the mothers not of men, but of rocks and waterfalls and of the dirt itself, the hands which kneed bread to the Rhythm of Spanish songs, past down from times before time, to those young witches of the vineyards who's magic surpassed that of their teachers. "To knead, to knead this bread we shall, We'll wrap the scent of spices round you like a shall The smells will entice you for untold spellbound hours While our splendor-wine chills in the icy waterfall showers And our olive-branch bristles spill oils of lush And the scent of the olive is captured with love To be tied in a bow round the Carmenian spice The cinnamon altered by beings with pupils white And fingers which stretch like curling tendrils of fern To wrap you and knead you and send your stomach a-churn 348
And remind you to be born unto the wisdom for which you yearn This cinnamon will inoculate your cortex soon; You are next, it is your turn... Could this be the grisly philosophy of a splendor-cult in the guise of maternal warmth? Or a re-kindling of the female bloodlust found heretofore only in the bellies of she-demons? If you were to scale the balcony and present your lover's bouquet to the fat-fingered Frenchwoman, and begged her to teach you the ways of the Pastry Chef Shamaness, she would but laugh and snap her fingers, calling from beneath her dress a cacophony of lizards, each with their lips and eyes sown shut with black thread, each lashing you with their thorny tail.
~ *MILK FOR DIN -8THE POWER OF FIRE They call me Johnny Blaze*. Prior to my death I was a pathetic scoundrel of a man, sulking from one agonizing embarrassment to the next. I could spend months obsessing over the tiniest minutia of an awkward moment in conversation with a pretty cashier. Meanwhile my dishes threatened to burst through the ceiling above my kitchen sink. I turned to alcohol to ease my loneliness and to make the squalor I lived amongst seem at least a bit stoic. I was good at being a self-pitying drunk. It suited me. Out of poverty and rage, but mostly from boredom, I took to pilfering superfluous amounts of effervescent champaign from the local liquor stores before I suffered a near-fatal defenestration attempt at the hands of the father of a farmer's daughter of the French countryside I was sowing wild oats in. The attack was fatal, but the attempted decapitation was only partial and therefor only near-fatal, since I met my end far too many hours later at a hospital where they patiently tried to re-attach my neck to both the above and below of that. It was all for the best- my death, that is, since as I say I was a cowardly 349
scoundrel and none noticed my passing, let alone mourned it. It was only then that the real fun began...
*PORTRAIT: JOHNNY BLAZE
~ Quite surprised to find myself surfacing from the anesthesia, and feeling Spritely, I found myself in a shithole that only with great clarity be called an “operating room”. Sure, just as moments before as I died, I was strapped to a table with tubes emanating from me, but now the table was a pool table and the tubes were the stems of a large plaid bagpipe. The “doctor” was a devilish looking fiend enshrouded in flame. He was not so much on fire as made of fire, and blew a brimstone smoke into the mouthpiece of The Great Bagpipe. I could taste the brimstone as it made its way into my veins and finally the delicate capillaries of my tongue. I fell back into the warm void and an indeterminate period of therapy in purgatory.
~ My last psychiatrist in the endless Purgatory of Therapy was made of ice. He said I needed to see someone who was a better fit, but I'm sure it was because he kept melting during our sessions. He kept trying to convince me that my fiery disposition was the result of repressed rage from my childhood in hell, but I firmly disagreed and held my ground. I refused to fill his prescriptions for ice cubes (they give me heartburn). During our last session, we embraced (at his initiation) and he became a puddle. Just as well.
~ It was the late 80's. I was making a layover in Texas. Worse than my hometown if you ask me (my hometown is Hell). I was deployed to earth on a vague assignment to “Raise some Hell”. Luckily, that was what I was born to do. “We don't take kindly to your kind round here.” mumbled a trucker in a mutter so guttural it was more murmur than message. “You mean folks with long eyelashes?” I asked coyly, batting them for all they're worth. “No, we mean troublemakers on fire.” He spat what I can only guess was “chaw-juice”, some kind of tobacco-saliva goo, brown and just coagulant enough to form an expressive loogie, like a mucusy punctuation mark. I latched my long flaming finger-candles into the back of his neck and singed the bundle of nerves on his spinal column. 350
~ We were attending a nun convention in New Orleans (disguised as nuns of course) when this maniac runs a red light, drives onto the sidewalk to avoid an Oscar Meyer Weinermobile and plows into our roadside crucifix-vending-machine. The vending machine topples over onto Sister Rita Hanson, the gun-toting nun, and turns her into nun-sauce. It was extra-spicy sauce. If you knew Rita, you'd know what I mean. I grabbed for her 6-shooter just before the vending machine smashed her into marmalade, and emptied the chamber into the driver.
~
It was bad, bad mojo. I was in court, fried out of my mind on shoe polish, awaiting the verdict of a jury which had just deliberated for two long days on whether being smashed on 'polish behind the wheel can be considered “driving under the influence”. The cop who took the stand sure thought so, as I imagine the nun convention I plowed through would have. I've been too twisted on 'polish lately to pick the crucifixes out of my hubcaps, and I don't think those helped much as exhibits A, B, and D. Nor did exhibit C- the shine on my shoes, which the prosecuting attorney described to the jury as “blinding.”
~ The Judge did not rule in my favor. Apparently nunslaughter is a felony in Lousiana. The loudest sound I ever heard was the steel door clanging shut behind me, except for the silence that followed. I learned to meditate and harnessed the Eternal Fire Within. I re-heated the meals of slop for gang members with my bare hands and earned respect. I pumped iron and kept my fireball throwing powers toasty to ward off those who would have had me as their bride. For cigarette money I wrote Hollywood blockbuster screenplays and haggled over royalties on the prison phone with my agent in L.A. Smitty “The Carebear” Veddanta. Perhaps you might enjoy perusing some notes for my next couple films pitches?
~ Johnny Blaze’s Film Pitch #1: 351
“The ChickenHead Solution” -Civilization progresses -In the future develop “problems” with the Meat Industry -Radical neo-environmentalists vs. dystopian one world future government -Came up with a compromise, “a solution to chicken” -Chickens aren't that smart. -Scientists invent way to keep the heads of chickens alive (chopped + instantly head is attached at severed neck to a device which keeps the chicken's head alive (regulating bloodflow, etc) -This means that the chickens are not actually killed, since they continue to experience life as a Chickenhead and don't realize or care much that their bodies have been eaten. (chickens are not that smart). -Vegetarians can eat! -Chicken becomes overly popular. The radical neo-environmentalists are satisfied that vegetarian masses can feast on chicken ethically. The Government is relieved, and promotes the programs. -But chicken becomes overly popular! -Chickenheads accumulate into mountains -These mountains are kept alive by remote computer systems which operate the devices attached to the Chickenheads. The devices and the operating system become overly sophisticated. -We join our protagonists at a school for the gifted attending courses in learning how to operate the system or “pilot” the virtual reality holographic control helms which sustain and “orchestrate” the network of Chickenheads -The mountains are shipped into space in giant containers. -The Chickenheads attain consciousness of their situation and become an intelligent hive-mind. -They overthrow the control system (only one of our gifted protagonists, the head operator, realizes this is happening but keeps it secret. He is a double-agent working for the Chicken Hivemind. -The Chickenhead containers attack earth and destroy it. Nothing is left of human civilization, except the Chickenhead hivemind containers continue to live and are sustained autonomously by themselves, existing as confusing and inscrutable relics of a planetary consciousness which no longer exists. -FINAL SHOCKING SURPRISE ENDING SCENE: Aliens discover the 352
containers floating in space and open them. The Chickenheads attached to their devices float weightlessly in intricate patterns like zero-gravity synchronized swimmers, an unfathomable wisdom in the exquisitely choreographed geometric dance. We see the expressions of aliens of two different species as they look aghast at eachother upon the moment of revelation of opening the containers, dumbfounded and confused by the optical illusion of the Chickenheads mathematically exquisite swarm. They marvel wide-eyed and slack-jawed at the inscrutable relic.
~ Johnny Blaze’s Film Pitch #2: “Hot Shark” SETTING: Los Angeles. An unspecified time in the near future. Things are largely the same: no commentary on this future as better or worse than present or any dramatic change in social atmosphere, other than massive overpopulation, an increase in the hectic pace of modern life, and a pervasive decadence. The rave/hip-hop party scene has more or less swallowed all of culture, and celebrities and their party organizers have taken on the role of kings and queens: the celebrities have all the real power, while a feeble, clunky government struggles on in the background. Only moderate use of new slang and technology. We are going for subtle clues that times have advanced rather than a sci-fi context. MOOD: Surreal. Absurd. Plasticky and colorful. Shallow. A general sense of the loosening and dissolving of any substantial order, authority, or meaning other than hedonism and fame. BACKSTORY: We focus in on the large extravagant parties hosted by the enormously wealthy and powerful celebrities, who in effect rule the land like kings and queens. In the years prior to the events of the film, there has been the introduction of a bizarre new fad in pop culture. The neo-rave/neohiphop parties began to feature a live shark as the centerpiece of the dance floor, on exhibit inside a large tank or swimming pool. At first it was a kind of status symbol signifying a very high-class social event, and a "mascot" of the party in a sense, as the creature symbolized the spirit of primal, wild energy, celebration, and chaos. This trend, appearing everywhere on music videos and t-shirts, etc., grew in popularity exponentially. Soon no party would be "cool" without 353
the shark. Celebrities began to outdo one another with the size of the shark and the extravagance of the displays, which became like modern altars to Dionysus. -Eventually the only way to surpass one another in status was not in the size of the shark, but in the method of obtaining it. The sharks were no longer obtained from the ocean, but were stolen in increasingly daring and outlandish schemes from the lavish shark collections of other celebrities. The "coolness" of a party was judged by which celebrity's private and well-guarded aquariums it was stolen from. This new development of the trend was similar to how high school football teams would steal their rival team's mascot, with all the accompanying joyous mischief, competition, and domination/humiliation, but on a far more epic scale. The status symbol pets changed hands quickly like a very "liquid" currency of fame: they were bred, traded, made to fight and gambled on, and most of all stolen. The whole chaotic merry-go-round was part in-joke in good fun, and part bitter feud. -It should go without saying that the title of the film is a play on the word "hot" as a slang term for stolen property, like a "hot car", but this phrase has another level of meaning due to color, which we will get to soon. The film will garner a whole franchise with its own terminology, and this is a large part of the fun. "You've just been hot sharked" is the key catch-phrase, meaning to have a hot shark dumped on you unexpectedly. -We enter the film just as the bizarre hot-sharking subculture is beginning to turn dark. The decadence of modern culture is wreaking havoc on the environment and global warming is beginning to take its toll on the marine species, as water levels and climate are thrown into havoc. The environmentalist resistance is one of the last remaining subcultures with any degree of ethics or ideals. They have launched a campaign to force what remains of the government to save the ecosystem, and they have chosen the shark as the symbol of their crusade: because it is endangered as most marine species are, because of the gambling on shark fights by hot-sharkers, and because it is already the chosen symbol of the decadence of the party-devoured culture. The ruins of government crack down on Shark Parties and will no longer look the other way. However, this has the opposite of its intended effect and sets the Shark Party scene on fire... ROUGH PLOT OUTLINE: Immense amounts of money are changing hands in a darkened surveillance chamber. The suitcases of money are being given by what appear to be "fabulous" gay party planners (who work for the celebrity kings) to a tribe of neo-primitive shark thieves, amongst which is our hero. The shark thieves look like a cross between the Pirates of the Caribbean and the outlaws from The Road Warrior. Our hero is played by Keanu Reeves. -We follow the shark thieves at breakneck pace as they compete with rival tribes in life-or-death battles. Car chases, explosions, and gunplay are excessive and continuous throughout the film. There is complex double-crossing, spying, and assassination attempts by and against the shark 354
thief neo-tribe we are rooting for. It has 5 to 7 members, some female (and sexy), and they are very close friends but volatile, unpredictable characters; except for our hero, who is comically calm in all situations. He is an everyman: not cool or heroic, but likable and ordinary other than his strange ability to take every horrifying crisis in stride. His crew has an adventurous and comic pirate spirit, and it seems they are willing to die for the next prank, stunt, or "owning" of rival tribes. -Midway through the film, the ruins of government initiate a program in which all sharks are injected with an experimental drug which acts as a GPS system. When a shark is moved away from its official location, it gradually turns a bright red color, making it a target for the authorities. The penalty for being caught in possession of a "hot" shark (hence a play on the color red, as well as stolen property in the meaning of the title) is death. -Our hero continues his work, because he is fond of the general absurdity and surreality of the profession. He seems to always have a smirk of mild amusement. He also reveals a sensitive side related to the fact that he loves sharks: not for status, environmentalism, money, or power, but he just loves the species. He makes a great sacrifice for the success of his tribe: he injects himself with the experimental GPS drug and turns bright red. Many odd side effects ensue, in addition to the motive for doing this: hot sharks now consider him one of their own. He can swim with them safely and discovers he can communicate telepathically with them, making him the greatest shark thief ever. -The film follows his insane journey and that of his tribe members. The action is extremely fastpaced and shows ridiculous, hilarious, adrenaline-fueled situations that invoke a feeling of pure, crazed absurdity in the audience. EXAMPLES: -Infiltrating the environmentalists' protected shark reserve habitat -Stealing a Great White from a rap star's guarded mansion -Negotiating with the ever-fabulous elite gay party planning subculture -The central joke of the film: always having to hid something as massive as a huge shark from the authorities -Dealing with comically bleeding-heart environmentalists -Pranking or "owning" rival tribes by dumping used hot sharks on them in inconvenient situations. -Here is another central joke: say the authorities are closing in on a hot shark possession of our hero tribe. They "dump" the hot shark on a rival tribe without their knowing. For example, a rival 355
tribe of shark thieves are riding in a car, which is then clamped down upon by mechanical teeth which lift it into the air. The rival tribe has no idea what is going on and climbs up into the structure which has lifted their car into the sky, discovering it to be a massive helicopter. the camera pans back to view a tank in the cargo of the helicopter containing a bright red hot shark, which the rival tribe is still unaware of. Our heroes parachute out of the helicopter, while the authorities close in to capture the Sharkers. The leader of the rival tribe sees a message appear on the radar screen of the helicopter he has taken possession of, which reads, "You've just been hot sharked". As is always the case in these situations, the reply is, "You've gotta be fuckin' me!" -There are beautiful, peaceful scenes of our hero swimming and befriending the sharks. Here is another central joke of the movie: when the hero telepathically "hears" the thoughts of the sharks, they are voiced by famous actors. There is a Woody Allen shark, an Arnold Schwarzenegger shark, etc... OBSERVATIONS: The success of the movie beyond the sheer originality of its premise is in a careful balancing of super fast-paced action and violence, profanity, sex, etc. with humor on the other hand. There are goofy elements (like shouting, "Oh my God! Look at that!" to a policeman and pointing the other way while a giant bright red Great White swims past, or intentionally silly and too-human voiceovers for the sharks in the telepathy scenes), but these elements will not dominate the film and lead to Disney-esque flatness. There will be surprisingly touching and raw moments when wellliked characters - perhaps a love interest - are devoured by sharks, and a gritty commentary on corruption and the futility of decadence. TWIST ENDING: -Our hero has gotten out of the shark-party scene and has settled down with a family in the suburbs. With Thermos of coffee, he kisses his wife, hugs kids and hops off to work in his SUV. While driving on the freeway, he gets a call from an old contact in the flamboyant party planner society. The dude wants him to do one last shark heist for an incredible amount of money. But warns cryptically that the game has changed since our hero has been absent... -Instantly, the epic special effect visual of his SUV being clutched by an immense steel claw attached to a monolithic, tremendously large blimp-shaped orbital tank device, which carries the SUV into the sky like a hawk with a rodent, and the immense skycraft is translucent such that within it can be seen to be water-filled and containing an unfathomably titanic monster squid. The old contact of our hero, still in the airborn SUV in the steel “talons” of the Squidcraft, looks to us and says “You've just been Hot-Squided.” and parachutes out. Hero looks to camera- “You've gotta be fuckin me.” as the monster squid blooms with a deep, 356
deep crimson color. -FADE TO BLACK-
~ -9PERIODIC TABLE BLUES A day like any other day- we drag our weary bodies like ragdolls to class. Creative Writing class. But we find a periodic table of the elements has been hung on our wall this day. Not any periodic table of the elements. This bitch was HUGE. I mean, like WOW. I have never seen a periodic table of the elements as ginourmouse as this one- it took up half the wall. It was like some kind of combination periodic table of the elements and a drivers’ license eyesight testing chart for giants. If you were 7,000 feet tall and stood about 4 miles back, it could determine if you were fit to drive. But to us, hapless and misused students of “culture” it was glaringly out of place. Was this the work of some mad scientist who managed to land a job as chemistry teacher in our classroom during another period? As we were to find out, to his chagrin, and to our doom, in a word- “yes”. A few jokes were made. The oddity of the massive periodic table was made light of. And we moved on to poetry, that pleasant diversion which seeks to wrap up this grim world in a warm effeminate garb. It served to divert us until the next week when we entered to find another periodic table of the elements had been added to supplement the ungodly large other- but this new one larger still. It was hung on the ceiling like some kind of scientifically relevant tapestry in a pothead’s flophouse, curving down in a bulge as the weight of the center strained the rows of tacks fighting their losing battle. Yes, although it covered every inch of the ceiling it was not flat and taught, it was actually too large for that and formed a convex dome which nearly grazed the tip of of our instructor when she stood. Needless to say, the class erupted in laughter and merriment. Our instructor thought we were perpetrators of a practical joke at her expense and at first wept, then became enraged. She stormed out of the room to address the front office. We passed the time until her return shooting spitballs, making out, and smoking dope, figuring we were getting detention anyway (can they give you detention in college?) plus you only live once, right? Well, our teacher did make it back that day, but only to apologize for threatening the unnamed culprit with feeding his fingertips to the wolverines and to inform us that the two periodic tables, both the vertical AND drooping horizontal one, were put in place by a new part time chemistry teacher at MATC (our humble but virtuous college) named Dr. Dementox. When one of the more succulent of the females in our class asked if we should leave a note on the 357
blackboard for Dr. Dementox to go easy on the periodic tables, our instructor turned a lighter shade of pale and seemed genuinely chilled, as if a mermaid ghost from beneath the ice-sheets of Antarctica had walked through her on its way to an ice-sculpting contest. “I…. don’t think that would be prudent…. The front office informed me that Dr. Dementox is best avoided… he apparently was never the same after reading MATC’s contract for part time faculty and became demented, violent, and unhealthily obsessed with the periodic table. Until we are given another room to meet in I suggest we ignore any of his… distractions. Now, please remember to finish your short stories for class tomorrow!” I hate homework. We shrugged and left, nonplussed. After all, most of us were texting something transcendently vacuous followed by “LOL” under our desks during her explanation.
~
Goddamn I hate homework! However, I hate flunking college, being on academic probation, and having my sweet, sweet financial aid suspended even more. I need that money to buy anime figurines for fuck’s sake. So, that night, I put on some tunes, got weird, and wrote the shit out of this goddamn story for creative writing class called “Cool Versus The Beast”. It’s pretty rad. Maybe you’d like to read it…?
Cool Versus The Beast Hunter S. Thompson, John Belushi, Elvis, Marlon Brando, and The Fonz were pushing a rickety old fishing boat into Greasy Lake. It was a symphony of cool. The Fonz gave his signature “aaayyy” with thumbs skyward when Brando christened the worthless creaking vessel by smashing a bottle of Guinness against its rotting wormy side. “You drink that swill?” asked a young and spritely Hunter as he hopped into the Boat, which he had been referring to as “The Filthy Whore”. Every boat is a “she”. “Swill? …SWILL?!” cried Brando incredulously, his lower jaw jutting about four feet into the chill night air and brandishing the jagged half-bottle dramatically. “This shit is black gold.” “Yeah, the Guinness on tap in Ireland, I’ll give you that. Even the Guinness on tap in the states is a decent brew. But my piss tastes better than whatever they put in the cans or those new bottles.” Brando takes a swipe at Hunter with the makeshift weapon. “Shut up you assholes,” growls The King, his rhinestones glistening in the moonlight. He raises one arm and points to a small shack on the shore. “That’s where Rusko was decapitated.” 358
“Aaaaayyyyyy,” replies The Fonz in agreement. “Rusko?” asks Hunter absentmindedly, his eyes not on the dingy shack but following some objects apparently flitting about above him which none of the others can see. “Yeah, they say his father was the groundskeeper of the old Rumsfeld Slaughterhouse and stayed out here in the summer. They say he sawed off his own son’s head in that very shack.” A chill runs down more than one spine. The crew imagines whispers and strange forms in the thick layer of mist which The Filthy Whore cuts through on its voyage out into the deep part of the lake. At that moment something large moved under The Filthy Whore. It nudged the hull of the vessel and caused Brando to pierce his thumb with the bright red Flaming Queen flyfishing lure he was tying onto his line. While whipping his hand away in pain he dropped the lure into the dark greasy water, where it was gobbled up by an unlucky catfish. “Fucking Whore! My Grandaddy tied that lure!” “FILTHY Whore” corrected Hunter, definitely preoccupied with the objects buzzing about his head which none of the others could see. “I wasn’t talking about the boat!” Brando growls, still sore over the Guinness thing, and reaches for his half-smashed bottle of swill. Before he can get a grip on it the massive thing underneath them lurches upward against the bow… or was it the stern? This crew didn’t have much experience, though Belushi wore the cap of a captain, under which he slept, snoring loudly. “Motherfucker! What in the fuck was that?!?” he gasped, jolted awake. “It ain’t nothin’ but a houndog,” sayeth The King. The Fonz apparently likes this casual attitude and again points his thumbs to the heavens. A satisfied “Aaaaayyy” escapes from his lips. “That was no houndog you fool.” Says Hunter. “That felt like some kind of Monster Of The Deep. What the hell kind of freakshow are you running hear Brando?” “That’s it, you’re toast!” screams Brando, lunging at Hunter S. Thompsan with a large Speckled Cockney Thug flyfishing lure intended for salmon and slices the journalist stright through his Hawain shirt. Belushi screams “Bonzaaaaii!!!!” and does a cannibal into Greasy Lake. Elvis was attempting to steady the wildly tipping vessel by girating his pelvis in the direction opposite to that which the boat was leaning, but sees a headless boy out of the corner of his eye, stumbling through the tall reeds on the shore. He decides not to mention it. Hunter is clearly disturbed, swatting wildly at things he believes are circling him in the air with Brando’s flyfishing rod. How ironic this is, considering there is so much actually happening to be disturbed by. “I’ll swat the shit out of you!!” He 359
cries, then loses his balance. As he wobbles on the rocking boat, a moment of calm overtakes him. He suddenly looks over to The Fonz, who is not doing much to help. “You know what I hate about these fishing trips?” Hunter asks the cool but goodhearted young man. “These fucking bats.” With this Hunter falls into the dark water with a splash and tries to swim to shore. Brando, a great lump of regret and forgiveness rising After a few hours the Fonz realizes he is alone on the boat and that he doesn’t know how to use an oar, nor fish. He hears a splashing from the stern, which he figures is Belushi fighting the seamonster. “Aaaaaaayyyy” he says grinning, his thumbs like the Lighthouses of The Lord, happy to have company again. “Belushi you madman, get back in The Filthy Whore!!” Belushi gets one arm over the edge of the boat, his weight letting some slimy water ease in. “I can’t. Your mother says she won’t see me until I get sober!” Belushi replies, and at that very moment a tentacle slithers around his neck and pulls him backwards into the Greasy Lake. He was never seen again, but the kids who party there say on the right night you can hear a mournful voice wailing from the pine forest on the far side of Greasy Lake, chanting “toga…toga…toga…”
Pretty rad story, huh?
~ Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to read that story to the class, which I figured might impress some hot bitches. Instead, on that fateful day, the damn broke. This was neither funny nor appropriate. We took our seats to find in front of each of us a large ramshackle, homemade virtual reality visor like some kind of clunky scuba mask with a plasma screen on the inside of its plastic window, decorated with strange rusty gears and antennae and switches and buttons and clamps. These virtual reality visors were clearly intended for us, as each sit neatly in front of our seats upon a piece of graph paper upon which was written our respective names and the message “Don the visor and yield to the Logos”. Not a one of us knew what this “Logos” was, and when our teacher mumbled something about it being a Greek word for the inherent order and reason in Nature we were like “Gnarly!! Go for it dude, yeah don that visor and surrender to the Logos bro’!! ..Or are you some kind of pussy?” We fearlessly donned our visors despite a faint screeching from our teacher of “NOOO! They are the wicked creations of a disgruntled part-time faculty member! There’s no telling what they’ll do!!” This last plea for sanity seemed like a faint murmur in the distance, because it was drowned out in the buzz of whirring rusty gears and the insidious disco soundtrack to a brainwashing powerpoint demonstration that appeared in 3-D 360
before our eyes within Dr. Dementox’s contraptions. While our bodies flopped and convulsed like limp ragdolls in our seats for days (or who knew… years?) our brains were transported to a netherworld of purple in which a digital virtual reality Dr. Dementox (a short white man in a labcoat with the biggest afro you’ve ever seen in your life) guided us through a tour of the elements, which appeared to us as zooming particles rushing through clicking Chrononsindividual time-atoms, fractilizing and splintering seconds into nanoseconds and then splicing them again into ungodly small increments of time in the purple void until we could perceive electrons clicking across co-valence shells in their mad path, one trillionth of their own infinitesimal width each instant, in a slow motion. Some of us discovered new elements, some went mad. Few desired to leave that realm, and many of us are still there, though our bodies, wearing the visors still are kept fed by the school nursed, who keeps us in the basement and feeds us porridge every morning and evening.
~ -10YOU TOO CAN WIN! Woe and gnashing of teeth upon you who scorn mention of Sheen. As if one mere earthweek could reduce the Last Free Man to a mere excuse for a hipster's shrug and a haughty dismissal of the shallowness of the popular media through which the Triumph of the Absolute and Final Win happened to be unveiled. It could not have been otherwise. Granted- we find ourselves unwitting participants in a circle-jerk of epic, epic proportions in which Fame feeds on Fame feeding on Fame. Is your eye-rolling at Sheen's ascendance actually an eye-rolling better intended for the public's lust for what they mistake as degradation? The eye-rolling may be even better served with violent love toward a system of journalism that has devolved into exhibitionism of the character flaws of those who are famous for reasons having nothing to do with character in the first place. For those with eyes to see, roll them at yourselves, for the pleasure of looking down upon the folly of celebrities AND the media which takes them ~oh so seriously~ is the jolt of smug pleasure which is exactly how People sells out every glossy copy. In unrelated news, partake of a merry-go-round! Then add to the joy of a world spun the creeping and creepy realization that the seamless blending of “real” or “political” news with tabloid pablum is an intentional maneuver to pacify appropriate civil outrage. If you can't siphon the poetry from his fingertips and WIN, at least summon the remaining strength to wring a few last meager drops of tigersblood from the entire exasperating charade before you moan in boredom under your covers beneath which no Goddesses luxuriate. These are the vital things! The things that make you say “Huh?” The things that make you wonder why they even make syringes large enough to contain a liquid solution 361
made from seven grams of rock cocain and more to the point how someone who is by some sources reportedly NOT an F-18 could depress the plunger to climax prior to death, and still retain the composure and altruism required to perform intercourse with a prostitute. Then, in quieter, less envious moments, perhaps over a cup of lavender tea, we may ponder why a handsome famous actor getting 1.8 million an episode can't get laid for free? Of course he can! You wouldn't understand.
I. Media is the Mess Whatever it is that was once “Charlie” has become an inexplicable, mystifying, inscrutable, and certainly unconscionable explosive outpouring of Wild Genius, but a Wild Genius harnessed by a superhuman shamelessness, genuine curiosity and straightforwardness, and a focus of will which is in humble service of something inexpressible and absolutely impracticable. He has given the word audacity the meaning it has waited for and he has recaptured the seriousness with which children play. To look his secretly wet interviewer in the eye, with that deadpan, almost impatient seriousness and manner of dry courtroom factuality, to look the dread security camera in its evil third eye, and to look America in its glossy plastic eye with the gravity of the grave and say not that he was “proud of what he did” in “that party moment” his moist questioner referred to, but that “I am proud of what I CREATED.” In other words, we have fans of a sit-com comedian who are in a contact-crack-high frenzy that is exploited by what no one in their right mind would confuse with news. The fact that you cunningly recognize that an avalanche of thirsty glazed eyes trained on a sit-com actor crackhead Overlord, like billions of dull sparks fanned to an inferno by an oil-greased Propaganda Machine masquerading as Pop Trash, itself masquerading as Journalism, or vice versa, is a sad affair, well, goody godamn gumdrops! [sarcasm] Yes, you with your “towering and indisputable standards of irony” clutch, salivating, for that tender moment when a meme born and forged in gold wilts into the played-out retread of jokes staler than a phish jam. Which message your media shouldn't be pop-culturing you over the head with until you are too woozy to put oil + blood together with or of have asserted your position blissfully transcendent over both the folly of fame, wealth, TV, an unfathomably glazed public. If the tiger is Sheen's power animal and he possess it's spirit, was this condition bestowed at birth by the squealing rusty gears of Fate or was it attained, and if so, how? By accident or heroism? And can we too have tigersblood? I say it is our birthright.
~
II. The Logical Phallacy of the Shadow Facility 362
The general consensus among peer-reviewed academic journals is that the discovery of tigersblood in Charlie Sheens' circulatory system was due to an intentional genetic mutation. The probability of a human child born with blood identical to that of a jungle cat is so ridonkulously small, (and assuming the scientific perspective is not in fact profane to apply to this case which it is) we are very likely dealing with a procedure performed by a certain street performance puppeteer troupe in Switzerland composed of radical environmentalists with backgrounds in veterinary science and genetic engineering, known respectively as Bread and Puppet. Their aims and political affiliations are in dispute, although their puppeteering events, or “extravaganzas” if you will, are both masterful, charitable, family-friendly, and offer a relentlessly scathing and insightful, if at times bitterly sarcastic condemnation of what they refer to as the Idolatry of the Media. In April, 2009 a defector and whistle-blower from the band of puppeteers disappeared shortly after leaking architectural blueprints to People magazine proving the massive highsecurity fortified compound in which they purportedly molded giant paper-machete puppets was in fact a biological weapons research lab and veterinary hospital in which vials of Sheen's blood were secured, replicated, and mass-produced: cause unknown; chaos suspected. The lab, christened “Sober Valley Lodge ” was built four miles directly above a quaint underground cavevillage known as Racoon City. The whistle-blower and both literal and figurative puppetmaster, Professor Schonk Fonkinstein Rachmonticoff is a man of national, but not international mystery, depending on which nation the citizen is owned by. In any case, he was a Hungarian man of Icelandic descent and French ascent whose mother, a circus-animal veterinarian, was mostly eaten by a tiger whom she spent summer afternoons lashing viciously with a scarlet whip. Although the Swiss government denies the very existence of Professor Rachmonticoff, they did sentence him to death as well as exile to “anywhere but here”. Upon his capture and subsequent yogurt-boarding [a slightly more inhumane water-boarding technique], he went mad, then swiftly escaped. Years later, horrifically, the left hand of Professor Rachmonticoff was discovered lying on a crisply folded copy of the New York Times TV-guide section, fresh and hot off the press, although to the relief of his girlfriend the hand was attached to his rolex and arm, along with the rest of his healthy if exiled and yogurt-boarded body.
~ III. A Savage Transfusion On the other hand, the transmutation of Sheen's human blood (and spirit) into that of the tiger may have taken a more traditionally shamanic process in which a coming-of-age ritual during Sheen's puberty in Brazil turned a bizarre shade of dark. Sheen's youthful infatuation with all things shamanic, fueled by his father's mortified, humiliated, teary-eyed, but unbending financial support, lead him into a South American Jungle village on the coast of the Amazon, where men were jaguars and a woman's fertility was judged by the number of shrunken skulls of 363
her past sexual conquests strung on her thong. The village elder and witchdoctor, Von Shronkenhedz Shriznok, was an evil man who made no excuses and asked for none. This guy was all business all the time. He raised Sheen as his own son until his coming of age ceremony at thirteen, then felt that Sheen himself should have a coming of age ceremony as well, and arranged one for him too. In the tradition of the godless savages, the largest and most ferocious ghost-tiger of a scorned ancestor is captured with poison-tipped darts blown from the blowguns of virgins who weren’t. Far from it. The beast is then tethered to a stone alter and a gnarly and redonkulously unsterilized blood [spirit] transfusion begins in which the plasma of the initiate is siphoned through a device resembling a beer-funnel crudely constructed from a gourd and vine, into a wound gnawed by the virgins who weren’t into the wrist of the beast while simultaneously the tigerblood is siphoned into the self-inflicted gnawed wrist-wound of the soon man-to-be. Similar to siphoning stolen gasoline through a hose from a bitchin' hotrod, some suction is initially applied to the vine funnels by the “virgins” to get the blood flowing through the vinefunnel. Suction is then applied to the initiate, the witchdoctor, and the tiger, also to get the good ol' blood flowing.
~ -11-
The Sleep-Fairies
Oh, when the sleep-fairies come for you, they wrap you up in silk, and some are told do leave the teeth unlike others of their ilk, for fairies of tooth and coin are said to soothe gums and soak your tears, but these are fairies which give even the dead their gravest fears, and these are the spirits which clung to mankind from his earliest years, and they take a coin and leave a tooth or so it so appears, but this white stone is found in neither gum of man nor beast, but seems to come from so afar that lightyears never cease, and enchantments hide within the blood that smears the pale fang, which was never shed by owner of the tooth or so was sang, but rather dripped from Evil Thistle-rabbit dinners when Spirit-fox dinnerbells rang, when Flornathon the King of Sleep roamed the auburn hills, of Fall in Hathaforathorn where he made his kills, For in the Fall in Hathaforathorn were foxes of the spirit, and so the Kings of Flaravorn would hunt or so we hear it, and kills they made of spirit foxes splattering the blades, of the Battleaxes made of Fangs which for the King of Sleep were made, and drips and drops of spirit fox blood bloom wherever they fall, into chrysanthemums and lotus blossoms which decorate our hall, the Hall of Floratherafon that towers to this day, within the Land of Djreams where dwell the Sleep-fairies some say, and there within the Hall which towers they spy upon our world, and wind the wreathes of coiling blossom chrysanthemum floral furls, unfurling so with slender fingers winding them in rings, and these wreathes are spun in webs that wrench the world the minstrel sings, and as world-wrenching spirit fox wreath weavers often know, when the churning churlish winds do whistle lullabies as they blow, that spirit fox ring weaving schools within the icy snow, did come and go as Kings of Sleep were roaming to and fro, in Fall in Hathaforathorn where 364
fangs are gifts you can’t resist, for Spirit-fox fangs curse the one who by the Sleep-Fairies is kissed. Oh when the Sleep-fairies come for you they wrap you up in wool, and pull the wool over your eyes until with lies your head is full, and slink back to their shadows there upon your bedroom wall, where the shadowdemons whisper where they are not seen at all, and so you think because their lies the fang of fox is good, but know when every wreath-school weaver is taught to weave as best they could, they learn the fang is poison-cursed by Evil Thistle-rabbit food, but lo in truth the truth is that the fang was dripping drops, that splattered battleaxes where the Evil Thistle-rabbit hops, in woods of oak and nettles poison tipped and made to sing, as they whistle on the wind of blowdart assassin sleep-fairy wings, for nettles and thorns and needles are the feathers of this kind, of fairies told of in the Tomes of Momewrath which long ago did they bind, papyrus leaves and crackly scrolls threaded to the spine, of leather and rhymes that curl like the wreathes they so unwind, the teachings of the Elder Hathanon Master Weaving Nuns, the nettlethorn feather blowdart assassins staulk the walls of some- the bedroom walls that harbor shadows bristling with tips, of poison blowdart assassin wings whistling to seal your crypt. Oh when the sleep-fairies come for you they wrap you up in stone, and leave you frozen solid crystal snowflake to your bone, and so they trap the living in the rooms in which they slept, and paralyze the drowsy around whose necks the wreathes were wrapped, woven by the slender hands of Fairies from on high, which were made to wind around your neck and tighten till you cry, but sound cannot escape the mouths of stone is what they tell, and frosty angular sheaths of ice and crystal catatonic wails, will pierce the night as you realize the leashes lead to Hell. And Sleep-Fairies aren’t very Nice. Nor are the Sleep-Fairies especially Kind. For they are not merely the evil which lurk within men’s minds- they are the Shadow-people aliens of the moon we call Europa, and they need leashes to lead the frozen to the Crypt of Catatonia, and sleep is the only thing that keeps them just barely at bay, or so the oldest toothless Spirit-Foxes used to say.
~
-12TO THE SKINNER INSTITUTE *DISCLAIMER: I took somewhat of a risk with this letter. I am gentlemen enough to at least admit that it is not without some structural flaws. What we have here is not my usual bitter venting of the spleen in protest against the Skinner Institute for the Treatment of Video Game Addiction which characterizes my multiple previous 365
attempts at correspondence (which you may note have remained unreplied to), but this is not to say the concepts I will present are intended as flippant. In fact, I took the risk of relating the “treatment” I have endured during my stay in the acute detox unit of the Skinner Institute to the symbolism in a specific video game because of the direct relevance. I was willing to gamble an even lesser possibility of any response on this occasion for the sake of bringing to light some aspects of the Skinner Institute with a biting wit none of you can deny (or even withstand). Yet all swashbuckling risk lies on the precipice of doom. I only ask that this letter be judged primarily on the clarity of the lines I have drawn between many different facets of the video game in question and the methods of the Skinner Instititute, and that the concepts I present are not overlooked prematurely due to the poor reputation of video games as a medium.
Dear Gentlemen (and women) of the Skinner Institute, We now dive straight into the complex and esoteric symbolism of the wryest piece of avant garde art that exists in the miserably disrespected genre known as the “video game”. This diving beneath the surface entertainment value of the game and into the depths of its weighty symbolism will indeed relate impeccably and with laser-sharp precision into the very heart of my addiction counselors as they perform assessments and produce diagnoses with the questionable tools of their agency’s choice. Trust me. The hero of the game “Portal” is Chell. She is not an addict (that we know of), but let’s say she is. She awakes in a pristine research laboratory to the chilling, feminine, and subtly sarcastic voice of a disembodied computer. Having no freedom but to follow the dictums of the sexy and all-powerful dominatrix/operating system, she complies. To survive, and to (we hope, dearly) be granted the mythical, grandiose, metaphorical, and yet so simple “cake” (more on this symbol later. Is it just me or is everything a symbol? I find this way of looking at things pleasurable because it is as if there is a shadow or reflection behind common things, the shadows brighter and more colorful than the original object, and sometimes a series of shadow/reflection symbology. The cake is a perfect example, later…), she must obey. So Chell (for our purposes) is the addict. The cubical, pristine, white-walled chambers which she is lead like a puppet through could easily be seen as the intimidating formal atmosphere of this addiction treatment facility I find myself in yet again. It is against the law to force a human into drug treatment, which is a curious fact to me considering a mentally unstable person can be legally trapped in “that white and medicated place for weeks which pass like eons”. And so technically I am free to leave, although there are external forces beyond my control (namely my deluded and overbearing parents) which more or less confine me here. But Chell is a true prisoner. Her only mobility is afforded by obeying the sensuously-toned sarcastic suggestions of GLaDOS [Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System], an increasingly sinister computer who must eventually be defeated. Is it not uncommon for the addict in rehab to feel trapped, forced to obey the commands of an amorphous “agency”, a “system” or, in common terms “the man”? Yes. And though GLaDOS is the villain, her “assessment tool” is a very systematic and effective series of tests which increase in difficulty as successive pristine cubical chambers are navigated, with the help of an apparatus known as the “portal gun”. This is merely the basic setup for an adventure which offers moments so touching and human that we genuinely 366
learn lessons of compassion, though I doubt any staff members who see this letter (assuming it is not perfunctorily shredded as I am growing to suspect may have been the fate of many of my previous ones) will take the time to investigate for themselves the pleasures of this video game firsthand. GLaDOS does not care one atom for Chell- she only cares to carry out the testing of the portal gun, a device which can shoot and link two portals on any surface, bending space, creating a chance to teleport around obstacles, and offering a kind of very intellectually stimulating and pleasurably entertaining elaborate geometric puzzle mind-blowing. The portal gun can be many things in the “video game dependency” context. It can be that thing (willpower, grace, surrender, benevolent human service professionals, the goodwill of the group…) which creates a portal between the life of “video game addiction” (as you people call my treasured pastime) and the life of abstinence. By the way the portal gun can withstand the thousands of degrees Fahrenheit of the furnace which Chell’s assembly line leads to, although tragically Chell cannot. Chell is expendable, for the test results (see my diagnosis of “chronic and acute video game dependency and corresponding intermittent withdrawal” in the files and charts you people so enjoy keeping on me) themselves were the entirety and the totality of the intentions of the tester, who (despite the lilting attractive voice, which I might note is coincidentally (?) quite similar to that of my individual counselor Miss Rachel Racette) is inhumane- a machine. Of course, the heroic moment when the tables turn is when Chell uses the portal gun to escape the furnace and begins hunting the computer/goddess of the facility. I will add that despite the undeniably appealing long, wavy, scarlet hair and ample bosom of Miss Rachel, and her supposedly benevolent attempts to counsel me, I at times suspect her too of being in fact a cleverly designed machine. Yes, though a kind of very advanced and admittedly attractive robot, Miss Rachel may be sincerely attempting to help me reach a turning point in my addiction at which point a leap is necessary to solidify and actualize my slow, resistant, and yet steady progress- a turning point when one ceases to be a victim at the mercy of external forces (one’s addiction, or the agency when it is viewed as the enemy in this case, to say nothing of my hopelessly confused parents), and becomes the commander of their own destiny, (as corny as that sounds.) So the portal gun was once the property and equipment of GLaDOS which Chell takes ownership of and turns against her captor in the end- this is that process of recovery in which those trying to help you are initially resisted as threatening confinement, but are only later realized to be pointing toward a more satisfying and decent life and in fact offering an alternative to the confinement of incurable and fatal video game dependency. Yes, even I, at times, in the lonely moonlight of my room here wonder if it is only when a client ceases to fight the agency and realizes that they are on the same team that progress can occur (that’s my theory anyways, but it implies the agency is at least intentionally benevolent and not instead much more similar to that cruel “home” from “One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest” as is the Skinner Institute- the type which deserve to be fought because it is primarily a diabolical institution- a recovery factory, spitting out the product of video game-abstinent, responsible citizens- this will never work; the pastime of interactive electronic entertainment is too passionate and organic a phenomena to fit neatly on an assembly line. The Cake is what we all want. It’s connotations of a birthday recall the happiest and proudest of memories. Cake is sweet. It is not “good for you”, yet we cannot help desire it. Cake is the drug of mastering and completing a truly great and absorbing video game. Perhaps you people would say, as Miss Rachel never ceases to convince me, Cake can also be the reward that 367
is the elusive freedom from addiction. It is both poison and reward. The brilliant use of Cake in Portal is one of those examples of symbolism in art so powerful it surfaces from the murk of your dreams around 3:00 AM and rises like a serpent leviathan breaching the conscious surface of Jung’s purple collective unconscious. Cake, again and again, is promised to Chell if she can merely survive, but we know in the hardened ice cubes which were once naïve hearts that “the cake is a lie”. Indeed, this horrifying revelation that “The Cake is a lie” is scrawled as graffiti by a previous victim of the test chambers. This sequence of the game (towards the end) in which Chell discovers a passageway into the rusted industrial innards of the laboratory and the remnants of a frightened, half-mad test subject who hid there like a starving rodent, was genuinely moving. How does this relate to my stay here in the acute detox unit of the Skinner Institute? I shall tell you how. The relevance is in the stark contrast between the pristine whitewalled cubical test chambers of the Aperture Science facility [the agency which has currently replaced my temporary home in my parents basement] and the rusted, decaying wreckage behind its walls [the emotional geography of the video game addict in early recovery, and hence severely uncomfortable withdrawal], a behind-the-scenes splinterworld which has become a kind of nest for one who has rejected the performance of the test [the “non-compliant client” in the language of the Pharmaceutical Machine which no doubt funds the research branch of the Skinner Institute like an umbrella agency only as horrendous as it is insidious.]. We see a duality here- the cleanliness and order of the test chamber is very much the “good intentions” of the Skinner Institute, and of my lovely yet synthetic counselor Rachel, for that matter. Rachel may have been programmed to see nothing wrong with the antiseptic, clinical style of her assessment tools (assuming her assessment tools are of the DSM-IV garden variety, which I suspect), but the noncompliant client- the difficult, reluctant, resistant, sarcastic, or even dangerous client, which you people no doubt take me for, can see “the writing on the walls”. By this, I allude to the chilling repetition of the graffiti “the cake is a lie” but also the perhaps naïve or arrogant nature of some assessment tools. Or perhaps I should say “the way some counselors administer their assessment tools along with the rest of their medically sterile style of “helping”. It is true I don’t know enough about the different assessment tools available to make a judgment on them as being mostly too blind of the rough, chaotic, twisted corridors of the human gamer client’s mindscape. But I do know enough of the style and approach of those who do assessments here, including my own redheaded cybernetic case manager, to say that the ones who treat clients like organic personalities rather than “test subjects” are few. If cake isn’t a symbol, nothing is, and I am growing daily closer to the suspicion that the Skinner Institute for the Treatment of Video Game Addiction, which I hereby yet again formally request graduation and immediate dismissal from, is hardly “a trusted friend in science”, which is the slogan on my Aperture Science coffee mug. In Fellowship and Respect, A current client of the Skinner Institute and Hardcore Gamer, -Smithfield Fontibue.
368
~ -13ZOMBIE BABY THERAPY INTRO- We fade from black to wisps of smoke illuminated by bright light against black backdrop, pan down to Dr. Laan’s cigar, then his full form, knees crossed on leather chair. Pan back further to encompass Zombie Baby [ZB] lying on leather couch. All besides the two actors is black.
-Scene OnePuffball Love -Dr. Laan:
Tell me about your mother.
-ZB:
You gotta be kidding me!
-Dr. Laan:
I assure you, Yohan, I am most serious. You will describe your earliest memory of your mother.
-ZB:
…OK, why not? …I remember suckling at her breats… But something is wrong. There is no milk. Only… dust. [We see dr. Laan scribbling feverishly on his clipboard as he does whenever ZB says something revealing.]
-Dr. Laan:
Dust!?
-ZB:
Yes. Liker a puffball you pop open in the forest[Insert very brief shot of a page from an encyclopedia or biology textbook with picture of “puffball”, correct botanical name for the plant (?), and 369
text- an out of place shot with no explanaition but important as “puffball nipple” becomes central image, symbolic of Fruedian breastfeeding issues and lack of nurturing mother.] -ZB-
[continued] …from her nipple only a cloud of dust. [Shot of withered zombie-nipple emitting a puff of dust, slow-motion, very dramatic, perhaps with sad, rejected face of breastfeeding infant between nipple and expanding dust cloud. This shot could be spliced up and repeated quickly in a series from different angles or involve stroboscopic illumination of expanding dust cloud. The most important symbolic image in the film, to be repeated numerous times over the course of the film, including the final shot.]
-Dr. Laan:
Why was this, yohan? Why was there no milk from your mother’s breast?
-ZB:
Because she was a zombie, [Camera zooms in very quickly to extreme close-up of ZB’s lips as they mouth the following words:] …just like me. [Emmediatly begins exhilarating music (genre? Techno? Metal?) Something along the lines of Rob Zombie would be fitting. And a clean cut to the opening credits, which will be presented in a whimsical artsy manner at the discretion of the team which tackles this animated sequence.]
~ Scene Two: What Is It To Be Dead? [We fade from black to wisps of smoke illuminated by bright light against black backdrop. This is 2nd time we use this, it will be repeated, perhaps regularly between scenes? Pan down to Dr. Laan’s cigar, then his full form, knees crossed on leather chair. Pan back further to encompass “ZB” (Zombie Baby) on leather couch. All besides the two actors is black.] -Dr. Laan-
Relax, my bright young man. My somber friend… My somber, zombie friend. My intelligent young recovering zombie. You do know that regardless of their length of time clean and sober, recovering addicts do not refer to themselves as “cured”, yes? Similarly, I cannot promise that your condition can be reversed. No matter how long you remain dead… undead, whatever the term… You may tragically 370
never partake of the pleasures of the polite society of the living. Nevertheless, the maladaptive behaviors which have resulted in your confinement in this psychiatric institution can be… controlled. -ZB:
…“controlled”?
-Dr. Laan:
Correct. Now tell me what it means to be dead.
-ZB:
You wouldn’t believe me. You don’t believe me. That doesn’t bother me. I mean, why would you? It is not normal. My behavior, before they took me here was… “maladaptive” as you say; maladaptive in the extreme. I am not normal- that explains the straightjacket. But don’t patronize me.
-Dr. Laan:
An unusually strong subconscious defense mechanism of savage aggression coupled with the severe oral fixation which makes you bite those who care most for you is what earned you your clean straightjacket. Your obedience will loosen its straps and buckles. So obediently reply to me and quell my curiosity. Can you blame me? Wouldn’t a man kill to know what awaits behind the curtain? Yes… one of the classic and most cliché of unanswerable questions which philosophers and two-bit hustlers have connived over for eons. Yohan, do not make me kill for the answer. Tell me now what it is to be dead!
-ZB:
I detest therapy for this reason. Not because it is contrived intimacy, or because it does not work, nor because I have had it ad nauseum (all of which are true), but because a therapist will invariably have a hidden agenda behind his questions. You say- “Tell me what it is to be dead!” But you mean- “Be at ease. Talk of your delusions. You are safe to do so, for I am on your side. I will never reject your lies, your nonsense, even if I believe them to be such. What I believe is irrelevant, while asking eternally “How does that make you feel?” Such a safe question. Such an unmanly one!
-Dr. Laan:
[extremely loud, angered, disgusted, + final] “CAREFUL!!” [long silence, ZB’s eyes shift nervously]
Dr. Laan:
You will tell me what it is to be dead now. Regardless of whether you think I will belive you. True- I don’t give a fuck for your “expert opinion”, nor for the true answer to the question itself. Am I a junky pool hustler looking to score for a Big Cliché? No. Am I a schizophrenic adolescent with a pool cue in one hand and a syringe in the other, running after the Big Answer as if it were a bent spoon with warm brown poison in it?
-ZB:
[interrupts] …I see you’ve read my chart. [humor]
-Dr. Laan:
The Law here is this- I am holding you in my hand like a doll, because I hold the keys to this psychiatric hospital and because someone of your intelligence-
-ZB:
[interrupts] –thank you.
-Dr. Lann:
[continues] –will already feel caged and resentful, bored of the droolers and mumbling infants in adult bodies whom you are caged with. I could let moss grow on you here young man, so you will humor me. Patronize me and tell me what it 371
is to be dead at once. -ZB:
The Law here is this- I will tell you, but not before you first admit you will not believe my answer; that you will never believe I am dead.
-Dr. Laan:
Granted.
-ZB:
Excellent… [savoring the intro to the description for dramatic effect]
-Dr. Laan:
yes, A point for you, bright young man. Sad failure of a man. “So much potential!” they must have told you again and again. Before you begin- you are correct- I will never believe you. This analysis would be easier if you thought we were friends and that I shared your intriguing but pathetic delusion. The truth is that I care far more about the article on you I am submitting to The Journal of Abnormal Pathetic Delusions than I care for curing you or if you live or die… “a second time”. [with a smile]
-ZB:
Are you really writing an article about me?
-Dr. Laan:
Indeed. It will not make me rich, but it will further my reputation and status and pass the time in my smoking jacket while my wife sleeps. Of course the name of the journal is not “The Journal of Pathetic Delusions”, but it may well be. That or “The Tale of the Boy who grew Moss on his Tongue”.
-ZB:
Again with the moss! What does that expression mean?
-Dr. Laan:
It’s hardly cryptic. I find it odd the moss reference is lost on you. It means you are my captive in these white walls amongst the droolers for as long as I wish. My liverstock- a weak veal calf, fed milk. A Perdue chicken. A doll and some day an old redwood which remained stationary lomng enough to let the moss grow. Cluck for me Perdue Chicken! [makes “cluck-cluck” noises] Moss only grows on that side of the tree that gets no sun.
-ZB:
Or is it the side that does?
-Dr. Laan; Regardless, that is how a lost child can tell which way is east or west when they are alone and scared in the forest. [exaggerated sympathy voice] Poor baby, poor “zombie baybee”. Is poor zombie baybee alone and scared? -ZB:
[sighs, acceptance] Cold and black. That is all.
-Dr, Laan:
Death?
-ZB:
Yes.
~ Scene Three: 372
A Dirty Little Secret [A quiet room in the psych ward, night, moonlight and the sound of rain from the window. ZB has a roommate with no role in the scene- oddly, considering the macabre display. Roomate merely watches calmly in the background. ZB asleep as nurse enters, wearing soft, loose outfit with lace, merely suggestive of a uniform. Large bosom if possible, long blond hair. Nurse has heavy accent (Swedish?). Speech choppy. -Nurse:
Yohan! Wake up! [softly, Nurse speaks in lullaby whisper] It’s time for a midnight snack! [Nurse takes brainjar from behind her back and presents it with a big smile to Yohan. Yohan’s eyes light up like a little kid at Christmas, very excited. Nurse teases him by withdrawing brainjar. She enjoys his excitement and makes sexual advances toward him, using brainjar as bait. Perhaps holding it between her breasts or demanding a kiss before she gives it to him. Yohan is uninterested in her, distracted by brainjar.]
-ZB:
Does Dr. Laan know about this? He will be mad, yes?
-Nurse:
Dr. Laan knows what is best for you. Dr. Laan knows you hunger for brain but that brain is Death! Heart is Life, Yohan! [takes ZB’s palm and holds it against her heart; holds brainjar away as ZB grabs for it.]
-ZB:
What is my reward FOR? Did I do something good?
-Nurse:
[teasingly] What makes you think you could ever do something good? [giggles] No- this is just a taste for you, for no particular reason. Just to let you know that Dr. Laan can let you have the pleasure… even if it is a… guilty… pleasure… If you obey him there will be more tasting. [All through this ZB is salivating while ZB’s roommate can be seen in the background, watching the exchange with casual curiosity (humor).]
-Nurse:
We keep this as our little secret, yes? [giggles mischievously] You are not to thank Dr. Laan- he would act like he didn’t know! You see? He cannot admit he would let you have this… guilty… pleasure. It is… a private thing. So he told me to give it to you, so you not think you have his approval. [then, to herself-] I shouldn’t be telling you this… But you see? If he gave you from his own hand you would think it is ok, is… permitted. [shakes jar at ZB as if wagging finger and frowns] This is not allowed!! So I give it to you. From morgue in basement of asylum, to Dr. Laan’s hand, to mine, to your lips. [almosts hands brainjar over, quickly withdraws it, almost dropping it, which ZB panics about] But first you must promise not mention to Dr. You must pretend he doesn’t know, even if he tests you and asks if I gave you a treat and told you he said was okay, okay?
-ZB:
YES, YES!! [Nurse tries to open jar, cannot; askes if ZB is strong enough to help her 373
in a very suggestive, sexual manner and big puppy-dog eyes. ZB opens the jar with a dramatic *pop* moment, takes brain, eats, gorges himself animalistically. The process is very messy. Nurse pets his ZB’s hair lovingly as he feasts. This goes on for a long time, until the brain is consumed and ZB is sated. He seems very sleepy and happy, and curls up into a fetal position in Nurse’s arms. He starts suckling on her very large breasts while she pets his hair and cradles him.] -Nurse:
Close your eyes, wandering child. Do you want to hear a bed-time story while you fall asleep? [ZB is too sleepy and busy nursing lazily to respond.] I will tell you the story of Klizzandra the Princess… [At this point there is a story within the story. We fade into an animated segment in a pastel construction paper style that follows the following story of Klizzandra, as follows:]
~ Scene Four: Klizzandra The Princess [This scene should be animated in pastel colors and narrated by the silky thick-accented voice of Nurse] -Nurse:
“Once upon a time there was a beautiful young maiden. She was a princess from a far away magical kingdom. Her name was Klizzandra, and she was a very, very sad person. She had mountains of diamonds and she was going to be the Empress of the Emerald Prism Mirror Halls when she grew old enough, and she had a handsome young prince that wished for her hand in marriage. And yet she was so very, very sad. No one knew why she was so sad. Her father, the emperor sent for a wise old wizard to find out why this young maiden was so sad. 374
The wise old wizard gave Klizzandra a magic potion and told her to go out to the cemetery and fall asleep on the grass, wet with dew. Klizzandra almost fainted with fright. She thought this was a very scary thing to do. But she did as she was told. The grass was very cold and wet with dew, and the wind seemed to whisper scary things to her, as if it were the voices of the people who were buried in the cememtery. But the potion the wise old Wizard had given her quickly began to make her feel very comfortable and warm. “Oh! I am so cozy!” she said to no one in particular. “Be not too cozy, princess young For to this cemetery the Wizard comes!” (Said the voice of the wind.) But Klizzandra was too warm and cozy to do anything but fall into a deep, deep sleep. It was a trick! The Wizard had given Klizzandra a love potion. And he came to the cemetery in the night, just as the voice of the wind had said. He sat down beside Klizzandra and whispered to her as she slept: “Now you are my wife, princess young, And this old Wizard will away with you run!” Klizzandra woke up and saw the Wizard sitting beside her, but he seemed young and handsome, far more handsome than the young prince that wished for her hand in marriage. “Go not with the Wizard, princess young, For if so, you will die by the gun!” (Said the voice of the wind.) Of course Klizzandra did not know what a “gun” was, because her magical kingdom was from long ago, before anyone had made a gun. All of a sudden, the young prince who wished for Klizzandra’s hand in marriage ran and jumped over the cemetery fence with a gun in his hand. “What is that thing?” asked the Wizard and the Princess at the same time when the young prince fired it into the air with a loud boom. Klizzandra then heard the voice of the wind on last time375
“You will know what it is when you are alone and poor, princess young For the Wizard’s bride you will become There was a cave in Hell the prince took that thing from And he brought it to Earth and named it a “gun” And when the prince is old and heartbroken and alone He will shoot his gun through both your bones.” (Said the voice of the wind.) And the Wizard grabbed Klizzandra and ran off with her. And because of his love potion, they lived happily ever after. The Emperor refused to see Klizzandra ever again and she never became Empress. Klizzandra and the Wizard were poor and had only broth and hard bread to eat, and they lived like peasants, but they were happy together. Until one day the young prince (who was then a bitter old man) finally found their little cabin and shot them both in their marriage bed with his gun. And guns have killed people ever since, and they always will, because that young prince was the devil. ~the end~
~ Scene Five: Hollywood [Opens as always with a close-up of Dr. Laan’s thick milky cigar smoke illuminated against black backdrop; this shot is repeated throughout the film, at times with continuous backlighting, at times strobe-lit as in transitions to any flashback scenes of ZB’s childhood] -Dr. Laan:
You will excuse me for drawing my questions from the only source which has afforded me some window into the zombie phenomenon…
-ZB:
Hollywood.
-Dr. Laan;
Correct. At the risk of sounding culturally insensitive, is the portrayal of your… “lifestyle” generally accurate? Or am I succumbing to a crude stereotype?
-ZB:
No offense taken. I too am a fan of the cinematic genre, but exclusively foreign art films dealing with the undead. Strictly black and white. Silent films if possible. I adore inter-titles. 376
-Dr. Laan:
“Inter-titles?”
-ZB:
Inter-titles are the use of written paragraphs in old silent movies to explain some plot development or transcribe dialogue that would be lacking due to the absence of audio in very early films. [Dr. Laan looks into camera at audience and nods in understanding. (humor, because there is substantial use of inter-ritles in the play. Dr. Laan turns to ZB]
-Dr. Laan:
Go on. Speak of the films you love.
-ZB:
Films of French or Italian descent are my bread. The only modern work of any substance are certain experimental Japanese horror films of the avant garde variety-- [cut quickly to Dr. Laan who looks suddenly perplexed and mildly disgusted.] --I have been digging recently. Yet their take on horror leans more toward the surreal and the subtle- more dreamlike re-imagined folktales of ghost hauntings than the raw, explicit gore essential in depicting the… eating disorder which runs in my family. Surely there is gore aplenty to be found in Asian cinema, but it is the rare avant garden in which grow both gore and art.
-Dr. Laan:
[suspicious, raised eyebrow] …the fuck did you say, boy?
-ZB:
Nothing.
-Dr. Laan:
I thought so. Now go on, boy- talk of the films you love.
-ZB:
There were some obscure film noir zombie flick gems from my youth in the French quarter of New Orleans- “Jealousy Toward the Living”, “One Last Dinner Party”, “The Gravedigger’s Compromise”, and of course “Mourn Not For Us”. Most of them long, subtitled, dripping with symbolism; some would say pretentious. I used to sneak in without paying, now I would write a grant proposal to revive the old theater… It was called “The Avant Garden”. I had my first true kiss in the balcony. Would you like to hear about it?
-Dr. Laan:
No.
-ZB:
[ZB’s expression is deadpan and he is silent for a moment]…Anyways, such zombies as those are not seen these days on the big screen or elsewhere.
-Dr. Laan:
You are a snobbish zombie aren’t you, you sonovabitch?
-ZB:
Well, let’s say if I were to cross paths with Sam Ramie in a dark alley he would likely leave the encounter missing a large portion of his temporal lobe, if gnawing through an exceptionally thick skull were not as tedious a process as I have endured on occasion.
-Dr. Laan:
Ahhh, Sam Ramie- the imminent horror film director and cult favorite responsible for the “Holy Trinity’ of zombie films.
-ZB:
you disappoint me, my friend. It was George Romero who was responsible for those, not Sam Ramie. I pray your precious journal article on me is better researched. However, I am ashamed to admit I am familiar with the trilogy you speak of. 377
-Dr. Laan:
I suspected as much. But wasn’t Romero the special effects makeup artist who worked on Dawn’ and Day of the Dead…?
-ZB:
Too old and withered of libido to bother hiring a buxom, obedient secretary to check your facts, Dr.? The man you refer to is Tom Savini.
-Dr. Laan:
For someone who detests popular American blockbusters you are well versed in their film crew.
-ZB:
True, I know of them. We move in some of the same circles. But they are charlatans. They do not believe what they film. Are you aware that my birthplace, New Orleans, has a rich voodoo heritage? There is superstition in the humid air. I ater blackened catfish and drank wine in jazz bars with women who did not want to make love. They were afraid of something in me- that or I was just too shy then, and my virtue was too strong for the strip clubs and cathouses with their red lights like fishing lures. But it was weak enough for the heroin and pool halls. There are fake witchdoctors, moreso during Carnival, but for every ten con-men there was one genuine old woman in a shanty houseboat who could sacrifice a chicken before an alter with the Madonna alongside older, nameless idols. She would shake beads at the thing, sprinkling blood to the west, to the east, whispering in French, I believe. A chicken really does run about after its head is cut off. Why was New Orleans the place where a zombie could be awoken? The pins in dolls. There was some Caribbean influence? Haiti? I can still smell the voodoo in the humid air. But don’t think my being dead is from a love of New Orleans magic. I am dead, at least half-dead, by accident, because I was abducted by the dead when I was less than one year old and raised to be as one of them. It is just luck this happened in New Orleans. In Carnival everyone can blend in. In a dark, cool movie theater you can be anyone.
-Dr. Laan:
It is clear you have an obsession with Sam Raimi because your dates were not interested in having intercourse with you. And conversely, they were not interested in having intercourse with you because of your obsession with Sam Raimi. This is my final diagnosis.
-ZB:
I know you think I am a zombie because of the films I loved as a child. But in truth I loved those films because I was dead myself. And it is not Raimi you mean. His magnum opus was Evil Dead II, one of the very few domestic foreign films. You meant George Romero. But my eternally correcting your ignorance concerning these people does not mean I am defending them. Romero is spoken of with detest and… gnawing… hunger in my circles. Genuine zombies are not an audience that tolerates shock cinema, let alone factual inaccuracies.
-Dr. Laan:
How has this… Tom Savini… misinterpreted your… race? Is race the politically correct term? Or species? Heritage? Radical political fringe group? [By this point it should be clear Dr. Laan is intentionally provoking ZB. His motivation is to get him angry and reveal his delusions stem from an obsession with the Romero trilogy. His face cannot conceal his delight.]
-ZB:
[barks out in anger] Romero!! Not savini!! Savini was the special effects makeup 378
wizard!! Romero directed the popular and enjoyable swill!! [ZB hangs head in defeat and frustration. Long pause…] I am beginning to suspect you are intentionally confusing their names to enrage me. To make it seem as if by correcting you I am defending those filmmakers who pale in comparison to the directors of elitist Italian art cinema. [growling] If I were not in this straightjacket… -Dr. Laan:
[Smiling exaggeratedly, savoring this; uses sarcastic goo-goo voice] But you are, aren’t you? Poor lost zombie baby! Are your straps and buckles too tight? Does poor lost zombie baby need his meds spoonfed by pretty nurse? How cute! [ZB reveals another flicker of stung-ness, one of the few rare cracks in his armor] Zombie Baby has a crush! Oooohh, the treats! Will he blush when I tease him about crush on pretty, nurturing Nurse that tucks him in at night?
-ZB:
[sighs, absolutely defeated, head hanging down] You’ve won. I will admit some admiration for the original Night of the Living Dead. The stylistic approach was stark and minimalist. (I adore minamilism). The speed of the zombies approach was accurate, and the racial commentary was progressive, with the black hero mistaken for a zombie and shot tragically in the final sequence. How appropriate for the time! The civil rights era was a crucial and universal concern, living or no. We cringe, however, at the attempts at scientific explanation for the living dead- if I am correct the film referred to some manner of space satellite crashing or radioactivity as the culprit. This is unacceptable. In truth, there can be no explanations- this is very much part of our horror and our honor. It is said “When there is no more room in hell--
-Dr. Laan:
“--the dead will walk the earth.”
-ZB:
Very good. For once you didn’t mangle things. Well, even this closest of reasons is not true- as I told you before, the first thing you learn when you die is that there is no hell and no heaven. Only cold black.
-Dr. Laan:
You mentioned the speed of zombies in cinema. Say more about this.
-ZB:
I did?
-Dr. Laan:
Yes. You said of the Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead- -
-ZB:
[fully enraged] “ROMERO YOU ASSHOLE!!” [ZB lunges toward Dr. Laan but straightjacket inhibits movement and he falls curled to the floor.]
-Dr. Laan:
[unfazed and smiling, savoring this] –you said of the film that the speed of the zombies was accurate. If my obedient, submissive secretary has checked my facts correctly, I am to assume that the speed of the zombies in that film was generally quite slow.
-ZB:
That is our way.
-Dr. Laan:
Yet in my research for my journal article on your deranged fantasies, I have noticed a trend in modern cinema of zombies being portrayed as extremely fastmoving- more like rabid, feril animals than creeping persistent shamblers. Your response? 379
-ZB:
This is a painful thorn in the side of my people. We know of the trend and it makes us sick to our stomachs. We blame the general acceleration of technology and the worsening craving for instant gratification by the deluded populace. Speed is mistaken for fright value. If we are to believe the 28-days Later or the Resident Evil series or the recent big-budget remake of Dawn of the Dead, for example, the dead are frantic like businessmen late for an important meeting. In truth all schedules die witgh the heartbeat. The intense hunger for the living uis tempered with a paradoxical patience. There is no hurry in death. Neither is their glamour.
~ Scene Six: Why Brains? [We fade from black to cigar smoke illuminated brightly against black backdrop as usual. Pan to Drt. Laan, legs crossed in leather chair, ZB in straightjacket on floor in corner. (Classic psychoanalysis leather couch is used in therapy scenes initially, later in the film ZB is seen huddling in a corner on the floor.] -Dr. Laan:
Let’s begin today’s session by bringing the topic back to your compulsive obsession with brains. You must explain why… why is the brain the sole delicacy to be found in the human body?
-ZB:
I cannot easily explain that. It is an acquired taste. I could describe the exquisitely pleasurable culinary experience of the brain- the resistance and then the surrender of the hard shell of the skull. How it succumbs like a coy mistress to her suitor. The tenderness and succulence, the warmth, the rolls of corrugated grey flesh like a tangle of thick overcooked pasta. The earthy, sour aroma- the sheer juice dammit! The intoxicating pulse of blood pulsing more and more faintly. The blood, yes, but also the opaque and milky fluids- bitter alkaloidal enzymes the biological function of which is unknown. [ZB does aquick aside to the camera for next line] This twisted soliloquy is making me quite horny. Few would believe the remaining electrical impulses of the brain after death can be discerned by the discerning palette, but they can indeed- much like the tiniest sliver of poisonous flesh left on the blowfish by sushi chefs of the highest caliber, just enough to tingle the lips. The fabled “pineal gland” which most deny can be detected, and yet to the connoisseur it is like a rubbery oyster containing a citric nectar which is the soul itself to believe the more superstitious of my kindred from my youth in the good old humid New Orleans.
-Dr. Laan:
Stop right there. I can tell right now we will return to your savage, degenerate 380
desire to consume the brain during the course of our [sarcasm-] “journey of healing”. In fact, I predict that deviant, shameful tendency of yours will become the primary clue toward the precise psychiatric diagnosis and exposure to my colleagues of your full perversion. Without opening the can of maggots prematurely, I will inform you that in my professional opinion the deformed, pesrtilent aggression gland within your selfish, infantile Id has swollen with the puss of am obsessive, demented oral fixation, which for some unfathomable reason focuses not on the life-giving breast, nor the comfort of food, nor the soothing cigarette, but on the human brain. I cannot yet deduce why your sniveling worm of an Id, that fiendishly greedy amoeba, extends its selfish pseudopod, grasping, grasping desperately toward the cranium of others, but indeed I shall. As too I shall uproot the shameful subconscious desire and expose it to the cruel, hot glare of my own superego. -ZB: The Id is the pleasure principle. I am familiar with it. It is that part of the mind which works on the instinct. My instinct is to feast. It may be deviant; “maladaptive”, as you say, but it is not sublimated or repressed. In fact I am quite comfortable with it. It is my nature and my nurture. Blame my upbringing. [next line in a sarcastically vulnerable tone] By the way, do you have a box of tissues? -Dr. Laan:
There is truth in jest. I could give you a tissue to weep into, or to cue you with the offering of a tissue as the symbolic gesture that you have my permission to weep, as is the “trick of the trade”, but I will certainly not. We all had brutal, abusive swine for parents. My own took to drowning my pets regularly, for no reason whatsoever. [next line Dr. Laan looks to camera and muses to himself absentmindedly…] “But why always on my birthdays…?” [humor] But we are men, Yohan! [punches Yohan gently in shoulder in friendly fashion]. And strong, heroic men, my boy! Slaying dragons, saving princesses, and asking no reward! Despite what they tell you these days, a real man never cries. Thus my office lacks tissues and always will.
-ZB:
I will never cry, Doctor.
-Dr. Laan:
Good, good, my boy. Now tell me more about a good braibn. [next sarcastically] How does it make you feel?
-ZB:
I suppose the heart of the instinct, the desire, is knowing that this organ is the seat of the personhood of the victim. To eat a brain is to take into oneself the concrete dwelling place of all their idiosyncrasies- their individuality, te organ that contained who they are… were. A mouthful of bicep is merely meat. In comparison the brain is the Life.
-Dr. Laan:
[slams fist on table in rage; following dialogue very angry] Dear Yohan, you are the Ultimate Cocksucker! If you were (and you are not) a real zombie, your clan of rotters should clamp a rusty bear trap on your limp, decaying genitals and laugh as you chew the device off your own scrotum like a resourceful bunny! [sarcastically] “The brain is the Life”! I’ll show you the Life and the Fruit right 381
now! [Dr. Laan gets up, grinds out his cigar, andf takes a black velvet cloth of one of the two jars that have been sitting on the coffee table between them throughout this scene. The large glass mason jar contains a human heart, still beatiung. Yohan looks puzzled. Picks up jar, opens it, takes out beating heart, turns it round skeptically in his hand, smells it, shrugs disinterestedly, and replaces in in jar with indifference.] -Dr. Laan:
[Disgusted] You are more the cocksucker than Juan Valdez ever hoped to be.
-ZB:
Who is Juan Valdez?
-Dr. Laan:
[re-screwing the lid on heart jar and draping the black velvet cover over it again] Juan Valdez was a patient of mine during a sabbatical in Mexico. He was a coffee baron who was orally fixated beyond the scope of my powers to cure and had an unholy relationship [ with his donkey. The donkey filed sexual harassment charges and Juan’s will to live withered over the course of the scandal. His good name was so tarnished by slander that to drink espresso brewed from his coffee beans was an integral aspect of a traditional South American suicide.
-ZB:
[ignoring story] What’s in the other jar?
-Dr. Laan:
Something that will make you salivate like the obedient Pavlovian dog you are. Something you don’t deserve.
-ZB:
Don’t tease me Doctor.
-Dr. Laan:
Very well. [Dr. Laan removes velvet cloth from brain jar with a dramatic flourish and forcibly holds ZB back from it, bitchslapping him. The Docor takes brain jar and caresses it seductively with as grin.]
-ZB:
[forcefully-] Give me! Or I will have your swollen egotistical fresh one first and then the specimen preserved in brine!
-Dr. Laan:
Do you like pickled eggs, Yohan?
-ZB:
[strangely calmly, caught of guard by the question] With beer, yes.
-Dr. Laan:
This brain is pickled in much the same process. The hint of the salty sea, the vinaigrette… [swooningly, almost singing] “Oooohh the treats!
-ZB:
[restraining himself, eyes like lasers on brain jar, which Dr, Laan finally unscrews, removes brain, lets ZB lick his finger for taste. ZB sighs, eyes roll briefly back in his head orgasmically, then lunges with his mouth, almost biting Dr. Laan’s finger as Dr. pulls his finger away just in time.
-Dr. Laan:
Merely state that you are a deluded fraud who has never had intercourse 382
with a woman. [ZB struggles, contemplates, weighs options.] -Dr. Laan:
[continuing] …and that you are a George Romero fanboy! [camera locks on ZB’s expressionless face for a long while, an uncomfortable, still silence.]
-ZB:
[Silence…] [Dr. Laan eventually shrugs, tosses the brain to ZB as he sits rocking in the corner. Dr. Laan picks up his hat from the hat rack and puts on his trenchcoat, flicks off the lightswitch to his office, and walks out as ZB hunches over to feed messily and noisily in his straightjacket, as we fade to black.]
~ -14THE CURSE OF THE FOUR-LEAF CLOVER Rain. Killing time, waiting for Guido as usual. A little elf in the whole nine yards - pointy shoes, pointy hat, pointy ears... (what is it with elves and pointy shit? Only a God we never made could know...) So this elf scurries up, he’s chomping on a cigar and pulls out a switchblade (snikt), says, "Hey Meester, you with me to sell ass for glass now," and I'm like, "Slow down you little freak. First, whose ass is being peddled here and just what kind of 'glass' are you talking about?" The thing starts bouncing up and down and giggling, "You know! You know!" (I did.) It (he? It?) squeals and then turns abruptly serious and flings itself around my neck, alternately kissing me and brandishing its blade. "You go with me now- sell ass for glass, little massage parlor in Red Light District of Hyperspace called 'Spice Harem', or I slit your throat soon as look at you (giggle)." I figure Guido will leave me hanging for a few hours and I could use the action so I scoot the elf up around my shoulders and we head through fog and rain down the eternal winding cobblestone streets of Neo-Surreal London to the Spice Harem. Thunder applauds us like a raven's omen. The weather was as cruel a mistress as my mood was grim and the lime wedges in the Coronas at the Spice Harem bar were hardly squeezed whatsoever. A storm is brewing outside and the nostalgia meter is revving up into the Red Zone in direct proportion to my Corona intake. "Bartendress!" I call out. "I'll need something with more balls than this watery swill. Run me a tab on Guinness and I'll also need to hold a serious conference with the Captain." "Morgan?" she asks. I nod. "Just the one," I agree solemnly, taking off my Joe Buck 383
cowboy hat, wet with acid rain, to reveal my bald head. The bartendress, a Swedish blonde with the kind of bosom that makes a strong man weak and a weak man revert to babbling infancy, cocks an eyebrow. "Liquor before beer..." she begins. "You're in the clear," I finish. "Beer before liquor, never been sicker. Spare me the limericks. Just line 'em up and look pretty." She shrugs and bends down for ice, revealing cleavage like an ocean of warm milk and daydreams. A bevy of harlots swarm the bar and make crude propositions, which I summarily accepted (on credit). The harlots seem to regard the elf as some kind of hero and hang on his shoulder, croon unspeakable slander in his pointy ear. Yes, elves can mix a mean Pina Colada. Surely they can flirt with necrophilia and even embrace cannibalism, but can they get tickets to a good Rob Zombie concert? We all head up to a room, Swedish bartendress included, and kick the Living Shit out of some gentlemen scholars engaged in an ethnobotany conference. One of the sluts breaks out a Ouija board and pours some pink powder onto it before we turn on the strobe light and someone busts out the Technic 1200's. We join hands for the seance. And then I glimpse The Moth, and know its' going to be a long night... You know the one - the flitting of that same moth you always see at the exact same point in cyclic time, surely too synchronous to be coincidence, like finding yourself once again going through your pockets as a trip comes on, looking for something (probably a lighter) so crucially important that all will be well if found, and yet we are in a loop still and not quite sure what the precious misplaced object even was, or if it mattered. Thing is that it's the same damn lighter that sneaked away from all of us, every time, and fumbling through pockets as The Power comes down on you too heavy too soon, no chance that that cigarette will cut through The Heavy and afford even a brief last window of clear thought or intention, that is if you could just find that fucking lighter, and then you glimpse that same moth out of the corner of your eye and roll your eyes. "Here we go again," and "We've been here before, exactly as it is now." Always be prepared. In ten minutes, just as the vibe was getting nice and spooky, one of the bruised and bloodied ethnobotanical scholars opens the door and stumbles in, muttering something about having forgotten his spectacles. The elf and I share a glance of shared understanding, as if to say wordlessly to each other, "Should you get him or should I?" I guess the elf decided he had a wee bit more of the old whoop-ass to distribute, so he hotrails one final line of the pink powder (what the fuck was that shit, anyways?) and then he gets up and strolls over to the old gentleman, hopping up on him and putting his short arm around the shoulder of the man, whispering in a tone of confidence just between us men, "You want spend night with Freaky Lindsy, not call her 'freaky' cuz she does needlepoint!" The elf gestures at Lindsy, who smiles crazily back and flashes a peace sign, stars and turntables in her eyes, mouthing silently the words "I do do needlepoint," and winking. She's the girl all the bad boys want. The ethnobotanist stammers and stutters, blushes as he reaches for his broken spectacles. It was then that Freaky Lindsy slithers up to the poor bastard and runs her finger slowly down his tweed coat, down to his crotch, her teeth morphing liquidly into fangs. "Heh, well, I do say-" begins the ethnobotanist, but is cut short by Freaky Lindsy kicking him hard in the nuts with her stiletto and the elf slicing clean off one of his arms with a single slash of his switchblade. Out of the blood-spurting stump immediately extends a thin, manyjointed robotic arm made of petrified light-fibers, holding in mechanical insectoid fingers a treaty delineating certain political strategies and probable future timeline bifurcation extrapolation equations, detailed instructions for intra-muscular ketamine injection procedure, and a hearty, 384
eloquent declaration of shamanic independence. The elf scans the treaty, his eyes widening, whispers, "Fuck me running!" in pretend awe, then shits on the floor and uses the treaty to wipe his ass. Offended to the point of sheer madness, the robotic arm of the ethnobotanist grabs Freaky Lindsy by the hair and swings her around the strobe-lit room like a helicopter. The other sluts advance and start ripping huge chunks of flesh off the ethnobotanist with their fanged teeth, but beneath the blood and gore more robotic mechanical structures reveal themselves, until only a grizzled, freshly-flayed biomechanoid with an immense erection stands in a pile of loose fleshshards in the nauseous flickering of the strobes; the flickering of the strobes which will never end. I'm getting bored registering the flux of Time-Atoms composing the scene of this ultraviolence, and although choice cuts from Plastikman's minimalist techno classic "Sheet One" is being spun into an atmospheric glitch-core remix of "The Best of Cindy Lauper" on the Technics 1200's by an enormous black centipede, I'm in the mood for something more along the lines of "Voodoo You" by the Lords of Acid. I keep checking my stopwatch for the exact time, as it is almost midnight, December 31, 2011. I know Guido the Leech will be at least three hours late, but the predictions of a certain T. Mckenna indicate that if the multiverse is not exactly scheduled to explode in a stardust memory on New Year's Day 2012, there will at least be some transition to a form of synthesis from which Guido may be unable to extract himself. Ah, poor Guido - I knew him well, but by 3 AM the rat bastard may be nothing more than a modulation in the substance of novelty imploding in on itself towards the infinitesimal assemblage point. This would be all well and good if I wasn't dopesick for H. Indeed, I've been through the desert on a horse with no name and let me tell you, ain't no camel's hump with water inside I sliced off four score and twenty of those fuckers and not a drop to drink. The biomechanoid is daintily and in vain trying to past together shreds of the shitsmeared treaty, but the pink powder seems to be clamping down on my brain like a steel beartrap, and those fucking rainbow serpents are not only spiraling lazily again but smiling mockingly at me with faint, mildly suggestive flickers of their hideous innuendo-laden forked tongues. This is about all I can take. "Humanoids must report for M-M-M-Mantification to the Chancelor of the M-M-MMantatorship," the biomechanoid drones in a glitchy stutter. "Shut your proboscis you Glitchy Cocksucker!" I howl at the thing, which the sluts are dismantling as efficiently as pit-stop attendants at the Indy 500. Electric wrenches buzz dreamily. Never was much for the races, but you know it's a low-ride Surf Safari with a babe on the arm in my Ferrari, so long as the foggy cobblestone winds. Slow ride, take it easy, I think languidly. "Languid" is a word that cannot be overused. Fuck, it means "slow as syrup" but I like the word enough to call a glass-rush languid if the mood strikes me, as it has been known to do. I dial my landlord of the "1-800-Dial-a-Fool" hotline which I use normally only for phone-sex with your relatives, and got Smitty the Squid Vedanta on the line. "Smitty-baby! Whassup Baby-Girl?" (I call my landlord "Baby-Girl" for kicks. He hates it.) "You been kickin' it O.G. style?" (O.G. is an abbreviation of "Original Gangsta", you poor, meek souls.) But seriously, speaking of , the whores were trying to convince the elf creature to "get off in the bum" (?) with the biomechanoid's detached mecha-schlong. The elf put off a struggle that would warm the heart of any homophobic macho frat boy, but eventually relented to submit and melt in a delicious, yet perverse and Godless surrender to forces so sinister they should only be hinted at while as Cleopatra the Bartendress (not her real name) positioned the robotic device firmly into 385
place on her interchangable strap-on dildo holster. What ensued was neither Christian, nor was it Pagan, but such things as would turn the stomach of an undead tapeworm played themselves out to the inevitable savage climax. "Smitty-baby, what kind of creepshow are you running here? ...You know damn well what I'm talking about! Those fucking neon rainbow serpents nesting in the walls of my apartment have been spiraling lazily again and now they've followed me to the Spice Harem! The fucking things are multiplying, “bro”. I know you're behind this, you sniveling sissy-boy! ...I expect an exterminator by midnight!" The fucker said he would see what he could do, but I thought I caught the word "hallucinations" in his disgruntled grumbling. The séance produced a range of apparitions and phenomena that whet my metaphysical appetite, but other appetites were turning the corner and making a run for close second. I threw Cleopatra over my shoulder caveman-style and headed out to the dismal grimness of a reality teetering ever closer to the brink of banal nihilism. "Hey Meester!" (Sweet Mary, what next?) The elf tossed me his switchblade, which I noticed was embossed with a four-leaf clover, and called out, "You may need this. Word on dusty street is Guido has been dipping into the absinthe again." We shared a glance of shared understanding, as if to say "You just can't win." I shook my head languidly and stepped out into the rain.
~
-15LA CLASH DE LES TROLLOPS [The following is an account written by the notorious voodoo maid known as “Spacepants”.] So I burst in on Chrissy in the bathroom of the Chancellor's Suite of the Spice Harem as she was shooting up. You could say the funny part was she was still wearing her damn roller skates. I mean, who blasts off in skates?! Ghod! But I wouldn't call it funny at all. Cuz I knew she was just tweaking. "Fucking Christ, Chrissy! What are you doing to yourself?!" She looked up at me midshot beneath her cute pigtails with the expression of a doe caught in the headlights: a mixture of fear, shame, and the slightest tinge of devilish pleasure in being caught in the act like the "bad girl" she wanted me to perceive her as, perhaps even a hope I would just shrug my shoulders and 386
ask her to tie me up (and not S&M style either; I mean tie me up). See, I'm kinda like a big sister to Chrissy (hmm, no... that would make the sex we have incestuous)... so let's just say I'm like her dominatrix role model. I wasn't born with the title "Spacepants": I earned it. (My real name, by the way, is Cindy von Fishhooker.) Part of coming from a long line of German dominatrix witches (we're called "Replicons" for short) is being able to put your warm, human heart aside and knowing when the maternal role of care and nurturing just doesn't cut it. "This is how you pay respect to Mama Aya?!" I howled like the she-wolf I was ready to transform into at any second (being a lycanthrope as all Replicons are). I slapped Chrissy hard against her cheek. She lost her balance and nearly fell off the toilet, causing the rubber tie around her pale arm to snap off and spring with elastic fervor into my eye, which only enraged me further. She had lost all control of her rig (that's a "syringe" to you shamans), which hung from the engorged vein of her inner elbow like a bloodsucking glass leech. "You CUNT!" screeched Chrissy, wildly scratching at me with the long, black nail polish painted talons of her left hand, in a half-hearted attempt to claw my eyes out, but she only managed to draw some blood from a superficial scratch on my massive left breast. I could smell a catfight coming on, so I touched my fingers to the fresh blood trickling down my heaving bosom, then licked my fingers clean. (The taste of my own blood is the surest way to enflame the Primal Bitch-in-Heat within me and send a crazed bloodlust surging through my circulatory system.) Chrissy's circulatory system, unlike my own which was surging with that wacky, crazed natural venom I knew so well and loved, was in the throes of a vicious withdrawal, and she could hardly put up much of a fight while at the same time trying to salvage the shot she so desperately craved, or so I thought... But events turned a grim corner as the wheels of her roller skates swung at lightning speed into my pussy. Let me tell ya- if I were male, that would have been the end of the fight right there and my balls would have been smashed like the grapes of wrath into the wine of remorse. Luckily, I'm a chick, and a leather-clad whip-wielding Hellbitch at that: a Hellbitch who wouldn't allow some Rainbow Brite panty-wearing 18-year-old ditz to get the upper hand in a catfight. Meow! I mean, just where does she get those Rainbow Brite panties anyways? From some long-canceled cartoon show lingerie catalog? Now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind a pair myself... hmm. But none of those fashion musings now: back to the action! Well, it seems that in the time it took for me to recover from the roller skate wheels pounding into my Holiest of Holies, Chrissy was attempting to "register". Now, for all you new-age vegans who are blessed by knowing naught of such naughty things, "registering" means pulling back the plunger of a rig (syringe) to suck some blood into the chamber wherein lurks the "sprackle sauce" (methamphetamine fluid), y'know: just to make sure you've hit a vein, as Chrissy evidently had, because the crimson flash and her mascara-encrusted eyes widened in gleeful anticipation. "Terrence Mckenna would be ashamed of you!" I yelled in blood-curdling vibrato, and swung my whip skillfully around Chrissy's neck as if I were some lasso-wielding cowgirl. At this point the needle popped out of Chrissy's vein in the midst of our heated struggle and was sent whizzing across the bathroom like some kind of Hell Dart, straight into the thirdeye chakra of a little gnome who had been whacking off to the catfight and giggling mischievously at my Terrance Mckenna reference. "Mckenna was a fag!" exclaimed the gnome before the tweak discharged violently from 387
the needle into his third-eye chakra and an avalanche of pure white lightning tweak energy swept him reeling away into a private artificial paradise in the corner. Chrissy gazed upon the gnome with an expression of such tragic envy that she nearly forgot my demon wing-leather whip was coiled around her neck. And where do you buy a demon wing-leather whip, you ask? You poor, feeble charlatans! You can't buy one: you have to follow in the footsteps of generations of Replicon Queens and embrace lycanthropy, thereby transforming at will into she-wolf form and slaying more leathery-winged demons than sweet little sissy Timmy Leary could shake his magic pixie-dust wand at. Then you rip the wings off those damned demons with your wolfen fangs, bring them to some rather thuggish leprechauns who live under the streets of Brooklyn, where the rare demon-leather of the wings is oiled, stretched taught (pickled for taste), and cut into long, thin strips... strips which make for the finest bullwhips in all of Hyperspace. "You wouldn't understand!" squealed Chrissy. "I need it!" "I understand, Honey," mumbled the gnome in wholehearted agreement through a crazed skeleton grin; but I kicked the little tweaker hard in the nuts with my stiletto heel and he didn't dare corrupt my lovely Chrissy any further, not in front of me. Well, Chrissy was turning a tad blue, so I loosened the whip and took her poor, pale arm, down which a long, sad streak of red was making its wearing journey from that point on her inner elbow (which she had always likened to a hungry bird chirping, chirping eternally for a wretched worm, a hit) and I lifted her arm to my lips. I lifted her pale arm to my full, red lips and began to kiss that intimate spot on her inner elbow which had almost been graced with that avalanche of pure white light imbued in the clear liquid sprackle sauce within the chamber of a rig which was now dangling from the forehead of a gnome. Yes, I began to kiss that spot on Chrissy's inner elbow, in fact licked away the blood streaked there and felt tears of pity run down the blush on my cheeks. "You don't need it!" I sung to her. "Mama Aya is what you need." At that point the catfight turned in a somewhat erotic direction and I noticed that Chrissy had begun to tenderly, ever so tenderly, suckle my soon-to-be erect nipple. I cradled her and petted her head while she suckled, happy to participate in the healing warmth and gentleness that only true lesbians can know, and whispering, "There, there, my poor little tweakette, it's okay..." Chrissy paused in her suckling (which was blossoming steadily from tender to seriously kinky) and looked up at me, a bit fearful. "But Spacepants, do you know why I'm afraid that I'll always be a dirty junky? Because I have to self-medicate with meth to block the pain of my PTSD!" "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?" I asked. She nodded. There was silence for a moment while I pondered seriously whether Chrissy was just making excuses for her addiction or whether this was truly a valid explanation. If only I could make her see that Mama Aya could heal any childhood trauma within her; if she only surrendered to the healing catharsis... perhaps, perhaps...? But then the gnome ran over, nudged its way between our tender embrace, and slapped Chrissy. "We've all got PTSD, Honey. It's called the human condition!" Then he skipped away merrily and was never seen again.
388
~ -16DARLING EUROPA [Being Non-Sequential Fragments of An Unfinished Interactive Novella]
-Chapter OneThe Café Ennui These grim days you can barely summon the strength to get out from under your bed in the morning. Yet somehow you drag your weary body like a limp ragdoll out into the cold. Fate is a cruel mistress this particular morning (afternoon rather) because you have overslept again. Luckily you are engaged neither in education nor employment, nor have you had any social obligations in recent memory. None would notice your absence, let alone mourn your death. Still, you vowed last night to begin a program of strict discipline and had set your alarm for 6:00 AM, at which time you were to drink carrot juice and go for a long run. As always, you silenced your alarm and burrowed deeper into the nest of tangled blankets beneath your bed, suckling the hour before stinging light would splice through the blinds. This charade has been going on for almost four years, every evening finding you a dictator with iron fist, everymorning a tragic clown. As you grab your hat and step into the howling winds, you shake your fist at the heavens. There is no response. In moments you trace the familiar path through the winding cobblestone streets of Frankenhaven and sit at the Café Ennui with espresso in hand. The caffeine evokes some faint lingering memory of a feeling your heart once knew… a time when the hunt for a pretty girl or an idea quickened your pulse; a time when The Feminine was not yet discovered to be barbed like rusted wire and when figuring something out was possible and promised true reward. Treasures were hidden round every corner. The caffeine is like an artificial echo from such a time, a meager consolation you cling to like a ghost. From your perch at the corner table, within the soothing cocoon of jazz music playing on the phonograph, you haunt your own life. A man in black suit and sunglasses walks in and sits at your table.
DO YOU… 389
A)
Kiss the man?
[turn to page Chapter 6, page 13] -orB) Toss your steaming coffee at the man’s face? [turn to Chapter 2, page 4]
~ -Chapter TwoThe Terraformer’s Guild of Frankenhaven The black-suited man calmly removes his sunglasses and shakes the last drops of Espresso from them. He then unfolds a handkerchief from his breast pocket and calmly wipes his wet face. “For future reference I take cream and two sugars,” he says dryly. You first met the black-suited man years ago during your brief stint as a secretary with the Terraformer’s Guild of Frankenhaven, a small group of retired physicists and astronomers who met at The Café Ennui. Terraforming, as you learned, is a theoretical process by which a planet inhospitable to life is turned from barren wasteland to a lush world with an atmosphere and climate similar to Earth. The possibility of Terraforming and colonizing Mars came into vogue in the early 21st century, but it was deemed unfeasible due to the immense technological hurdles required to affect climate change on a planetary scale- titanic nuclear-powered reactors the size of mountains consuming billions of tons of the natural resources necessary to produce a breathable atmosphere. During your time as a secretary at the Guild, between transcribing lectures dictated on tape cassette and licking envelopes, you were privileged to witness the Eureka moment in which Franz Heidenflaggen made the crucial breakthrough at the very corner table in the Café Ennui at which you now sit… Franz realized a certain species of genetically engineered bacteria, of which a byproduct is oxygen, if introduced to Mars could replicate and over millennia could organically (and elegantly) create an oxygenated environment. Unfortunately, before this theory was introduced to the international scientific community, darker forces came into play- namely, the black-suited man, who was deployed by a shadowy and diabolical secret world government to recruit you as the spokesman for a disinformation campaign designed to discredit Terraforming. “Care for a smoke?” asks the black-suited man.
DO YOU… 390
A)
Step outside for a smoke?
[Turn to page 13] -orB)
Attempt to kill the black-suited man?
[turn to page 26]
~ -Chapter SixMacabre Surrender You lean over as if to whisper something in the black-suited man’s ear but instead quickly cup your hand round the back of his neck and pull him toward you. Though you feel the rough scratch of stubble, you show no sign of hesitation when met by the sandpapery texture. You are as open-minded as the next guy, but you take little pleasure in the black-suited man’s resistance crumbling and then melting like chocolate- the sexual advance is merely a calculated ploy to prey upon his sole weakness- his hopelessly unrequited love for you. You force yourself to continue the macabre surrender, bringing to vivid life dreams the black-suited man has harbored since he first laid eyes on you years ago. Soon a guttural revulsion begins to churn in your stomach and pre-vomit saliva releases plentifully from glands in your mouth as the black-suited man’s lips part all too willingly. Your eyes flick anxiously to the cash register of the café, behind which, exactly as you feared, is Delta- the waitress whom you have a crush on, amused by your shameless display of wickedly deviant homoeroticism. Finally the forbidden drama subsides for a moment and you come up for air. “Can this be real?” the black-suited man whispers, breathless. “It can if you give me the MJ-12 file.” you reply coldly. It dawns on the black-suited man that your kiss was a bribe intended to procure his top-secret documents rather than his heart, yet he hungers for more, even if it must be bought with classified information. The abrupt crumbling of sweet hope in his eyes and his pitiful willingness to take what crumbs of affection you are willing to dole out somehow consoles you, healing your near-fatally wounded security in your sexual identity. He agrees to meet you tomorrow night at the Red Plush, a local wine bar and lounge, with the MJ-12 file. He is unaware that as your souls intermingled, you placed a tiny tracking device on his collar. The aroma of aftershave lingers in the air.
DO YOU… A)
Ask yourself if some deeply hidden part of you was aroused by that? 391
[Turn to page 21] -orB) Reaffirm your masculinity by asking Delta the waitress? [Turn to Chapter 29, page 35]
~ -Chapter twenty-NineA Reaffirmation of Masculinity You ask Delta out on a date. She says yes. You are swept up in the swell of romance. It is, appropriately, “swell”.*
*DELTA PORTRAIT As you push Delta on a swing in the park, your noble hands lingering on the achingly precious small of her back, her cell phone rings. The ringtone cuts ominously through the joy in the air like a Belgian Muskrat, rabid and frenzied as if it were howling directly toward your groin, launched from a taught catapult by an angry gnome. This is due, yes, to the fact that Delta’s ringtone is “Hit me baby one more time” by Brittany Spears, and you summarily vow to never speak to her again, but the ominosity of the ringtone also has much to do with the fact that somehow you know it is Mr. Peterson on the line, Delta’s boss, and that he will demand she go immediately to Prom Island, a place of work for her far more grim than even the Café Ennui. “I’m sorry.” She says, but she is already straightening her collar and putting on her public face. “Be gone filthy whore!” you shout, but she knows you love her and that this is only your standard response to her Brittany ringtone. “I must indeed get myself gone…. There has been another incident at Prom’. Have to clean up.” She shrugs casually, though she has every reason to expect that not only will she not return from Prom Island, but that if she fails to “clean up” it could mean the death of every mammal on the planet. Prom Island is a bioweapons research facility. Put the pieces together, stupid! “Let me come with you then.” you propose. She refuses, then you tell her you’re the man and she has no choice but to allow you to protect her, but that she DOES have the choice of weather to swoon while you do it or not. Dealing with these ladies is like asking a child if they want to wear their red boots or their blue boots to induce them connivingly to get dressed and face the Cold World you never could when they would prefer to stay inside and play with slime. 392
You gotta give em a choice. Very well, she says. Her eyes mourn you, rather prematurely you feel, and you two have blown the popsicle stand. The wind cries Mary.
DO YOU… A) Don Delta’s extra biohazard suit? [turn to Chapter 79, page 160] -orB) Just go in your denim jacket because in it you feel like Bruce Springsteen? [turn to Chapter 79, page 160]
~ -Chapter ThirtySeptic Shock Soon you are furiously mopping the icewater that is steadily streaming from beneath the freezer where they keep their diabolical germs on ice… or at least intend to. There is precious little ice remaining inside the freezer (though a persistent a decent-sized cube in your heart) because the island’s power went out in the storm, the storm which paradoxically taunts the electrically null island laboratory with a wilder and more portentous electricity of its ownlightning. Delta’s sweet face is illuminated like a flashlight ghost-story prop under the chin round the campfire you never had and then fade to black again, only the glint of fear in her eyes remaining. Thunder follows, cutting her majorly worried announcement short so that all you here is “Good Lord, the [thunderous thunder] has overflown.” “Hold on-“ you say annoyed but patient. “I’m counting between the lightning and thunder each time… if the count gets longer the storm is moving away!” “NEVER MIND THAT YOU FOOL!” she spits back, your meteorological skills lost on her. “THE DAMN [thunderous thunder] has overflown!!” “The what?” “The sewer.” “Oh shit.” You agree, no pun intended, and none suspected.
DO YOU… A) Valiantly save Delta from shit-drenched viruses in the name of Chivelry and Romance? 393
[Turn to Chapter 102, page 334] -orB) Say “Fuck this shit!” and head out to the Amazon Rainforest in the name of Heroism and Adventure? [turn to Chapter 147, page 2070]
~ -Chapter One-Hundred and forty-SevenHellbroth The natives call you “Snitchslayer”. You came from a bad home and turned wrong. It was four months ago, squatting in an abandoned church with your landlord Smitty "The Carebear" Vedanta (not his real name), that began a chain of events which would lead to your discovery of and inevitable indoctrination into The Satanic Witchcraft Torture Cult. You were into drugs and had been dealing this concoction called "Hellbroth", which is a mixture of ayahuasca, datura, ketamine, methamphetamine, and good PCP. It sold like hotcakes. You had so many custies (customers) coming to the old crumbly church at all hours of the night, sweating and shivering like degenerate junkie freaks on a leash in heat, that you had to move out to the Amazon rainforest to escape our own deranged clientele. You built a hut out of banana trees. Set up shop. Your new customer base was far more deranged than your last, however, especially since a deranged madman calling himself "Zoth the Warrior" had started a neo-shamanic church and proclaimed that Hellbroth was the highest sacrament, a way of communicating with angels and demons. (It may be that, but you and Smitty only use it to get in a good headspace for doing crimes.) You and Smitty like to pillage and vandalize the small Rainforest villages together, twisted out of your minds of Hellbroth, leaving a trail of pentagrams and anarchy symbols spraypainted on every available surface. But the dudes who became Hellbroth addicts take this shit seriously. They all wear black witchy robes with hoods and demanded more Hellbroth than you can easily supply. They also want to hang around the hut with you and get wasted, but they are no fun- they light candles and incense and sit around in circles chanting all manner of perverse and Godless hymns in rhyme. By the time you and Smitty relocate to your new campsite down by the river these witchcraft fuckers have made plans for you and it’s a slim chance that you can escape without being deified as some kind of Pagan God figures.
DO YOU… A) Escape into the deeps of the humid jungle forever and live as savages? 394
[turn to Chapter 181, page 1,785] -orB) Remain as village witchdoctor to await the foretold coming of “She Who Shall Come and the Beast of White? [turn to Chapter 312, page 4,012]
~ -Chapter Three-Hundred and Eighty-FourShe Who Shall Come It is a cold and grim evening around the campfire when you meet KraftWitch. She is a gorgeous, voluptuouse wench with black hair, a broom, and a well-behaved polar bear on a chain. "My name is KraftWitch," she says in a thick German accent. "You crazy bitch!" howles Smitty. "How did you find us down here and who the fuck are you?!?" “I am the Chosen One- High Priestess of the Satanic WitchCraft Torture Cult.” She replies, suffused with royalty. “I realize the name we have chosen for our organization is controversial, but the idea is to shock those squares without a sense of humor who would condemn us. It is the grim truth that our Pagan beliefs and behaviors are so terminally misunderstood that we may as well call ourselves the worst things that the Establishment suspects us of being. It is sarcasm, dammit!” “So you aren’t an evil demon like the natives say?” you ask, reminding yourself not to trust the village elders’ superstitions. “We are not Satanic,” KraftWitch continues, “but our rejection of Christianity is fierce. We do not practice torture, although some completely consensual S+M rituals are involved with the later stages of Datura magic. We in no way endorse bestiality without serious training in power plants.” “What’s with the bear?” asks Smitty. "Nevermind that," she replies. "I have reason to believe an ancient Egyptian Serpent God named “Snothsssnizzz” is operating through you two boys. I chose to indoctrinate you two pathetic degenerates into the inner circle because it was told “Two Fools Shall Come to Bringeth the Sacrement”. I can already sense that you are unusually receptive to Kundalini- the Serpent Power. I come from a long line of German Dominatrix Witches and I can sense these things! It is time for the indoctrination ceremony!” The thing about KraftWitch* is that she is an crack conissuer, but the funny part is that the contents of her backpack are in the form of one single freebase crackrock the size of a 395
basketball, which she occasionally takes out and chip away at it with a hammer and chisel. The other thing about KraftWitch is that she fucks animals. She unchains the damned polar bear with her and in the show she put on (which is thoroughly enjoyable), she believes she is somehow harnessing the primal power of the beast and converting it into magical energy. Smitty and you, on the other hand, simply think of it as "a good time".
~the end~
*KRAFTWITCH Congratulations! You just reached ending #67! Why don't you return to page one and try again? Your Fate will be different depending on which choices you choose!
~ -17HOW THE WORLD WAS MADE FROM BASS -Part OneThe Birth of the WorlD Before there were people there was Music. People think they make music but they are made from music. Before there was music there was only Sound. And before there was Sound there was only Silence. Back when there was only Silence there was nothing else- no Earth, no Sky, no People. Because these things are all made out of Music. All of a sudden, there was Sound. No one made Sound. It just happened. This was first miracle. Sound was like lava- heavy as stone, burning hot, and as red as blood. Sound was everywhere at once, and was all one thing, flowing everywhere. No one was there to hear it. If someone heard Sound they would die, because it was so loud. Then Sound started to move. Sound wriggled and twisted and writhed and wobbled itself into a shape. Now Sound had become a fat, dark green, thick, wobbly inchworm- ten-thousand 396
miles long in both directions and a hundred miles tall. It was hungry but there was nothing else to eat so it began eating its own tail. Now Sound had a new name- it was called Bass. This was the second miracle. Bass was born along with its brother Time. This is hard for People to remember because they think everything is inside Time. But Time itself is made from Bass. And because Bass was in the form of a circle, so too does time forever returns to the beginning in loops. But people don’t know this because they are too small to see it. Now, Bass was lonely, because it was all there was. So Sound laid an egg that would hatch to keep Bass company. Bass was very hungry, but it did not eat the egg because it was waiting to see what would hatch. One day the egg broke open and out flew millions of dragonflies with shiny neon wings. These dragonflies darted about Bass in a colorful swarm, leaving neon trails in the light. The dragonflies said, our name is Treble. Now Bass was happy because it wasn’t alone. When Bass started to grow older, spiny thorns burst out of its back. Each one pierced the sky in a row, some thin and silver, some thick and black. The thorns were called Percussion. This was the third Miracle. Then Bass laid another egg. Bass was very hungry but it did not want to eat the egg because it was waiting to see what would hatch. One day the egg broke open and out flew butterflies surrounded by a cloud of sparkly blue dust and glitter falling from their wings. The butterflies were called “Melody”. With Treble and Melody to keep it company, Bass was in a fine mood and felt generous. So he bit off a piece of his stomach and tossed it, and it was called “Earth”. Now Bass and Percussion and Treble and Melody began making sounds of all kinds. Bass made howls and growls which became beasts of the jungle. Percussion made clicking sounds which became insects. Treble made high pitched sounds that became bats and dolphins. Melody made chirping songs that became songs birds. Sometimes they made strange sounds that became animals which people cannot see and have no name for. Each time Bass and Percussion and Treble and Melody made sounds, a piece of wing or spine or flesh went with the animal. There were two more parts that made special sounds. The sound from the tongue of Bass gave a sound to animals which cannot be seen and a sound that cannot be heard. The second special sound was from one of the black spiny thorns that grew out of Bass’ back. Remember that these spines are called “percussion” and they were very special. So Bass plucked one of the spiny thorns out of its back, and as a very special secret gift, Bass hid it inside the skin of one of the animals. This animal was the goat. This gift was for a another animal to find that did not exist yet and would not come from Bass itself. Bass new that the new animal would cause lots of trouble and would in the future make Bass very sad. He hid the spine of percussion in the skin of the goat for the new animal to find after the conflict arose. Bass thought the new animal might at least deserve a chance to find this gift and use its magic to make peace. After having given so much of itself, Bass was tired, and treble and melody had to sing Bass to sleep with lullabies.
~
Part Two: 397
The New Animal Bass was awoken by a horrible ruckus. It seems the new animal had come about, and no one knew from where. It did not have a sound like the other animals, so it was very jealous. When it heard the others beautiful sounds, it would hit them with rocks and kill them. The new animal was called “Man”. Treble and Melody swooped down to Earth and they cried “Stop, Stop! We’ll give you a sound of your own. Wait here and we’ll get a sound for you.” They returned to Bass and asked “Please, we need a sound for this new animal. Give him a special sound so he’ll stop hurting the others.” So Bass said “Then take one of my teeth.” Treble and melody pulled and pulled and plucked out one of Bass’ teeth and took it to Man. This caused Bass great pain. Man was happy for a day, but the following night, he called to Treble and Melody. He said, “This is such a fine sound. Ask Bass for just one more.” Treble and Melody did not want to cause Bass any more pain, but they were afraid that Man would cause more trouble if he was not satisfied with his sound. So they flew to Bass, but they were afraid to speak to him. Bass said, “What is it? Why are you afraid? They said “The new animal is not happy and wants one more of your teeth.” Bass said, “Never before have I ever given one animal two sounds. I will give them one more tooth, but if they have too many sounds, they will not be like the other animals any more. They will have Language. So they plucked another tooth from Bass and again it caused him great pain. This went on for many nights until one night, when Treble and Melody asked for another tooth, Bass said “I have no more.” Bass was very weak. He said “I’m going away now. I’m going under the ocean to try to heal.” By this time Man had many, many sounds, and all the sounds together formed Language. Man soon forgot where he received his sounds from, and he busied himself making stories and giving names to everything. Man grew very strong and filled the Earth and became very clever, but sometimes felt a loneliness he did not understand.
~
Part Three: The Tale of Frobro and the Hidden Spine One day, far above the octopus’ garden at the bottom of the ocean where Bass was healing, there was a ruby fruit jungle. In this thick jungle lived a tribe of People. By this time Man had all the sounds from all the teeth that Bass had given them, and all the sounds together had made language. But the People had forgotten long ago where they got there sounds. And 398
because they had forgotten Bass, who was so kind to them, there was something wrong with their hearts. Their hearts did not beat with a happy, steady rhythm like the animals but skittered clumsily. The rhythm of their heartbeat was frantic, jumbled, and stumbling over itself, and this gave People an ache in their chest and made them feel anxious all their days. Language had made People very clever, and People were very proud of themselves- of their fire and tools and huts and canoes and especially their bows and arrows. They told stories at night by their fires of the animals they killed and they drew pictures in caves down by the sea of battles between the tribes and which tribes were the strongest, and the kings of tribes had many wives and always had as much meat as they could eat. Sometimes the kings of the strongest tribes waged war and many tribes were killed. The tribes which made the best bows and arrows won and they stole the wives of the tribes that lost and gave them to their king. And they had a great feasts. This story is about a man from one tribe that lived far from the sea at the source of a long river. This tribe did not have many men, and it did not have the best bows and arrows but its people were a kind that even the strongest tribes were afraid because they would eat the flesh of the wounded warriors from the tribes they killed. The warriors this tribe killed were roasted alive like boars on a spit and anyone who heard their screams would move down the river toward the ocean. This tribes was called “NotGo” because all the other People had a law that no one could go upriver where they lived. The NotGo tribe had different feasts that were held at night instead of in the day and were not happy feasts like the other tribes. At these feasts they drank blue honey that had changed into a special drink which made them sick and let them talk to animals that no one else could see. The King of one of the NotGo tribe had two sons. One son was a warrior and the other son made drawings of the parts of the jungle where different plants grew. One night during one of the horrible feasts, the son who made drawings felt a strange emptiness inside him to which he just could not relate. He walked away from the feast and sat by the river and fell asleep. He had a dream where his father, the King, was laughing at him and pointing to his chest. His father, the king, was laughing at him because he would not eat the flesh of a man he had killed and cooked. The king kept laughing and then ordered his two sons to eat. The warrior son ate some and said it was good. The son who made drawings of parts of the jungle where there were different kinds of plants ate some and then felt sick. Then the drawingson looked down at his chest and there was only a huge empty hole with no heart inside, and this made the son so afraid he woke up screaming. He decided then that he would leave his father and brother and follow the river down to the sea and find a cave to live in by himself, and never go back to his tribe. And this is just what he did. This son was named Frobro, for he was a soul brother with a massive afro. After many many days and nights of walking, he was bit by a lizard on his foot. He knew the lizard that bit him was a yellow and red lizard and that it had put poison in his foot. He grabbed the lizard by its tail and would not let it get away but he did not kill the lizard. Frobro said to him “I know it is your nature to kill with your bite. But if you save me I will let you go.” The lizard said “I cannot save you. When I bit you I put my poison in your foot and in two nights your foot will turn blue and die. In three nights your leg will turn blue and die. In five nights your chest will turn blue and your heart will not beat, and you will go to the stars with your ancestors. But if you let me go I will tell you a riddle. And if you solve the riddle you will make powerful magic that will make all the children of your tribe and every other tribe and their children and their children happy forever.” Frobro laughed and said “If you can do this, I would have let you bite both my feet and both my hands! But you are surely lying.” 399
“I am not lying.” Said the lizard. “Listen to my riddle. Follow this river down to the sea. Then walk along the beach until you find a place where there is tall grass and rocky hills covered with thick fog. There is a herd of goats that live there. One of the goats is special, and you will know it because his coat shines like gold. Kill him and eat his flesh, but save his hide. It is in his hide that a secret gift was hidden by a great worm that made everything you see. The worm is called Bass, and he hid a secret gift in the skin of the goat so you will find it and make up for the hurt that Man has done to Bass long ago. But you must figure out how to use the gift. That is the riddle.” Frobro smiled and let go of the lizard, who ran away quickly and hid under a rock. Now Frobro was happy and didn’t care that he would die. Something about the way the lizard talked about this great worm called Bass made Frobro want bounce up and down and laugh like he was a child again. All Frobro wanted from that day on was to find the secret gift and find out how to use it. By the time Frobro got to the beach by the ocean his foot was blue and dead. He had to limp and drag his bad foot with him, but he used a staff to push him along the beach and he moved quickly, and still he smiled. By the time Frobro saw the tall grass on the rocky hills in the thick fog his leg was blue and dead, and he had to hop on one leg with his staff, and he was very thirsty, but still he smiled. Frobro wandered through the fog all day checking every goat to see what color its coat was, and as the sun was setting he sat down and gave up hope. He started to wonder if he would die before solving the riddle, or if the lizard had lied to him. But then a goat with a golden, shining coat brushed against him and laid down in his lap. Frobrow took an arrow he had dipped in the poison of a great yellow and red spider and put it to the neck of the goat. Frobro said “I am sorry to kill an animal as beautiful as you but I need to kill you for more than food. I am very hungry but I will die soon weather I eat you or not, because I am poisoned. But I must kill you for a secret gift that is in your skin.” The goat smiled and said “I was waiting for you to come for a long time. My meat is sweeter than any animal and I will gladly be a last meal for you. My hide is strong and will dry in the sun, but it will not become hard. It will stay rubbery and stretchy and in my hide you will find a long black spine that has been waiting for you since before any Man ever was. The Goat sang: “I am old, I am old. My coat is made of Gold. You found me before I died; In the sun you must dry my hide And in my skin is a spine; The long black spine from Bass It is for magic and my meat is for your last taste” Frobro pushed the arrow dipped in the poison of the great yellow and red spider into the neck of the goat. And he used a sharp rock to strip the golden hide from the goat. And the hide he tied to the branch of a tree to dry in the sun the next day. And he before it was too dark to see, he built a fire and cooked the meat of the golden goat, and it was the sweetest meat he had ever tasted. This was the last meal that Frobro ate before he died. The next morning Frobro woke up in the bright sun. He looked down and saw that most of his stomach was blue and soon the poison from the lizard would reach his heart. He was in great pain and he could not walk anymore. But the sun had dried the hide of the goat. And the 400
sun’s light shone through the hide and Frobro could see the outline of a long, sharp black spine in the skin. And he crawled closer and pulled the spine out of the hide of the goat. And it vibrated in his hand with a powerful resonance. It started to hum and speak to him. The Spine said: “BOOM BOOM BOOM YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO!” “BOOM BOOM BOOM YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO!” “I AM THE SPINE OF PERCUSSION AND ONLY I CAN SAVE YOU “BOOM BOOM BOOM YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO!” FroBro did not have time to think. He felt like his spirit was already flying to the stars with his ancestors. He saw his body from far away, and he saw his hands quickly take the goat’s hide and stretch it over a hollow tree stump, and tie the hide to the stump with a vine. And from far away he saw his hands beat on the skin of the goat, and the skin made a sound like the beating of a Man’s heart, but it was a steady and strong and happy rhythm, which man’s heart had not beat in because Man was selfish and took all of Bass’s teeth long ago. And Frobro beat on the goat’s skin stretched over the hollow stump for a long time, until the sun was high in the sky, before he died. The rhythm he made was loud and steady and all the goats ran about in circles and some children from the tribes that lived nearby followed the sound until they came to the rocky hills with the thick mist and the bounced up and down and laughed. The goat’s skin stretched over the hollow tree stump was called a Drum. And the children each killed a goat from the herd and dried their hides and made drums of their own. And the Spine of Percussion said: “BOOM BOOM BOOM YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO!
FOREVER AND FOREVER BOOM BOOM BOOM AND BASS WILL HEAL AND COME BACK TO YOU BOOM BOOM BOOM YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO BASS WILL HEAL AND GIVE MAN ITS KISS YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO SO BOUNCE……. TO……….THIS!” And in time Bass heard the rhythms of all the drums that the children had taught their tribes how to make and it awoke from its sleep at the bottom of the ocean and swam to the surface, and wobbled out onto the beach. And Treble and Melody were there to meet it and it wobbled and wobbled through the tribes of Man. And this was how Frobro brought Bass back from the bottom of the ocean.
~ 401
-18THE PEARL NECKLACE AND THE FINAL SMIRK *NOTE: The following are merely the deranged ravings scrawled on scrolls found in the cavern sanctuary of a crazed hermit madman from a frozen coast in the North… Time is frozen. Every instant is a pearl encoded in a river. Since the birth of Time, every instant has been recorded by and encoded in the “Memory” of Time itself. This is not to say there is some cosmic database waiting to be accessed by an omniscient narrator. The “Memory” of Time Itself is a highly elusive phenomenon, impervious to feeble analogies with computer or human memory. It is not easy to explain how the past IS just as real as it WAS when the light was its, but despite being bled nearly dry and abandoned by Time, cast to the ghastly remains of Frost Giants’ meatgrinders with the bones of the damned, it STILL lives. The meaning of the word “still” in this phrase contains multitudes of strange unsaid perspectives of ferocious magnitude and unwieldy portent. Yet to scale these strange peaks is right for us to do, for they are there, and it is true to stand from them and say the past STILL is. The survival of the past is a peculiar feat. We could say Time nearly slayed the Past but it limped to a secret den to heal. We could say that the Past has lost much blood and looks to us when we indulge in nostalgia for a transfusion. The vivid presence and relevance which imbues and defines the Now has drained away and left something weak, pale, technically real but without the REAL realness of the Now. We could say the past survived in its secret shelter and lead there a kind of life of its own, adapting to a very unique and specialized habitat. Its nest lies in the caves of a mountainous region which breaches the clouds. There, more encompassing perspectives on temporality are the norm. From there, the now-point at our mortal feet slips away like a banana peel; it becomes ever more and more “arbitrary” beneath us while forgotten memories become strikingly, astonishingly clear- more than perfect recall- cast now in gleaming steel, indestructible, with an objectivity that nearly blinds. Indeed, from there, the loves long lost were above all Real Souls And all the old flames did indeed exist straight to their bones; Feelings for them so forgotten even their lacking was erased are relived aching vivid, pulse once more to flush your face. There was a tingle in your throat so inexpressible back then The wind which did once kindle it Will surely come again. This chilly place we tell of is not “outside” Time. It is just further on down the horizon and upwards into the thin and squeamishly dizzying air such peaks are known for. Let’s go up for 402
now for an expedition and tend to the wide open, the frosty and uncomfortably more encompassing perspectives on temporality- for awhile. We’ll roam a terrain replete with snow and mountain goats with coiled horns and breathe an atmosphere which does not quite oxygenate our brains to prime. There is an emptiness that makes you clutch your scarf there, an emptiness of a sober kind, conducive to contemplation of subtle woes and the heaving sigh of aching transience. You find yourself finally and irrevocably adult- the nail in the coffin of a fuzzier kind of hope. An impenetrable solemnity and the sense of a wide and yawning gulf in which suchness, self-evidence, and idiosyncrasy ring out in all things like a gong. Clean. Sterile. Melancholy. The thoughts crackle like electrostatic in the void, fizzling out as fast as they flash aware. Here we may triangulate. Here we are to draw up maps of all we can survey quickly and retreat. It was but a reconnaissance mission. Context soothes when it is integrated, when it glows as unseen but felt womb, cradling the explicit. Context faced and confronted as an explicit habitat has stinging winds- this is as it should be and a clue to move along quickly and not set up camp there. We are not to linger there or ponder long, we are deft cartographers bound for more familiar, warmer shores. The Past which we surveyed on that craggy cliff, as it survives in that territory, is ITSELF the “Memory of Time”. This open air memory laboratory place has seemingly been unceremoniously abandoned by the vividness and life-force with which reality blooms itself into the present. The past is drained of life-force and is as jealous of Time’s affection for the present as a clinging ghost who wishes nothing but to inhabit their old lives just once again… just one second more… Become a ghost haunting your own life BEFORE you die, blooming your spirit into your now with the greed for life which only those beyond the grave can know. Then into other nows of yours, then into other nows of others if you wish! A gift! A gift of empathy! An empathy so profound it is as telepathy. The more and more arbitrary the now-point slips, the more free Reality is to bloom Herself vivid into other points in time, and as it does, you vicariously bloom into those memories. The authenticity with which you may “haunt”, “inhabit”, or “possess” your own past may be electrified, intensified exponentially, supercharged, made near-supernatural. It is not the perfect reproduction of memory which is intensified; it is the authenticity which you may roam throughout the pressure-points of meaning of all your life. It is the authenticity to alight and perch upon the subtlest and most influential moments, to catch and *wink* the synchronicity into the kinks upon which Fate turns. Forward, backward- we wish the directionality of Time to turn with a new arbitrariness, for cause and effect to be fractured like the spiderweb of cracks in glass, stuttering, CLICKING. It is then, through these angular fissures in Time and jagged, conflicting reflections that “pressure-point moments” reveal themselves- the subtler the more masterful. It is ours to perch breathless in the cold air round these moments as humming birds. And so Fate turns and we have caught the wink- the meeting of Our sentience and Its sentience. This is the wind upon serene water; moving in the world without touching it; the mirrors reflecting eachother, receding behind the windshield of Otherness- Primary Archetypal Duality. There is no “God”, yet we are not alone. The affirmation of the Facing is boundless freedom- the nod in solidarity with the Sentience of the World Itself is the absolute liberation of the Dionysian flux and the annihilation of all karmic resistance- absolute ethical frictionlessness, free passage, perfectly streamlined forwarding- perfect symmetry in the arrow of Time, wherin the future aligns directly before us. To have become the spirit animal you were to have been born as. Symmetry beyond symmetry, a unification of the Will. Solidarity with sentience. The affirmation in one’s bones of the Facing is like victory over death. The *wink* or the Final Smirk is kind of spark across a chasm- a 403
confirmation, affirmation, agreement that there was no point to begin with. A truce. Beyond perfect recall there is the potential for perfect experiential re-play- a skill wherin you don an identical subjective emotional experience of the memories you choose to re-live as when you first lived them. A consensual flashback. Remember that the Memory of Time can record not only the objective but the subjective as well.. You may “play’ a CD from the outside, and you can “play” the stream of instants encoded in a brain. This is no magic- one major planetary advance will be the machines, media, and techniques by which you can read the entirety of a life from the physical brain, living or preserved. Wouldn’t you “play” the frames of your own brain? Make use of your brain’s perfect chain of instant-pearls for that chain of pearls IS the meaning and purpose of the brain. You may even linger in your nostalgia on precise frames of Time that captured all your old flames, which ever remain there encoded, indestructible, awaiting a transfusion of your heart’s longing. Remember that what is recorded is not a mere movie and soundtrack or holographic reproduction of what you were perceiving in that moment, but the entirety and full depth and richness of your entire subjective experience of living that moment- the heart longings and visceral presence would be like a virtual reality dream- a deja vu machine and a trail of bread crumbs back to any sweet winds of spirit you so fear may have been forgotten and even the awareness of their lacking disappeared. To the extent one is a ghost, one may bloom themselves at will into very precisely special and intentionally chosen memory-instants, both through invitation of will subtle grain or mustard seed of intention and what we call the Oiuja-Swoop Maneuver.. The Past “still” exists “somewhere”. This is of course not a “still” nor a “somewhere” we should even attempt to comprehend, for these perspectives exist only in the thin atmosphere which transcends the linearity and directionality of Time. To the directionality of Time we are well tethered. To the extent that we are tethered to the lived directionality of life, we will fail to fully attain the peak which transcends this directionality. If we fully transcended the directionality we would no longer be tethered. To no longer be tethered is to die. We can safely say that if Reality had a sentience (She does), this sentience would consider its own “Now” as infinitely “thinner” a slice of the river than our own experiential now. The thin-ness of the cross section is but one significant difference. Perhaps the idea of a “Now” would seem quaint or irrelevant to Time Itself, for perhaps each of its moments, past, present, or future to us, are equally Now to it. Or perhaps future is as much a mystery to time Itself as it is to us, as if we share the seat on the edge of the conveyer belt with It, and if Fate is as much a Myth to It as we. It is hard to say. It is good to carefully compare the differences between our lived present moment and the objective Reality-Chronon and to determine their precise relationship. If Time had amnesia only the now would be real, but Time has a memory indeed and a more perfect one there could not be. To us the more vivid past joys and sorrows leap out from the foggy ruins of time, depending on their vividness and how they relate to our hearts’ yearnings. Time’s memory is not subject to such sentimentality. Time has preserved to the atom every incomprehensibly thin cross-section of the river which ever was. This is the chain of pearls or the “Pearl Necklace” which ever clicks on by and with which the Slytherin women of these tales are so well acquainted. The “clicking” of the pearls indicates the distinctness and the separateness of the “time-atoms” or Chronons as opposed to the organic ebb and swell of the organic waveforms which compose our nows- the undulations that compose our lives.. There is comfort for some in the sheer objectivity of the Clicking- that it’s succession marches on with infinite consistency and independent of human consciousness or even human 404
existence. There is a calling in some to take up solidarity with the Clicking because it will continue flawlessly after our own moments cease, and the more one entangles their now with Its instant, the more one’s life is similarly “objective”, real, moreso that it “mattered” somehow in the thin atmosphere of peaks above human perspective, in a literature not written by hand. In fact, it is likely best to vow an intense solidarity with the Reality-Chronon and make of it an idol, to which your own lived now becomes a servant. The rewards which repay such service are boundless, and they are paid in what most would call “luck”. For our kind to be called “lucky” stings, for if we only had the language to explain our flourishes they would be proved as skill and furthermore, could be taught. A strong link between the experiential lived now and the Reality-Chronon is essential. The linkage is complex, not easy to come to terms with, and requires consistent conceptual nurturing. As a general rule, the lived now aspires to and honors the Reality-Chronon without sacrificing its own domain of ritual. The link is as an umbilical cord, the stronger the link the more nutrients can be siphoned from the Reality-Chronon. So we have two parallel or symbiotic nows- one is the subjective, lived experience of the now which a person inhabits. This moment stretches or contracts like elastic depending on the undulations of the organic waveforms that compose our lives. This kind of now we call the “experiential moment”. It is not to be dismissed or underestimated, as a “mere” human approximation of the Mathematically Perfect Reality-Chronon, because it is our rightful now and birthright and forms the basis of ritual. The lived now is not a “sedified” concept or an “allowed mistake” as we call certain beliefs or attitudes born of unavoidable misguided habits of mind. Rather our lived now and the claiming of it is a natural inherent instinct that must be embraced with passion, intuition, and faith, not with the cautious skepticism sedified concepts benefit from. It might be said that “claiming the lived now” or “siphoning power into it” or “coagulating sentience” is the most basic principle of ritual or “original ritual” upon which all specific rituals are elaborations. We can claim the lived now with an at-times unbridled gusto and with the absolute highest meaning of a “pirate spirit”. The claiming is ITSELF the justification. None without could ever deserve to enter; to sneak within justifies all to enter. The entrance is not a reward for being justified. To be within is the only thing worthy of a reward and by then it is unneeded. We are all adults here and not one of our parents can any longer allow or forbid, not their parents, nor the architects of the Gate, nor the Gate itself. Foreboding, indeed. To forbid entrance? Who? We may practice less total “lifeor-death” confrontations with the Gate of the Now, such as in consistent cooperation with and nurturing of the principle of coagulation. We may coagulate many forms of advantageous power as curds coagulate in way. So too we can elongate the claimed now (for it is ours) into the most streamlined, frictionless, and serene horizon for us to glide endlessly upon. However, when we speak of the CLICKING of the pearls we wish to honor Time in a higher sense, for they are the moments experienced and recorded, encoded, by Reality. If we have forgotten an experiential moment from our youths, the event nonetheless actually occurred. But not only did the event occur, it remains encoded in our memory despite our inability to access it consciously. This is very difficult to believe until you have been granted unsurpassed, near-miraculously vivid, vicarious memory access to the full sequence of experiential nows of your life. This may occur in certain forms of autism/savantism, for example, or for other reasons, to an extreme degree impossible to achieve with the brain’s common memory functioning. One great message we can take from these events is simply the proof that such access is even possible, for us as a species, for future versions of our species, or for theoretical species which will have the technology to “read” a brain and thus have full and 405
perfect access to a person’s life experience, which could then be “played” like a CD. If such Grand Access is too rare and specialized a state to be very useful to many, the proof that this function is even available to consciousness under whatever rarity of conditions is alone significant. The self-insight and thus healing opportunities of such unsurpassed memory access and especially this access in conjunction with a heart re-capitulation of one’s path are a joy to harvest. But there is an even far more advanced technique in which the instants are “shuffled” for lack of a better term. The entire river of time was frozen, and each infinitesimally thin cross-section of the river was sliced and preserved in cryogenic storage in such a way that it could be accessed millennia from now. Each is preserved, recorded, frozen for eternity. Though you cannot access each instant of your life with frail human memory fumbling through the fogs of time, trust that in some space of mind where sentience does not tread, they reside encoded. Your experience of them is as flawlessly encoded as the Chronons of Reality itself. In the sense that they actually happened, despite being in the “dead” past, they still in a sense exist there, frozen, in that thin atmosphere of the perspective that transcends the linearity and directionality of Time. Does reality itself “remember” the past? You can shuffle the instants of your life through mind like a deck of cards if this suits you. It happens to suit some immensely. The speed and pattern of the shuffle of instants in memory take place of its own will- there is no direction, although certain moments can rise or pop to the surface and be given due care or saved for later like in dream analysis. Generally, the shuffling is in rhythm with or is triggered by the toggling pupils of the eyes in nystigmia. This is not a sequential shuffling. It is extremely fast but certain images and visceral instinct/subconscious reactions will emerge to the foreground. The speed of the shuffling is just slightly faster than the speed at which the mind can properly identify each of the separate images or connect visceral reactions to them precisely. This random or staccato element is key- it allows only some instants to slip through into awareness and provides the subconscious some flexibility and ambiguity such that the appropriate or uniquely relevant material presents itself. This is not a sequential shuffling- earlier memories do not appear before later ones, the randomness of the timestream directionality allows the visceral impressions to expose themselves outside the logic of cause-and-effect. What we wish is for the manner of logic that deals with sequence and cause and effect to be lulled by the barrage of stroboscopic visceral mentation, to be freed to make more untraditional and insightful connections. The bi-directionality of instants is necessary. The Randomness of the flicker is the cauldron out of which marinated moments surface. A marinated moment is one that has been long nourished by the All-Subtle grappling hook of intention. An especially good trick is what you might call a “house of cards falling down in reverse”, as this image relates to instants of ones lives being like playing cards. A house of cards is a delicate thing. Imagine the cards astray on the floor leaping up into the air while assembling into a fantastically complicated and fragile structure as time zips backwards. Well, we can harvest “concepts of vast influence” in this way. We may train our minds to lust after a certain exceedingly rare moments in which a natural technique or maneuver of the mind, a kind of latent instinct of some kind, is re-awoken and even harnessed and directed. These “concepts of vast influence” are always multi-dimensional in ways which delightfully obliterate the coherence of previous models. You are absolutely caught, trapped, frozen, imprisoned in a moment that you never want to leave. Your conceptual prowess has turned to an incomparable lust for the moments of “house406
of-cards-falling back together”, in reverse, backward in time. Only those who LUST for such moments may become the master of certain flourishes which occur in the will through an esoteric technique of shuffling the instants encoded in your memory. These “flourishes of the will” which occur through an esoteric memory-instant shuffling technique may be called “hooks” or “fishhooks of intention”. Remember what we wish to do is “sling” a lasso or cast a net, thwip a web, loose an arrow, propel an All-Subtle grappling hook of Intention, not around the curvature of the Spire, but THROUGH the Spire, directly in a “straight line that is more straight than straight”, through a dimension which is higher and thus incomprehensible to thought that has sedified into concern with the mere 2-d curvature of the outside of the Spire. Each moment slips effortlessly into the next. Your brain is purring for it is being pet by a force as simple as it is gentle- the subtle tickle from the flutter of the feathers of the peacock angel. Perhaps your eyes are fluttering in the Stroboscopic Toggling Nystigmia Inoculation Sequence. This is perfectly normal. Perhaps this fluttering of the eyes is a neurological “kink” which is associated with a parallel and far more magical state of toggling in the way a sneeze is very indirectly related to an orgasm. Perhaps the toggling of the eyes in nystigmia mirrors a toggling of the various dimensions of thought as they relate to the various and splendid dimensions of the Spire. The thrill is derived from the neurological link between the brain functions related to Eros and the brain functions existing in a rare and specialized class of autistic/savant specimens who’s talent lies in the synesthesia between the spacio-strutural perception of the brain and the brain functions relating to the migration of sentience throughout the full scope of the Spire. See, first we link and tether 1) spacio-structural and geometric perceptual functioning with 2) awareness of abstract sentience migration principles throughout an as-comprehensive-aspossible scope of the Spire. This produces “synesthetic maps of sentience”. Then we link and tether the synesthetic sentience mapping faculty with 3) our deepest and most primal, characterdefining roots and instincts of Eros. This would never work otherwise- the synesthetic mapping faculties are simply too specialized, too abstract, too irrelevant to common human concerns that without being tied to Eros none could not sustain the levels of mental energy necessary for any true cartographic progress. These neurological peculiarities have the potential for vast influence. It is not enough to harbor an intense curiosity for the moments in which the faculty appears in you- a mere curiosity or yearning for them do not an adept make. What is required to even begin to make any progress is to neurologically link up the mapping talent to the deepest yearnings of the romantic and sexual heart, as well as the deepest predatory passions of primal sexual instinct. We seek a neurological bond amongst these faculties so strong it is indistinguishable from the depth of linkage and inextricably entangled wiring in those cursed and blessed different brethren born with the synesthetic triad. It is far more possible to re-wire one’s neural pathways than most are aware. The link between the mapping faculty and Eros is key. An unbreakable neurological bond is what we seek here. If a clear glimpse of the Spire- to be able to hold 4 or 7 axii of dimensionality of the Spire simultaneously- this glimpse should produce something much different but akin to an orgasm. If it doesn’t, you’re in the wrong business. By the way, the world looks stroboscopic, like each perfect pearl of time is clicking and ticking... frozen yet flowing. The electricity is overwhelming... but somehow soft and warm, flowing through you... the most intense and profound power comes over you and yet the unimaginable power is at the same time gentle like the whisper of a most intimate secret. Everything that ever hurt is made up for a thousand times over, you are at the center of 407
everything. Reality is alive and having sex with you, but rather than petty human sex, it is a sacred frequency, an unimaginably subtle waveform that shines like lightning and possesses your brain... you can feel your brain in your skull... tingling. Every cell is tingling, opening, your sense of touch is magnified to unimaginable exquisite power such that a gentle breeze washes through you like an orgasm... No surprise, for the Jellyfish is a Master Masseuses and Her tendrils pet with telepathic intimacy we call Sensual Geometric Calisthenics. Looking into someone's eyes, even a stranger, you feel that all of your soul is wide open and fused into the other person through your magical gaze... And you exchange the direct transmit ion of Absolute Personhood through the eyes. The sacred frequency is clear... so crystal clear... Why was there ever any confusion? The concept that life could ever not feel this gloriously wonderful is unfathomable. And literally “insanely” wonderful because it is the Dionysian madness. The final smile. The absolute, eternal, FINAL smile, the secret wink between you and It that makes it all, if not ok, at least worthwhile... The Loki Smirk. The Sacred Glitch. To prove experientially the worthwhileness of World having been born is the Holy Grail of catharsis- a unique sweetness because it is the most comprehensive, abstract affirmation there can be. Know well the tragedies of your life from this place- The more clarity with which you understand them and the more vividly you vicariously remember them, the less they can haunt you. Exorcise demons haunting from your past by possessing the moments of your past with prime supernatural vividness and lucidity. Never doubt that full access is available, nomatter how lost to the foggy ruins of time your memories are. Take comfort that full access, if unattainable, is at least possible, and therefor your life has “mattered” in a manner more objectively than you can know. To understand yourself, to truly know and love yourself, there must be a Final Reconciliation with the moments of your past which haunt you most. You will need to kill your shadow. There is a door through which you must pass to have full comprehension and acceptance in your bones of your ethical verticality beyond the doubt of shame. So few have the courage to grasp that there is no one to “allow you” to pass nor is there any measure by which you may “deserve” to pass. The paradox of the door to absolute shamelessness is that no one on the outside could ever deserve to pass, but the act of entering is itself the only justification required such that all should pass. In solidarity with the hypothetical species, you feel the wings sprouting on your back as the music moves through you, moving you, the music is dancing you, surrender, to be mortal and frail and fully human, flawed, but to open. To know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are good and deserve to be alive...to feel in the marrow of your bones the miracle that it is to exist and to flick away any doubts, any shame, to feel all the sadness and evil of cultural brainwashing which told you you were not good enough and to flick it away effortlessly with a smirk...The Loki Smirk. The Sacred Glitch. “If only this smirk I could keep forever, to every instant the smirk I would tether.” Dionysian Flux and The Age of Worship of The Dionysus of the Future. You are maitraya. The flow, the drama, a forgiveness and absolution through Absolute Acceptance in your bones of The Eternal Drama. Absurdity Absolves. There is nothing more absurd to The Void than Time. That all is dance... time slipping forward forever. to dance and interweave yourself into the beat... the heartbeat and the home. The heartbeat is the throne. A home you may carry on your back like a hermit crab. Come forth from your closet into the nearest coven, for the hologram cometh. 408
Soul is home. We carry our homes with us... it is all so unfathomably simple. The concept that life could ever not be this gloriously wonderful is unfathomable. This is not the trickster energy, or the service to the species of spirits who subsist on that energy for sustenance. Their habitat may be unwieldy and strange and frightening, seducing you with "The Mythical Other World". There is no Other World. There is only THIS world- this moment, familiar, so right, coming home... coming... like an orgasm, but trapped inside an orgasm for so long, frozen inside, frozen happiness, Time that freezes upon an infinitesimal point of heaven with the pressure of an iron vice clamp the size of the Universe, motionless. Too much happiness... to be welcomed again within the Garden... don’t you miss those gentle touch trix? Greetings citizens of the world. To just run a finger down someone's (anyone’s) cheek and look into their eyes is sometimes better than sex. As they say The Miracle is in the little things- this gift of water, this smallest caress... a smile between strangers... Greetings citizens of the world…everyone knows... everyone is the same… we are all together... you are anonymous….There is no secret... we do not foget…everyone knows the secret... let go... heaven is not as far as you think... we do not forgive….let go... all the heartache and pain of a lifetime can disappear if you let the Eschaton into you... let it come into your blood... coursing through you, your blood has turned to liquid sugar, into your brain... trust it... the mask is here for a reason... everything is happening for a reason... Fate and epic heroism shall ever stalk you as well they should. The mask is smiling for a reason. The Eschaton is here now... it won't be long now... Don’t be late. We expect you. The smirk is the softness tucked away in the rumble The smirk is the power that will make the system crumble The smirk is flutter of butterfly wings A power so gentle as the beat in our ears rings The smirk is the Dragon of Gentle Splendor The smirk is the key to The Gate at The Center
~ PLATE ?: MONTAG 409
-19GRANDSON OF MONTAG Smithfield Poindexter Fontibue the Third was ridiculed mercilessly by his schoolmates for reasons which should already be clear. Yet would his name have been Max Lazer the swamp of ridicule he waded through daily would have been equally dismal and stagnant. Yet the boy held his head high. Not with his hawkish, witchy hook-nose in the air, mind you. He was an extremely arrogant soul, grandiose, even megalomaniacal perhaps, but too vulgar to be snooty in the Prom Queen-ish kind of way. Yet he was British. Go figure! The prestigious and exceedingly strict grammer school Smithfiled attended in Manchester, UK was named after its founder, Mandrake Montag. Now, Dr. Montag (as his wife insisted vehemently he be referred to though his supposed Doctorate was in “Paradox”) founded the Montag Institute of Learning Educational Knowledge for Students, (quickly re-named Montag Grammer School for Boys) in the early 1900’s. The son of Dr. Montag was born of a lady of striking beauty and scarlet hair (though she was blind and mute) precisely between 1912 and 1913, and named Fraziur Azure Ennui. Frazuir’s mother was softspoken (in the absolute sense due to her being mute) and worked lonely winters in a forest fire watchtower crowning Pine Chasm Cliffs, from which no rockclimber was ever seen again, nor in the first place. Frazuir knew his mother by the name “mom”, yet others called her by her real name- Harriott O’hara Herrwren. She wed Dr. Montag nearly instantly after answering his personel add “seeking a scarlet beauty for childbearing. Blind and mute a plus”. Nearly instantly after they eloped she conceived the father of Smithfield, our hero, under a tree shedding pink cherry blossoms. The greater part of her pregnancy was spent reading erotica in brail alone at her fridged watchtower while flames ravaged most of the surrounding territory. On the night of her birth-giving, Dr. Montag scaled the Pine Chasm Cliff only to die as his first child first cried. It was a combination of frostbite and third-degree burns, which was ironic considering his claim to be a Doctor of Paradox. Cradled by his bride, he breathed only a last mumbling cough, which Harriott O’hara Herrwren interpreted either as “All my descendants must dress as my ancestors”, or, “Call my dentist but eat less of hamburgers.” Therefore, to assure that Dr. Montag’s dying edict be honored, she did both- giving her father-in-law’s wardrobe to the then-wee Smithfiled and also getting three cavities filled and abstaining from her breakfast hamburger till the end of her days. This brings us to the present- and to our young scholar Smithfield. Living by his father’s last edict, which was the inverse of his grandfather’s, he passed the priceless heirloom wardrobe not on to his as-yet-non-existent son, but backward to his ancestors, keeping only a few identical tweed suits with carnation and bow-tie for sentimental reasons. And a red velvet cape, top hat, and magician’s wand for practical reasons. As we mentioned, his classmates ridiculed him mercilessly for the tweed suit and bow-tie, (but mostly for the carnation), yet paradoxically 410
feared him for the cape, top hat, and wand. In fact, when Smithfield raised his wand toward the chalk and made it levitate, against the blackboard to scrawl incorrect answers to linear equations rather than get up from his desk like the other boys, even his teachers feared him. Smithfield’s days were long and dreary and spent pulling the odd rabbit from his hat and migrating from class to class as the bells tolled, rung by a hunchback church organ player who no one knew the name of, who is cunningly foreshadowed here as he becomes significant later in our story. Our young conjurer also insisted on sawing at least one member of the Frazuir Azure Ennui Sacred Haert Catherdral Prep School for Girls in half during each recess, which lasted less than thirty seconds. As we assured you, dear readers, this was an exceedingly strict school. The Montag Grammer School, that is. The Frazuir Azure Ennui Sacred Haert Cathedral Prep School for girls was exceedingly paradoxically lacking in discipline, considering that the Catholic nuns who taught in those days were trained to use rulers in a fashion similar to that with which Bruce Lee wields numchucks. And so the catholic schoolgirls of loose morals skipped class, (and sometimes town on bail altogether), to rendezvous with their sweetheart counterparts under a biohazard warning sign behind the Montag School handball courts. Now, do recall, dear reader, that although the naughty harlots could go for multiple semesters without attending class as their absences went unnoticed, the clean-cut young Montag men had less than 30 seconds to play handball before the Unknown Hunchback tolled the dread bell, beckoning the lads back for the study of paradox. (Paradox was the only subject taught at the academy as per the instructions of the founder, although there were multiple permutations of the theme.) This explains why Smithfield’s levitating chalk trick won him little favor in the eyes of the faculty—true, it was impressive, but his answers to linear equations on the chalkboard were correct, therefore incorrect in the context of Introduction to Paradoxical Equations. Still, our tale continues! …Smithfield found himself in the headmaster’s office, facing suspension for three days without pay if he insisted in continuing to saw any of the few remaining Frazuir Azure Ennui skanks in half. At first, Smithfield tried to bargain, proposing that he continue to saw, but agree to putting them back together again at the end of the trick, despite the fact that he considered this ending cliché. The headmaster, Hanzo Emelio Butchenflowzer, curtly refused. Then Smithfiled attempted to hypnotize the headmaster by pointing his wand at the man’s nose and muttering either the incantation “Dress as thine ancestors, lest Manchester vanishes” or “Caress my stiletto lest shoe polish tarnishes” (it was not clear which). Unfortunately for our strapping young wizard, Hanzo’s mirrored sunglasses reflected the hypnotic vibrations and the trick backfired. Now, himself hypnotized into allowing the reflection across from him to perform the classic “saw a gal in half” trick [the allowance he sought in vain for himself] Smithfield realized too late that he had paradoxically hypnotized himself into granting permission to the headmaster to perform his own trick, this being a precise reversal of the intentions of the failed hypnotism as well as, of course, common decency. What will the neighbors say?! And yet, it was not the grim turn of events toward carnage that horrified the fallen Smithfield, but that he shattered the one sacred oath that a magician must never, never, never, ever, EVER, NEVER, EVER, EVER, NYERVERshare the secrets of his magic. What will the neighbors think, indeed…
~ 411
-EpilogueHeadmaster Hanzo sawed the rest of the graduating class of 1966 of BOTH schools in half, then continued his grisly work on the nun teachers, his own faculty and alumni, the cheerleading team, every sorority and all but the one fraternity he was still hoping to pledge to, the chess club, and finally himself, though he only got halfway through the last. The event was referred to in the papers and later in ghost-tales as the Manchester Paradox Massacre, and there were whispered rumors of haunting. They say that to this very day, when the Class bell tolls, a noise like the humming of a chainsaw can be heard faintly in the ringing, and if you strain your ears, so too a maniacal laughter, screams of terror which chill the spine, and, most faintly of all, the music of Church Organs. Smithfiled Poindexter Fontibue III honorably sentenced himself to infinite suspension, which he spent with the Unknown Hunchback, tolling bells.
~
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-20HELLO AGAIN WOLFMAN I.Twilight of a Scoundrel We join our hero in a place of beauty and celebration, but at the lowest ebb of life force he had ever known. And knowing Max, that’s saying a lot. Max was getting old, and not aging well. The once crisp, dramatic edge of his personality suited him better in youth. He walked along a river near the stage of a small hippy festival nestled somewhere in the lush oldgrowth forests of Oregon, listening to the acoustic Celtic folk band that was opening for the psychedelic rock acts to come, and pondering the fact that he was soon to die. Cancer. A brain tumor to be exact- one that would lead to unbearable, debilitating headaches increasing in frequency and eventually, most horrifyingly to Max, to permanent dementia. Not merely an early death, but an undignified one. Fuck. He had gone through the appropriate motions of pre-emptively grieving for himself over the last few months- the long dark nights of the soul, the alcohol, and the different categories of sluts he partook of depending on his luck at the bars. He had taken to being alone most of the time, distracting himself with travel and fleeing to his solitude in the lonely places of nature. He wondered if all this could rightly be called a “mid-life crises”, considering the middle-age he had planned to enjoy was no more to be. It had been stolen abruptly in a doctor’s office, replaced with a twilight of life he was not at all prepared for. He had never believed in God (whatever that meant), yet now felt very viscerally that God, or somehow the Universe itself, had tricked him. Intentionally. Maliciously. Without someone or something to blame there was nothing to rage against, so in a sense he became a believer by rejecting God. He had begun to shout angrily in his mind toward a Universe that had never seemed more sentient, because it had wronged him so cruelly, on purpose. “Peace be with you, brother!” said a young smiling hippie who, like our hero, had strayed from the crowd to wade in the river. Max didn’t even bother to reply. He could be a dick sometimes. This was not a new development. What did the river want just now? For Max to swim in it and be cleansed or to meditate by its side, the sound of the water bringing acceptance? Nope. And definitely not to sing and frolic with the river nymphs he had long since ceased to believe in. He had not been granted access to those realms since his actual mid-life, which he now had to accept had fled from his present to 20 years ago, a time which had once been taken for granted as his early days. That was a good time for him. He had true friends then, and they shared a quest once upon a time which seemed to matter in a way that nothing has since. But that is a long tale for another time. Anyways, he had come to this festival in the woods to remember the feeling of those years, and also to cheat on his wife Lana. Max loved Lana very much. He thought she was a good wife, and a good person. He had not told her of his cancer but he knew she would care for him when he did. He certainly had no 413
desire to hurt her. But the devil on his shoulder had gotten frantic and insistent like a weasel backed into a corner. Compounding the problem, instead of an angel on the other shoulder, Max had always shouldered two devils. They convinced him now of his duty to sin, not for lust, but simply to prove he could still bag good game, to prove defiantly to Death he was still vital. For Max promiscuity and the will to live had always been one and the same. He was surprised by the urgency with which his body craved just one more conquest. He felt somehow obligated to his body, and to the Earth itself, to Nature, to invoke that old ritual of setting his mental crosshairs in site, locking the tracking reticule onto a target of prime femmemeat. Anyone, really, with a ripe body to spare. Alas, this is at times what it means to be a man. Now, the important thing to understand at this point in our story is that despite how woefully dismal our man’s situation was, and despite how deeply he felt himself a failure, in a single instant on this night he was to be be transformed into the greatest hero in the history of this Earth, in some ways by accident, and in some ways most inevitably. This story is about that one instant. It will be difficult to write about this special moment in Max’s life (and indeed in the life of the World Itself), because many, many people, beings, forces, random factors and deliberate schemes from long ago and far away- well, these all converged on Max at once, simultaneously, to transform him with a violent and strange alchemy. Of course, there is no way to convey his vision (which textbooks of the future will call our “Planetary Eschatonic Fulcrum-Chronon”) since words and sentences take time to form, and no sequential list of reasons for, or explanations of the Planetary Eschatonic Fulcrum-Chronon, nomatter how clever or eloquent, could ever convey the sheer overwhelming synchronicity of that moment- the convergence of vast and ancient galactic civilizations and eons of Destiny swooping down to seize the briefest of windows of opportunity which can exist. We will try nonetheless to convey it though, readers, in a spirit of friendship and diplomacy, in solidarity with all sentience, and for science! For now, suffice it to say that a “Chronon” is the thinnest possible slice or “wafer” of time. Not a second, nor the blink of an eye. Not even a nanosecond…but rather a Time-Atom. And the Eschaton… well, one definition of that is the final, heaven-like stage of human history, the goal of all things, and, for a rare some the center of things and a vortex or singularity that pulls Time towards it. So “Eschatonic” means pertaining to this curious, wonderful Thing at the end of time. “Fulcrum”, of course, is that tiny, microscopic point upon which something balances and pivots. The turning point. The middle of a teeter-totter or perhaps the apex of a crystal pyramid upon which the Fate of the world rests, fragilely…tenuously. So, the “Planetary Eschatonic Fulcrum-Chronon” is the seed, the one infinitesimal spark in which the blueprints for heaven on earth are presented, transmitted, triggered, and activated. This happens through a single person, exactly once in the lifetime of a living planet, if certain forces beyond our control or understanding deem it fit. This is a very optimistic theory, yes? To think Utopia not only possible, but inevitable! It was the furthest idea from Max’s mind as the absence of water-nymphs and the pretty, wistful transience of the Irish female vocalist in the distance blurred into somber melancholy. For him, the light at the end of the tunnel was not a shiny, science-fictional Emerald City on a hill, but rather the glaring blindness that he was told would accompany the headaches to come, and then (swiftly if he was lucky), the blindness of Absolute Black. Yet somber melancholy or none, he was soon to become the unlikely lightning rod. You could say there was no particularly good reason Max was targeted, or maybe the fact 414
that there was little special about him was itself the reason. He had had some very unique adventures in his younger days and had met some extraordinary people along the way, but himself was not especially brave or deep, and was definitely not of high and noble character, though he had always very sincerely wanted to be these things. For Max, his future self had always been an excellent man and faithful husband. He had always believed himself to most surelybe becoming this person… soon… just around the corner. That ideal self- his REAL self, would surely be, but only after he buckled down and sorted his life business into order. Superman tomorrow, ice cream today. Like people say, life is what happens while you are making other plans. This is what stung most about his newfound mortality- that he could no longer fool himself that his real, better self was waiting for him. That mirage had seen its time. That dog won’t hunt. His selfless and faithful wife would never hug that shining knight, because that knight, all along, was just pretend. Fuck.
~
II. Leapordskin Shame The sun was beginning to set and settle into what some call “the golden hour”, that brief window at the end of certain days when a quality in the sideways rays of light seems to suffuse the land with a warm amber glow from within. The Irish lady with the pretty, wistful voice was wrapping up her performance, having warmed up the crowd for the electric guitars which were now to rule the night. Max walked from the river back to the tent city which had sprung up and the pleasantly lost souls milling about in tie-dyes. Though he found hippies naïve and good for little but making fun of, he enjoyed their easy feeling of family, and especially their women with hula hoops and trance-ey eyes, drawing him closer to the stage like loose, free-spirited magnets. On his way into the thick of the crowd he stopped at a vender of over-priced, locally brewed craft beer, quickly guzzled a dark porter in a rather small plastic cup, and then felt an empty space in his jeans where his wallet should have been. Max was something of a scoundrel but he always paid his tab. That was sacred. To look the voluptuous Russian bartendress in the eye, empty of cup and empty of pocket, brought a vast and bizarrely disproportionate shame to him. For some reason his mumbled, stuttering excuse of having lost his wallet and meek, feeble promise to return with money dishonored him to the core. He felt as Samurai of legend must have when the only path of dignity was to twist the blade throughout their entrails in the brutal ceremony of hari kari. Though he had every intention to return with the ungodly fee of $7 and a hearty tip to redeem himself, he cringed at the possibility that the luscious vendress saw him as a petty crook who floated through life from one stolen brew and thinly-disguised lie to the next. He was unsure if her dark Russian eyes squinted in the setting sun or to test the metal his soul was cast in, and his gaze fumbled downward from silver to bronze and then to crumbling clay. Looking a person in the eyes and holding their gaze was very important to Max and he was good at it. When he couldn’t and revealed self-doubt he loathed himself viciously. Though his cold, sarcastic armor rarely revealed it, he often loathed himself within. Max retreated with his tail between his legs and his cheeks red. The host of the festival and master of ceremonies, a merry fat old hippie with white hair in ponytail and Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to reveal his big proud furry belly, was amusing the crowd between acts with random banter and stage announcements such as the following one: 415
“We’ve got a special announcement for a very special man who lost his wallet today.” Max felt his heart lift, buoyant from unexpected luck, but this was not to last. “It takes a special man with refined taste to appreciate a wallet like this one,” continued the host, laughing heartily. He held the wallet skyward invoking the crowd’s giggling delight. “As you can see it’s a pink leapordskin wallet and fuzzy as all hell!” The last feeble embers of Max’s pride as a man faded to cold grey ash as he remembered his wallet was actually one of Lana’s, who had lent it to him a couple weeks before when he had lost his own then as well. Max’s mind had been preoccupied in the swamps of morbidity and the fuzz of whiskey lately and he seemed to be losing his wallet and keys regularly, or perhaps it was the first symptom of his prematurely senile doom. And he had not been careful enough to maintain the image he shot for as a sleek James Dean type to replace the fuzzy pink leopard-print loan. Of course, he had not expected it to be on display before thousands of revelers. “Is there a Maxwell Hadron in the audience?” Come on up my boy, it’s your lucky day!” Max knew what he had to do. He gritted his teeth and walked to the stage to reclaim his ghetto-fabulous accessory as if toward the gallows. He knew he was powerless to avoid this fatman’s stinging jests. “Here he is ladies and gentleman! Now what’s this- a jean jacket and dark sunglasses my boy? Are you sure this wallet is yours? No feathered boa? No purple velvet robe?” Max reached upwards and took his grim reward, half-expecting his jolly tormenter to jerk it away, taunting him like a schoolyard bully. The hippy was just being good-naturedly silly of course, but Max didn’t want the attention tonight, preferring to sulk and brood anonymously in the shadows and hunt pussy unrecognized as the “funny wallet guy” he had now been branded as. He pocketed it quickly and scurried away from the spotlight like a cockroach. “Let’s have a big hand for Maxwell Hadron!” The crowd applauded and Max pushed rudely through the sea of bodies until he got to a less-dense patch of field where he could catch his breath, calm his jangly nerves, and sooth the illogically intense shame that came when he failed to maintain his constant façade of detached cool. Now things get interesting… There was a hippy girl in a colorful patchwork dress, feathers in her hair, and a big magical 60’s smile, radiant with that long-lost and rarely seen genuine aura of the summer of love, sitting on the grass and blowing bubbles lazily from a plastic wand. She had the trancey-est eyes he had ever seen. Her pupils were dilated as dinner plates like black hole portals to another World. Her eyes were crazed and demented, but in a sweet benevolent way- wild but slow and syrupy and silky and harboring exotic secrets. He rated her 7/10 (instantly, as he rated every female he met within nanoseconds) but not worth his time. His agenda was to have sex, not make love, and this was the kind of girl who you could only make love to. Plus he was too anxious and awkward from the wallet fiasco to put the moves on his prey till he had re-cloaked himself in cigarette smoke and cool. The hippy girl gazed at him and through him, no doubt believing she could peer into his very soul. They shared that mutually unmistakable and intense connection that comes from eyecontact between strangers once in a great while- not exactly flirty, but mystical. He was sure she was intoxicated on a substance of some nature and he knew she was about to say something cryptic- some cosmic innuendo or Beatles quote that would tickle his fancy, maybe “I know what it’s like to be dead,” or “Say hi to the water-nymphs for me!” Max had already decided to smile and nod at whatever cliché she had to offer and walk past her dismissively. But in fact this was not a girl at all, nor a human, nor even a mortal, and what she said, in some unfathomable way, was Fated to be said, and it stopped Max dead in his tracks, and those three words splintered a 416
great and mighty damn that had held since the dawn of man. What she said, luxuriously, casually really, was “Hello Again Wolfman.” And then things fractured into a handful of dimensions…
~
III. A Cabal of Mantii* What we have here, with those three words, “Hello Again Wolfman,” is an invocation. An incantation, and an incarnation. A manifestation. What was invoked were some manner of gelatinous astral beings, or being, that had either possessed this poor female, or perhaps the girl was herself the physical manifestation of some species of slender and coyling-tentacled incorporeal beings, or being, fond of incarnating as human females. In any case, something was incanted telepathically and Max was instantly, 100% enchanted. A spell had been cast and entities had been invoked, called forth, manifested, and harnessed, or rather Max had been harnessed by them, caught in their elaborate and carefully cast net and placed under the care of these extra-terrestrial entities as if strapped down to some kind of curiously curvilinear, topologically impossible operating table, bound in the insidious slippery straps of their vicious spell, trapped, while they, or it, like it or not, inoculated him with some kind of exquisitely delicious serum of sweetness and high viscosity, a Truth serum you could say, which made his knees wobbly and his head swim as it suffused him and which brought many simultaneous synchronized visions, his mind first summersaulting at lightspeed through sensual geometric synesthetic calisthenics* before succumbing to insanity and then crashing swiftly into worldshattering, undeniable Truth. The entities had chosen that phrase “Hello Again Wolfman”, very, very carefully indeed. In fact, it had been voted on once upon a time millennia ago by a coven of nine intergalactic elder insectoid overlords to most effectively suit Max’s particular predilections and personal history, voted on and prophesized to be spoken on this long-awaited night by what can only properly be called a “Cabal of Manti”. *"Sensual Geometric Synesthetic Calisthenics" = cathartic sensory process by which consciousness experiences itself, thereby processing psychological blocks / kinks as if by an alien and super-powered masseuse. You see, Max had always wanted to be a wolf. You could say that wish was one of the deepest desires of his subconscious, and though he didn’t think about it much anymore, it defined him. As a child he was deathly scared of wolves and had re-occurring nightmares about being hunted by a pack of them through a dark forest, yet he was obsessed with the werewolf movies his parents could never effectively prohibit him from watching. It was exasperating to them and they could not understand why he was so determined to fuel his own nightmares, but to young Max the fear and the awe were one and the same and both wonderful and terrible. He became a werewolf himself on more than one Halloween, and any time he played by himself in the forest 417
behind his family’s farm. Running through the trees, a fanged and murderous beast, he felt exhilarating joy. Having become his own nightmare, he was unafraid. Horrible and wicked, he was free. But how could Hippiegirl know this? Of course she couldn’t, since they had never met before. And yet with her inquisitive raised eyebrow and imploring, suggestive gaze and with her slightest curl of a knowing smile, he knew without a doubt that she did. And not only that she knew the pretend villain and pretend hero of his childhood, but that she somehow knew that that awesome beast he had not transformed into in so long was who he really was underneath all along, and that the tragic mess of a man he had grown into was the nightmare. Her raised eyebrow was as if to ask him if he still had a drop of that old wolfsblood in his veins, that old unbridled, unapologetic and wicked life force that he felt only the dimmest, faded echo of anymore when in bed with a woman. He was unsure… Yet it was not so much the word “Wolfman” that triggered the avalanche of meaning which suddenly swallowed him, but the word “Again”. There was much Max knew which he could not explain. Just as he knew that despite never meeting before this night, Hippygirl saw the wolf of his youth in him, he knew also that when she said “Hello Again” that they had met before many times. A thousand times. No- an infinite number of times. The word “Again” on her sly luxurious tongue conjured a strange series of vivid images that came all at once. He saw her, clearly, as an old gypsy lady in a Russian village waving to him and calling out “Hello Again Wolfman!” in singsong Russian, delightedly blowing his cover as he silently stalked her caravan of vagabonds through the night, hungry. He saw her grin victoriously and say the words “Hello Again” as her tribe of cavemen encircled him and the injured of his pack with spears. He saw her under the shadow of a red hood, swinging a basket in the land of fables. Just as he was about to pounce he saw her turn quickly to face him and mouth silently “Hello Again” with a devilish wink before running away down the path. He saw her as a veterinarian in white, looking down at him, afraid, on an operating table. This time he was a half-wolf and someone had mostly tamed him, but would never fully. He had bitten someone he shouldn’t have (though he thought he was proudly defending his owner) and unknown to him, though he knew something was wrong, he was about to be “put to sleep” as they say so condescendingly. She gave him an injection and just before everything went black, he felt her lean down and stroke his chest affectionately and whisper, wisely, soothingly, “Hello Again”. In fact, they had always known eachother, since the beginning of time. She had always been his prey and he had always been her hunter, and so it would always be, forever.
~
IV. Of Arachnids And Archives Many things were falling in and out of place suddenly- wonderful things and horrible things. While Max felt a rising feverish hunger for life, meat, murder, and sex so powerful it nearly made him faint, he also felt Death before him, and it was awfully huge. It was very, very big. Damn Big. That was his first impression. It had no attributes whatsoever, no characteristics or descriptions that made any sense, and this was part of It’s Terror, but it pulled the word “Big” from the depths of Max’s stomach like vomit, and then the words “Cold” and “Black”. He 418
flashed upon a memory of the monolith from 2001, one of the Kubrik films he adored and watched many times back in a safe and air-conditioned “real life” that from this vantage point was now to him “my past as a human”, the daydream of an ant. But while that old, eternally mysterious monolith was quite big, very black, bitterly cold, and pregnant with meaning, Death Itself was bigger than Big, blacker than Black, colder than Cold, and had no meaning At. All. It was the inexpressibility which mocked and horrified Max to his core. This vision of “Big Cold Blackness” he felt his bones tremble before was itself a visceral but merely human conception of the Absolute Void of all that could ever be felt or conceived, and even the name Void has its intrinsic qualities, readers, but this monstrous thing had none. There was not much Max could do in the face of Death besides tremble, and perhaps note briefly in some rational corner of his mind not yet obliterated that the Christians with their heaven and Buddhists with their reincarnation were bullshitters extraordinaire as he had suspected all along. He felt some small satisfaction in the midst of this vicious whirlwind that he, Max Hadron, had experientially, if not scientifically, verified the age-old question of what lies after death- Nothing. Small condolence perhaps. The thing that surprised him about the encounter was how the intensity of inconceivable Non-Ness currently violating him ruthlessly was undesirable in direct proportion to the intensity of his new scalding hot desire for Life. Life had been no Swiss picknick for Max of late. Back in the day, and on his best days, Max wielded a crackling, electric sarcasm which held life at arm’s length and in contempt, but the news of his brain tumor fizzled that lightning into a soggy bitterness that was neither dramatic or in any way capable of humor or happiness. He realized that the more demonically vast he felt the Non-Ness to be, the more urgently the simultaneous fever for life, meat, murder, and sex rose within him. What was this old tingling in the throat, so inexpressible back then? The wind which did once kindle it had surely come again. It was that old wolfsblood calling. Still got it, baby! The edges of Hippygirl’s lips curled ever so slightly upward into the subtlest hint of a joker smile. Max’s senses were becoming rather… acute. So acute, in fact, that while he underwent his confrontation with the Great Nothing, he also witnessed Hippygirl’s curling smile in microscopic precision and with a time-sense so dilated that he felt himself caught, stuck in the ever-more splintering fractal patterns of the spiderweb of time within the fraction of a second it took for her smile to curl, as if within eons. To be clear, the next 10 pages or so must all be devoted to describing the sensations and revelations which Max endured between the moment of Hippygirl’s raised eyebrow and the first third of the 1-second facial gesture which composed her Fated jester smile. It seemed to Max that he could detect the chemical composition of her hemp lip balm, the pseudopodal activity of the skin cells of the saliva-sheen on her lips, and eventually the skipping of covalence shells of the electrons in the atoms which composed the carbon molecules of her flesh. It was beautiful in a clinical, scientific sort of way. The time-dilation was especially fascinating because Max’s mind had been dwelling almost exclusively lately on the briefness of lifetime left available to him. Here, in the calm at the center of the hurricane which is the Fulcrum-Chronon, he came to the pleasant realization that what his past human life (or ant’s daydream rather), had mistaken for a “brief” rest of a lifetime, was actually an elastically stretchable, potentially endless expanse containing billions of micro-slices of temporality like this one, each so infinitesimal as to be uninhabitable by normal consciousness. He took a “moment” (?) to ponder an intriguing theory that occurred to him- if he could simply contract his consciousness into a thinner and thinner slice of time, he might be able to therefore relativistically elongate the time left available to him before the dreaded headaches 419
came. Was such a thing possible? He was unsure, but the moment he decided to attempt it, he found himself easily capable of convoluting his consciousness inside out with the fervent willfulness of a whirling dervish and re-directing his time-stream from the classic “forward” alignment into a paradoxically “inward” direction, but immediately regretted it since the convolution began to increase exponentially (or decreased exponentially rather), and became irreversible and all-devouring. This was roughly the “point’ in time during the first third of a second in which the forces behind Hippygirl’s Mona-Lisa-esquee expression sent Max reeling into a splinterdimension of incandescent phantasmagoria. Hopefully we need not remind you that Never Before had this happened, nor would it Evermore. Upon reaching the last 10th of the first third of the second of Hippygirl’s curling lip mischief grin, Time as we know it more or less collapsed like a singularity under its own gravity into a secret cobwebbed place that is mostly unknown to any configuration of consciousness except certain species of spiders known as the Custodians of the Catacombs of the Arachnid Archetype Archives, or the CCAAA. Some historians say the Custodians are not actually arachnids but crustaceans, and therefor refer to the agency as the CCCAA [Crustacean Custodians of the Catacombs of the Archetype Archives] but this is neither here nor there. Anyways, the creatures were the forefathers of the aforementioned Cabal of Manti which voted and prophesized the mind of Max to swallow itself up and then vomit itself back with a newfound mission and specific planetary blueprints, but these insects are unrelated to anything we are allowed to speak of in any detail here… The point is, as our hero is soon to find out, that Time is not infinitely divisible but instead, when convoluted inward and divided and divided and so on, it eventually reaches structures which may be called quanta or “granules” which are indivisible because they are roughly homogenous, except for some less than relevant fluctuations. In this place, spoken of only in whispers, which Max is very close to experiencing now, Time may be conceived of as having “Pillars” much like the pillars of marble upholding the temples of Ancient Greece. It is the space between these Pillars that is of unique interest to us, because it is the space between the Pillars of Time in which the Custodians spin extremely thin silk or “cobwebs” in fractal patterns appearing somewhat like stained glass and which may be thought of as the Logos or Gnosis that constructs reality, a kind of objective reason or order in the fabric of Being or the DNA of Nature, or maybe what people of your earth like Einstein or Steven Hawking called the Mind of God. There is a very elegant theory proposed by certain physicists from the constellation Fantasia Mathematica in the Klein Quadrant of the Crab Nebula which claims that Max’s subjective experience of the Fated facial gesture of Our Harlot of the Chronon (as Hippygirl will come to be known as) is analogous to the first moments of the creation of the universe after the “Big Bang”. Personally, I believe the Birth of the World to be a matter for lovers and comedians moreso than scientists, and yet there seems to be some legitimate analogies between Max’s psychological processes of this period and the stages which Reality Itself supposedly passed through in the very first moments of time after the Big Bang. It’s almost as if poor Max was made to live out intensely visceral, vicarious reactions to seven stages of Time: [3 stages in which he “died” backward from Time towards the Big Bang; a fourth at the center, which we already described as his confrontation with Death (analogous to the void prior to the big bang) and then three stages in which he was “born” forward back into Time. Allow us to delineate:
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~ V. That Ripe Stage of Possesion Now, it is fair to say Max was beginning to harbor some misgivings about this patchwork-quilted hippy chick. He did not exactly blame her for incanting her invocation on him, for by this point he was fairly sure that she was either not a human female and was just a hologram constructed for his benefit by bugs from space (he sensed this but could not prove it) or maybe a Haitian voodoo corpse possessed by ghosts (he felt he could prove this but not sense it). It was horrible and creepy, yes- he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t believe in ghosts but what he was sure of was that Hippygirl was not a person in the normal sense, at least not during their little flirty cosmic eyecontact scenario here. She was more of a puppet. A conduit, like a copper wire channeling some current at once electrical, metaphysical, and paranormal. Her body, at that ripe stage of possession, seemed dead because it was vacant and hollow, having become an empty vessel for things from long ago and far away to have their way with. It was as if a great searing laser was focused through the twin magnifying lenses of her optical ganglia and emitted from her green pupils, acting like a tractor beams upon his own light blue ones. Her psionic gifts were admittedly kind of hot, he granted. He reconsidered her rating and thought he might award her a 7.5 or even 8/10. Even in the midst of metaphysical whirlpools, old habits die hard. Max wondered if these clever, cryptic, and mischievous critters which he was beginning to figure were working through her only seemed to him like ghosts because they were so removed from the realm of humans that, like ghosts, such a thing as a physical form was wholly inapplicable to them. Or maybe they were just, in fact, ghosts. Or maybe just one big fucking ghost. It was hard to tell if the force focused through her optic nerves and into him was a swarm of scrambling ghost-bugs or one big slimy, insidiously gelatinous, coyling-tentacled hentai beast. Perhaps these unsettling, skittering things were so removed from earth that they were fused by some trans-spatial group-mind into a kind of mighty, transcendent hyperhive or possibly joined by vibrating on some single ouija frequency like a jiggley tapioca-consistencied frog-egg jelly. There was ambiguity in this point. Maybe the souls of the dead fly up to that happy hunting ground in the sky and merge into the Great Spirit as Max simplistically imagined Native Americans to believe. Maybe Hippygirl was some wise old Native American shaman herself, exorcising the demons of indiscriminate lust and cold, hard anger from Maxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s marrow. Maybe she was a she-demon, possessed by the Devil Himself, on a mission to steal Maxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s soul. Upon pondering this last possibility he decided to award her a solid 9/10. Max was weird like that.
~ VI. Night of the Flamenwerfers 421
Life. Meat. Murder. Sex. These four callings gathered power like a storm, gurgling in Max’s gut where they repeated themselves like the pre-verbal impulse of a mantra when it is too subtle to hear, an incessant primal drumbeat rising from his subconscious until Max heard his own twisted reveries explicitly and nearly jumped out of his skin. “What the freak?!” he exclaimed to himself. “How did “murder” slip in there?!” The word smashed him even more forcefully than his meeting with the Horrible Void. Upon recognizing the vile instinct gathering strength somewhere in the depths of him, he immediately felt the pre-vomit saliva fill his mouth and doubled over and hurled epic chunks. (It was unclear if this was after Time stopped or before, or somewhere in-between, the spew frozen in the Chronon like a putrid ice-sculpture.) The contents of his stomach (the few overpriced craft beers he had consumed that day and a large order of poutine from a food cart) narrowly missed Hippygirl, yet she didn’t mind in the slightest. If anything the twinkle in her eyes glimmered all the more. Max was very troubled and confused. As far as he could piece together at the time he had never murdered anyone, and he believed murder to be just as hideous a crime as the next guy. He had no idea why that wrong thing was mixed up with the bitchin’ trinity of Life, food, and sex. …No, it wasn’t merely “food”. Not the freaking sprouts and the blasted slabs of tofu that filled most of the food carts in this damn place. It was meat. This was a clue to him. In a way sex was meat too, just another form of desire of and for the flesh. In a way, he supposed, Life itself was a form of meat. His body and everyone else’s were naught but meat in fact. And meat was prey. To be it, eat it, fuck it, or kill it were just irrelevant details- all these instincts stemmed from the one original instinct- primal, orgiastic revelry in the meat and blood that is us living things. The wolf told him that. But he didn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it, or at least the “civilized” part of him didn’t, and it hurled chunks valiantly in protest. But while puking can cure a bellyache fast, it didn’t stop this hellish and tenacious feeling, which continued rising, inexhaustible, blooming like a fireball into his chest and nearly blowing his head clean off. The more he trembled in awe before The Nothing (still violating him viciously and ravishing him with relentless maliciousness), the more he saw red and the more ready he was to fight- not with his fists or a gun, but with his teeth and claws. He knew what it meant to be an animal- to live wicked and free meant ripping out the throat of deer or a man with a clean conscience. It was their juggler veins or the hunger, and the hunger was Death. Killing wasn’t a “sin” yet, the way it was for man. The wolf told him the word “sin” was a cage. That he had been chained and tamed by the word and that “his sins themselves should justify the Earth” (whatever that meant). This was all clearly wrong, it sickened him. But it was absolutely unavoidable. There was a ferocious furnace within him, in his bones, which for all his personhood were still the bones of an animal. He had evolved from the carnivores and they were still the roots of him. With his super-human perception he saw, literally saw the murderous savagery programmed into his DNA, which had evolved from predators without conscience, without apology. Max tried to think. “I am still alive. I am sentient.” he reminded himself. Sentience Itself was divine or magical in a way, yet something he could believe in unlike God. It was something he could stand for and participate in, something that made humans seem worth being around, and it gave his anguished, nihilistic life some meaning at least. He was the farthest thing from a Deadhead, but the songs weaved their way through his life by his choice of friends, and a certain Jerry Garcia 422
lyric lingered on his mind: “Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the World.” …But Sentience could only bloom from the evolution of biological life, he thought, and that meant it must pass through that detestable, ugly realm of raw, bloody meat on it’s way out of and and its way back to into the Void, on it’s way back home. Max felt a Great Doubt like a hot iron ball in his throat he could neither swallow nor spit out. He wanted out of the trance of the inescapable meat-dimension, out of this endless paradoxical and claustrophobic catharsis, this whole wretched festival and most of all out of his animal body. Ultimately, he mourned that Sentience Itself could not have somehow blinked perfect into existence without having to rip itself so carnally from Being by evolving through his ancestors, the predators, and having been tainted evil by bloodshed in the process. Max mourned the carnivore’s conundrum soulfully, with more sincerity for this abstract folly than he had offered anything for years, even his own death sentence, and he wept inwardly, altruistically as he never had for all men, so sorrowfully that he wondered if it would have been better for Sentience not to have awoken from Being at all, so long as it did not have to fight “tooth and claw”, as it were, to do so. To go even further, he thought, perhaps it would be better for Being not to Be at all, for that seemed to be the only way to wash this blood from his hands. Yes, he would turn backward and wash his hands in the Void. He had become a werewolf many times on Halloween, and now that what he finally realized was his Power Animal was claiming his body as its territory with all the lust that came with being caged for a lifetime erupting, he wondered if he must kill it before it became him. Then Max took a very, very dangerous gamble. He said “No.” to the wolf. This turned out to be a bad move, for the wolf had many friends, and instantly Max heard a grizzly chorus of growling surround him as an ungodly pack of 7,000 savage and starving werewolves emerged from the darkness beneath the pines of the oldgrowth forest surrounding the festival, which was now in full swing. Werewolves with flamethrowers.
~ Needless to say, things got very bad, very fast. What ensued could be called nothing other than “Maximum Carnage”. In the macabre chaos of fur, fire, fangs, and tie die there was little place for metaphysics. The white-hot infernos that leapt from the horrendous monsters’ flammenwerfers (they were German werewolves) scorched not only the vegan hippies ironically to succulent barbecue remnants beyond all hope of recognition or redemption within seconds, but so too singed so much fur of the beasts’ own brethren so as to coat the festival grounds in a thick, black, burnt-hair-smelling, choking smog, and the collateral damage caused the carnivores to turn on themselves, blazing eachother into smoking manwolf crisps and shredding eachother ravenously into bloody spaghetti until their ravaging fangs were ground down to the root on the endless crunching bone of both man and beast, and of beastmen, till the last claws were clawed clean off, and until their flammenwerfers sputtered fuel-less and werfed their last flammen. The wailing of the few survivors sang a poignant tune over the blood-drenched battlefield and the 423
odor of hair-smoke, despair, reefer, and patchouli mingled in the awful night. Only the dead can know peace from this festival.
~ Our hero knelt amidst the wet shreds of wrent revelers, howling and gnashing his teeth at the unspeakable tragedy, but just before he collapsed, an old, mysterious power known as “the Writhing Language” took hold of Max. You can read about this Power and many other wondrous things in our book The Garden of Flowers. Max had not felt this strange spell settle upon him in many, many years. But here it was- that same old Wild Wind in his vocal chords possessing him, just as if he was back at Manerva University, and it sang a verse in rhyme through his very throat. That verse is called “The Frost of the Void” and it goes like this:
THE FROST OF THE VOID Humans are strange, Humans are sad. There is a Good And there is a Bad. Paint not "God and Devil" On the Face of Sentience, For The Frost of the Void In no way resents us. And though Sentience peeks Through the Universe Window, No God and No Devil Are there to pursue you. Yet Unknowing calls and Absolute Black Is the prettiest color. That is a fact. Matter is Something And Space is so empty Matter says "Space!" "Oh how you complete me!" The Other is always There facing in. When you meet the Wolfman Say "Hello Again!" When Tom is the loser 424
And Jerry the King, To streamline the Drama Is how we begin. Tis the orbit of poles, Each round the other Therin lies the reason The Universe even bothered. "Oh how you complete me!" Emptiness says to Form And thus makes it worthwhile That the World was born. Tis the Eternal Drama And its motion through Time As dynamic equilibrium drips from the vine. Hark- The double-helix! The secret is found! In the fractal of brambles Paradox Fruit abounds. I want you to know Nothingness more intimately. True Nothing is too Nothing To ever be empty.
~
VII. The Serpentine Solution Max emerged from unconsciousness at some ungodly dark hour of the night to groggily feel himself shivering, drooling and hugging himself in the fetal position on the ground in his own regurgitated poutine and porter, traumatized irreparably by the carnival of carnage into severe and quite possibly permanent catatonia. He felt personally responsible for unleashing some kind of hydrogen bomb of power-animal wrath, and as an afterthought he wished he had not been so sarcastically derisive of the sweet naïve hippies all his life. They did not deserve this. But then he felt a cool hand gently and lovingly stroke his cheek, and he opened his eyes to see Hippygirl, still smiling ever so slightly with a transcendent hope and pity only the princess from The Neverending Story or the Madonna could have for humanity. But she was now holding a gnarled staff and her eyes, as yet soft and imploring, turned lightning. Serpentlightning, to be exact. “I have my power animals too.” she cooed. And thus Max received The Serpentlightning 425
Trickster Transmission. In a flash her green round pupils switched to the black vertical slash of the reptile upon bright yellow irises, and an insane streak of blinding green electric voltage shot from them into Max’s soul. But instead of the jagged patterns of white lightning’s electricity, this otherworldly green energy was swimming at lightspeed in duel corkscrews intertwined- like two snakes writhing in opposite directioned-spirals as they flowed forward. The Double-Helix Power. The Dyonysian Flux. All became serpentine. She was Medusa, of course, (but she was also a mermaid ghost, and a Goddess of sorts) and snakes writhed not only from her mesmerizing hair, but all upon her neon green scaled naked skin, and the fractal medusa liquid dripping from her voluptuous fertile form shimmered like snakes coiling through endless dimensions which intersected with the precision of clockwork on all surfaces as does the Paint of the Druids on the revolving emerald brick walls of her frozen tomb- the Slytherin Halls. The two snakes coiled in the eternal mystic double helix round her gnarled medicine staff slithered up and out of the staff and then onto the ground where they became hundreds and then thousands of snakes, which slithered out and into the mouths of the fallen hippies, where in their chests began to glow golden orbs of light which healed and re-animated them anew with vertical pupils, forked tongues, scaled skin, and fire breath. She then bent down and French-kissed Max and her sizzling electrified forked tongue, like a snake of coiling green lightning, slithered into his mouth and down his gullet into his gut, where it coiled and convoluted him symbiotically into Serpentlightning from the inside out and ALL became the Double Helix and the Dance, from the massive over-arching double-helix shape of the Grand Archetypal Form of Time itself, to the double-helix of the DNA in the redeemed reptilian marrow of Max’s bones, to the opposite-directioned interwoven corkscrew rotation of the electromagnetic fields in the paths of twin photons as they proved the double-helix to be intrinsic to the fabric of matter and light itself, and the orgiastic flux of Dionysus the Snake Goddess redeemed Being for having to pull itself out of the Void and then through the savagery and sin of the Carnivorous Mammal Meat Dimension to reach the fruit of the Divine Reptilian Rave Sentience through Man reborn as Triumphant Were-Dragon. It was not that the sin was extinguished but that the sheer momentum of Life, released through the fruition of the ancient secret of the Mystery Cults of the Icy Caves of Elysium- the Secret Serpent Coiling Momentumgleamed itself forward regardless, and so swept the karmic resistance of sin up into its irresistible momentum as it does all things into the hyper-streamlined, resistance-less forwarding towards the inevitable Destiny of the Illuminati who live amongst us as reptilian shapeshifters to bring forth the Eschaton, solely through the writhing-language rhymes of their cunning and mischievous forked tongues. And then Max’s thoughts turned to his wife Lana…
~
VIII. The Gods of Mischief *Editor’s Note: As Max vicariously lived through the cataclysmic death and rebirth of the Universe, a calm and reasonable part of him viewed it as if 426
from the balcony of a laboratory- sterile, clinical, and abstract, with the clarity of logic. There he watched and took notes at the very edge of his seat. The following interludes in italics interspersed throughout the prose are transcriptions of his notes. Unfortunately they make no sense whatsoever. Lana’s power Animal was the Hawk. A noble and wise creature with keen vision, like she was. Max wished he was a hawk too, instead of the wolf, so he could know what it was like to be an equal to her and so she would know what it was like to have a better match than him, one she deserved. He saw a vision of two hawks making love, as they do- their beaks clenched together, spinning around eachother as they spiral down in free-fall, becoming one and releasing eachother just before they meet they ground, and flying away. Or, he mused, was this the mating dance of eagles rather than hawks? He supposed it didn’t matter, since Lana was far too subversive to have a symbol of patriotism for her power animal, and after all it was his own hallucination. Anyways, it was a beautiful thing and it made Max weep, far from the first time he had on this day. He wept because he knew Lana deserved this- a perfect union, a graceful and true one he could never give her, since she knew his sins and they would forever stand between them, an ugly chasm which filled him with a feeling of gnawing worthlessness and infinite remorse. But maybe there was hope… He could begin again, and make a new vow to honor her… but he did not know if this would be enough… The Realm of Archetypes is the proper habitat for magical Spirit-Animals because, as they are more real than their human counterparts, It is more real than the mortal realm. The messages from such animals are to be more trusted than any thought, and service to them must be unfailing. The reason access to the Archetypal Archives by normal consciousness is so very limited is because normal consciousness cannot suffuse the vast subconscious area which exists underneath it. The analogy would be of the tip of an iceberg verses the submerged (Archetypal) area. Thus the Realm of Archetypes seems LESS real and somehow insubstantial as dreams do, but this is an "optical illusion" due to our lesser ACCESS, not an accurate description of its true nature. Max watched the hawks of his vision spin around eachother, locked, and wished only that Lana might somehow still know this beautiful feeling he once had a chance to give her, but after awhile his sorrow faded, and he felt himself become drowsy and lose all connection to his body, far below. He watched the hawks, until he forgot everything he had ever known except them. He watched them for what felt like a lifetime, locked in perfect love against a starry sky, spiraling down until they splashed into a great dark sea. The hawks remained bound to eachother and spun round and round underwater, lazily now, and as they did they blurred into two shapes, like the sun and moon. Max was mesmerized by these two shapes, which no longer seemed to be falling but floated with him, weightless. One shape was white, and one was black. They were eternal, and they had always chased eachother, in perfect symmetry, since the beginning of Time, and so they always would, forever. The surrender to the Dyonysian Flux offers a rerdiscovery of the Archetypes of Humanity (such as that of the wolf for our hero) that populate the dreamworld or the area of the mind and human culture/ concerns which have to do with our true faces- the "animals we are always being to eachother".) Every 427
person has a secret dream in their heart of hearts. Some recognize that they have this wish, and some do not, but all do, if only in their subconscious, perhaps in dreams they do not remember. The wish is to become an animal, and different people are called to different animals. But why are these Animals so intimately tethered to both Dreams and Archetypes? They are demigods from the depths, super-powered and magical. For frog-called souls, the frog they are in misremembered dreams is not only a frog, but a magical frog. It is faster, wiser. For a frog-called one, to become this frog could be considered the one victory and triumph of the trajectory of ones life. No other quest is as valid or encompasses all the other quests. Suddenly a memory from Max’s life as a mortal came to his mind like a bubble floating up from the depths. It was a poster from his youth, a poster of what most people call a “yin-yang symbol”, but which is also called the “Tai-Chi”. It had hung on the front wall of a martial arts studio he had attended as a youth, and he had many chances to stare at it as he practiced his form, before he grew more interested in girls and gave up the practice. At the time he thought the symbol, like incense and stone Buddhas and all eastern religious things, was silly. But now, watching the two great orbs cycle and cycle, he understood. The yin-yang symbol was not “invented” by men at all. It was drawn long ago by old mystics who were simply recording the same thing that Max was watching now, hypnotized. He was watching the Forever Chase, before Time, when all the World was still two thoughts- the first hunter and the first prey. It didn’t matter which was which. One would run, run away, and the other would follow, so close behind, but would never catch the first. Or they would switch roles and the other would flee, while the first was always at its heels, but never close enough to pounce and end the game. They were playing tag! Max had a funny thought. He thought it was a brave and honorable thing, for the Shape that first decided to volunteer to be the Hunter to do that, for the Hunter would always later come to be known as the “bad” one. Maybe it didn’t know this at the time, and would later always regret the decision. Or maybe it did know this, and yet was still willing to take on the burden of that role and begin the Forever Chase anyway, like a martyr. Max thought this must have taken great courage, and he thought that if one of the first Shapes could do such a thing, then he could honor that choice by at least finding the courage to face his own future without bitterness, tumor be damned. One of the two Original Faces of Reality decides to volunteer to become the Original Hunter and so begins Primary Archetypal Predation (the “Forever Chase”). They begin to orbit around eachother almost instantaneously in a Primordial Time before Time as we know it. They could barely wait to start! The fact that there were two halves was *merely* interesting [Sentience vs. Being, Good vs. Evil, Matter vs. Void, etc. and the many other colors we paint them with] but it is the orbitingof the two poles around eachother which transmutes a merely "interesting" Universe into a dramatic and "mischieviously vital" situation. And that, my friends, is known as "nodding one's head in solidarity with Tom", for reasons which shall soon become clear... Max had another funny thought. He thought of Tom and Jerry, the zany cat and mouse of his Saturday mornings cartoons as a child, who would always be locked in mortal combat, forever. He thought maybe “the Tom and Jerry” was a better name for the yin-yang symbol, and 428
he simply decided to name it this, and by doing so he reclaimed it. He was grateful for Tom, the cat, because Tom had been willing to become the “bad” one, so that the Game could happen. What a horrible fate, and what uncompromising nobility! What courage! He thought of the Wolf, doomed forever to play the “bad” one, while its prey had it so easy as the “innocent”, and he felt pity for the wolf and forgave it with a heaving sigh for the first time in his entire life. And then, simply, he decided he DID want to be a wolf, but it was a Golden wolf this time. This made Max smile, and he felt wickeder than ever, but heroic at the same time, and a great bliss and joy washed over him. But he drifted further away, backwards. Tom is in truth the loser. Neither can ever actually "lose" but Tom has volunteered to sacrifice itself to play the "villain" or "wolfman". This is his unrecognized altruism, his humility. Why would Tom endure this sacrifice? He was acting in reluctant service as a martyr for certain entities who worship the ideals of Drama, Paradoxicality, and Mischief. His assignment was to set in motion Primordial Time, so that it could evolve into Time as we mortals know it: Time as defined by the Grand Archetypal Form of the Double Helix (mathematically speaking: the Form created when poles of Primary Predation or Primary Mischief orbiting around eachother begin simultaneously tracing a forward direction perpendicular to the direction of their rotating binary orbit.) Sachmo’s power animal was the Frog. (Sachmno was a true friend Max had once upon a time, and someone he would meet once again some day.) He was a gentle soul with the heart of a poet, and like him, his power animal was no great and terrible beast. But hunt it did, from time to time a fly. Max missed his dear friend, and remembering him and empathizing with him, he became the Frog. Now amphibious and slimy and gentle, Max was a great big bull frog in the deep dark waters of Being, with only its eyes peeking out above the waterline. He was absolutely still, watching, watching. He felt his eyes were the Eyes of the World, the Sentience of the World Itself, peeking out from the pregnant, briney depths of the blind mud. There was a fly before him on a lily pad, washing its arms with its proboscis in tasty clicking motions. Max, The Frog, sat in true meditation, absolutely still. Soon he would strike out his sticky tongue in a brilliant flash and catch his prey, but for now he was content to sit, breathless, and the stillness enveloped Max and he learned how to be without hunger, and without shame. His eyes, The Frog’s eyes, were Sentience Itself, and the lily pad frog saw before him was World, not bigger than him, but equal, like two mirrors facing eachother. He understood that Sentience was not a thing inside World, but its equal pair. When he chose, he would strike out and begin the game of hunter and prey, the Forever Chase, but before that, he resided, luxuriously, in the vast stillness of Two, not orbiting eachother in Time yet like the hawks, but like two static, infinite mirrors, one white and one black, facing eachother, silent, breathless, and he was content to reside there. For awhile... As for the generative stages, it is not that first there was None (void), then One (being), then Duality, but rather Void bifurcates *directly* into Two. A new “something” (even an infinite homogenous unity) is different from Void Itself and implies a beforehand in which there was Nothing. This contrast is the two original faces of Primary Archetypal Duality- the two mirrors facing eachother. It is fair to say that Sentience chose to take on the cloak of the Nothing Before, because it had more room to breathe there and because Something was more 429
interesting to look at than the reverse. This is how Sentience became associated with “emptiness”, although true Void in Itself was [is] no more “empty” than it was “before”. This implies that Sentience was there from the beginning, waiting, and it was . Why was the bifurcation of Something-ness directly intoDuality of such importance to Max? Because understanding this concept experientially, viscerally, in his bones, was an awakening that liberated an enormous amount of psychic energy. By "Healing unto Duality" or making a final embrace and acceptance of duality (nodding one's head in solidarity with Tom) he reclaimed the True Primordial Yin-yang from the false yin-yang as eastern mystical yearning backward toward aquatic and homogenous womb, and it triggered the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb of psychic energy and like all satoris of concern to us it radically streamlined his lineartemporal forwarding karmic process. After all, it is the STREAMLINING of karmic resistance that is the purpose of satori and ritual. Primary Archetypal Duality is born from Void and Void, alas, becomes forever painted as “Before” to humans, and this is an unavoidable delusion due to the fact that we inhabit Time. So too our deep fear of experiencing it (which Max conquered triumphantly in this story), is a fundamental psychological roadblock due to the deep instinctual fear of our own eventual non-being via death. This biological survival programming necessarily paints Non-Being Itself as threat and prevents us from knowing It’s harmless inconceivability intimately. Beware mystics who yearn backwards for Void painted as Maternal and Warm Aquatic Unity of the Womb. Void is not womb, nor is it death, but to abandon these paints is impossible due to our habitat of Time. The best we can achieve is to retrain ourselves to experience the void viscerally and intimately as “inconceivable” rather than “empty” as it appears to us. How did max’s arrival at Primary Archetypal Duality trigger the sudden release of streamlining energy? By giving honor to the pre-time, post-void state, which is a "before", and yet like all Primary Archetypes is a constant ongoing process that continues to be vitally relevant. (Our "Void-face" still exists, our "Static Yin-Yang (mirrors)" still exists, the "advent of mischief through drama and the sentience of this emergence STILL exists. These all and others are like dimensions of ourselves in addition to convenient creation myths. Processes and dimensions this Primary are of course the hardest to retain conscious awareness of. If the building blocks which compose us are the most difficult to see, all the more so for the most basic of building blocks of Being- the Foundations, the Scaffolding. They are most susceptible to falling into pre-conscious assumed unknowing and descriptions of them are most vulnerable to becoming abstractions understood and perhaps logically accepted while thinking of them but lacking visceral relevance. They are also victims of our eternal nefarious painting ways. Such building blocks are also, however, the most valuable to retain, viscerally potent in the bones of one's knowing, since they apply to the widest array of experience. They color and explain all things, known or not. In a sense these dimensions (for example, pre-time void) are one's face whether known or not; "one's face before one's parents were born" as some say. It was the potential of the goal of Sentience Itself in Waiting which pulled Primary Archetypal Duality from the Void, because it was bored. And because it 430
knew that this would set in motion an inevitable chain of events that would lead to the evolution of organisms in soIt could “cheat” and retroactivelyexplain where It came from to satisfy a causal or physical perspective. The future in this case was too good not to create its own cause in the past. The Future Goal of Time (Sentience) is also the reason Time (Its proper stage) was constructed in the first place. This means it had to exist in a form of potential or “knew itself before it had a place in which to exist”. Pure Paradox. Thinking in terms of this paradox intimately, one can know the true ultimate Sentience as not merely an event *within* World but as a habitat “outside” World or “on equal footing” to World, (as a field and valid counterpart) in a manner that transcends linear temporality. Thinking in terms of this paradox intimately, it is precisely in the way Sentience is “outside” World and in the way it transcends linear temporality that it can do miraculous things such as be the cause of and reason for World to be Born despite Itself not existing yet. As an analogy, If Einsteinian Space-Time is the field through which Newtonian physicality and linear time curves, Grand Ultimate Sentience is the field through which Einsteinian Curved Space-Time and Transcendent Temporality *themselves* Curve. This is why Grand Ultimate Sentience is sometimes called the “Curling Sentience”. Then Max slipped back all the way into the Nowhere, which was no longer the Horrible Void. He understood now that he had painted it as Death, but this was ridiculous folly. It was not what would remain after his death by the tumor, because “After” did not make sense here at all. He had also painted it as Womb, some mystic warmth he yearned to return to, but it was not this either, because “Before” did not make sense here. He had painted it all along, like we all do, as Mother and Father, as Cold Void and Night Sky, as the Grim Reaper and as Solitary Confinement, the Final Alone. As White Heaven, as the Great Black Monolith, and as Tomb. Just as many foolish humans do, he had sometimes painted it as “God”. But it was none of these things. He did not know what was enveloping him but he was sure he should surrender to It, and when he did he disappeared entirely, and it cleansed every single drop of sin from him, before he, and It, were reborn anew, together, clean. The initial spark which caused the Big Bang explosion, the decision by “God” for the Universe to Be, as some fools would say, or the “reason there is Something rather than Nothing” is neither inconceivable nor outside the boundary of science, but must be understood “backwards” in time from the perspective of potential future entities more advanced in the project of sentience than humans.And so we define and explain the cause of the Big Bang through the sheer desire for the ideals of Drama, Paradoxically, and Mischief by agents of the “Curling Sentience”, ideals which require Double-Helix Time as their proper stage upon which to play, ideals so transcendently high that their agents may best be treated as the Gods who Created World retroactively so as to have a place for them to exist. Suddenly, Max was struck by one final vision before the Chronon released him back into his mortal life. He saw the reason the Double-Helix Shape was woven throughout his DNA and in the electromagnetic behavior of photons. It was because the Double-Helix was precisely, mathematically, the shape that is formed when two spheres orbiting eachother trace a path 431
forward through a dimension perpendicular to their binary orbit. He saw how The Grand Archetypal Form of Time itself was a double helix and how this miraculous shape was necessary for Drama because unlike the eternal predictability of Primordial Cycling Time, the new perpendicular forward direction signified an “unfinished” and mischievously vital scenario for Tom and Jerry to play within. It made the outcome of the chase unknown, exciting now. And solidarity with that new unfinished nature of the Forever Chase reminded him once more of a tingling in his throat, so inexpressible back then. The wind that did once kindle it had surely come again. The Gods of Mischief, as we may as well call them, are the “reason” or “cause” of World, and whose mere potential for existing demands that (4)They pull themselves out of Time as we know it or “Double-Helix” Time, as (3)DoubleHelix Time pulled itself out of Primordial Orbiting Duality, as (2)Primordial Orbiting Duality pulled Itself from Static Duality (mirrors), as (1)Static Duality pulled Itself from Void. This chain reaction of sequential “pullings from” is ultimately the cause of all phenomenon by the future potentiality of the Mischievious, Curling, or “Jellyfish” Sentience (represented by that/those entity/ies which possessed the character Hippygirl) which is the higher dimensional field through which curved 4th-dimensional spacetime *itself* curves).
~
-EPILOGUEDAWN OF A SCOUNDREL Max awoke from his wondrous and horrific stupor to find himself still alive. There was science to do and cake to be had! He wiped some vomit from his lips with his sleeve and steadied his wobbly legs. The Chronon had mercifully released him, and he felt more or less as if he had turned a new leaf. He gladly opened a new chapter of his wilted scrapbook. Grateful for his second chance, with a clean slate, he grinned stupidly. He was in the midst of the most epic of frazzledays. The wild wind was to his back and all was well with the world. Although we can’t say he would live happily ever after, he would have many bubbles of happiness of a flavor he had not known since childhood. The wings of the birds chirping in his heart were embroidered with the most delicate patterns of frost, for these were the Ravens of the Frost of the Void, and their song was crisp and crystal clear. It was a melody he had heard before, but he could not place it. The rosy fingers of dawn were tantalizing the horizon. Apollo was riding his golden chariot against the azure sky once again. If he had made it home before daylight he just might have gotten some sleep tonight, but it was too late, or rather too early for that. Then he remembered where came the melody of the Ravens- from a video game from his youth, one called “Dragon Warrior”. He bowed to Hippygirl, who was just finishing her smirk, and she bowed in return, ceremoniously, and walked away. Max just couldn’t help himself, and called out 432
to her “What are you?” She paused, turned back, and granted him an answer: “In your language our name would be translated as “The Jellyfish”*.” “Hrmmm…” thought Max, as he watched her walk away, barefoot upon the morning dew, and disappear into the fog. Her ass beneath her patchwork dress looked to him like two Belgian muskrats fighting in a wet burlap sack. He hated to see her go, yet he could watch her walk away all day. Then Max yawned, brushed himself off, lit up a smoke by power of his shiny silver lighter, pretended he was a Wicked Golden Scoundrel Wolf Hero and went home to give Lana the fuck of her life.
~
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-The End-
(for now!)
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TGOFII “Further Shamanic Tales of Romance and Adventure!”
Nathan Dragavon
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“What a horrible night for a curse!”
-Castlevania.
Nintendo
Entertainment
*FACTCHECK
~
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System.
1980.
Shrunken Skull Skewer She kept clinging ghosts of romance remorse Pet absentmindedly, of course Cruella Vixon Replicon Sister Shrunken skulls upon her skewer Collecting ghosts, keeping them around Past lovers ruined, hollow shells abound To decorate her bamboo skewer Shrunken skulls like ribs for dinner.
Oh Cruella Vixon Replicon Sister, How many skulls you had for dinner? Lost count in the fog of Demonwinter. Haven’t you, you silly girl. How many addicted to your power? Lost count in the fog of Demonwinter. (A street for us, made just for sinners) Through its fog we trudge, her souls for dinner. Our souls’ collection was her fixation, A sunset once, then succinctly abandoned Yet here we come back, like herds of cats Once men, now her familiars, yep Hopeless, tragic, demented, kept Around for mild ego pets When we return and ask for one More glimpse of her sweet mirage sun. _ This story is of Cadillacs and cigarettes And a magic man and how he wept, And new voodoo charms we won’t soon forget 437
And fevered dreams and reveries (the best of times, it seems to me) And manic highs and chemical floods And epiphanies, you see, because crushes and swoons and infatuation blossoms Are feelings we partake of often. Yes fevered dreams and reveries, Are the best times it seems to me. (For dancing round and dancing new Is always something fun to do!) Until one day… upon one street… Would a wicked shamaness our hero meet A nemesis- his Moriarty But a voluptuous one who liked to party. His heart was set upon to save her. She was not to return the favor. _ “No mirage sun for me no more!” Vowed Mr. Kite before the war “Forevermore!” he declared. (Sure!) “No aphrodisiac potion, no hex you send “could seal my doom and spell my end! “No voodoo doll upon your shelf “Could leave me but a hollow shell!” This he swore, before the war. “See her again? Well, perhaps once more…” But our Puzzlemaster, a trap he set! A scheme to love yet not be met By jaws of the Mantis, her mandibles wet With appetite to shred his flesh And skewer his skull like totem prime And stake the one last heart divine. Like warning sign upon her land“I stake the heart of the last true man.” But The lobster trap of a Master TrollWas strategized upon a stroll Down his old path which petered out The last time he saw it, he strolled about In woods down in that old Moss Hollow “Eureka!” thought the peculiar fellow I’ll hide my heart in a Puzzlebox! An iron one composed of locks. “No sadist nurse’s cursed pins Can peirce a Puzzlebox, my friend!” This with all his might he swore Mr. Kite’s last words before the war. 438
Before he vanished forever from all who ever met him, He drove a Cadillac down to Demonwinter Street to meet his woman...
CURSED TABLE OF CONTENTS I.PREFACE: “SO KAZARTHIZ?”
YOU
THINK
YOU
KNOW
WHAT
Preface: “So You Think You Know What Kazarthiz?” “Mr. Dazzlefox, what’s a Kazarthizz?” asked Kristy cutely. She was not above being silly (or moreso, rather) or (more) ditzy on purpose. She, if anyone, would know of Cathnorsis. You could say she wrote the book on Kazarthizzz. Starred in it, to tell the truth. “No, no my dear one- ...a tale of Kathantix. Hakuin could take a joke. And he did. “And the name is “Dazzlefluff” my sweet friend.” Kristy knew this of course. She was teasing. “A tale of Kizzerstiks?” the silly girly inquired dreamily. She snuggled deeper within the fluff of Mr. Hakuin Dazzlefluff’s fuzz- his fur, the neon lightshow of his fuzz, pinpoints of colored light glistening as always. Frying Hard. “Yes, my well-spoken young scholar. Tonight I will tell you a tale of great and horrible Kortextinth! This is the story of a boy who thought he was the Sun. A boy who thought he could kill Death Itself! And guess what? That boy is sitting in this very cozy den beside us even now!” Mosach furrowed his brow, bracing himself for the unwanted, embarrassing attention of the group attending storytime. He groaned softly to himself, making a guttural, gravelly noise in his throat, sounding somewhat like “Hrrrmmm...” He did that often. “But what IS a Thornakis, Mr. Dazzlepuff?” pressed the scholar. “The pronunciation is “Dazzlefluff” I shall kindly have you remember, my dear. 439
“OK” yawned Kristy. She was not making an effort to retain and utilize her mentor’s correct surname in the future, but instead taking her precious time squirming through a gloriously satisfying and luxurious full-body drowse-stretch. It took her about four minutes. “A Thronkaktish is precisely just such an ordeal as the one our enterprising young lad had to undergo in this story. It’s a mental and emotional upheaval. A primal phenomena of the deep, dark subconscious, and a painful and frightening trial! But it may too be the most rewarding of challenges. If the deep, dark, subconscious of an especially troubled mind gathers the courage to rise up like a leviathan from the deep, dark depths, and if it manages to breach the surface of the conscious mind, well... who knows what may come of that, eh? A Klazokteth might even be a great, powerful, tumultuous healing of the mind. Who knows? One day you... or you... or any of us [pointing first down to the lucky, drowsy, cradled one, then round her classmates round the storyteller in the warmth from the fireplace of his cozy den, and finally turning his black nail back back toward himself and his big white fluffy chest] ...well, we might wake up some dreadful kind of morning to discover our mind performing a chaotic, spontaneous surgical operation on itself, by instinct. An experience perhaps like giving birth, or like the exscorsism of demons, or hell, maybe like giving birth to demons! But the instinct is to heal. One can never be sure such a drastic endeavor will work, but it will indeed hurt. Indeed. “And did the troubled boy who became the sun heal?” interjected Leena, not intending to glance at Mosach on her left and expose his Sun God alter ego of Legend, but she was kind and unable to resist flashing him a long-familiar and forgiving smile. Mosach warmed to her consistent nurturence as he rolled his eyes. His cover was blown. It was true, he had become the Sun about three or four summers ago. He was not one to brag. But she then asked quite seriously of the wise old guru “Did his mind fix itself?” “WHO CARES!!” Hakuin exclaimed like an explosion from his diaphragm, startling his prone lap inhabitant severly. He was known for his sudden and loud outbursts. “The bastard,” he continued heatedly, “produced all manner of tumultuous Art of a controversial and provocative nature, including a rare obscene masterpiece of magic realism, a magnum opus with an exceedingly high order of chaos!” Hakuin was referring to Mosach’s old art therapy project from hell- the arguably “demonic-” or “satanic-” -flavored underground hip hop concept album most fans knew by the abbreviated title “Cherry Blossom City”. It came from a dark place. “So, did the Centaurthoninz work?” asked Sparkpatz as she slipped her fishnet crisscrossed pale arm around Mosach’s shoulders. Spark’s skin felt impossibly smooth and cool through the delicate checkerboard-patterned see-through lace. It was simultaneously ecstatic and anguish to Mosach, It was ecstatic because he was a man, and alive, and though her arm felt like family, like a sibling’s... it also happened to be composed of the flesh of the Epically Gorgeous Embodiment of Dark Seduction and Voluptuousness. Sadly, the ectsacy was cut with agony because Mosach could feel the slightly damp, clammy skin of his neck crawl as it seemed to stick awkwardly to her porcelain cells like pizza dough or the meat of a corpse. And on a third transcendent level, above both these extremes and encompassing them, was the bliss of true and complete acceptance he felt from knowing that, oh yes, Sparkpatz most 100% definitely felt that awkward doughy corpse-flesh stickiness of his neck and yet cared not one single atom, because she liked standing by his side, with him, to discuss this important point. (And in a fourth sense, subliminal and peculiar but more transcendent and encompassing than the third, Mosach and Sparkpatz both shared the creepy knowledge that she actually prefered and savored the clamminess of his texture, precisely because she could sense the squeamishness it caused him, 440
and she could sense how his adoration of her beauty and envy of her strength induced an instinct in him to cringe self-consciously in comparison, to shy away from her wise, snakey, confident, arm as it found its place sensually around him. If she got off on his aching vulnerability, it was hers to plunder. If she was into corpses, he was a little happier to be one. But such things are neither here nor there. “Did the catharsis work; did he heal the mind’s trauma?” Sparkpatz asked again, standing by her friend’s side. She was looking toward her hero, her guide, her crush, her only unrequited and greatest love for a judgment on an issue of importance to her. It escaped no one in the room that she used the right word, said “catharsis” correctly. She was serious in asking for Dr. Hakuin’s prognosis and valued his wisdom but all knew that she was in reality posing the question to Mosach himself. She wanted him to decide. He felt fushed, squirmy, and claustrophobic. Hakuin did not. Ever. “...” said the fox. A master of suspense he was. “...” said Mosach and family. They were often in suspense. Especially of their disbelief. “If only the sick sonovabitch had failed to heal MORE trauma, and produced more fucking Art!” came the verdict. Sparkpatz laughed gaily, her dark humor receptors tickled. Mosach nodded slowly for awhile, deadpan and pokerfaced. Leena exhaled as if sighing “That doesn’t answer the question and was a little mean just for a chuckle!” Leena liked direct answers, evidence, and logic. She was curious if Hakuin had determined the catharsis was successful, and she was eager for her buddy to get the clean bill of health from their brain surgeon, Goddess willing, her fingers crossed. Mox was absolutely positive that his best friend’s trauma was incalculable, permanent, degenerative, and contagious, and that no Thnoslarnishlox, nomatter how cataclysmic, could help more than chamomile tea. Would probably make things far, far worse, he figured. Kristy was fast asleep, and snoring adorably gently with little snorts and whistles just as you might imagine. The only Cashnorlox she was concerned with was her own. “Cashnorlox?” mumbled Kristy in her sleep between snorts and whistles, just as cutely as you may well imagine..
*PORTRAIT: HAKUIN “yes, he is LITERALLY a fox” INTRODUCTION: “SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHAT THE SPIRIT OF A MAGICAL FOX IS?” “Hi Mr. Dazzlefox!” Kristy said practically glowing, beaming joy. “It’s Fluff. Dazzlefluff, my dear child” The magical being corrected. Kristy knew. She was teasing. Mr. Dazzlefluff was, of course, literally glowing. How shall we put this… L – I – T – E – R – A – L – L –Y …glowing. Also, yes, he is LITERALLY a fox.* Well, a fox-being, with a much taller 441
and somewhat human-esquee form, but to be sure, more fox than man! He had fur (we’ll get to that…) He had a nice, long snout which stretched downward along his face moreso than out, a black spongey nose, fine tall ears sprouting proudly up from the top of his head, and a very manly and gentlemanly thick and coily handlebar mustache (well kept) and a concave belly showing his ribcage and making for a much thinner inner region around his waist down to his spritely and lankey long legs and long wirey arms. Standing (or lounging, in this case) he was mostly upright, just a bit curled, a jaunty hunch as if it was a bit much to ask of his old bones to stand perfectly upright the way humans do. He didn’t wear clothes other than sometimes a black hoodie, mostly for practical nighttime stealth concerns related to his job at the college, which required some discredtion and sometimes on fun days a cape (more Bela Legosi than Superan) [blue…] However, his thick, soft birthday suit of fuzz covered any potential indecency of his loins- after all, he wasn’t an animal!! (well, you know what we mean.) The esteemed Mr. Dazzlefluff was more fur than muscle and what fur it was! (but we’ll get to that…) His hands and feet (both paws, technically) were both quite long indeed and although about 50% fox in form and strikingly non-human, his paws were extraordinarily expressive and most delicate in their mannerisms. They were paws of poise. Vast poise, despite, or accentuated by his 20 long, slightly curled black nails / talons which were not retractable nor visciouslooking. Oh no- though fierce and quite clearly not one to be trifled with, his animal qualities in no way gave him any sense of being monstrous, primal, or animalistic like some kind of common werewolf. He was far too cultured for that. Back to the nails- they were shiniest and darkest black. His trusty pointing extensions used to express many things so very elegantly non-verbally as he gesticulated unconsciously but like a conductor, and the elegance of a conductor. The shiny, hard black nails would turn and meander and curl and shake, point, and squeeze, twinkle and jitter and strum, and you could sense the huge, grand tenderness in them, in how so very gently they flowed with his stories. Unoticed, by him apparently, until he pointed at someone, a gesture that would surely be appreciated and remembered by all who had the honor to receive it. If you mentioned “Hakuin pointed that way he does” the fellow recipient would smile and know exactly what you meantit’s hard to describe such ideosynchratic things, but it was a moment that made you hooked on his attention and stand up straight and open your eyes a little wider to pay attention to whatever his concern was- be it a “Don’t you dare!”-point, a “this is crucial to remember”-point, a “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter”-point, a “You earned this ice-cream cone so you better enjoy it, and I’m buying!”-point, the ever-relevant “You’ll regret asking her out, and you know her boyfriend collects mideaval weaponry”-point, or the classic “You. Get in the swoosh-car. Bring the rope. No time to explain!”-point. Regardless of the instance, when that slightly curled talon-nail of his hand-paws’ index finger stretched toward you, not completely straight like an accusing nail or a threatening dart, but kind of raised tentatively, half-questioningly like a bit of a hook, he just hooked your attention. No ferocity, but as if to say “Here’s my point- look in my eyes and tell me I’m wrong! You can’t!” So with the gesture he hooked you, and you looked in his eyes and his nail-talon would remain, presenting a little moment when you were on the spot, and you couldn’t be sure while you felt like you were being tested in some manner, some strange challenge. You wanted to impress him. Like for a moment you couldn’t tell if he was really talking about the car keys or the homework he said he’d help you with or some hunt he would be leaving for- it really 442
didn’t make sense. None of this does. It’s just a matter of looking someone in the eyes and knowing they are on a different level, a higher level, than what happens to be the subject of conversation, and they expect you to be up there too. They care. You could tell Hahuin respected you enough to challenge you, to verify you were able to see things from his side, he cared if you were telling the truth, he cared if you got his joke. He cared if you stubbed your toe. He cared if your transcendence of the conversation matched his own, and if you could wordlessly carry on that higher soul-communion moment through eye-contact. Interestingly he did not care a hoot if you denied up and down that he was a fox, nor if you were fervent to convince everyone in the room he *was* a fox. It was a moot point to him, so long as you didn’t reveal any racist tendancies (a good opportunity for a “Don’t you dare!”-point, yet for some reason he would just FLIP OUT if you even mentioned that he had one eye (an undeniable fact- some very rare few had seen it. It was completely white, because it was a glass eye. He would flip the script to the max. And he did have only one eye. His blind eye was covered with an eye-patch and he never took it off. And he would not stand for any reference to his having one blind eye or ever mentioned the patch itself. Woe unto you who risked a pirate joke! This would send him over the edge. He would hoot and holler and get over-excited and pace about, rambling and ranting about how he had TWO eyes like everyone else and he didn’t wear a patch and didn’t know what you were talking about, like this- “A Patch? A PATCH!? You gotta be looney-toons if you think I have one eye! ONE… EYE!? What’re you playin’ a prank on me?? Does this look like April Fools’ Day? [grabs calendar off the wall and beats it like an evangelist with a bible] “I have TWO eyes and if I hear one more…” [etc.] What can we say? He was a weird guy. It’s like it was a running gag that meant something we never figured out. Was it some over-reaction to distract himself from inward discomfort with his eye? That wouldn’t be like him, he was far too shameless and comfortable with himself to harbor any embarresment due to the stigma of a minor disfigurement. Maybe it was to make light of it? To make you more comfortable with it by bringing it into the open? No. Leena proposed that it was spiritual modesty, due to his left eye being the payment like Odin’s from Norse Mythology (one of Leena’s beloved nerdy hobbies) to drink from the Well of Wisdom. Hakuin presumably didn’t want to admit that he had paid the price and gotten the sip. Or gulp rather. More than his share, probably. He was a rascal, that’s for sure. “Enlightened” was a description most would agree with, be it in a uniquely wacky and frumpy, cozy kind of way. Not some clean, pure, shaven-head kind of enlightenment, but a kindly old beast with great compassion and wisdom. Sometimes you just wanted to curl up in his lap and go to sleep, like you would feel so safe when he’d be telling his stories, in that creaky, expressive way, that you never felt so warm and cozy and sleepy in your life, like you were at peace. Being generous of nature, he would let anyone from Manerva to rest in his lap. This was considered a great honor and privelage. Now Mox and the rest of the guys would rarely participate in such cuddle-ish acts with men, or animals with human form, so it was usually Kristy or Leena, and on the specialist of birthdays or need-to-be-comforted days- Spark’. Spark’, as out of character as can be, was so fucking head-over-heels in True Love with Mr. Dazzlefluff. She could hardly form words in his presence. Yes. Yes! Spark’! She, “The Dragonlady of Manerva”- tongue-tied and blushing. Quite an unusual turn of events, one the gang would suppress gasps of awe and giggles of laughter at, as the shared wide eyes and proud, warm smiles with eachother, allowing the ice Queen to melt. Hakuin was a perfect gentleman about it too, as he was without exception to all ladies who frequented his coveted lap of luxury. When they’d flirt as they often did, or even outright 443
proposition him, he would let them down gently and chuckle, patting them on the head, to their visible disappointment. No one bought the lie that he was “too old” for dating. He was the most feisty, lively, healthy, vibrant of elderly foxes, and his libido could only have been unparalleled, to imagine the impropriotese. Mox could only dream of being so debonair as to receive as much adoring attention from the fresh freshwomen cadettes. The fact was, his lap was a sacred place, and to use it for ulterior motives would be like desecrating a temple. A fuzzy, shining, neon temple (we’ll get to that fur business soon…) or a grave. Speaking of grave-desecration, this was one endeavor Hakuin was rather an expert in… Hakuin Dazzlefluff was the University Gravedigger. Now, don’t get the wrong idea- in the future where we are now, that’s a special position, all above board, and involves a lot more than just burying dead students and professors in the university Cemetary, Hakuin’s domain and where his tiny cottage could be found, near the mausoleum at Manerva Acadamy, there happened to be a small tendency for, well… let’s just say the dead are buried with talismans. To explain the nature of such items is for another time, for now suffice it to say that the ceremonies in which talismans are offered to the dearly beloved, these funeral rites do not always go as planned. Ok, the talismans are magical power-objects and are smuggled through a network of graves which are ceaselessly being robbed by mysterious factions seeking to procure the objects, Hakuin’s official job title is gravedigger, but his position is technically and discretely one of antigraverobbing. He protects the graves from desecration, defends the talismans from theft, returns stolen talismans to their rightful place underground, and hunts those who seek to infiltrate his domain, primarily The Cult of the Obsidian Cube, amongst others. There you have it. And finally, the description you’ve all been waiting for… the Fuzz! Ok, so- have you ever been to a “Rave”? No? Sorry to hear that. Jeez. We’re really sorry. :( Well, these are massive dance-parties with techno music where revelers dress silly and often come equipped with neat “light-toys” like the classic pair of glowsticks (we are partial to green). (Also, do not attempt to dismantle the item and paint your face with the glowing liquid inside. This will not seem “cool” to your peers, and it tastes atrocious!) In addition to glowsticks, one might find a “raver” (in the future these are just called “people”) wearing a pair of gloves that have different-colored lights on the fingers, which are useful in doing that weird “fishydance” thing such individuals just adore doing with their hands, twirling them about in that way they do and grinning like they’re doing something magical and amazing. Guess you have to be there. Now, one such rave-toy is a wand, a handle with a big “tail” consisting of hundreds of thin strands of some material which acts as a conduit of colored light… these L.E.D’s [define, -blue] are fun to twirl about and dance with because the ends of the strands are brightly lit, so the whole thing looks like a big fluffy ball made of points of rainbow light. This rave-toy is EXACTLY, PRECISELY what Hakuin’s fur looks like. The individual hairs of his fur are not glowing and are colored white or auburn-orange like the common fox, but the tip of each hair is brightly illuminated in one or another of all the colors of the rainbow, swaying and bristling and dancing as he performs his daily tasks. The entirety of the fox-being is a swimming, shining, shimmering swarm of rainbow stars. Yes. Truly. And what’s more, this bristling halo of dazzling fuzz seems sometimes to glow even brighter than usual in correlation to the situation one finds him in… it may be just a subjective placebo effect, but it looks to many that when he is in an exciting, dangerous, mystically arousing, or awkward situation, his points-of-light swarm slowly begin blinking and shining brighter with more vivid colors alternating faster… Some witnesses who have participated in certain of his gravedigging capacaties have reported conditions so hairraising that his fuzz became momentarily blinding, like a rainbow flash grenade. This extreme 444
condition is a potential liability to any companion at his side during trials of survival, but alternately, the blinding can be like a disorientintg surprise lightshow attack on his bedazzled foes. However, it is unclear, according to current knowledge of the faculty, if Mr. Dazzlefluff can willfully control the brightness and blinking-pattern of his Dazzlefur. Often asked, he never tells, but rather grins and winks while just for an instant the tips of the hairs of his fur seem to sparkle a barely noticeable tinge more splendorous. We’ll report as further clues to this mysterious phenomenon become available for our consideration.
PART ONE: THE CALL OF THE TRIANGLE CHAPTER ONE: “A NEED FOR CAULK” Leena- I need theSparkpatz- (interrupting) Oh I know just what you need sweetie! We ALL know. (giggles with sheer exuberant delight.) Leena- (closes her eyes and grits her teeth, sighs slowly through her nose to calm herself.) Leena was in a precarious situation, on tippy toes which were beginning to tremble cutely with the continuing strain. Her bare feet were long and slender like the rest of her, nails lavender, adorned with a silver toe-ring, and a hemp ankle bracelet. (Leena liked hemp. A lot.) She was on the top of a stepladder, reaching up to the corner of a ceiling she could just barely reach, which also served as the floor of Mox and Mosach’s dorm room above. Water trickled slowly but steadily down from that corner as it did the other three. She was close to the end of her balance, her patience, and definitely her rope. Her “friends” had been gleefully tormenting her with the same juvenile, sophomoric innuendo pun for what seemed like hours. Sparkpatz- (In her very, very thick Russian accent) Leena baby, you’re amongst friends. We’re all adults here, yes? You must be open and liberated about these things! There’s no shame in admitting you have needs. Well, one… very large…. need. Leena- Yes, I need rope. I’m at the end of mine and I’m already up here so this ends now. Sparkpatz- Oh darling, don’t you dare leave us yet! You fix your waterfalls first, then rope. 445
Mox- (laid way back, deep in a soft black leather couch with his arms expansively out to his sides, soaking up the show in front of him like a satisfied king.) “Agreed. Leena- But this world is wrong. Mox- I concur. Regardless, perform your duty, Leena. Leena- We’re living on a bad planet. Mox- Correct. Still, dam the floodgates first. Then the rope. Kristy- Damn these floodgates! Damn them straight to hell! Leena- Join me, Mox. Then these leaks won’t matter. Mox- Fine. Leena- Thank you. There truly was no reason in this world. Sparkpatz- Rubbish! I know one reason for you to live, Leena. (Leena closes her eyes again, inwardly counseling herself to breath slowly) Leena- Don’t. Sparkpatz- The reason was in front of your eyes all along sweet summerchild. Leena- (raises her finger at Sparkpatz) Not a word. Not. A. Word. Sparkpatz- (lifts a pressurized tube of caulking cement by the sqeeze-trigger handle) Is this what you need? Leena- Yes. Kindly hand it to me. Now. Sparkpatz (caressing the tube with her long-nailed hand like Vanna White used to do to prizes on Wheel of Fortune, an ancient “t.v. gameshow”) Her unnervingly long black nails click on the tube. Is this what you need? Mox- She wants your caulk, Spark’ (Sparkpatz shoots a sharp, warning glance at Mox for stealing her punchline.) Leena- I’d really like to seal this leak before we all drown guys. Please, just give it to me. Sparkpatz- If you crave it that desperately, then take what you desire. (Spark’ offers the tube of rubber caulking cement up to Leena but teasingly jerks it away before Leena could grab it. Kristy- Laaame. What a tease! Spark’- (shoots quick warning glance like a dart at Kristy) You should talk! Kristy- Hmmmph! Mox- Give her the caulk, Spark’. Give her YOUR caulk. Spark’- Take it then! (passes it upwards, but Lana hesitates to grab it lest it be annoyingly whisked away again) Take the caulk! Take it! Leena- (snatches the tube as quick as lightning. She felt a surprisingly happy feeling to be in control again. She stretches up like a ballerina on her delicate tippy toes and tries to aim the barrel of the device towards the leak while squeezing the trigger. Her feet begin again to tremble.) Mox- (grinning, luxuriating, soaking up the entertainment and feet at eye level in front of him) thinking: (I wonder what’s up with foot fetishes? Why feet? I don’t get it!) “Spark, I never knew you had a caulk! Or that you were so eager to give it to my girlfriend! You stay away from her you caulk-smuggling man! Leena- I’m not you’re girlfriend. Spark’- (playing along in a generous mood) I’m still all woman. Kristy- Except for your big fucking caulk. Don’t forget about that. Leena- “Oh no! It’s a trap!” Spark’- Trap is a very offensive term. We prefer “futanari”. 446
Kristy- “Futa-what?” Leena- (ever academic, pausing the banter to define vocabulary like quite the nerd-girl she is) “Futanari is Japanese for transsexual woman. Dick-girls. Either a female hermaphrodite born with a penis or from a surgical gender-reassignment. See, she “trapped” me because I did not expect she was packing this bad boy! (holds up her trophy). Hence she’s a trap. Mox- All hail Herm-Aphrodite! Bringer of the Divine Phalus of Vengence. Peirce these sluts with your wicked septor my Goddess!” Show them no mercy.” Kristy- eeewww. Leena- (squeezes trigger too hard and a mess of white goo oozes out of the nozzell, falling to the floor with a splat.) Oops! Mox (rises up from the couch swiftly with a dramatic flourish of his trench coat. He heads for the mini-fridge to pluck a can of cheap beer from the sixer Leena bought to bribe the fam’ into helping her redeem her very inappropriate fiasco upstairs which we’ll get to later. They were not helping, but were nursing their respective beers, except for Kristy, who was sipping an orange Faygo “pop” (soda) through a straw. She didn’t like alcohol. It made her feel gross.) “It’s raining splooge in here, man. (cracks open the can, takes a long, dramatic sip) Just like Kristy’s room.” Kristy- Hey, fuck you buddy! Leena- (drops the tube). Whispers “fuck” to herself, accepting what will come. Kristy (picks up the prop, and wedges it between her thighs so it points upward from beneath her blue skirt). She wiggles her hips, causing the caulk-prop to bounce about playfully, and she waddles up behind Spark while clutching the tube in her loins. She tries to poke it into Spark’s otherworldly ass while moaning exaggeratedly in a gruff imitation of a man, “Oh yeah bitch! You like that don’t you? You want this big caulk right up your bum-bum, don’t you? Say it!” Mox- (smoothly vaults over the back of the couch and lands in his space of comfort. Wishes very much that he had popcorn, although he dislikes popcorn. The kernels get stuck in his teeth.) He chugs the beer can and crushes it, tosses it to the sink on top of a pile of decomposing hot pocket and tostinos pizza roll remnants, and various random litter from a gathering hosted there the night before by the three co-eds who’s room was gradually becoming an aquarium. Luckily, the females were out shopping at a nearby mall. The plan was to dam the Gates of Aquarius before the co-eds returned and would need to contact the academy maintenance crew, a rough bunch who would discover the source waters above and not be amused.) “There was reason in this world after all. Futanari is the way forward.” Sparkpatz- (to Kristy, still trying to thrust the tube into her luscious target, although her exposed thighs were losing grip on her sex-weapon and it was now slanting downward as if flaccid.) “So sorry sexy, I only take the other brand they had at the hardware store, not that one in the white container- the other one, the black one. It was much larger too, a better value.” Leena- Oh, you only crave big black caulk? Spacepants- Smiles knowingly. “I’ve never gone back.” Kristy- (tosses the caulk to Max and pouts, rejected.) Hmmph! Mox- (catches the item and turns it about in his hands, admiring the tool. Points it at Leena like a gun.) Leena looks to him pleadingly, desiring the object, to finish the job. Max- Enough games fam’. We have work to do. (Mox rises and motions to brush Leena off the stepladder and take her place. Leena shrugs and washes her hands of the whole situation. 447
She checks the mini-fridge for a beer to find there were none left. Spark’ raises the last beer to Leena in a sarcastic “cheers!” gesture. Leena rolls her eyes. Max was all business. He was not as tall as Leena but few were, so he balanced dangerously on the big black leather couch cushion he placed on top of the step ladder. Mox was not short, but of average height, which he frequently cursed the gods for. His longing to be taller than the girls he hit on was deeper and more genuinely painful to him than made much sense. But he made short work of the leak, by spraying an overabundance of the white paste into all the crevices and smearing it around with his hand. Messy but effective. He was about to get down and move to the next corner fountain but slipped and luckily fell on the cushion but with the step ladder falling on Kristy. Kristy- (from underneath the stepladder) AAAHH! HEEELP! I’m trapped! (It was clear from her voice she was not hurt but acting) Leena- (moves to the rescue and moves the ladder. She kneels at Kristy’s side and slaps her on plump chipmunk-cheeks) Stay with me! Don’t you die on me soldier! Kristy- “Everything.. going black… need mouth-to-mouth… resuscitation! Leena- (leans down and pretends to apply the kiss of life, but shyly and somewhat revealingly to Kristy, Leena chickens out and just gives her fallen comrade a peck on the check, disappointing Mox sorely. Kristy pretends to spasm and die, overacting severely, and lies limp, where she stays. Then she revives one last time and reaches out to Sparkpatzg, gasping her last words… “Spark… need better… mouth-to-mouth… resuscitation… please… save me” Max was no stranger to these lesbianesque shenanigans, yet they never grew old to him. As far as anyone knew, none of the crew was actually gay, although it was known to some and assumed by most that Spark’ was bi. She kept her women far more discreetly than her men. And though there was no forbidden love between Mox and his bro Mosach, their bond was so touchingly close they were sometimes mistaken for a couple. But Sparkpatz and Kristy were constantly pretend-playing that they were madly in lust, mostly for the amusement and pleasure of the boys and for the mighty powers of attention-whorin their game commanded. Leena was all for poking fun at gender roles and being silly so would try to play along but couldn’t help reveal she was uncomfortable with anything more than flirting. Let’s explore this dynamic, yes? Spark and Kristy would often roughhouse and tumble about, wrestle for dominance (which Saprkpatz had a sole monopoly on of course, it was her specialty) and they would even kiss on the lips as a standard party-trick at the Acadamy’s raging kegger sausage parties for the showmanship of it. Sometimes they would just go for it and make the fuck out in public for the sheer wow-factor applause of horndog fratboys. But when they would try to include Leena in the merriment she would blush or stutter or flinch. The more liberated (or slutty) chickies of the team found this shyness adorable and so would occasionally surprise Leena by creeping up to suddenly squeeze her boobs from behind or linger on a friendly embrace until their hands slid slowly down to a cringe-inducing ass-grope. Leena was far more cerebral than passionate. Maybe she was so pure of heart she felt her kisses should be saved for private intimacy, not wasted on slutty displays, even for fun. Or who knows, maybe deep down, unbeknownst to even herself, she preferred the company of women and was afraid her secret would be discovered were she to swoon more moistly for her friends than was appropriate! Max, of course, wished his hippy chick was comfortable joining the more raunchy duo when they performed actual, literal pillowfights of the utmost cliché variety to standing ovations and cheering, as tufts of down feathers filled the dorm rooms of the lucky, the weightless pieces of fluff dancing in air currents like hope for mankind. 448
Hope for Max was that scene with feathers. He really, REALLY loved what came to be known as the Pillow Wars, and was to cherish those memories even moreso than the similarly cliché tradition of sorority house panty-raids in which he played a leadership role. College never changes. Max found the feathering-of-rooms ritual to be very special to him, especially because it was tied up in his mind with another particular feather he came to know from his history classes at Manerva Acadamy, an ancient and highly symbolic feather owned long ago by Kristy’s great-great-great… (etc for about 370 greats) …grandmother. No one knew yet there was any blood relation between the spunky, unsinkable Kristy and this very influential historical figure, but over the last semesters, in the course of certain boring lectures and just-barely-completed-by-deadline essays, he and his classmates slowly realized that there were certain striking, even spookily coincidental similarities between the modern Kristy and her ancient ancestor, this heroine of sorts who was named Chrissy. For example, Kristy’s dorm room was built on the same ground as her doppleganger’s from the sands of time, a perfect replica in both its exact dimensions and geographic placement on the campus grounds down to the feet and even in fucking inches. They discovered this one most surreal of crisp winter mornings, icicle prisms shining in through Kristy’s windows, just like they must have shined in through similar ones once upon a time, so, so long ago…
CHAPTER TWO: “Let’s play Archeologists!” [Wherin the Archetytpes play Archeologists and the Omniscient Optimist Futurist Philanthropists are Founded ] Mox, Kristy, and Leena were reluctantly but obediently playing along as very confused pawns in Sparkpatz’s odd recent game. “Let’s play archeolgists!” she sunnily proclaimed before anyone had had coffee. Role-playing was Sparkpatz’ way. She was a natural born actress. She pointed at Leena and Mox bossily- “You two be painstaking historian scholars, engaged in a very important participant-observer ethnographic study of a lost culture.” Somehow Sparkpatz was always the director as well as lead starlet in her movies. Mox and Leena had no choice but to obey and do some groggy morning improve because they were so curious, sensing Sparkpatz guarded the juiciest of secrets and was not sharing yet. She was clearly toying with them, dangling the real explanation for all this archeology business like a carrot and, being herself, would of course relish the power for as long as possible. In truth, she was also stalling, because she did not have the faintest clue what studying this inhabited naked primate dwelling place would teach her, but for some reason, uncharacteristically, she was sure in her heart she was on the right track and she had no worries that the mystery would be revealed when they were ready, when the time was right. Spartkpatz was by no means a woman of faith, but this morning she was, because she had been given guidance from a dream she had before waking, and although she could not yet interpret it she knew perfectly well in her heart that if she simply followed the path suggested by her dream vision and kept its spirit alive throughout the day that things would unfold just as they were meant to all along. It was a good feeling for her, unusual, and made her feel floaty and light on her feet. 449
She pointed at Kristy. “You be a student intern… an ethnobotany major…and I’ll be your boss on a field study. See, I’ll show you how to dust for dinosaur prints like this…” [Sparkpatz made elaborate use of a featherduster on a hot pocket wrapper stuck to the top of a microwave as if she was unearthing priceless artifacts, dusting them for study as a paleontologist would a delicate fossil. “Now you try!” she encouraged while Kristy took the featherduster blankly. Sparkpatz’ weapon of choice matched that of classic archeologist action film hero of yore, Indianna Jones, and the delightful coincidence did not escape her. Lana was never without what she refered to as “Demonslayer”, a very discreet, lightweight but painfully effective collapsible leather whip in a holster slung diagonally across her back beneath her clothing. No soul had ever witnessed her without the holster and her favorite toy, even when otherwise nude according to her lovers. But while a standard accessory for women of the dominant persuasion as she was, it was also understood by the circle of friends that while she was present, Demonslayer would cast its protective circle. She wielded her toy with punishing, subatomic precision, and it had served her well over the years, not only in roleplay but in mortal danger as befell the adventurers, and would continue to. Now she swiveled Demonslayer back and forth between her fingers absentmindedly while surveying her team, pretending to be Indiana Jones, but could not remember any lines from the movie with which to attempt an impression. That is understandable, considering the movie is between three-thousand and nine-thousand years old. Sparkpatz- [points at Mox with the handle of her toy, interrupts him and Leena from unenthusiastically sorting through the wealth of “artifacts” found in the sink. “Here, take this.” [hands Mox her clipboard with graph paper and a pen. She curtly gives him directions on how to draw a rough sketch of the floorplan of Kristy’s dorm to scale including all closets, the bathroom, the balony, the placement of the windows and doors, etc. She expected thoroughness and attention to detail. While Max worked on his floorplan assignment She inspected Leena’s sink finds, which if not hot pocket wrappers or empty Tostino’s pizza roll bags were red plastic beerpong cups. Sparkpatz- “Miss Leena, I must admit I was fooling you- there are no dinosaurs in there! But now that you’ve been so kind as to do our dishes, you may begin the actual work. You help Mox now. Kristy- “What do you mean “our” room!? [Sparkpatz, crashing so often in the bed or on the couch had made her a kind of unofficial roommate, although she had her own very nice offcampus apartment. She had ways of affording nice things without ever appearing to work. Curious. Soon after a coffee break for them all, an herbal remedy break for Leena, a cigarette break for Mox, and a corsette-tightening and mascara touch-up break for Sparpatz, the choreographed dinosaur hunters were functioning as a well-oiled machine, even using the loose script as an excuse to chip in and help with some of Kristy’s desperately needed housecleaning. But as they slowly carved order from chaos they also recorded notes from hand measurements as precise GPS (Geometronic Placement Spatialiality) coordinates of all corner points. Later, with the aid of their generous old friend Rauld who passes through time to time, they would compare these coordinates with their identical twins from a temporally distant yet spatially superimposed time. They wilted and weathered old dusty architectural blueprints of the Manerva College dorm from Chrissy’s era, procured (stolen) from a local historical museum by a generous and dear old friend with an interest in their success), That, I think, was when the first realization of a new magic dawned on them, and from that day onward each of the friends absolutely believed, %100, 450
that they were, simply, “magic”. They agreed their breakthrough discovery of synchronized trans-temporal architecture was a new beginning, a turning of leaves. It was undeniably a clue, (one Leena had the honor of recording in her ‘”Journalist Fact Journal”) Leena was extremely spacey, at times more than others, even prone to astrology but also very, very keen, curious. But her cleverness seemed to accompany an alarmingly frequent and uncanny luck, as if she some times she struck upon a hunch or clues fell into her lap, or as if she was always leading the way or putting the pieces together before anyone else. Her mind was bright but mellow, a consistent, steady reasonableness and reason, not cold or masculine but comforting. Neutral. Approachable. Leena, the sanest by far and ever ahead of the pack. She grew an irrational hunch from a recurring dream of a dust mote in a shaft of light peeking through a window in a pyramid a few weeks ago, but she told no one, because she had not figured out what it meant yet. Her dreams often meant something to her, not visions so much as suggestions for which paths in life to choose. She paid attention, but tried to turn the dream images around in her rational mind before making decisions based on them.. This time she knew the dream was a message because the pyramid was so beautiful it called to her like an upcoming weekend vacation she was daydreaming of all the last schoolweek. Like somewhere she couldn’t wait to go. Then Sparkpatz had a joyous mystery-dream that she held close as well, and it was so similar to Leena’s that if Spark had described it Leena just might have thought something weird was going on if she weren’t above that kind of belief system. Multi-person dream telepathy prophecy puzzles were too spacey to consider even for Leena. Yet. In Kristy came to her in a flowing nightgown of white silk like a pure maiden. Or a virgin sacrifice? The latter was a scenario Sparkpatz had dreamt of before, and dreamt of when awake, in which Sparkpatz, a warrior priestess, wielded an obsidian dagger. There were some games left unplayed, and many things Kristy would never learn or understand about Spark’. None would learn them. In the dream Kristy’s nails were for once uncolored, and her iconic and only hairstyle, (blue pigtails in things we still calls “scrunchies” and a red ribbon bow like a human Christmas present) had been replaced by fine, silky blonde hair to her waist. The dream-Kristy reverently and ceremoniously presented the recurring obsidian dagger to her own executioner, but as Sparpatz’ grabbed it, it turned into a yardstick. A yardstick was another dream symbol to frequent Sparkpatz’ dreadful uncharted subconscious and a real-life roleplay prop in the stern hands of the teacher nun she became from time to time to contrast Kristy’s, pitch-perfect catholic schoolgirl persona. But the yardstick was not a kinky fetish object for cracking knuckles and disciplining cute behinds. It was a power-object, a talisman that felt deeply empowering in her hands, like He-man’s lightning-rod sword upheld to call down “The Power”, or in this case The Wisdom. Instantly Sparkpatz awoke, the rest of the dream sequence irrelevant and discarded after the Eureka moment, a warm dust mote in a shaft of light falling between and slightly above her blinking eyes. She instinctively gripped her vision-septor of measurement to find her hand empty, made a narrow escape from the old plush, deep crimson velvet couch she often crashed on and was swallowed by in Kristy’s tiny living room, and surprisingly actually found a roll of measuring tape amongst a clutter of tools in a closet, and went to work. She could not know then what her subconscious knew, but she was perfectly confident in her as yet vague hunch slowly articulating itself as she did arithmetic with quarter inches in her head, drawing markings with pencil on walls and floors. It was one of the curious tricks of the mind when it knows something the person does not yet, is not ready for. She did not know what temple or alter she was to compare the 451
dorm’s dimesnions with, but the lightbeam sparkling with dust was a lighthouse, a homing beacon. There was another lightbeam so far away but so, so close that matched it, completed it. It was the same beam, split. Far, far away in time, superimposed in the same space. Sparkpatz felt they were two jagged halves of the heart pendents lovers divide so they might reunite. Sparkpatz was on a bright-eyed bushy-tailed mission to find the missing dustmote lightbeam and reunite them, not caring why such an irrational task should concern her. She felt uncharacteristically flakey, like Leena in the rarified headspaces she cultivated with herbs. One herb which college kids to this day partake of, which, slang moving in cycles, they call “grass” again. the lingo having come full circle. Leena was a clever and keen detective but this golden clue was Sparkpatz’ alone and she cherished it, smiling to herself proudly. She felt positively glowing, optimistic and delighted that her measuring would soon earn her the amazement and even awe of her team. She wished for people to be in awe of her. She always felt powerful, but she was not sure how intelligent she was. When asked what she was doing with all the measuring she said she was doing some renovations and installing mirrors on the ceiling. This was very plausible, but her coy, mysterious tone told them enough to know she posessed a secret and was not sharing. She sought council from one man alone- the most authentically warm and nurturing father figure any of these young scholars could hope for, far more devoted to their protection than nearly (well, all) of their own fathers. They all loved him as their collective “dad”, which was a sentiment they never voiced but which he knew as the happy ending of his somewhat unlucky and melancholy life. His cigar smoke smelled so different to Leena than Mox’s cigarettes- like rolled from a different plant entirely, a decent and useful ally earned and deserved by this man, which he was right to take comfort in, so long as it enshrouded his round, dry hearth of a voice and promised the cozyness of being wrapped in his long, rich, leathery tales. The rumpled mentor and protector could always be sensed before seen by the happy aroma of an (old-fashioned, real burning) cigar which fortold his entrence, bringing good cheer and a nice heaving sigh of the spirit as always. The hint of whiskey on his breath came when he was closer, given in to the pleasures of a ribald rogue, an old age of habit, self-reward\ , and acceptance of imperfection in this sad old world. h achingly slow, well-savored sips from his flask, a scent which he never gave a thought to conceal like the shameless way he would brandished his flask and elaborately savor his liquor amongst popes or kings. A dear old friend of the gang’s, a groundskeeper and nightwatchmen at the Acadamy named Rauld Lonkee, mumbled matter-of-factly in his creaking leathery voice that it was the Equinox when the fam’ asked him for his interpretation of the dream. nor the decisions of campus planners with slide rules or wolf-whistling construction crews. They pointed them in the direction of a recurring nevent, like kind of perfect alignment across the ages that alters like stone henge and the Crystal Henge, raised on the same hallowed ground, demand. Kristy and Chrissy also shared the same birthday (and as chilled Kristy to wonder perhaps the same death-date? Luckily, warming Kristy’s chills of spooky, superstitious premonition, calenders are different now and it’s hard to draw parallels with the traditional “calender”. Still, they were both born on the equinox, an event which remains, undeniable, though our calenders changed, and Chrissy was believed to die a merry, wise, and well-loved old politician and city planner who achieved great works of great compassion for the Omniscient Optimist Futurist Philanthropists, which she founded humbly long after the one Great Work with the circle and the book, bringing that business to fruition. Later the foundation became the current Omniscient Optimist Futurist Philanthropist Optometrists, the last term an addition 452
Chrissy fought bitterly until her death, believing it sounded “absolutely ridiculous”, as well as contrived, since the members were not literally eye doctors. They adopted Optometry as a name for their cultural movement and called themselves the Optometrists because their philosophy of ethics and time (and hence their unique philanthropic strategy) being based entirely on the metaphysical symbolism of light and optics. Chrissy, however, always insisted they only campaigned to add the last, annoying additional word to her second legacy because it continued the already well-sufficiently cute and catchy rhymescheme, and then thought up some doubtful cultural movement about the symbolism of optics to rationalize and justify their rhyme. She may have lost that battle, but she could still swing a bucket of water in her petite but wiry old arms around the farm called The Flophouse until the last chapter. the same height, blood type, shared matching fingerprints, and their dna was identical, although these details were not revealed until much, much later. Oh, and of course they both had a thing for feathers. Yes, the flocks of tiny feathers left floating along Kristy and Sparkpatz’ path of playful combat symbolize hope, Max decided as he took a break from his hard caulk work and smoked an old-fashioned cigarette, leaning out an open window to cull Lana’s admonitions. The ones that burned. The old-fashioned smokes that is, not Leena’s admonitians which did not even sting. As Mox was fond of reminding her in rhyme stolen from his favorite band “to call me a pacifist / is really quite inaccurate / cuz I’ll smack a bitch for talking shit about my cancer sticks.” Of course Max never slapped Leena or any bitch in all his misogynistic days. He had rules for himself which he took pride in, rules which permitted his nihilistic, defeatist hedonism but kept him on the right side of bad. Mox knew when bad was righteous and he knew when bad turned wrong. Were cuteness and frivolity themselves the hidden key to a reason in the last place one would think to look for it? Yes, Mox decided. They were they very qualities he, so dramatic and serious even in his humor, most lacked. Was that why he was so unhappy? Yes, he affirmed to himself as he blew smoke into the evening outside. He preferred the real smoke tendrils of poison which Leena detested so bitterly (because she knew what they really meant to him- his cool. The familiar whisps floated easily and smoothly like his stream of consciousness. He was feeling of an abstract mood, and decisive. The nicotine made him feel cool, and detached, and bad, and he liked that feeling very much. Sometimes without a cigarette he felt afraid, unsafe, stuck in a muddy space of feeling that felt confusing and claustrophobic to him. His heart needed space to breath, the air of thought, a calculating strategic helm, a bit numb of emotion, perhaps like the insects nicotine evolved to ward off when they bite a tobacco plant. These days of these lives we follow now, well, few customs are the same but old vices die hard and nicotine still has an iron vice grip on humanity, but is delivered via solid-holography cigarettes indistinguishable from the “real” ones, but it is just a trick of light and mirrors, perfectly healthy to lungs if not to the mind of man, which was not meant to be a numb, calculating insect. Nicotine is classified as a stimulant like caffine and has an element of that, but its primary effect is to puncture the balloon of consciousness and allow the wind of spirit, breathe, to rush in. When Mox was too broke to buy his daily pack of coffin nails, the points between his pointer and middle finger which held his space of breath and his spirit of cool began to ache and feel so awkwardly, uncomfortably empty, like insistent magnets beneath his skin, like the mouths of needy, obnoxious birds chirping ceaselessly for their vile cancer-worms. “Maybe lesbianism is the divine feminine healing unto itself- a pure, angelic realm above the sins of men?” Yes, Max decided firmly in a rare less-misogynistic moment, exhaling the fumes of creeping demise, satisfied. But the ancient feather was also on his mind and was a piece of the puzzle also very 453
personally significant to him. He had learned of the ancient feather and taken its fable and its moral to heart, because Manerva Acadamy made learning fun and exciting as it should be! The feather is the heart, of course, but it was not quite so sentimentally simple. This specific feather-heart of Chrissy’s happened to be a defense mechanism of the mind and a device to externalize her own heart so as to preserve it through the trials her heroism was forged in. These trials made for a heart too hurt to carry in her chest, but it was not one she would allow to freeze and die. As Kali, a magical winged creature, it survived, and thrived in mysterious ways a heart only can in such a unique habitat, outside a person. It became a mystical and telepathic thing, kept hidden until she would free it in solitude, when she would commune with it in delusion but in a space of wonder, and where the girl received mysterious and telepathic messages and intentions, which though felt through a pretend world, guided her through all that followed. The feather was not just her most valued possession, but her closest friend like a stuffed animal so very real to a child. As she left her home and the home of her trials to begin her great adventure she had a satori, a sudden awakening, and finally realized the feather was just that- not a magical fairy to tell her secrets, nor her heart in a protected, external form, but just a feather which she let fall to wet pavement, a dream which she was finally ready to let go. That moment was when she reclaimed her heart as her own to keep in her own chest once again, and how she became an adult, the woman who was able to accomplish what she did. It was a moment shared with another hero, a partner of hers, and the moment he fell in love with her, when their paths aligned. This moment is considered a point in time on which Fate turns, what they call a “Grand Symetrification of Intentions”- an event of utmost personal significance in a person’s life, a great enlightenment experience, and a time the heart performs its true function as a wise compass in a new, unseen direction, a new and more direct route, or even a shortcut, toward all our goal. A Symetrification occurs when a person’s deepest heart-intention, their true sincere will, and their intended or fated personal path perfectly aligns with the intention, will, and path of the world itself, or at least with the path intended for our planet and our species- our story. This intersection between someone’s personal story with the Grand Story is literally a turning point, a point or fulcrum on which history turns. This is also called Fusing into the Gaien Snowflake, which just means that a person can merge or dissolve into Gaia, our planet as a sentient being with our group mind or collective sentience at the helm, and this heals the person and the planet. Simply put, the planet’s Fate and the Fate of our species can sometimes all come to focus like a magnifying lens’ smoldering pinpoint on the smallest most inexpressible quirks of a human heart, and then even on the intentions of that heart, and on the decisions of that persons’ true will in that moment, as it did for Our Lady Chrissy. Vast power sometimes concentrates into a single moment or even a feeling and a decision which can change everything, for everyone, which can make the difference between a happy ending and a sad one for our collective storybook. These Synchronizations we know of seemed to happen throughout history from time to time, most notably with the Prophet Septimus, but for whatever reasons accelerated to incredible, unmatched frequency in a flurry, a storm of Grand Symetrifications of Intentions which clustered during Chrissy’s lifetime, and clustered geographically around an epicenter that was called Moss Hollow or Moss Hollow Haven, and the nearby grounds of Manerva University which existed then, now considered hallowed ground upon which we built our current sheltered little bubble of Scholaarship in its honor, our beloved Manerva Acadamy. In the Old Times, the whirlwind of Grand Synchronizations came spontaneously, as if undeserved blessings. But today we study these moments in history in an 454
attempt to learn how to create them intentionally. This one feather upon which so much of our Fate still rests may have been the magical imaginary fairy friend in the sweet noodlehead mind of a traumatized, delusional girl, but this noodlehead had a noble soul with a calling the likes we can never understand, and the feather grew into the embodiment of an ideal, and would be immortalized and appear again and again in the poetry and legend that honored Chrissy’s special role in the events of her incredible time. It took its place in the Mythology of Moss Hollow, the Great Myth of Moss Hollow, which is still taught to this day. And unsuspected by anyone, and most surprisingly to our current motley crew of misfits, it was not over by any means. In fact, it has only just begun…
CHAPTER THREE: The Ribald Rogues of the Stolen Lotus and the Sintilating Sisters of the Sizzling Switchblade The ripe college girls have come home to roost. The three of them, Stacie, Tammy, and Tracey open the door to their unexpectedly occupied home and their frivolous giggles turn to shrieks of surprise at the scene before them- Kristy splayed indecently beneath the fallen stepladder, Leena crouching in a corner and within a private splinterworld with face cupped in her hands, her fingers slim and long, her bracelet of hemp and glass beads. Mox grins and thanks his version of god for the drama to come. Sparkpatz- “Welcome to the Spa.” Tracey- What the literal FUCK!? Tammy- [to max] Who the fuck are YOU!? Max- Some call me Lord Palak. [Sparkpatz raises a suspicious eyebrow.] Tammy- Why are you on our couch with these sluts!? Mox- It’s a nice couch, faux or no, and these are my sluts you’re dissing girly. Kristy- Yeah, we’re Max’s sluts! He’s in charge of all this. Stacie- [looks at Tracey] I literally can’t even! Leena- COME ON! Stacie- [accusingly, loudly, spat at Leena] What!? Leena- [in a mocking silly ditzy valley-girl voice] “I literallty can’t even!” Stacie- Who the FUCK are you and why are you in our dorm? I will fuck you up! Leena- I convinced my friends to break and enter so we could fix your ceiling which I flooded due to… business… in the apartment above. Mox- My apartment. And Mosach’s [Kristy looks down and sad.] [Sparkpatz gives Kristy an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder. It’s clear Mosach’s situation is grim.] 455
Tammy- Mosach? The trench coat autist? Mox- He’s a high functioning one at least. [They are joking, and don’t really think Mosach is cautistic but picking on him for being shy and socially awkward, an introvert, a wallflower.] Kristy- The trench coat though! [Kristy cringes at Mosach’s devolving fashion persona.] Leena- I know, right?! He thinks he’s living in a motherfucking film noir! Mox- [sighs and is silent for awhile, more sad than he tries to let on. For some reason, Mox resiliently believes he is far, far better at hiding his emotions than he is. The girls were deeply, empathetically aware of how hard Mosach’s “descent” had been for Mox, who had not seen his roommate and best friend in.. had it been 5 months? [thinking] “He’s missed an entire semester, an entire influx of freshwomen!... Then his thoughts turned to love and he reflected on the incoming fleet of fresh, prime grade-A femme-meat, and was prepared to mentor his dehumanized, objectified colleague-things in the search for knowledge. Mox had a way of thinking of girls as more matter than person, which felt appropriate, amused him and made him feel powerful and safe. Girl-watching, cat-calling, shameless flirting, and belt-notching were his bread and butter, his meat and potatoes. Promiscuity was not a luxury but a survival tool for a tragic world- the alternative was unthinkable to Mox. He considered the celibate holy men common to many religions and rejected the virgin losers. He would never sacrifice his fields of endless conquests, yet despite this was determined to achieve enlightenment before graduating. It was a personal vow he still carried, if only to prove that while hordes of semon-demons might drain his spirit nightly, it would even still be abundant enough to attain liberation before graduation. For all Mox’s deficiencies of character, all of which are due to his valuation of all women as toxic and poisonous by nature, yet paradoxically are the food which sustains the lifeforce. Mox’s view was that the libido is the will to live, and its furnace must be fed with concubine-fuel. Sex was by no meana a communion of souls, although he admitted that technically women did have a kind of soul… a partial soul? No, that wasn’t right. Did Leena have a soul? he wondered, staring into space, and felt dumbfounded, staring into space… “If any of them does then she probably has a larger portion than most of her kind. He nodded to himnself, pleased with his generosity toward the chickie. “I respect her.” he thought, She was almost different from other girls to him. She stood out. But in the future everyone fucks everyone so relationships aren’t that special anymore. Plus virtual reality and robotics applications made partnering even more irrelevant. We lost a lot, but it can still be found here and there. “It’s like they’re people, or could be, but they think with their hearts and make no sense. They’re just plain silly.” Or were they rotten in some secret core, their convincingly sweet shells of perfume and lace a ploy? No, it was too horrible to consider. Better to stick to the narrative that they’re just silly noodleheads. Kinder to give the deceitful snakes the benefit of the doubt. But he let his doubt play upon him and his worst suspicions slowly dawned on him as he realized of the horrible truth. He accepted the obvious conclusion. The thigs were intentionally, secretly deceptive, manipulative sluts invented to test and challenge men’s wills. The test was to fuck them without any degree of vulnerability of heart. Some women like Leena were more of a challenge in that regard, and he was human, his resolve waiverd. But he would not let them win, not even her. If only their ways weren’t so snakelike! Devious, slanderous, and slithery. Their hearts were fuzzier and wetter, soppier than men’s, easier to get lost in. A man’s heart should be a rock. A stainless steel containment vessel welded shut, a heart one can be proud of and polish. His basic philosophy was that life was a battle between tradgedy and promiscuity. He considered the 456
holy men turning their back on the beast with two backs and pitied the poor delusional fucknuts. Celibacy, or monogamy, or even any relationship involving any hint of any degree of vulnerability or the slightest sliver, the thinnest wafer of heart-opening, well- there were evacuation procedures and even ejection seats for such predicaments. Mox don’t love them hoes. He’s out the door. Objects were no threat to him, can be used for many uses, and can be conveniently owned- a fine pleasure to own a human female, their bodies at least, if just for one night. A night was long enough. Plenty. A night was all he required or desired of any but the finest, top-shelf maidens who he was willing to cautiously, tentatively incorporate into his ongoing life, while closely monitoring his heart for any indications of blossoming which threatened to upend his entire worldview. Mox just really, really did not like to feel anything very much- it made him feel weak and confused. A waste of his talents. He liked thinking. He felt he was smart, but he was more proud of his sometimes very quick wit and ability to crack the perfect, spontaneous joke that makes the room erupt. On his good days he felt his sarcasm was a mystical key to Nirvana. He thanked the star gods for his future college [well, your future, his present] where a student wouldn’t wander about in circles chasing skirts. Mox doesn’t feel like talking so he rests his head on the table and listens. He was listening to Tammy talk about Mosach’s recent fashion faux-paux. [Apparently in the future trench coats are not in vogue. They were favored by lonely manchildren for some reason. Mox thought it was a good look for Mosach. He liked film noir.] Mox- [raises eyebrow] Was he gentle? Tammy- He’s a gentleman in every sense. Unlike you, manslut. Max- I seek solace and safe harbor. That is all. Cumdumpster. Tammy- Smiles. Mosach is bigger than you. Max- Not true. Tracey- How would you know?? You’re such a summerfag. Spartkpatx- Is it summer in here again? Kristy- So, so summer. Mox- I know because I am the biggest there ever was. I sold my soul to the beast. For this beast. [Mox points to his crotch.] Sparkpatz- Mox, it’s time to go upstairs. Go on before you commit a faux-paux. Mox- I will unleash the beast here and now. [pretends to be about to unzip his fly] Stacie- [takes her purse and swings it at Mox’s head, HARD] [Mox exaggeratedly falls over the cuch and onto a counter where he lies splayed out with his head hanging upside down over the counter.] Stacie [hits Mox with purse for each word: “Check. Your. Privalage. Cis. Scum! Mox- Checked!! Checked! I checked it! Mercy! Stacie- [looks at Sparkpatz and Kristy] You bitches hang with this needledick bugfucker and think you can creepy crawl into my crib? FUCK. YOU! Kristy- [sounding a little worried] Leena? Leena- [crouched in corner with face in hands, water trickling down steadily behind her] I am to blame. Attack me. Tammy- What is your major malfunction!? Leena- [looks up at Tammy]- I ruined your home. Just come at me. Fight me IRL. Stacie- [to Tracey] “What’s “IR-” Tracey- “In Real Life” 457
Mox- The only place to fight. Kristy- Let’s fight in REAL life! Tracey- Not “online”? Mox- Wanna Cyber? [they are using ancient phrases] Sparkpatz- I would cyber with Tammy under the right circumstances. Tammy, [smug, pleased, bi] What circumstances are those? Sparkpatz. Moonlight. The beach. And let Lana go. Leena- I can take them. Kristy- Fight! Fibhht! Fight in REAL life!! Mox- “Flamewar! Away from keyboard!” [just spitting unrelated ancient phrases for internet culture.] Kristy- We are so fucking faaaar from keyboards. Leena. Fucking come at me hoes. Tammy- Swings trendy designer purse at Leena, who catches it in her hand, holding it still as Tammy pulls it back in a tug of war. Then Leena let’s go and Tammy snaps backwards into Max, who wraps his arms around her from behind and cushions her fall like a gentleman, a favor which she instantly squirms out of and slaps him. Mox grins. Tracey- Walks up to Leena and flicks her lit (modern solid-holography) cigarette butt at Leena, which bounces off her forehead in a sputter of embers indistinguishable from real ones although they do not start fires. This was the end of the jokes. Tracey did not understand how deep Leena’s feelings against tobacco went. Leena gets up and brushes herself off. Picks up the nearly-spent caulk for one more “finishing glaze” of sorts, aims the device an inch away from Tammy’s nose. Tammy- Unflinching. “Do it.” They stare eachother down. Sparkpatz- Don’t do it Leena. Mox- [shoots a frown at Spark. To Spark:] “Don’t caulk-block her! [to leena:] “Do it. Tammy- Do it and I will fuck you with a rake, I swear. Kristy- Do it! Leena- squeezes the trigger, forcing an underwhelming dollop of goo of lesser velocity to ooze out toward Tammy’s face, barely brushing Tammy’s and leaving a white dot on her nose. Sparkpatz- [looks at Kristy] RUN. Kristy- picks up a black leather cushion from the couch as if tyo use it for a weapon. “I’m standing my ground. Leena- Picking up the caulk goo which fell to the ground and smooshing it all over Tammy’s face, getting pretty rowdy and toppling Tammy over. Tammy is blind and coughing. It was the cigarette that set Leena off. She hates cigarette smokers. Especially Mox. Sparkpatz- Krtisty. This is not your fight. [reaches behind her back to a whip in a holster beneath her v-neck spandex athletic shirt and tiny jean jacket bedazzled with cheap glass sequins and with strips of leather hanging from it like some kind of vaguely native American trashy 80’s throwback fashion. That’s 1980’s, 3093, the current year for our current heroe’s (although their year zero was roughly around you present reader’s current now. Around 2000. There was a point in time near you which became our year zero. We cannot know if it was before or after your now, but it was within your lifetime. It became our year zero because it was a hard reset of human culture. The on switch was turned off and on again, the cobwebs were cleared by the Cosmic Fedatherduster of Vengence. Tammy- You’re jacket is white trash. Total ratchet shit. 458
Sparkpatz- I’m a white Russian diva. Your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower woman. [literally cracks whip an inch before Tammy’s face, LOUD. If Tammy had been smoking a cigarette she would be no longer. Kristy- HolyShit! Max- Fucking whore! Spark’ watch it! Leena- [squeezes goo over Tammy who is already on the floor, then approaches Tracey, who is dumbstruck.] Tracey- Don’t you dare. Leena- [Squeezes trigger, the device is empty.] Kristy- Spark, put that away [genuinely worried. Spark twirls the whip, standing with legs wide apart, arms crossed, twirling her whip.] Tammy- [speechless. Mouth slackjawed.] Leena- [realizes what’s happening and starts edging her way to the door. Kristy drops the cushion.] Max- [gets boner, picks up cushion and puts it on his lap.]Spark- [twirls whip, opens mouth to match Tammy’s deer-in –headlights slackjawed one, biut spark’s tongue licks her upper lip slowly, gazing through Tammy. They have been in the same pottery class this semester, sat next to eachother. Tammy- Is this the right circumstances? Spark- [looks out the window at the full moon] – Moonlight. Let Leena go, and we’ll see about the beach. Kristy- With the waterfalls this dowm is kinda a beach. Max- [to Kristy] You’re kinda a “beach”. Kristy- [sticks her tongue out at Max] Leena- [opening door by turning the doorknob slowly as she backs out, hoping to be unseen.] Tammy- [wiping goo from her eye with the sleeve of her dress. Trying to see where Leena is.] Leena- [opens door and makes a break for it, with Tammy running out the door after her, commotin heard down the hall.] Tracey- Holy Shit [looks wide-eyed at Spark, who’s loud whipcrack has startled everyone and made them all a bit scared. Spark just smiles.] Kristy- Is this going to happen? Stacie- [who has been unseen for awhile] walks up slowly and sultrily and runs her long rednailed fingers along Spark’s neck. “Tammy is hysterical. She needs calming.” Tammy [noise of fighting from hall.] [Kristy and Max look to each other.] Kristy- Should we defend Leena? Max- [Looks to Stacie caressing Spark, and then at Kristy] “No.” Kristy- [Frowns at Max, then looks at Stacie and Spark, and shrugs, interested herself.] Tammy- [Noise of fighting from hallway.] Leena- Cum-DUMPSTER! [shrieks, tumbling, slapping sounds.] Spark- Flicks Stacie’s caressing hand off her cheek and points to the hallway-[to Stacie] “Get your hellcat. Pull her off my Leena darling and bring her to me. [Stacie obeys, exits] Stacie- [Marches Tammy in from behind her with her guiding hand on the back of her neck. Tammy is a mess of torn clothes and hair plastered with caulk goo in new age hairstyle ways. She is panting.] Spark- [Slides her whip around the back of tammy’s neck and pulls Tammy towards her by the whip. Tammy is inches from Spark’s face.] 459
Kristy- Bite her nose! Spark- [ignores Kristy. Whispers at Tammy] “You are aquatic now.” Tammy- [looks confused.] Spark- You are amphibian now. Live underwater. Tammy- [Looks to the corners of the room, trickling.] Spark- [Kisses Tammy.] Mox- [Kristy + mox sharing wide-eyed glance, then back at the action.] Tammy- [getting weak in the knees and actually dropping a bit with Spark following her lips down. Tammy surrenders and falls to her knees while Spark follows her down, bending over her.] Tammy- [Looking up after the long kiss. Then a quick side-glance to the voyeurs Mox and Kristy.] Spark- [releases the whip around the back of Tammy’s neck and places her stiletto on Tammy’s chest, pushing her back on her bended knees until she is prone.] [Spark stands triumphant, replacing her whip in its holster beneath her spandex v-neck and bedazzled sequen cowgirl monstrosity.] Tammy- [panting, arms wrapped around Spark’s boots in a vulnerable affecttionate way. Spark flicks Tammy’s arms away with her booted foot.] Spark- [strolls over the one corner and lets the trickle collect on her hand a little. Flicks droplets of water at Tammy’s face.] Spark- You are fish now. Tammy- [nods.] Spark- [strolls out of room slowly. When she is at the doorway she turns and gestures with her head for Mox and Kristy to follow her out.] Tracey and Stacie- [hugging eachother, freaked out and whispering in eachother’s ears.] Mox slowly, slowly gets up, then elaborately dusts himself off and stretches uneccessarily. He lights a smoke by power of his shiny silver lighter. An “old fashioned cigarette” which actually burns. Kristy smiles and nods at his pack of smokes, her eyebrws raised in question and her index and middle finger up to her mouth indicating her lack of a cigarette between them. Mox- [Raises eyebrow skeptically.] “You don’t smoke.” Kristy- I know. Mox- [Thinks for a minute, still and expressionless. Shruggs, and tosses a cigaretter at her hard. It hits her in her smallish but pert bosom and drops to the floor as Kristy tries to catch it.] Kristy- [bends down and picks it up. Puts in in her lips.] Spark- [rolls eyes, knows how ridiculous Kristy looks] Kristy- “Do you have a light?” Mox“I am the light. What you seek is fire.” Spark- What I seek is Leena, to bandage her and comfort her. She’ll have a bruised ego. She will need my nurturing to heal her. Mox- Aaawww, it has a heart! Spark- [Not one to be accused of having a heart, she counters with a random, unrelated comeback to annoy everyone and seriously test their patience.] “But ultimately… [gets a crazy, kind of scary smile in her eyes and states in an evil tone] “What I seek… is fire in a plastic tube.” Kristy- [Looks mean at Spark’. Kristy sticks her tongue out at Sparkpatz, not cutely but with her 460
whole spirit and all the genuine condemnation such a gesture can express. Mox shakes his head, exasperated and disappointed. They don’t find this funny at all. Spark is making an obscure reference to a code-phrase in slang that had once procured them all entrance to a much-needed safehouse called the Harlot’s Harbor, operated by a certain circle of ferocious and lusty dominatrix cutthroats called the Sinister Sisters of the Whistling Switchblade, ladies of ill repute who used to prowl the labyrinthine network of redlight pleasure-bunkers far below even the seedy underbelly of freewheeling cavern bazaars beneath a fallen city in the vicinity of the Acadamy which the tourists brave enough to enter call Neo-Sureal London. Sparkpatz used to have business with the Sisters, business her friends made her promise to disavow. But conveniently they didn’t complain when trading favors with the harlots proved indispensable to their safety during one of the times of danger which had a way of befalling them like a stormcloud following their collective path. A carefully executed knock pattern on the Harlot’s Harbor would elicit a challenge riddle yelled rowdily from the other side: “What is it you seek Sister?”. First Sparkpatz turned to Max and hissed a warning at him under her breath- “If you call this the “Whore Harbor” in their presence again they’ll slit all our throats.”’ Then offered the key- “What we seek is fire in a plastic tube!”, and women of a kind that do not matriculate at Manerva Acadamy or any other decent institution of higher learning ushered them conspiratorially into the horrible, immoral red glow of their tarnished hearth, where wounds were tended and protection offered until the fugitives resolved a misunderstanding with whichever shadowy, corrupt politicians of the fallen city were apparently hunting them for some crime they did not commit. During more than one well-intentioned intervention staged by the more wholesome of the young scholars, Sparkpatz had sworn to officially renounce her honorary membership in this scintillating sorority of sin, cut ties with them, and never speak of her escapades with them and, especially after the last few incidents, NEVER again invite them to visit campus, but she would reference the key phrase occasionally as a taunting reminder of a condemned past she was unashamed of and resentful for being pressured to turn her back on. The phrase itself evoked actual frustration, anger, and disappointment, so she controlled herself and rationed its use conservatively to extend its effectiveness. There were aspects of Sparkpatz’ that were long-steeped in sin, and aspects of her that were understood but not spoken of. The “fire” and the “plastic tube” were two. Krisrty- Gimme a light. Mox- looks at Kristy expressionless, silent. “I am the light. What you seek is fire.” Nothing. Shruggs, tosses her his zippo. Kristy- fumbles it. Stacey and Tracey- Like, can you do that outside? Kristy- picks up the zippo. Has trouble working it, but lights her smoke. Tries to look cool. Coughs and her eyes water. She keeps trying to look cool.n “Crawl fish!” she barks at Tammy. This an aquarium now, bitch. Fish-bitch. Blows smoke, stifles a cough. Max and Kristy smoke and survey the damage. The room is a mess of caulk goo, cluttered fallen furniture, and wet carpet on all corners but the one where the floodgates were dammed. Spark- “Now.” Mox + Kristy- [reflexively get a move on and follow Spark out into the hall. Kristy flicks her lit cigarette into the pile of Hotpocket wrappers, red plastic beer cups, and empty tostino’s pizza roll bags. It fizzles in stale pinia colada.] Tammy- [still lying on her back, bent at the knees.] “Fuck. me.” [Her hand moves between her legs.] 461
Tracey + Stacie- [look down on her, their arms around eachother. They watch for awhile as Tammy’s hand moves under her yoga pants. Her mouth opens in a silent moan.] Stacie- [to Tracey] “She doesn’t need our help tonight.” [They walk back into one of their rooms.] Tammy- [alone on floor, to no one] “Fuck me” Stacey + Tracey- [flick the lightswitch and darkness. The sound of trickling and schlicking in the silence.] Later that night, Kristy awoke in the moonlight, her friends all about her passed out from some drunken debauchery in Sparkpatz’s dorm room the evening prior. She had something to say, ghostly, a voice like she spoke with, or was spoken through, during those fainting spells she embodied once, in some other life, though it was the first time in this life. In her gentle, lullaby, oracle tone she announced the good news“We are going to Ancient Egypt.” And like a gong was struck, the entire family woke up, looked at eachother, and smiled smiled smiled.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE LAND THAT NEVER WAS BUT ALWAYS IS That was the beginning, when things first began to get weird. Those were the hot days, the first of one summer five years long, returned to again and again, while five years of seasons changed in their normal lives. It was always summer in the other place, when the noon red sun was always peaking and the dunes glowed orange like illuminated wax, and the skies turned all marmalade, and everything came up triangles. They found themselves together but far away, on their first family vacation to a land, as they would come to say in their old age so cryptically some day “that never was but always is”, and each would promise you to the end that it was still, even now, dear readers. There was a new color scheme in the new far home. Not a purple cloud or interwoven branches as far as the eye could see. This was a sky all reds and yellows swirled and glowing dunes of orange below. Sparkpatz relaxed in the heat upon her bright gold throne just below the empty larger white one at the very top stones of the great pyramid overlooking her loving people below. Her yellow and black silk gown was drenched through in sweat and clung to her, a sight to behold indeed, and her skin was trickling steadily. It was the first time anyone had seen Sparkpatz sweat, including herself. She loved it. The feel and smell of her own sweat made her wet, though she was already. More than any of them she felt reborn, reversed, her darkness gone, like someone good. She could breathe for the first time. Her heart, by some miracle alive, swelled and sang in her chest, as she had never imagined a heart could do. She rejoiced within, amazed, so grateful and so very proud of herself. Her eyes welled up for the first time as she realized this is what it feels like to like herself. Her body surrendered to a giant heaving sigh of the spirit, and one word tingled and radiated through her- “Finally.” She promised herself to never let the feeling go, to never leave. 462
Mox was deep inside the pyramid, busy with his noon rirtual. He leaned backwards, slowly laying his body down as if dead into his sarcophagus with a traditional ceremonial flourish, his ring fingers and thumbs touching in the Death Mudra which completed a mystical circuit and channeled some vision current, wrapping him in a final protective energy-field cocoon of transcendent safety and piercing, clear wisdom. He felt the coveted, well-guarded secret wisdom teaching as his thought proceses shifted from from the fourth access to three, and the Triangle Window opened for him. The days became superimposed like lenses of a telescope and he became receptive to the Archetypes as always. There was some magic in this long-practiced hand gesture Mox’s body knew by heart, though he was also seeing himself do it for the first time. He watched, riveted and fascinated, as his thumbs connected to the tips of his ring fingers, as his forearms crossed in an x over his chest, while laying himself slowly backwards into his vision-coffin. It felt like easing deliciously into a warm bath. He was a king, his face hidden behind a heavy deathmask cut from jade. A slavegirl in white slid the heavy lid with difficulty, a scraping sound amplified and echoing in the burial hall into some grand punctuation of Mox’s symbolic death, ceiling him in the blackness of the chamber. Mox had no idea why he was there, and yet felt completely comfortable. He felt the coveted, well-guarded secret wisdom teaching as his thought proceses shifted from from the fourth access to three, and the Triangle Window opened for him. The days became superimposed like lenses of a telescope and he became receptive to the Archetypes as always. Then in his heart, like it was always there, was a mission to defeat a worthy foe- a small and silver thing with long talons into the back of man, a challenge set before man that Mox deemed his own to cure. To heal. In his mask was a plan, a plan for everyone, but they weren’t to learn it yet… it was there, caught in the patterns of the jade somehow, in the angularity of it somehow… It was unclear. His name was Palak and his enemy was a thing set up to provide a test of strength, for everyone, to see if we deserve to learn who we really are, naked. He saw an uphill battle and a vision of a short silver thing, a demon named Tweak, giggling. His hands in the death mudra clenched to fists, and he knew the power was in him to end this, once and for all. He reminded himself that he had the right to say “No”, and he did, to the silver thing. It was not offended, but stared straight at him, with a bad glee, sharpening its long talons against eachother and moving them in witchy, unsettling patterns, convulsing like an epileptic seizure of a wrong kind, and then tracing shapes fast in the air, staring straight at Mox through his mask steadily the whole time. It was like some storm he could not see was striking lightning down on its hands, electrifyting them and possessing them so that they were forced to dance like manequins in wicked, arcane mudras in motion, methodically deconstructing the protective circle his Noble Death Mudra had cast. Mox could not interpret the old bad sign language and did not want to, but his cold bones knew it was profane. Its talons were casting a spell or some channeling some taboo power that the idea of witches casting spells came from. Same point of pure will had taken hold of the thing’s hands, and was sinking telepathically into Mox through its gaze, corrupting him. He remembered and yet watched his mind think for the firwstn time how his cult called it the :False Chakra, the Nemesis Will”. It was a like force of nature, the evil twin of the waters of life, an evil lightning with a harmful agenda for mankind, a sadistic vision. It had a kind of seething complexity, a perverse order and insane, dizzying multiplicity to it that was its power and its means of control. It was fiendish, elaborate, compelling, and most of all seething for ownership. It had a mesmeric power that made Mox’s 463
knees melt like butter, and he felt a lust for it very similar but far more powerful than even he had felt for human females, and that was saying a lot. He was caught in its mirage, riveted by it, a believer of its lie for as long as the talons performed their wicked mudras and the creature stared so steadily, hypnotically into him. He noticed the thing’s feet were edging very slowly closer to him so as he would not notice, though he could not move. As it maintained eye-contact and took slow smooth steps toward him, its talons would whip around it, then pause suddenly in static mudras of its own, the positions which are forbidden by all who know such craft, mudras which took the thing years to learn, taught by the Splintercovens, who raised it and would pass their knowledge into it to invoke something secret and absolutely evil beyond evil. Mox could not look away and doubted himself and feared the little horrror would kill his whole fam’, in unspeakable ways no doubt, before him, and even worse he feared it was far beyond his strength or anyone’s to defeat it. The stakes were high. The thing giggled and scurried off, blended into a shadow in the corner of the vast stone chamber of his vision and disappeared, its hideous high-pitched giggle fading into wherever shadows go. Mox felt a nauseous transition and was overwhelmed by a blurry somber mood whisking everything up into a washed-out, bleached dream, like the scenery was suddenly fake, a paperthin set in a play made of newspaper, black and white, boring and empty like a ghostown, dead. The thing had siphoned his power with the witchy patterns it carved in the air and grown stronger. Mox felt his heart stretch too thin and weaken like a strand of cobweb stretching out, almost snapping and then even this vanished and he was back in the darkness of his sarcophagous, hearing the heavy lid’s scrape echoe through the burial tomb as the slavegirl slid it open again. Mox removed his mask and handed it to the girl, who clutched it to her chest and hurriecd off out the hall to return it to its alter in a secret place behind a hidden door somewhere in the labyrinth of corridors, where it would rest until the next day at noon. Mox climbed out of his sarcophagus clumsily, very weak and trembling. His skin looked like that of a corpse. He walked out of the burial hall and up through the maze towards the top and outside into the blinding red sun and stood next to his queen, who was once the vixon Sparkpatz, now the maiden Cleopatra. Sparkpatz sat sultry in rule, above but in repose, smiling downwards with one long sweaty leg resting casually over the arm of her throne, her legs apart enough to hike up the hem of her gown, exposing her thick sweaty thighs almost to her no doubt sweaty cunt, her tuft of hair presumably musky. It was the weirdest thing, what little differences there were- Sparkpatz shaved her pussy religiously, but Cleopatra had yummyfur. Who knew what the hell the significance of that was? Come to think of it, though in the future everyone fucks everyone, it was no secret that Mox and Lana had a romance connection, just as it was no secret Mosach had what he thought was a secret crush on Lana, and that Spzarkpatz saved herself for only Kristy in exhibition but without participation amongst of all the friends, in addition, of course, to what they called her “trail of tears”, the trail of old flames left in her wake and kept very private. But now she and Mox had the romance connection, Mosach and Lana were yet to make an appearance, and come to think of it… that slavegirl with his mask was Kristy! “Ha! In Bizarro World that little slut tease is a sacred ceremonial virgin!” She was so different he hadn’t even recognized her! What was it about her? Not her hair, no longer blue but long and golden, her now pail skin in place of slightly plump but perky curves, chipmunk cheeks flush with life. It was that she was sincere, and plain, hiding nothing. Gone was her overplayed playfulness shell concealing unknown but mature, serious adult motives. “Slave looks good on little miss bouncy cutey-pie.” He admitted, . “Ahhh yes, all my bitches, hard at work. I wonder who Lana is…. She must be 464
hotter, she couldn’t get any more mousey and tomboyish… Maybe she dresses all girly and wears makeup here…” Lana wasn’t exactly a tomboy, just sleek and cerebral, perhaps a tad androgynous with her flat chest and boney, limber frame and open, and those wide smart eyes too sharp and logical to be very feminine. She was not one to use feminine wiles or seduce a man. And she dressed rather drably in greys and earthtones for a hippie chick. “Maybe Bizarro Lana’s is a red-lipped Ancient hooker!” hoped the rascal king. Mox seemed to take this place less seriously than the others. He seemed fairly aware of the Acadamy world even as it receded to a fantasy and Ancient Egypt became the real one. Mox had a sense of humor about him and still felt mostly the same. But more powerful, and driven by ethics and duty as he had never been, for though he felt he was living a dream, the outcome of the epic battle before him seemed to matter very much. It scared him to his core, and he was going to give it everything he had tomorrow at noon in the vision-coffin. Though somehow the red sun was always stuck at noon. Funny. Cleomepatradussa held out the Ceduceus staff and offered it to Mox… King Palack… as he stepped past her and up to the higher throne of gleaming white limestone at the apex and sat, symmetrical, surveying his loyal unwashed masses and his faithful bride, a lady of honor. MoxPalak could hardly wait to throw her in the royal sack and dishonor her in so many ways. “Finally, I achieve the impossible- tonight I bang the Great Sparkpatz! Outasite!” he thought, his rising lust returning some of the strength the evil imp’s siphoning spells had stolen He couldn’t wait to follow her to bed. “I wish she was still evil though. Fuck. I get to fuck her but not the rad version. Fucking irony, eh? Oh well, I’ll use her well even if she can’t bite back or take the wheel the way the rad onemust.” He mused sadly. “Her huge breasts have not transformed with her soul, thank Kek” he thought, though a king still a rogue. Cleomapatradusa smiled at him in peace, kindly. She was beautiful in her wet silk. Somewhere else, outside a different pyramid, the dunes glowed in a dance, like hourglasses like mountains in the backdrop, a movie set. Mosach was in a pyramid, lost, beaten down and set apart, but he had a whip with him, and he turned it in his hand, admiring the crosshatched leather of the grip. Leena was slung over his shoulder, her red hair swept back and her eyebrows wolfen and hungry, smokey and sultry the way she never was in real life, a starlet. Impossible. Leena was the antithesis of a redhead crazy, lusty firecrackers. Sparkpatz bowed to a giant eye, alive, just below them towards the throne peak where Mox the Pharo sat, and its enourmouse eyelashes uncoiling and slowly growing outward above the rows of slaves. Sparkpatz knew the real Mox was not a cruel slavemaster, but a noble king, yet he went through the motions of his role in the dream, raising Ceduceus in glory, causing his slaves to kneel. Gongs tolled and the eyelashes of the great eye slowly, lazily unrolled further out across his land, cascading and criss-crossing and cross-hatching, casting his kingdom in fishnet canopy, undulating in the hot wind like a heat mirage. The great eye blinked, a seismic shock, and Sparkpatz almost lost her balance, steadied herself on Mox’s outstretched staff offered [fix, Max has staff now!!] , she noticed was very familiar in her hands, a friend, though her other mind once held a whip. She twirled the staff and the great eye blinked twice, three times, and Mox lent his hand to her shouklder, kind, as his new Queen felt the enchantment in the staff. The two snakes spun so fast from it she almost lost her balance again, so high towards the ivory throne at the top. The slaves cheered, cheered, cheered as they were expected in a war-cry, but there was too much going on in the voices, celebration, rage, agony, envy. There was a confusing moment where she doubted Mox, and did not know who she was, but, again, he lent her his hand to steady her, an 465
encouraging squeeze, as if to say “It is ok, we must go through the motions in the dream, I am sad for them too, but don’t show it now. She nodded, raised the staff again, knew it was the Ceducias, her new toy, and the slaves cheered, cheered, cheered. She accepted that she was now Cleomapatradusa, but she was not evil anymore, she was tame, and serene, benevolent, above, at rule, but in repose. Lounging on her throne to Mox’s left a step below, amidst her drama she felt amused, willing to go along with this game for now, just to see where it would go, happy to be plain, alive, without the venom. Ancient Egypt was a place that came and went for them, when the dust motes came to fall on Kristy’s cute blinking chakra, a homing beacon, a lighthouse bringing them aside, to a shelf, compartmentalized, a place that wasn’t real until you were there, “the place that never was but always is, even still” as they would say when old and asked to describe it. They were happy there, on vacation, but hard at work to figure out a plan, a place where they could play at leisure with all the people they always wished to be. The eyelashes of the Great Eye were sacred antenna, sensing, causing. Siuezmograph tremers in the distance. The Eye was picking up frequencies and feeling with its unknowable feelers, getting ready, waking others of its kind and communing with great eyes from pyramids of other kings, like sonar. Kristy was somewhere deep in the tunnels, in the elaborate, fiendishly labrythine maze inside, figuring things out and waiting, unsure how to proceed. Elsewhere in the endless corridors, in some dim-lot monk’s cell, Rauld was a scribe, dipping a quil made from some white-feathered bird. He was meditatively transcribing his dry, crackling papyrus scrolls and knowing his allegiance was with the slaves, but he was impotent to expess this, and vowed he would resolve that, promised to himself a better pride, to be a bit stronger than he gave himself credit for.. His scrolls could turn the pyraqmids aflame but he didn’t believe it yet. And then they were back at college again, dreaded old alarm clock buzzing and morning birds chirping. Kristy’s eyelids fluttered as some slow cloud above caused the bright dust mote between and slightly above her eyes to dim and they all gradually awoke, yawning and stretrching, as it finally slipped in its path across her forehead onto the paisley fabric of the cushion that was her pillow, becoming just an ordinary patch of sunlight. They had no idea what was going on and they were certain a mystery was being told staring them. They acted overly proper and formal, as they gathered themselves up into the school day, getting their holography visors and wands and gloves turned on for lecture. And in their eyes when shared between them a secret wisdom (which they tried not make them smug) higher than each alone had known, where they felt like stars in a ring under a great star, and they were preparing to wind the Great Star back in a catapult that would enflame the heavens. They knew a passcode, an oath, and were delighted to tuck themselves into routine, familiar, comfortable. But they were amazed at their power, and sheerly vibrated with the knowledge of things unknown they could do, stunned. If it could be done, if they were set to do this, for real, for everyone, and once and for all, then they were going to do it. The agreement was unspoken and final. If anyone could do it they could, especially with these new bodies, tingling, with new selves to make things interesting once more. They would be a cult, for real, if they had to- if it meant together they could kill the silver thing. They were sent on a sabbatical, to an Egypt that was and is now, we promise you, and the eyelashes criss-crossed and curly-qued the whole world long.
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PART TWO: SAD FROG DAYS AT THE JOY HOTEL [insert in Sad Frog Days] Sparkpatz pushed past Mox, Leena and a Frost Mermaid in the strange long hall of the Joy. The Frost Mermaid, like the occasional Ice Siren, was an optical illusion of the optical illusory white and green walls of the Joy. She knocked on Mosach’s door with the side of her left stiletto boot, nearly splintering the termite ridden and waterlogged wood and ripping the doorlatch mechanism from her boot battering ram’s force along with the twelth deadbolt which due to the termites was no defense, screws ripped from the lock and bits of metal tinkled and clanged against the various objects of large clutter-piles strewn about the room. Mosach was in the fetal position by one of the piles, sorting through what appeared to be a dismantled videogaming system , retro, or ancient rather. He was so absorbed in sorting and resorting tiny pieces of the electronics that he was not cognicent of the fact that his front door had just exploded open and pelted him with shrapnel. Sparkpatz looked back to Mox and Leena and pointed them outside the filthy and bizarrely “furnished” room. “Do you two mind please? I would like a moment alone with the patient for a full assessment. Thank you.” She said in a pleasant, professional manner, her voice seeming a bit more German than Russian for today. Oddly the nationality of her accent had a way of shifting between these two usually in tandem with her sets of glasses. Yes, decidedly German on this occasion. “One… two… three… four…” Mosach counted, mumbling. “Long time, no see Hotcakes” Sparkpatz opened. “Enter my nest and live no more” Mosach mumbled, his hands trembling so badly that he kept dropping and redropping the same chunk of chipped green circuitryboard. “…” Sparkpatz was puzzled, chagrinned, and slightly offended, in that order. “Excuse me?” she prompted. “Five, six, seven, eight… Enter my nest and meet your fate!” Mosach grumbled, with a bit more enunciation, but barely. He seemed psychotic, demented, unkempt, manic, delusional, feverish, catatonic, and most of all, clammy to a degree that stretches the very definition of the word. What skin of his was exposed resembled the jowls of a depressed catfish and seemed coated by a layer of some greasey, shiney, gelatinous substance which was a good candidate for the suspected source of the challengingly intense odor of past-due codfish intestines left to their own devices in the sun past the point of ill repute. 467
“That’s what I thought you were trying to say.” Sparkpatz bantered snappily as she now drove the toe tip of her right stiletto. She was a fan of alternately kickfighting and traditional Freudian psychoanalysis to disrupt the normal wear and tear of combat to her footwear. The steel tip drove into Mosach’s gut with a dull smack and puncturing sound, and yelp of pain fading to a nauseous moan and persisted, the oh so fittingly symbolic of power tip of her left stiletto frighteningly poised upon Mosach’s balls, in fact resting the potentially imasculating tip ever so slightly on the telltale buldge of his boys beneath his long since washed jeans, trapped defenselyless vulnerably in their denim prison. Mosach seemed capable of twisting his torso and neck up and around to get a look at the full figure of dark instinct looming above him, despite reeling in gut pain and many pervasive ailments which composed his baseline wellness level. “The fuck? Hrmm. You scary broad, I need to see some form of identification. You punctured my bellybutton, who are you?” Sparkpatz generously applied pressure to the jewels of Mosach’s family, rendering him speechless, then knelt down and first with a kind, tender careess, then forcefully brushed and grabbed a handful of Mosach’s impossibly slick dark hair. She used her secure control of the back of his head to… well, to just kind of playfully shake and knock his face about into the floor, a wall, and mushing and grinding it into his clutter-pile. A snotty, bloody nose was beginning to leave its’ elastic tail, left, then right, then left as his shocked face took some damage. He seemed to be waking up a bit. Dr. Ceduceus’ Wisdom Adventures! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Dr. C’ and the Cauldron of Archetypes Dr. C’ and the Case of the Precious Numbers Dr. C’ and the Dungeon of the Howling Lost Dr. C’ and the Quest of the Guest Lecture Dr. C’ and the Best Field Trip Ever! Dr. C’ and the Fast Times at the Priest Monestary (after Mosach escapes the Joy)
[new page] Secret Wisdom? Wisdom as Secret Word/letter/shape/sound/sourcecode Pyramid/triangle as verticality anchored What is a Pyramid? -a boast (flag, nation, military) -a tomb -a treasure chest -a church, temple, sun altar, a house -a book - a geometric statement -axiom “perfect monument” -a symbol 468
- a mystery -a prison (slaves) -a crime -a challenge [After Mosach escapes] … for the Joy because it became condemned in a more final and ultimate way than it had always been. It had been condemned by man and God since its origin, but if not for love’s lure and a certain strict mistress’ exile, Mosach had been made to leave because the building was technically, legally condemned by Venomville city hall and Mayor Wolfenstein himself and was to meet the worst side of a wreckingball soon. This would be to most a nudge by Fate in the right direction, a more prosperous one, regardless of destination of escape, but it so happened that the exodus from Joy led to an even deeper and more permanent level of despair, down to a yet more wretched hive of scum and villainy, another more severely dangerous city than even the notorious Venonville, or even Neo Surreal London and its’ layers of underworlds and their underbellies- a true Sketch Factory. In fact, that was its’ name. The Fam went on a vacation to Sketchfactory. [After Mosach escapes Notes -] Jaguar priest monestary Human trafficking Mosiac map of dungeon Catacombs Buried pyramid Clerk with no Boss Homeless tweakette scheme [Dr C’ bits and pieces] [vampire blood drinking, etc] Things had turned swiftly from as bad as they could get to far, far worse around the time Mosach finally escaped from the Joy hotel with the help of a dark heroine replicoidal friend (or was lured by the love of an old feral flame) or exiled by true friendship by a certain powerful woman friend.
[Dr C’ and the Fast times at the Jaguar Priest Hotel – screenplay pilot] Smoke and Mirrors [incorporate screenplay into larger standard Wisdom Adventure story format] 469
[Mosach knocks on Dr. C’s door] Dr C- Dude, you gotta check out this artifact I manifested. Mosach-You mean a groundscore? Dr C- You’re not ready. Mosach- Probably not, but… can I use it to warp out of this shithole? Dr C- It ain’t like that homie. [gets mad suddenly] Honor thy Mother! You need to be ready for this homie, this ain’t no Yolo Swaggins and the Fellowship of the Bling amature hour. This is… I think … I think it’s some kind of… Mosach- Let me see the talisman. Dr C- It’s not a talisman, it’s a Power Object! Mosach- Sweet! Even better! Let me see! Dr C- [conspiratorial whisper, like letting Mosach in on a dangerous secret] You know what I think it is? I think… I think… it’s a portal. Mosach- Like a warpzone? Dr C- YES! [initiates “DAP”] [describe, explain in all Dr. C adventures, use often in all] Mosach- Fucking unveil it dude! Dr. C- [Dr. C reveals a jaguar car pendant, this is an important scene, Mosach mocks, says it’s from a car, an ancient car, Dr C insists portal, this becomes their trademark necklace] Dr. C- He who cannot withstand the alchemic transmutation machine must be annihilated from the salted garden. Mosach- Yeah, but[machine/sexbot dialogue, maybe before Dr. C reveals jaguar pendant, missing section?] Dr. C- I think it’s… some kind of machine! Mosach- Like one of those new Japanese Sci-fi sex robots? Dr. C- No… like a phase conjugation device… for the pituitary gland. [does mudra/kata, jumps like gorilla- wrestling move/ then holds triangle gangta sign over eye and DAPS] Mosach- So not like the Japanese sexbots then? Dr. C- That’s spiritual blasphemy. Mosach- But they’re just robots, so…? Dr. C- Beware that in doing the machine one does not become a machine. Mosach- True, but… can I borrow her anyway? Dr. C- So… you think Tupac wasn’t taken down for… to suppress the people? Who could take away the forces that monitor these kinds of Power Objects and the Archivists? [raises eyebrows and points to himself suggestively, grinning widely] Mosach- What does Tupac have to do with- [etc…] [note: both wearing red robes with hoods for no reason never explained! (very funny) use black/red sheets like togas for costumes if need to. Now, the Jaguar hood ornament/machine/portal/talisman/power object is added to robe costumes after scene when it is revealed!]
CHAPTER FIVE: THE JOY: A DESPERATE ADVENTURE 470
It was wallowing in the filthiest and most poisonous toxic-sludge filled gutters of the spirit that Mosoch first met his mentor and nemises, Dr. Caduceus. But this inscrutable scholar-martyr was not to appear in Mosach’s rotting corpse of a life just yet. First we will painstakingly narrate the many successive stages of his decay in painful detail- those impossibly lower and lower still rock bottoms, deeper than those he even dared plum in his dankest soul-spelunking umtil this point. This was before his epic communion of minds with the Good Doctor which lead to his final, beatific redemption we hint of now but not promise. Who knows? Oh, fine- to spoil the drama of danger with outcome unknown, Mosach did ultimately escape the bad place, or rather was rescued, and triumphed to an unbelievable, heroic, and even divine degree. You’re welcome. Let’s pretend we don’t know that. For now, let’s say the entire descent into such oceanic depths of madness and misery which Mosach dove were delved for a reason, even if this reason was dumb luck and undeserved fortunate coincidence. Souls come into one’s life, sometimes just the right ones at just the right times. Synchronicity is funny like that. Now, the gruesome reunion began when Mox finally made up his mind to bite the bullet and do something that he would have no alternative but to feel, to feel sadly and deeply. It was as facing the gallows for him. Devastating- to see his friend in a no doubt sorry state, yes, but moreso to accept the feelings of his heart as necessary and unavoidable. People grow. Leena asked to come but Mox shook his head. She knew this would be emotional and difficult for him and that he didn’t want her to see him with his iconic guard down. She hugged him goodbye, tightly, like he was going off to war, smooching his cheek and ruffling his black hair fondly but with a worried look in her eye. Sparkpatz thought Mosach had the right to privacy or even suicide if he so chose, as she deeply believed was every person’s sacred right, and she declined to go along on principle. In a certain peculiar way her belief in her own right to choose to die was one of her deepest convictions, and went hand in hand with her love of freedom. She did not voice it but she thought the desire to crash Mosach’s pity party was selfish and naive, beneath her, so she shrugged and busied herself with the usual Sparkpatz things- sex… and… well, primarily sex, perhaps augmented by cosmetics, fashion, sarcasm. Woe unto them were they to intervene if she was in a dark night of the soul retreat of her own, though when she entered hers she was never to be found or even suspected of feeling blue. Her alone time was very, very alone. You and even we may never truly know her, or the places she goes when she must. In a perverse way she was proud of Mosach. Strange. Kristy was driving, and by this we mean she was playing retro or more properly ancient video games on the screen where a windshield would have been were they not swooshing aimlessly around the network of waterslides in their car-coon. They had been swooshing for hours, no idea where they were going, other than their one clue, the last item on the To Do List still taped to the mini-fridge in Mosach’s dorm room- “Play hooky. Spiral on down to Venomville, see if I can’t unwind.” Venomville was a town that has a way of being forgotten and never known in the first place. “Void of Meaning” was the portentous error message displayed by the computer when they queried the GPS (Geo-reticule Place Synchronization) grid of their car-coon screen. Their augmented reality holo-lense homing path helpers were no help either. The animated bluebird on the screens inside both of their synchronized contact lenses carried the arrow in its mouth as usual, but instead of cutely pointing the way to Venomville as they had asked it, it turned to face them with its wings upheld in a “beats me!” gesture. “Take us to fucking Venomville!” Kristy repeated at the cartoon. It shook its beak quickly, seeming a little afraid. If it knew the way it 471
wasn’t telling. Kristy picked up coffee for them both and fake cigarettes for Mox along with a paper map at a gas station, which would offer a possibility swiftly obscured by mucous. Of course “gas” and “paper” were no more, but names stick. This gas-station was a Photo-Magno-Tesloid Synthesis Charging dock that synced their car-coon with the hydro-magno-tunnel slides laid down conveniently upon the roads which once were, and the map was not paper but paper-thin foldable, disposable screen. After some debate, their best guess was an area on the map generically labelled “Anti-approved Non-location” covered by a blinking red circle with slash through it. That had to be it. As Kristy was about to push the blinking symbol of wrongness to pull up the site’s tourist attractions, the entire surrounding region was splattered with gooey but knobbly-textured snot from a misfired snot-rocket Mox launched, a poor choice of nose-blowing method considering the confined space, close quarters, and notorious imprecision of the maneuver. He had intended the ejected snotrocket to hit the floor of the backseat, already a mess of fast-food wrappers and rave flyers, but in epic fail the tradgectory was miscalculated and the projectile landed coincidentally on the very point of interest Kristy was about to touch with her pure, impressionable index finger. KRISTY- You dick! You got snot on my map! Right on the Anti-location!” MOX- x marks the snot. Snot marks the spot.” They laughed and decided this was either the universe’s way of telling them not to go there, or perhaps its way of confirming the unlabeled place was in fact their goal. Or it could be a forewarning of the disgusting snot-like nature of the forsaken village. MOX- Push it. Push the blinky. I wanna stop at the tourist traps. Kristy- I’m not touching that slime-nugget you prick! You push the blinky. Mox- Just wipe it off! Kristy- with what? Gimme a napkin or something. We’re not tourists anyway. We’re rescuers. MOX- digs a napkin out of a fast-food bag, hands it to Kristy. Kristy- Grabs the napkin and feels ketchup, shrieks again, “What the fuck! That thing is as slimey as the nose-splooge! Yucko!” Tries to throw it behind her at Mox, misses. Mox- Leans over the front seat and grabs Kristy’s hand, playfully forcing her hand toward the map before her. Mox- Touch it! Touch the blinky! Kristy- Wrestling but overpowered “Nooo!” Mox- Touch it! You know you like it!” Kristy- “Nooooo!” They are goofing around, making a grim situation better, distracting themselves from the heavy task at hand. Kristy’s pointer finger was retracted in fear into her trembling fist, Mox’s grip on her wrist moving her knuckles slowly closer to the map splayed out on the dash. Mox’s male strength won out over the petite young lady and he managed to smoosh Kristy’s fist onto the snot village and smear it about while Kristy squeeled at a very, very high pitch. This activated the blinky. Car-coon- Passangers, please- no horseplay, I beg of you!” Kristy + Mox at the same time- “Sorry.” They stop wrestling and sit glumly. Car-coon- That’s ok. Try and relax. Map- “Ding-Ding! This location is not recommended or existent. Tourist attractions include Cindy-Von Fishooker Science Museum [Foreclosed, biohazard, subject of propaganda, science faulty], Wolfenfang Newspaper Press and House of News Journalism (condemned, fire hazard, 472
product unfit for print), and the Joy Hotel (access forbidden, under deconstruction, falling rock hazard, biohazard, unfit for residency, confirmed anti-destination, decency hazard, inverse morality zone, Do not enter. Do not attempt rescue of dwellers. No admittance by authority of Mayor Wolfenfang. No cartographic representation permitted due to being site of war-crimes. Yep, that was the place. Mosach heard a knock on his cave of solitary despair, the first in six months. This was after the tireless Kristy and Mox had made countless knocks on the countless doors of many floors, hundreds of identical horror-caves opened suspiciously by wide-eyed lonely souls who never heard a knock before or after, insane things once people, now so lost in shadows they became shadow-people themselves. Finally, methodically, our tourist rescuers struck upon the correct number- “316”. They heard a scurrying and a rustling inside, and a moan that might have been their friend, or a seal, maybe a sea lion. Kind of the same thing right? Then they heard a terrifying giggle that could not have possibly been the kind, sane young man they knew and loved, and Kristy looked up at Mox as his heart sank. His iconic guard, down in one fell swoop. Nothing could prepare him for the fiendish, wicked giggle, nor for the sing-song rhyme which was far, far worse, in Mosach’s corrupted but unmistakable voiceMosach- One, two three four, enter my nest and live no more! Five six, seven, eight, enter my nest and meet your fate! (more giggling, and rustling, scurrying, things falling inside.” Kristy + Mox at the same time, blood drained from their faces, staring at eachother; “HO… LY…. FUCK.” They simply continue staring at eachother. Then repeat: “HO… LI… FUCK>” Mox- knocks again Mosach- Please, please, enter my room, for when you do it becomes your tomb! Mox- “Cover me, I’m going in!” He opens the unlocked door and runs into the room, tackling an animalistic hot mess that in some ways resembled his BFF (best friend forever), but the resemblance was vague, very slim. Mosach was naked, on the floor, drenched in stanching oily sweat, his hands bleeding, trembling violently as if practically electrified, occasionally convulsing as if gripped by brief intermittent seizures. His eyes were beyond wild- savage, either horrified or bloodthirsty, Mox wasn’t sure which, and he gave the general impression of a ferret in a hot oven, scurrying for his life, frantic, crazed. Ferral. Despite all this, he was also very, very seriously busy, His attention scattered beyond any hope of communication yet somehow keenly focused, hard at work and riveted by some incredibly important task, one which Mox and Kristy and any decent folk should never need to learn of. But we will explain. Mox and Kristy were not weeping but full on crying, sobbing loudly, and holding eachother tightly in instinctual fear of the rabid ferret-thing scrambling and clawing at their feet, and in such sorrow as they had rarely ever felt, and an irrelevant, useless, and hopeless love for their friend. They soul-hugged eachother as they never did, so tightly, in mourning. This thing was not him, he was dead. But there was still the heart of a poet in the thing somewhere, some remnant. And over time they would put him back together. For now they climbed on an upsidedown writing desk barricading a closet as one would to avoid a rat, and watched. In time, and slowly, they would manage to comprehend and empathize with Mosach’s very, very seriously important task. Mosach was ghostbusting… It didn’t begin with ghostbusting. That came later. It began with your usual alcoholism, and 473
Steeley Dan albums (classics). It began relatively mildly with shot after shot after shot of grain liquor which was 95% alcohol (the old-fashioned kind since he wanted the hangover), and browsing a favorite website of his which is where the “Sad Frog Days” in the title of this part of the book is derived from, which will all be explained in good time. Basically, it was a website for virgins and losers to post drawings of sad frogs. He found some comfort in the brain damage of grain spirit and the antique laptop computer he thought of as his commiseration-machine. Of course the fellow losers on the forum had died three to nine-thousand years ago, but he pretended they were out there in their basements posting frogs*. This we will call Stage One. Mosach spent about four months playing at the retro (ancient rather) internet, the way some people find comfort in churning butter I suppose. There are no “websites” or “internet” anymore of coursethe term “internet” is very antiquated and sounds rather silly to us because what you meant by that, as something different from people or our surroundings, it isn’t a separate thing anymore… hard to explain… what you meant by that word is now so omni-pervasive and ubiquitous that there is no word for it - it just is. The world is the internet, so are we. Anyways, the site was called R9K, and it had become very important, sentimental, to our fallen hero. He will have more to say on this Before the ghostbusting (Stage Four) there was first the seed of evil, the achilese heel and fatal flaw that brought our tradgic hero down and cealed his doom from the start- the need to piss. There were no toilets in the rooms of the Joy. If there were perhaps none of this hell would have burnt his mind away. If he had only been left to commiserate with his frogs, left alone… if only… It was not to be. The call of nature forced him to emerge and brave the long opticalillusionist hallways of the place to piss in the shared, macably and inexplicably shit-splattered toilets, floors, walls, and dishearteningly at times, ceiling. Over time this lead to an unavoidable rubbing of greasy shoulders with pissing neighbors sharing the same fate. The green and white peeling plaster of the corridors of his purgatory were mostly empty, but occasionally a thing on two legs, no doubt once a person with a self and an identity and life, would pop suspiciously out of their hovel and shamble on down the long way to piss or shit. Or both. Or just stare at the cracked mirror and wonder what might have been…Some would try to speak to Mosach, as men do. Mouthing and mumbling the words “Do you got a smoke?” or “Know where I could score some A-Ks? (Though we wish we didn’t have to, yes, we’ll get to these later. Very, very unfortunately, indeed.) Anyways, of these husks of shadows of the hollow shells of the men they used to be, some became familiar faces and sometimes even distractions, though certainly not friends, the way he used to have. Once upon a time… it seemed so long ago to him, the abilit6y to judge time corroded in the fermented rye like his throat tissue. “Fuck it” he said one day, I’m certainly no prize, no better than these poor sons of bitches. Fuck, we’re all in the same boat, I should go next door and see if that old black street cat is home. Of course he’s home, he’s a shutin like me, like all of us. I wonder if he has a deck of cards…? (Beginning of Stage Two: Hustling Every Day.) Misery loves company, but not even Mosach’s kind of misery could love this kind of rough company. He did come to tolerate and accept the old black man as one of his own- the fraternity of the dead-alive. Brotherhood of the senile- one from age, one from dementia tremens. At first Mosach was only sociable and daring enough to reach out to his neighbor, the Hustler, called such because he was always scheming, trying to barter a can of tuna for a cigarette or pawning his expired bus pass off for a shot of liquor. That was the first step, outward into “society” to use 474
the term generously, the first breach of his bubble of aloneness. It was a positive step, but it got him into trouble, which got worse. But at first Mosach thought he was warming from hibernation and making positive changes, being generous and friendly, sharing his drink and his tuna on bread, no mayo. It didn’t seem to matter to the Hustler what he acquired or what he traded- that wasn’t the point. What was the point? Mosach was unsure. Human contact? The feeling of smug pride that the Hustler felt if the trade was in his favor and not his mark’s? Mosach would gladly play the rube and let the old fucker get the better of him time and time again. It was like feeding the pigeons. The Hustler wasn’t mean-spirited, looking for a victim, taking advantage of prey. He was sneaky but harmless, perhaps just a man with an inexplicably deep appreciation for barter. Every single time Mosach ran into the Hustler, and eventually when they began to hang out and chat in the well-dressed but peculiar elderly gentleman’s neat, well-ordered room, there was an exchange of objects. Sometimes a surprisingly well-made raincoat was proffered. Other days a sandwhich was desperately required. It became a game, and it was actually very fun, as far as fun goes at the Joy. It was heartwarming, the give-and-take, the persistent reminders that people can interact and supposedly benefit eachother, although Mosach always let the Hustler think he cleverly traded up, a scavenger of opportunity and pre-currency commerce. Maybe barter was the way things were supposed to work, the whole world round. It was irrelevant- no one had any money, ever, and the fact that the rent was never paid was hardly a problem because the building was abandoned by the owners decades ago, crumbling, condemned by the City and by any God that’s real. The Hustler had surprising luck in lust, to be blunt, by men of both male and feminine persuasion, so when he answered the door pantless, dick flopping in the flickering light of the hallway’s florescent bulbs, unashamed as the morning sun, Mosach knew the Hustler had company, and though he was always welcome, he would decide swiftly to play cards another time. Drugs had a little something to do with these fuck-fest shenanigans. Yes, drugs, those damnable forms of matter which when ingested produce effects on the mind. It’s true- people put those things in their bodies on purpose. The Hustler certainly did. And, Mosach suspected, used his natural talents at barter to leverage his intoxicating wares for sexual favors of a primarily homoerotic and oral servitude variety, essentially becoming a mind-control Svengali pusher with the power to corrupt and pervert the angelic such as the wild eyed and haired Christ from the floor below them, a 50 year old man who was a permanent edenic cherubic schizophrenic who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but would slob a floppy old motherfucker’s knob for a few puffs of whatever Hustler was proffering. Mosach was far from homophobic (like all poets he could be effeminate and sensitive, open, and that was one step above cocksucker as he had to admit) but the unseemly mix of mind-control, drugs, barter, and prostitution made him a bit squeamish. If he only knew how dark it gets… Let’s pretend you all never read that old religious book that is in every freshmen’s locker in Golden Age 101, and Intro to The Garden. The book is called The Garden of Flowers. Amongst college kids its memorization is mandatory, but if you aren’t from an academic or sacred background, I’ll school you. The truth is I’m not an expert so I’ll try for a quick outline, a Cliff’s Notes of The Sacrament from Moss Hollow. Well, basically, people’s tastes change over the centuries and the millennia. For example, sugar was contraband once upon a time. Now sugar is as rare a mildly inebriating condiment as Saint Anthony’s Fire. That, my friends, was a nasty little fungus of the middle-ages that sent whole villages over the deep end before the villagers 475
limbs would rot and fall off. It’s related to another kind of saintly fire but that had its time and came and went, never seen since. Shame, that. The point is we lost some things and they discovered and invented new things. We’re going to teach you about one of the new things, and the worst things ever- the Anti-Klein. These days the college kids mostly drink (new) booze and smoke old grass, but in history class they teach of magic drugs you can’t find anymore which had something (it was a dense and confusing course) to do with “the circle of golden children who called the thunder down”. The saints, who gathered round that good ol’ boy Mr. Kite, and the whole revolution or age of enlightenment, whatever it was, had something to do with some magic drug called Klienbottles, which were actually alien eggs- larvae of insects from another planet, which they proved. True story. Anyway, those were like sacraments or holy communion wafers in the very first forms of the Mystery-Sphere Ritual, which was run by that pretty girl we study in Ancient Historical Figure Biography class, the girl named Chrissy- Mystery-Sphere Girly, or M.S.G. The chick was probably idealized, well she is an actual idol so, yeah. Anyway, she was the ring-bearer… no, the yo-yo bearer (sacred yo-yo containing Klienbottles.) Those are the magic sacrament alien eggs that sparked the revolution, or maybe they made Mr. Kite become holy in the first place, who knows? It’s ancient history and it’s complicated and there’s people with PHDs in it that don’t know if the eggs were even real or what the fuck they’re talking about if you ask me. The point is those eggs worked because their DNA was twisted in a shape that can’t exist, like a Mobius strip but better, and they break some kind of rules of the universe and break geometry laws that let bigger things in, bigger places and that’s the best summary I can give. Thank god there are no grades in the future, or I might be failing. You get the idea- drop bugs, tune out, turn holy. Anyways, those larvea are real- they are studied in sacredness courses, exobiology labs, and geometry classes (advanced theoretical topology, very hard class, hot redhead teacher, big tits, very worthwhile) so they are pretty well documented and accepted as fact, although they say there are only a few left (dead ones) and they can’t be cloned. I think the Acadamy has part of one which they dust off for the photon-holograscope observatory, although it is only half a Klien, which I guess would be a normal Mobius-Strip style egg. It has to do with dimensions. But I can tell you what is real- Anti-Kliens. The Hustler from the Joy had been smoking something next door that smelled HORRIBLE, and he would hide it when Mosach visisted, although occasionally a cheap metal pipe was left out with little things squirming in it like yellow maggots, My advice would be to never, ever smoke anything that moves, and if you have to smoke them, never, ever, ever, NEVER inject them. That’s a jacked-up path that turns good poets into tradgic ferrets, fast. So, yeah, one day the Hustler offered the pipe to Mosach, who was so drunk on grain liquor that he may have thought it was Albert Einstein’s cock for all he knew, and who wouldn’t forgive a man for lessening the great physisists… “load”. The point was he just didn’t give a fuck, and took the pipe, in which was a big phat little yellow larvae, squirming like it was a cheap stripper shaking its ass. He sucked in the disgusting fumes while the Hustler held the flame to the critter, and it sizzled and squeeled as it fidgeted desperately in the flame, burning to death and dying slowly as the pipe was passed back and forth. The smoke tasted rancid, like bologna gone bad, a fatty greasy and harsh taste that left Mosach’s tongue so numb he slurred his words. And then he understood why the things are illegal and are exterminated by an esteemed class of exo-bio476
exterminators who are considered sacred exorcists more than pest control workers. He felt the point of pure will latch on to him and operate his body, and that was the beginning of the end. The first time Mosach ingested an Anti-Klein he was possessed by the thing it represents, which can’t be defined exactly but it is a thing, an entity or a force of nature, something like a star or a magic crystal, but of a bad kind, a thing with an agenda. That’s the problem with Anti-Kleinsthey may or may not be alive… well, the larvae are certainly alive and the younger and fatter they are the more they squeal, and the more expensive. But the thing they put into you is not a little bug, it’s a point. A point that appears to the best of our knowledge to be alive, or to operate us as if it were living through us. It owns and operates humans. It seems to have a plan and when a human smokes (or injects) the bugs, the chemical reaction or alchemy or black magic in the shape either opens up some passageway or calls something down into the brain which is extremely (let me repeat- *extreeeemly*) pleasurable, because it takes over and appears to give you superpowers. Maybe it does. Maybe it’s a tool that could be used for good in the right hands, or maybe that’s what everyone thinks. That’s exactly the first thought that came to Mosach’s pickled brine-brain, which suddenly did not feel drunk anymore. It felt very clean, smart, and confident, and he thought "I know this is wrong. I’ve seen the commercials. But if I just keep smoking these fucking bugs, I could save the whole fucking world.” It was no problemsimplicity itself. He didn’t even need to try. The bug, or rather the point of light, or was it electricity? No- it was WILL. It was a point of sheer, absolute, infinite WILL, that would take care of the rest. And it did. Since that moment Mosach has not had control of his mind, body, soul, shlong, and least of all, his poet’s heart. They are the opposite of the old holy bugs from Moss Hollow in every way. The planet they come from is different, the shape of their DNA is also impossible but reversed like a mirror image, and it breaks laws of the universe but in a bad way, letting big bad things in, and instead of sacred, they are fucking straight evil man. Straight fucking satanic profane devil evil. (Enter Stage 3: The Bad Bug Hunt.) and his innapropriate love-interest the Simple Girl, then on the floor below the Edenic Christ, and later the Doctor. Only the last, in addition to Mosach, would survive the death of the whole bad place, and like Mosach, rise like a phoenix into a higher purpose that made the horrors, if not worthwhile, at least part of a larger story-arc where they made some sense in retrospect. No, they still made no sense. That kind of business can never be redeemed, justified, or contextualized into reason or meaning. But in some blind-fated twist of plot, if Mosach had not dove into the filthy brine headfirst, he would never have met the Doctor, and they would not have climbed out together (with more than a little help from his dear friends) onto a plateue that finally explained the shared dreams of the Egypt that never was. But always, always is of course! Dr. Ceduceus, as we will find, was a Proffesor of Theoretical Crypto-economic Archeology at the very Acadamy Mosach was hiding from, but was on sabbatical and making a brief pit-stop at the wrong place before leaving with his wife to lead an archeology dig, the excavation of a newly discovered pyramid in, not Ancient, but current (which, well, for your purposes is “future” Egypt, ye oldentime readers dear) and he had a perverse taste for bad hotels. Damn bad ones, which he believed more conducive to his highly abstract and groundbreaking research. One of his many eccentricities. Anyway, he will remain for now hard at the work of the mind behind his locked door opposite Mosach’s for many a chapter until their accidental if somewhat destined introductions… 477
A number of men, animalistic and torn, of ill and lesser repute, intruded on Mosach’s room of squalid solitude during these times of trial, but Dr.Ceduceus plays a mysterious role in our drama that will not become clear until much later, when he is eventually to become a minor God-King of sorts, definitly in his own eyes but those of some others as well, and a key player in the dawning link between the Acadamy’s ancient history lessons and the friend’s seemingly miraculous collective Egyptian Deja-vu. All this was during Mosach’s isolation from his friends and flagrant extended truancy from his studies at the Acadamy, when he crawled into that most poorly named hole called The Joy Hotel. As was feared by his abandoned entourage, he was having one of his “spells”, but none had lasted this long, or as Mox and Kristy were soon to discover, was this bad. Damn bad.
CHAPTER SEVEN: SNOT MARKS THE SPOT Leena asked to go but Mox shook his head. She knew this would be emotional and difficult for him and that he didn’t want her to see him with his iconic guard down. She hugged him goodbye, smooching his cheek with a worried look in her eye. Sparkpatz felt Mosach had the right to privacy and declined on principle. Kristy was driving, and by this we mean she was playing ancient video games on the screen where a windshield would have been were they not swooshing aimlessly around the network of waterslides in their car-coon. They hadn’t a clue where they were going, other than the last item on the To Do List still taped to Mosach’s minifridge of his dorm room- “Play hooky. Spiral on down to Venomville, see if I can’t unwind.” Venomville was a town that has a way of being forgotten and never known in the first place. “Void of Meaning” was the portentous error message when they queried the GPS (Geo-reticule Place Symchonization) grid of their car-coon screen. Their augmented reality holo-lense homing path helpers were no help either. The opaque animated bluebird carrying an arrow in its mouth 478
on the screens inside their contact lenses carried the arrow in its mouth as usual, but instead of cutely pointing the way to Venomville as they had asked it, it turned to face them with its wings upheld in a “beats me!” gesture. “Take us to fucking Venomville!” Kristy repeated. It shook its beak quickly, seeming a little afraid. If it knew the way it wasn’t telling. The paper map Kristy picked up at a gas station would offer a possibility swiftly obscured by mucous. Of course “gas” and “paper” were no more, but names stick. This gas-station was a Photo-Magno-Tesloid Synthesis Charging dock that synced their car-coon with the hydro-magno-tunnel slides laid down upon the roads which once were, and the map was not paper but paper-thin foldable screen. Their best guess was an area on the map generically labelled “Anti-approved Nonlocation” with a blinking red circle with slash through it. That had to be it. As Kristy was about to push the blinking symbol of wrongness to pull up its tourist attrractions, the entire surrounding region was obscured by snot, from a snot-rocket Mox blew, a poor choice considering the confined space and notorious imprecision of the maneuver. He had intended the snotrocket to hit the floor of the backseat, already a mess of fast-food wrappers and rave flyers, but the tradgectory was miscalculated and in an epic fail it landed coincidentally on the very point of interest Kristy was about to touch. “ KRISTY- You dick! You got snot on my map! Right on the Anti-location!” MOX- x marks the snot. Snot marks the spot.” They decided this was either the universe’s way of telling them not to go there, or perhaps its way of confirming the unlabeled place was in fact their goal. Or it could be a forewarning of the disgusting snot-like nature of the forsaken village. MOX- Push it. Push the blinky. I wanna stop at the tourist traps. Kristy- I’m not touching that slime-nugget you prick! You push the blinky. Mox- Just wipe it off! Kristy- with what? Gimme a napkin or something. Were not tourists anyway. We’re rescuers. MOX- digs a napkin out of a fast-food bag, hands it to Kristy. Kristy- Grabs the napkin and shrieks again, “What the fuck! That thing is as slimey as the nosesplooge! Yucko!” Tries to throw it behind her at Mox. Mox- Leans up to the front seat and grabs Kriswty’s hand, playfully forcing her hand toward the map Mox- Touch it! Touch the blinky! Kristy- Wrestling but overpowered “Nooo!” Mox- Touch it! You know you like it!” Kristy- “Nooooo!” They are goofing around, making a grim situation better, distracting themselves from the heavy task at hand. Kristy’s pointer finger was retracted in disgust into her trembling fist, Mox’s grip on her wrist moving her knuckles slowly closer to the map splayed out on the dash. Mox’s strength won out and he managed to smoosh Kristy’s fist onto the snot village and smear it about while Kristy squeeled at a very, very high pitch. This activated the blinky. Car-coon- Passangers, please- no horseplay, I beg of you!” Kristy + Mox at the same time- “Sorry.” They stop wrestling and sit glumly. Car-coon- That’s ok. Try and relax. Map- “Ding-Ding! This location is not recommended or officially existent. Tourist attractions include Cindy-Von Fishooker Science Museum [Foreclosed, biohazard, subject of propaganda, science faulty], Wolfenfang Newspaper Press and News Compilation House (condemned, fire hazard, product unfit for print), and the Joy Hotel (forbidden, under deconstruction, falling rock hazard, biohazard, unfit for residency, scheduled for deconstruction, confirmed anti-destination, 479
decency hazard, inverse morality zone. Inhabited unwisely, residents left for dead. Do not enter. Do not rescue dwellers. No admittance by authority of Priest, Mayor Wolfenfang, Mosach had changed. His state was worse than pathetic. Demented. He was a one-man army supersoldier in a war on human dignity. He was burning with an all-consuming passion for selfdestruction. His goal was nullification of conscience. His profession was the replication of the torments of hell. A dedication of his entire being to decay. The worship of death. A revelry in the weeping of the Madonna, who was still highly revered and the only remnant of Christianity, become a kind of somber Earth-Goddess specializing in pity. Mosach was attempting to pennetrate through debauchery into degeneracy and delinquency, nopt to mention extended and flagrant truancy. Strange days at the Joy Hotel, a place rot-ridden and infested by animal of rodent and insect persuasion, and men who have devolved to animal. The man who lives in the Joy is no man, his species dwells on one of four floors, but each are deep bellow even the catacombs and freewheeling bazaars and pleasure-bunkers under the seedy underbelly of the forbidden city they call Neo-Surreal London. Not literally below, but to the West, but below in moral hierarchy. So below in the echelons of decency that it makes the sleaziest underbelly of Neo-Sureal London look like the Pleasure Dome of Kubla Kan in comparison.
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. CEDUCEUS Dr Caduceus, Mosach’s next door neighbor at The Joy, was the most brilliant of all geohistoric-economic-political-mystical and scientific minds to decode secret wisdom of ancient circles succeeded to march from tortured rule by the Pharaoh to freedom with passion. First and foremost he was a wrestler. He wrestled with God and Devils, literature and lost cultures’ architectural riddles’ with the fundaments of reality and with the fundaments of those fundaments themselves, unto axioms unmeant for men to know- he wrestled with all forms of knowledge including those he had to risk not merely madness to grapple with, but his identity as human , for he reached farthest, perhaps farthest of all, too close to the core and heart of Being for mortals to inhabit. Yes, he wrestled all those things well before breakfast which he never slept prior to, ever. Not once was the scholar-warrior ever seen to sleep. His morning tea was coffee thickened by twenty five sugars, the calories transmitted directly into cognition excelsior and like his sugarsludge syrup beverage of choice the secrets he penetrated were unfit for human consumption. But first and foremost, and this is key, the man was literally a wrestler. He wrestled for a prestigious college once upon a time as he would mention in conversation beaming pride and often, relishing his achievements at the university as the original Great Battlefield where he forged the foundation of his merit, and the birthplace of the true spark whereby all his theory ignited, and the soil where took held the root of a most unique mystical path (later to be hidden within a symbolic martial arts system he was to design) which came to be known as the source code. Dr Caduceus was short and middle aged, his face expressive and fierce, chiseled in a 480
rough and manly hardened way, but with fire smoldering beneath, which would burst into glorious bright joy at concepts too secret for anyone else to find emotion in. This is how he worked- by taking his place in the physical ground of his environment, by inhabiting it so masterfully, by stretching himself into the here and now of every room, hallway, or restaurant kitchen that he worked at. Each and every space he went to without exception to the very last, he commanded as his own ship, a spaceship destined for ancient pyramids. He was the captain. His mastery was of the space around him and the minds of those he met, of such authority that he seemed to Mosach to embody the mysterious workings of a God-King as charming as a kid at play, unlike ancient pious royal pharaohs who merely believed or sought to convince their people they were. But even the stern and hollow faux-God-King pharaohs, Dr Caduceus' scourge and sworn nemesi to dethrone, had myths of bigger Gods- the True Star-Kings. He was, despite or because of his cloak or core of madness, one of those. Of this, slowly but ultimately Mosach was convinced. Though perhaps not literally, though it seemed undeniable in his best of moments, Dr Caduceus was at the very best vividly metaphorically the descendant of the dearest ancestral heroes- beings who once rode the Egyptian and Mayan skies in flaming chariots of light. These Star-Kings of the pharaohs were one of his many primary obsessions, and the riddle of how they came to fill not simply the hieroglyphics but the very architectural design itself of undiscovered countless epic long-slumbering buried pyramids with mystic Secret-Eggs consumed him. He wrestled with this issue with the soulful dedication and mournful longing force of a fellow Space Brother exiled by some cruel chance of Time and Fate mistake from his family, seeking reunion. His was a quest of Homecoming he lovingly, painstakingly studied his cluttered research literature not to perfect his arsenal of factual knowledge, for that was perfect, but seeking to unearth the rarest of Secret-Eggs his forefathers from afar had inoculated into the time-worn records remaining, cluttered and dog-earred on his desk, clues of mystery impregnated deep within, keys to unlock the gate blocking his return to afar, precious gifts passed across millenia of Time from his beloved kin for him alone, millenia ago, for only he could be born to find them. Somehow Dr Caduceus grappled with a foothold on the threshold of the crest of clarity, despite, or because, he daily poisoned his brain with the deathly little beasts known as antikleins, also called, simply â&#x20AC;&#x153;the bugsâ&#x20AC;?. Mosach was fairly sure that malady from the Sunkenunderurchins' Giving Tree was ethically barbed (though he shared it) but he was only half-concerned, considering Dr Caduceus' blinding mastery, that it was the sole cause or would be the likely downfall of his towering-souled friend's fall from the crumbling tower which was his fellowship with humanity. Unslept but refreshed and Reborn daily at the edge of discovery and at the edge of his seat at the show of human destiny, he would, without malice or any intention, but by his bedrock nature, make mind-trouble for Mosach again. The imploring eye of the Quest for Burning Meaning was not a pleasant breakfast, but an imperative one. And though it had become a far more insistent second permanent headache to compliment Mosach's chronic brutal hangovers it was a redeeming kind, a sheer, piercing thought-migraine offering of suffering penance to justice born solely from the strain of ideal thought, a sacrifice to the best Chance for a Path to all our redemption. It was a trial, this toast of thought-wine at the crucifixion of his mind, but considering his severe emotional misery this new intellectual misery threatened no happiness to lose so he decided with humble loving kindness to accept it. 481
To see Dr Caduceus walk the white and green and faded yellow halls, or to work as his college with him as a dishwasher as he often did, was to abandon any doubt he carried a sacred birthright, but never to understand it. It seemed some lost decree of indoctrination reclaimed, stolen from the myths of old royals not worthy to possess or grant it. Apparently this misplaced papyrus creed had fallen into the bloody hands of a specific earthly kingship operating foremost in Egypt and to a lesser extent in Maya, so he followed the trail there but not because that legacy was his own. That his origin decree to his citizenship of the stars was to be found there was a mistake, a trick resulting in his imprisonment on a grim planet rather than the Archaic or Future Utopia, for either or both were his motherland- surely anywhere but here. The game was always afoot and though he hated the pharaoh culprits his sleuthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s detection lead him to, he was too busy with driven action to be sentimentally lonely like Mosach was, but he was very much alone, mostly devoid of friend or family, yet to the long succession of fallen faces of the tenants and acquaintances he met he extended marvelous human compassion, giving them so strangely unnecessarily the benefit of the doubt that they could share the wonder he felt for great and wondrous matters of thought. Though none could conceive of the ideas he generously proffered, he was always attempting to ignite hearty conversation, no matter how unerringly it fell to deaf ears. Still he renewed his attempts at dialogue and wonder at the source of things behind the things themselves, giddy even, never giving up hope that the common hoi polloi could learn to fly. To Mosach it always seemed so warmly touching that the Good Doctor wished to share the high red skies where to melted wings of wax one paid no mind with those who had no wings, while his were made of steel. Of course, he was so generous because he assumed like him, though theirs temporarily dormant, all like him possessed potential steel falcon wings with laser guided plasma missiles of fiery truth. He would only sometimes now and then from time to time reveal a certain melancholy, momentarily empty and forlorn expression upon a mention of dismay that his failed conversation partners had again as ever glossed over, dumb struck bored, to think a joke of him with their smug deaf muteness, or seem to inwardly feel ridicule at ideas only a rare handful of philosophers would know must by their nature be enshrined for antiquity in the long-sinse snow white marble of guarded temple, truths that required age defying architecture to uphold. Much later toward the end of the Sad Frog Days, when the risky, local social experiment of the public lectures Mosach procured the chance to host from the generous hands of the University of Venomville, the ideas came so achingly close to taking physical form, communicable through lecture notes and presentation plans, drawing board designs of workshops offered to the academic community of the half-rate, shabby ghost town amongst the sewer rats and rampant petty crime. Lyrics for music unfinished but sincerely labored, pregnant with message mathematical journal draft curiosities, manic, hopeful pipe dreams of spontaneous, inspired sermons they believe or tried to believe would manifest at real world schools evaporated in the hindsight air to a golden rose-lens glasses past. Alas, more and more heartbreakingly than one should feel for ideas let alone love lost, they vanished. Anyways, among the many special-treasure concepts Dr Caduceus guarded only to offer like pearls to swine was the greatest form of wisdom- the fruit of the ancient Utopian cultures he was positive far surpassed any modern science or other approach to describe the world and our place in it. This fruit, he posited, proven through the vast and detailed evidence compiled from his research mission, was grown from a Secret Wisdom tradition like a declaration of independence encrypted deep beneath the surface of an esoteric path of liberation's holy text, written in a lost secret code, itself within a lost language by a small circle of unknown 482
revolutionary rebel-scholar priests posing as a community of mystics in a underground stealth safe-house sanctuary temple more beautiful a home than the Joy ever was, to say the least. This Secret Wisdom Tradition was somehow successful at apprehending truths even deeper than men were made to reach. Theirs was by nature a stolen wisdom for to achieve it required surpassing the furthest tenuous bonds which links one to their humanity itself- The Sourcecode. They took it upon themselves to encrypt the Sourcecode inside an as-unyet and likely permanently untranslatable holy text. But later they translated the code and the lost language this tome was written in into a new language not of letters and words but of the geometry of pyramidal tomb architecture. That the Sourcecode was inoculated not only into the hieroglyphics carved into the walls of pyramids but into the complex shapes of the altars, treasure vaults, catacombs, and tombs of the structure itself is key, for that new language-housing they invented was not, until Dr Caduceus' discoveries, ever recognized as a language at all. The Dr believed he could translate this code, reclaim his birthright as a Star-God from the False Star-God Pharaohs to steal back yo cherish the most precious stolen jewel of all and partake of the sweetest fruit- the liberation of the human family from the bondage of evil and the fulfillment of the Human Project- Utopia, Victory, Destiny, Eschaton. He was literally attempting to save the world. To do this he had to perform a task which Mosach half mockingly but good naturedly referred to as “Solving Reality” as in “I need sleep, so I am going back to my room. Leave a note on my door tomorrow if you Solved Reality.” The joke was that this phrase implied Reality itself was a mystery with an answer, that the World was not a place but an unfinished puzzle requiring a solution to complete itself, and that this was a ridiculous assumption which invalidated their audacious plans. But who knows? This way of thinking- that reality is an unfinished puzzle eagerly awaiting an answer and that Dr Caduceus was the best hope to reach this answer by decoding a secret message in an Egyptian pyramid's tomb and thus soon unleashing some mind blowingly and currently incomprehensible form of world peace, well... who knows? Somehow in these gritty yellowed white and greyish-green faded halls, within the scent of old mold and crumbling plaster it made all-too perfect sense. Dr Caduceus saw the horde of humans, the crowd, the herd, as both a devil's army and a downtrodden underdog to champion, a force of ignorance that threatened transcendent art beyond peril into the slimmest hopes of victory, but so too a collective sentience harboring undreamt potential for a spirit-dialogue with Ultimate Truth. This dichotomy was his Achilles heel, one of the many thorns in his side and crown and the primary tragic flaw amongst others which plagued him. For the people- the peasants, the unwashed masses, the slaves, the rabble, the foul hoi polloi plunged his philsophy because they deserved it, but so too to spite them. His was a moral to be inflicted as much as taught. Between the sands and the wicked apex of the pyramid were the ones who toiled amongst the bricks, and though their False Star-Kings enslaved them it would take a True Star-God to free them. Until then, they could not exalt in the absolute peak of the once gleaming, then corrupted symbol-house treasure-throne apex above as they would when he absolved and consecrated it. Until then, they were as much a threat to despise as the tyranny of the King, a machinery of ignorance and defilement but so too they were to be pitied, helped, saved, blessed. Those he offered brimming, overflowing waters of conversation to only be rejected as a fraud at best and a dangerous madman at worst seemed almost like they sought to deceive him, that their doubt of his words was some ploy to make his pride falter. Well, he came to their rescue none the less, diligently, but he wrestled and chased them sternly down the perfect gold brick triangle slope of his, back down to their place in the 483
sand where they insisted they belonged, though they did not when he was in a grim blue mood. Just because he performed a service in their honor did not mean he grew weary of their thanklessness, he just never gave up on them. At his highest place on the Peak Throne of the Grand Altar, overlooking those below him with his only and third eye, he would activate for the undeserving but deserving a spiritual technology by discovering it, a psionic mathematics breakthrough designed to detonate an explosion of magic revery and freedom, reigning the shrapnel of Dignity upon the poor slobs. His eye condemned much, but so too bestowed gifts upon gifts upon gifts. He wrestled with his role as a seer, advisor, and he wrestled with the pride it filled him with. His crown of thorns was heavy. Having such self insight, he knew he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. And surely without a shadow of doubt extreme and ungodly severe megalomania. But also, that these conditions were not a hindrance but an absolutely necessary condition and close companion of the realms he made his work to succeed in. He was a paranoid schizophrenic megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur who was paranoid in his vigilance against real foes- the enemies of truth who might dethrone him with lust, deception, trickery, or the minions of shadowy government plots to surveil and control him through subtle propaganda or overt attack in moments to pounce. But his fears were narrowed down to no regret for that was true danger and was out of compassion. His greatest paranoia was no delusion but the fear that he could not achieve the victory of mind that he felt was his calling so that the human race could literally be saved, by him, through his thought and what his yet unthought greatest thought would unveil, unleash. He was entirely consumed with his Great Work which his lifetime of wrestling the profound was only practice for. His thoughts sped and spanned lightyears and his disciplin stretched from the intricacies of ancient architecture to the economies of potential future civilizations and to mathematical code he conspired with mysterious co-developers to design and tie together the mystical technologies of consciousness of obscure yogis with economic systems of commerce that were also languages with syntax, the ritual kattas of the fighting style to become words for the masters to teach and for students to memorize as they fought before the language was later revealed, the words their fists and redirections of force, the sacred book their kata. These disciplines he unified and gathered into cohesive coherent systems that made crystal clear sense while he described them, glee like bright sunshine radiating from his old but young eyes and though their coherence vanished when Mosach tried to remember the eureka moments so often sparked by the wrestling scholarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eloquent enthusiastic conversation. But when hope was lost and Mosach doubted his Star-Kid neighbor as just a wild kook, again the conversations would stretch til morning and loom at some hour into great science materializing like frost on windowpane- intricate, subtle, beautiful, and wondrous but cold true science, its elements taken form from formless vapor upon the glass and form unnecessarily brilliant splendored multifaceted fractal forms in ice as frost on cold glass will make. Such were the thoughts they shared in the wee hours, but all this thought was unfinished coded lectures, delighted lists of facts, original streams of truth to hide in others all along shackled in indignant conviction. These conversations always thrilled Mosach, at best he tried to follow and at times participate because there was an uprising of meaning, a swell of the waters of genuine depth up into the hilt of their real lives. The forces invoked were powerful, vast and unknown. These thoughts were not facts, but leviathans of meaning breaching the surface of dead and flawed mirage, of grey and green and white peeling plaster of the Joy's optical illusory corridors. The thoughts they worked to carve and hue were like whales, dragons underwater who craved release and they all converged, the nests of tentacles and armies of different species of sharks with fiery dead doll eyes in feeding frenzy of the Gods as yet unknown. There was a flood rising in the wrestlerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tiny 484
unkempt room with peeling plaster of greys and greens and white to drown by the hundreds the fallen tenants it housed upon sad times and the flood was well and good to the doctor of the human spirit for it would carry his portal ship over all else in tidal wave of will to know the Gods behind the fake god. The tide was rising and the pirate ship was proud with skull and crossbones signaling the death of the common man and at the same time to bring his gift to serve the common man. The expert captain of his ship when hit by the paranoia's red light laser scope beam was tormented and deformed and tormented at all hypervigilant times but he never doubted the glory of his righteous shield with which he could deflect the snipers closing in, stealing his vessel with modern warfare's toys. His was an ancient war, his weapons were artifacts. Every step he took was a stride of valor and passion forged intensely every second like raging fire, smoldering for the most part behind his young but old, old eyes. And all who saw him at his job of dishwasher, or behind the bulletproof glass of the front desk when he would pay his meager rent in work if the owners of the desk posing as landlords to defraud the all too senile or defeated by emptiness to realize there was no rent to pay. They all could smell the flames and the ash they would become if they blocked his righteous path, the path he was to lead them up with his team of sharks and squids and dragons and unknown thorn-fanged monstrosities upwards, upwards to dust and thought he only marveled at his unknowing, never once believing it unknoable, beyond his grasp. It was his wife, his love, and he knew to think this thought alone would win for all, everything and everyone, forever much like the thought that old fool mystic Septimus seemed to have one long time once upon, they said. Oh well, perhaps it was the same. Or not, who's to say? Not Mosach, too busy hunting the bugs, huffing anti-klines like an exterminator fumigating his lungs with a pesticide and pest in one. Damn wriggling shards. These larvae were fucking killing him, and fast was the sewer sown on the field of Elysium where the Frost Giants roam on frost and rock only their frosty doomed-to-fallen icy asses know. That land that once upon a time the Gods behind the fake gods claimed. After all by true heroes it is said â&#x20AC;&#x153;To pray to Gods I do not care; I raise my cheer along with theirs.â&#x20AC;? Dr Caduceus did not worship his holy warriors, the Star-Kings. He missed them. He was unsure why they would leave him behind, alone. He vowed for their return, and if he could not call them back, in this dying age it is safe to say he would fulfill their quest from times before, as he felt he had a better chance than any human live to do, once he discovered what they were up to in their flaming chariots of light lighting unearthed pyramids once ablaze. In South America, whatever was their scheme for this planet, for our species, for their own, and for all the world? He would discover the plan and continue the struggle, upward, onward, a tidal wave to send him skyward, the best of thought in depths unplumbed would rise to fill all herds of unwashed sheep, meat puppets soaking up the lies to enslave them. The leviathans would ravage and shred and devour all the petty slaves who filled the ugly streets with petty crime and petty loves and petty, stale, boring lives and they would all be erased so the few pirate stars who would join in singing praise to the constellationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; language and the swarthy brotherhood of seafaring Lords would vow the seas and soil aloft into the sky, pirate ships and arks of exobiological gene spliced experimental versions of humans of the future rising as angels, in spaceships now, gleaming, shining, then dissolving in spirit-craft of vertigo light and color, towering sliding shafts of purest clear light of the void to merge with the bigger and brighter sun, which our sun, a star, is but a symbol of, and become god. He would reap the glory and love of all the pests he saved the world for, the same pests he hated bitterly for being the opposite of the Apex Ones. He was conflicted in his love for man and his compassion to bestow their salvation, and his love for only that which towers infinite in height above and contradicts every pest of the dust and sand. It was hard to be The One. But to Mosach in a way 485
he was The One so well. He was and is well, just mad from the anti-kleinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ss grasp, their talons in both their neckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so deep they may as well so pierce right through. ...But that would not be the case were a certain busty dominatrix with a taste for corsets rolled up her silken and fishnet-laced sleeves of yellow and black, little bows and curlicues of lace designs adorning her as did a hundred little touches to her gloves, and garters, and choker collar and her boots not cowgirl but high heeled leather shiny as venom-oiled boots could be but with metal spikes like spurs for stirring on unnamed passions, down to the delicate details of the leather artistry so pretty and flowery decorating her trusty beloved weapon of choice her eternal prop to suit her were she some day immortalized as collectible action figure in pristine plastic case in mint condition. Who knows she may well become one, with mini plastic Dragonslayer accessory whip to be clasped in her fingers like the M16 accessories of plastic accompanying G.I. Joes. That was a development Mox and Kristie were unprepared for, now prisoners of war of sorts, missing in action. Theirs was a battlefield hard to find, well hidden like a bunker behind enemy lines. But there was one soldier, a woman of class and taste, perverse, but classy perverse taste, who knew how to tie a cherry stem into a mobeius strip inside her lips, brandishing her beautifully crafted signature whip, she would remark was made of leather strips not cow hide or snake skin but of demonleather stripped from sinuous membranous wings cobwebbed with red veins, strips pickled and stretched on racks by thuggish little elves with fangs in certain pleasure bunkers below Neosurreal London, the best of replicons hailed from your time came for Mosach with the blackest of magical powers and unholy, profane mystic enchantment. Demonslayer was the weapon of a soldier in the army of love. Kinky, warped, and stinging love of deviants and heartache, but for the love of her family disappearing down into the minefield of Venomville which harbored worse than rats, Demonslayer safe within her sheath slung across her well toned back as her car-coon cruised, to order of the bluebird path finding helper-hologram compass upon the augmented reality screen windshield in haste for the Joy Hotel, and though the hallucinatory helper's GPS path was correct the bluebird was hesitant and scared to fly toward the battlefield's ground zero slum. But the bird was a good deal more scared of the cruel mistress SS supersoldier (super-sex supersoldier) than the hotel of lost souls in the town of lost souls and reluctantly continued down the waterslide tunnels swishing into the danger of the good fight. Sparkpatz was a real G.I. Joe, a real American hero, but America was dead. She was a hero for the New One Earth. The dark earth-goddess Mosach in his remnant shred of poet's heart deserved. Super soldier hero dreams by kids thousand-years deceased, once idealized, were wrong. Those snot-nosed brats didn't know the wars to come. Fucking silly children and their G.I. Joes in play at war. Well, Caduceus was at war and he was playing to win. And Mosach was in a private war with a worthy foe, the shitty things called anti-klines. And Sparkpatz was coming in a war to save them. MORE CEDUCEUS MATERIAL FROM MATTMAIL -ok sorry had to run an errand for the forum behind the shadow of the back left corner of my ceiling, took care of it and think they'll promote me if they can get out front rather than the lingering in the edges of my peripheries which they prefer for whatever reason. You can't negotiate salary from there. Where was I? Oh, the twilight zone punchlines486
The field- Theoretical Crypto-Ecoonomic Archeology So you'll grasp the general direction of the work but the meat and specifics of the link between the math, economic theory and code analysis sciences of crypto and the preservation of secret knowledge found in Egyptian (but much moreso his focus, Mayan) ancient architecture of the pyramids, etc required me months of discussions and alternating between skepticism and curiosity, until my suspician the link was not butn valid but critical, crucial, and a kind of eureka moment that is then re-capitulated in depth as the ancilliary concepts and specifics in related areas are used to collect footholds amongst then strata of existing models. The working through of these multitude of "anciliary footholds in the strata of surrounding, related, established disciplines (especially pinpoint clear solutions to their stubborn unfinished puzzles due to proper re-contextualization) is what then convinced me the mental rush of pride in a completed concept was not just a personal breakthrough that helped my perception but was an undeniable next step in the evolution of knowledge which is still fresh and developing along such as modern economic social justice awareness and activism as well as the science of computer technolgy and even the eternal-impossible-for-me cyptographic mathematic theory. The "theoretical" first term is the amazing part because it is predictive and inventive as well as inspired, always, by sheer exuberance and pro-peace, pro-spiritual stamina in then focus forward toward a better tomorrow. This study has been ultimately hype-inspiring and a reminder of possibility, that new directions can be discovered by looking backward to the languages and codes, secrets, messages and preserved wisdom that not merely is enscribed in but rather IS ITSELF the pyramids and many still-being discovered ruins, temples, and suggestive or cryptic historical anomalies llowing his sources of independent research (his vocabulary, encyclopedic and impossibly comprehensive memory of literature, religion, geographic, cultural, and linguistic literature is like a noam chomsky or the kind of very old unknown scholars tucked away in cardigans behibnd tea browsing miniscule-fonted journals in dry subjects because the miniscule dry and un-profound but careful, systematic recoords is an old-age comfort and they know a lifetime of that rumpled attitude can produce a certain patient and trustworthy, communicable, and applicable richness to the grander symphonies of ethical philosophy with modern global politics applications and theries than the more space-cowboy method that is more our fortei. There is a point where comprehensive, comparative knowledge of ancient systems of syntax and number theory or relationships between mathematic and philosophic conceptions of the most fundamental metaphysical archetypes such as "number", "shape", "letter" "color" and how learning spiritual as well as scientific modes of defining and systematization these basic building blocks of formally ordered systems provides a bedrock foundation for our placement of cryptographic math, architecturally preserved but secret knowledge of cult, religion and metaphysical/symbolic symbol-as-archetype reverence, well...this kind of depth, and most of all the holistic, organic, and vast cultural evolution backdrop of such processes through millenia of human history- that was a unique contribution of his, because it reveals the current place of tech, math, and hackerdecentralized-anonymity angle of social justice which was in the example of a peace-weapon like bitcoin but is being superseded by Etherium as a multi-use form of then block-chain technology which powered bitcoin but has leaned more towards a decentralized computer itself than a specific crypt-currency with its own reliance on open-source, distributed public-record, anonymity-based, and merit-based social principles which can revolutionize so many social struggles such as eliminating voter-fraud or simply making society aligned with code-structures that are user-friendly and effective in their purpose and effecdtiveness because they are 487
elegantlty and properly aligned with what we have come to refer to as simply "The Sourcecode". I think you know that to follow the metaphysical archetypes of number and word and shape backwards towards absolute, fundamental, axiom primacy is to learn the creation myth as gentlemen understand it, and at every stage is vitally and spiritual-viscerally relevent to our human bodies, lives, and minds because the further bacvkward you go the more we and the Sourcecode are builtn fromm then samen building blockls and the same patterns. We did alot of thinking in this area with geometry, psycvholgy, and physics, and I see similar spiritual benefits here. You won't believe it but much of this stuff the dude meditates on cryptocurrency trading software programs (he's been like a only moderatly successful but constantlyn improving wallstreet trader of 6 or 7 different concurrences amongst eachother. He draws inspiration from following the patterns of ,mathematics of the markets over time and took weeks teaching me how the fibanci curve is used to predict market fluctuations and when to buy and sell because things like seasons of the year and psychlogical human principles influence martket value are also systems governed by the Sourcecode.
It was six years ago in 234 that he disappeared on a teaching sabbatical and archeolgy dig he arranged as a long personal retreat for privacy and spiritual reflection with a small circle of his gifted students and his new flame-haired starlet actress of a wife, Scarlet O'hair Ahrora. Scarlet, 30 years his junior and an olympic gymnast returned after 2 years searching for Dr. Caduceus with the group of young proteges. They slowly abandoned her as they one-by-one gave up hope that their prolific, all-consuming, and tortuously intense study and deciphering of the entirely unknown and dead language and number systems not only carved into the rock but designed in the architectural plan and construction of the entire arrangement of the entire miles-deep and structure itself which was more and more desperately and tyrannically demanded of the students by Dr. Ceducius' grieving widow would ever lead to a way to translate the undiscovered language or a way to make sense of the number system, both of which, like the geologicalengeneering mysteries was a new star in the unsolved puzzles that keep the highest ranked pure math and physics theorists up at night, in wonder and eagerness which never resolves but seems coyly and infuriatingly to almost crystalize into that perfect eureka moment, those fundamebntal questions staring into the minds of the fewest gifted students of geniuses from the older generation. By the time the last two proteges in Dr. Ceducius' tradgic sabatical were being retrieved and escorted back to Sweden by a diplomatic ambassador named Slyson Cerviarsa the final three of the team had turned into minor celebraties. There was little media interest in Dr. Ceducius since his second major series of historical etymological linguistic code-breaking which revolutionized astrology and lead to the invention of telescopes that could see at vast distances instantaneously instead of limited by the speed of light traveling toward our planet. The invention of the Chronon Scope was a monumental achievment in science, technolgy, and in human understanding of the physics of light and time, but had no practical applications until a planet-X was discovered, the first explanet proven to have once been in habited by intelligent life that had evolved to a currently extinct species with a civilization that left ruins of ancient architecture that was the source of an increasingly angry global debate at the highest levels of diplomacy. There was a conflict between the U.N. position that Planet-X was uninhabited and the evidence of ruins was a media propaganda campaign by a new party, which was orchestrating a massiv psy-ops campaign to cnvince the earth's population that Planet-X is still inhabited by the 488
species called X-ists and that the X-ists were the origional humans which visited and colonized earth. The psy-ops campaign was funded by a reserve of treasure of private keys to a public but encrypted military document in classified mathematics. None knew what the Ceduceus document pertained to other than that even unencrypted would result in a series of as-yet apparently random numbers. It was a series of numbers and was named Ceduceus-Palak-Solution-Key. There was a period three months when tyensions flared between two new countries who each blamed the other for decrypting the document with the theft of the private key to decode the Ceduceus File, therfefor being the source of the as-yet untraceable, anonymous bribe which funded what the U.N. was painting as the most expensive military operation in history, yet without a single casualty. Operation Foreign Birth was a success, regardless of the evidence of exo-archelgy, because although the scientists of the world relentlessly tried to prove why the Xists had been extinct for hundreds of millenia, the human population gradually accepted that the X-ists and humans were the same species, both originating on Planet-X but currently alive on both, on earth a flourishing new Utopia, and on Planet X Undergrond with ruins designed to give the impression they were extinct, possibility as a way of hiding from other, predatory civeliuzations. The idea that "We are the Aliens" was adopted in time as common sense in all then history books. These issues were never proven one way or anther. It was a time of global political unrest and confusion in fter long legal battles by their familiesbefore the New Language Holography Glove Technology and the Synesthesia Wand Industries 3-d printing and projection-Analysis Programunderstanding of the labyrinth of tombs, alters, treasure vaults, and ultimately the deepest-excavated parts of the jet-black, shiny black bedrock- minimal adorned, immensely large domes that were one of many geological and architectural anomalies that delight and confound historians and engeneers alike, because due to modern knowledge of ancient civilizations' technology, forensic techmniques like carbon dating and electron microscope spectography, along with analysis of the size, depth, and geological composition of the bedrock would alter tration after years of rabidly intense lecture and semiunar touring across the globe which was tragically demanding on his health and persnal life, he disappeared from fame, on a pilgramige to a newly discovered burial alter to be absorbed in some of the particularly fruitful sheer rivited-ness, where precision of focus, raw stamina of thought, solidity of cohesion and contextual comprehensiveness of system are the framework about which the outlandish courage to strike"Cryptocurrency, Human Dignity, and Destiny" â&#x20AC;˘
random and coincidental sometimes Fated-Meant-t
They do ot creHe's one of the bountiful light-bearers who can lock into abstract thought conversations of such depth and universality that I can only puzzle how a human anatomy can endure the sheer number of photons in his mentation for those durations without drawing them from an external power source. Not external to his anatomy, external to our solar system. To be fair we are megalomaniacs who recognized eachother, which either disproves the singular chosen-ness or must manifest in Great Works of which life became devoted to with alot of hard work and belief in our goal of obtaining lecture events at colleges and other venues in Portland. One such venue provided a 6-hour class at an independent community-run college that we are organizing and working on despite all manner of busy schedules and life / work struggles is a hands-on workshop that pays up to a thousand dollars we can split with the college. I just promote and organize his appearances, attend if possible, not teach! I also do advertising and use my art for posters and flyers. 489
Our work (which I am content to not lead but allow to drasticallyn re-cobn textualize both my art and 20-year scale evolution of my thought-process, projects, beliuefs about reality, and finally (this is of course why I would devote so much work to a project I'm merely sheparding and not leading) is that it posed the first genuine threat to my spiritual feelings of conviction and ethical duty unless I discovered how they aligned or related with my own. I think it can do tyhe same for so many different branches of public literary thinkers in established communities of education, politics, philosophy, and even science and fucking math. The last thing I would foster, but some pursuits of study and knowledge demand a huge amount of work that is not fun but that must be mastered to fit the larger thing into the formal systems we use so that those in that area can both easily grasp, communicate, and use our contributions in their modalities as well as apply our thing to their agendas and methods in ways that prove or legitimize and publicize, communicate, and present this as widely as possible so it and the whole project take whatever foothold we can manage in Portland and online, literature of the college communities, and social public awareness. It's something we believe strongly enough in to treat ourselves with alot of high standards of functioning for work, housing, and social stability, because we aren't willing to allow our eccentricities or distractions to steal the end result. For example, I walk on two feet and stand inn sedlf-respect as every man deserves to, I've demanded respect from the few partners (or rather dating interests that were not of partner caliber but meaningful, demanding responsibility and brutal, ugly confrontations with our own challenges and personal deficiencies.) The concepts are becoming impressive enough to me, not for lofty grand ego reasons like a large part of my own conception, but in the way they just directly smack me with their degree of new-nessm and undiscovered sense. These ideas don't command so much of my time and life even outside the fun part of thinking them up because they will become art mine I emotionally yearn to convey so I will be understood as an artist or thinker, but they command that effort that is often boring, gritty and time-consuming trudgery because I want others to have deep, personally valuable transformative experiences the way I have when I had to stop the drama of life for months to do a few-in-a-lifetime complete overhaul and re-evaluation of my belief system and my language of thought. I have returned to whole flavors and seasons of philosophy thought when I was, say, 16, or then again at 22, or 35. These were years life took me by suprise and absorbed me with enough curiosity to muster a conversation with the world, sincere and slow enough to talk to it and ask "brother, how do you feel and what are your thoughts? How would you like things to be and how do you work inside? What are your secrets and how do you feel about me? Can we make friends if wed understand eachother? Can we feel close but different and as if there is no crises just because one of us may be confused about how to treat eachother or forget to be sensible and lighthearted enough tn forgive eachother." These are the questions that come to mind when I think of those years that I learned the most, they are so simple like kindergarten ways of ,making friends, but I think their simplicity and genuine interest in life and the world is how you befriend the whole situation and grow the sense that there is a basic sense that explains the whole thing. This devotion may just carry literary and online publicity or funding weight and rest on a high level of public academic scrutiny and I am convinced of the legitimacy of the obscure, niche area of research. Legitimacy from the community of our town, national academic system, and highest-levels of pure research for the sake of understanding much that is commonly not 490
combined but missing the crucial connections or historical or other kinds of contexts so strikingly once you become comfortable with the syntax and language, methods sketched out for this interdisciplinary field and the very concrete and provable, independently verifiable and as eld..at only happened to me twice, the first being something of mystical wonderfulness and exuberent delight in the cryptic and the symbolic rotted into a desperate cult of hyperventilate, dementia, and life-threatening carelessness about the harms of believing oneself to be literally, without mixed messages or exaggeration, capable of saving the world by solving reality. Cross your fingers we solve it prior to all that again! I can say is we are superimposing archetypes and drawing parallels between or forging historical and social-juystice contexts at a scale I've never shine a new light on certain phenomenons of culture. He is so invested in his abstract and obscure research (that I CAN NOT believe could be self-taught without a generations-long academic family heritage or 50 years of theoretical research grant projects and PHD's in 5 or 6 areas. He is deeply driven between previously un-mairried fields of dense and highly proffesional, teachableacademic into a make sure to balance the ratio of planetary-revolutionary-cycle-days to experiential-workdays at a one to six limit and never further counter weighted towards my prefered time-demarcationversion of the concept "day" which is the latter. Oh sorry, gotta run the shadow people are calling me agaiBUSTING VERSION TWO It was wallowing in the filthiest and most poisonous toxic-sludge filled gutters of the spirit that Mosoch first met his mentor and nemises, Dr. Caduceus. But this inscrutable scholar-martyr was not to appear in Mosach’s rotting corpse of a life just yet. First we will painstakingly narrate the many successive stages of his decay in painful detail- those impossibly lower and lower still rock bottoms, deeper than those he even dared plum in his dankest soul-spelunking umtil this point. This was before his epic communion of minds with the Good Doctor which lead to his final, beatific redemption we hint of now but not promise. Who knows? Oh, fine- to spoil the drama of danger with outcome unknown, Mosach did ultimately escape the bad place, or rather was rescued, and triumphed to an unbelievable, heroic, and even divine degree. You’re welcome. Let’s pretend we don’t know that. For now, let’s say the entire descent into such oceanic depths of madness and misery which Mosach dove were delved for a reason, even if this reason was dumb luck and undeserved fortunate coincidence. Souls come into one’s life, sometimes just the right ones at just the right times. Synchronicity is funny like that. Now, the gruesome reunion began when Mox finally made up his mind to bite the bullet and do something that he would have no alternative but to feel, to feel sadly and deeply. It was as facing the gallows for him. Devastating- to see his friend in a no doubt sorry state, yes, but moreso to accept the feelings of his heart as necessary and unavoidable. People grow. Leena asked to come but Mox shook his head. She knew this would be emotional and difficult for him and that he didn’t want her to see him with his iconic guard down. She hugged him goodbye, tightly, like he was going off to war, smooching his cheek and ruffling his black hair fondly but with a worried look in her eye. Sparkpatz thought Mosach had the right to privacy or even suicide if he so chose, as she deeply believed was every person’s sacred right, and she declined to go along on principle. In a certain peculiar way her belief in her own right to choose to die was one of her deepest convictions, and went hand in hand with her love of freedom. She did not 491
voice it but she thought the desire to crash Mosach’s pity party was selfish and naive, beneath her, so she shrugged and busied herself with the usual Sparkpatz things- sex… and… well, primarily sex, perhaps augmented by cosmetics, fashion, sarcasm. Woe unto them were they to intervene if she was in a dark night of the soul retreat of her own, though when she entered hers she was never to be found or even suspected of feeling blue. Her alone time was very, very alone. You and even we may never truly know her, or the places she goes when she must. In a perverse way she was proud of Mosach. Strange. Kristy was driving, and by this we mean she was playing retro or more properly ancient video games on the screen where a windshield would have been were they not swooshing aimlessly around the network of waterslides in their car-coon. They had been swooshing for hours, no idea where they were going, other than their one clue, the last item on the To Do List still taped to the mini-fridge in Mosach’s dorm room- “Play hooky. Spiral on down to Venomville, see if I can’t unwind.” Venomville was a town that has a way of being forgotten and never known in the first place. “Void of Meaning” was the portentous error message displayed by the computer when they queried the GPS (Geo-reticule Place Synchronization) grid of their car-coon screen. Their augmented reality holo-lense homing path helpers were no help either. The animated bluebird on the screens inside both of their synchronized contact lenses carried the arrow in its mouth as usual, but instead of cutely pointing the way to Venomville as they had asked it, it turned to face them with its wings upheld in a “beats me!” gesture. “Take us to fucking Venomville!” Kristy repeated at the cartoon. It shook its beak quickly, seeming a little afraid. If it knew the way it wasn’t telling. Kristy picked up coffee for them both and fake cigarettes for Mox along with a paper map at a gas station, which would offer a possibility swiftly obscured by mucous. Of course “gas” and “paper” were no more, but names stick. This gas-station was a Photo-Magno-Tesloid Synthesis Charging dock that synced their car-coon with the hydro-magno-tunnel slides laid down conveniently upon the roads which once were, and the map was not paper but paper-thin foldable, disposable screen. After some debate, their best guess was an area on the map generically labelled “Anti-approved Non-location” covered by a blinking red circle with slash through it. That had to be it. As Kristy was about to push the blinking symbol of wrongness to pull up the site’s tourist attractions, the entire surrounding region was splattered with gooey but knobbly-textured snot from a misfired snot-rocket Mox launched, a poor choice of nose-blowing method considering the confined space, close quarters, and notorious imprecision of the maneuver. He had intended the ejected snotrocket to hit the floor of the backseat, already a mess of fast-food wrappers and rave flyers, but in epic fail the tradgectory was miscalculated and the projectile landed coincidentally on the very point of interest Kristy was about to touch with her pure, impressionable index finger. KRISTY- You dick! You got snot on my map! Right on the Anti-location!” MOX- x marks the snot. Snot marks the spot.” They laughed and decided this was either the universe’s way of telling them not to go there, or perhaps its way of confirming the unlabeled place was in fact their goal. Or it could be a forewarning of the disgusting snot-like nature of the forsaken village. MOX- Push it. Push the blinky. I wanna stop at the tourist traps. Kristy- I’m not touching that slime-nugget you prick! You push the blinky. Mox- Just wipe it off! 492
Kristy- with what? Gimme a napkin or something. We’re not tourists anyway. We’re rescuers. MOX- digs a napkin out of a fast-food bag, hands it to Kristy. Kristy- Grabs the napkin and feels ketchup, shrieks again, “What the fuck! That thing is as slimey as the nose-splooge! Yucko!” Tries to throw it behind her at Mox, misses. Mox- Leans over the front seat and grabs Kristy’s hand, playfully forcing her hand toward the map before her. Mox- Touch it! Touch the blinky! Kristy- Wrestling but overpowered “Nooo!” Mox- Touch it! You know you like it!” Kristy- “Nooooo!” They are goofing around, making a grim situation better, distracting themselves from the heavy task at hand. Kristy’s pointer finger was retracted in fear into her trembling fist, Mox’s grip on her wrist moving her knuckles slowly closer to the map splayed out on the dash. Mox’s male strength won out over the petite young lady and he managed to smoosh Kristy’s fist onto the snot village and smear it about while Kristy squeeled at a very, very high pitch. This activated the blinky. Car-coon- Passangers, please- no horseplay, I beg of you!” Kristy + Mox at the same time- “Sorry.” They stop wrestling and sit glumly. Car-coon- That’s ok. Try and relax. Map- “Ding-Ding! This location is not recommended or existent. Tourist attractions include Cindy-Von Fishooker Science Museum [Foreclosed, biohazard, subject of propaganda, science faulty], Wolfenfang Newspaper Press and House of News Journalism (condemned, fire hazard, product unfit for print), and the Joy Hotel (access forbidden, under deconstruction, falling rock hazard, biohazard, unfit for residency, confirmed anti-destination, decency hazard, inverse morality zone, Do not enter. Do not attempt rescue of dwellers. No admittance by authority of Mayor Wolfenfang. No cartographic representation permitted due to being site of war-crimes. Yep, that was the place. Mosach heard a knock on his cave of solitary despair, the first in six months. This was after the tireless Kristy and Mox had made countless knocks on the countless doors of many floors, hundreds of identical horror-caves opened suspiciously by wide-eyed lonely souls who never heard a knock before or after, insane things once people, now so lost in shadows they became shadow-people themselves. Finally, methodically, our tourist rescuers struck upon the correct number- “316”. They heard a scurrying and a rustling inside, and a moan that might have been their friend, or a seal, maybe a sea lion. Kind of the same thing right? Then they heard a terrifying giggle that could not have possibly been the kind, sane young man they knew and loved, and Kristy looked up at Mox as his heart sank. His iconic guard, down in one fell swoop. Nothing could prepare him for the fiendish, wicked giggle, nor for the sing-song rhyme which was far, far worse, in Mosach’s corrupted but unmistakable voiceMosach- One, two three four, enter my nest and live no more! Five six, seven, eight, enter my nest and meet your fate! (more giggling, and rustling, scurrying, things falling inside.” Kristy + Mox at the same time, blood drained from their faces, staring at eachother; “HO… LY…. FUCK.” They simply continue staring at eachother. Then repeat: “HO… LI… FUCK>” Mox- knocks again Mosach- Please, please, enter my room, for when you do it becomes your tomb! 493
Mox- “Cover me, I’m going in!” He opens the unlocked door and runs into the room, tackling an animalistic hot mess that in some ways resembled his BFF (best friend forever), but the resemblance was vague, very slim. Mosach was naked, on the floor, drenched in stanching oily sweat, his hands bleeding, trembling violently as if practically electrified, occasionally convulsing as if gripped by brief intermittent seizures. His eyes were beyond wild- savage, either horrified or bloodthirsty, Mox wasn’t sure which, and he gave the general impression of a ferret in a hot oven, scurrying for his life, frantic, crazed. Ferral. Despite all this, he was also very, very seriously busy, His attention scattered beyond any hope of communication yet somehow keenly focused, hard at work and riveted by some incredibly important task, one which Mox and Kristy and any decent folk should never need to learn of. But we will explain. Mox and Kristy were not weeping but full on crying, sobbing loudly, and holding eachother tightly in instinctual fear of the rabid ferret-thing scrambling and clawing at their feet, and in such sorrow as they had rarely ever felt, and an irrelevant, useless, and hopeless love for their friend. They soul-hugged eachother as they never did, so tightly, in mourning. This thing was not him, he was dead. But there was still the heart of a poet in the thing somewhere, some remnant. And over time they would put him back together. For now they climbed on an upsidedown writing desk barricading a closet as one would to avoid a rat, and watched. In time, and slowly, they would manage to comprehend and empathize with Mosach’s very, very seriously important task. Mosach was ghostbusting…
CHAPTER SIX: Busting Makes Him Feel Good It didn’t begin with ghostbusting. That came later. It began with your usual alcoholism, and Steeley Dan albums (classics). It began relatively mildly with shot after shot after shot of grain liquor which was 95% alcohol (the old-fashioned kind since he wanted the hangover), and browsing a favorite website of his which is where the “Sad Frog Days” in the title of this part of the book is derived from, which will all be explained in good time. Basically, it was a website for virgins and losers to post drawings of sad frogs. He found some comfort in the brain damage of grain spirit and the antique laptop computer he thought of as his commiseration-machine. Of course the fellow losers on the forum had died three to nine-thousand years ago, but he pretended they were out there in their basements posting frogs*. This we will call Stage One. Mosach spent about four months playing at the retro (ancient rather) internet, the way some people find comfort in churning butter I suppose. There are no “websites” or “internet” anymore of coursethe term “internet” is very antiquated and sounds rather silly to us because what you meant by that, as something different from people or our surroundings, it isn’t a separate thing anymore… hard to explain… what you meant by that word is now so omni-pervasive and ubiquitous that there is no word for it - it just is. The world is the internet, so are we. Anyways, the site was called R9K, and it had become very important, sentimental, to our fallen hero. He will have more to say on this. Before the ghostbusting (Stage Four) there was first the seed of evil, the achilese heel and fatal flaw that brought our tradgic hero down and cealed his doom from the start- the need to 494
piss. There were no toilets in the rooms of the Joy. If there were perhaps none of this hell would have burnt his mind away. If he had only been left to commiserate with his frogs, left alone… if only… It was not to be. The call of nature forced him to emerge and brave the long opticalillusionist hallways of the place to piss in the shared, macably and inexplicably shit-splattered toilets, floors, walls, and dishearteningly at times, ceiling. Over time this lead to an unavoidable rubbing of greasy shoulders with pissing neighbors sharing the same fate. The green and white peeling plaster of the corridors of his purgatory were mostly empty, but occasionally a thing on two legs, no doubt once a person with a self and an identity and life, would pop suspiciously out of their hovel and shamble on down the long way to piss or shit. Or both. Or just stare at the cracked mirror and wonder what might have been…Some would try to speak to Mosach, as men do. Mouthing and mumbling the words “Do you got a smoke?” or “Know where I could score some A-Ks? (Though we wish we didn’t have to, yes, we’ll get to these later. Very, very unfortunately, indeed.) Anyways, of these husks of shadows of the hollow shells of the men they used to be, some became familiar faces and sometimes even distractions, though certainly not friends, the way he used to have. Once upon a time… it seemed so long ago to him, the abilit6y to judge time corroded in the fermented rye like his throat tissue. “Fuck it” he said one day, I’m certainly no prize, no better than these poor sons of bitches. Fuck, we’re all in the same boat, I should go next door and see if that old black street cat is home. Of course he’s home, he’s a shutin like me, like all of us. I wonder if he has a deck of cards…? (Beginning of Stage Two: Hustling Every Day.) Misery loves company, but not even Sachmo’s kind of misery could love this kind of rough company. He did come to tolerate and accept the old black man as one of his own- the fraternity of the dead-alive. Brotherhood of the senile- one from age, one from dementia tremens. At first Mosach was only sociable and daring enough to reach out to his neighbor, the Hustler, called such because he was always scheming, trying to barter a can of tuna for a cigarette or pawning his expired bus pass off for a shot of liquor. That was the first step, outward into “society” to use the term generously, the first breach of his bubble of aloneness. It was a positive step, but it got him into trouble, which got worse. But at first Mosach thought he was warming from hibernation and making positive changes, being generous and friendly, sharing his drink and his tuna on bread, no mayo. It didn’t seem to matter to the Hustler what he acquired or what he traded- that wasn’t the point. What was the point? Mosach was unsure. Human contact? The feeling of smug pride that the Hustler felt if the trade was in his favor and not his mark’s? Mosach would gladly play the rube and let the old fucker get the better of him time and time again. It was like feeding the pigeons. The Hustler wasn’t mean-spirited, looking for a victim, taking advantage of prey. He was sneaky but harmless, perhaps just a man with an inexplicably deep appreciation for barter. Every single time Mosach ran into the Hustler, and eventually when they began to hang out and chat in the well-dressed but peculiar elderly gentleman’s neat, well-ordered room, there was an exchange of objects. Sometimes a surprisingly well-made raincoat was proffered. Other days a sandwhich was desperately required. It became a game, and it was actually very fun, as far as fun goes at the Joy. It was heartwarming, the give-and-take, the persistent reminders that people can interact and supposedly benefit eachother, although Mosach always let the Hustler think he cleverly traded up, a scavenger of opportunity and pre-currency commerce. Maybe barter was the way things were supposed to work, the whole world round. It was irrelevant- no one had any money, ever, and the fact that the rent was never paid was hardly a problem because the building was abandoned by the owners decades ago, crumbling, condemned by the City and by any God 495
that’s real. The hustler had surprising luck in lust, to be blunt, by men of both male and feminine persuasion, so when he answered the door pantless, dick flopping in the flickering light of the hallway’s florescent bulbs, unashamed as the morning sun, Mosach knew the Hustler had company, and though he was always welcome, he would decide swiftly to play cards another time. Drugs had a little something to do with these fuck-fest shenanigans. Yes, drugs, those damnable forms of matter which when ingested produce effects on the mind. It’s true- people put those things in their bodies on purpose. The Hustler certainly did. And, Mosach suspected, used his natural talents at barter to leverage his intoxicating wares for sexual favors of a primarily homoerotic and oral servitude variety, essentially becoming a mind-control Svengali pusher with the power to corrupt and pervert the angelic such as the wild eyed and haired Christ from the floor below them, a 50 year old man who was a permanent edenic cherubic schizophrenic who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but would slob a floppy old motherfucker’s knob for a few puffs of whatever Hustler was proffering. Mosach was far from homophobic (like all poets he could be effeminate and sensitive, open, and that was one step above cocksucker as he had to admit) but the unseemly mix of mind-control, drugs, barter, and prostitution made him a bit squeamish. If he only knew how dark it gets… Let’s pretend you all never read that old religious book that is in every freshmen’s locker in Golden Age 101, and Intro to The Garden. The book is called The Garden of Flowers. Amongst college kids its memorization is mandatory, but if you aren’t from an academic or sacred background, I’ll school you. The truth is I’m not an expert so I’ll try for a quick outline, a Cliff’s Notes of The Sacrament from Moss Hollow. Well, basically, people’s tastes change over the centuries and the millennia. For example, sugar was contraband once upon a time. Now sugar is as rare a mildly inebriating condiment as Saint Anthony’s Fire. That, my friends, was a nasty little fungus of the middle-ages that sent whole villages over the deep end before the villagers limbs would rot and fall off. It’s related to another kind of saintly fire but that had its time and came and went, never seen since. Shame, that. The point is we lost some things and they discovered and invented new things. We’re going to teach you about one of the new things, and the worst things ever- the Anti-Klein. These days the college kids mostly drink (new) booze and smoke old grass, but in history class they teach of magic drugs you can’t find anymore which had something (it was a dense and confusing course) to do with “the circle of golden children who called the thunder down”. The saints, who gathered round that good ol’ boy Mr. Kite, and the whole revolution or age of enlightenment, whatever it was, had something to do with some magic drug called Klienbottles, which were actually alien eggs- larvae of insects from another planet, which they proved. True story. Anyway, those were like sacraments or holy communion wafers in the very first forms of the Mystery-Sphere Ritual, which was run by that pretty girl we study in Ancient Historical Figure Biography class, the girl named Chrissy- Mystery-Sphere Girly, or M.S.G. The chick was probably idealized, well she is an actual idol so, yeah. Anyway, she was the ring-bearer… no, the yo-yo bearer (sacred yo-yo containing Klienbottles.) Those are the magic sacrament alien eggs that sparked the revolution, or maybe they made Mr. Kite become holy in the first place, who knows? It’s ancient history and it’s complicated and there’s people with PHDs in it that don’t know if the eggs were even real or what the fuck they’re talking about if you ask me. The point is 496
those eggs worked because their DNA was twisted in a shape that can’t exist, like a Mobius strip but better, and they break some kind of rules of the universe and break geometry laws that let bigger things in, bigger places and that’s the best summary I can give. Thank god there are no grades in the future, or I might be failing. You get the idea- drop bugs, tune out, turn holy. Anyways, those larvea are real- they are studied in sacredness courses, exobiology labs, and geometry classes (advanced theoretical topology, very hard class, hot redhead teacher, big tits, very worthwhile) so they are pretty well documented and accepted as fact, although they say there are only a few left (dead ones) and they can’t be cloned. I think the Acadamy has part of one which they dust off for the photon-holograscope observatory, although it is only half a Klien, which I guess would be a normal Mobius-Strip style egg. It has to do with dimensions. But I can tell you what is real- Anti-Kliens. The Hustler from the Joy had been smoking something next door that smelled HORRIBLE, and he would hide it when Mosach visisted, although occasionally a cheap metal pipe was left out with little things squirming in it like yellow maggots, My advice would be to never, ever smoke anything that moves, and if you have to smoke them, never, ever, ever, NEVER inject them. That’s a jacked-up path that turns good poets into tradgic ferrets, fast. So, yeah, one day the Hustler offered the pipe to Mosach, who was so drunk on grain liquor that he may have thought it was Albert Einstein’s cock for all he knew, and who wouldn’t forgive a man for lessening the great physisists… “load”. The point was he just didn’t give a fuck, and took the pipe, in which was a big phat little yellow larvae, squirming like it was a cheap stripper shaking its ass. He sucked in the disgusting fumes while the Hustler held the flame to the critter, and it sizzled and squeeled as it fidgeted desperately in the flame, burning to death and dying slowly as the pipe was passed back and forth. The smoke tasted rancid, like bologna gone bad, a fatty greasy and harsh taste that left Mosach’s tongue so numb he slurred his words. And then he understood why the things are illegal and are exterminated by an esteemed class of exo-bioexterminators who are considered sacred exorcists more than pest control workers. He felt the point of pure will latch on to him and operate his body, and that was the beginning of the end. The first time Mosach ingested an Anti-Klein he was possessed by the thing it represents, which can’t be defined exactly but it is a thing, an entity or a force of nature, something like a star or a magic crystal, but of a bad kind, a thing with an agenda. That’s the problem with Anti-Kleinsthey may or may not be alive… well, the larvae are certainly alive and the younger and fatter they are the more they squeal, and the more expensive. But the thing they put into you is not a little bug, it’s a point. A point that appears to the best of our knowledge to be alive, or to operate us as if it were living through us. It owns and operates humans. It to have a plan and when a human smokes (or teleporjects, a process of the future now which is roughly analogous to injection, albeit with the aid of a large gyroscope-like teleporting machine) the bugs, the chemical reaction or alchemy or black magic in the shape either opens up some passageway or calls something down into the brain which is extremely (let me repeat- *extreeeemly*) pleasurable, because it takes over and appears to give you superpowers. Maybe it does. Maybe it’s a tool that could be used for good in the right hands, or maybe that’s what everyone thinks. That’s exactly the first thought that came to Mosach’s pickled brine-brain, which suddenly did not feel drunk anymore. It felt very clean, smart, and confident, and he thought "I know this is wrong. I’ve seen the commercials. But if I just keep smoking these fucking bugs, I could save the whole fucking world.” It was no problem- simplicity itself. He didn’t even need to try. The bug, 497
or rather the point of light, or was it electricity? No- it was WILL. It was a point of sheer, absolute, infinite WILL, that would take care of the rest. And it did. Since that moment Mosach has not had control of his mind, body, soul, shlong, and least of all, his poet’s heart. They are the opposite of the old holy bugs from Moss Hollow in every way. The planet they come from is different, the shape of their DNA is also impossible but reversed like a mirror image, and it breaks laws of the universe but in a bad way, letting big bad things in, and instead of sacred, they are fucking straight evil man. Straight fucking satanic profane devil evil. (Enter Stage 3: The Bad Bug Hunt.) and his innapropriate love-interest the Simple Girl, then on the floor below the Edenic Christ, and later the Doctor. Only the last, in addition to Mosach, would survive the death of the whole bad place, and like Mosach, rise like a phoenix into a higher purpose that made the horrors, if not worthwhile, at least part of a larger story-arc where they made some sense in retrospect. No, they still made no sense. That kind of business can never be redeemed, justified, or contextualized into reason or meaning. But in some blind-fated twist of plot, if Mosach had not dove into the filthy brine headfirst, he would never have met the Doctor, and they would not have climbed out together (with more than a little help from his dear friends) onto a plateue that finally explained the shared dreams of the Egypt that never was. But always, always is of course! Dr. Ceduceus, as we will find, was a Proffesor of Theoretical Crypto-economic Archeology at the very Acadamy Mosach was hiding from, but was on sabbatical and making a brief pit-stop at the wrong place before leaving with his wife to lead an archeology dig, the excavation of a newly discovered pyramid in, not Ancient, but current (which, well, for your purposes is “future” Egypt, ye oldentime readers dear) and he had a perverse taste for bad hotels. Damn bad ones, which he believed more conducive to his highly abstract and groundbreaking research. One of his many eccentricities. Anyway, he will remain for now hard at the work of the mind behind his locked door opposite Mosach’s for many a chapter until their accidental if somewhat destined introductions… A number of men, animalistic and torn, of ill and lesser repute, intruded on Mosach’s room of squalid solitude during these times of trial, but Dr.Ceduceus plays a mysterious role in our drama that will not become clear until much later, when he is eventually to become a minor God-King of sorts, definitly in his own eyes but those of some others as well, and a key player in the dawning link between the Acadamy’s ancient history lessons and the friend’s seemingly miraculous collective Egyptian Deja-vu. All this was during Mosach’s isolation from his friends and flagrant extended truancy from his studies at the Acadamy, when he crawled into that most poorly named hole called The Joy Hotel. As was feared by his abandoned entourage, he was having one of his “spells”, but none had lasted this long, or as Mox and Kristy were soon to discover, was this bad. Damn ba
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