ghost in the margins

For years i would come home afraid of what changes might have struck this old city, or worse, what might remain unbearably the same, streets and habits rotting on the edges of time while life happens elsewhere. i suppose it was a projection of my own fears of time, and each visit would bear the fruits of my expectations in new sidewalks or deeper potholes, friends and family still caught in the joys and sorrows of a decade past, and myself straining against the future like it was a vast chasm i had no choice but to throw myself over.

but recently this has begun to shift, perhaps as i make peace with time, and the family home becomes not the forshadowing of a tomb but a storehouse or museum to its memories, a treasure chest of the past from which the story of this life is being written. in "Man and his Symbols," Jung tells of a recurring dream in which he was continually on the verge of discovering a new wing in his house, some lost corrider older than his ancestors which at any moment he might stumble into. later he realized that this new wing was really a new idea or direction he was about to embark on, his discovery of the archetypes, and that dreams contain a prophetic element or at least a 'cryptomnesia,' whereby we might discover what was already known but forgotten thorugh the intricacies of our occluded symbology. similarly i now walk through this house looking at the bookshelves, through old cabinets and boxes, as if with each visit their contents might grow older, or i grown more comprehending of what was always there, photos from our childhood at the beach, hurricane lamps filled with seashells, heirloom candlesticks and hundred year old poetry books that seem to cry out with that much more significance. i look through them as if these objects might contain some secret to life only now readable, and wonder that i never saw them before.

one such set of objects, which i was excited to come upon, were the set of encylcopedias belonging to my grandfather Wilson Lee Johnson, in which, as the story goes, after his heart attack and confinement to bed he proceeded to work out in the margins and endpages a solution to world hunger based off the chemical composition of yeast, which seems an awfully marquezian tale. my father had looked through these formulas once, without comprehending much, but then chose to forget them as time moved on and the pain of his father's death and then his mother's death last year made it difficult to look any closer at his family history, which for a genealogist must be the sore blow of closing a chapter on the past. but as he told me, he had never had much interest in his father's artifacts, nor knew much about his life to begin with except that he had aspired to be an artist and a writer in his youth.

i expected the strange often heiroglyphic chemical formulas that abounded in each margin, but there was something else being worked out in this man's head too, that as i read further dawned on me gradually as being an entire cosmology of life and alchemical struggle against death and disease in all forms. stuck between many of the pages were articles clipped from papers with which he would update the aging encyclopedias, and from these emerged wild theories and aphorisms about being in time, charts of correspondence between the electromagnetic spectrum, the planets, chemical elements, and the human body, a subtle numerology and cryptographic word play which seemed to seek as its object a total description of reality and its effect on the human body and mind, synchretizing whatever information it could find into a progressively more complex and phenomenal world view, where god is equal to light, and life derives from the sun's chemical illumination. amidst these notations and scrawls were veiled referances to a prophecy or vision of the future that he was given, perhaps in connection with the passing of the icarus meteor in june of 1968, or with his heart attack, which undoubtedly threw him into this wild speculation and cabalism that as far as my father knew had never been a part of his father's life before that.

also among his papers were a book of poetry and some short stories, but these seem to have come from an earlier period, and whatever possession or illumination he sought to articulate in his last years remained mostly in his head. except that he seemed to know it would not be lost, for in one passage he describes the body's projection of self after death into the future where its descendents would be able to access it, but in another passage asks not to be remembered for that would take precious time away from the rememberer for their own present and future. but perhaps what seems like a theory of the continuation of the soul through DNA and heredity holds some truth, for though we never knew him, as he died when our father was still young, we his grandchildren seem to be working out his themes and visions in our own lives, devon's chemical experiments with photography and time, scott's computer science, my own experiments with linguistic alchemy, and all tinged with an edge of the spiritual or occult that seeks to step out of time towards some ultimate sense of reality altogether. so whoever this man was, and though he will (and perhaps wanted to) be forgotten, i suspect in him was the workings of a great modern alchemist, and i can only seek to honor that in my own life and tasks, as if destiny was something not just created from the images of one's own childhood, but passed down from generation to fruitful generation like another well loved and worn family treasure.

exercise in caving in

I want to collapse. Walking home from work, late at night, with the stars beating out a restless compass behind the clouds and streetlamps, and the flood of red and gold bleeding from piles in the gutters into puddles of decayed parchment on the streets, the loathsome rot of ginko berries crushed underfoot like dog shit or sexual frustration. There will be a sudden gust of wind, the face of a friend gliding ghostlike by on the whir of a bicycle, a song heard with such deep emotional undertones that it sunk into my bones and lays there a melancholy twang for each love lost, each moment slipped through cut fingers. And falling into that depression like an old well I’ll be unable to take another step, and if it weren’t for the force of habit drilled into these limbs I would stop completely and sit down overwhelmed on a cracked porch. Or tumble directly into the leaves with the fingers worn out of my gloves and overcoat grunged and melting into the reek of the street. On these days I feel like a bum or one of those crazies who are already lost in their own worlds, who have no need left for society, to hold together that face that was always caving in for other people and leaves them mumbling incoherently in the edges of vision or back tables of cafés. One wonders what realms they have vanished to behind those ill-fitting masks.

I lay down and pull the night over my head like a thick winter blanket to ward off the nightmares and wonder that I have managed to make anything of my life so far. Just a few copied poems, a couple unreleased demos, no degrees, years wasted on the clock making wings and sandwiches, a bare minimum of friends I can still only vaguely relate to. I have had too many dreams and not enough follow-through. Each time I begin with the full intention to create great works of art, lasting relationships, I trip up and collapse mid-sentence into the hairy arms of lethargy and despair. Even this never ending novel, which haunts me each night for years now, lurking even through the day. All the effort I seem to put to it produces maybe an hour or two of results occasionally. The rest is spent lost in that world wondering how I might get out, or get it out of my head. For that’s it, if I was just content to dream and falling through that city of symbols wander aimlessly and mesmerized and never wake up, It’s not the dreams that haunt me, but the desire and effort needed to articulate them. The force of mountains.

It would be easy to get lost, to become one with the bums. That’s why I haven’t stopped yet, for if I collapsed, laid down just for a moment to rest in the raw emotions of the gutter, I might never get back up. I would live there pecking crumbs with the pigeons until moss grew on my coat and my shoes stretched roots into the concrete and perhaps countless years later I would make a good tree stump for someone else to rest their mind on. That would not be such a horrible fate, a stump serves at least some useful service.

But no! I must keep moving. Those lights in the windows are beckoning me to sit, to spell the interplay of shadows through the bare branches, and if I do so I’m finished. I must keep moving, as far and as fast as possible, before this entropy kills me, the atrophy of each daily routine, each stale lead-bound instinct, creeps into my bones and freezes them in mid-fall. That is what I struggle against, the ruts worn so deep in the sidewalk from each and every walk this same way, that there is nowhere left to tread and the caving concrete collapses over my head, my grave eventually marked by some illegible and inappropriate scrawl left by some equally bored vagabond not yet submitted to his own tomb.

I have considered alternatives, racked my brain on ways to extricate myself from these aching streets. A change, of work, of going back to school, of building some career for myself here. And yet I fear it would not be enough, that I’ll still be here walking these same streets for even longer duller years, caught in just as much of a habit in all the meaningless work that would require. Not that I feel I couldn’t do it, but why? I am sick of habits. I am sick of being sick of habits. I grow nauseous at the very idea of having to get up again.

Perhaps I should learn to fly instead, escape entirely to some foreign country where I have no habits, where everything is as of yet still unknown, even myself, and I can look in the mirror and see an infinite number of new lives to lead each morning in this new and breathtaking place. I will ex-patriate, go live in Paris. I have always felt I belonged there for all its history of literary existentialists. I will sit at the cafes on the sidewalk, write furiously, and look at everything, and dream as often as possible. It sounds idyllic, but how long would that last before habit caught up with me again and I grew bored and listless and ready for another chang? One month, two? Perhaps a whole year if I really pushed myself to explore each and every alleyway before they too become mapped onto the veins on the back of my hands. And then what? I could go everywhere and even grow bored of going (as I already am), and still not find peace. I would have to leave the Earth altogether, chart the depths of the stars from my dreaming mind, wander a nomad from galaxy to galaxy until I come to the unknown edge of the Universe, and even that would not be enough to contain me. I shudder at the mere notion of immortality, what could fill it?

Better to abandon that plan and just lock myself in my room, where lying curled on my bed with a cat nosing at my elbow I can descend to the inner edges of the mind. The psych has no known bottom, no final borderline, no accurate maps except those still marked with the winds blowing cherub-like in the four corners and fantastic beasts prowling the seas where they fall off the sides and drown infinity. Here be dragons. If only I can get back to my room without collapsing first. Perhaps there will be a dragon on the way (that would be something), perhaps one must finally accept boredom and reality and grow accustomed of amusing oneself in whatever manner available until you die, occasionally amusing others as well in the process. If that is the case than hopefully the hours spent on this have not been in vain.


[this was written a few days ago in a stressful weekend of falling apart]

street of dreams

"I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystallizes for us... They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life... Such images constitute a program, establish our soul's fixed fund of capital, which is alloted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings. It seems to me that the rest of our life passes in the interpretation of those insights, in the attempt to master them with all the wisdom we acquire, to draw them through all the range of intellect we have in our possession. These early images mark the boundaries of an artist's creativity. His creativity is a deduction from assumptions already made. He cannot now discover anything new; he learns only to understand more and more the secret entrusted to him at the beginning, and his art is a constant exegesis, a commentary on that single verse that was assigned him. But art will never unravel that secret completely. The secret remains insoluble. The knot in which the soul was bound is no trick knot, coming apart with a tug at its end. On the contrary, it grows tighter and tighter. We work at it, untying, tracing the path of the string, seeking the end, and out of this manipulation comes art..."

and

"The Demiurge has had no monopoly on creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well. In the depth of matter, indistinct smiles are shaped, tensions build up, attempts at form appear. The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself."

-Bruno Schulz, author of "The Street of Crocodiles"

kiss the dirt

because you aren't afraid to kiss the dirt
(and consequently dare to climb the sky)

-e.e. cummings

infornography

Reading more PK Dick before work i came on several passages of relevance to the dream novel. it seems Dick was also familiar and concerned with mythological themes and their application to his life (as i imagine every writer must be to some degree). but as the inexplicableness of his transcendent experience took hold of him this was the only place he could turn to make heads or tails out of whatever had actually happened, which could otherwise be considered madness; much the way i am doing with my dream visions. indeed there are many parallels, of most note that when he had looked deep into the void he was shown he found in the heart of it and himself a beautiful and all knowing woman, his anima; whom he associated with the goddess Sophia, who in xtian mythology Christ promised would come to those who embraced the light through the dark night of their souls (i will have to find this reference, probably in the Gnostic texts), as the Glory figure came to me when i was struggling with the end of my internal world and disintegration of the self.

Dick also said he found that void to be God, the awareness in all things behind their apparent, separated, realities, who was both more real and ineffable. the way that in my San Pedro trip I found what i could only call God in the hollow behind all things, yet could only describe it as a comfortable absence that was aware of the entirety of existence. Dick remarked that no one else (in his knowledge) had had this experience in the past 200 years, and i wonder that i should also come to a similar place, even down to the anamnesia of the Record, and if this kind of awakening is becoming more common. especially as the ages of consciousness expanding drugs and information make connectivity and the concept of omniscience more obvious and essential to modern life. one could probably make an argument for the exteriorization of the sub- or unconscious, where it was latent or hidden before. as the pantheon of gods (cross-cultural) could be seen as a finer-grained pattern of ourselves, our hopes and fears, desires and other subtle energies (which it has been postulated they were created to represent in the first place, for lack of better terminology or understanding of our inner workings), so too could the gods be seen as a rough-hewn emanation from some deeper, lighter source or pattern that runs beneath and shapes all things. the matrix metaphor points to this condition, but as this matrix is but matter or mother (Ma’at), it is more related to the veil of maya, the ground of appearances, Dick’s black iron prison; and not to whatever energy or awareness lies formless behind the forms.

in talking with sophie about her process of coming out of her darkness (the shamanistic rebirth or psychological individuation process), she mentioned having to find a “positive energy” to rely on, though she was understandably hesitant to call it God, as AA usually tells its participants to turn to. i suggested there was nothing in the energy itself which is positive, that it is our perception and use of it which casts it in either that dark or light. one could argue it is that same energy (or our refusal of it) that drives people to drink or madness, and the acceptance of something larger than themselves to trust in which leads them back to a sense of peace or heightened presence in themselves and the world. i suppose it is many things for many people, that some find it necessary to couch this energy in terms of myth or religion in order to match their own peculiar symbolism of the world, but that ultimately it doesn’t matter what you call it, as it is inexpressible outside of metaphor and imagination. of course, that the energy is chargeless (for lack of a better word to describe its dual positivity/ negativity), means that many choose consciously to embrace its dark face, the madness of the world of forms, the secret longings and highs and powers of sex and violence which currently seem to be driving our world. but these are just as much a “path to god” as the more ascetic, pure paths, as evidenced by the tradition of tantra, in which instead of drawing the senses away from the world in order to find what is beneath them, one purposely overloads the senses until they reach a breaking point, and find the still emptiness that resides in the chaos. our culture is currently in such a process of overloading itself with information and images (infornography).

i suppose the distinction is that like breeds like, and that increasing the amount of sensory stimuli or violence in the world only creates more of a maze to extricate ourselves from later. certainly in the early days of disentangling my dreams i found myself relying heavily on metaphors and symbolism to explain my experiences, only to find that they were creating that much more of a labyrinth between me and reality. this continued until i asked the zen master Chong Hae what this dream was i could not wake up from, and he said it was all the theories and images we put on top of reality in order to avoid just having it be reality itself. as Dick tells it in an amusing argument with God, each time he came up with some other theory besides having met God, he fell into an infinite regress of thesis/ antithesis, at which God would butt in saying, “i am this infinity, and i will play this game until you die or accept it” at which Dick would say “but maybe…” and fall into another infinite regress, ad nauseum.

cryptomorphology: hidden in the forms

Of course, it’s right when i should be sleeping, that i’m struck with the compulsion to write. which i haven’t felt for days, like the hesitant gearing up of some infernal machine. you’d think i’d be brain dead by now, not sleeping, and waking up still drunk from last night’s birthday festivities. but no. the muses work the night shift. after a slow afternoon working on the hero’s journey notes, i finished huysman’s “against nature” and can finally leave the Decadence aside for a little, and figured i’d take the rest of the evening off. but then i needed to start researching Gnosticism, particularly the emanation of the aeon Sophia from the Pleroma (fullness) of the inexpressible; who in being born without her male twin (syzygy), gave stillbirth to the demiurge, that blind god who created our material world and in not being able to see the greater light cried out that he was indeed the only god. i don’t know where that came from, why i needed to find that info. like a paranoia or obsession, the process of creating a world becomes the object of a focused attention into which everything falls pray. like a black hole, except with an other side. and the strangest quick references latch on as crucial building blocks for the creative task.

so then i picked up a copy of Philip K. Dick’s exegesis, and began reading his account of the mystical experience/ psychotic breakdown that haunted the later years of his life. with the cats prowling at the door and the stillness and buzzing of electronic devices in the room and infinitely tired i started to get those edges of movement in my vision, tinges of other worlds made only more possible by PKD’s surreal yet straightforward narrative of having dead friends and scholars or some alien intelligence speaking greek in his dreams and all around grooming his life. interesting also as a side note, he was born a twin, though his sister Jane C. died a year later. i think the point that struck me was he also related this force to being Sophia (in that the voices were all couched in Gnostic terms), who in that mythology was said to come into the world of forms/ darkness and rescue the shards of light that had gotten trapped here. which Dick went on to relate to Osiris’s dismemberment and subsequent rescue by Isis (another wisdom goddess, on the darker magical side of knowledge).

i had that dream. several years ago after the year long dream storyline of the world ending and civilization crumbling and everyone i know getting put in prison camps, i was coming out of my dark and dreamt one night that my twin brother took me down into a basement laboratory where he chained me to a monolith-machine and proceeded to extract my consciousness from my physical being, so that i was aware as if i was everything around me (foreshadowing my actual experience of this on 8-23-2003). but then he couldn’t get me back into my self and had to find someone who i would recognize and return to my body for. who he found in the glory-sophia figure i had been following around in my unconscious but hadn’t caught yet. he convinced her to come back to the basement and on seeing her i fell back into my body and woke up on a beach, drenched and naked and remembering everything i had been aware of while i was everything.

it could boggle me that i had this dream experience without any prior knowledge of the deeper archetypal occurrences of similar plot-lines, that it is a theme (or mytheme, a term i came on tonight to) inherent in the psyche. placed in the context of the crumbling dream world, and that i was also fighting off a schizophrenic breakdown my twin was going through at the time, this event stands as probably the crucial moment in the whole dream story. and comparing it to other hanged man myths (odin on yggdrassil, Buddha on the immovable spot, christ on the calvary mount…) certainly sets its significance to the myth i’m unraveling in my head.

so i got all jittery, and walked upstairs still catching glimpses out of the corners of my eyes, and suddenly felt like something was following me into the bathroom. and i realized that it’s been a couple years since i’ve felt that, and that that feeling of being stalked or haunted is one i lived under for most of my life. time always looking over your shoulder making you remember this could be it. a healthy dose of paranoia to balance out the pronoia of finding what i was looking for in the texts. probably that gimp death i dreamed the other night finally catching up to his normal place behind my left shoulder. i suppose it means i need to get started on this task soon. not for fear that the work or inspiration will dissipate, for i suspect it is much bigger and longer lasting than i am, but that i might in the mean time. at least, not till after i get a good night’s sleep.

death drags a bum leg

Our show last night at club cafe was our best yet. we rocked it in front of a dark spangly curtain to a small but receptive audience, and Nikki got up during the next set to do an improv spoken word bit with soma mestizo.

And finally i got to sleep in a bit, and though my sleep felt scattered i still managed to remember a dream before i woke up. i guess that's been one benefit of working on this dream novel, that my recall is up to about three dreams a night, growing in vivid detail and symbolic content. we were riding over a desolate tundra stunted with white fir trees, in some cross between a flying car, a miniature airship and santa's sleigh. except the old bearded man with us seemed more like god than santa claus, and he was arguing with death, who had come along for the ride even though no one wanted him there. death was dressed like darth vader, had a limp, and talked with a high nasally voice like "c'mon guys, please let me come along?" we landed shortly, and set off across the snow dunes towards the city, with death dragging his gimp leg and falling behind, and when we looked back he was still there, but lagging so far that he would never catch us, though i kind of felt bad that everyone was picking on him.

down boulevards of story

"Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

-Joseph Campbell, from "the hero with a thousand faces"


yup. this book is my new bible. the madness is unraveling and the dreams are all falling into place. if i don't stop myself now, i might try and write the whole blest novel tonight.

the lamentations of an icarus

the lovers of prostitutes
are happy, cheerful and well-fed;
as for me, my arms are broken
through having hugged the clouds.

it is thanks to the incomparable stars,
blazing in the depths of the sky,
that my devoured eyes see only
the memories of suns.

in vain i wished to find
the centre and end of space;
i know not under what fiery eye
i feel my wings breaking;

and burnt up by love of beauty,
i shall not have the sublime honor
of giving my name to the abyss
which will serve as my grave.

-Baudelaire

the art of irreality

"The main thing is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate your attention on a single detail, to forget yourself sufficiently to bring about the desired hallucination and so substitute the vision of reality for the reality itself."

J.-K. Huysmans, from "Against Nature"

strapped to a gearwork nightmare

Continuing research on 'the aesthetic', Alberto and i finally found the collection of Brothers Quay short films at the Dreaming Ant. what words can i give to this? sheer genius, the stuff dreams are made of... intricate machines filled with strange tinketry, dirty mirrors, living dolls missing half their heads, objects that have a life of their own, moving in a jittery buzz like mechanical bees, the little gremlins engineering the contents of our nightmarish sleep. each vignette seems utterly familiar, yet inexplicable. as soon as you almost understand what's going on the lights drop to that dream blue, the camera fades, blinks, fuzzes out, and the mind slips off comprehension. sheer genius, mastercraftsmanship, perhaps they sold their souls to the dark side...

one of the shorts, more explicit than the rest, was a historical lesson on the artistic technique of anamorphosis, used mostly in the 16th century, the couching of one image in another image so that it is only perceivable from an unconventional vantage point, full figures popping out of landscapes when looked at from the side. mesmerizing, and i begin to wonder how it is possible to achieve this effect linguistically, not just some code or cryptology concealing information in the letters and words themselves, but in the images, and themes. an enhanced symbolism where what is said is really a veiled allusion to something much deeper, that you would almost have to put your eyes parallel to the page to read... much the way that dreams function in the subconscious.

walking back at two in the morning, i was confronted by the surreality of sirens, flashing red and blue lights, a mass of ambulances and cop cars on the corner of liberty, a body being dragged in the light rain. flickering streetlamps. i shuddered. last month after watching Holy Mountain w/ alberto i witnessed a man sprawled out on the sidewalk near the hospital, one shoe off and the sock laying withered on the bricks and two security guards moving the van he was laying behind. and now this. it turns out a man was shot at the ATM last night, three times in the head. i can't help but think it is some reminder from the universe that though i am trying to be patient with this work, shit does happen. and two blocks from home. or that the act of creation on one person's part balances out with destruction and violence down the street. i am reminded of alberto's horror several years ago, in realizing that everything we do has an intimate affect on the world around us, every negative thought, every moment of doubt and disturbed anger ripples out like we're tapped into (or trapped in) some plane of crumbling energies. all the more reason to create, to sing, to smile at strangers, to live...

researching the subconscious

(from akira kurosawa's "dreams")

as i get my scattered notes and dreams together in some semblance of order (or several semblances), i've started researching cultural and artistic depictions of dreams in order to more fully capture the specific dream aesthetic i am going for. as my alchemical friend Alberto Almarza put it yesterday before we watched kurosawa's masterpiece, "dreams are of light and water, but hidden in vases and lamps, in oceans and lighthouses. full of cliffs and deserts and forests, wind-up birds, compasses and clocks, doors and doors and strange ghostly figures."

while watching "dreams" i was struck, as i was the first time i saw it, how his themes and images could have sprung from my own mind, or any mind, certainly winsor mccay's mind portrayed in his "little nemo" comics; archetypal situations playing out the crux of humanity in a wealth of colors and melancholia. lost in a blizzard, walking through a dark tunnel, watching foxes dance in the rain, running from an erupting volcano. i've been there before. so perhaps have you.

restless folk arcana

Ill-lit by xmas lights, no one notices a shabby figure warming up his pump organ, mashing the chords like it's 1885 and you're strolling restless on a boardwalk at coney island. in no hurry he sets a sampler to carry a a few sparse notes, kills the lights, and pulling out an old diver's lamp begins creating his world. out of a box comes a red and black striped carnival barker's jacket, and a faded parasol protecting the organ from the dark. out of a decrepit traveling chest comes a paper mache head, followed by hands, one covering the mouth, one pointing still into the dark of the box. from another chest comes more lamps, colored gels, a miniature record player, the atmosphere of a winsor mccay comic. with care he places them just so, and casually picks up a trumpet to accompany the procedures in small plaintive squawks. and then a tiny case with a tiny chair reverently deposited on the turntable, a tiny man even more reverently set on the chair, which begins to spin as the boardwalk descends into some dark jangley rhythm from your dreams. the jerk and start of sine wave switches all one-handed with organ and trumpet key saloon songs like some old-timey analog sequencer. he's telling a story, about his father and 4000 year old finubulae. questions accosted by the melody. and back to the boardwalk for a last stroll into the crooked sunset.

followed by a punk cowgirl singing a sad ukulele in front of old twenties' silent films, keaton and chaplin, journey to the moon; and my favorite 22nd century blues singer rocking caveman songs to scrambled porn.

the journey, by charles baudelaire

When i started reading this poem earlier i knew it was going to be one of those poems, the ones that make you cry yes! the ones that when they were written you know the microphones were listening. this translation, by geoffery wagner, is not as good as the french (and that's funny that what with the five years of latin reading it in the french actually makes sense. it least there it meters and rhymes), so i may tweak it a bit, but won't transcribe all eight parts.

1.

For the child, adoring cards and stamps,
The universe fulfills its vast appetite.
Ah, how large is the world in the brightness of lamps,
In the eyes of memory how the world is petite!

One morning we leave, brains full of flame,
Hearts full of malice and bitter desires,
And we go, and follow the rhythm of the waves,
Rocking our infinite on the finite of the seas:

Some, happy to escape an infamous country
Others, the horrors of their cradle, and a few,
Astrologers drowned in the eyes of a woman,
Some tyrannical Circe of dangerous perfumes.

So not to be changed into beasts, they get drunk
On space and light and skies on fire;
The ice that bites, the suns that turn them copper,
Slowly efface the mark of kisses.

But the true travelers are they who depart
For departing's sake; hearts light as balloons,
From their destinies they never swerve,
And, without knowing why, say continuously: Let us go on!

These have desires formed like clouds.
And they dream, as a conscript of his gun,
Of vast pleasures, transient, little understood,
Which the human spirit can not name.

ii.

That we imitate, the horror! the top and ball
In their bounding waltzes; even asleep
Curiosity torments and turns us
Like a cruel angel whipping the sun.

Whimsical fortune, whose end is displaced,
And, being nowhere, can be anywhere!
Where Man, in whom hope is never weary,
Runs searching for repose always like a madman.

Our soul is a brigantine seeking its Icarie;
A voice resounds on deck: 'Open your eyes!'
A voice from the maintop, hot and mad, cries:
'Love...glory...fortune!' Hell! is a rock.

Each little island sighted by the lookout man
Is an Eldorado the promise of Destiny;
Imagination, dressing its orgies,
Finds but a reef in the light of morning.

Oh the poor lover of chimerical lands!
Must one put him in irons, throw him in the sea,
This drunken sailor, inventor of Americas
Whose mirages rend the gulfs more bitter?

Thus the old vagabond, tramping through the mud,
Dreams, with his nose in the air, of brilliants paradises;
His bewitched eyes discover a Capua
Wherever a candle glimmers in a hovel.

iii.

Wonderful travelers! what noble histories
We read in your eyes as deep as the seas!
Show us the coffins of your rich memories,
Those marvelous jewels, of stars and stratospheres.

We would travel without wind or sail!
And so, to gladden the boredom of our prisons,
Pass over our spirits, stretched like a canvas,
Your memories with their frames of horizons.

Tell us, what have you seen?

ghost in the choir

Before practice nikki and i met up for a cup of coffee and one of our deep conversations that have proven to be a strong part of our growing friendship, in which one of us will bring up some thought and we'll fall into it like life depends on it. the issue of spirituality came up, as a mutual acquaintance of ours follows Krishna, and i feel like the rest of our set either could give a fuck-all for spirituality or has their own non-linear path they tread, and nikki was wondering where that distinction is between religion and spirituality since it's a subject she has little explored herself yet. i told her a story my dad told me of when he was a child and they went to his mother's methodist church, even though his father didn't really believe in it he went along anyway, until he finally saw how hypocritical it was and they stopped going. the following saturday the minister showed up preaching hellfire and brimstone and my grandfather listened quietly before explaining his precise reasons and then explained that it did not matter where you worshipped as long as you kept god in your heart and he couldn't do that under the church's stifling rituals. when the minister left he turned to my dad and pointed to his chest and said "you can believe in anything, as long as you remember that god is in there." which is why when my parents had a catholic wedding he went along with raising us in it, and later said that it was so we could learn that having belief in anything, the world, yourself, the unknown, was a good thing. i also told her a few of the stories from rilke's "stories of god," an early collection of edgy faerytales for children, of how people used to pray with their arms open to embrace god but when they put their hands together and built imposing steeples god grew afraid of all these pointy things, or how a group of children decided their parents had lost god and so put him in a thimble so they would know where he was at all times. personally i never could relate to the idea of some imposing old dude up in heaven. why should i? i had a twin brother who i could talk to, create whole worlds with, who was me. what did i need with some absent and abstract deity? my idea of god resides in the people (and things) around me, in myself, in those really deep conversations and connections we make as recognition of something deeper that is shared. and the strongest relationships i've had rely on a mutual expression of divinity. even if it's not called such. of course there is much to be said for the aesthetics and rituals of any established religion. a wealth of meaning that when practiced regularly can really set one out of the every day, the sense of displacement necessary to break us from our too-established patterns. but in order for any of it to make sense, or be fulfilling in that way all the drugs tv money sex fail to be, it has to be yours (or ours), a space that is created which is open to embrace the world, and not fend it off or tune it out. that rapt free flow of hearts and attention, of undistracted eye contact, not readily found in the thick of the maddening crowd. unless i'm on stage or writing, but then it's like preaching, and only at times as intimate. it is often like howling into a void, the space left by noise-clogged senses. throwing a ghost into the choir.

god is the absent narrative: notes on formation

memory is a narrative. for memory to be constructed,
a degree of forgetting is necessary; the idea of a negative narrative.

a narrative is a measuring of time.
we function within the illusion that we have moved forward in time.

all narrative is ritualistic.

the ritual has a beginning, a middle and an ending.

in the absence of ritual, there is no culture.

the basis of all culture consists of stories.. i.e. myth.

the basis of our idea of myth: muthos: stories, neither true nor false, neither realistic nor logical.

dreams are neither true nor false (and not necessarily realistic or logical).

"our own myths we call reality."

"in my beginning is my end."

correspondences

from an intro to baudelaire (by enid starkie)

"the hidden relation between things here below and in the world above he called correspondences. everything in this world is merely the symbol of a hieroglyphic language and he claimed that it was the function of the artist to decipher the hidden writing of nature and interpret the mysteries of the universe. he considered that only poets who had reached a high degree of spirituality were capable of understanding and interpreting these mysteries. beauty was not for him, material beauty alone. beauty was essentially a spiritual reality and he was convinced that art was the greatest and perhaps the only means of effecting beauty in this world... beauty for him did not lie in the subject itself but in what the artist brought to it. beauty was the flame of the fire, the radiance of the energy, generated by the spiritual shock he received when he was moved and this spiritual shock could come from aspects hitherto considered ugly. he did not see beauty in ugliness, he only said that from ugliness he could distill beauty. from the fire kindled within him the poet forged beauty and the intensity of the fire depended on his spiritual nature. the more spiritual the poet the greater the intensity of heat generated. poetry for him was not mere composition and to be a poet meant to be capable of spiritual growth."

lovely dangers

"The lover, is in such splended danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky center, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence."

- Rilke

a day in familiar sensations

smell of musty elevators in apartment buildings like the one my grandmother lived in
and checked tableclothes spilled with diner syrup
the rumble and stale subway air echoing melancholy off the platform walls with classical guitar chords well dressed but scruffy fingers wincing as the train announcments sound off beat
jumbled glare of warehouse graffiti only visible from the tracks

smell of ocean salt and expectation, each summer of my youth
crunch of toes in sand and spiraled shells between fingers worn opalescent with waves
colors in the mute gray breeze: sky blue and purple clouded sand drifts edged with red tar waves with green ripples only vibrant when the sun slides out from behind the approaching storm
then the sand is brilliant
a cut of tweed porkpie hat and mother of pearl inlayed accordian, a boy on the T tries to look ambiguous and older than his too smooth cheeks and century

"hello!" shouts an old friend smile not seen for four years
smell of basil grown and ground to pesto by her hands
tang of red wine and bite of whisky, irish clinking on ice
overtone harmonics of musicians tuning and crackle hiss of microphone failure
sore muscles from too much walking
shimmering reflection of moonlight on water and the configuration of the Plaeidies
taste of kisses on rooftop



***

today we wandered into the downtown crossing to browse through musty old used bookstores (and why am i not running one?) where i found a copy of some aldous huxley poems from the 30's and Plath's "Ariel" which i remembered later i had dreamt about buying a copy of in my dreams last night (except that one was enormous and in spanish).

dusting off time

The other night nikki and i hung out and we were talking about our families and childhoods and how we got into performing. she's been on a big memoir kick recently, writing out things from her past whether with her family or old places and lovers, and she asked if i hadn't tried writing about all my years performing, what got me started playing music and doing poetry and how all my years acting have influenced the full aesthetic i strive for while on stage. and i said yeah i should do this. and started the next day! it's taken me awhile of hemming and hawing to find an angle in on my past, for months now, and suddenly there's pages and pages of experience, certain gigs, teachers, desires acted out... and i'm finding it is not enough just to write about one angle like performing, the past is so intricately interwoven that to write about one thing i have to bring in my social searching, my family, my loves, etc... "as the pattern grows more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough." even if i never publish this, or not till years hence, it is such a worthwhile exercise to dredge up the full contents of my life. i suppose i would have to say all my views on memory in that essay i wrote are wrong. or if not wrong than i was missing the key point that though we can only access our memories from the present and can view them how we will, who we are now is only possible due to the precise nature of what has happened to us, from the big events down to the smallest corner we went around instead of going around another. even if we don't remember these things, and perhaps especially if we don't, because our whole lives of memories are still stored in our bodies and acting out through us everyday, the whole weight of our becoming determining what we do from moment to moment... i suppose that's what they mean by fate. destiny (rilke's destiny) would be learning to take up that body of fate and let it lead us where we want to go and not just at the whims of passing time.

pirates at the end of the world

In the first dream things were falling apart fast, another black skied apocalypse with the buildings crumbling in and the birds flying off. even the insects had made their peace and began crawling up out of the ground, dancing in their bioluminescence on the stalks of the tallest grasses they could find in order to say goodbye before lifting off for some other planet. those appliances and gadgets smart enough to have found a mind of their own also followed suit, though a large washing machine that had had enough of our human meddling heaved itself up in the air, and hovering like a strange mechanical land shark tried to land on me. then i went outside, and things seemed normal again, at least as normal as they always are with the greying zombies walking around, ghosts fading in and out of the walls, and all succumbed to the monstrous tv eyes that floated in the orange haze that now blanketed the city.

Falling back to sleep, i was captured by cartoon pirates, along with a pig and some other anthropomorphized creature, and were forced to do a lot of the grunt work swabbing the deck and such so the captain and his crew could sit around drinking and playing video games. we were also land pirates, the ship able to sail down the roads with as much ease as on waves, and stopped here and there to pick up food supplies and more crew members, large bloated men in scroungy shirts with even mangier facial hair and sharp knives. at one stop however the pig jumped off to try and catch a rabbit to eat, since we prisoners weren't given much food, but he only succeeded in catching a small black kitten, who immediately took to me and the captain let us keep despite the jealousy and hunger of the crew. he figured they wouldn't mutiny over such a small matter. the cat ran around and nosed into everything and i worried that he wouldn't fall overboard and drown. eventually we passed what was like a school district with people waiting at the bus stop for the school schooner to take them home, and things were mellowing out until the cat pissed all over me, and there wasn't much choice but to wear the smelly clothes.

action breeds action: on establishing a healthy practice

something it’s taken me almost 26 long years to learn and i’m still only beginning to realize it: the more you do the more you are able to do. power builds by use. will, focus, practice, patience, compassion, communication, these energies are a muscle, you have to exercise them in order to make them grow stronger. Like a corollary to the first law of thermodynamics, a body in motion will remain in motion. as soon as you rest, you loose all drive and ability to act.

i noticed this first at work, where on slow busy days i get a lot more done. there is no time to sit down and i go from task to task in a continual flow. but as soon as there is a lull in orders and i sit down, smoke a cigarette, read the paper, play pinball, i loose all momentum, and getting back into the kitchen is near impossible. the same goes for writing, the moment you stop working on a poem, a story, it dies, and the longer you wait between working the harder it is. you must keep going, you can not stop loving it and living it or entropy takes hold, the flatline fading of the couch and the doldrums. of dying daily. you must keep exercising your muscles or you will rot where you stand.

and more, finding this kind of practice, anything you choose to do regularly builds that flow of energy, your will to act. i’ve heard several writers and artists talk about running or biking regularly in order to build a healthy practice for something, anything, to get the blood moving and apply that to their primary task. recently i have found myself creatively slowed down and realize i have a poor practice of it of late. this past week i’ve had to watch the dog and chickens and gardens while my housemates are on tour, and this regular activity is already allowing me to focus in on having to perform my tasks on a more regular basis (even if these creatures are taking up a lot of the time i would like to spend on my crafts). this is like the path of karma yoga, of doing one’s daily tasks without looking forward to the reward of them being done, of building a healthy practice out of doing the dishes, going to work, watching your children, whatever it is you are required to do on a regular basis. the key point being that it’s regular (though not necessarily clockwork) and part of one’s flow of doing.

because it is a flow, a font. you have to be open to it and let action well up and pour through you, and it will carry you along through everything you want to do. drinking won’t, tv and video games won’t. the internet won’t (unless it’s part of a practice of research or networking). Remember, you are what you choose to pay attention to. of course, it helps if you have specific and limited paths to practice. one can’t build focus towards any one thing by spreading thin towards everything. i would recommend no more than one practice from each discipline (unless you choose to focus on multiple from one discipline). physical- running, biking, yoga, martial arts, etc. mental- research, essays, conversations, crosswords or other logic puzzles, math, etc.. creative – poetry, fiction, visual arts, music, dance, photography. the day to day – work, pets, children, cooking, etc. emotional- all your various relationships. spiritual- church, personal rituals, exploration (external or internal)… you probably get the point. the benefit of a multi-disciplinarian practice being that it allows one to exercise the numerous modes of being that make up a complete human and thus allows one to grow in totality and not just specialized in one direction at disadvantage to the others. keep in mind we are multifaceted and easily atrophy, and if you maintain good practices across the board than when the situation arises you should be capable of doing anything.

his angst was gnawing at him

And the question of the night, just why was the President reading Camus' "The Stranger" on a recent vacation? perhaps he heard the Cure song, "killing an arab" and thought, oh i can relate to that...


and
the word of the evening:

hegemony (n.)- control or dominating influence by one person or group over others, especially by one political group over society or one nation over others

tongues against the grain

i went out to dinner with aurelia the other night, between bouts at the bar. i had missed all the intelligent conversations we get in, that with some people it is easy to talk, that there is still a spark of intelligence left that is willing to be exercised when so often it is just the recounting of the daily hijinks and work and bullshit like there's nothing more important to talk about in this world. i rue this daily. i am also shy, but that's my own problem. over thai tofu salad she lamented that no one is willing to really talk anymore, that here we are in this city (this world) which professes to be on some advance edge but we are not even willing to critique ourselves much less critique the main society that we are embedded in and constantly struggling against. i didn't get to raise the point that counterculture is dead, that any sense of struggle gets co-opted, that people would rather try and be happy or sated for the day than face all the frustrations and unsurities that comes from opening that can of worms. what are we to do about this world? where do we even begin talking about it? certainly not in a blaring bar, though centuries worth of artists and revolutionaries found their greatest conversations over a glass of vino in smoky backrooms.

for my own sake, and i've said this before in so many ways, i often feel i am living in an aesthetic void, an age in which the meaningful, the epic, the search for Truth and Beauty, are no longer relevant. youtube is. snakes on a plane is. the yeah yeah yeahs and poems about getting beaten as a child. i'm reaching a point where i almost no longer care, and will go about doing what i feel it is important for me to do and say, except that i don't live in a vacuum. any writing i would want to do, any stirring song, comes from this world and reaches the ears of someone in this world. but maybe only a few who will actually listen. that art music literature have reached a relative null-point is telling of some deeper lack of meaning or view in our culture. that "the da vinci code" was a bestseller. that i can count on one hand those few people who inspire me, whose work i actually admire, and even then only occasionally. that as this year passes i hear more and more people make passing jokes like "lets burn all the great works of art," "let's murder all the bad pop stars," "let's ship andy warhol's bones back to new york where he belongs," as if the only thing we have holding us back from whatever turning point in creativity, in life, is the cultural drift of the past, the dead heavy hand of these artifacts that we can say everything has been done, everything has been said... why bother to add to it anymore? let's just get high and see what's on tv.

i've said before as well, what's the alternative? a return to the folk, the ultra personal where the art is only being done for one's self and closest friends, recounting personal experience (as the best art has to) but out of any context of the centuries of culture to which we are heir. we live in an age where anyone can write about their day, and if it is compelling enough, the whole world can listen. where anyone can record their fourtrack pop song and post it on myspace. but who's actually listening? with such an influx of information you can't possibly sift through it all, and the signal to noise ratio approaches a blind static panic. like the hordes of fashionable hipsters who i'm sure are all interesting enough people in their individual but subsume it all to the latest trends of cowboy shirts and tulled skirts and indie pop much less the "masses" in their tshirts and reality tv. we are all stars, and every star wants to shine, if it weren't for the uniform illumination of the streetlamps. what's the alternative? certainly not a silent acceptance of the everyday and the status quo.

through the spiders web

i went to go visit my muse, who lived in a tall row house on the edge of a cliff (like most of the houses in my dream city). she was getting ready to go out so i waited and noticed a small yellow butterfly-flat spider was weaving a web over the entire door which i had just disturbed by coming in. the spider and several more like it were quickly weaving across that entire side of the room and the strands were so thick my muse had already hung some clothes over them to dry. i was concerned how we would get out of the room, but she just walked right through the web, breaking it but saying sometimes you have to disturb what's there.

we started walking along the back side of the city, following a map my younger brother had given me that was marked with an x graffitied on the wall of some building. (this is not the first time he's hidden stuff in the walls of buildings in my dreams) we found it and i reached through the wall to find another map, looking back to see already the x was fading indistinguishable into the other tags. this map pointed to the location of various small islands off the shore to the north and their relation to certain places and trials in my quest dreams and methods for reaching them in a faint alchemical script.

so we started walking north out of the city towards the forests, stopping briefly at my cafe so i could tell my boss i wouldn't be in to work for awhile.

spells on the wall

It was rather disconcerting to find that someone had posted a magic spell on our bulletin board at work. a shoddily photocopied sigil of an upside-down pentagram surrounded by almost illegible hebrew letters above a cutup poem that claimed to be "a piece of machinery for the advent of the meat-eating masses backstroke" with a bunch of seeming drivel, including something about the inferno of Liza Minelli, and ending with a call for the targets of the spell (presumably meat-eaters?) to get cleft lips for christmas. i won't reprint the whole of it here, as it was put in a public place it probably works mimetically and i don't want to inadvertently infect anyone with it. and who knows what the intentions of the poster were, if it was just some random piece of junk someone put up or if they really do want to give people cleft lips, and are fully capable of doing so. either way, it bothered me on some deep level, enough that i didn't even take it down because who knows what sort of wards people put up on these kind of things. i've seen too much to take any bit of random symbols and mumbling as just that. they have a power only at the edges of our comprehension.

Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

"freedom depends on the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera

• Memory is accreted (like a seashell, armor, crystal) in our bodies and blood*, taking on a recognizable pattern, a body and meaning that can be called a life. when we are young and have no memory we have no such psychic detritus carried around us, but as we age we can't help picking up memories, symbols, songs, and attaching them to ourselves as sort of an addendum to that central self
• Thus we can say of an object, idea, person, moment, that it “gathers world” (ie: accrues meaning), which though often psychic or imaginative in nature can be displayed in a physical manner (wrinkles, collections of junk, crumbling, etc…)
• World itself could be considered an artifact of time, the shell or record (imprint) left behind by the movement of light/ life, in the way vinyl is a physical imprint of the sound waves of a song.
• Memory is not a recollection in the past, but a reconstruction in the present of what one images the past was like, and like dreams, may not bare any factual resemblance to what actually happened.+
• The longer ago something occurred, the less factual or clear the memory becomes. it is much easier to remember yesterday as it happened than last year, or childhood. as memory recedes it turns into myth (ie: its meaning takes on larger and metaphorical proportions turning the contents of our lives into a cohesive story instead of a disjointed series of circumstances).
• Memory is aided by symbolic, emotional, or physical cues (mnemonic triggers) in which the present reflects or replays some similar aspect of the past. music is an excellent example of this, hearing the first strains of a song related to your first relationship can years later still bring tears to your eyes.
• Object-bound (codified) memory is called history, imagination-based memory is called dream, or in the collective, myth. history is no more factual than myth, as both are perspectives relating event to meaning. and as myth is an amalgamation of countless archetypified memories, so is history a collective story we build around ourselves (in the world) in order to give ourselves a sense of time
• Media (writing, recordings, photographs, etc.) act as External Memory Devices, in that they take on the burden of memory into a physical object, thus removing any dreamlike/ mythic qualities of the memory. the current proliferation of EMDs marks a transition from myth to history, as well as the view of World from mind (“God”) to one large medium (artifact, the husk or corpse of “God”)
• While memory remains in imagination (subjective), it is fluid, malleable, and can take on whatever perspective or meaning the rememberer chooses. in a process similar to Dreaming Back, “bad” memories, moments of failure, anger, regret, can be re-remembered in a different light, one that allows the rememberer to get over or move past certain negatively ingrained perspectives or hang ups, thus altering where they stand in the present, as well as what they can make of their future.
• When a memory calcifies into history (becomes objective/ objectified), it is no longer fluid and can no longer be re-remembered in a different angle (unless of course the process of objectification is one of re-remembering), as it is no longer in the world itself. this also means that the memory is no longer personal, and belongs to the collective store of memory, the Record, and thus available to anyone as a memory of their own life. this is particularly true in ages of hyper-information, like this one, where the contents of individuals’ daily lives are offered up and become more readily available to strangers than ones own childhood. an example is a song coming on he jukebox and everyone singing along, even if they do not know the words or hadn’t heard the song before. what this means in terms of collective myth remains to be seen.
• With this vast store of memories to draw on, it would seem the artist should have no end of themes and experiences to draw on, effectively being bale to take on any life that is presented to them. However, art that is drawn from one’s own emotions and experiences rings the most true, as it has been lived, and the artist must be wary of assuming experiences that have no relation to their own. yet there is a balance to be found in taking the historicized memories and already written works of art of the collective and running them through one’s own experiences to create art that is both true and able to touch upon those deepest and most common themes of being human: love, death, family, struggle, the search for place and meaning. this could now be said to be the task of the modern artist, to take these themes that are available in the collective memory and return them to the fluidity of the subjective, where they are once again able to be reshaped or re-dreamed into whatever form imaginable or desirable, and thus to recreate the lost sense of myth in our culture. as Joseph Campbell put it: “dreams are private myths, and myths are collective dreams.”


• * memory and the body– one talks about having intellectual memories, emotional memories, muscle memory (the learning of physical tasks to a subconscious level). really, this separation of memories is a misnomer, as mind and emotion exist nowhere but in the body. there is only physical memory, the storing of tensions in muscle, the decay of skin cells with age, the patterning of genes, which can be read on a variety of different levels. take for example accounts of a person doing yoga for the first time, or receiving a strenuous massage. memories stored in the muscle tension are released and they have a flashback to that memory, effectively reliving the primary experience. however, most of us are not nearly so attuned to our bodies as to have such visceral remembrances.

• + time and memory– the trichotomy of past/ present/ future is also a misnomer, and the perception of time as a linear flow is an illusion, although sometimes a convenient one. Really all we live in is the present, and any perceptions of past or future are but imaginative extrapolations of this one current moment. a kind of subjunctive pattern recognition in which we can assert a sense of causality and desire in order to effectively plan our next action, and feel not so lost in the chaos of sensory data. as World accrues meaning, like seashells or thorns buried in the skin, so does times (our sense of eventuality or continuation) leave shards or ripples of itself in the periphery of our experiencing. these objects of memory are interpreted as a “coming from” that “goes somewhere,” and give us a reason and context for our present. it is also possible to remember the future, interpreting the present pattern in a manner that points to what will happen (prophecy).

asterism

Blinking balefully between the barlights and billboards. “that one’s Deneb,” he said, “and that’s Vega, and the third making the long point in the Summer Triangle is Altair.” It wasn’t a constellation, but it’s shape, drawn out of our peculiar penchant for pattern recognition, was one of the only asterisms visible in the city sky. “though i might be wrong which are Deneb and Vega, but it doesn’t really matter.” it’s not like we were trying to go sailing. He pulled out a piece of paper and began drawing clusters of dots, “let me show you something. you know where the big dipper is, right? well trace up from the lower side and you’ll find the Pole Star in the little dipper. Up from there, Cassiopeia, which looks like a crooked M. continue that arch and you’ll hit Andromeda and from there trace the longer arm down to Perseus. I’m not sure if that’s clear, oh wait, i’ve got a book of star charts in my bag.”

I flipped through it, mesmerized by the map of spectral points lines, like some secret forgotten tome of connect the dots, while he turned back and continued the winding conversation about comic books, snakes on a plane, the current debacle in Israel. Around the tables others stood in the summer sweat, drinking and talking and looking for some meaning in each other’s faces but none of them looking up. I wanted to take the book and use it for what it’s for, to find a way out of here. I wanted an antique telescope (even if the magnification wasn’t enough), a tall hill, a rock to bust the streetlamps, and all the heavens spread wide before my gaze. I sighed and lit another cigarette.

For the past several years I had made it a habit to go out at night and look up, try and familiarize myself with the few constellations i could find and name and watch their course as the earth spun through the year. as if being able to orient myself to the universe i could know where i was, or what i was supposed to do with my life. for centuries man has thus looked up and seen the vast oceans of light in which we are only the barest speck of dust. we have based whole societies off these configurations, determined harvest times, sailed around the world, created mythologies in the movement of figures in which we could understand the process of life, even if the constellations only appear as congruent, due to our perspective looking out into space, one could be spread out across billions of light years distance. but i suppose it was reassuring, and still is, to imagine the sky as a large dome of night on which the stars are drawn. a sense of center, of importance. but now we have forgotten even that, and walk around as if there was nothing outside ourselves, no greater reality on which to plot our lives, like we could no longer find a place or meaning beyond that small internal starlight that pushes us through the days.

the next night, another bar, another restless longing. “i want to go on an adventure, but where? how far is there to go?” eventually remember the Perseid meteor shower and we head off to the cemetery, which though still in the city is the closest darkest place, and even if we don’t see anything it’s still a nice walk. down the path between tombstones, like the black road of the Milky Way mapped on earth. i look up, try and orient myself, excited to use this new knowledge so soon. my companions are talking, adjusting to the dark. “ok, there’s the big dipper, there’s the pole star, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Perseus, we should be looking there… oh, fuck yeah! there’s one now!” a streak of light falling through the clouds, caught between a tree branch and an obelisk. i start jumping up and down, running backwards. “there’s another!” no one else has seen them yet and i take off running, zig-zagging through the graves to the tallest hill where i plop down on a headstone and stare up rapt. an hour passes in the drift of clouds and the overfull moon. i keep on reorienting myself but there are no meteors. eventually we head out, and on the way see a couple more, but that’s it, as if they only fell when we weren’t actually looking for them. i feel ecstatic, radiant like a star myself, but saddened that that’s the best it would get this night, this century. back on the streets it’s impossible to see anything up there and someone says, “well, now what?” Perseus may have slain the gorgon and turned Cassiopeia to stone to wed her daughter Andromeda, freed from the rocks, but now he is fading, forgotten, dying out as his story turns to dust and his stars fall, dead long before he was imagined. i wonder how long might we last, who aren’t already emblazoned in the heavens?


this following little ditty was based off key lines in the above piece, much like the deconstruction exercise...

a star fell off the map
and got tangled in the treetops
i wondered what myth had crumbled
while we kicked among the tombstones,
some warrior-god forgotten
between barlights and billboards
and finding fate in faces
and not one looking upwards.
if i had a telescope
and a rock to break the streetlamps
i'd sail the constellations
to see if it was my own

notes on days

spinning along the tightrope shadows of telephone wires
and the constellation crunch of fall's first fallen,
though the days lay dogged and panting still
the underlying heat subsides into the liner notes
of stolen LPs pouring over star maps at the bar,
charting the course of cool breezes from dream
to rust in the trajectory of meteor showers and silence
and long walks in harvest moon hoodies
hanging from the eaves of the hospital
with a stack of hotcakes.

landscapes as large as insomnia

A couple weeks ago several of us started a writer's group so we could get feedback on work in progress and talk about our craft. also including furious rounds of exquisite corpse and writing exercises as homework between meetings. this last week we decided to each write a poem of sixteen lines, edit it down to eight, then four then two lines, a process of, as i see it, learning to refine the essential or necessary metaphors of the piece.

the problem being that for days i have been feeling unable to write. not writer's block, there are still too many themes and images welling up to be written, but just sort of a dauntingness of knowing how. not to mention working way too much and sleeping way too little and the always frustrations of figuring out the logistics of living, and the full moon and in the trough of my bimonthly manic cycles. and spending whatever free time and energy i have writing long letters and doing way too much research on Yeats' complex and strange symbol system (which is another story entirely and too close to home for casual thought).

finally last night i went to armand's, where i go after work occasionally to get a drink and write, and just started in on a piece about my grandmother's funeral that i hadn't been able to touch yet and probably needs a lot more work if not the rest of my life to consider in full. but much too long to be the 16 line homework assignment. but relieving, and like turning on the tap again.

so tonight after reading octavio paz's magnificent piece "sun stone" i just figured, it didn't matter what i wrote, as long as i went at it, and came up with the following bit of train of thought that while much much too short (it is a theme of all themes i could expand indefinitely in any direction), the process of culling it down was highly highly illuminating as far as seeing how metaphors are constructed from disparate images.



16.
i call on the names of all:
candle light, tabletop, train tunnel,
terror touched in a stranger’s face
and turned to smile (we’re really not so strange)

call on sublime sunsets
over rose petaled oceans
and lightning storms, days of travel,
the crumbling chessboard of roads and fences

this third smoke, that man’s beret,
the glare and howl of the television,
every drink shared between friends
and every toast thrown at the wall in rage

i call on you the names of all:
histories and communiqués and fading,
every memory lost and rewritten
on the silent stone of this world

8.
i call on the names of all:
the light that turns the stranger
from a tunnel of terror to smile,
across the storms of road and rose

i call on you the names of all:
the everyday glare shared like toast
with the memories of history smoking
on the silent stone of this world

4.
i call on the names of all:
daylight shared with strangers’ smiles
to toast the tunnel of memory smoking
on the silent rose of this world

2.
i call on shared sunlight smiles
to toast the tunneled rose of time

from sun stone by Octavio Paz

"I search without finding, and I write alone,
no one is here, and the day ends, the year ends,
I have gone down with the moment, all the way down,
the road is invisible over all these mirrors,
they repeat and reflect forever my broken image,
I pace the days, the moments pave this roadway,
I step upon the thinking of my shadow,
I pace my shadow in search of my one moment,"

track is to time as tunnel is to transformation

after visiting Selena's flat i wandered into another house (built on a cliff edge like all the houses in my dreams), where some old friends were hanging out, and all the curtains bedspreads table cloths were a syrupy lime green color that nauseated me but then i remembered i had a sweater in that color (i don't really). so i went out onto the backporch, really the landing over the back stair well, which was a small bedroom decorated with all my twin brother's discarded childhood toys, including a strange multimedia collage of a sci-fi train depot. Rob (who i saw yesterday) came out to smoke a cigarette and asked to show me the rest of the house. we went down and explored several rooms, one of which i thought Sarah Baure used to live in, except it was like the room was being swallowed by the wood paneled walls and doorway. it was covered in yarn and her spinning wheel still sat in the middle. i somehow missed the ground floor.

outside, i found myself walking along the train tracks with someone i thought might have been an old childhood friend (either James Thompson, who i haven't thought about since middle school, or Marshall). there were several tracks parallel to each other and they were all still active. every few minutes a train would appear around the bend and blast by, making it an interesting little game to not get hit. i looked back, and saw my two younger brothers following along the track. devon kept on balancing on the rails and i was worried he was going to get hit. along the track to the left, Christian and Chris St-Pierre were walking (i also saw them yesterday), and we were all heading for the vast train tunnel that appeared up ahead. eventually we all crossed to the left, james was gone at this point and devon was ahead of me. my friends took a small access passage to the side while my brothers and i forged ahead, running swiftly through the dark coals next to the track until we came to a larger room that sloped upwards. devon bounded up the hill saying it was possible to do in five leaps, with malcolm on his heels. i however had a bit of a struggle getting my legs out of the now quicksand like mass of soot. at the top was a small exhaust tunnel they had both just squeezed into to crawl back to the surface. i looked at this and decided to wake up.

i think one of my goals for today might have to be to get a flashlight and go explore the train tunnel down in the hollow. three nights of train dreams, there's something up in my subconscious about the need to get moving.

Later: the hollow is dark and quiet, no busses, no fireflies, the occasional bat and the crunch of gravel as spat and i walk along the rails. "so if you see any vehicles up there, make yourself invisible. i guess it's more of a mind thing. i hear if you think of fresh fruit salad cops can't see you. that's an old SoCal punk mindtrick. Exene Cervenka told that to Sweet-tooth, who told it to me, and now i'm telling it to you." we grow quiet as we approach the tunnel's mouth, passing the spot where Selena and i found the dog's head. crunch of gravel, voices from over the hedges, and a bus on the bridge. paranoia and rot in the bushes.

and the gaping dark, with two steel strings leading off like guiderails to time. flashlights lit we step inside. it's muddy, thick gray ooze covering the tracks, and water drips down the walls onto years of worn graffiti. every 40 yards or so an alcove sits off to the side, large enough for two people to stand in if a train comes. after the first few moments with the mouth growing smaller behind us it's really not as imposing, not like the tunnel in my dreams.

not like the train tunnel from my childhood, back in old town in alexandria, left over from an earlier age and now connecting a grocery store and a playground. we used to walk through it to go swing and practice cartwheels in the field on the other side. i remember the lights were a ghostly yellow and the echoes were filled with extra voices. reaching the other side without running was always the biggest challenge.

it's hard to stomp through the slime, but we're between train schedules so we have time. looking down i notice footprints in the mud, someone else walked this way since the last rain. barefoot, and running all over the place. spat jokes it might be a ghost, but there's nothing really all that haunted about this tunnel. we try to gauge if we've made it halfway, and soon come out in Oakland, down in Panther Hollow, pants and shoes caked and with all the surreal feeling of having taken the offbeaten path.

Jack Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose:

Jack Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language &knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

digging through pages of time

Long days of welling memories between the mechanics of living. engineering the sounds and sayings, looking for work and a roof, flashes of each time i've looked for work, a roof, strum and song and all the harsh grating of details. i almost got a whole house for cheap, but not cheap enough, so instead i went to goodwill to look for books to sell and came home with a stack for my own library. i can't help myself. of course there were some excellent finds. a copy of PKDick's Exegesis, a book on missing myths in america, a pocket edition of the surrealist poet Apollinaire's "alcools" who coined the term surrealism (in french unfortunately, but it was only a dollar. these texts can not be lost to time).

the greatest find, comparable to a DJ's record crate digging, was a copy of the Comte de Lautreamont's "les chants de maldoror" which i've been meaning to acquire for awhile and never expected in the snooty shadyside thrift shop. hailed as a masterpiece by the surrealists (it contains their founding quote "beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table") this prose poem was written in the late 1800's by a mysterious youth who died at the age of 24. many of the writers i admire, and the ones they admired, relied heavily on this text, which from the sound of it falls in the same type of journalistic literature as my two favorite novels, rilke's "the notebooks of malte-laurides brigge" or sartre's "nausea". where the "hero" of the notebooks is obsessed with and sees through Death, and in "nausea" with the existential horror of Emptiness, Lautreamont's anti-hero Maldoror is obsessed with Evil and the absence of god and how this is acted out (in apparently disturbing and imagistic passages that almost had the book banned for obscenity when it was first published). i look forward to reading this when i'm done with Henry Miller's "Plexus", along with the copy of Yeat's symbolist text "a vision" which i also recently tracked down. now if i can only find a copy of stephen mallarme's poetry in the trash...

lautreamont is also credited with saying: "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author's sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with a right one."

and

"Poetry must be made by all and not by one."

mining a map of dreams

...over a large map of forests and mountains and rivers, swirling down slow until I landed beside a watchtower lighthouse on the bluff of a cliff overlooking the sea. to one side lay a low slung beach and to the other was a huge ravine between the cliff and the Vast, the large desert of ruins that lies to the north-east of the city in my dreamworld. turning i entered a large marble open air hallway, towering columns and archways and swarming with a bustle of people all dressed in dingy gray workoutfits and protective coats. i was wearing a black halflength frock coat under a large trench and tall black boots (somewhat like the outfit worn by the alchemist in "Holy Mountain") and had a knapsack with me. none of them noticed me. down the hall they were turning left into a large ampitheatre like auditorium in which the forman was explaining the procedures of the excavation and warning the new workers to keep away from the scourge, who were a bunch of freeloading outlaws who mooched off the operation and just wanted to lay around all day. at this, several members of that band scattered throughout the audience, who looked like a bunch of long haired hippies, started jeering him and goading the workers until he threatened to destroy their camp, at which they got up and left. we were each given a work suit and tools and a locker combination and told to report for the next shift. i got up and found my locker down a hall to the right, near the infirmary, the combination was 601-552 and i dropped off the outer coat and extra boots i was carrying along with the tools before going to look for the hippies, which wasn't hard as they were standing about the hallway literally aping the workers. i approached one, with long hair and large beard named john (?) and explained my mission and asked if he could take me to their camp so i could plan my next move. something about my attire and eyes swayed him. he agreed, and they led me wandering through the halls till we got out the back to where the cliff overlooked the sea. it was really a steep hill and they started down it slowly, while i decided to just slide down it spilling out near the bottom into a pile of red dust, the contents of my bag also coming loose and getting covered in the stuff. i sat down to clean them off while the scourge sat around me and out of the bag fell a round red coin (or ball) which rolled in a perfect clockwise circle around us. john, who was sitting opposite, smiled and joked that i was casting a circle. i shrugged and he suggested i should probably talk to mambie (?) since i was one of "those ones". he led me through a grove of palm trees to a wicker hut on the beach. inside was like a storehouse hung with food items, fruit, fishing nets, etc... in the back was a smaller room also crammed with stuff, but of a strange and voodoo-like nature. laying on a cot by the wall was a young woman who seemed incapable of getting up. around her stalked a yellow catlike creature that seemed to be made more of liquid than flesh and bones. i approached, and she began to explain to me the nature of their tribe, how they had a somewhat symbiotic relationship with that of the mining operation (though in what way was left unclear) and that her community felt she was more a burden at this point since she lost the use of her legs, even though she was the one who predicted the tides of the dunes and sea which dictated both were they would move next and which ruins would be uncovered. as she talked she unshelled seed after seed and tossed them in a large basket/ pot in which was the pulp from what must have been an enormous amount of cantaloupes. she seemed sad because they would probably off her soon and she suggested i get out of there before i was recruited in her place. on the way out she pressed several tattered pages into my hand.

back at the watchtower i examined the pages, which turned out to be several maps. the first, which i got the best look at, was of the cliff face below the tower marking out all the tunnels and bridges that had been carved out of the side of the ravine. the others were of the beach and the desert ruins. i quickly stuffed them in the pocket of my jacket as a bell rang, and hurried back to the auditorium for the next shift meeting. there i ran into M, wearing only a leather bra and leggings who was laughing and teasing the workers, i tried to see if she knew anything about what was going on at the dig site but she was too distracted. several other strangely attired characters filed by. soon the meeting was over and i went back to the locker room and entered my combination. however, since i hadn't reported to the shift (i assume this is the reason) the locker imploded and destroyed my belongings. for a moment i tried to entertain that it was the wrong locker, but no i was out of luck and thought i would have to give up my plans. but then Spat came up and gave me his tool bag and told me he'd find me a coat since it was deathly cold out on the Vast. he did so and i geared up in the leather work outfit, strapped all the equipment on and placing the goggles tight on my eyes clambered down the south side of the cliff and out onto the desert. towering dunes of stark sand, craggy cliffs and a biting wind, in the distance ancient crumbling structures swam, old marble and caryatids decimated by the centuries of sandstorms. checking the maps i pulled myself together and began to walk... and then woke up.

word is gold

i knew i wouldn't be able to sleep, so i went on a long walk around bloomfield from the hollow to the playground swings behind Ritter's, scheming up the next piece of 'anamnesia' and a counterpoint to last night's ramblings on language. then when i might have passed out i got my nose stuck in the anthology of surrealist poetry i picked up last week and ended up with this whimsical little ditty about four in the morning (the excessive ellipses are only in leu of indentation, and not morse code):

I am beginning to see whatever I say becomes real.
Birds
. . . . . fly fluttering feathers from lips,
cakes and carousals
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . turn round the tongue
and every secret is illumined with
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . .starlight.
I will never thirst again, sleep when I whisper
can tell the helicopters to finally
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . be quiet
and always have the most exquisite
. . . . . . . . . .. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .beautiful day.
Immediately I called for a parade:
. . . . ... . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . .. ... . .elephants
acrobats,
. .. . . .. . . brassband banners
. . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . .. .. . billowing out,
huge crowds promenading down the boulevards.
Called for
. . . . . . . . . insane ecstasy
. . . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . .. .. . . nonstop laughter,
what the gods felt when they spoke the world.
I began to experiment,
. . . . . .. . .. ... ... . . . ... porcelain cacophony
rained tea cups and toilet seats for weeks
and no one could keep their hands off
the insatiable piano
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .or the velvet sunrise,
even if it burned a little on the edges.
I quickly learned to not say words like
pain or police or palpitate
. . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . .. . for fear
of the red jagged beating and woe
if I ever uttered
. . . . . . . . . .. . . a final Armageddon;
loose, these lips really could sink ships.
But this is no big thing, we do it every day,
most of us never noticing how with a word
we bring the heavens down on our heads.
So I kept at it, crying for
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .. . peace
possibility,
. . . . . . . . . . full bellies
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..and free speech,
and all the war machines sprouted flowers
prison bars bent into ornamental gates
groceries exploded across the streets
and everyone said exactly what was on their minds.
It was sheer chaos and reveling and many asked
me to say
. . . . . . . . .normalcy
. . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .. .or at least
. . . . . . . ... .. . . . . . ... . . . . .. .. .silence,
but I only smiled, and said
. . . .. . . . . . . . .... . . . . . .. everything.

when language spills over...as opposed to that purity and fullness of language in which every word becomes real, which harks back to the work Ezra Pound and others did in showing how ideogramatic (Chinese) poetry relied purely on images working out their own fate, words also have a tendency to fill up with so much meaning that they overflow, and produce all manner of absurd juxtapositions. This is pointed at in Hakim Bey's article on the taoist philosopher Chaung-Tzu's idea of spillover language, refers to the process by which images fill up with so much meaning, or minds with so many images, that they spill over like a full gourd and create new unprecedented ways of looking at the world. This idea found its peak as a body of technique in the surrealists with their automatic writing and exquisite corpses, that while sometimes being just ridiculous (like the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table, the line that sparked their movement) also have a way of recreating the way one looks at the world in every moment. in relation to the pure expression of language, this sense of bizarre juxtaposition can both mask the image being presented and express more facets of it, for example saying "oceanic swiss" both masks the reference to the moon, and highlights its cratered landmass and gravitational pull on water, and has the added benefit of positing a fleet of scuba-diving mice upon the moons surface, if your brain takes you there. of course, not all these images really carry such a surplus of meaning, and we haven't yet accounted for where these divulgent images come from...

hunting text

Current research on schools of poetry, tracing back technique and themes through all outsider literature, from the beats back to the surrealists, the modernists, etc etc... curious to find the strain of occult/ spiritual practices that underlies most of these groups. was blown away reading a biographical sketch on Yeats, too many parallels to my basic belief systems, he even created a whole system of personality types based off the phases of the moon, and recorded in his poetry.

also this, from Jean Baudrillard's "Simulations" (semiotext(e) publications):

"This would be the successive phases of the image:
-it is the reflection of a basic reality
-it masks and perverts a basic reality
-it masks the absence of a basic reality
-it bears no relation to any reality
whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. in the first case, the image is a good appearance- the representation is of the order of sacrament. in the second, it is an evil appearance- of the order of malefice. in the third, it plays at being an appearance- it is of the order of sorcery. in the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation."

this last being about where our culture is right now. the question being how to take it to the next step, to reclaim the image by positing there is no difference between the image and reality (at least as far as we are able to percieve it), in that to say there is a difference between images and reality creates a false dichotomy. everything is real, even those things resigned only to the imagination. to give something a name, a function, a relation to other things, is to give it life. this applies equally to poetry/ art as it does to sensory perception. for example, when i write moon, beggar, glass of water, i am talking about these things (even if they are not specific moons, beggars, or glasses of water in front of me). when i see these things i am seeing a moon, a beggar, a glass of water (even if it could be argued i am perceiving merely lightwaves and assigned mental labels and not objects at all). the image of something is what it is. what it means however, is a whole other issue, and dependent on both cultural and subjective reference to these things. when i say or see "moon" it brings up a host of connotations and allusions from anything as ancient greek mythology to my own life, etc... which i imply in my use of the image, but are not extant in the image itself, and this is the key point, if someone else reads my word moon or is pointed out the moon in the sky, their interpretation of moon may be vastly different from their own experiences of moon (unless of course i give proper context for my own interpretation). but this does not change the fact that the moon is still the moon. even to create an artificial moon (orbiting an artificial planet in an artificial galaxy) is dependent on that it is still a moon.

Yeats rued the fact that most poets of his time (and this has only gotten worse) did not draw their images (and meanings) from systems of correspondence, large cultural drifts of symbol/ interpretation bordering on the archetypal, whereby the poet showing a particular image is sure to be understood. nowadays the trend is towards reiterating portions of their life without any regard to symbolism at all, turning poetry into a journalistic or biographical medium that when read the audience has very little subconscious imagery to connect to, unless they have had a similar experience in their own life. and even then, how poetic is it, in relation to the epic imagistic poems that have withstood the axe of time? Granted, all one can draw on is their own experiences, otherwise the words do not ring true, but to draw these disparate events into the vast host of cultural, and human, meaning... to say "i saw the moon" and have that imply not only this occurrence of the moon but centuries worth of moons. imagine the force then behind that word, that could send shivers down your spine and impart the physical affect of the moon's gravity on the blood, a language of reckoning where saying "moon" creates Moon. the image not just as reality, but containing the full reality of that image.

on the climb

Wandering around last night decided to stop by sarah and alberto's to tell them of my absurd revelations and see how his art is ticking along. without knowing it i was jsut in time to watch one of my favorite movies ever, alejandro jodorowsky's "the holy mountain"...



Filmed (and set?) in mexico in the 70's, this is the surreal tale of a jesus coming back from the dead and fighting off his personal monsters and the horrors of the modern world learning the secrets of self-transformation from an alchemist and going on a quest to the holy mountain in order step out of time and become immortal. not only is this movie incredible for its use of disturbing sound collages and almost no dialogue, but the symbolism! my gods is just too blatant, nothing couched or hidden and drawing on so many sources at once it hits like a ton of gold bricks, especially the scene where the romans get jesus drunk and he wakes up in a warehouse surrounded by a thousand plaster copies of himself. simply harrowing in the best way. i'd recommend this movie to anyone with a keen eye, but forget that so much of it draws on occult literature and shamanic visions that not everyone can relate to or even has experience of. nevertheless it is a brilliant surreal adventure.