Monsters and Boundlessness

Monsters aren’t real in a B-movie way.
Dracula, Wolfman, Swamp Thing, that archaic Mummy
who wears the dirty bandages, the ravenous “living
dead” hordes shambling along in the ruinous cities:
these monsters are simply sensationalistic projections of
macabre imaginations.
The real monsters are internal and amorphous,
shapeless and ambiguous.
They mysteriously cling to divisive thoughts,
delusions, habits, nightmares, fears, phobias.
They cease to be real when we refuse to feed them
the lies we feed ourselves.
Their death is the death of all that is fragmentary
and benighted within.

The ensnared captive:
What was thought to have been slain
at the base of myself has now taken in a paucity of air.
Soon it will emerge from the ruins anew.
It will claw at me from below, and shriek, and hurl
a burly mass of congealed vulgarities right at the apex
of my precarious personality.
My defenses are down.
Blood will erupt from the craters of self-consciousness.
My mind will be scarred.
My body will shiver.

The liberator:
I want to present my scarred mind and shivering body
to the infinite.
I want the highest of lights to prevail.
I want to ride the white horse of boundlessness.
I want all to ride with me over the radical and supernal
mindscapes of radical self-discovery.
I want us to be whole.

Monsters are only real in the “inner movie” way.
Change the script and the actor (or actress),
and then they
are expunged from the
cinematic psyche.

Blind Evolution Vs. The Ire of a Sociopathic God

Things crawl out of the numinous, and to the numinous they return. We feel this implicitly in our bones. Any theory or idea we use to deny the existence of the “duality annihilator” is nothing but a theory or idea. In the ultimate reality, they’re non-existent. The numinous neither approves nor castigates anything. Why would the ultimate plenum of being take sides? The infinite field has no sides, no dimensions, no limits, no restraints, no qualms, no theories, or ideas. We impose limits on the Grand Mystery. Not the other way around.

If the numinous came to the forefront and we venerated it like a newborn child, the creationism vs. evolution debate would become totally extraneous. There would no need for any intellectual battles, pedagogical wars, or anything of that ilk. We would simply acknowledge the Truth to be the Suchness of Reality. All arguments would become moot.

Creationism fails because it tends to honor a type of supernatural tyrant that is supposed to be the father of the world. If you ask me, this supernatural tyrant comes across as a total spazz, a demiurge that acts compassionately or maliciously. It all depends upon the time of day or season, I guess. All I know is that a sociopathic god who is susceptible to tumultuous mood swings is probably not the type of god I would invite over for spring rolls. In actuality, this god is a prime candidate for an asylum.

Standard evolutionary theory fails because it seems to disregard the need for meaning. It reduces everything to blind chance, meaninglessness, the survival of the fittest, genes, cause and effect, and other things that lack a purpose. Standard evolutionary theory plays out like a horrific tale where life is good at the beginning (the big bang) but terrible at the end (entropy). Who in their right mind wants that? Not me. I don’t want a nihilistic ending to a romantic yarn spun by visible and invisible forces. I want triumph.

The tug-of-war between the creationists and the proponents of evolutionary theory will probably go on indefinitely, and the porous minds of humanity’s children will be caught up in the storm indefinitely too. All the while, wisdom will take a back seat in the classroom and remain silent, because those who know keep their mouths shut and those of us who do not know blather on and on in absurd ways.

An Age of Noise, Geese Honks, and the Aleph

If I were the size of a fly, I would always be bombarded with that sonic buzz, that electric hum, that vexing noise. There would be no escaping the intractable flap of erratic wings. I would be forced to run and hide under pillows or bars of soap. I would have to build a dome, an imperceptible shield that would protect me from the perdition the fly brings with him (or her). I would look for a machine that would make me big once again. And then the fly swatter would come off the hook and rage like it has never raged before. Splat! Victory. Brief reprieve. Enter stage right...new fly.

The fly is vexing by itself, but imagine a world where the auditory extrusions of flies happened to be more palpable and, dare I say, amplified. People would constantly be wincing or cringing. A walk in the park would be like being caught in a war zone. People would probably commit suicide en masse. "Survival of the fittest" would turn into "survival of the hearing impaired," for they would be the only ones capable of living in the flies' sonic blitzkrieg.

In a very real way, we live in a world of "technological flies". All of our machines make noise. The blender. The lawnmower. The MRI machine. Microwaves. Mp3 players. Guitars. Drums. Guns. Fans. All of these co-conspire to create a world of bifurcating and evolving din. This would of course be okay if we were somehow protected from all this clamor. But we are not. The frequencies of the world batter and bruise us. They mingle with the oscillations we carry within. They disrupt. They distort. And there is nothing we can do. The machine is relentless. Only a long, near-eternal dip in the cold waters of the zero-point field could potentially save us in this Age of Noise.

In Cyndi Dale's book, "The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy," there is a six-page section that deals with geopathic stressors. Essentially, geopathic stressors are either man-made or natural frequencies that are inimical to our body. Gamma rays. X-rays. Ultraviolet light. The list goes on. All of these stressors slowly but surely undermine the well-being of our bodies and minds. In this Age of Noise, I do believe "sonic stressors" are doing the same thing to us. They are mutating our nervous systems, damaging our beings, and depriving us of the sanctity of silence.

Onto other things...

Autumn is a season of exquisite colors and cool nights. It is also a season where the geese create cacophonous sounds in the pre-dawn sky. The welter of sounds are disjointed and slightly draconian. It's almost like they are flying away from a predatory threat of some sort. A part of me actually looks forward to the din every morning. Geese skronk is better than no skronk. (I am well aware of the fact that "geese skronk" violates the sanctity of silence.)

I purchased Paulo Coelho's book "Aleph" recently. Jorge Luis Borges is quoted in it:

"The Aleph was about two to three centimeters in diameter, but all of cosmic space was there with no diminution in size. Each thing was infinite, because I could clearly see it from every point on the universe."

The Aleph. The beginning. The origin. In my novel, "Mundus Imaginalis," it is the guiding star that spits out a visionary world for the protagonist, Johnny Phoenix. When I read that Paulo Coelho wrote the book "Aleph," I just knew I had to track it down. It seems like both novels deal with Man's eternal search for meaning, love, and spiritual grace.

A time for reflection: I passed by a jade pool of water earlier in the day. The geese are gathering for their impending migrations. Stillness reigns supreme.

ALEPH:

Enfolded inside the seed of every
passing moment, the unspeakable reason for being.
Tucked away in the drawer of the beginning is
the ending (and inside that ending the spark
that is the beginning).
Every scintilla sings the same song,
and the near-silent song blesses the waking eyes
of now and then.
Every step an echo of another.
Every breath wedded to the ocean of recycled breaths.

Ramblings II

Long weekend. Clouds everywhere. Soon the wasps will become like skittish bible-thumpers looking for the forbidden fruit of Eden. They get up in everyone's business. I think they must be blind or myopic.

Ashley's sundrop flower (primrose) has a nice bloom at night. Attractive and delicate. It completes her garden. The flower itself seems attached to an umbilical cord of some sort. It snakes its way into subtelluric recesses of nutrients.

Heard the thundershowers last night but didn't see them. Great temblors in the sky. The gods must be hungry and crazy.

Finished reading Bill Clegg's book on crack addiction and Charles Burns' "X'ed Out". Bill Clegg really lets himself go. He chased the "pearly bliss" until he was hospitalized. He made notches in his belt when he lost inordinate amounts of weight. When he wasn't high, the world was filled with deceptive DEA agents wearing JC Penney garb. "X'ed Out" plays with the existential malaise of Burroughs, hypnagogia, and the ethos of punk rock and art. The main character is supposedly reminiscent of Tintin. In his feverish reveries brought on by pill consumption, the main character travels to a sordid interzone filled with bizarre characters and giant, splotched eggs. I can't wait for the next installment in this series.

Here's a page from "X'ed Out":
http://www.boingboing.net/filesroot/xed-out-2.jpg

Hafiz:

"The warriors tame the beasts in their past so that the night's hoofs can no longer break the jeweled visions in the heart."

Untitled

Dream is the hunter that stalks us along the lamp-ridden
trail of subconscious space.
He knows all others in his clandestine field.
He is not afraid of what howls in the night, because
I am almost certain that he is the one who is howling.

Dream is the gift delivered any time of the day by that creepy
boy or girl you once smiled at.
Inside the garish box slithers the snake
of charmed libido dressed to the nines in subliminal heels.

Dream is the doctor that sutures, dissects, vivisects, pokes, prods
and massages the inner life.
His diagnosis could be promising, or not.
All depends upon the patient, and the condition of the
pulpy psyche.

Dream is the hunter, the gift, the doctor, and I am sure
a bastion of other archetypes.
They all have varying degrees of autonomy, yes, but who is
in charge of them?
Who does the hunter report to?
Surely the creepy gift at the doorsteps masks
the reality of an enigmatic gift that masks the reality
of an even more enigmatic gift (recursive gifting).
Does the doctor have a boss?
In the palaces of archetypes,
how many of those archetypes are pale reflections
of greater patterns of awe?

There is never just one dream, or one persona
that flirts with the singular dream out of some
type of existential boredom.
There are always tons of dreams and tons of personae
stuffed into the vivacious atom of a prismatic imagination.

The Incarceration of Equilibrium

The Prologue:

The day was marked as dark and ill by the oracle who read the future with leaves. She passed the message along to her acolytes. They passed it along to feral animals of various shapes, sizes, and psychological temperaments. They, in turn, hid under stones and in damp grottoes.

The Story:

Ecstasy, Eros, and Equilibrium: three best friends, apostles of the highest order. The bond was strong with them. Their quips and jokes passed off as the stalwart and sprawling philosophies of the day. Seemingly nothing could break apart their triadic brotherhood.

Foreboding clouds gathered. The Dark Riders descended upon Triple E’s camp. The Dark Riders singled out Ecstasy first and chased him with clubs and swords. They managed to cut off both of his arms. Emasculated and defenseless, he ran off to the hinterlands. He vowed to return with a trumpet-of-resplendent-fire, and music that scorched dry no-hearts.

Eros was second. The Dark Riders knocked him unconscious and quartered him. His writhing torso was then hoisted up on a stick and used as a barbarous memento mori.

Equilibrium was then cornered by looming trees of enchantment. “Please,” he beseeched the rabble of cloak-wearing monstrosities. “No more carnage. Turn me into a slave. Turn me into a tool of oppression. Just don’t kill me.”

For some reason, the Dark Riders showed pity upon the pleading Equilibrium. Instead of torturing him or gouging out his eyeballs or taking his scalp, the malefic Dark Riders tied him up and transported him to Sickness Tower. They placed him in the deepest dungeon without food and water. For Equilibrium, the silent and unseen horrors in that darkened pit were hellish beyond measure.

Sickness Tower was the architectural equivalent of disease, distress, and madness all rolled into one. The large, stately spires would spasmodically cough up black phlegm. Inside the confines of the benighted tower, the Dark Riders would play games of disenchantment and dissolution. They would drink poison and blood and the intoxicants of black magi. They spawn devils in cauldrons with their Mephistophelian incantations and potions. They talked about the end of the world, the abject apocalypse, and the dissolute progeny of future eras.

For centuries, Equilibrium sat in a darkened pit while the unruly influence of Sickness Tower spread. Governments became more corrupt, and corruption became more inflammatory. People ripped one another to pieces over reasons not grounded in sanity. The oceans soon filled up with the excreta of industry. Chaos became the compulsory garb of the day. The dress code was destruction.

Oh, the cities burned and burned and burned. Oh, the children cried and cried and cried.

Just when everything appeared to have fully capitulated to the Dark Riders and the malefic presence of Sickness Tower, Equilibrium escaped. Over the years he had dug out a tunnel with his bleeding hands. When he reached the surface of the terra firma, he drank from ash-ridden puddles and ate the discarded remnants of previous meals. After all, he needed his strength. Vengeance required energy.

He took Eros down from the stick, and fastened his limbs to his lifeless corpse. Then he bequeathed pneuma to him via the mouth-to-mouth transference of internal winds. Eros’ eyes opened. “Beautiful world,” he exclaimed. “How I missed you.”

Ecstasy was found by the Bard River. He looked like a zombie statue. When Equilibrium reattached his left arm and Eros his right, Ecstasy jumped to his startled feet. “Gentlemen,” he exclaimed. “How long has it been?”

Their attack on Sickness Tower was swift, calculated, and unrepentant. Ecstasy’s trumpet-of-resplendent-fire torched the black spires with sonorous notes of sweet, sweet revenge. Eros threw jaunty rainbow-bolts at severe-looking windows like Zeus hurling lighting at a retinue of disobedient gods. Equilibrium, for the most part, watched Sickness Tower fall. His mere presence was enough.

The Dark Riders fled the conflagration that had besieged their abode of shadows. Many were covered in flames of justice, love and order. Some even either imploded or exploded when the triumphal notes of the trumpet entered their blackened beings. Some jumped off cliffs.

While watching the smoke rise from the rubble, the three E’s, the superheroes of archetypal time, shared smokes, quaffed victory from a flask, and shared jokes of eternal relevance.

The Epilogue:

The feral animals purged themselves of their fearful hiding places, and returned to the World-At-Large. The oracle saw good omens in her constellation of rustic leaves. Her acolytes went on to write books of enlightenment and prosperity. All of their books alluded to the powers and potencies of the three E’s. All of them became bestsellers in an age of freedom.

A Fragment From My Work-In-Progress, "Mundus Imaginalis"

Suddenly, Johnny could hear a faint, timorous voice. “Help me,” the urgent voice implored. “Help me.” It took Johnny some time to locate the source of the incessant cries, but when he did he saw an old man lying on his side. A strange, celestial fluid was leaking out of his ears. It was celestial in the sense that it turned the sand grains into a twilit star-field.

“What happened?” an astonished Johnny asked the injured or dying old man.
“I fell over and all this star-junk started pouring out of my ears.”
“Can you get up?”
“No. I am paralyzed.”
“What should I do?”
“Tell me your name. I only trust people with names.”
“My name is Johnny Phoenix.”
“What? That’s my name too.”

Johnny Phoenix looked over the hairy ear cavities, the wrinkles his dour face wore without dignity, his callused hands, his dirty clothing, and his decrepit shoes that almost ceased to be anything whatsoever. He found it odd that the old-timer had the same name as him. He found it odd that the old-timer had been mysteriously wounded. The “outer space” fluid that pooled beside his dilapidated body was also unorthodox. But the oddest thing of all became apparent to Johnny when he peered into the old man’s glassy eyes and saw nothing but his very own existence. Johnny was, in reality, looking down upon his own body.

“You’re me!” Johnny Phoenix exclaimed to…well…an older version of himself. The old man moaned and tilted his time-ravaged face towards the younger man he once was. “I am,” the old man stated, matter-of-factly. “I am the you that is tiresome and sickly. I’ve been over the highest mountains and trekked through the widest deserts. I’ve been in search of myself for decades. Alas, I’ve found nothing to share with the angels of conquest. I filled my head with cosmic notions, and now look at me…the very substance I created with grandiose ideas is leaking out of my ears!”

Johnny didn’t know how to help the dying doppelganger. He only had the implements of a baroque profession in his dusty bag. He thought about taking off his shirt and tying it around his second head, and then thought against it when he realized for the second time that the cosmic ink obliterated matter. At a loss for words, Johnny just stood there and watched the elaborate hallucination cough and moan.

After a coughing fit that caused more celestial fluid to exit the winding tunnels of his ears, the older version of Johnny spoke in a soft cadence that resembled the shuffling of tiny feet:

“You didn’t ask for this moment. You don’t have to help me. I am not even your responsibility, even though I am the you that came from a future you can’t see. If you let me die, this celestial fluid will probably eat away at the known, measurable world. It will kill those carnies, Athena, that prophetic plant, and everything else. The choice is up to you: you heal me or kill the world. Once again, you don’t have to help me even though I asked you to.”

The quandary was quite flagrant. If Johnny didn’t do something, the world was going to become an inky void, a waxy expanse of limitless stars. If he miraculously healed the older version of himself, the hallucinatory doppelganger would probably incessantly haunt him until he became a perfect mirror for its withering. As he stood there pondering the immensity of his decision, the old Johnny coughed once again and broadcasted the cosmic cancer all over the granular, brown ocean.

Then, out of nowhere, or a somewhere that resided in the dark recesses of internal processes, the prophetic flower’s parting words came back to the pondering Johnny:

When reason falls away, when preconceived notions are thrown away like stones into the sea, when time dies in the lap of its owner, when the search ends at the Great Wall, the edge of the world is reached, Aletheia speaks.

The lingering words were aromatic and true. Johnny had to stop rationalizing all the time. He had to let the narrative of his life go on like the alchemical seasons, without the blathering interference of his ego. He had to stop differentiating between the real and the unreal with armored, preconceived notions. Thirdly, he needed to let time perish. This meant he needed to let the old man die in a puddle of his own making.

“I’ve decided to let you pass on, old one,” Johnny said in a confident and earnest tone to his fallen, wizened self. “If the world disappears in that inky wax you call grandiose notions, so be it. The world deserves the heavens anyways.”

“So, you’re going to let me vanish? You’re going to just watch your future die?”

Following his raspy questions, the old Johnny Phoenix—that consummate lover of inebriating dreams—coughed like he had never coughed before. The celestial fluid spewed out of his ears like hot magma from a grumpy volcano. Some of it landed on his cheek. His cheek soon resembled Orion’s Belt.

“I am going to let you vanish. My personal history must die. My future must die. I must only follow the silent language of my heart and the magical pulse of this grand universe. I am sorry you didn’t have anything to share with those angels. You should have. You should have told them about your sadness.”

And, in a flash, the old Johnny was gone. The celestial fluid and wrinkled face ceased to exist. When the real Johnny Phoenix heard a melodious bird trill a couple times, he turned around to see if he could catch sight of the winged one. To his astonishment, the bird was resting its spindly legs on an opulent wall that reached higher than anything constructed by man.