Ouroboros Offerings

Because my physical journal is locked away in the room, where my beloved sleeps presently, I can’t make this entry there just yet and will have to make a transcription later.

Miller’s course started on the 31st, so I have been throwing myself into his material.  His magical momentum is impressive, and it’s easy to see why his coursework was something of a beacon in the hazy darkness.  The coursework thus far, clearly, has not been anything wildly new to speak of, beside the initial inklings of an initiatory order as conferred through the coursework itself.  He has specific sigils and group empowerments that are potently organized together to offer an initition into a group space that’s otherwise inaccessible without the instruction.  It’s a very interesting space, at least from the little I’ve seen and felt of it at this point.

I also undertook his Hekate Rite, which has proven interesting if half-hatched from today’s invocation.  Hekate has been a goddess that speaks to me through reflections, through fractal manifestation via the Chthonic Mother of Magic.  Being a frequent trafficker at the trivium and quadrivium, and I’mm well familiar with her movings and workings through certain channels. 

In the interest of experimentation and adherence to the coursework as its laid out, I took part in the rite as Miller has it written.  The effects were noticeable, if not the crashing wave I for some reason anticipated.  She manifested, but wordlessly indicated that offerings were to be made again tomorrow, so we shall wait and see.  What is clear is that the empowerment has taken effect in some small ways, namely that the energy being manifested is more electric than flaming.  What I had forgotten nearly completely is that this was a common manifestation in my youth, which had taken a backseat to flaming manifestations of energy.  It feels like something of a leveling up, like a focusing, balancing and intensifying after a wearing drag of years in degradation. 

I spend too much time researching, analyzing, contemplating, and agonizing over things, as opposed to doing or being or even being aware of them.  It’s a vicious cycle that multiplies itself whenever possible.

But the real issue with this tendency is that it translates itself across all pathways of mental life, this habit of overthinking, over-analyzing, re-editing internal thought and policing my own activities.  It’s been a tendency of mine for nearly two decades, a division that runs right through my sex; a personal secrecy, a masquing of reality, a masquing of Self, a diligent self-appraisal and reworking in real time.  Everyone does it, but most people are less aware of it.  The social calculus of extroversion, and the negotiation of being a person in a body in a public place.

Real events are not words.  Pure being is naturally non-linguistic.  Example: Something happens.  The internal chatter starts to run, and the individual makes identifications with things externally.  In the subsequent flood of internal dialogue, it’s too easy to lose the thread, lose the trail of light, of the magical creation of doing and the mystical happening of being.  The real experience in the present moment has taken a back seat to the internal world of mental chatter and subjective ideas.  Effectively, losing wordless becoming in a sea of newsprint approxmation--an ocean of facsimile reality and symbolic existence.  This is the ideological fallacy of identity.  It is the unfortunate case for identity as a root for ontology that the linguistic symbolization of a thing in reality (or even of reality itself) is not the entirety of that experience (or of experience itself).  The mistaken assignment of authority to the wordy droolings of lowercase self is what causes the Paper Tiger ontology of identity in the modern academy. 

Let us consult metaphor.  Is the photograph of a beautiful mountain sunrise the exact same thing as that mountain sunrise?  Is the light of the sun the same light that you see in the picture?  Do you feel a breeze from the paper?  Can you feel the dew in the air, or feels the grass rustle against your leg?  These images and sensations can be awoken from within our minds by words, and we can generate these feelings ourselves through imagination.  But are the words, or the picture of the sunrise, actually the same sunrise?

The roaring oneness of reality unmediated by the self has time and time again been classified as non-linguistic.  Ineffable, is the usual term.  Real, present being or doing is non-mediated.  The self recedes and eventually dissolves through successive inundations in pure reality, pure existence.  The acid burns away the impure metal and leaves behind gold.  Identity is the self--the lead, in this case.  The awareness that shines through when reality is experienced without an “I” to mediate it is the pure nature of being or doing, and that is not a state of being with a subject.  No subject, no monologue, no identity. 

Where words cannot venture without poetry, identity cannot venture without transcendence.  Where words cannot accurately approximate reality or experience, the identity cannot accurately be considered operational.  In this case, analysis through conventional methods will break down.

And this is my problem.  Here I have done it again.  A simple experience of presence over-wrought, made overly-verbose, mediated beyond recognition from the moment it originally shone through. I spend too much time analyzing, researching, contemplating, agonizing, re-editing.  The words of analysis, the stifling mediation of pure being and doing, clogs the flow with paper tigers, and I lose the stream of light in the quagmire.

"Is that all that memory is for?" you asked.  "To bring us back, to rehash the sadness? To make us remember a greatness long gone?" No, and I give you the platitudinous reassurance of a seemingly unromantic man.

In truth I am deeply enthralled by romance, but wary of that dangerous liar Nostalgia.

Romantic fancy is peachy.  History is fine.  Idealism, well it can even be divine.

But Nostalgia, that fabulist wretch wars are built on, that is memory's nemesis, the bane of impressions and lived moments in kind.

Nostalgia is as nobody did, as a time that never was, like a waking dream of history idealized, romance historicized and ideals romanticized. 

The light of morning may have been gray and feeble, but the night before had been a beautiful fugue state of humidity hanging in halos around the streetlights, a starless limbo sky of haze and a murky, enchanted cityscape of soft edges and swimming lights.  Air like a warm towel almost dry, breeze like feathers.  Warm goosebumps on bare arms and purple shadows across the bulges of hard work and low-swinging pride.

Something new was on the rise. It had been evident for days before.

Indian deities arriving with temples afloat in ruined forest on the wings of dream, strange criminals in the urban jungle, fae liminalities around every bend, abandon in the populace and chaos smeared across the political landscape.

Something big was crowning, about to breach the surface, a new current in the tide, the bubbles rising to the tops of the whitecaps, liberating a trove of new energies ripe for decoherence, wave functions primed for collapse.  Time to dig in deeper, grasp the reigns a bit tighter, lower that center of gravity, soften the knees and get ready to push.

That night sex nearly rolled through the gutters, which was a new development for sure.  The prudish bell jar that sucked vacuum tight over the city seemed lifted, somehow, and the flies of lust spontaneously arose to swarms as if nothing in the word were so natural as this.  And nobody seemed to notice the shift, simply acting out the consequence as if it had always been this way, as if the change had been a slow and gradual crescendo--a lazy Sunday awakening--of sap risen season-slow, instead of a superbly sudden communal puberty that seeped into every corner, crease and cavity. 

There is a song to put the lightning in the bottle,

There is a wave to crash the sand back to stone.

There is a fire to quench the mind's stalking troubles,

There is a smoke to freshen the soul's wayward note.

There is a clear gold to wash the body subtle,

There is a fine soil to fruit in rainbow tones.

There is a road to lead you pebble by pebble,

There is a spring to suckle eternity's seed sown.

There is a feeling beyond feeling sun tree-mottled,

There is a vision beyond vision of stars unknown.

There is a rain that heats the night's voce sotto,

On the day of my birth but sixty-seven years before,

The Great Beast ate shit for the first time at the behest of his Scarlet Rider.

I was partially shielded in the caravan.  Unable to see the murky heavens above, and likewise unable to take in the full panorama with the interfering metal frames and rubber sealing around the windows, every scene we passed was cut into moving frames like cinema film poorly aligned and played at the wrong speed.  People moved too fast or too slow.  Panning shots dragging on for ages.  Filtered lenses and grease. The guide was speaking, but not too gradually my interest completely waned.  "As you can see on the left, this is the glorious historic seat of state power..."

Yeah, glorious two or three hundred years ago, now a mess of cables, posted bills, filth and people; people huddled or standing, people leaning sleeping or running.  The streets were wide, but clogged with dust, dust swept into corners, dust falling from roofs, dust kicked up by foot traffic and machines, dust hanging on the air in sheets over crumbled heaps of clay, the streams of daily waste, gutters and dirty water, slap-shod food vendors with great fiery fry pans propped up on plastic crates and oil drums, the tarpaulin shelter of street sellers and street sleepers, the food scraps, colorful refuse, animals and children, dingy bags caught on wires, on poles, on stones in the ground, scraps of metal and plastic, corrugated cardboard blending in with animal shit blending in with dried mud and wheat husk blending in with last month's rinds and peals.

The caravan drove further, through a cloud of acrid brown-gray smoke. A bolt of sun broke into the miasma and struck the wooden ornamentation atop an ancient bridge straight ahead, rendering its color let alone its features invisible in the refracted dusty air.  The bolt was gone, and the sky returned, between the buildings and down the boulevards, roiling horizonless and leaden like molten gunmetal flake stirred through smoking plumes cement.

"The traditional seat of political authority has always been bordered on one side by the treasury, and on the other by the docks, which remains the traditional avenue of incoming goods and trade for the Capital.  The very first Grand Sovereign wanted his fellow subjects to always know that he stood for and with them, and the struggle of their labor.  His greatness was nothing without them, as a pair of hands is meaningless without its field to till."

We came upon the ancient bridge, waterlogged and worn.  It had been brilliantly painted--once, maybe not long ago--yellow and red, details in green and blue, inlays of dark wood and light, now all chipped and tired, faded to dirty pastels and covered with the omnipresent dusty gray the heavens bestow upon the ground.  The wood beneath the caravan groans under our weight, but that sound is not what catches my ear rapt tense with wild-eyed glaces.  I crane my neck to see. Out the far side of the caravan I can see the sea.  Dark, turbid, swirling, undulating with the rhythm of the tide, bouncing, crashing, breaking and overtaking the stone walls of the docks, rising and falling like an angered and languishing beast, like a single cell trying in turns to gobble up and spit out its mineral nemesis.  And along the walls of the docks are people, lining both sides of the docks leading into the canal that goes under the bridge; hand over hand, wave upon wave, feet atop shoulders atop feet--two never-ceasing, clawing streams of human grit and determination pulling a net full to bursting from the sea.  The net, in fact, suffocated the canal, which was far less water than net and catch.  It seems that in the lower reaches of the canal, far below the net, the water still carries the net onward, but on the surface nothing was visible save for the fibers of the net, the dead fish in the catch, and the filthy slime and refuse of the sea with greatly outweigh the catch of fish it cradled. And the sound--the rhythmic groans that move in waves away from the sea, along the net, are the constant labor song of the hands and feet that pull the net to town.  The moaning and the slumping, the wet slipping and the raw pulling, the net rubbing on the stone dock, and the hands pulling the fibers to creaking.  There's a strong set of waves at the seaside, and the first sets of hands brace themselves for the third crest.  The wave throws itself against the docks, and flies up fifteen meters overhead as its surge ripples through the lower reaches of the canal.  The net jumps, then lurches, and some people are thrown to the stones.  The moan climaxes beneath us as we cross the bridge, and we hear the soft thud of bodies beating against the wood beneath our wheels. The caravan moves forward. "And ahead of us, you see the diplomatic quarters..."

Throw out who you are and start over

Burn down what you are and grow anew

Kill your darlings and be reborn

Get rid of everything you think is you

Think less

Be real and

What if wars were fought

By fuck instead of by gun?

Dark thoughts and hidden

Tears, secret confessions told

Eye to eye in lies.

-

"What's that?  Oh, sorry.

I'm great.  Just tired is all. 

No beauty, no doom,

No time, no wisdom, no passion,

While walking one day, dark in thought and taut in deliberation, towards the fountain,

I came to a curious object.

Puzzled sleek, and carved by craft of master wielded,

It spoke like a spiral wrung out opposite Earthly spin,

Like fossil child called cold from skin made bone.

It wound, ebony and corrugated from its inception knot,

Out by grooved teeth so long  interlock’d by thousand year need

That the force had bound by static, one tooth into another.

Now solid and polished shining under the tumbling of the soil,

It emerged gleaming liked fresh lacquer, with the slick smoothness of a buckeye,

The glossed lone coiled progeny of canopy above, ditched infertile and firm,

If not vivid and sterile by choice, to remain unbroken pristine for forever.

I bent down and palmed the Nautilus seed,

The bumpy whorl pressing rigid against flesh’s softness.

I held from beneath, and blew back a crumb of dust.

Dense and heavy, metamorphic like marble, made fit for heaving,

Not unlike that one would expect of an oversized pocketwatch.

As I pressed digit to groove I felt a balance shift within,

And like the terrifying unravel of an embroidery string vase,

The furrows cracked and unwound, and become naught but a handful of spindles.

And then they danced.

At first tentative and paralyzing,

The spasms and jittering of the inanimate, like worms hopping endlong into the air,

Tiny black tendrils, single-cellular inorganisms, jumping the po-go tango in my palm.

They bobbed and weaved between each other, occasionally collapsing and writhing in upon each other in a puddle of whirring threads.

And then, en masse, they turned, like the coagulation of a reptile consciousness.

No longer the larval mamba of stony flukes,

They coalesced in a serpentine bit, like a vivified drill feeding on fear and spinning in mechanical cooperation.

Their point inspected me from arm’s length, my appendage paralyzed doubly so since this odd bundle of living jet vein clots had begun to notice my involvement in the situation.

The point bloomed, like some distant malicious satellite willing to pull me skyward.

It shivered the burble downward, like swallowing, till teeth gripped fleshy pad,

And then it bit, a deep-earth anemone taking up residence not so tentatively.

It stuck its claws in more deeply, now drawing the humor that cries foul.

With the game quickly turning away from my interest I, in cagey fits, began to shake at it,

In the vain attempt that struggling may be able to abate its advance,

Or at least let it know that a hand, namely mine, was a terrible home for the immobile.

And with that in leaps and bounds it shot like a predator up my appendage, to the shoulder, up the neck, behind the ear and, pop! into the skull.

“I come from the deep, from the dark primordial wellsprings of life, where water was once bonded to earth, and the air was toxic with mischief, and the fire had nary intervened nor been incarnate in the proper of its body, just the light and cracking flash of its unforgiving and momentary essence.  I can teach the Dark, bring you the fornication of the murk and the mire, where Life is crack’d open and the darting Kao of the original intelligence still permeates the breathing world.  I run flush with the way that bounds garbling against the sky, the subvertant incongruous disjunct of the place where speeking falls apart, on principle that the air borne the sky, and the sky burns flush against the stream through which we secretly garble.    Now scream!  And wail!  And rant!  You’re in pain!  I’ll wait for you to wake up, and sleep myself softly and unfrozen beneath, gently caressing and slipping silently into periphery, just to dissipate and chuckle.  The Dark creative of the universal empty nothing that permeates all things—living, dead and otherwise—does never permeate anything as deeply as it doesn’t permeate any thing.  I am Old; of the school before the school that taught the school who taught the school,

and you in youth shall cleave to the center of the universal darting Kao, empty as nothing, which cracks Life open and breathes consciousness into the universal breathing nothing mire of the twitching barbs and snares and thorns that build your world, terrified.  And you will shake and rattle and scream and go crazy; and be stricken by Dark, and filled with nothing and shown the beautiful shining nothing in the middle of the muck, and not shown any thing, because I will lie to you.  Always, I will lie to you.  And you will never know truth.  I wait for your call.”

let’s love like light

come sweet baby death

fuck the arches shaking

crashing in your kisses

bright night caresses

let’s be beggars

hold me evernow

let forever come hard

gimme that cosmic gaze

baby let’s be devils

brilliant bastards

undoing the knots

as a beast tied in two

let’s blow each other blind

it’s revolution heavenly

we gods in beauty’s toil