#bluerosering

Parsons talks all night long, lingering lazily about the point, spinning sugar soft and easy to swallow slop about spirits squirreled away inside the walls. Things that come from another place, but lodge here, in his home, in his shrine to sweat and psychedelics.

Not many of the eager faces ogling him absorb what he’s saying, and fewer still swallow it. Even the office girls gathered on the carpet, picking martini olives off toothpicks with their bared teeth, do not have time to listen to Jack throw his conspiracy theories around. He seems unsettled by the silence, the dull nodding, when he shares his stories with us all. Squares his shoulders and acts up, insisting that there’s more than trees in the woods, and more than wood in the walls, before skittering off, slapdash, dashing across the carpet.

Jack Parsons got jittery after Crowley jammed his claws in. Couldn’t be satisfied with the parties themselves, they had to have a point. Like he was waiting for Pan to appear in the flesh and give the guests his blessing.

Spirits in the wood. What rot. There’s nothing.

The Magician Longs to See, and there never was a man so close to magic. The man who could make men fly. Who had their head higher in the clouds than Parsons? Putting us on Mars, and into the afterlife, if he had his way with it. With reality, and all its bends.

They say the walls of his house were painted with demons. Demons, and he would have told you there were more where that came from.

The ring was part of it, polished and green, glittering in the dim light. Like a piece of the sky. The sea. Somewhere. He showed me once, that ring on his finger, couldn’t keep from twisting it round and round like he was trying to work the bone right out of its socket. The ring was part of it.

He saw himself, he said, he saw himself. In visions, visiting, in the vile heartbeat of the house that held him in its hollow hell. Not himself. Not anyone. Not one of us. If it ever escaped, if it ever escaped… and where would he be if he wasn’t himself anymore?

Jack liked to talk. Usually with a glass of something heavy in his hand.

Your destiny, Jack, your grand old destiny. Is this the path you’re supposed to be on? Is this the way the wind is blowing you?

It’s the path we’re all on, he told us. It’s the way the wind is blowing over the whole world.

The old man got inside his head real good. That brain could have done something if it wasn’t seeing stars. Men that realise they’re important, all that weight on their back, they go one of two ways. Like black and white.

He knows which way the wind blew him. We watched him go.

One Chants out Between Two Worlds, two places that were incompatible with each other from the word go. The drone of inevitability demanding to know why a man entwined with the US government was chasing demons on Tuesdays. Shut down, shown the door, and suddenly with all the more time to tease the world of magic. There’s nothing in the woods. There’s something in the words.

I heard it second-hand this time, the story of Parsons’ pilgrimage. Trying to secrete himself inside Pan’s panelling, seeking the world inside the wood. The woods where it started, not where it would end.

They say he saw something, wherever he went. He saw himself, and a dozen others. All milky-eyed and manic, making haste and hassling anyone intruding into their world outside of time. Speaking in tongues, twitching, twisted grinning. He came, he saw, he failed to conquer his fear. Played a game of tag, his chase chase chase, catch me if you can. Can you?

Could they?

That part isn’t part of the story, not the same version I heard.

Watcher, waiter, see you later. Dwelling on the threshold of the last of Parsons’ mind. Plenty of words without a point to be made. No story explains what he saw, because he saw into somewhere that common men and women cannot bring themselves to believe in.

Nothing in the woods. Parsons preaches to nobody. The spirits, he says, they’re part of his grand destiny. His will, his True Will, has put him on the path, the one that crosses into their court. The spirits, the ones that lodge within the wood, the woods where the lumber for Parsons’ house was ripped up before the place was ripped down.

He says he saw himself, they say. He saw himself and hardly got away.

Fire Walk with Me and light the road back to what is right. I’ve heard enough about Jack Parsons to last a lifetime, and he doesn’t have a lifetime left. He lost. Whatever game we’re all born playing, it’s safe to say that Parsons put his chips down on a bad hand.

Screwing that ring round his fingerbone, the one he said was the way in, like he was tightening a bolt, he told me that alchemy is taking one thing and turning it into another. Like taking a smart man with the world at his fingertips and purifying him into particles. Parsons blew up. He ignored the world that wanted him and kept his nose buried in another. Hanging in the home of his spirits, his ghosts and goblins grumbling from within the wood panels.

The explosion took his arm off. Burnt down to dust. Took the damn ring with it, as well as the ringing in his ears. Snuffed out the spirits and their irresistible invitations. Whatever he saw, sensed, and suffocated within, it went with him. Now nobody knows.

Jack Parsons turned to smoke, his greatest trick to date. The magician met the fire, and I’m sure within the flame, he saw his own eyes glittering back at him.

I’m sure he met himself at the threshold when he tried to cross.