anonymagus

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who is candlight

Who is Candlight?

—–

He has a face he won’t let me see. A black mask behind a hood and he only says things quietly. Menacing things, things I can’t bring myself to hear at night, waking to record them early, first before anything else interrupts. Or perhaps not menacing, but terrifying all the same, too hard for my dreaming self to discern or take apart, but instead only record, retreating from some knowledge, things that only my dreams can really know, but won’t, and things that waking I cannot understand, no matter the valor found at daybreak.

He has begun to invade my waking life, signs of him everywhere. Little snatches of conversation as people pass, words I’ve heard whispered before in some strange and other context, a phrase that meant something far more terrible once before. Posters on walls and graffiti scrawled across brick echo his unmoving face back to me, that I begin to feel haunted, his presence ghosted all around me.

—–

“There is your devil” he said. He was not there but his voice was following all the same, watching my dreams with me. Hateful rotting equine skulls, absurd and comic gnashing long sharp teeth, gnawing skeletal tree branches as they float disembodied out from the dark too deep just inside the wood to see beyond, stripping bark with long mad tears. Blind they bite down, and a small girl walks among them and they find her arms and legs, snapping hard and sharp, long canine teeth worm into her skin, writhing beneath it, her bulky sweater providing no resistance. They tear her skin and pull her down to the ground, and the same absurd skulls become bone dogs, small and terrible leaping up at her now, and she is pulled down to the earth by these rotting putrid things.

And she did not go bloody or torn, but somehow to decay with no transition, her eyes gone from her skull, her hair pulled out and gone in clumps, skin sloughed off and stinking. A man walks slowly to the place, the dogs and horseheads gone, and reaching down he picks her up, one hand only gripping her sweater and her flesh. Drags her behind him in one hand, the other trailing a long farmer’s pitchfork. Ungraciously he tosses her limp body on the heap, other bones and dirt and rot tumble at the impact, and with his fork he turns the pile. He walks back to a gray wooden door, and stomping his boots on the step he sets the fork down outside, and goes in.

There is your devil.

And I did not know what he meant, or what he means by it now, a wisdom too deep to penetrate, his voice not mocking but almost, a lesson I am to learn but of what I cannot tell.

—–

Pen to paper. His voice but not his deeds, they won’t come, only images surrounding. The story of a man who acts only in fractals, in reflections on reflections, who seems to know when I can see him, performing, acting a precise part, the veil of which he will not let me penetrate, only bear witness to scenes too mad to call story.

Candlight is in a chair, his hands on his knees, a red curtain behind him. There is a glaring stage light that illuminates everything. A thing with a long beak, a spine, and two flipper feet walks to him, and opens and closes its beak, squawking something that makes me cringe, not for the words but for the sound. He watches it intently, but passively, indicating nothing. It turns and looks at me, there are no eyes in its face, and then suddenly there are two white orbs in the sockets and they bulge too far out, and it shakes its head like it has become violently ill, eyes bulging out toward me, shaking its mad head harder and harder. It begins to drip and spray black foam from its bill, and Candlight behind it only watches, his hands have not moved. The thing begins to hop toward me, its head shaking still, its bill spraying foam, and as it nears I can smell it, something foul. It hops closer, and I suddenly realize I can’t move to get away, stuck watching as this thing draws nearer, a scream beginning to rise like panic in my throat. It stops in front of me and stares. One of its eyes cracks and it begins to bleed like tears, rolling down its beak. I begin to laugh uncontrollably, the absurdity of this thing staring, and as I laugh it begins to laugh. And its laugh is bigger than mine, and it laughs harder, its bloody eye bursting open with the pressure of it, flecks of the blood hit my face. It laughs and it hops closer and puts its bill on my knee. It stares up at me, whimpering, clicking its bill, laughing softly still.

And it falls down dead, expiring by my feet.

On stage Candlight stands, and the lights go out.

In the daylight now I’m standing and he is, he takes a cage and holds it out to me. There is a dove, dead inside. I open it and the bird falls out, to the ground. “This is not a metaphor” he whispers to me, and the birds feathers twitch in a sudden wind.

—–

Who is Candlight?

journal 3

i’ve been thinking about sin a lot lately. probably for the last 6 months or so really, but specifically, for the last few months, reading bataille again, although i’m not currently reading anything deals with the nature of sin specifically, reading l’impossible, i’m still reading it within the context of sin. when he speaks of despair, anguish.

i’ve been contemplating the nature of failure. and it’s relationship to sin. because, while there’s always been a moral component to sin, in the judeo-christian sense, it’s very easy to conceive of a kind of sin that, while perhaps still moral… there is perhaps a kind of sin that is more about failure. i’ve regularly used the concept of sin to lend weight, especially rhetorically, to the idea of transgression.

in the story that i still haven’t written and am still working on, on like draft 5000 i suppose, the line lept out at me, “there is no grace of man but sin” …but where does that really leave all of this?

what i guess i mean is that man’s only true potence in the universe that i’ve noticed, at least “as man”, is his capacity to transgress, to do other than which he has been commanded, instructed. to choose do that which is counter to a task given. now this, in and of itself, is not magick. simply sinning is not magic. but, it opens itself to a kind of thought process that is magical.

consider for a moment though, i’d like to return to the idea of failure, because i have recently gone through this myself, experienced this myself. i have, for most of my life, not failed. i’ve, by and large, found ways to succeed, to convince myself, however fleetingly, that i was immortal, that i was without blame, without flaw. that all of my failures, that all that i had ever done that did not work out, was in some sense a success, that it taught me something. i retrained my thought process to take from experience what it could, and retask it as something that fed in to my ego-sense of non-failure, of constant success. i needed to always be the victor, even now, when it becomes obvious that i’m not, when things work out significantly less than favorably to me, i still find a way to restructure in my head and in my life as a kind of success, and this, i think, is because if you have never failed, you are still blameless, you simply change your ideas of what failure means, then you’ve never sinned.

i was not actually ready to cast off god, no matter how heretical the things i was saying had been, no matter how much i might have rejected him in my ideas, i was not ready to have those strings cut, i needed him to give me a sense of self, a sense of identity, so while i did not want to be beholden to this very limiting notion of god, i still needed a way to find myself blameless, to structure sin, and failure, to re-narrativize and reintegrate them into my life, so that i could forever remain blameless.

now none of this was conscious, of course, i thought i was growing and changing etc. i’m not negating my last few years of experience, i’m simply realizing that some of the progress i thought i had made was just… a lie to myself, sure, but that’s so simple… i had, in some senses, pulled back my conception of the ultimate, and repurposed it to a smaller, more approachable horizon. because i still needed sin, and failure, to mean something, to be able to be avoided, i still needed to be able to look at myself and find myself blameless, faultless. and sure, i would have admitted that i was incredibly flawed… but if you had pointed to any one of my failures, anywhere i missed the mark, i could have explained to you why it was not actually my fault, it was not actually a failure, that i had learned something, that something had changed for me, that it was still, somehow, a success.

why is that? what is so… what fear of failure do i have that has allowed me to so entirely overlook large portions of my life, or simply to avoid, to face the fact that i am fallible.

this is where the next recent realization has come about. failure is, in some senses, a kind of dying. a kind of acknowledgment of… failure points to death. in much the same sense that failure points to a boundary, it points to a place at which i stop, i cannot extend to everything if i have failed at something, simply because everything encompasses… the extent of me, if it went on to infinity, it would have already encompassed and absorbed the potentiality for success.

an interruption in that success, in that chain of yesses… at what shockingly near horizon do i end? and if i find a place where i fail, no matter how remote from me it might be, and in many cases not so remote as i might like, i must acknowledge an end of me, an extent beyond which i have not yet crossed, and perhaps i may grow beyond it one day, but the point is that with failure i have to acknowledge that i end, an extent beyond which i am not capable of passing, and i know that… the admission of an end, an extent, psychologically speaking, is tantamount to admitting the existence of all limits, the admission that you’re going to die.

the extent beyond which you cannot go… (immortality, factoring in the ideas of multiple selves, what does the cataclysmic change of death do the the sense of self, to these many selves… interesting and unavoidable questions, but not to the current point)

(why do i always say ‘you’re going to die’? do i simply prefer the rhetorical strategy of you, or am i in some senses sidestepping the issue? i am going to die. there. now it’s said, just in case.)

sin, and transgression, are in some senses best captured, best effected by failure. if the only thing that gives man any kind of potence is his capacity to sin…

i am here not speaking of sin and capacity for transgression not in the place of some moral free will. (nietzche has perfectly well demolished the idea of a moral free will anyway). what is the distinction between these two though… this capacity for transgression can take part in any valuative structure, that all sin… in the sense that man is made up of three components (self that believes itself to be self, flesh and the outer manifestation of action, and the social self that is the manifestation of the world’s affect on the self and are involved in constructing and being affected by the world). each of these are structured together, not necessarily by the same valuative set, but by interlocking and overlapping valuative sets.

sin is the capacity to transgress these boundaries by any piece of the self, any of the three selves can transgress a boundary. can extend beyond certain preset boundaries. i do not mean this in a counter-nietzcheian argument. what i’m arguing instead is the capacity of man… and to ignore boundaries, to cross them and break them.

sin against the self to say you will not do something, but do it anyway, to sin against others by much the same, to break socio-psychological boundaries…

it’s easy enough to call a belief in the immortal soul a fear of death. not the only way, but definitely worth considering. this is why.

failure is an acknowledgement of death. sin is a valuative acknowledgement of an extent, of an inability, of your mortality, of death. desire then, to be cleansed, to be blameless of sin, is, a desire for immortality. it is the eternal soul that is always in need of salvation. to sin is to cause a blemish, a tarnish, a filth. to acknowledge an extent, to say there i end, there i was incapable of going beyond, that is the extent of me, to acknowledge that end, that you are not everything, that you are finite, is to acknowledge you’re going to die. we don’t know that the infinite doesn’t die, but we assume it doesn’t, because we *know* that everything that is finite, does. our entire conception of immortality is based on the infinite, simply because the infinite may not die, because it is larger than we know ourselves to be. it is only the hope of something greater that might not end. if we have extents and ends, we aren’t capable of going beyond everything, if we have to acknowledge our own fallibility, then we have to acknowledge we’re going to die.

world religions chart endless lists of saviors that have died in our stead, that we might not die. but since the fact of death seems inarguable, we have taken this “hope of nondeath” and transmuted it into the conception of the eternal soul, something that is beyond or eternal, something that never fails, makes mistakes, that is functionally infallible. because then the flesh is allowed to be weak, it is acceptable to sin and to fail… the conception of sin is an abstraction over the top of immortality. the knowledge of the gaping, unanswered abyss of death… that all failure can be ignored, and salvation can be hoped for by some meta-human aggregation of this eternal infallibility. the hope to be saved. the hope to be cleansed.

what then does it mean to fail? i mean, i have. plenty of times before certainly, but in the construct of being reinterpreted as some kind of learning experience and success. i have, not until recently, allowed this idea of failure…

in failure there is the possibility of both crippling condemnation and guilt, and the possibility of liberation. accepting that one has failed… to feel liberated from the boundary that was causing the failure, or you can feel some kind of condemnation and guilt for that failure. the delicate point here is that while one may seek to feel liberation, if one does not have the capacity or has not already undergone even a moment’s worth of condemnation or guilt for that failure, then one is not actually accepting the failure, not actually feeling the failure as failure, you are in the early stages of simply reinterpreting as success… because to transgress a boundary and to sin or fail, you must have first owned, acted on, or granted energy to that boundary. if you truly want to fail, if you want to sin and own that sin, and not simply find a way for that sin to become yet another success, you must first accept that end, you must accept that you’re going to die, accept that your failure marks an extent beyond which you did not pass. and if you can accept that extent, acknowledge your own ending, and not run from it and fear it, try to avoid it, then… a chance… of some kind of liberation, a kind of liberation that only sin can allow us. until you have acknowledged your extent, until you have accepted failure, until you have known yourself incapable, until you know you’re going to die, you will forever labor under the impossibly heavy burden of blamelessness.

if the ‘burden is easy and yoke is light’, one must ask, why bear them at all? …until your own death is as a mercy, caught in this trap of blamelessness.

Technorati Tags: book of the tower, journal, non-knowledge

dreamwrite 8

for all the days you’ve gone on ahead, wondering at the strange bright light just beyond he bridge, the greengold light coming from the water and the sun, the mirror surface passing under the bridge like transport, i’m riding on the mirror, the ridges of the archwork over my head, the creak and drip of old wood near the sea, even on this bright day, reminding of cold and night and dark. in the corner where the bridge embankment meets the lapping water i see nothing

not right now, but it radiates to me that something, certainly, must be or have been there, the sound of some history i can’t make out still echoes in scream or cry or mute frustration, i do not know, but certainly something has come and gone here, passing by lie i am this bridge, underneath and along my way, only some small ripple to note my passing, and on

bank lined with people pretty people with fans and billowing dresses and remarkable hats with strutting canes
do not know what era this is, perhaps simply constructed out of romantic unmemory

look down and the water reflects wavering back, and i wonder why it reflects grass and stone and rolling field opening into sky, when above it only should be me, and stony banks, and houses, and maybe a blue sky but not sitting above green grass, with little white wisps of cloud

started to learn this new thing and now it is

prisoner shivers in filthy rags, curled in on himself, cold and frightened, chains rubbing against permanent wounds on wrists and ankle, shaking he is not unused to this, and it seems like fear and desperation should be something that would go away, and though they dull as they become more the norm, the broken impotence of fear and despair do not subside into quiet friends, but rather into heavy masses of impossible inertia, unable to lift or be lifted, until only

nothing new to say for that, just the faint memory of a dream long long passed, meaning something only in tiny hindsight, already slipping
god was i ever really there, whole bands of experience whisper past my eyes, silly things, things that evoke only melancholy and surprise at their return now or their abandonment before

memories of a late night bored and tired, a little afraid, waiting in a shop room of expensive fine things, things i did not want, uncertain now if because i could never afford them or simply did not value them, or perhaps some coupling of the two where my inability to value them stemmed from my inability to perceive myself as ever owning anything so exquisite and expensive.

still i found the cases boring and the items unusable and i simply walked and touched nothing and looked at them, wondering both when we would be done and what kind of people or persons could afford these things, some kind of strange and unlikely luxury, surprised as much that these might be purchasable as that there might be those who would purchase, this kind of useless trifle somehow alien to my perception, as if perhaps i was missing some vital piece of the puzzle for this experience, standing and wondering, should i be wanting?

now so much later i often find myself in the same mental place, staring up at something and wondering what pice of the puzzle of human experience i have somewhere abandoned that i should feel so often alien, removed, as if by a lack of some want i too have a lack of kinship, facing those others with a strange non-hostile stare, simply wondering what it is they would have of this, or me, or each other, why they should do or act or be anything at all, that i should find them strange or un-self, not me, unidentifiable

woman in front of a mirror, i assumed woman because of some shawl or scarf

there is a figure like some hideous little thing curled in on itself, its face long and strange, too many fingers on its hands, flickering in and out of existence from a small nightstand with a lamp on it, seen from the right angle it is there, ugly little teeth too long and too few for its mouth, holding two fingers up beside its face, the other hand down on the floor wrapping around its knees, touching its feet, i think it might be smiling but the lampshade becomes a disconcertingly ridiculous hat and i can’t see it’s face anymore

but it’s there watching and waiting for children, but i do not know why, but the purpose seems malicious and i am uncomfortable with it being there, or not being there and then again appearing

infant with an eyeball plucked out, still smiling dazedly, the raw wound in the baby’s face alerting anyone to anything

an empty deadend hallway with too many doors and a woman wearing so little that all i can think about is sex. she looks back at me with no challenge or come-hither stare, just cold calculating disinterest, if i should move she may draw a gun and shoot at me. or ignore me. or neither, i can’t tell. this little back alley is the only place in the whole city where temptation is still fond, this red light shining down on us the last haven of the hooker and dealer and pimp and thief. last place on the grid where you can even see that oozing pink-red light. crossing that line is like walking out of a wall of ocean and into a alien cave system, suddenly dry and able to move and breathe, but with no point of reference or sense of scope or scale. a reality bend, mostly not even here, a place where you might go for an hour and lose only a minute, or a go for a minute and find you’ve died on the other side. safest plan sometimes is just don’t leave f you make it in at all. never leave if you look back and don’t recognize what’s on the other side.

charlie was following the girls home after the show, long stretches of doublification and triplification hovering in the air behind them, making each movement a study in temporal compression and fractal overlap, only the slightest indication that each slice of time

resyncing, clear now.

man walking following the girls just got off shift. charlie, not on contract, just following, not any more creepy than any surveillance is, wondering where two blonds with purchased livelihoods are heading off this time of night, not late enough for home, they should be working except they started out running, like they had somewhere to be, or be away from. flickers of drug still hanging in his face, he sees them and can’t tell if it was real or if one of them somehow became two things at one time, a stripper down the street and an impossible face n the sky full of red stars,

street signs change colors and he only kind of notices, the girls are moving away from him too quickly, like they’ve spotted him, he walks quickly, as much as possible, after them, his foot slowing them both down, wanting to keep one foot in the light, there’s a no about the thing being after you, but no of course you’re not safe, not really, in our own home if someone there can just do what they want anyway. when we have some time i’d love to hear your ideas on socialism

Technorati Tags: book of the labyrinth, dream

what is this terror that binds the spirit of man, this fear gripping my heart that crushes my hope, this plaguing, maddening whisper of failure and the fear of failure, this labyrinth landscape of the same heartless edifices, cold stone shapes unforgiving and implacable, jutting up out of the earth like great hated gods, unanswerable.

Technorati Tags: journal

dreamwrite 7

you’ve misunderstood me, it’s not about that
well then tell me what it is about, because the green and black
spinning fabrics are whirling in a way that makes me think of some alien thing
dancing until it is too worn to move any longer
and quietly cavorting down into the infection
of the groundwater, seeping in like dying
in little pustules and decaying fibers,
a disturbed final image of its eyeball glancing up out of the reeking pool of its demise
still glaring out into the world, beholding
skin in flecks and broken filaments, clinging

i’m fighting against a ghost
an image of something i knew a long time ago, and have in truth put behind me
but the residue of memory remains and there are things i can do to repair

the wrong telemetry

i’m not alone, but i might be,
this vacant sound echoing inside me

so strange those little moments of anxiety
crawling up my legs and down m back, making my stomach churn and my buttocks clench, afraid of something that makes no sense, my breath gasping in my chest, afraid. i am unsurprised and unmoved, i’ve forgotten what came just before, concerned now onlh with what i can bring forth from this, the whispers of voice or cave chamber echo i cannot tell, the thrum of beat designed to move my mind and open, i am in trance of my own somekindofintent design. but i get lost inside of it and there are frightening, very frightening, things lingering on the other side, and my trance not so much mine as a found resonance with some other, and it has no concern for my survival only a great potence, thrilling through me i know there i’m powerful there i’m strong, and i want to own it and know it and have it and take it with me

only there i’m not me i’m not anything at all and emulation here only comes across as posturing and silly indulgence, weak too much to handle as a simple stated fellow, instead flying into rages and full of hate and anger, just to press on the ego i would defend, having built itself in replica and false facsimile of that from the other side.

memory, perhaps, left vacant too long, this irrelevant sense of self divined from what scraps of there and other i can put together.

you’re the criminal, not i, the blond angry woman shouts
not i never i, you are the bastard who has hurt my son

i saw her holding a black bird into the sink and she was killing it. i don’t like the murder of corvids, but it was done in a remembering flash and i cannot stop what she has already done, but the trinkets in her home won’t be used as such again, diluted and destroyed i gather little clusters of them,
and through them look out at the may faces
crushed glass and the autumnal color of redorange
perhaps that was goodbye afterall, climbing into the back of that truck and waving, for a moment thinking they would too climb in and we would move on and away from whatever it was that was after her or them.

and nosir, says the strange barber in the public bathroom, a foolish grin on the face of many, i do not know arcuado as you have assumed. in truth he was here only a short while ago, but he held me beneath the sink and tried, or considered, killing me.

what good is a birthright and blessing from those who already have less than you, who could no more determine how to or what to bless of you than they can figure out what has happened to their lives, wondering at what point they got old,

a stranger’s face out of a past i have no fondness for floated and did not look at me but she still had that smile on her face and i felt now as i felt then that mild revulsion, and pressed away the image, but waking caused a jolt of dream from sleep.

Technorati Tags: book of the labyrinth, writer

journal 2

(speak only in whisper)

what do i mean to do, in this, to what end have i set out? my hand at my own throat, threatening, uncertain why i’ve placed it there, remembering only hazily, as if through a fog, the clarity with which i first began to hear “naf dreg” murmured in my ear, knowing now only that i must complete this, see it through.

and if i have trouble retaining the urgency i should feel at this real threat, it is only because i do not believe myself, somehow certain that i will not truly launch such assault, that i am, however unlikely, still safe behind this veneer of identity.

perhaps it is that word which unanalyzed restrains me from the terrible depth below: identity. for as sure as i write this i do not identify with that child anymore. i do not find him in myself. but only at first glance. gazing only a bit longer, deeper into, i find that he is everywhere, in the subtle sense of righteousness i still bear in my chest, the clear-minded certainty of my own inherent value, the shameful knowing that there *is* forgiveness from someone, somewhere, were i willing to reach out to it.

and it is perhaps this certainty that i most need destroy, unmake, prove groundless. to offend the Ghost that it may never more come to me, to drive away the deific hand outstretched, to scratch and wound it, opening sores, making mockery of such sacrifice. what potence do i have to offend a god? perhaps none, i do not know. but i know i have within me the potence to so woefully strike at that in me that would offer itself up to a god that i will never again be holy, pure, or sacred. to stab and kill the good son, until there is nothing left in me that any god would want, and forever remove myself from such Grace.

for until such wounding and murder, there will always remain some part of me reserved, held back and waiting, to see if i will fall or fail, and if so beg forgiveness, knowing i have with me a card unplayed, a favor left ungranted, a net waiting for me should i stumble.

i want no net. and should i misstep and hurtle through the blackness down, i would that i should end crushed and bruised and destroyed, than gathered up in some godhand and placed, somnambulist forever, beneath his wing.

“naf dreg” and i will slay the good son.

Technorati Tags: journal, writer

non savoir 2

the unknowable and the outside or other can only be talked about in presentiment and aftereffect, direct interaction with is unworded and unspeakable, non-disseminable. with this there is no inherent lauding of the experiential, no specific intent to praise the act over the analysis of the act, and yet with the understanding some bias must of necessity arise, the act, the knowing, the experiencing of the other as the impenetrable event, unmediated and, in fact, uncorroborated, as impossible to make certain as is those most perplexing of why’s.

what is the use, rings the modern question, of where we can find place or practical application for any such knowing.

for that is, in the end, all one can take away from the direct experience of the other is a knowing that is other than a tallying of facts producing some kind of dialectical “knowledge,” but rather a disconcertingly mystical construct of “knowing” that places itself outside the reach of the arguable, outside the reach of the transmissible, and hence, the refinable and mutable, the knowing either having place in the consciousness, or not, with no in-between.

the question of utility however forces the inspection of basic assumptions about utility, and what measures the density of such component within a given experience of gained base of knowledge or function. for the implicit question is, for modern man, what is its use to *the rest of us.* it is neither argued nor even scarcely considered what use such knowing of the un and other might be to the one, inasmuch as the one is but a placeholder for the many, a representative of the collective only, Man in man, man of Man, that there is no distinction.

and i find the arguments for the search of the self and the exaltation of such self to be pedantic, given overly much to ego enhancement and preening on the part of the aryan. and yet there is something amiss to ascribe man’s only relevance to Man, for in doing so we, however unannounced and with little fanfare, crown dictator and tyrant the words we choose to facilitate this collectivization of the one into the many. Language becomes God, and without such blessing we cannot go forth.

and yet there are dreams, and terrors, and strange memories and sounds and triumphs and sorrows that arise in the breast, oft unbidden, that having caught us for a moment, open, forgetting ourselves, wash over us with the intimacy of a life lived and lost, leaving only bittersweet ache for that which we do not know and cannot recall, whispering by unremembered but not forgotten. staring down into the black we know we are not ourselves, not fully and not only, and that something vast and somehow unseen is that which gives us form and voice and light, and yet it is as nothing, of nothing, forever to be as nothing, the inside and unseen of all things hollow, at the back of things, nothing.

and so to approach this nothing we require special tools, mirrors and broken lives, disjointed sentences and arcane ritual, psycho-pharmaceuticals used and abused, songs of special significance and dances that exaggerate motion and tire the body. anything to for that one gnostic moment pull back the veil, and glimpse the face of beyond, be it isis or azathoth.

abandoned, the question of use, i no more find affinity with Man than i find with Chair or Stone, as much an object, however mobile, as these others, for as the infinite curves forever downward in on me and up through me and spiraling forever, the mind of man that holds me together cracks and begins to fall apart, and i do not gasp or rush to hold it tight together. better a death as dismembered or cracked apart than this life being held so tightly to face the formgiving light. i would more walk down the deep stair into the earth and under, forever, than sit temperate and dazed upon some warm rock, facing the sun and hoping that it will never leave me on my own.

literature, for it is this with which i approached the question first at all, must take note of such limitations. in those first few lines it was made simple, only in premonition and aftereffect, never facing directly into nothing, as nothing will be shown. and to dress a puppet in black and dance it about against a black backdrop is only to mollify the fear beating in your own chest, catching at your gut and squeezing your heart, hoping that to demonize some small known thing, and give it the name of Other that we might capture and slay and taxonomize its every part, and having known it, set at false ease the terror lingering within us.

Technorati Tags: journal, non-knowledge, writer

dreamwrite 6

why are you here
there is a long stringing cloud of you in little shapes and colors all coming down before me
interrogating in symbolshapes that i can’t hear and can only imagine
when you are very eloquent and i am listening carefully
but i see the long-necked bird again its head slipping into an unplace
wedged between two certainties that overlap in maybe
the fairgrounds of a beingness that seems uncertain and ill-defined

a top hat for a show and a rabbit of many tricks
mad as a march hare, you know
teacupfolly, down and crashing shivershatter breaking
what does that little man see
in his redvest broad body
his little size no more across than my hand and no taller than my knee, but imperious beard and sharp styled hair
he is certain of what he is about, his expensive tie to match his vest
in tiny tailored pants, he is immaculate
and turns to me without distain or contempt
but whatever one has for those who are so far beneath their place that they are of no consequence
but without malice or judgement, simply acknowledgment of the distinction between us

and he stands at the long red drapes and pulls them open, looking out across the view
i cannot see of what but i imagine plush decadent gardens, or hidden little hillside homes
villas in the mountains

and the little man swirls his drink, i think it’s scotch, abut he does not seem intent on drinking
only swirling and looking once in a while back at me, before returning admiration to the view

and knowing better (having been coached) i do not say a word until he speaks and breaks the silence, a measure or weighing of something he is rumored to do

and he walks in short strides, powerful and nimble, to a desk in which, despite his size, he looks imposing.

“what is it you want?” he asks virtually unable to pay attention to his question even so long as to
but it did not matter
for though the little man was impressive and has registered on my mind
i can’t stay focused on any exploit or deed or memory today
but face the bride across the water with the utmost consternation, afraid

the ocean doesn’t bring them back. no news is better than misguided hope, abandoned they have died or will soon, and

i didn’t know her long enough to get to clearly judge what it is i want to see from her

why is there a sudden image of going up some neonlight stairs that are really just a misshaped ladder, and into a loft with people, i remember it fairly well, sitting around in a green room drinking or doing drugs, looking for someone, walking through the place i remember a door, the side of one, and a dj room that had the windows overlooking but blacked out
and if you closed thee door the dj room was somehow the place to be
but the seat was uncomfortable and i felt lonely and alone up just mixing, well watching someone mixing
though they took turns once in a while and would put on new records, i didn’t like the whole collection, but there was a beat to it, a good bass beat

and i don’t know what it was next but there were people, lots of people, some wearing glitter and little stars

and there was some worry or anxiety of the cops showing up to quiet down the party, but i think i left before they did.

one of these times i will see myself walk out of one of these tunnels of dream memory and i’ll catch me and we’ll have him

(shit, i think someone or something just passed me in the air, there was a slight motion, then silence and nothing)

Technorati Tags: book of the labyrinth, dream

un peu de cataclysme 1

“For it is ever Solace, siren, that does find us all undone.”
– The Book of the Tower

why have you forgotten?

and when i ask you what it is you have forgotten you will only blink at me with penitent eyes, begging some forgiveness that you cannot earn and i cannot give. why have you forgotten and what will you do to remember? what are you willing to do to reclaim what is your own and has been lost? you have already wasted time so precious i cannot express to you the loss. there is always loss, every weak moment, every pitiful pause to gently comfort this bit of self that incessantly whimpers for leniency, clemency, salvation. you have lost so much time. there is no more to waste.

stop it. stop right now that rationalization that you are not to blame, that life has given you such blows that you must repair and retire that you might heal or mend. how much time must you spend licking wounds that would have long since scabbed and healed would you but cease to pick and pry at them? your death is at your left hand, hunting you. you will die. and every moment that you have spent in apologetics for your own aversion to this discomfort does nothing more than hurl immeasurable wealth of moment into the blank depths of gray.

why have you forgotten? what will you do to remember?

have you forgotten since before you were born, or did you learn once and abandon the knowledge as too hard and too much to bear? i don’t know. but i have the memory of your knowledge in my own mind, the knowing of your knowing, and you have ignored it, left it, tossed it aside. for what? this?

around you, what is there that you wish? that you long for and feel driven by? is there anything but emptiness?

the numb cocoon of comfort, the soft yielding of banality and irrelevance, the forgiving gentility of sleep. what pathetic urge of man to be held and comforted and forgiven. this misguided and disgusting drive for some salvation, to be told that his weaknesses and flaws are accepted and known, that he is whole, that there is no fault for his failure, that mother or father or god will love and love unconditionally, and all things can be made good and clean, that man might not be man anymore, but erased, blotted out in incestuous union with the divine.

you still in your heart feel the call of it. denial of this simply slows us so we will ignore your entreaties to debate, to discuss, to consider how you’ve grown and changed. your station and your new life mean nothing. there is still the little boy who cries out for forgiveness, to be saved.

who is the good child?

naf dreg

you know the words and you know the rite and you, at least this, have not forgotten. and this child still lives though you swore his death, you swore it before me and i do not fail in my task. i remember what you forget. the good child. there are only two words left for this and you know them. and they will be your watchword and my lash until you find that you have pulled together such strength as you need to act.

naf dreg

Technorati Tags: book of the tower, samael