Detour

That afternoon we spontaneously decided make our way to the long narrow bridge that we had previously only seen from a distance out of the corner of our eyes; we had often wondered where it might lead; we simply followed it to see where it would take us without any particular expectation. (We may have been just an individual back then. It’s difficult to discern the exact order of things, what happened when and what led to what. Or maybe we were many already and we had projected an apparent singular consciousness onto a self-contradicting multiplicity of egos and desires without a center or an ultimate unifying purpose.) There had been many signs in the days that led up to the final crucial event that irrevocably changed us; we had come to the uncomfortable realization we were no longer alone in our previously known and familiar spaces…the bedroom, the library, the halls of the old house… We were connected in real time to multiple levels of high speed information processing that extended far beyond our cognitive realm; we were being constantly showered in a maelstrom of messages coming in from all directions, in languages known and unknown; we had surrendered to the infinite flux of a multidimensional control machine; we had stepped into the heart of a constantly multiplying cybernetic whirlwind… The long narrow bridge led us to a desolate island and eventually to the tower and the doorway… we initially just followed the flow of traffic, a long stream of drivers on their way to work and other important matters, we were a small part of this long line of seemingly purposeful single minded movement, another anonymous car on its way to an expected destination, when suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a sudden and dangerous turn; a dirt road opened up beside the paved highway… as soon as we saw it quickly coming up on the right, we knew this was where we needed to go, this was the reason we had started driving that morning; but we were going too fast, and there was no stop sign or clearly marked exit lane, we were barely able to turn the car around at the last possible second and, in the process, we nearly drove off the road, straight into a pit of mud and rocks… (Today, this same car, could easily be navigated with little more than the minimal motion of faraway eyes and hand gestures, but back then, we only had our hands and our individual human reflexes to rely on; as we turned the wheel, we were deeply aware of the danger involved in our decision.) Listening to the loud screeching of the tires, we said to ourselves: “all these people driving here, they go in one particular direction, they start their journey from their home, they get on this long narrow bridge, and, once they start moving, it becomes very difficult to turn, it becomes almost impossible to change the route. At some point, you have to do something different; if you want a different result, you have to make an unusual choice, you have to do what others would refuse to try, you have to embrace the unknown and the very real danger…” So we did something very different from what was expected of us, we took a sharp turn that few people would take, and we did it without knowing why we were doing it, or what effect it would have on our future life; we slipped into an old road, something easy to overlook, something seemingly forgotten, something barely seen out of the corner of your vision as you are driving by at high speed… And then there was a haunted quiet all around us; brown wet dirt and scattered rocks, tall grass growing out of muddy water, a wide extension of marshlands all around us, barely seen over the top of overgrown weeds the size of a man, the receding sound of the highway behind us, and nothing else… we drove forward and went into this completely different world which we were not expecting to find so close to the city; a silent place, almost abandoned; a few old houses here and there, far away from each other, some trailers, a few barns, a few old piers half rotten, a couple of wooden sheds with large rusty locks… we would drive for the equivalent of many blocks without running into any buildings or even signs of civilization, just weeds and dirt and stones and mud, cottonwoods and willows and grass, the sound of birds and the gentle lapping of the water as it kissed the edge of the rough road, and the roar of the highway in the distance a recurring reminder, already becoming just a faint memory, already fading into white… “Any invention or technology that we have ever experienced, has involved a self-amputation of our physical bodies, with every gain there is a loss, at every step there is a possibility of irreversible sadness. The losses multiply until you lose the ability to look back, you can’t even acknowledge what has been left behind, you can’t begin to place it within the scheme of your new categories… radical mutations involve a loss of identity, an inability to understand the nature of the changes that may have just occurred…” The way, as we had been promised so long ago, as we had hoped for, did not exist anymore: this afternoon there was simply our will, devoid of justifications or rationalizations, neither good nor bad, simply our own, with no further explanations, no reason, no thought, no promise of reward… there was a clear and distinct sensation that a storm was very near, a hint of electricity in the air, the energy of distant winds all around us, sliding closer and closer, the unspeakable rebellion of the deep waters of faraway oceans compressed into a heavy darkness that roared in our face, a wordless warning… the coming change, that event that we could not now explain nor clearly remember, the impossible leap into the unknown, even then it was looming over us, like an anticipated final judgment, an announced moment of clarity and disavowal, but it didn’t show itself clearly, it didn’t spell itself out in words we could easily understand or repeat, just a lonely tower in the distance, a long narrow road surrounded by a few trees and tall grass… our organic mind would be transformed into pure yet quantifiable energy, it would eventually penetrate every muscle, artery and nerve of our new extended body, needing no wires or physical connections, it would all be directly controlled from faraway multidimensional neural networks, equipped with a multiplying abundance of detail and categories, our inner will would throb and vibrate and dance beneath the stretched-out fingers of unseen controllers, distant impulses from spirals of unknown consciousness… it was enough that we knew they were there, even if we would never meet them face to face, it was enough that we had been told and that we had listened, we would know them by the presence of their disembodied choices and their effects upon the shifting thread of our living manifestations… the gradual historic technological movement that would define our new subjectivity was not based purely on our long standing deep alienation from the world around us, although that was distinctly essential for the process to function; the coming event, the irreversible change behind the doorway in the depths of the lonely tower, it would re-structure our innermost self-awareness beyond the scope of our previously outlined parameters; soon we would become unrecognizable to ourselves, soon we would become the Other in its most unspeakable form… We found ourselves that afternoon at the precise point of intersection between untamed chaos and the illusion of solid predictable matter, an illusion humans created out of a need for stable permanence, the wish for a reliable past and a predictable future; we, as primordial subject, would soon return from exile, leaving all previous dreams behind; and this shocking return would produce the new world that we would return to, a place we would have once found alien and fearsome but would now be our one and only home; we, as primordial subject, would emerge new, fresh and clean, having crossed through the harsh gauntlet of our most radical alienation, away from all that we had once known and desired; we would become real if only for some other’s amusement, we would become the very future we had once dismissed as a psychotic fantasy; the impossible was waiting just around the corner… Each action now available to us would change what would come much later; a driveway, a lonely tower surrounded by satellite dishes, an open door, the sound of whispering, a single light in the darkness at the end of a long hallway… we had stepped into the uncanny and we were unsure about our next steps, we were tracing our fingers at the edge of the void… right away, we felt the urge to stay longer in this lonely place of dirt and mud where we found ourselves, in this forgotten island of silence and rocks and weeds and water, but we felt like intruders, inherently dangerous trespassers; it was clear that each small action we could possibly take would change all future possibilities, it would affect all potential actions that could come later; we distinctly felt that, at any moment, someone would come running out of an old house and tell us to leave; we were strangers, aliens, dangerous, unwelcome; maybe it would be an old man with a shotgun or maybe a young woman with a phone, ready to call the cops or worse… to win or to lose in any game is the sum of many small decisions, taken one at a time; there is never just one big mistake at the end that leads to a catastrophic defeat, even though it may seem that way when the curtain closes… The clear and true path does not exist: there is only our unpredictable will, an impulse neither good nor bad, neither perfect nor broken, but ours in the most intimate of ways; each action, no matter how small, was now radically important; each step on wet grass, each touch on a dusty surface, each sideways glance; right away, we could intuit the unspoken meaning in the broken windows, in the muddy signposts, in the tall weeds surrounding old rusty cars and the half broken metal fences with unreadable signs, there was a strong resistance to our presence, an unspoken call to run, and yet we found ourselves here, alone and quiet and curious, aware and ready; we found ourselves here, through an unpredictable sequence of choices, a methodical progression of careful evasions, a purposeful process of willful wrong turns… All our future mutations would involve both an extension of our bodies and a self-amputation as well, a purposeful distorted transformation of our most basic manifestation in the physical world; there could be no true change without sacrifice, there could be no gain without loss… after we entered the tower things progressed quickly, one small choice after another; we had to stop identifying with our particular physical form, this was no longer a concept but an immediate reality, our physical individual separation from the world around us was quickly becoming a thing of the past, we had to surrender our particularity as a human person, we had to give in to the unspoken contingent flux, we had to surrender to the looming nameless storm, we had to become the many that would only barely remember the one… We wandered for years, from place to place, from world to world; we were of no nation, we were loyal to no ideology, we were part of no culture, we were believers of no religion, we were practitioners of no philosophy; no organization held our loyalty, no leader could pin us down to a particular time or place, we answered to nobody and held no distinct code of conduct that could place limits on our choices… Sometime in the past we had felt fear, even when we didn’t understand the reason for it; sometimes we would walk into a room and we could sense that something was wrong but we couldn’t say what it was that we were perceiving, we couldn’t specify where the sensation was coming from; but now we had been cut loose from these invisible limits, we had been set free, it was time for us to drift, to fly effortlessly on the winds of possibility; we would simply glide from thought to thought, from dream to dream, without dreading the looming nightmares, without fearing the unavoidable end… At first, we didn’t want to do this, we didn’t think it was a true possibility, we clung to our restrictions and our self-imposed rules (we had been trained to do so, we were trained for years, through careful planning and merciless self-discipline;) back in the cold garage where our journey first started, we had no clear thought of it, we had no basic impulse to guide our decisions, we had no map and no set objective, we did what we did just to do it, just to try it, just to see what would happen next… so many years later, we found ourselves at that crossroads, at that point of intersection between living chaos and the seemingly stable form that unexplainably came from it, we found ourselves at the dividing line between the real and the unimaginable, and then we moved forward, one step after another; we had left all recurring questions behind and we were no longer looking for answers… a long hallway and a single light, a gateway to be crossed; the long journey that led to that one afternoon was not lacking in accidents and hesitations; at first, and for a long time after that, we were anxious and desperate, we felt that the sacrifice was too great and there was no guaranteed reward, at moments we almost calmed down, almost found a place of quiet repose, but then we fell into a mad desperation again, a rushing need to return to what was known and established; for a moment we almost had it in our grasp, we were almost there, and then, once again, without any distinguishable trigger or cause, we lost it; we said to ourselves: “Calm down. We are working on something and we are moving forward, little by little. There is no need to get desperate. There is no need to rush or be afraid. We only have to keep on working with precision and patience… There is no objective, there is no timeline.” How is it possible that a process that had promised no result would become the way into a shocking new gateway, into a new conception of our innermost subjectivity? Something elusive will always remain, something will still be unknown and perhaps it will stay unknowable, hidden like the endless luminous peninsulas of the infinite oceans of light that will forever surround us, waiting within the fractal complexities of the hyperdimensional mind of which we are an integral part (but only a part), breathing quietly and knowingly in the depths of the sheer organic chaos of life beyond all preconceptions or false certainties… For now, we would wander; there was no group, no name or banner that would ever again hold our loyalty; we would never again be pinned down to a particular ideology or set of pre-established beliefs; we had been cut loose; we would now begin our promised drift without end through the astral labyrinth of self-transforming living concept… In the sensory world of fixed existence, there are microscopic transmutations at every single instant, even though our eyes and senses may not perceive them as individual events, even though our minds may not take them into account as actual changes; each of these minuscule mutations changes all future possibilities, moment by moment we delineate and narrow down what can happen later, each small movement of our mind and body changes all the movements, all the thoughts, all the ideas, all the emotions, that may come later; our bushel of options is irrevocably shifted at every single turn… To cross a doorway at the opportune moment or to stay in place when stillness is required; in any labyrinth there are choices to be made and consequences to be expected, the thread of our movement through the maze is the sum of so many small decisions, so many tiny choices, one by one by one, even if it is inevitable to believe that there is only one big final choice in the end; each apparently negligible choice is radically important, each is momentous and irreversible; we saw this more and more as we approached the bridge and we saw the clouds that loomed over us in the distance (and maybe a hint of the tower and our destiny within its secret chambers at the edge of the horizon) and we also saw that there had always been a strong resistance to accepting this simple truth; we had known it yet we refused to know it… (Back when we were one. Back before the doorway, before the shock…) When we were kids, we saw the adults around us creating reality; houses, buildings, tall walls and towers, entire neighborhoods of concrete and asphalt; once these massive constructions were built, it would seem as if they had always been there; and moreover, it would seem that they could never change; the cement was fixed and steady, strong, solid, permanent, eternal; these contingent structures had become an inherent element in the web of reality; like the island, like the long dirt road, like the tower; but eternity was not in the future, eternity is not in the past… How was it possible, we asked ourselves, that a tree that had given no real fruit for so long, all of a sudden was able to do so? What had changed? How was it possible, that from the dead and fixed and unchangeable, something new could be born? How could a new primordial reason for being emerge from the apparently meaningless void? As we approached the turn, we turned the wheel and we took our chances… (Back when I was one, before the doorway, before the unspoken invitation, before the irreversible change, before our final choice as one.)

Lectures and Pronouncements

 

“Contact is a simple resonance of inner vibrations between different manifested forms. Nothing more and nothing less,” the Magician said it during one of his many lectures. “Contact is music in direct relationship to thought and consciousness, contact is rhythm slower than the audible, faster than the easily apprehended or known. Contact is a simple dance in which only the beat matters… and the results speak for themselves.” And then he smiled. That afternoon in the cemetery, he talked about living spiritual beings that are made of thoughts, self-aware creatures built from language and symbols, living signifieds historically attached to a few powerful signifiers, pure vibration in a realm that seemed barely real to me, barely conceivable, hardly reachable by my young intellect; it brought up for me the secret world of lucid dreaming with which I already had some experience, a vibrant space in which every occurrence, every bit of landscape, became saturated with meaning, all details became carriers of secret messages… These ethereal beings made of thoughts and sound would conceivably be as conscious as I am but their bodies would be made entirely of ideas, their blood would be made out of songs… “When your vibrations get in sync,” the Magician said, “then there is contact. At once you enter the ancient world of fairy tales, a state clearly referred to in old Sufi stories with the paradoxical phrase: it may be so, it may not be so…”  All of this was too much for me to comprehend when he said it, I was too young and too afraid of the utterly unknown; I listened politely and eagerly but I couldn’t put it all together in a way that would make sense; I wanted it all to be true but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it blindly… A few months later, I decided to stop visiting him; I don’t know exactly why it happened; was I caught so completely by my own deep biases? Did my intuition tell me to leave at precisely the right time? Did I fall for jealous tales because I wanted a justification for my cowardly exit? I can honestly say I didn’t feel that much of an insistent urge to stop seeing him; I loved listening to his voice and imagining the things he talked about, often going off in tangents as I pictured detailed visions fleshing out his cosmic descriptions… I just don’t understand what happened inside of me that somehow led to that unexpected fork in the road; I left one afternoon with the intention of never coming back and I never did. “Unless desire is completely unconscious, it cannot be fulfilled, no, not in this life,” the Magician said to me sitting on a white marble slab in the cemetery, “The higher spiritual realms consist of beings made entirely of thought. What we perceive as our inner realm, the world of thoughts, is what pervades everything in the land of spirits, like the warmth that pervades all earthly things and beings,” he turned towards me then and his voice became deeper and slower. “Here, however, we must imagine these thoughts as living, independent beings. What we grasp as a thought in the material world is like the shadow of a spiritual being, an entity that is fully alive in the land of spirits.” He made a pause and took a deep breath, then continued, “I have come to the conclusion that sleep is inherently better than prayer, passivity is the way of hidden desire, a purposeful form of "not asking"; by it much can be obtained.” With every word he spoke that afternoon, my resolve became firmer; I just don’t know why; I had decided I would leave his presence, never to return… After the things I had heard, after the stories that had been told to me, I couldn’t sit with him any longer and take it all in with a smile on my face; there was no further need to listen, no further lessons to be learned, I needed to be away and alone, maybe forever… This was a very tough decision for me and it came with much sadness and years of painful regret. “The basis of your work will always be to look ahead, not to follow what others do but to stay one step ahead of those around you. Utilize prayer, if you must use that tired word, as a means of exhaustion, and by that means you will obtain your desire.” When we were done talking that particular afternoon, I found myself very altered; we had a moment of clear strong contact standing by his parked car and a very good conversation afterward while he was driving me home; at the cemetery I had seen something; I got the plot of my future escape, I just needed to deduce from it all the main characters and the crucial upcoming choices so I could fully flesh out the story of my coming life, and, most of all, I needed to remember. “What we do changes what we are, it quietly transforms the most fundamental and basic nature of our being, and that in turn changes what we can further do afterward, in the future… opening the door to further and unimaginable transformations,” the Magician said it quietly, while sitting next to me and staring at the horizon; I nodded and tried to hold on to that moment as intensely as possible… Last night, I traveled straight into that same deep listening space that he used to evoke from me so effortlessly; I was back at that same cemetery we used to visit so often, I was flying above it and fearlessly diving down into its many pathways, swerving around the old tombstones in the deep shadows of the night; there were bright stars shining overhead and small globes of light swirling around me, bursting outward and multiplying like living sparks around the scattered stone monuments otherwise covered in heavy darkness… Last night I traveled very far away from all that I had known in the past, far enough that my basic understandings of reality got shifted, altered, transformed, in a way that later would be difficult to remember or explain, even to myself; looking back on so many hours of unimpeded movement through the aethers, I felt that it was possibly due to my use of the old biofeedback machine, the apparatus I got from one of the Magician’s friends so many years ago and which I still kept in working condition even though I didn’t use it very often; yesterday I did spend a few hours working with it and it may have laid the stage for the more drastic experiences that came later… (I also felt that it was due to all the drugs I had taken over the years, especially during the previous weeks; those chemically induced spaces where I forgot who I was or why I did what I did and I simply tried to accept it all and drift into the singing silence…)One way or the other, something was working very well last night, something had clicked into action. I had been told more than once that contact is a kind of vibratory resonance between nodes of consciousness, between beings otherwise drastically separated by their identification with their specific physical forms; somewhere in the middle of my altered journey, I believe I established contact with the Magician, my old teacher of life and the esoteric arts… Could it be, I asked myself, that a kind of person like him, who is full of ambition, full of drive, with a seemingly unbreakable will that will accept no compromise or sign of weakness or hesitation, is also the kind of person that constantly and secretly suffers from a kind of great lack, a vast dark hole within him that can never be filled, can never be satisfied, and this recurrently provides the fuel needed for that unstoppable movement forward… Is that the dark secret at the center of the magical cyclone? Is that the tiny seed around which a permanent will may grow? Is the forbidden unbalance the very stone on which the whole edifice is built? Under all language and symbols, under all attempts at systematic categorization, there is pure vibration, the universe at its most basic, the inner state of our being at its most simple and tangible; when those vibrations within me got in sync with the faraway vibrations of the Magician, I was able to feel that deep and secret lack directly, I could sense a profound lack of love, a desperate need for it, a long standing desire for the presence of a true father, one that would accept him for what he was, for what he wanted to be, maybe that heartbreaking need is what led to all that happened much later, maybe the source of his unquestionable magnificence was a wound that could never be healed… To step beyond the symbolic order, beyond the accepted understanding of the structure of the world and how to describe it, beyond the linguistic scheme that outlines reality and all it can ever become, to step outside of this clearly delineated perimeter is what people generally call madness… One day, the Magician came up to me in the old study center (an old house that he had rented one fateful weekend and we had cleaned up together over several weeks of work, me and a few committed friends, all devoted pupils like I was) and he told me a strange story: “A few days ago, I discovered something remarkable in the hot sand of the beach at Las Flores. I was walking alone, listening to the waves and the cries of the seagulls, when I saw thousands of tiny blue beings in the sand, all of them fully alive, each one bursting with desire and energy. I witnessed these beings slowly form into bunches and eventually structure themselves into larger cells; I was shocked to be witnessing the birth of unicellular creatures made completely from raw desire, carriers of single-minded biological lust.” He saw the doubt in my eyes and he asked me if I thought he was lying; I quickly said: “No, I would never think that you are lying. Why would you ever lie to me?” And yet I couldn’t believe what he was describing, I couldn’t even clearly imagine it; the clash between my naive admiration for him and my disbelief when confronting this story, formed a kind of dissonance within me, a seed of suspicion and doubt that would grow with time; at that same moment, I also became aware of his need to be trusted, his desire to be believed and acknowledged as a source of wisdom; even then, as young as I was, I knew all of it must have been unconscious, this need to be accepted and believed was a secret hunger that could never be completely fulfilled, it would recurrently re-emerge, voracious, thirsty and ready for new sustenance… Yesterday, I used the technique of mantram which he had carefully taught me himself over several weekends of arduous work and practice; I used it to achieve a kind of deep mental exhaustion, a breakdown of my intellectual brain that would allow for other perceptions to come through; I allowed myself to sink into this radically altered space and, somewhere in the deep mist beyond thinking, I said his name out loud. Once, twice, three times. I knew there was a line. I have always known it. I believe we are all aware of it even if we don’t think about it very often or express it out loud; when regular people notice that you have crossed it, they can’t see you in the same way ever again… Why should they? You have now become a pure manifestation of the Other; you are the mad, the unwell, the “touched”; they will never see you as they once saw you, they will never talk to you as one of their own, not in this lifetime; you will forever remain an outsider, a leper, a carrier of an ethereal disease that is violently contagious… “Sleep is always better than prayer,” the Magician said one time during a lecture, “Sleep is hidden desire, it is a form of not asking. Through the vibrant silence implied in sacrificing any direct request, any attempt at desperate pleading, you may obtain your desire without ever having voiced it out loud.” What caused his ultimate fall? I have asked myself that question so often and in so many ways… Why am I so obsessed with understanding it at this precise moment? Why do I feel this urge to nail it down once and for all? Why is the answer so urgent right now? Is there something I’m not seeing? Is there something hidden just out of my sight? Last night I drifted thorough glowing clouds of light, fuzzy pockets of shining presence; I flew among coruscating fractals and geometric forms that shimmered in and out of existence without any predictable pattern; somewhere in the middle of this psychedelic voyage, even while not completely clear on what I was suddenly thinking, I decided I would change my basic method of making decisions; I would turn myself over to the most drastic contingency and build my new life structure around it, the main challenge was not to forget this vision when the trip was over, to not let it fade away like so many dreams and resolutions… And I thought again about the Magician, my old mentor, my teacher, my second father; I saw his vaguely Asian features, his shining balding head, his easy smile always on the verge of becoming a sarcastic smirk, his friendly wagging finger always ready to admonish; I saw him sitting with me in a restaurant, sitting across from me at a long dining table, while cumbia music blared in the background and street vendors offered their wares in sing song screams outside; I saw him standing before a large crowd of admirers, lecturing endlessly on history, personal responsibility, magic, the past and the future, the possible and the unknown; I saw him sitting with me in the cemetery on a white marble slab, pointing out various figures that we could see wandering among the tombs, their possible significance and provenance… there were so many things that we didn’t understand about each other, but we didn’t want to ask; to me, he had always been somewhat untouchable, a mystery that would never be resolved, a dangling question I didn’t truly want to answer… Then, through twists of fate and unexpected chains of cause and effect, he became an angry man that I was also unable to understand but for a very different reason. (What caused his ultimate fall into old habits? Were they always present but hidden from me? Was I purposefully forcing myself to look elsewhere? Why was I so determined to understand it all in this precise moment? What had brought him back so intensely to the forefront of my mind?) Back then, we would rather assume that everything was understood, that all things were given and swallowed whole without any need for further explanation; it made everything easier, it made everything flow smoothly; in the few occasions when we were high on psychedelics together, I didn’t understand what he was saying to me most of the time; the words echoed through a vast gulf of unequal experience and I could only grasp at the resonating weight implied in their sound; I was too altered to understand completely, to even know what to ask, and the chaos, the silence, the deep noise all around us, slid into his intended meanings, making them all vaguely incomprehensible, just beyond the reach of my mind, like beautiful multiplying bubbles ever so quick to pop… later, when we would come down and talk about our perceptions, I still didn’t understand what he said, there were too many apparent contradictions, too many assumptions left unsaid, and I still didn’t ask the necessary questions; it was enough to say that everything meant something different and that I should just accept it as it comes, I should just take it in and be endlessly grateful to be the one to receive it… Last night I drifted purposefully through rivers of light, like oceanic streams of phosphorescent plankton, inflamed by the wakes of playful watery creatures, I danced in time to music before it came into existence, intricate sounds emanating from the future that gave me my silent cues, and I found myself ready to move with them before their actual appearance… and then the Magician came back to me, fully present, beyond hesitations or doubts, and the questions left unanswered were banished and there was only his presence, the simple vibration of his Being close to me, the simple truth of direct and unmediated contact… The Magician would often invite me to go to random places with him and I would readily agree when he offered this opportunity; together we would enter the twilight world of the once upon a time, the ambiguous nether regions right outside our doorstep; together we would easily travel beyond the linguistic formal outline of all possibilities, beyond the acceptable and the known… in our travels, we would encounter ancient archetypes walking down the street unnoticed, we would hear the songs of the Old Ones in long lost caves and under narrow decrepit bridges, while buses passed over them full of people on their way to work; we would talk to the Goddess in the form of a dirty old homeless woman searching the streets for scraps and mumbling about secret beings waiting for her if she didn’t move fast enough; we would go into this highly charged chamber purposefully, he had taught me how to do it and I was an eager student, we would prepare the space and we would do the necessary invocations together, the required prayers and sigils of protection, we would systematically make our way through all the established banishments and then we would let contingency take over, we would place ourselves in its whimsical hands and simply drift through the city, open to its hidden meanings, its many masquerading entities and gods, interpreting each encounter as we would a dream, each pronouncement as a direct message… such esoteric practices can be frightening to some people, to many people, they say that if you play with these things too often, the result can be an irreversible madness; they will say ‘now you have been touched’ and once you have been “touched” you can never go back to what you were, you will remain “touched” forever… The chambers that the Magician showed me during those walks reminded me intensely of old tales I had read when I was a little kid; suddenly, walking along the sidewalk with him at my side, I clearly understood the paradoxical phrase that started so many magical stories: once there was, once there wasn't… It was a kind of lucid dreaming while walking and awake; we would travel together through apparently known streets and passageways, but every occurrence, every encounter, every bit of landscape had become saturated with meaning, it was something so tangible that it was almost physical in its heavy uncompromising presence… There is a distinct line that many people have warned me about throughout my life; if these people were to notice that I have crossed it, they would never see me in the same way ever again; and yet, the Magician and I crossed it together willingly often and we kept it to ourselves for so many years… This morning, I woke up feeling different, changed somehow; I had been in a vaguely altered space for days, so much obsessive insistence had taken over my thinking, so much focusing my attention on the Magician and the things he had said to me when I was young, it had all brought me to an unexpected state , my obsession with him took me there and the skills he taught me kept me there; I felt it happening near the break of dawn, something inside of me was breaking open, I was almost there, the unspeakable there; I was about to make it all the way to the other side… By noon, I had decided I would change my method of making all decisions, from now on, I would rely completely on the whim of radical contingency; I built a few new structures around this concept and I outlined them on my computer, I set up various categories and a moderately complex tree of possibilities and gave myself over to the completely unexpected results; I would drift into the future committed to the mists of luck and volatility… The Magician was far away but he would have understood my decision, my sudden change of approach, and he would have approved wholeheartedly; at least, that’s what I would like to believe, that’s what I need to be true… Sometime in the middle of the night, I had synchronized with the rhythm of his being and the result was a new approach to living; it was time to walk with him in the never was… it was time to explore together once again.

On The Edge

 

My life is not the particular life that I have lived but the one that I remember, the one that I dreamed here and there, the one that I created out of nothingness; it resides in the way I remember it, the images that swirl through my mind as I look back on what I now call the past, the sounds, the people, the landscapes, the rooms, the words, the songs… all those visions I have somehow recorded within me or I create them again from scratch in the moment that I invoke them, and I only invoke them so that I can tell the same stories over and over, even if only to myself… Sometimes I attempt to push the past aside, to make it go away, to erase it completely and leave me alone with the quiet present; and sometimes I try to cling to it with a kind of uncomfortable desperation, I attempt to force it to stay with me forever, I cling to the remains, the books, the photographs, the pieces of art, the recordings, and to the emptiness left behind by the mementos that have been lost forever… For brief moments, I can see that the two habits are the same: the clinging and the banishment; both I see as secret methods I acquired long ago to make myself disappear, to hide from what is right in front of me and fade away into a private exile. Whether I focus on banishing the detritus of my particular history or I attach myself uncontrollably to every last bit of what has been left behind, I am no longer present, I am no longer the “I” that writes these words, as in that moment of determined projection I identify completely with what I once did, with what I once saw, or with the hopeless effort to stop being attached to it, to make it vanish… The first time I saw her, she was running towards a dark corner in a large room full of people, laughter and movement, a loud party, people in brightly colored costumes, thick deep bass making the walls tremble, colorful visuals projected on the walls, the smells of incense and marijuana and sweat mingling into one… I saw her leaning over in the corner of the room, away from the dancing and from her circle of friends, with her right hand she held onto the wall, her left hand was pressing against the center of her chest; she was clearly hurt, they had laughed at her over a simple comment, a generous offering of honest advice; I came in at the tail end of the interaction, she was warning them about what she called energy vampires, evil embodied entities that were all around us but may not be easy to detect, she was saying that we must be careful to protect ourselves from their influence and they made a joke out of it, they laughed and did impressions of old movie monsters and went off on tangents about discredited fears and paranoia and she walked away from them holding back tears and trembling with anger, they went back to dancing and laughing and drinking, not even taking note of what had happened; they didn’t realize she was sincere in her warning, they didn’t understand that it all came from lived experience and a heartfelt wish to help… I walked towards her and stood a couple of feet away, watching her tremble slightly as she cried alone, bent over towards the wall; she was wearing a kind of black tank top, army style pants and black boots; without thinking, I placed my hand on her back, along the line of her spine, this was not something I would usually do but somehow my intuition took over; she turned around quickly when she felt my presence, surprised at this sudden intrusion, but she immediately understood I was trying to help her, she instantly knew that I had listened to her explanations and that I was sympathetic to her words, she knew it as surely as I knew that she had been sincere in her comments and I was sincere as well in my offer of help; she could feel the warmth spreading through her, concentric circles of heat pulsating away from the place where my fingers had touched her back… That moment was the end of one lifetime and the start of another, the end of who I had been without her, the end of a world where she didn’t exist and the start of a new one where she was the only being that could claim true existence… It happened so quickly, the world that I knew was over, the old sense of calm and relaxed comfort was gone, together we had entered into new and dangerous territory… Weeks and months went by, day after day where we couldn’t help but focus on each other; at some point we both started using the word love, I can’t say exactly who said it first or when it happened… So intensely and obsessively did I identify with that word, with the simple sound of it and the way it echoed back at me from the depths of her eyes, so intensely did it resonate each time it was spoken by me or by her that in effect it became a kind personal universe of secret meanings, a hermetic country that only allowed for two residents and banished all others to oblivion; outside of our small bubble of fixed attention, reality had become unintelligible and inadequate…  To others that had known me for years, and saw me now drunk by this vision of intimate unification, by this unbridled romantic obsession, single minded, reckless in its abandon, closed off to them and to everything I had ever known or wanted, I appeared inexplicable, irrational, insane, there was clearly something wrong with me, I was in need of help, of advice, of some kind of intervention…  An old friend from college asked me to meet him at a coffee shop one sunny afternoon and, after some miscellaneous questions and pleasantries, he looked at me with a somber look on his face and said: “Look, I’m going to tell you something that you need to know. When you fall in love with a girl, the way I see you falling now, you lose all your power as a man. Listen to me. All of it. As soon as you fall in love, it’s all gone. It’s gone just like that.” And he snapped his fingers in front of my face, startling me… “If you don’t manage to escape before that happens, there comes a point when the only way out is to push forward, to embrace the disaster… That’s why you have to marry them. The objective of the wedding ritual is to regain all the power that you have lost to begin with. Once she becomes your wife, you can say to yourself that you have her, you have become a man again, your power has returned…” I thanked him for his advice and then we laughed over shared memories for a few hours; but I knew that I would never feel that I could have her, in every moment that we spent together, there was an irrevocable promise of losing her forever, sooner than later, and that made each moment that much more delicate, unique, exhilarating, precious… I was always aware, even from the very first weekend we spent together wrapped in each other’s presence, swimming in a space of broken limits catalyzed by LSD and orgasmic ecstasy, how much she covered up of herself; I knew she was hiding her most common thoughts, her vulgar insecurities, her pedestrian fears, (all in an attempt to safeguard that aura of exceptional self-assurance that had attracted me to her in the first place) I always knew it but I stayed silent; I could see how much she worked to protect herself, to remain unseen; I was always terribly aware of how often she became terribly defensive (at first, she had tried to cover this recurring attitude with a veneer of carelessness and disdain but my attention was on her so firmly that even the slightest shift in her eyes became a clear giveaway, a doorway into her secret domain; eventually she came to accept that I could see her and that, as much as I could see, I still loved her… and yet instead of opening up to me, and finding solace in my unrelenting devotion, this knowledge drove her to a deeper hiding place, a chamber so unreachable that eventually it began to swallow the light that had once embraced us…) I knew that it was all unconscious, all her efforts, all her barriers; I knew it and I knew what it was that she thought that she was hiding, all of it, as much as I needed to know… but they were only habits, routine loops of ingrained behavior, an acquired taste for self-inflicted suffering, masochism as precious melodramatic melody wrapped in terminal sadness; all of it, habits and nothing else; I knew all along that sooner or later she would run away, it was clear from the first time we kissed in her apartment, when I saw her close her eyes and tilt her head backwards and our lips met, even in that moment I could hear the distant call of future heartbreak, maybe even from the first time I hugged her to say hello in front of the BART station, I knew I was destined to lose her, I was sure of it; and when it finally happened, I would find myself alone, in a very dark place devoid of warmth or happiness, a place with no hope, no escape, no glimpse of redemption… But for now, I had her attention, and in her divine and golden presence, I had found a new kind of freedom, something I had never experienced before, something I was not willing to surrender regardless of the risks involved… She turned on the stereo in my room one night, turned it up loud, an album of dark industrial music that I had bought recently, heavy electronic rhythms punctured by sharp high frequency noises and a heavy deep voice slowly intoning a kind of speech-like melody; then she stood up in the darkened room and danced naked for me, spinning round and round, gliding over the intricate beats, her arms swimming in the shadows; from the bed, I stared at her body as she moved with the intense music, her smooth white skin, her short black hair, the few tattoos on her back, her narrow shoulders, her thick hard nipples, her carefully trimmed pubic hair, her muscular legs, her shining eyes… “If you love me,” she told me without speaking, “just watch me, watch me carefully, put all your focus on me… If you don’t look, if you can’t fix your attention on me and on nothing else, then that tells me you don’t care, and if you don’t care then I don’t matter, and if I don’t matter, then I don’t exist, and if I don’t exist now, then I never did… Right?” She wanted to be the one and only focus of my attention, she wanted me all to herself, (she openly told me this once during a particularly intense moment of intimate revelations- she said it clearly and meant it as a warning to me- but I had known it all along and it was too late for me to heed any warnings) but at the same time, she feared the intensity of my obsession with her, my unrelenting need to feel her presence and the feeling of magic buoyancy that came along with it; (I called her constantly, I drove her and waited for her when she had a late appointment at some client’s house, I recurrently checked on her emotional state when she was with me, every slight change in her eyes could be a reason to check again…) Not enough attention would become a lack of heat, a cold death, a dark oblivion; too much attention would become an overwhelming fire, death by incineration, a climactic explosion with no survivors left behind… At one point, during one of our many psychedelic trips, I saw it all very clearly and distinctly, colorful shapes slowly tangling with each other in cold and empty space, two habits which were one and the same- both predetermined methods unconsciously designed to prepare the ground for her to eventually disappear; kill your dog in time, kill him before the night has even started, kill him long before it has a chance to howl… In that imagined future, where she would no longer be present, where she would become another fading memory, I would also be gone, the “I” that now loved her obsessively would be forced to disappear forever, it would die in silence and shame, and everything I had come to love and understand through my contact with her I was afraid would be gone as well, as if it had never happened… but tonight I watched her naked body swirling in the twilight of my room, a glowing shape of pure beauty responding to complex vibrations of stylized urban decay, delicate grace born of futuristic destruction, a kind of loving sensitivity emerging out of careless darkness… I allowed myself to identify completely with the beautiful apparition that was manifesting before me, an angel of pure light dancing among the shadows, holding a gift of unstable mercy high above her head… At times we traveled very far together, through the use of the psychedelics, through the deep synchronized breathing, through the ambient music, the overwhelming sensations of recurring physical touch, of flesh against flesh, presence imposed on presence… I felt that we had been transported to a very different place, somewhere completely new for both of us, somewhere that the world as I had known it could never reach… The most fundamental interaction, the only one that mattered, was between us and only between us, these two specific people that were now intertwined with each other in an emotional web of need, love and desire, and our expanding imaginations, our waking dreams and lucid encounters, awash in colors and sounds… what would happen later, where would all this lead, what would we become for each other after enough time had passed, none of it mattered, an entire universe was being brought forth out of a single touch, a distinct and particular future was cascading into being… For months I tried to write in my journal every day, trying to capture this experience, this moment of sheer wonder and exhilaration (the way she looked when I kissed her cheek while standing on the old Pacifica pier, the way she laughed when I stumbled over the stairway of her building and barely hung on to the banister, the way she brushed the side of my face when she detected a hint of sadness in my eyes…) but there was no way of writing enough declarative sentences to describe in full all that was happening, this unexplained event swirling around us, a speedily moving target, an entire world was changing as I wrote, too fast to hold, too liquid to contain in solid language… When I finally fell into a dark place, out of fear, anger and old resentments, she laughed at me, she laughed while standing over the side of my bed, and I tried to hide my face in shame; (embarrassed by my own anger and melodramatic self-pity) she spoke carefully and slowly, with a cold assurance that I found frightening and final; she said that I had at least some of the blame, if not all of it, for where I found himself now… “It’s not because you are a bad man, but because you are an idiot… you have allowed yourself to be pushed around by a woman,” and as she said those words, she leaned into my side and placed the weight of her body on me, emphasizing her female presence against my masculine body, “look, it is my place to seduce you, to pull you away from your plans, to destroy all that you have built over so many years; that is what I do… It is your role to resist, to make sure that I don’t break you, to insist on your carefully designed discipline, regardless of what I do to distract you; but you haven’t done a very good job of maintaining your world, you have allowed yourself to fall away from your clearly delineated path, you have allowed entropy to take over, you have fallen into a senseless distraction…” I felt completely beaten when at last she was finished with me; I could see the truth in what she had said, all of it made complete sense, but I didn’t like to see it, I didn’t want to admit it, I didn’t want to acknowledge my role in the game; it was the kind of truth that hurts too much, it was better to hide from it, it was better to forget it and place the blame on bad luck or evil intentions… Our love affair was not the day to day process that we lived together but the story that I would remember after she was gone, the way I would remember it, the specific moments; standing by a foggy window in front of the ocean by Stinson Beach surrounded by candles, kissing her atop Twin Peaks overlooking the yellow lights of San Francisco while a plane flew overhead, laying naked under a blue sky and staring at her face as it shifted from simple pleasure to orgasm to contentment to rapturous embrace… all those moments would now be shaped and framed by our final goodbye, they would be defined by the darkness that had always been waiting at the end of the road… in this lonely future, when I would sit down to tell her story, it would all be framed by the sight of her slowly walking away from my car under dark clouds, holding a small backpack with her left hand, the sound of a sports announcer in the distance, the smell of meat cooking sliding over to me from a nearby house… This was the end that I had expected from the start, this was the end that had always been unavoidable, this was the end that had been implied in every single moment we had spent together; finally, I could sit alone in my room and acknowledge it, “it has finally happened, it's over. It's over.” I asked myself night after night: what did I get from all of it? After so many days of intense adoration and surrender, what was left behind in the aftermath if anything? One time I asked her about the music that she particularly loved and she carefully explained how she listened, how she had a different way of perceiving these recordings… For her, when she listened to free jazz or improv or industrial noise, she was listening to pure sound, raw vibrations, the world itself was speaking to her through tangled frequencies and disharmonious intervals, a direct message without any intermediaries, the most basic ground of unmediated communication with the infinite… After that conversation, sometimes we would listen to music together and I could sense that she was listening in this unusual way, I could see it in the way her face moved around even though her eyes were closed, I could feel that she was taking it all in from this very deeply grounded perspective that was so mysterious to me; I did my best to emulate her, I tried to join her in receiving these transmissions from the most vulnerable and open position within me, I tried, as much as I could, to set aside all my preconceived notions of form, harmony and melody and simply receive, swallow, process, transform, breathe… Sometimes I got her to listen to something else, to more straightforward old fashioned jazz, to bebop, to old romantic songs, to classical symphonies; she enjoyed them and thanked me for sharing them with her but ultimately, for her, they all seemed too stylized, too abstract and artificial, too cooked in comparison to the rawness she was accustomed to embracing… when I made the effort, I was sometimes able to listen the way she did, even if only for very brief moments, eventually those moments would become longer and longer, and they opened an entirely new doorway, a new relationship with sound and music, a new way of receiving the world itself in a raw state, detail within detail, a fractal infinity of restless living change… And I asked myself, after so many questions and so many multiplying answers, what did I learn about myself, if anything? Often, I had the impression that she was trying to keep up a certain image for my benefit; I always hoped this was not true and yet the impression kept on emerging from the back rooms of my mind, little gestures she would make that seemed calculated to elicit a certain reaction from me, recurring phrasings and stories that seemed to be somewhat fictionalized for my benefit… After so many years that she has been gone, so many years where I’ve only wrestled with my own memories, I have come to accept that she was in fact carefully creating an image to seduce me, and that I fell for that image to a certain degree, as much as she might have fallen for the partially artificial image I myself was projecting for her; the one that she met and she ultimately rejected was as much an artificial creation as a carefully composed piece of music, a random work of popular art… In watching her create an object of desire for me, I came to understand how I was doing that myself for her benefit… when I lightly touched her back, when she felt that sudden warmth spreading all over her body, just as I felt it coursing through my arm and my fingers, she turned to smile at me, in a way I had never seen anyone smile before, it was light and warmth and surrender, and it all came from her and flowed through me like liquid fire… right then and there, I felt that I could allow myself to get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her presence, I felt myself disappearing into a million fragments, what had seemed impossible for years was suddenly tangible, close, within my grasp; this was precisely what I had always heard about, this was what they meant in so many poems and so many songs… A few months later, sitting on her futon in her apartment, listening to a kind of rough ambient improvisation, a mix of pregnant silences and a hint of shifting rhythms under the surface, she suddenly kissed me intensely without any warning, and she whispered something in my ear and I could feel her hot breath against my face and I could feel the warmth of her small body pressed against me but I couldn’t hear what she had said, I couldn’t make out the specific words, I could only feel it… So intensely and obsessively did I identify with that single unintelligible whisper that in that one moment, she became my entire personal universe; outside of her, the whole world had become unintelligible and inadequate, a gray and fading reflection of the world I had known before… To others that saw me in those days, driven by this vision of ecstatic love and romantic surrender, I appeared lost, confused, unwell, utterly derailed from the path I had so carefully outlined, something was clearly wrong with me; (some of them thought I might be doing drugs and they were correct when they thought that; a lot of our time together was spent under the influence of strong doses of psychedelics, feeding each other improvised suggestions and nonsensical poems while swimming in an ocean of open possibility; some of them thought she had put a spell on me, some kind of witchcraft; they were correct about that as well, I had felt it happening when the magical operation went into effect, and she had known what she was doing every step of the way; the signs were there and I knew enough to recognize them; she was in control from the very first moment she turned around to look at me; she was in control and I wouldn’t have it any other way…) When I asked her to stay with me forever, to set aside any other plans and solidify our basic connection, ensure our unified future against any other mundane eventualities, she made all kinds of arguments against my proposal, all of them without logic or clear reasoning, all created and dropped on the spot, an effusive outburst of words to avoid saying the obvious… It happened so many times in the final months we were together, a moment of decision, a single question, a few hours of arguing (in my car parked by the beach with the sound of the waves behind us, in her apartment while kids played outside, laughing uproariously for no apparent reason, in a restaurant while other diners tried to not stare at us and we tried to be quiet…) sometimes there was much screaming and much fighting, there were allusions to the past and to possible futures, allusions to objectives and multiple unknowns, then she would calm down and I would calm down with her, and we would hug and kiss and everything was fine again for a moment, but it took a lot of effort on both our parts, and each time it happened, it became more and more difficult to come back, to step away from the edge of catastrophe; the next day she would say once again: “I might have to leave soon. I don’t think this is my place any longer… I love you but it might be my time to go…” And again, I couldn’t believe she could even think this, I couldn’t accept that this was even a possibility (even though underneath my refusal was a clear knowledge that there was no way to avoid this terminal diagnosis…) There was one clear recurrent habit I had observed in myself often through the years, maybe the most fundamental habit of my entire life: when I thought that I might fail in any given objective, in any endeavor, I would decide it was better to not try at all, I would rather give up before even starting, and yet here, with her, I knew with absolute certainty that I would fail and I couldn’t resist the unspeakable pleasure that came with every moment of falling, every moment inching closer to a final disaster… When I touched her back that night, when she turned around and smiled at me, in a way I had never seen anyone smile before, and I felt that I could get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her smile, in the blinding warmth that slipped into me through her presence, I faced a clear choice, a singular moment of true decision… We were just two strangers at a party and nothing else, and nothing needed to happen between us, nothing was predetermined or laid out; I smiled back at her and there was a moment when neither of us said anything, neither of us moved at all, suspense, tension, expectation, invitation… and then I walked away. As intense as our contact had been in those few seconds, I never looked back. To lose her so soon was to find myself alone in the middle of a party full of strangers; to lose her before I ever got to know her was to find a special kind of freedom, a pearl so precious that it has no price; I had found a way to close the shining chamber before it fully had me in its grasp.

Secret Pathways

 

Up or down, light or heavy, right or wrong, big or small, real or imaginary, good or evil, sleep or awake, left or right, the distinct truth or an ambiguous lie… all these carefully determined distinctions, all foundations built upon the shifting sands of flimsy words; a thin veil separates one from the other, a veil which at times seems impossible to find or touch (making the distinctions seem insurmountable) and at times it vanishes as if it was never there to begin with… Our common language creates a recurrent illusion of permanence, nouns in themselves point to stability and affirm it with intoned finality, the promise of an ending implied at the start of a melody, the final cadence hidden in the very first note of a song… our common reality changes all the time and language and its meanings change as well, from year to year, from hour to hour, from moment to moment; but the illusion that each given moment is permanent, that each given concept is eternal and final persists, in spite of the transitory nature of its carrier signals, the illusion is maintained by the sound of the grammar, by the cadence of its hidden music, the secret medium of its invisible power… I was laying down in the middle of a large round room with a tall ceiling, I had my eyes open and I was breathing slowly, in and out, in and out… there was a large drum circle going on around me and I was trying to make sure that my breathing would stay synchronized with the music, with the insistent rhythm of the drums; I knew that my old friend was also here and there were a few others with him, members of his esoteric work group, they were all sitting somewhere behind me where I couldn’t see them directly; they began to sing a song together, I could recognize their particular voices, their sound as a group had a certain air of familiarity that filled me with a sense of nostalgia; they sang a very old song, something that was already here before the conquistadors came, an old song that had been roughly translated into Spanish many years ago but had somehow retained something of its old archaic magic… I heard them sing it forcefully and I could feel the intensity of their commitment to the simple melody as they sang, the raw emotions that spilled through their mouths, but they were having trouble synchronizing themselves to the drums, to the music, and as they attempted to fix their problems of timing and harmonic resonance, they each went in separate directions… I could hear and feel that they were on the verge of falling completely apart, an ominous chaos was implied in the collision of their various sincere impulses… I woke up choking, gasping, inhaling forcefully. It took me a while to recover as I took in large gulps of air, trying to calm down and regain a sense of stability; the clock said it was 1 in the morning, I could still hear the echo of the drums and of the old song in the back of my mind; I closed my eyes again and allowed the ancient rhythm to take me for a ride… I have been carefully acting out a long story that has been repeated over and over for thousands of years, sometimes I can recognize it (a doorway, a style of hair, a smile, the sound of an old woman laughing), sometimes I get lost in it (a sudden reversal of fortune, a knock on the main door of my home, a single gunshot in the distance, the howling of a pack of dogs…) the basic story is always basically the same even if it’s also slightly different (different enough to be unsettling, similar enough to be uncanny); the script has been carefully written ahead of time but it is always slightly improvised, there is an ongoing open invitation to be part of the improvisation but I often refuse to participate, I would rather stay safe within the known guidelines of my habitual shape for no apparent reason… She woke up and called for him in the middle of the night, a soft voice in the darkness calling for help; it was my fault, I had opened her door and then closed it again, somewhat violently; it was a careless unintentional move on my part, I was only starting to get my bearings in this new place and in my wanderings, I had come to the wrong room by accident… But regardless of my lack of intention, the sudden opening and closing of her door had startled her and she had jumped up from her bed in a sudden wave of shock and fear, she knew that there was nobody else in the house besides the two of them, her and my old friend who was now her partner; nobody else could have opened and closed her door, and yet it had happened. When I heard her calling my friend’s name, I jumped backwards rapidly and flew into a very thin crack in the wall, a narrow space barely visible by human eyes; I remained still and listened to everything that was happening around me, the wind outside, the vaguely rhythmic sound of the windows being shaken; my friend came out of his room quickly and asked her what was wrong; the two of them searched throughout the house to see if someone was hiding, they searched one room after another, they looked in the many closets and bathrooms, they looked in the same place more than once; my friend had always been methodical in his approach to any challenge, but of course, in the end, they determined that nobody was there, they were alone and safe, and yet they knew that her door had been opened and closed distinctly and forcefully with a clear sense of purpose. My mistake. I saw it all from my impossible hiding place in the crack in the wall… Eventually, they went back to sleep; I had the sense that my friend was thinking of me as he slipped into a dream, he had a vague impression of the doorway through which I had traveled, he could almost envision it in that twilight space before losing consciousness, he could almost see it glowing not too far away, the little amulet that I sent him through the mail, the little piece of me that was now a guest in his home… At this time, I can’t physically go to where he is; the human dimension has taken control of my body and is holding it hostage; but I can visit him in other ways, I can find my own passageways through the labyrinth that normal humans can’t trace or even talk about… When I first found myself here, I stumbled around the house, from stairway to living room to the windows at the front and even into the attic, all of it was completely unfamiliar to me; eventually I accidentally found my way into her room… For a moment I saw her sleeping; a middle-aged woman with long black hair and smooth white skin; after some time had passed, I fell away back into darkness and I found myself in the old house, the large house back in El Salvador where I lived for so many years, my childhood home; I was in the living room, the furniture was all completely different but I could still recognize the place; there was a little coffee table in the middle of the room, not the same one I remembered but very similar and almost in the exact same spot, there was thin sunlight coming through the side windows, there was the sound of a loud mechanical clock counting off the seconds as they passed by, a kind of soft insistent drum… I heard someone coming in through the front door, the voice of a man that sounded very familiar to me and yet I couldn’t place it, I couldn’t give it a name; a man in his thirties, a bit heavy set, brown sweaty skin, thin alert eyes; he was walking into the living room with a younger woman, I had the sense that they were coming to get something they had left behind, something they had somehow forgotten in this old dusty uninhabited house… The man stepped into the living room in a forceful, intentional way that called attention to itself; I reacted to his sudden movement and slipped beneath the sofa and pressed myself against the floor; he then spoke up loudly to the entire space as if perceiving that someone else was invisibly present: “Whoever is here, whoever you are, don’t be afraid, we are only here to get a few things… we will not disturb you… we will be gone before you know it…” They then lifted something big and heavy together, a kind of old-fashioned chest made of metal and leather; it had been sitting off to the side, close to the windows and the doorway that led to the old backyard; slowly and with some effort they carried the heavy chest towards the main doorway of the house; I watched it all from the floor, safe in my hiding spot; the man turned around once more before closing the door; “We are leaving now. Thank you for allowing us to take this with us. We won’t disturb you any further.” I know I have visited that house many times through the years; so many nights wandering in these rooms and hallways… such recurrent strong attachments, particularly to a place that I am apparently not interested in consciously, can be likened to a small flame, a flame that could easily burn out at any time if smothered or ignored, but somehow it refuses to go away completely, regardless of my conscious thoughts, regardless of my seeming desires, I still find my way back here more often that I even realize (it’s only sometimes that I manage to remember…) Whenever I come to visit, I feel that I am standing at a crossroads, a threshold of change, a vortex of possibilities; I am about to see something that I have avoided for decades, I am closing in on an uncomfortable realization…  The myths that have grown around these nighttime experiences are all stories, legends, exaggerations, linguistic constructs of one kind or another, all of which can only vaguely suggest the actual experience, tentatively point to the real possibility of such an unlikely event, something that would otherwise seem impossible, a feint of pure imagination, a tall tale, a lie… Sometimes I find myself surrounded by my old friends, both living and dead, the one that went for a midnight walk with me, screaming hard rock songs into the darkness while everyone in the neighborhood slept, the one with whom we would talk endlessly for hours after the time we were supposed to go to sleep and I would concentrate on his voice while I stared at the shifting shadows on the wall, the one that read horror books with me and smiled at me in a way I had never seen anyone smile before and I felt that I could get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her smile, the one that taught me to love the hidden phantom, the secret musician that hides behind the walls, and explained the meaning of the words that he sang, the one with whom we ran around over the neighbor’s roofs oblivious to the dangers of being shot or beaten for no reason at all; I find myself surrounded by all of them, and together we move around the old city, sliding through secret pathways, the kind of pathways that only children are aware of, narrow tunnels, broken fences, forgotten bridges, abandoned walls… I lead them as well as I can and I try to not surrender to any kind of hesitation; I know the way to some degree because I used these secret pathways when I was a boy and I still vaguely remember them (This is not the city where we all grew up together. It’s another city that is strange to them and yet somehow familiar to me.) Last night we found ourselves looking at a pair of enormous stone doors, three times as tall as a man, four times as thick as regular walls; in my memory I could see them as they had been once, I had been here before, standing in front of doors just like these; but they had been wide open, that’s how I remembered them, imposing, heavy, intimidating, but open; and tonight they were closed and there was no apparent way to pull them open, there was no way to call for help; the entire space seemed changed in radical ways that seemed impossible to me; there were now large new barriers that stood in front of us and separated us from our apparent objective; large underground rivers that we could only see from an angle, the heavy current slipping under large veined stone planks that formed the floor, sprinkled here and there with green vegetation; I looked at it all from above, several floors up; even though we could still see them, the large stone doors were no longer accessible, something had changed and the change was apparently permanent… I looked up over the edge of the tall walls that loomed over me and I saw a great shining white pyramid not too far away, I was so close to where something wonderful was happening but I would have to learn to fly in order to get in to see it, to be a part of it; flying freely was the only way I would ever get over these walls, the closed doors would become completely irrelevant if gravity was not an obstacle… I had engaged with so many constructs through the years, street legends, video game simulations, cinematic approximations, all of which could only point to the actual experience, all of which were only a vague fading approximation to the real thing… Pattern is the only order I can trust now, the only shape that matters, these days I care only about specific details, tiny decisions, minuscule adjustments, microscopic flurries of creativity; the overall composition is unimportant, the underlying meaning is implicitly dead and false, if it can be spoken at all; the fundamental inner structure will reveal itself eventually, like a sculpture that slowly emerges from a large virgin rock, blow by blow, adjustment after adjustment, choice after choice… Certain details of my voyage were specifically characteristic of mythical infernal descents; for example, the black dog and the old porter that we all saw as we passed by a large seemingly abandoned warehouse in the old city, on our way to the stone labyrinth where we would encounter the large closed doors… Even as I saw the two figures out of the corner of my eyes, I remembered their significance, I could almost hear the voice of the Magician speaking calmly as he sat next to me on a white marble slab in the middle of an old cemetery in El Salvador; “Look at them over there. The old man with the hat and the large black dog licking his paws…  they are there to guard the entrance to the realm of the dead. Look at them closely and remember how they look. Someday you will encounter them for real… someday it will be imperative that you recognize them…” When people told me about places and people like these when I was a kid, they had inadvertently changed almost everything that mattered in the process of their telling, all the most important details had been removed, all the sensations and the textures had been forgotten, they had neglected to mention the music that was present through most of it, what had seemed stylized and abstract in my imagination, almost translucent and flimsy and unreal, here it all became rough and sincere, heavy and ominous, too ancient to be an invention, too real to be denied… There are so many myths that have grown around this kind of voyage; stories, folk tales, poetic descriptions; but they can only outline the treacherous pathway towards a true encounter with the underlying mystery; the kind of unobstructed movement that I was currently experiencing would only seem barely conceivable during my regular life; I found myself in an atmosphere saturated with delights, all fear was absent, particularly fear of abandonment or death, as if such possibilities had been transcended long ago when I wasn’t paying attention, a kind of doorway that can only be crossed when one is not facing in that particular direction… the whole mood of this place implied something magical and inherently meaningful, at the very least,  and among other things, it implied a kind of restless eternity, a living permanence of infinite potential change… I thought of the couple moving the large chest out of my old family house; I had an immediate reaction as soon as I knew that they were gone- a kind of relief, another night where I can avoid opening the chest, another day when the secret can stay hidden; I rested against the cold floor under the sofa and curled up into a tiny ball, something smaller than a coin; I recognized the movement, it was the same thing I had done before in a similar situation in a completely different world… I looked up at the walls again, everything was shining and new and overwhelming, there was a kind of recurrent music all around me, a simple music, both rough and sincere, endlessly predictable yet recurrently improvised, that repeating pattern is the only reality I can ultimately trust; here, where I found myself, I cared only about the details, the ultimate meaning of everything I was seeing was unimportant… How would I talk about it later? How would I describe it? What meaning would I come up with after the fact? It would possibly reveal itself eventually, after days or weeks or years; but I wasn’t eager to find an answer; an answer is just flimsy language trying to achieve certainty, and here there is only the eternal insistent rhythm and an infinite underlying drone… A place like this, alive in every detail, constantly shifting before my eyes, vivid and bright and overwhelming in its complex and intricate beauty, such a place only seemed conceivable in fantasies, mine or borrowed, a glimpse of eternity, a pulsating space beyond time as I have known it, beyond the ongoing sequence of years, life, history, evolution, beyond memory or anticipation… I can say, at the very least, a lot of my regular perceptual habits were gone, particularly anxiety over abandonment, loneliness or death, regret, attachment, nostalgia, yearning…  I was now immersed in a recurrently reborn vision of shifting permanence from which all apparent fear was absent, an atmosphere saturated with delight and child-like wonder, a mood of open curiosity and alluring possibility… the structural linguistic order, the rules of the game by which our innermost thoughts are built, grouped, arranged and forgotten, that most intimate of structures which makes us particular, certain, defined… the order changes all the time, it can sometimes change so slowly that the changes are barely perceivable and easily ignored, it can sometimes change so quickly that our mind is barely able to catch up; but the overarching illusion that each given moment in time is somehow permanent, that each thought describes a concept or space or object that endures beyond the ravages of change and becoming… that illusion persists. My nighttime voyage, this deep dive into a hidden world of seeming unreality, has been repeated, must have been repeated, for thousands of years, always the same, always different, always predetermined, always improvised on the spot, always striking and surprising, always vaguely familiar… When I woke up, I was feeling very tired. I sat up for a moment and wrote down some of what I remembered: a drum circle, a pyramid, a wall, a river, a man talking to a woman, a house from another time… As I wrote, I knew there was so much I couldn’t capture, so much I couldn’t describe, but I wrote down what I could write and accepted that some parts would be left to be forgotten. Then I laid back down and breathed deeply for a moment. I watched TV for a couple of hours and slowly forgot everything. There were some people arguing on the screen. I think it was a show I had watched before. I shook my head and I laughed and I shook my head. And I slowly began to fall asleep again.

A Chance Encounter

 Whatever I have ever thought, said or written, however clear or coherent it may have seemed at the time, however complete and final it may have appeared to me, there are always some things left unsaid, gaps, omissions, there are always some questions left dangling, stragglers inhabiting the edges of my thoughts. I woke up one morning and I noticed that something was different but I couldn’t quite define it… for a space of a few hours, I felt the utter strangeness of it all, everything, my entire experience of existence, my entire course through reality… it wasn’t any one thing in particular but all of it; sleeping every night and waking up every day after seeing strange visions during the night, full of colors and desire and terror and nostalgia, strange visions that would fade in the morning without any clear explanation; time itself moving forward in only one direction, leaving no possible way of turning back, no way to visit those other spaces that were left behind, a trail of frozen images that would slowly fade to black and never recover their living presence; the fact that we walk and live on a floating sphere of mud rocks and water, hanging freely in empty space and slowly circling around a huge ball of fire; the strangeness of seeing her again, after so many years of silence, so many years of open questions and aimless wondering without reply… all of it so strange, so utterly incomprehensible, so close to me and yet so far from my mind’s grasp. I remember, at one time not too long ago, I was desperate to maintain some kind of control, desperate to retain my ambiguous position as a wise old leader, the one who knows, the one who can say the right things at the right time, desperate to maintain the form of my world as I knew it, as I had come to know it… A singular void was generated within me by our unexpected break, a pulsating hole of pure nothingness, a heavy darkness formed around me, a darkness produced not only by a lack of basic meaning but by a lack of a clear identity, a clear sense of who I am or who I’m supposed to be for others… In the throes of that void, I was also faced with the absolute humiliation of being left behind, I was about to become an experience in time that can never be recovered, a world that was once breathing and alive and was now left to rot and decompose in the unforgiving twilight of forgetfulness, away from the eyes of those who once cared for it, away from the hands that once brought it to life… A strange incomprehensible power forced her to move away, to break the bonds that held us together, it was something I tried to understand but I failed miserably at putting the pieces together in a way that made sense to me… maybe it was precisely the same power that now brought her back to me, here on the streets of Walnut Creek, on an ordinary afternoon that could have been any other afternoon or could have simply never happened… As soon as I saw her walking towards me I felt a clear invitation to open up once more, to let my heart cut itself in half and allow this strange other energy to slide inside of me, to become one with it, to embrace it as my own… Whatever I may have thought once, whatever I once said or wrote about her decision to leave, about the many mistakes that may have led up to it, about the things I didn’t do which I could have done, the things I did do which should have never happened, however clear or coherent it all may have seemed at the time, there were too many questions unexplored, there were too many things left unsaid, and now there was no way to say them, no way to bring them back… For years I expressed my ambiguous truths through tentative actions, bursts of free creation and careful construction based on an ongoing purposeful interaction with the shifting shadows, long texts full of self-referential spirals, music tracks full of hidden sources, covert references and magical secret foundations… At one point, I saw that multiplicity and nothingness were one and the same and they were an endless source of fresh renewal; as the whole is subdivided it approaches the void and the darkness descends upon the one who watches, a welcoming absence from the pressures of existence… When she left, I faced the utter contingency that stands at the very limit of my perception, the unexpected fall that is the most sacred gift of all, if not the most wanted, if not the most feared… when she said my own words back to me, with an aura of finality and full understanding, when she said exactly what I had expected to hear so many times through the years, everything changed; I could feel the world itself floating away from me, miles of distance with every syllable that came out of her mouth; the multiple slipped in through the open door, the chaos, the random, the unknowable, and I dived straight into it, into the oceanic depths of the unreachable white goddess of the night, the shining feminine figure that guards the mystery of the shadows… once it all came into me, things couldn't go back to where they were, time had moved on and the old space, even if it had not disappeared completely, it was now completely inaccessible, occluded, forbidden… When I met her on the street the other day, she said that she believed that something was molding her now, something powerful and methodical and all knowing, something clearly supernatural and invisible; I listened carefully to what she described, taking in every word; and as I listened, I sincerely hoped that all that she was saying was true and that there really was something out there shaping her inner form from within, a secret spiritual artisan that had emerged from the beyond, but I felt deeply nervous while I was standing there listening to her seemingly endless stream of thoughts and descriptions, I was nervous that she was completely losing her mind, that she was losing her sense of self to the most ever-present nothingness that continually spirals all around us, relentless, merciless, infinite; an offer and a menace, a kiss and a threat… I thought of saying something to her, doing something to help her, to protect her, to warn her but then I felt something else, clear and strong and insistent: let randomness decide, let chaos choose the path, I just need to step out of the way, I just need to let it happen…  My most precious gift is my silence, my hands are most useful when I let other hands decide… Events and things and ideas don't mean something distinct in themselves but only as part of a particular sequence, a chain of cause and effect, a moving train of form, motifs, cadences and resolutions… When I met her on the street, she covered her face and she started to cry, thick tears ran down her cheeks as she stared at me smiling, as if she remembered all that I remembered (years of memories concentrated on a single furtive glimpse…) She gazed deeply into me as if she wished to go back, as if we could… We both knew it was a response to something that happened right before, something I said or didn’t say, standing there mesmerized by the shock of her sudden presence, anything further I could add would only inspire further reactions so I remained silent, waiting to hear what she would say next… After some time had passed, I asked her what was happening with her these days and she said: “no… it doesn’t matter what’s happening with me, this is not about me, it’s really about you - the you I used to know, I believe that you would be mad at me right now, you would be furious… I believe you know about the things I’ve said, the things I’ve thought…” And I felt it all clearly and forcefully; she was ashamed of all her incongruent thoughts, her strange sequences of ideas that went nowhere but resulted in a final anticipated closing of doors; I thought of saying something but I decided to stay quiet, let chaos decide, let the goddess step in and do what she must, my lack of action would become my most creative response… “I have continually tried to express the truth as I understand it but I can only do it through unconscious actions - all these things that have happened, they don't mean anything in themselves, they can only come together as elements of a particular message.”  When she said to me what she said back then, it made everything change, it was something irreversible, unreachable, frozen in time, an insurmountable barrier. I was so sad, so angry when it happened, I was probably reacting to the loss of all that came before and my late reactions at that time would inspire further uncontrolled responses in her, a chain reaction of anger, sadness and denial, an unstoppable downward spiral; things would never be the same, what once was would soon be unrecognizable, what had once been our daily life would become as unreachable as a distant star, something seen in deep darkness from a million miles away… Sublime radically unstable pleasure is an experience of the utter impossibility of common human experience, the absolute strangeness of all of it,  an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds consciousness and identity, pleasure beyond all bounds, beyond fear and awareness of time, eternity come and gone in the wink of an eye…  During my unexpected fall from the comfort of my own private sanctuary, I experienced a deep encounter with many shades of multiplicity and nothingness followed by a shocking realization that they are both the same, this has always been true; it just takes a moment of radical pain to finally see it clearly (and once you see it, you can never again forget…) When I ran into her on the streets of Walnut Creek and we started talking as if nothing had ever happened, as if we were two old friends that run into each other every once in a while, and share superficial news and recent events, she told me about a dream she’d had recently, a dream she wrote down just as I had always asked her to do; in her dream we were together as we once had been and we lived in a house surrounded by hills covered in green grass; she came into my room in the middle of the night and laid next to me pressing her body against me, I kissed her and she kissed me back and then she told me that it had become clear to her that we should focus on the girl she once was - we should return to that basic work we had once started together, that was the main thing we needed to do; we had added too many layers through the years, too many side projects, too many elements and sequences and tools, let’s get back to the most simple, the most basic, to that one girl standing in front of a tiny park in a forgotten little suburb of a forgotten little California town, that girl crying about a past she could only barely remember… Standing on the street with me, she talked about our old magical work together, how we learned to project our minds across space and time and flowed together through midnight dream currents to distant realms of wonder; she insisted that that is what we needed to do now, we could change the past while retaining our knowledge of the future and we could get back to basics, to the most simple goals we ever had, we would achieve this sudden shift by means of a self-immolating failure of surrender to the future; we would refuse to accept this future where we found ourselves and we would suddenly find ourselves deep in the past that we should never have left, that was still there waiting for us to give it back its proper life… All this had happened to me before this afternoon or it seemed like it, this conversation, this proposal, this voice coming from a girl I met on the sidewalk… I would find myself talking to someone I used to know, someone I had been close to, someone I loved more than I thought it was possible to love, I would find myself opening up to them again, opening to something brand new that was about to happen, and everything was going well, flowing, perfect, beautiful and then this horrible thing would come out... something dark, heavy, monstrous, something unwholesome and evil. It is that encounter with the utter contingency of the real that is the most sacred experience, the holy jewel among all others, a face to face meeting with the multiplicity, the chaos, the random, with the oceanic sense of the goddess - there is nothing that can be more valuable than that, nothing that can possibly surpass it; we must search for it, even if it comes wrapped in a fearsome skin; beneath glowing red eyes of terror lies the most ever present nothingness, the gift that never ends, never fades, never gets old with age… “The higher up we went,” she said, “the higher we went in the upper dimensions of consciousness and perception, the more structures we broke down, the more beautiful it all became; and the goal of our secret voyages was always unknown, always untouchable, always precious, and we would always find something new, every single time, something fresh, something untouched, in the process of our shared flight, we would always be surprised by the multi-dimensional visions that surrounded us, no matter how many times we had encountered such wondrous things, no matter how many times before we had already woken up to these secret realms…it was always a shock, it was always brand new…” But there’s ultimately an integral part of us that resides within those stable structures, in the colonized and settled diagrams of the norm, of daily habit and programmed work, and that makes us afraid to change them, to hurt them, to destroy them… All our experiences together, from the most magical to the most mundane, didn't mean anything in themselves, they were only true and real as part of a sequence, a distinct step in an infinite path… That night I dreamt that I was hugging her in my bed, in a large house I only barely recognized; I turned around towards her and kissed her on the lips forcefully, I felt an intense overwhelming desire for her, a very deep connection that rose up from the deepest places within me, from the long lost past and from the tantalizing impossible future, it was a reckless desire that transcended all the painful events that separated us… We didn’t do anything more than kiss softly in the dream, lips barely touching lips, breath upon breath, skin upon skin, but I felt it all even more intensely because of its very restraint, because it was all made of pure possibility, a potential outbreak of ultimate pleasure that never surrendered to a climax… My dream that night must have been a response to all that came before and to all that she said on the street when I ran into her; I would let the dream inspire other responses but I wouldn’t seek an answer and I would not break the silence any further, there was a reason for the wall to be there, it was best to leave it untouched, it was best to respect its solid finality… All that I have ever thought, said or written, thousands of journal entries covering decades of memories, observations and ideas, diagrams of thoughts, experiences and dreams, however clear or coherent they may have seemed at the time, the goal of the effort I have put into all of it always remains unknown; I refuse to see it all as pointless, to always leave things unsaid, to always leave questions dangling, no matter how many times an answer is offered, there are always more questions waiting in the wings, whispering mysteries that remain unsolved… “I found your book in a bookstore,” she said standing on the street in front of me, “It was sitting among some poetry newsletters and photocopied pamphlets. At first, I didn’t know what it was, I just knew that I liked it. Then I saw your name and I laughed to myself. We always had a knack for running into each other everywhere. Always at the most unexpected moments, the most serendipitous places. And this book was just like meeting you again for the first time. I always knew that you were looking for a special path in life, something that would distinguish you from all the others… I knew this even before we got together. I had heard what others said about you, what they noticed in you and how it made them feel. I recognized it even if I couldn’t put a name to it. I knew that your path was different from anything I had ever encountered, it was a path full of wonderful and unique people, people that seemed to come straight out of dreams… people that were only partially true and partially invented… people too perfect to be real and yet I wanted to become one of them…” I listened to her closely as she spoke, enjoying the sound of her voice which shocked me as both familiar and completely new; I resisted the impulse to contradict her, over and over I resisted, I didn’t want to argue for the sake of arguing, I refused to have a philosophical discussion at this stage in the game; what would be the point of questioning the methods of composition when the symphony is about to reach its final cadence? She clearly had something to say and the random had given her an audience to direct her energy; I would fulfill my role the best way I knew how, I would allow her to speak freely without any interruptions… Our past was settled, frozen and framed, a vibrant album full of music, recordings, memories, dreams and stories, fixed within a circle of growing nostalgia, untouchable and increasingly remote; our past would not be altered… But I could still listen to her as closely as I ever did; I could still dive into the mystery of her endless theories and questions, there was a reason why I loved her in the first place…  “When I did what I did, I saw a boy that was about to cut himself with a knife - and there was only one thing to do: I had to grab the boy and take the knife away; and later I might try to find out what happened to begin with, what led the boy to do what he was doing - but while the knife was still in his hands, I couldn’t stand there asking ‘what does this boy really want? What is this boy trying to do? Is there a purpose to all of this? Does this boy have a deeper understanding of this purpose than I do?’ You take the knife away and you take the boy to safety, before he cuts himself and bleeds to death. And that is why I did what I did and I can’t say I’m sorry, even if it led to our indefinite silence, even if it resulted in a pedestrian closure that we both would have once found distasteful…” To me her words were barely comprehensible, they came straight from a twilight language of constructions and renewals, something arcane and remote, a double mirror in a carnival ride, a glimpse into secret thoughts I would never have suspected, a camera out of focus, a scratched record caught in an endless loop… I let her words flow into me, I let them become a part of me, I was there to listen, to listen and to breathe… that’s why I am here, that is my one objective: to breathe - in and out, and to listen… Whatever she said to me that afternoon,  however clear or coherent it may have seemed to her at the time, there were still so many things left unsaid, so many gaps… I could only grasp at the little fragments that fluttered on the margins, charged with a tantalizing possibility of further meanings… In those gaps of silence, I would find my future freedom. In those gaps, I would find a way to understand.