I walked aimlessly through the city one afternoon.
(I used to do this fairly often, just walk in any direction for hours, without a destination or any set schedule. The hours would flow by and the music of cars, shouting, construction would fill me with a kind of longing that I could never place or describe. Sometimes I listened to music on headphones, and correlated the mood of the music to the images emerging before me – dark, triumphant, joyful, melancholic. Sometimes the noise was music enough.)
It was about 3pm, somewhere close to Chinatown, when I turned to my right and saw an unexpected scene:
A large salon full of people sitting on wooden chairs. Several older women, a few middle-aged men, a sprinkling of young men wearing glasses. One young woman sat near the entrance, another woman sat by the corner of the room, looking towards the doors.
A man at the head of the room was giving a lecture in a loud confident voice. No microphone that I could see. His voice was loud enough.
It was an old building, maybe it had been a school once, or an orphanage or maybe a church – some kind of old style angry church full of fire and condemnation (the kind of heavy religious anger that clings to the walls years after the preachers have died and the sermons are over.)
There were windows facing the street and both the windows and the main doors were wide open. Come in. You are welcome here. The man’s voice had a tone and rhythm that made me curious so I stood by the doors for a bit and listened in.
The man on the small wooden stage was short but solidly built. His face was very expressive and his voice was deep and melodic, full of valleys and hills, quiet coves and sudden rushes of traffic. He exuded charisma, the kind that has a touch of intense desire wrapped within it, a sexual fire too intense to remain within the boundaries of a single human body. A whirling magnet about to burst.
He was talking about some kind of mysterious underground movement. I couldn’t quite understand what the movement was or what it was meant to do. Was it political, spiritual, artistic, occultist? Maybe it was a metaphor, maybe some wild conspiracy theory, maybe a religious revelation hidden by the angular words of regimented science. Even without understanding, I heard enough to become interested.
After a few minutes, I walked in and sat down on one of the empty chairs. Nobody seemed to mind.
“The university is this loose grouping of self-described magicians, the hidden shapers of reality. They see themselves as answerable only to their own interpretation of the law, of all possible laws, religious or man-made. Among them are biologists, engineers, farmers, environmentalists and artists. No field is untouched, no area is too fixed or wild.”
In the background I could hear a kind of shifting discordant music, deep and industrial, very dark and rough. Low voices and loud metal banging shrouded in reverb, some kind of subtle synth riding above the echoing clouds. A hint of rhythm always just beyond the bound of predictability. I couldn’t see any speakers but I could hear the music coming towards me from all around the room. The combination of the man’s voice and the music was hypnotic, as if his voice was the anchoring toneless melody that gave shape to the shifting drone.
“These magicians I speak of… they conduct many experiments, many experimental procedures – something like ethereal compositions, intangible constructions. Their collective procedures operate through an amalgam of established work circles or ‘hexagrams’ - cells of six, hidden from each other, and sometimes even from themselves.
All together they form an entity I have come to call ‘the secret university.’ This is simply a name I use to describe them. For themselves, they have no name or label. They have no use for names or any kind of insignia. It is rare for them to speak in any known human language – it is impossible to directly translate their apparent statements. Rare to even determine when such statements have been made.
I will roughly describe what I know of their procedures so you can have a glimpse of the nature of their work. This is just a glimpse, remember. And it is ultimately meaningless – and precisely because it’s meaningless I feel free to pass it on.
They start by taking old structures – these structures can come from any source – music, painting, mathematics, writing, science – the bubbling of melting gold, the scratches of cats against an old piece of wood, the carefully mistaken answers of a five year old answering grammar questions that are just a bit too far ahead for her. Anything that has a structure can be a source and anything that can be comprehended has a perceivable structure.
Once they have isolated the structures they will work with, they search for subterranean combinations-
superimpositions of quotes, mutated definitions, tangled isomorphisms, blended colors, elongations and diminutions, parallel melodic material and so on. In this way this secret university of which I speak has developed various new transformed structural mutations – these new structures exist first of all only as structures and nothing else. Structure for the sake of structure. Form for the sake of form. They can flow in many directions at once- loops that seem to go nowhere suddenly change into an explosion. Shapeless supernovas fluctuate and blink and are suddenly a circuit with clear lines and a sense of purposeful form. Vertical hierarchies with aleatory interconnections and periodic variations
form complex unpredictable webs. The information flow in these hierarchies can include all potential inner and outer events and can reach all hexagrams at once.
They manipulate these hierarchies electronically through specialized randomized procedures hidden deep within unreachable servers and through pre-determined sequences of interactions with occult artificial intelligences. (They are out there. They have been out there all along.) They also have devised a series of horizontal structures that are similar in operation to canons and fugues where the transposition of meaning and information is based on regular imitation, variation and sudden gaps of silence.
The main thrust of their thinking is simple yet terrifying. What we call democracy is imaginary- it is a dream-like wish that can never be fulfilled. Instead they aim to compose asymmetric hierarchies strictly based on predetermined game-like structures of information flow while leaving certain amounts of open space for individual improvisation and indeterminate accident. It is their clear understanding that direct and simple rule doesn’t work, can’t work, will never work. So the real seat of political power must be placed beyond the reach of reason, in what they call the astral plane- a place far away from any potential perception or intrusion by the uninitiated.
They work on this goal carefully and methodically by creating and revising their infinitely complex secret structures and carefully introducing them into the world- manifesting them through the manipulation of sound, image and word. Their ultimate goal is to maximize freedom but the mass population must be tricked into freedom. They are so used to tradition, habit and repetition- the mechanics of the endless loop maintain themselves through their own inertia.”
For a moment, I became so focused on the man’s words that I thought the strange music had been turned off. But as soon as I looked for it with my attention, I was able to hear it as if it was just then starting again. For a moment I thought I could only hear it because I tried to listen. It was only there because I looked for it. As if the music itself responded to my thoughts, to my urge to find it all around me.
“At the heart of these strange structures is the concept of randomness. These magician citizens believe that they have the power to decide and that the secret of true decision is hidden within the silent unreachable random procedure. Channels of free computerized will. Complex hierarchies of randomness, created by randomness, changed by randomness, charged by randomness.
Through these circuitous hierarchies they determine which laws they obey and which they ignore, the answer is never the same from moment to moment. (To disobey systematically is to be as predictable as an obedient slave.) The resulting decision is then crossed with other sounds and linguistic structures- made ahead of time or through parallel hierarchical procedures. The structure itself changes with every new answer and becomes ever more complex, ever more unreachable. They often produce indecipherable strange texts and create new sonic and visual structures that serve no apparent purpose. This is their work.
Hidden in their magick is the concept of secretly creating permanent work spaces on the astral plane, circles of pure attention which they call astral chambers. Their ultimate plan is to build many astral chambers which will then host sustainable invisible energy powerhouses. Sources of the Random and Children of the Random. The energy of chaos, of the change that has no name. Their aim is to compose these ultimate secret spaces through a form of blatant improvisation outside of any territory claimed by any government or terrestrial power center. They maintain that they are free of any legal constraints. Since human law doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of these realms of experience it can’t have anything to say about what goes on within them. What doesn’t exist can never be outlawed or regulated.
Once created and fully functioning, these autonomous secret intangible chambers would then foster a further development of compositional techniques, new horizontal structures in ever more complex canons and fugues where all signification transpositions will be based on sudden leaps of faith and meaning through intermittent gaps of silence. These new structures will then be transformed electronically and re-introduced into the symbolic order at randomly determined nodal points. A street corner preacher, a flier, a comic book, an incomprehensible message written on a wall. What was once horizontal now becomes vertical and all consequential events will be able to reach all terrestrial hexagrams at once. Pure synchronic and unmediated communication.
At this point, as far as I know, none of them have yet created such a structure. But of course, these structures, once they exist, if they ever come into being, if it is even possible for them to exist, these structures will never be recognized as true power centers, will never be recognized at all. If they existed already, we wouldn’t know it. If they never come to exist, we won’t ever know it. It is only from the standpoint of the secret university that we can see that creation itself needs a place where those who wish to experiment can go to test out their secret demonic ideas. They seek no recognition, no fame or fortune, no label or title. All terrestrial territory has already been claimed, making the astral plane the next frontier.
Take all the old habits, all you know, all you remember, all you have ever heard or suspected… and create new compositions, embark on new experiments, create a new world that by its very definition can never come to exist in any way comprehensible to the human mind. Fly deep into the nothingness and transform the very nature of the void.”
I was lost in his words. At several points I lost track of the train of thought. And yet I could still hear the words, follow the cadence of his voice and the beat of his breath.
Later I closed my eyes and I became fully immersed in the combination of words and music. The words became music, the music became meaningful communication. This went on for an undetermined amount of time. It seemed like hours. It may only have been a few minutes.
When I opened my eyes again, the man was gone. Most of the people were gone as well, except for a few stragglers like me. (I noticed a young man with his eyes closed, still listening intently.) I slowly made my way out, walking among the many empty wooden chairs I could still hear the strange dark music playing in the background. A woman in a light blue robe gave me a small black and white flier with a phone number and a web site printed on it. I had every intention to call the number eventually or at least visit the site. But a couple of weeks later I realized I had lost the flier. I looked for it everywhere but I was never able to find it. When I walked by the place again, the doors were closed and there was no sound coming from the inside.
