San Salvador
4/26/1985
At the house of the Magician, we are gathered in the open space that serves as a library. Old books, magazines, photocopied pamphlets, sitting in rows and piles on old mismatched bookshelves. Posters hanging all around us, some framed, some simply taped to the wall. (“Death is only the beginning”, “The truth is inside of you.”) It’s early afternoon but I feel very tired. I wish I was home, in bed, reading an old wrinkled comic book in my dark room.
A young spiritual teacher has come from India to visit the Magician, to visit the Magician’s center, to visit us. We now sit around this young teacher, listening intently. There’s about eight of us, arranged in a semi-circle. We sit on old wooden chairs, very uncomfortable and fragile, the kind that could break at any moment, that are always teetering on the edge of falling apart. The sunlight slips in sideways through the half open windows, streams of dust visible against the faded glass and the dried-up plants outside. I’m starting to sweat.
“It has many names, but the name doesn’t matter. It never has. Some people might say it’s simply breath or respiration, air, inward moving energy, the phrase ‘vital air’ has been used…”
He is a tall, dark skinned man, with long black hair, a bushy black beard and a thick mustache. He wears a long orange robe and a turban of the same color. There’s a black watch on his wrist. The Magician pointed this out to us the day before. (”Did you notice the watch? If he wears a watch, he is not a true Teacher. A true Teacher doesn’t need to keep track of time.” Did the Magician feel threatened by his presence? Did the Magician feel the need to point out this man’s shortcomings?)
“What I tell you is that it is carried in the breath, in the air, but it is not equal to it. It is the life-energy which circulates in the being from the time of its conception until its death. The breath is understood to be its most subtle material form, its outward manifestation. It is also believed to be present in the blood; it can be transferred through blood, even stolen. It is made from the invisible molecules of universal life energy which govern our moods and our actions. It is what we are but we are unaware of its presence. We are unaware most of the time.”
His body is thin but he looks strong and flexible. His hands are wiry and move in intricate shapes through the air as he talks. He is trying to describe something that escapes the boundaries of our language, so he tries to fill in the gaps with the shifting, curving movements of his hands. His hands have a flowing melody and rhythm and I can almost hear the music that he makes with this invisible instrument. His black eyes are full of intensity as he places them on each of us, one after the other. That short space of time when he looks at me seems like an eternity. I want it to stop, I want him to go away, I want him to stay there with me, I don’t want him to leave.
“By regulating and calming it, it is possible to gain control over the mind and body. While the soul is indivisible, it has been fragmented through our shifting moods and identities. By practicing control one can stabilize the mind and the senses… so you will no longer be divided.”
I’m too tired to take it all in. Hot and sweaty and uncomfortable. Maybe I should have stayed home. There’s a sound of flies buzzing not too far way, plates being washed in a kitchen I’ve never seen, somewhere behind the main hall, across the way from the small garden; a woman humming a love song, the kind of song that makes me feel both sleepy and nauseous. I can’t make out the specific melody, but I feel as if I know it, as if I’ve heard it too many times. I feel like I may fall asleep at any moment. My eyes are closing.
5/5/1985
A simple posted greeting over a door made of Plexiglas under an iron framework - large yellow letters with a pair of exclamation marks to emphasize them. “Welcome!” But the doors are closed and the greeting is empty and it fills me with a melancholic sadness. There are kids playing across the street, I hear a woman telling them to be careful, “don’t go past the gate, stay in the yard!”
Gerardo sits next to me on an old thin couch. I can feel the wooden structure under my ass, the maroon cushions are old, faded and battered and ripped in various spots. The walls are mostly empty except for a couple of posters. I notice a small swastika on one of the posters, on the left side of an orange pyramid; the OM symbol is on the right side, two small human figures are dancing in front of it.
“A basic, invisible force which can be seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, associated with living energy and not with inert matter.”
He is once again attempting a deep interaction with us, something I can somehow recognize but don’t fully understand; a deep connection with our innermost subjective consciousness, with the deep invisible subject that inhabits our unconscious. It happens through his gaze, his intense eyes, but it is more than the eyes, more than the gaze, and I can’t place it. I don’t have any way to describe it, but I can feel the difference. (Other people’s eyes don’t feel like this, other people’s attention doesn’t feel like this.) When he talks directly to me something happens, something unusual, something distinctly different from a casual conversation.
“While the body is mortal, this invisible force is immortal. It was known to ancient initiates as the power of the cosmos; it is a metaphysical, spiritual, binding, and ubiquitous power that holds enormous importance. It is present and at work in the world and in the vast outer universe; it is this force that must be discovered by the magician and the alchemist.”
I attempt to conceptualize this as the anti-entropic principle of the universe, the force that resists decay and dissolution, a creative substratum under all of what we call nature - difficult to imagine but present all around us. We are bound for chaos but there are other forces at work. Even a hopeless struggle is better than no struggle at all.
xxx
Last night I learned to fly. I made myself fly in all directions. I turned and turned over and over in midair- completely aware of what I was doing. Free. Ecstatic.
San Francisco
3/16/1990
I have always seen him as just another fellow composition student, one among many that shouldn’t exist and somehow, they are here, walking down these halls like me, studying harmony and counterpoint and the rudiments of classical composition when nobody even listens to classical music anymore.
Thin and careful, older than I would expect, but smooth and focused in his own way. He is always dressed in a suit and tie; a small elegant black hat covers his head. He is always holding a leather attaché case, always very friendly and yet rigorously formal. His speech strikes me as carefully put together; each statement comes out slowly, methodically, in perfectly constructed sentences.
Today he told me about a device he called the polarizer.
“It improves the performance and handling of human bodies through the careful alignment of spiraling living molecules using a kind of invisible energy. My friends and I have designed several special accumulators - devices that ostensibly collect and store this hidden energy by slowly inhaling it from the environment and transforming it into a powerful concentrate.”
We were sitting on the cement steps above the student union. In the distance I could hear laughter and pop music and secretive conversations. I leaned against the cement step behind me while he sat with his back straight, the attaché case at his side. I asked him about this device.
“What is it made of?”
“There are alternating layers of organic and non-organic material inside the walls. This increases the energy concentration inside the enclosure relative to the surrounding environment. In the newest model, I have substituted rock wool for sheet iron, but I believe it will still achieve the desired effect. The whole thing is made from a cylinder with regularly spaced shapes cut out of its sides. That cylinder is then placed upon a record turntable and rotated; a light bulb is suspended in the center. There is a small window on the side and a funnel to breathe through. The frequency of the oscillations corresponds to the basic frequency of the human heart: 60 rotations per second. I perceive the energy as electrodynamic or radioactive entities, self-luminescent sub-cellular vesicles. You can think of them as the miniature angels that dance on the top of a pin… a spinning pin in this case. I believe they can become observable in decaying materials, but they are presumably present universally. Incidentally, I recently sold the model in question. It’s no longer in my hands.”
I didn’t say much in response other that showing interest and admiration for his work. I could only partially picture the artifact he was describing. I looked upwards for a moment, straining to see miniature angels dancing above me, small graceful figures freely dancing among the clouds and the clear blue sky.
Thinking about it now, I try to recall everything he described. In his words, I perceive a bio-energetic view of sexual desire. Desire itself could be the hidden energy he spoke of, the darkest desires, the most hidden, the most shameful, the most secret. And if it is a true form of energy then it must be susceptible to physical experiments, to carefully designed operations, purposefully created mechanisms such as the one he described, a careful sequence of actions, prepared moments, chambers suspended in time. It’s a very different way of thinking of these things, these things that I usually don’t ever talk about. This vision startles me, it teases me with new possibilities, doorways leading to rooms I never knew were there.
He said many diseases are caused by deficits or constrictions in deep human desire, the most secret made evident through a hidden mechanism of physical revelation, the secret wants to be revealed and will be revealed in spite of all our attempts to hide it. This all sounds very familiar yet oddly strange.
Someone said to me a long time ago: “In the dream state, the soul leaves the body under the protection of the unspeakable.” Is it possible to capture the unspeakable and make it dance?
I have a vague unsettled feeling about the irrational nature of so many assumptions. Maybe my doubts will turn out to be justified in the end.
The way he speaks of its effects, the effects of the device, it sounds to me more like a type of drug than a medical apparatus: something to be used primarily as a kind of stimulant. All of it has strong sexual overtones. Something I don’t understand at all.
After our talk, when I was walking back to class, I saw a blond girl in a yellow shirt which instructed me to “hella resist!” I pictured a mouth open in rage, a left fist raised in defiance. What should I resist? What am I resisting?
4/21/1990
His theories have been present in my mind. I picture some kind of vitalism, the very essence of life vibrating all around me. This strange substance… he described it as transcendental, a kind of esoteric energy, a hypothetical universal life force.
He has put all the focus of his mind into this kind of subversive intelligence, and his own intelligence and will have gone into the development of this innermost secret substance. In the sphere of the life function, the whole can be developed from a part, whereas a machine can’t be reconstructed from a screw. Two clear aspects to focus on: imbalance and information. This gives me a clear initial structure.
For there to be movement, for there to be energy, for there to be life, there must be an imbalance: a room that is hotter than another; a ball moving through an open ocean; some that have and some that don’t, a lack that leads to desire which is itself the fundamental energy. It is the imbalance that creates movement, that propels life.
We generally believe that, in the realm of information, it is the specific that matters - the details, the point, the plot, the argument. That is what is important. But if we remove all specifics from what we perceive as information… In other words, if we look at information itself as a pure substance, then I see information as a wave of raw energy, a wave that can be somehow contained. Accumulated, released, shaped, composed.
I will try to work with increasing the flow of raw information through my mind and body. And I will create a new space where this can happen. Where information can flow. Like water. Like air.
5/10/1990
I dreamt about my classmate last night. I saw a vast alien future- strange, green, unrecognizably detailed. Ancient machines covered in intricate hieroglyphics, all of it vaguely technological but also distinctly ancient- computer circuits etched in stone, connecting cables made of leaves and mud, shining structures of blue light and fire.
In this strange yet familiar place, he would enable a radical emergence, a forbidden birth. He would call forth the powers of this secret energy source that he has worked so hard to control and a new form would be shaped by its occult pulsation.
The rulers of this alien world will try to destroy his notebooks, his rich grimoires full of raw complex information, details and specification on all of his explorations of the substance, it will all be lost, along with all of his research materials and strange devices.
They came over one night. They found what they were looking for. They destroyed everything and then they left. (That’s what they do. That’s what they have done so many times.) Later, much later, I walked into what had been his workshop and all I found was a broken clay vessel and an empty room covered in dust; a desert of loneliness and dirt.
I woke up and saw him as part of an ancient quest, a quest intrinsically connected to the improvised order of the world wide electronic network. Would I ever see the results? Or is it beyond my perception? Am I permanently banned from understanding it through some kind of fundamental principle? Am I doomed to only see a small part of it and nothing else?
The substance is not outside. It needs to be constructed within me. I have been impatient; I have been intemperate. I have been full of revolutionary ideas. But I lack discipline; I lack consistent work.
San Francisco
6/15/1993
She is Chinese but she was born here, so she sounds like a white California girl when she talks. She also has a certain American attitude which I recognize as very self-assured and full of certainty, very sure of her own realm of knowledge (“we know what we know and what we know is what matters.”) A kind of ontological arrogance that comes through in the sound of each syllable regardless of the content of the sentences. (“I know what is known and what is known is certain.”) At the very least, it gives the illusion of solid strength, it can be intimidating, it can be powerful in its own way, cutting and aggressive.
We’re sitting together on her beach towel, looking at the setting sun over the ocean waves. About an hour ago I asked if I could sit next to her and she agreed readily. She was only wearing a pink bikini and she was reading a book that I recognized. (I had not read it but I knew enough about it that I could talk as if I had.) An hour later, she has put on a pair of loose flowery shorts and a yellow t-shirt without sleeves. She sits with her knees pushed up towards her chin and chest.
We talk about the nature of reality, the endless possibilities that life offers, the existence or non-existence of inherent talent, the truth or falsity of magic and the harsh nature of what she calls “the real world”.
At first, I asked if she wanted to go somewhere else and she said “NO”- a no that was solid and unquestionable. A few hours later I said let’s go and she nodded, smiling. We walked through the dunes and down to the old great highway where I had left my car.
Desire is a life-affirming force repressed by society, by language, by rules. The living desire deals with the energy of living things in the present; their outward moving energy that evolves and changes with every passing breath. I will plunge towards a new undiscovered horizon in the coming days, towards the unlimited possibilities of the infinite Outside. I want to see it, I want to touch it.
I perceive a symphony of resonance and feedback, far too subtle for my distracted human ears. Her voice has become softer, inviting. I hear something in it that she doesn’t want to say out loud. I don’t want to point towards it, I don’t want to touch it too harshly, I don’t want to risk dissolving it unintentionally with a clumsy sudden move.
6/22/1993
In the psychedelic state, I saw nascent sexuality as the primary energetic force of life. A mountain of many colors, all slipping and sliding against each other, all of it brimming with lust and hunger, fluid and perverse and eager to slip into new forms and shapes.
I saw a kind of mouth at the top, a gaping mouth hinting at a deep hunger, a restless appetite for disintegration. The living fire, everywhere at once all over the earth, but most concentrated in men's semen and women's vaginal fluid. In the most secret of places, in the most shameful, in the most wanted.
This Love, this attraction, this magnet, this Mystery of Union. Both eros and amor. It’s what I yearn for and what I fear, what can give me life and what can utterly destroy me.
For there to be movement, for there to be life, there must be an imbalance, a lack of symmetry, an injustice, a radical difference. Beautiful and painful. Light and dark.
7/2/1993
She came to my house and we relaxed in my room. We laid back against the white cushions of my bed and she stripped off every bit of clothing that she had been wearing. Light yellow shirt, blue jeans, tiny pink socks, light blue panties. All gone. Then she did the same to me.
She laid naked in my arms. I spooned her from behind, rubbing my nose against the back of her neck. Our nude bodies were covered by thick black blankets. I felt her soft slightly sweaty skin against me. I have never felt anything so perfect, so intensely satisfying.
When I touch her, when I feel her body against mine, something is talking to me, something is communicating. The very form of her body is in itself the underlying communication. She is the message, manifested between my arms.
Is this love? I insist on perceiving this uncanny inner movement as a straight line but I also notice an intense acceleration. I feel a lot of energy all around me and I see it reflected in her eyes.
“Yes, I am very hot, but it moves around. It goes to weird places…”
“Did you feel it getting very high just now?”
“It’s overwhelming.”
I am not a carrier of information; I am the message itself. But I have to be better. I have to be more efficient. I have to work more than ever. I foresee my dissolution as a single “I” into a myriad variety of subatomic messages. Liquid, smooth surface, emptiness, rigid body, rhythm, flowing focused attention.
Later we talked freely. The conversation soon turned to psychedelics and my enthusiasm couldn’t be repressed. Yes, I have some. Yes, we can do it. Yes, we can do it now. Now.
A skeleton makes its way out of a rip in the red fabric that covers my closet. "I happen to be rolling... in acid," it says it in a voice barely louder than a whisper. A floating black and white mask that hangs from my wall sprouts black and white mushrooms from its forehead.
The living fire in my body is akin to the energy of the sun, an entirely unknown but measurable force, something that has always been there but I didn’t know it. Impulse, excitement, explosion. It partially exists inside the life forms that use it: us. We use it. It uses us. Now I can’t distinguish a difference. It draws energy from our emotions.
A single number one sits on my third eye, two white flowers spin on either side of my regular eyes.
7/15/1993
My experimental techniques have not been very successful. I am unable to suppress the habits of my mind, of our minds.
Today she came over to my house, crying. She was angry, sad and resentful. She had a long list of things I had done wrong, things I was doing wrong. Things I should have said but I didn’t say, things I did say and I should never have said, people I spoke to at the wrong time, small actions I should have understood and acted upon, small actions I should have undertaken at the right time, not sooner, not later.
I could see that she was letting herself turn into a vampire, an addict. I recognized it and the words to describe it came naturally. Maybe she had been a vampire all along and I couldn’t see it on the beach. I didn’t want to see it. She was too beautiful, too perfect in my eyes. Too much flesh and sweat and smiles.
Now, instead of sharing energy with me, she is sucking it away. This is not a magical union. Instead, it has become a process of slow death, of accelerated entropy, of painful dissolution.
I fear it. I see it as disintegration, a self-propelled attempt at slow suicide. I must escape.
Paris
9/3/1993
I ran into him on the flight to Paris, right after the plane took off. A lonely soldier trying to escape across the ocean- escaping from a radical betrayal by the nation that he loved, by the people that he most trusted. He was walking down the aisle and he had a drink in his hand. He was wearing a green army t-shirt and black pants. His sideways smile implied so much but he said so little.
”Here’s what my commander used to say: ‘Soldiers don’t die in wars. They fuck up somewhere and get themselves chopped up into little bits... Don’t be a fuck up!’”
I listened carefully and drew my own conclusions. He was telling me a story but he was leaving out all the details, he was leaving out all the specific events. All that he couldn’t tell me, all that he didn’t want to repeat, all that he couldn’t say because it was too painful, too shameful, too dark. We looked down at San Francisco from the window of the plane and he said “fuck you all” to everything he was leaving behind. To all the tall gray buildings, to all the little houses in long rows curving over gently sloping hills reaching all the way to the ocean, to the wide busy streets, to the speeding cars, to the California air itself.
Through my own reckless experiments, I have entered a solipsist conception of mind in which unconscious communication is indistinguishable from conversation and all of it is composed of inherently selfish primal drives. All our thoughts are continuously suppressed or sublimated by internal totems of parental figures, secret gods, old ones and new.
Listening to him, I came to believe that the dark side was inherently more powerful than the light. I could feel it in him as he was, and I could feel it in his unspoken memories, in the long silences, in the sideways glances that passed without an explanation. Maybe the dark side is just more seductive to those who have used it. Dark fire, black flame. Once you taste it, it’s difficult to find your way back.
“Remember they said they were going to take over and fix everything? Remember they said they knew what the problem was and they knew how to change it all?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, it was all bullshit. They didn’t know anything and they didn’t care. It was a hot fucking desert, empty of everything good in the world but full of fucking poor little people, people half my size. People with no idea. And we were there to kill, to torture, to terrorize. And that’s what we did. That’s what I did. What I did. Over and over. For years. With a smile on my face and a joke always ready at the edge of my lips.”
He turned away for a moment in an effort at restraint. He asked the stewardess for another drink.
He has a long trail of blood behind him. But now he is a new born entity. He wants to be a new born. That is the nature of his current effort, this new project that I have somehow become a part of. A new mind irreducible to old agendas or dead biographies.
9/10/1993
Walking around exploring Paris, I accidentally left my journal in a bookstore. I put it down on a stack of books and forgot about it. When I realized what I had done, the soldier came back with me to get it. We were already many blocks away from the store and my college friend didn’t want to walk all the way back. There was something about walking back together with the soldier… He recognized the importance of my journal and offered to help me- no further questions asked.
“It coalesces to create organization on all scales, from the smallest microscopic units to macroscopic structures like biological organisms, clouds, or even galaxies. It is behind all elements- it can be found within all elements to different and varying degrees. I recognize an isomorphism that will allow me to speculate about biological development and evolution. Soon I will branch out into much broader speculations about the nature of the universe…”
He read it aloud and looked at me with a big smile on his face.
“You’re a bit crazy, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Maybe we’re not so different, you and me. I’m crazy too. I just came at it a different way.”
And he laughed for a bit. A kind of easy, relaxed satisfaction. Maybe we could really talk after all. Then he read some more.
“For there to be movement, for there to be force, energy, there must be an imbalance… There must be a difference.”
He jumped to another page.
“…what is in the sun is the same as what is in me: the grand Cosmic desire, the lustful need for life to continue after death… I will work with controlling, focusing, extending it…”
“What is all this?”
“I don’t know. I figure someday I will use it as part of the surreal imagery in my stories. Stories I will write someday.”
He smiles again and nods.
“Not so different…”
9/15/1993
There’s a black tree in the shape of a temple at the very center of the little park. In some way, it announces that this is a public space, a place where anyone can sit, talk or rest or meditate. A woman wearing a red skirt is sitting on the bench close to us. Every once in a while, I look at her as she crosses and re-crosses her legs.
The soldier told me a few of his stories today. He is so reticent to say anything. I have to be patient, leave enough silence until he feels the urge to talk.
“One day I ran across a strange ocean of green leaves of grass. I was all alone and in the depths of a terrible fear for my life. I saw many corpses all around me. So many of my own friends, so many people I would never know. People I had only met briefly. It got confusing when I couldn’t tell them apart. Any one of them might have been me, or someone very much like me. I couldn’t see the faces too well through, because of all the murkiness of the wet ground, because of my own restless confusion. I touched the grass hoping to find an answer. I could hear loud explosions in the distance and a few cries of pain. Desperate cries of hopeless pain.”
How can I transcend the basic strangeness, the hopeless void that stands between us? I try to understand him. I believe he somehow tries to understand me.
“In situations like these you have to learn to conquer your mind, your senses - that’s the only way to fucking survive. It’s the path to clarity - a clear mind, a clear vision, a clear sense of the mission and of procedure. That’s all you need: a clarity that will allow you to live one more day.”
I listened quietly. Something was happening and I didn’t want to risk saying the wrong thing.
“Pure strength is what gives you power. I mean a deep strength - not just the strength in your body, in your weapons, in your team. Something that I can’t describe. This deep strength is beyond the regular control of my mind. It is tireless. In some way, it may be connected to physical desire; to the sheer eager need that arises from my surroundings. I’ve never talked to anyone about this but I think you can hear me- you can actually fucking hear me. So I might as well talk.”
I believe I understand what he told me. It resonated with thoughts I had in the past, thoughts that lingered in me without further explanation.
He was silent for a long time after that surprising stream of thoughts. We sat in silence in the park while kids played in the grass and an old woman sang an old French song. The melody seemed somehow familiar. Old and graceful and full of melancholy.
That deep strength he was talking about. That is the life-supporting nourisher of my mind, of my body. I am alive as long as I take it in. When the strength is gone, so am I.
On the dirt path below our feet, I saw an army of bright red ants fighting an army of black ants. They fought over a terrain of black waves and gray hills.
9/20/1993
We went for a final walk around Paris, just the soldier and me. It is our last day together before he embarks on his new adventure. We walked over many bridges, past so many impressive buildings deeply drenched in history. We talked and talked and we lost track of time. As we walked, I felt the breath of life, vital air. Here may be the principle of energy, of the strength he talked about. Walking together, I felt a kind of spirit binding us, something strong and unspoken.
All that I call life will slowly vanish, leaving behind a decomposing body, a system rapidly dissolving into its most fundamental parts. If I remove all my thoughts, all my ideas, all my memories and projections there is only a wave of energy- a wave, a certain fluctuating quantity, an oscillation entering and leaving a system. If I see my very breath of life as a kind of wave, then maybe the presence of novelty would imply a growth in the wave amplitude. This wouldn’t mean that the content is new in itself. Nothing is new in itself. But novelty is life. It seems like a paradox but it isn’t.
“The whole thing… It was a fucking bullshit process, a big lie. And it had to lead to massive destruction. At the most basic level, we were agents of destruction and nothing else. In the process of my duties I could not be held back by fear or restraint or compassion. I was ready to do whatever, whenever. I was pure destructive force. There was something strangely real about it. Something pure.”
If what some of us want is the movement itself, the energy of sheer action and not just a state of static peace, then it is necessary and desirable that there should be an imbalance… pain, suffering, destruction, loss. They all come along with that imbalance. Inseparable. Unavoidable.
9/21/1993
A psychedelic death apparition: tall purple hair, blank white eyes, a bright red heart over the third eye, white fangs tattooed over the mouth and cheeks. Two small pink wolves float around the shoulders. A bright star trickles down from the bright white right eye.
When the being leaves the body at the time of death, when it all escapes from the body into the air, there’s a single moment, when a clear knowledge arises. A moment and nothing else. Eyes wide open for a brief flash. A single ephemeral moment of deep understanding.
I try to look at the situation as it was lived by this lonely soldier, a man trying to escape his past. Goodbye to everything that was - mother, army, nation, people, sounds.
Late in the evening, I saw a black butterfly- dark against a world of deep solid colors, waves upon waves of green and red and yellow.
San Francisco
6/3/2000
I saw the old woman as she walked very slowly up the hill that leads to the cliff house, just north of Ocean Beach. I looked at her from my car and noticed she was talking to herself, her wide mouth flapping open and closed so distinctly that I could easily see the movements and gestures from twenty feet away.
I parked my car and followed her up the steep hill. Soon I was walking right next to her. This was what I needed to do. I didn’t know why. She turned around to look at me and she gave me a faint ambiguous smile. It changed my frame of mind completely. I suddenly knew I had made the right choice.
“This thing keeps flowing continuously through my body day and night, even when I am asleep. I need to learn to handle it better…”
She said it and raised her right arm. I could see her hand trembling and making strange shapes in the open air. I pictured the thing she was referring to as a massless, omnipresent substance, something I associated with a kind of living energy, something deeply different from inert matter. Something otherwise.
As we walked, she spoke to me in a momentous language- a way of talking far too old to be understood. I had to make large leaps of intuition just to try to barely keep up. There was no time to review what I had just heard; I had to keep focused and keep moving forward.
“The others think of it as an entity capable of intelligent thought, a kind of self-aware intelligence. But now I know that it’s a field created by all living things. It is a vital principle that permeates reality on all levels including inanimate objects… We now live in one of several alternative realities. I travel among them but only when nobody is looking. I use it as my primary energy source.”
We reached the top of the hill and she turned towards me and pointed to the sky and the ocean below us.
“It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the entire world together. It is the one desire, it co-exists with the entirety of space and time; and yet it is also invisible and subtle. It remains hidden behind infinite names and forms.”
Some kind of understanding slowly emerged out of this multitude of pronouncements, interrupted by long pauses where she would look into the distance and then back at me. Her eyes would open wide and her pupils became deep black marbles. I felt an intense clash of contradictory reactions. Disgust, attraction, curiosity, fear. I want it to go away, I want her to look away, I don’t want it to ever leave, I want her to keep on looking, to keep staring into me.
She left me there, facing the ocean above the Cliff House. She told me not to follow her any further.
In that strange interaction I felt the presence of novelty. I thought of the wave and I looked at the ocean waves crashing against the rocks below me, just beyond the remains of the Sutro baths. Something had happened. I felt larger. Vibrant.
"Love is the ocean we swim in." It was the last thing I heard before she disappeared.
Tonight, I dreamt of a huge city. The freeways wrap around themselves like snakes, a multitude of cars moves upon their gray surface. All the cars are red. The freeways have no exits. The edge of my forbidden destination is covered in a kind of lacy shawl - a reminder that something fluid and feminine lives among these heavy towers of concrete, among these rivers of asphalt.
6/8/2000
We came back to her old house which was now abandoned. It was a small two-story home in the avenues, a couple of blocks away from Ocean Beach. She had to get something she had left behind and I was there to help. (An old book? An old amulet? A journal? A notebook? A note?) The street was completely empty and quiet, I could faintly hear children laughing in the distance.
She had left it down in the basement where she used to live. Her old key still worked and we walked right in through the main door without problems, without any obstacles. A couple of windows were broken, but there were still many pieces of furniture in place and a few clothes hanging in the closets. The entire basement was empty. Damp and open and empty. We searched everywhere but we couldn’t find what we were looking for. (Did she sell the house? Did it still belong to her family? Had she just left it behind to be ransacked by random looters?)
Later, we sat upstairs on an old dusty sofa and she told me many stories… stories that folded into each other without any apparent meaning or theme. Here in this house, in this particular moment, all the stories made sense to me and I could see how they could fit together, like an endlessly unsolved puzzle that is always about to be resolved. Always so close. Her voice, the sound of the ocean in the distance, birds singing right outside the dusty, broken window. All so real and strong. All so alive.
She had changed into a faded nightgown which she found in a closet; it fit her like wrinkled packing paper in the shape of an old woman, old wrinkled feet bulging out of old faded sandals, her pink skin just as faded as everything else and drooping pink and stained flesh over her aged brittle bones. There were scratchy stripes of yellow and black over her arm. Her whole body was covered in brown stains, bruises, pockmarks.
“Who owns this place now?”
“Nobody. It’s empty and alone. I see it as a place to practice… like a beautiful undisturbed cave. In the sphere of life, the whole can be developed from a part, whereas a technological machine can’t be made from a screw... This is the transcendentalism of the life principle.”
We hugged and moved softly against each other while continuing to lay down on the sofa. We could both perceive a kind of arhythmic music in the air. Then she said:
“There are five types of work. In my tradition they are known as the five winds. Though we may categorize practices in this way, there are no specific abilities or powers that are only usable by a follower of any particular wind.”
I responded with a whisper:
“Yesterday when I was working with you, I felt it. I felt the heat…”
She opened her legs and sat on my lap, her crotch against my crotch, her mouth over my mouth. I could feel the heat and wetness of her vagina against my pants. We breathed together for a long time. Breath and presence and contact.
“What you felt is a circulation, a circuit. It doesn’t come from me; it comes from both of us. It is the vinculum, the magic bond. Through it, a witch can perform miracles. It is the life which circulates in a being from the time of its conception until its death. While the body is mortal, it is immortal.”
She kissed me on the mouth and I kissed her back. It was a kiss that seemed to go on forever, full of intense lust and hunger. And it radically changed the context of our ambiguous communication.
“Our main work is self-control. We sacrifice the actions we most yearn for, the release of the senses. We burn it all in this fire kindled by knowledge.”
This work has been much feared and maligned over time and now I understand why. An imbalance is desirable in itself; it has to be maintained and increased. This is the real source of all the fear and hate. This is the heart of the shadow world. The dark flame.
6/12/2000
“At the time of my death, you will absorb my subtle aspects into yourself, and then, to the degree that your current abilities allow it, you will release them into the region above the earth. There they will return to their source.”
“In twenty years, you will be able to resolve this apparent contradiction on the basis of a formula pertaining to the function of energy. You don’t need to understand it now.”
“I will die soon and when I do, I will no longer be limited by a time bound physical body and a decaying bio-electrical mind. As an eternal digital being, I will crack open the vast reaches of outer space. I will remain in communication with you if you stay attentive. You will hear me speak any time you wish.”
7/15/2000
The last time we went to the abandoned house we had to leave through a dark narrow tunnel. (The main door had been cut in half while we were gone. We could still see the main stairway leading to the street but we couldn’t go out that way. It was too narrow and fragile for us to make our way through it.) The tunnel went to an older stairway that went down, deep into the earth. I could smell the ocean in the distance and I could hear the deep sound of the waves.
“The old doors don’t work the way they used to. We have to leave this way.”
We crossed a long narrow bridge that passed over a lake of green bright cubes and flowers. The same shape and color repeated endlessly in all directions. There were a few clouds above us, a few birds singing, but no sky.
