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.

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.

Faceless Game

 

For weeks I have lived with a sense of heaviness, of darkness; things are moving slowly, reluctantly, as if they wanted to stay still, to fade away slowly and eventually disappear… I see it as my inherent duty to order my affairs and deeds, to oversee and maintain all that is around me; I must keep my attention fixed on all that is happening here, now, I cannot get distracted from my immediate surroundings, I must not get lost in things that are beyond my control… and yet my friend is trapped in a dark hole where he has been placed, sealed away, banished, caged, and he has called upon me in his time of need… I cannot be present where he is, I am so far away, and there is no way for him to get out, no way to escape, no way to find a clear sense of relief, no sanctuary, no obvious path to follow that will bring him back home. I remember myself now as the flower that blooms at the heart of the tornado, and I will continue to live here at the heart unto the ends of eternity; I am destined to forever rule over all small living creatures, over all those tiny things that thrive in the moonlight and hide from the sun, I am here to guide their path, to gift them the electrical impulse that moves them, that pushes them forward, to offer the rhythm that urges them to rise, but I am not just, and I am not kind; I am distant, unreachable, a cold surface of stone, metal and glass, incomprehensible even to the few that would care to know me… From the ruins of the ancient labyrinth that encircles the world, where I have spent most of my days submerged in a kind of aleatoric study, I have carefully created a catastrophic archeology of desire, a deep palimpsest of endless dreams; I make myself readily available to those that would trust in me, but they must be careful in spite of my warm and generous offer, as I am not merciful, I am not loving, I am not open and I don’t look back. There is no place, anywhere within the radius of my influence, that is devoid of me; understanding that universal glowing omnipresence is essential to reaching a state of true devotion, a clear true sight; if someone wishes to love me they should be prepared to do so, no matter what my intentions, no matter what my secret predilections, no matter how deep my secrets, they are a mystery even to myself. I can only barely speak my own language; I rarely find reason to use it. There is no way to get out. I will forever remain where I am. I am as trapped as he is, completely devoid of options, but my illusion is currently lighter and his is spiked and lined with thorns; I reach out to him recurrently and he responds sometimes but the messages are slow and the rhythms are broken… I am left with a sense of heaviness, of darkness, of imperviousness, a cold shadowy nonchalance resting on a bed of silence. I am driving back home one day, listening to an old song I had almost forgotten, a song from my childhood that we used to sing out loud when we were young boys without fully understanding the lyrics, neither their simple meaning nor their unspoken implications; I listen now as I drive and I sing along with the strong thick voice coming from the speakers and I am suddenly confronted with my recurring tendency towards melancholy, an endless yearning for a past I can’t quite grasp or understand; I turn right on Golf Course road and I suddenly feel that older me fully present within me, the quiet thin boy with all the toys, the one that lived on a little side street in a lower middle class neighborhood built by his own Dad… For a moment I feel as if it is really me, the one that is driving, I am the one I knew, I am the one I once recognized when I looked in the mirror, holding my eyes open, the one that didn’t know anything but wanted to know everything as quickly as possible… I let him go so many years ago, I changed in so many unpredictable ways, and in the process, I also lost some of my basic humanity, the quality of simple naivete, the eager curiosity of a pampered child looking through expensive comic books while the world burned outside; that me is now a fading image, a barely recognizable photograph, and all his friends are gone and they won’t be returning, they have faded into a dark cloud that cannot be breached, a silence that can’t be punctured by music or magic; this sudden vision, as I drive and listen to the song, is only the fading illusion of what I was, what I was supposed to be, what I should have become… I recognize this territory where I live now, this complex chamber where I move and act, as a big game modeled on some intricate ancient language that nobody ever bothered to research or understand, it is not a space where a game takes place but a game in itself, the materialization of an intricate infinite game, a game that doesn’t differentiate between ritual and art, between causes and effects, between frivolous rewards and cruel punishments, it is not a game of intelligence like chess (that old cross between mysticism and personal awareness that my father taught me, sitting up on a rumpled bed, the same game I used to play on the street with my friends while dogs barked trying to jump over concrete walls and storm clouds gathered in the distance…) this one is a game of pure luck, a lottery, something freely floating between religion and faith and a secret impulse towards dissonant harmony, where broken glass is the perfect rhythm section and clusters of notes are the underlying ominous drone; this game is unpredictable, merciless, untouchable, it can end your participation at any time, cancel your ticket without warning; and it has no end in itself, it has no ultimate purpose, no reason to exist, no motivation to stop. This calamity that has befallen my friend has overwhelmed my sense of probabilities, the reality of it keeps on hitting me in recurrent waves - waves of disbelief, waves of sorrow, waves of anxious desire, when I manage to forget, the world itself reminds me, I hear it in the cry of a bird, I see it in the many shades of rust on an old abandoned red car, I see it in the remains of a picnic in the park across the street, in the graffiti on the side of a truck; I wish to express my love for him, in the best words I can find, in the best actions I can muster, and I am prepared to do so, no matter what the implications, no matter what the result; but there are only so many words I can say and only so many actions available; all people have a duty and a right to spread themselves in all directions, to explore who they are and who they want to be, to connect with who or what they wish to connect with, and to abandon anyone that they wish to abandon, the ultimate right to become the stars of their own universe, the central point of gravity in their own system of radiant light; understanding that this duty, this right, is attached to each nucleus of consciousness, no matter what form covers them, is essential to learning the nature of true devotion, true friendship, true contact, true love… I couldn’t change who he was, I couldn’t change what he was doing, I can’t protect him now; at times I feel calm, almost as if nothing has happened, as if everything remains as it always was; then I am hit again by a renewed wave of anxiety, a growing pressure for a resolution that will not come, a conclusion that refuses to arrive… the game is all powerful, this game that engulfs us, that surrounds us on all sides, and I can only change very small things within it, tiny shifts in the underlying machinery, slight adjustments in a constantly changing maze filled with traps; the game is not kind as it has no counterpart to be an object for its kindness, the game is not merciful as it has no emotions to be a source for its mercy, anyone who resists the rules of this game is evil by definition, beyond question, beyond doubt, anyone who revolts will end up missing, occluded, forgotten, sealed away in a black hole behind thick tall walls where no one can ever find them, no matter how hard we try… I think and I think and I am hit again by a renewed wave of sadness, a sense that all justice is an illusion, has always been an illusion, a sense that the game has never been just, the game will not bend to my pleading, as much as I might hate it I have no choice but to play. I try to remain calm but the calamity keeps on hitting me in recurrent waves that reach out to me through the ordinary moments that the world has to offer. I see it in the color of dust by the side of the road, I feel it in those waking dreams before dawn when darkness hasn’t quite vanished and sunlight hasn’t quite arrived… this thing with my friend, this thing that has happened to him, this thing that I cannot forget, this thing that insists on being real as much as I want it to vanish… It is a precise measure of one's inner strength of will, the weight of one’s true presence in a vast maze of illusions, to know how far one can live without meaning, how long can you go without purpose or a waiting distant beckoning light; this place where I live is a big game, not a territory where a game takes place but a game in itself; how far can I bear to live within a meaningless game, a world of profit, exchange and betrayals, how long can I play a game with no room for subtlety, loyalty or endless threads of thought resistant to conclusions or dogma; for years I have attempted to organize it within my own mind, I have tried to make it make sense like chess, clear pieces, clear movements, clear results, one part here, one part there, one part that is many parts, one part that is alone, one part that comes undone; but all these parts never quite come together, all these many parts they always end up falling apart in a shower of emptiness that brings me back to the start… My friend told me once within the trust of a special esoteric circle, a moment of vulnerability and simple confidence, about a secret magical agreement that he had made, an agreement we could make as well, the two of us, if I wished to do so, the whole thing was a gentle process of luck and whimsy, untouchable, merciless, unpredictable, but there was a hint of something steady hiding within it, something strong and true; I cannot betray him now by repeating the words he spoke then but they are coming back to me, more and more, in the last few days; I hear them when I close my eyes to go to sleep, I hear them when I walk alone, wandering without a goal… He tried to insert himself into the game as a kind of psychoactive virus but he didn’t fully understand the game’s true nature; a virus has only two parts: a bit of hidden information at its heart and a wrapping of solid armor, of identical repeating blocks of steel meant to protect what hides inside; my friend has now lost his armor, it has been stripped from him by force and only the heart is left, helpless, vulnerable and alone… Many months ago I sent him a carefully worded message to let him know that he should not stay where he was, he should not remain placid and comfortable, waiting for the next shoe to drop, waiting for the game’s minions to come and get him, he should seek a place in the wilderness, a refuge, a dark oasis, away from the reach of the game, from its sleek and cold agents; I know he got my message but I think he was angry with me for having sent it, he resented the implications of it, he didn’t want to become an old story of a disappearance, a cautionary tale to prevent further turbulence in the map, he refused to become a scapegoat destined to bear the sins of others, the transgressions of nights almost forgotten, almost but not quite, he was confident in his own strength, his own resiliency, his own ability to resist; he gave his secret enemy a face and a name and he challenged him to battle, a fight he was sure to win as he had won at everything before now, always, at everything, he had won; I saw what was happening, he had modeled his entire life on a beautiful and delicate ancient process, a careful climbing up into invisible heights, up to remote chambers of unspeakable light, wisdom, clarity, truth beckoned at the top… I told him, slowly and carefully, that the game is real, the game has no face, and will not make an announcement when it comes for you, its voice is cold and final, it doesn’t play by your rules, it creates its own, it encircles you with them in a tight embrace that sucks in all heat and light, when it comes, the game will not be subtle and it won’t even acknowledge your wish to fight, you will be defeated before you even know the battle has begun; I said it all and I said it all again but he could no longer differentiate between ritual and personal awareness, between mysticism and the dynamics of a hidden tribe, between religion and the flourishing of new forms of art; in spite of my attempts to warn him, the ultimate and radical power of the game eluded him until it was too late, until he was held prone under its unforgiving lights… There are only two elements left in me after all that has happened; I still have a bit of presence and I still have a bit of memory, a few photographs, a few recordings and writings and an unexplainable sense of death and renewal, of rebirth at the edge of dawn; I have come to understand that I am in the process of falling apart and the parts that are flying away were never of my own design, they were not what they seemed and I can still stand strong without them… How far can one go without meaning, how long can one bear to live in a meaningless void? One morning just before dawn, I walked through my house, so quiet, so cool, so open to possibilities, a white door, a carpeted hallway, a bookshelf, I walked to where there should have been a stairway, banisters the color of forgotten dust which tremble when I press my hand against them, but where the stairs should have been there was only a thick open tube shrouded in total darkness; I immediately knew I was supposed to jump into it, I didn’t know why I should jump and I don’t know how I knew that I should do it, it was like a forgotten habit that I was powerless to stop, something programmed into me long ago, before I ever came here, before I ever learned about the game, before I became aware of its cold endless surface; I heard the distant cry of a bird outside the windows, a yearning song of unspoken hunger, a message from the most fundamental locus of life, and I jumped into the darkness below me… For a moment I simply slid down as I would expect, gravity was doing what it does and I would soon land at the bottom with a sudden burst of pain and disappointment, but then, instead of falling, I began to float, hovering on a thick soup made of shadows, and as I floated I became aware of who I was, long before the past I still remembered, before I became me as a clearly defined identity, long before the name or the place or the crying… For a moment, I became all powerful, I became the center of all living things, I became the one that others pray to, the one who gives the gift of life, the one whose nature is light and clarity; I was all powerful and all-knowing but I could only change very small things, things so small as to seem insignificant, the route of a leaf flying in the wind, the resting place of a broken shard of glass, and I could only accomplish these insignificant tasks for a very short time… Soon I was back where I was supposed to be, lying on my bed curled up in a ball, and the moment was set aside as just another dream, just another flash of lucidity in a daze of recurring digressions, there was nothing left to do, not even the subtle dances at the corners of my mind, not even a touch of hope attached to a leaf of grass… It is ultimately a measure of one's strength of will to know how far one can go without strong clear meaning, how long can one bear to live in a meaningless void: a world where your friend gets trapped and becomes forever lost and there is no longer a way to find him, no longer a way to bring him back.