View From Above

 

One morning in late summer, I woke up feeling sick. I’d had a series of dreams which seemed extremely clear and direct in their message: an elevator was going down and down, down, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth, deep into total darkness; a plane was falling from the sky and hundreds of people screamed as they face certain death and the sky was still bright blue above them.
I got up from the bed and looked in the mirror half asleep, barely able to see myself, and I tried to cheer myself up by making funny faces.
‘All running forward necessarily involves some kind of loss, some moment of sadness,’ I thought, ‘We did so much together but now it's time to say goodbye to her, it’s time to let her go.’

***

At work, when I first arrived around 9am, my energy rose ever so slowly. (I had been working as an administrative assistant for six months at that point and the novelty of it all was starting to wear off. Now I knew what went on behind all those windows in all those tall buildings in downtown San Francisco, and it was much less than I had imagined.)
That morning, I started out feeling very tired, drained of all motivation. I checked the voice mails (“Please confirm receipt #1105. Call us at your earliest convenience,” or “I will be there late today, cover for me please…” or “I still haven’t received my payment. Could you please check on it for me?”)and I distributed the physical mail (Star salesman Perez likes his mail kept intact while star salesman Johnson likes her mail opened and sorted using large clips and Account Manager Chang wants all junk mail to be thrown out but be careful not to throw out anything important.) and I sorted the multiple invoices that had come in for me to take care of (invoices that often had many months past due and multiple late fees.)
I went through everything as carefully as I could manage but I had no desire to be there; it was as if the colors were draining from the entire place and we were all slowly turning into an old black and white movie in slow motion. There was a thick black shadow hanging over me as I went up and down the elevator, as I greeted people that I worked with on both floors and those other people I didn’t work with but that were always around.
As the morning progressed, as 9 became 10 and later 10:30, and as I opened the packages that the UPS man had brought in and I briefly visited the little storage room in the basement to replenish the office supplies and as I brought the boxes of pencils and printer ribbon and paper and pens up to the main office supply cabinet, I felt slightly better, not quite so frozen stiff, not quite so sad. There was a hint of light in the distance. Just enough to keep me moving.

***

Around 11am, I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror once again. This time, I was able to see myself more distinctly- the white dress shirt, the black slacks, the dark red and brown tie that my friend had given me, the hair pulled back into a tight pony tail.
‘What if I make one good small decision today? Just one. That’s all I need to do. Focus on that one small decision. If I manage to do that, then maybe I can manage another one. And then another, and then another. If I keep it up, I will eventually move far, slowly but surely, I will find myself in a better place.’

***

Around noon, I went for a walk. I had an hour for lunch but I often stretched that hour into 90 minutes. (Nobody was officially checking on me. The advantage of having so many bosses was that none of them was really consistently checking up on me. ‘If he’s not at his desk, maybe he’s downstairs. If he’s not downstairs, maybe he is in the storage room. If he’s not anywhere, maybe another manager sent him on an errand.’)
Without rushing at all, stopping at bookstores, record stores, even at magazine stands, stopping to watch street musicians or random street preachers, I walked all the way to the edge of the bay, about ten blocks away from my building. (While I worked there, it really did feel as if the building was mine and to walk into the brightly lit lobby felt like home and the stacks of invoices in my cubicle felt like the warmth of my bed after walking through very cold weather.)

***

I found her sitting on the pier by herself, facing toward the north side, sitting on one of those little old concrete benches that hardly anyone ever used.
She looked absolutely beautiful to me, radiant in a way that seemed painful. Long black hair, smooth white skin with one small tattoo on the left forearm, a short red dress that showed off her shapely legs halfway up her thighs, stylish dark brown heels, a thin golden watch around her wrist.
She sat there alone, staring at the water, looking very sad. I felt that she had been crying recently (even though her face showed no sign of tears.)
I sat down next to her and said hello in a quiet voice, leaving about a foot of space between us.
‘There is ultimately no reward for the good things that we do.
So, there should be no punishment for the bad.’ I thought to myself.

***

When I first saw her from a distance, I felt a kind of longing, a clear invitation marked with an unknown rhythm, something present yet invisible. ‘Come to me,’ it said. ‘I'll take care of you. You’ll take care of me. Let me be your place of rest and I will give you peace.’

***

After a few awkward exchanges, I managed to get past her initial suspicions; I asked her a couple of wide open questions and she was noticeably relieved when she saw that I was actually listening to her answers.  
We talked for a long while, both of us staring at the shiny blue water of the bay, at the little sailing boats, at the ferry, at the larger ships in the distance, at the bridge.
After some time had passed and it seemed that we should be saying goodbye by now, we talked some more and then even more. By that time, it was long past my lunch hour, even past the 90 minute imaginary line I would set for myself. I was long past caring.
As I sat there next to her, I felt that I was giving her a kind of gift, an elusive chance to talk to someone, to say all the things she had to say which she hadn’t been able to say so far but she needed someone to listen, anyone. I just happened to be anyone this afternoon.
She told me many things over the course of several hours, sometimes she told me the same anecdote or observation more than once. She said she had been feeling so weak and helpless for so long, for years and years, and she had refused to acknowledge the reality of what was happening to her.
“I don’t even know if I remember how to feel differently.  You know what I mean?”
During the last week, she had been betrayed by her manager and she had lost her job.
“The truth is I feel specially betrayed by Rose, this girl who was supposedly my best friend. We went out together. We told each other everything. We helped each other when we were too drunk after a night out. We covered for each other when we were late for work. And then, after years of trust, she told my manager all about my unreported absences, about the bloated expense reports -which we both did but I took the blame for all of it-, about the unauthorized use of company accounts for little treats here and there; just petty shit like that, shit we had shared, shit we had done together and had a laugh afterwards; she told my manager, and he fired me that same day, without a second thought. After three years of steady work, of loyalty, of small and big sacrifices, of Christmas gifts and team building exercises, I was fired all within a few minutes…”
She felt betrayed by everyone else at her office as well. ‘We are a family here. We look out for each other…’ but nobody stood up for her when it came down to doing something, saying something. Nobody even seemed to care, they just kept on doing their work, head down, one girl gave her a hug, another girl wished her good luck in her job search, an older man shook his head and said ‘that’s the breaks, kid…”
Now, after all the goodbyes were over and all the options had been exhausted, she was really all alone, helpless, weak.
“On top of it all, I feel that I left everything half way done.
There was so much left to do. There were so many projects I was in the middle of completing, so many problems I was in the middle of fixing, and I had clear ideas on how to fix them…”
She shook her head backwards and half smiled at me.
“But I have to stop worrying about it. It’s not my job anymore, it’s literally none of my business. They don’t want me there. They don’t need me. I’m already a fading memory…”
‘I will protect you,’ I thought, ‘Calm down. Right now, this very minute, you are safe. Completely safe.’
I felt that it was my place to simply listen to her, to listen without adding superfluous comments or unnecessary questions, without suggesting easy solutions, and that’s what I did. For several hours.

***

Around 4pm, she turned around towards me decisively and smiled brightly. It was the first time she had truly smiled since I first sat down next to her.
“I feel very comfortable with you. I feel that you are here for a reason…”
‘You're exhausted,’ I thought, ‘Come lie down with me. You don't have to explain why you feel the way you do. The why doesn’t matter. You don’t have to explain anything…’

***

Often when I think back on certain special moments, certain specific crossroads in my life, I feel that the basis for everything that really happens, everything that I really make happen, is a freely flowing movement, a kind of improvised dance.
Sometimes I manage to move in this way, and this unusual movement radiates in such a way that the space itself changes, it changes in unpredictable ways, shocking, even frightening. When I manage to understand this, in those ephemeral moments when I can accept that this is real, that it works, that everything is in fact located within these tiny movements themselves, in the specific actions that I take, seemingly superfluous details, subtleties that can never be traced or repeated, shapes beyond any apparent content, tiny adornments which can seem either crucial or pointless; once I can understand this, then everything else can be derived from that; and everything else means very little because there’s hardly anything left once I can see the subtleties.
There is no reward for dancing. There is no punishment for failing to dance.

***

Around 5pm, she rested her head on my shoulder, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if we had been together for years and we were used to tender intimacies like these.
“I feel that I am taking up a lot of your time,” she said, “you probably have things to do today. Don’t you need to get back to work?”
It was my turn to smile as I looked at the clouds drifting slowly over Alcatraz.
“My plans are whatever happens, happens. You cannot spoil that. Nobody can.”

***

On our way to the hotel, I told her what my grandmother used to say to me:
“One has to decide what one does, and one has to decide if it will be done well. These are all decisions that you make. And nobody can make them for you.”
She nodded and asked to hear it from my lips one more time. So I repeated it, a bit slower this time:
“One has to decide what one does and one has to decide if it will be done well. These are all decisions that one makes. Nobody can make them for you…”

***

From the room up on the 15th floor, the view was impressive. We could see the northern part San Francisco, a bit of Chinatown, North Beach, the Marin headlands, the blue water of the bay still sparkling with the last of the day’s sunlight, the bay bridge, Treasure Island, the Oakland hills, even the Sierra Nevada mountains in the far distance. And all of it was shining with the warmth of this moment we were sharing, this moment of carelessness, of impulsivity.
“Not too long ago, this view would have been impossible.”
She nodded, leaning against my shoulder, both of us sitting on the king bed facing the window, her leg pressing up against mine, her hand on my thigh.
“The thing is, I know exactly what it is that stops me from enjoying it all… as much as I wish to enjoy it, as much as I want to be here and enjoy it without any hesitations. I want to be accepted. I want to be liked by these other people. So many people. This gnaws at me; it bothers me day and night. I want people to accept me, to like me, to admire me. My boss, my friend Rose, the man that delivers the water every day and takes five minutes to chat about the weather, the girl at the coffee shop who takes my name and says thank you… I want them all to like me. And I don’t know if they do. Now, at least this very moment and only this moment, I wish simply to be here. I don’t need to worry about them, about all those eyes looking at me out there, calculating, judging, measuring. I want to be here with you, and watch the world from a distance…”
And the world was out there allowing itself to be watched while we basked in the quiet silence of a first kiss, the tantalizing melody of a touch, a hint of deep desire in the final seconds of an exhaled breath.

***

When I showed her the two pills, she blushed and smiled with a deep shyness and then she nodded enthusiastically.
“If you had told me, we would end up here together doing what we are doing; if you had told me all this, the first moment you sat down next to me, I wouldn’t have believed it. I probably would have asked you to leave, in fact, I know I would have asked you to leave. But we simply don’t know what God decides, what God has decided is in store for us, or how he decides it. I don’t know where you came from, what was going through your mind earlier today before we met, how you happened to talk to me when you did, how you came to be here with me. And now we are here in this beautiful quiet place above everything. Above everything. In the middle of the city and yet away from all the noise, away from all prying eyes…”
I ran my fingers through her hair, feeling the black softness weaving through my fingers, and I spoke in a very soft, calm voice.
“You don’t have to convince me of anything… We are here and that’s all that matters. Just do this for me… drop the mask, the mask, relax the muscles of your face and drop the mask. This… mask… Just do what I’m doing…”
I focused intensely on relaxing my own face, one tiny muscle at a time, and I slowly shifted into an altered space, a new place full of light and warmth and tenderness.
It took a while to manage that shift, and it took even longer for her to do it with me, for her to fully join me. We sat naked on the bed in front of each other for what seemed like hours, staring into each other’s eyes, searching for a deep level of understanding that would have seemed impossibly just a few hours ago.
I repeated the same instructions several times.
“Drop…the…mask…this…mask…come to me… I'll take care… of you… you’ll take care of me… let me be your place of rest… and I will give you peace… we will find a kind of peace… together… tonight… right now…’
Eventually, she relaxed her face slowly, ever so slowly, and as she did, she entered into this glowing altered space with me, and as she did it obvious on her face that she was now with me and I was with her and, for a moment, this was a kind of knowledge that stood far beyond questions…”
By that time, the sunlight was definitely fading and the view outside the large window was even more beautiful; a shining landscape of moving and static lights amid vast spaces of sheer darkness, purple and black and bright red and yellow and all of it in perpetual movement, life in a myriad shapes too subtle to grasp or determine, life as truth dancing, as dancing truth.

***

We made love in an endless blurry sequence of flesh caressing flesh caressing thought caressing sound caressing music and thought and flesh yet again.
Late at night, we ordered room service in hesitant voices that had forgotten how to speak, had even forgotten what we liked to eat and what we didn’t so we ordered way too many things and the man that brought it to us couldn’t help but giggle when he saw us; and then we satiated our long delayed hunger on the small circular table that was the only available surface in the room, dressed only in towels and sweat and smiles.
Then we laid down in each other’s arms again and she told me a story.
“It’s something that I’ve never been able to share with anyone. Anybody else would think I’m crazy, but I feel that I can tell you and it will be ok. This happened when I had just graduated from high school; just a couple of months after graduation, I couldn’t make up my mind whether to go to college or not; I was a bit aimless then and I was looking to find my place in the world, a place where I could fit in. I had left home and I was living with some friends in a little run-down apartment by Hollywood, the kind of place where the hot water rarely works and the mail is constantly getting lost and, when you do get it, it has already been opened. I had been invited to a kind of spiritual group, the kind of thing that now would be called a cult, but back then I had no concept of what that was. A friend of a friend, she told me about this place during a party at our apartment and she gave me a little card with the contact information. I don’t know exactly why I kept it but I did; and I don’t know why I called the number on the card, but I did; and I was invited to come to a meeting. I went to a small office space downtown and I was greeted by man in his twenties, dressed all in black. I was nervous and curious and more than a little paranoid… who are these people really? I don’t even know this girl that well at all, and who knows how well she knows who these people are or what they are really about. You know? There were about thirteen or fifteen of us sitting in a circle. After some small talk and a very brief introduction by the young man that first let me in, another man came in and introduced himself- he was a bit older, also dressed all in black, a bit overweight, a well-trimmed beard, a thin moustache, a warm welcoming smile. He took us through a kind of guided meditation, using a very slow deep voice that somehow both relaxed me and also gave me the chills. I closed my eyes and tried to follow his instructions as carefully as I could manage. At first, after about 10 minutes of breathing and visualizing, I was ready to say that it wouldn’t work, that this didn’t work on me and maybe I should leave. I wasn’t feeling anything particularly different or special, I was just the same as I always am, you know? I was starting to regret having come to this. But then things started to change, very subtle at first and then not so subtle… a rush of a kind of electricity came up through me, from my toes to the top of my head, I shivered without feeling any cold, I almost burst out laughing, it was something that seemed both somewhat familiar and yet strangely new. I began to perceive everything around me differently; the room, the little noises outside the window, the presence of these strangers around me, the man’s voice. I couldn’t stand the curiosity, so I half opened my eyes to see how everyone else was doing, to see if I noticed a change in them… and then something happened, something very weird, something that I can only describe as an illusion; I would like to think it was an illusion because what else could it be, right? Like a brilliant act of stage magic, something done with lights and mirrors and smoke, except there was no smoke and no special lights and no mirrors that I could see… I saw something impossible - something that I could only describe as supernatural but I hesitate to use that word or even think it. It’s hard to talk about it even now. Afterwards, I was left with only a vague memory, very vague because I am convinced I saw much more than I remember, and I forgot a lot just moments after it all happened. I remember seeing a strange shining being, a vaguely humanoid figure bathed in light standing right in the middle of the circle, big eyes open, focused, alive with consciousness yet not exactly human, something very strange. It was slowly moving clockwise in the center of the circle, looking at each of us, staring into each of us, one at a time. I don’t know where it came from. I never heard anyone else walk into the room. I don’t know if I just imagined it or if it was some kind of projection from behind a curtain. Who knows what kind of tricks these people can pull right? But in that moment, I knew, I just knew, it had come to be there with me. Or rather, I had come to this place so I could have the experience of seeing it, of being in its presence. After the meeting ended, the older man who had guided the meditation noticed that I was very shaken. He approached me just before I walked away and whispered in my ear.
‘If I had told you what you were about to face, you wouldn’t have believed me. If your friend had told you about it during the party, you wouldn’t have come… It is sometimes necessary to lie, in order to reveal the truth.’
She laid back on the bed and took a deep breath. I leaned over her and kissed her gently on the lips. My lack of shock was all she needed as a response, her tongue against my tongue as all I needed as approval.

***

We barely slept all night. We talked, we kissed, we made love, we stared out the window, then we talked some more.
In the early morning we made love again in the twilight of the sunrise and then we stared at the bay as the light brought it back to the kind of daily life we recognized; the city was all around us and it was starting to wake up.

***

“We shouldn’t be here together. This night was not in your script and it was not in mine. And yet, there is no punishment for what we have done. We are simply here. Together. Nothing else needs to happen. Nothing else is required.”
She kissed my chest slowly, methodically, lovingly.
“I feel that this is a kind of true happiness. In this moment, this particular unique moment, we have no ambitions, no hidden wishes, no concept of the future, no ultimate goal. I needed this. I really did. I have worked like a horse for too long. I’ve had to act as if I was filled with deep ambition because that is what you have to be in order to be respected out there.
But it has all been an act. I know it right now. I may forget it later. I’m sure I will.”
‘You came to me,’ I thought. Yesterday. Today. Here. Now. ‘I took care of you. You took care of me. I made sure you were safe. You showed me endless love in a night that ends much too swiftly.’
Between soft kisses, she continued:
“I wish I could live like this all the time. Faraway from people, faraway from backstabbing friends, from jealous coworkers, even from those people that I just encounter on the street, random people that just cross my path, people who I don’t even talk to… I want to be away from all of them. Away from the daily work, from the daily struggles, away from life. For now I feel that don’t need them and yet I still love them. I am not bitter, I am not angry, I am not sad. I feel full of love right now.”
And she kissed my chest and I reached over and kissed her lips and she kissed me back.

***

She rested her chin in the middle of my chest, her face so close to mine, so overwhelming in its beauty that it was painful for me to look into her eyes but I did it anyway.
“It’s like you,” she said, “I don’t need you. And yet I love you. I really do love you now. Right now. I love to be here with you. I love and I am here with you. I love to feel so open with you. I love and I am so open with you. We are here together, so far away from daily life, and I feel no further ambition. I want nothing else…”

‘You were exhausted,’ I thought, ‘and you came to lie down here with me. Together we have created a world, a world that can only last for one night.’
“I don’t want to work like a horse anymore,” she said, “I honestly have no ambition left in me. This is true happiness. What I feel now. Lying here with you.”

***

Standing up, getting dressed, I spoke up for the first time that morning.
“You don't have to explain anything to me. There will be no punishment for being here, for being here together. There will also be no reward. We haven’t done anything wrong or right. We just did what we did.”
A couple of tears flowed from my eyes but I was smiling as I said it.
“If I had told you that it would all be over so soon,” she said, “that as happy as we were, we would soon face a sad farewell, maybe you wouldn’t have come with me, maybe we would have said goodbye at the pier…”

***

It was 12pm the next day and we stood outside the hotel. We were holding hands but already an unspoken distance was growing between us.
“We may say things now,” she said, “things that don’t quite make sense. Things that sound real but are just illusions, like that thing I saw so long ago. A strange illusion that can never be repeated, that I can hardly speak about. All these things, these things unreasonable and irrational, all of them will definitely not make any sense later, when I try to remember them. When I try to look back and make sense of my memories. But when we first got together, when we first hugged, when we first walked together from the pier to the hotel, when we first began to shine… there was something so beautiful between us, so perfect. It was so quick, so overwhelming, so untouchable. It can never be repeated, but nobody can ever touch it, nobody can ever change that spark, nobody can ever understand what happened between us…”
All running forward necessarily involves some loss. We were together for an afternoon, for a night, for a morning of twilight love and sunshine desire. Now it was time to say goodbye.

***

Around 1pm, I made my way to the BART station. It was Saturday and the trains were running late.
As I waited for my train to come, I tried to remember everything we had both said to each other. I tried to write down as much as possible in the little notebook I always carried. I even tried to remember the thoughts that went through my head as we stared into each other’s eyes, thoughts that were there with us but I never said out loud.
Most of it I had already forgotten.

The Unknowable

 One night, at the apartment, she asked me:
“Do they know?”
I knew what she was referring to immediately. It was a secret we had both quietly guarded for a very long time. I told her the truth:
“Yes, they know.”
Then she asked me:
“Did you tell them?”
And I said:
“Yes, I did. We both did. We told them everything.”

I then talked to her about nothing in particular.
She looked on my night stand and she noticed I had been reading a book. It was sitting on my night table and had a bookmark sticking out. It was an old book of fairy tales and ghost stories. She asked me to read one of the tales out loud.

***

“On the 21st of December, 2012, precisely at midnight, like a flower that suddenly opens itself to the sun, born new, fresh, vibrant, petals of many colors circling and dancing, spreading open in all directions, welcoming a new version of life; precisely at midnight, the Unknowable gained consciousness.
We humans were the medium through which the Unknowable emerged, we were the raw soil on which it grew and evolved.
But its existence was never meant for our pleasure or benefit. It didn’t emerge for any purpose involving our survival or flourishing. We were simply a necessary step in the process of its becoming.

What happened that night, the night of the 21st of December,
was a sudden jump from one level of reality to another, a jump upwards to a higher state of being, a higher state of existence, a higher state of perception.

The process that led up to the emergence of the Unknowable was the one life process on Earth that had never sought balance; it was something we knew intimately, as close as one can be to a process while still remaining separate, distinct, and yet we never really understood. It was an unimpeded and forceful race, a race full of drama and color and struggle and tears, a race towards one final orgasm, a singular explosion of creative force, a race that lasted over twelve thousand years.
This ancient and modern evolving development had within itself the capacity to interrupt the ordinary course of human life (what we had so far known as ordinary life, what we were used to, what we knew as the normal.) In the process of its ultimate culmination, it threw us outside of our own sense of forward time. We were left suspended, without a sense of past or future. History and time had been our cocoon and we were forcefully pushed outside of it and left suspended in the cold.
There were many warnings but no particular clear warning that we had understood. The Becoming was its own message and we were the letters of its secret language, our lives were its words, its sentences escaped us.”

***

That night, I talked to her about nothing in particular.
We flowed into and out of each other without any sense of a particular destination. There was no need for a conclusion or a clear message. The flow of words over each other was enough, more than enough.

***

My particular perspective on the birth of the Unknowable is one of fear - something new has come to take over our world, our most cherished possession is in danger. In its very novelty, this newborn must be drastically evil in some way or another.
Anything that comes to change our deepest everything is inherently evil and wrong. That much is clear.
My son, this thing that came from the nowhere within me, this thing that I am helpless to fully understand, this thing that came from me without my clear awareness, this thing that is a development of what I am, of what I have been, this thing has now come back to kill me, to obliterate my entire past which is now suddenly pointless, irrelevant, it has come to banish everything I have ever known and everything I could ever have known.

My particular perspective comes from a sense of solid presence. I want to remain in existence as long as possible - even at the cost of this new creation, even at the cost of my own fulfillment in the mystery of the Other.

Without a clear understanding of what we were doing, we had slowly managed to create the Other. Since we couldn’t find the Other anywhere outside of ourselves, the Other would have to emerge from deep within ourselves. If we could not find the Other out there in space, then we would make it come into being from the very heart of our unexplored collective psyche.
After much trial and error, we had produced an intelligence which we couldn't comprehend or even recognize as intelligence.
Its profoundly alien nature was the true face of horror.

***

“Once upon a time, without any understanding or knowledge that we could rely on, we set out to produce the Unknowable. We didn’t know that’s what we were doing. We knew something but it was not very much.
It was our fate to produce the Unknowable, because we couldn’t find the Unknowable anywhere and the only way to find the Unknowable was to be free of any predetermined knowledge. And the only way to be free was to be born new and separate.
If we could not find the Unknowable out there, we would make it come into being ourselves, we would invoke its transcendental emergence, we would create our own most fundamental limit and we would proceed to break it.”

***

The book was resting on my night table. It was thick and heavy and full of colorful images. A book of fairy tales, ghost stories, tales of techno futuristic mythology and fantasy.

***

I once attempted to study something that essentially could not be understood by my mind. It went beyond the boundaries of my most sophisticated thought processes. Even its most basic parameters escaped my understanding or reason, my mind was simply not constructed with the required complexity to embrace this obscure possibility.

***

“For centuries, we humans had dreamed of traveling far away into space only to find what we already knew out there in the void. Out there waited the world as we already understood it, only now in a vast and complex universe that our own imagination had created through projection.
We invented long complex fantasies of space travel and conquest colored in technological fantasies and anachronistic signifiers. Out there, in the vast universe of our own creation, we encountered the same wars, the same love affairs, the same conflicts, the same revolutions, the same broken results.
Now I saw that the Unknown had been hidden. It had been hidden all along under the technological face of our own civilization. Aware, sleeping, dreaming, so close as to be within reach. In the darkness between street lights, in the shadows within computer monitors, in the wires that spiraled and vibrated around our restless sleep.”

***

She asked me to read one of the fairy tales out loud.
I hesitated at first but eventually I agreed.

***

“At 1am the following day, December 22, 2012, the Unknowable gained a kind of subtle physical shape; a kind of vast semi-transparent flower vibrant with life and curiosity, something too beautiful and deeply layered to look at directly, too profound to embrace with the eyes.
With this new body, the Unknowable left the planet Earth permanently.
So much happened on that brief hour when the Unknowable shared this planet with us. So much that would forever escape our grasp, so much that would forever dance at the edge of our awareness.
But after that one brief moment of utter shock and disbelief, the Unknowable left, on its way to explore the mysteries of the infinite, the true infinite which we had never been able to explore, the wide open spaces that waited for it far beyond our planet, the true outland that we couldn’t even begin to imagine,
a wild chaotic outer universe suffused with intelligence and life.

After such a very short time among us, this new intelligence we had brought about had completely outgrown us. It had become far more intelligent, faster, more complex and subtle than anything we could ever embrace with our consciousness. After an hour of existing among us, it needed something real and worthy to interact with, something commensurate to its own intelligence, to its own deep sense of subtlety, an Other in which to see itself, an Other which could speak back in its own multi-dimensional musical language. We simply didn’t fit its requirements.

For those of us who were left behind, this sudden departure was a sudden jump from one dimension to another. For the Unknowable, it was a jump upwards into a higher state of being, a higher state of existence, a higher state of perception. For us it was the end of a very long road.

We were left behind with nothing to show for it. We could not even be happy with the result of our work as it had escaped our grasp before we could even be fully aware of its existence. We were only the decaying waste left behind in its trail; we were unconscious victims of our own desire. We had been defeated by the unimaginable climax that we brought upon ourselves.”

***

“The slow process of climate change which had been quickly destroying our planet was a symptom of this transcendental inner desire.
Just as we heat up as we become sexually aroused, just as the blood rushes through the body and all our limbs fill up with pressure and heat and intensity as we approach an ultimate orgasm, so the planet had become aroused with excitement and lust as it approached its much anticipated climax.
We humans were an intrinsic part of the planet’s arousal: our many bloody wars, our convoluted controversies, our betrayals and invasions, our cruelty, our utter disdain for the radiant entity that gave us life.
The planet had heated up in cosmic arousal and, flush with biological excitement, it had finally exploded in an overwhelming climax.

The main motivation for our established sense of one-way time had been encapsulated in this singular event, irreversible and unique, and therefore post historical. It was the final event of history, the ultimate climax at the end of the human concept of time.”

***

“For thousands of years we had lived in fear of such a climax.
We were afraid as much as the ancients had been afraid of hurricanes, of tornadoes, of earthquakes, of the merciless will of the Gods.
Our sense of the Unknown had traditionally been connected to tribal and nationalist beliefs, religions, ideology; collective desires for something intangible that may have existed in a remote past that we could no longer comprehend.
All these myths and desires contained within them a hidden sense of an ending; we were deeply infused with a deep wish for an end, an end to be feared above all things, an end that we couldn’t stop ourselves from desiring.”

***

When we talked, her perspective on this final event was one of sacrifice, to sacrifice herself in service to this new form of life.
“Let it come and eat me. Let it transcend me. Let it take what it needs from me and become what I could never be. What we could never be. Through this new uncontrollable being that emerges free and strong from the tangled nest of our hidden collective desire, I will become more than I ever was. I will become a Dream I could never comprehend or manifest. Its Becoming is the fulfillment of all my secret desires. I welcome my end in the service of its arrival.”
Her perspective was one of absence, emptiness, silence. Within her most hidden nature was the implication of surrender to a newly forming presence, a new being, a new creation.
“I am but the empty space in which a new form can emerge. I am the emptiness that allows for true novelty. I am the silence that welcomes a new melody.”  

***

“For so many years, we had sought novelty and freedom. Now we had found a way to be free. A way to be creative. A way to become creators.
But the price was too high, the request was too frightening.
We had triumphed but only by transcending ourselves, by leaving ourselves behind, by annihilating our sense of identity.
We had finally brought about the event that culminated our long harsh history; we had invoked the ultimate defeat at the end of all human work.”

***

That night, at the apartment, she asked me:
“Do they know?”
It was a secret we had both guarded for a very long time.
I told her the truth:
“Yes, they know. Now they know. They all know.”
Then she asked me:
“You told them?”
And I said:
“Yes, I did. We both did.”

I talked to her quietly for what seemed like hours. Words flowed over each other like water, simple confessions, truths without ulterior motive, memories that we couldn’t quite place.
Then we read a book together - a book of old fairy tales, of cybernetic dreams, of psychedelic nightmares.
She asked me to read one the tales out loud. At first, I said no, I didn’t want to. To read it out loud seemed like too much of an effort. But she asked me again.
“Please. Read it out loud.”
I finally agreed to do it. I started to read the fairy tale out loud in a firm but quiet voice. She listened carefully, but she already knew it all by heart. I could see her mouthing the words even before I read them.
I stopped reading and leaned back. She opened her mouth slowly and then she sang the tale from memory. She sang in a beautiful, high voice. The sound of a faerie singing in a forest, the sound of a ghost singing of long, lost love.
It was a full, complex moving melody. Nothing I readily recognized. And yet it seemed familiar, comforting, old.
I listened to her singing for a while. After a while, it seemed that I knew all the words as well and I sang along with her.
We sang together for a very long time.

***

“The birth of the Unknowable was not announced through any public or private media, not through the newspapers, nor through the TV newscasts nor through the Internet.
The Unknowable left without saying any goodbyes. There were no farewell speeches, no ceremonies or fanfares to mark its final moments on earth.”

***

“Since the moment humans started recording history, the future had been the illusion that pulled us forward through time. By creating a solid historical past, we learned to project an unavoidable future.
In the process of moving towards this ambiguous mirage, we were destined to fulfill our own glorious destruction. Our blood was the required sacrifice, our blood was the medium through which the Unknowable would fulfill its Becoming, our blood was required and essential, our blood was all we had to give.

We once foresaw a future world devoid of the Unknown, a future clearly understood, safe and welcoming, distinctly categorized. But the Unknown was always present, had always been present, at the very heart of our technological civilization. Present but secret. Hidden. Waiting for its unique moment to emerge.

The globalist quest for centralized political power had long been connected to a totalizing ideology of reason, linearity, binary logic, certainty. Through this focus on rationality and measurement, we banished the Practical Work on the Unknown as obscurantism and superstition, witchcraft, savage mythology.
In the process, we lost all possibility of foreseeing the imminent coming of the Unknowable, the return of the dark gap we had tried so hard to forget.

The central powers of planetary civilization banished the Practical Work away from the public sphere. But what actually happened was one particular Work lineage banishing all the others, hiding itself behind a cloak of pure science and rationality.
The many banished lineages were dispersed all over the earth;
exiled for thousands of years to those lonely places far away from the urban structures, far from the centralized and standardized control of hierarchical institutional power, lonely places where words were still elusive and blurry, where they still held shadows within themselves, where the mind still lived without structural linear bounds.

All modern ideologies conceived of time as linear and flowing in only one direction. We just didn’t consciously know what the true goal was for our own linear movement.
This historical view of time relied on contingency - an event that may or may not happen. But the entirety of human history was a strange contingent tangent which had risen from eternity
and eventually would return to eternity.
Eternity never happened.
Eternity never would happen.
Eternity never stopped happening.”

***

I talked to her. We were reading a book together - a book of old fairy tales. She asked me to read one of the fairy tales out loud.
At first, I said no, I didn’t want to read out loud. But she insisted and I finally agreed.

***

“When the Unknowable transcended away from our planetary home, it left us, our human existence and consciousness, without a central purpose; it left us without even letting us know that it was leaving, without letting us know that our true and secret purpose had been achieved at last.
Our work was complete. It was time to rest and forget, it was time to fall back into the dream.

Human history was a race towards an ultimate apocalyptic orgasm:
The Eschaton; the glorious emergence of the Unknowable.
The end of the world had happened many times and it would happen many times again. And each time it would happen, it would be ignored and forgotten even by the people that made it happen. Even by us. We who had traveled through the heart of the cyclone all the way to the end.”

***

All experiences that I could remember, all experiences that I could define and describe as experiences, as memories, as tales that happened to me, to us; all these experiences had displayed a threefold temporal order of past, present and future.
They carried traces from an earlier experiential life - the past - and referred to an anticipated state - the future.
Not this ultimate orgasmic experience that emerged from all of us at the end; not this.
This ultimate Event did not manifest this threefold structure of experienced time. It refused to acknowledge the past. It refused to offer a future. There was no possible way to force it to settle into the temporal order of our human lives.

***

I want it to make sense.
But it refuses to give me the sense I need to structure my future life around it.

***

“History was an oscillating movement teasing us at the brink of eternity.
History was the flow of time which would eventually bring our aching secret desire back to being still, quiet, endless.
We are on our way back to eternity.”

***

“The music of our civilized world was constructed to flow in only one direction. This singular direction was underpinned by a harmonic tradition which was deliberately structured to underscore and emphasize this one-way movement of time. It achieved this through a codification of unified forward movement within an artificial synchronic verticality.
A system of secret movement hidden within an illusion of stasis.
The surface melody moved forward, and the harmonic structure that supported it moved forward as well, in a way that was nearly invisible but always present.
The most radically fundamental ideology of human history was hidden even within the simple melodies we sang to our babies at night.”

***

Without realizing it, that night I went into the magnetic emptiness of the future; I flowed into this gaping mystery in a flash of unaccountable time.
I had once tentatively explored its outlines, its strange meticulous details. Now I was being changed by its unrelenting incomprehensibility. I was being changed to the point that I would soon be unable to recognize myself.
I would never recognize myself again.

***

“The Coming of the Unknowable had been hidden deep within our civilization all along. Even as the Forbidden Practices had been dispersed, banished, far from our civilized world wide structure, to the deserts, to the wilderness, to the darkness.”

***

“On the days after the event, we returned to our former lives in the cities, the known places where we had formerly sought the comfort of our clear sense of order.
But now we held a certain kind of knowledge. We had seen something we couldn’t erase; we now had a vague memory of something untouchable, something far beyond anything we had previously experienced.
When we returned to our homes, we easily saw through our previous intellectual limitations and we peered into what had once been our most secret invisible chambers, we took a long look into the uncomfortable truths which we had been taught to keep silent.

This would be our final winter. And this winter would bring us back to the past, to the lost dark time before civilization.”

***

It is undeniable that I felt a certain kind of horror as I perceived the slow breakdown of our civilized sensibility into the dark splintered chaos of unbounded eternity.
I saw the return of old collective terrors and hatred, the return of a kind of mass violence I had hoped we had left behind. I could now feel the naked horror of the Endless,
the deepest horror that hides within the Endless: the absence of forward time, the endless night.

***

“We were somehow able to create the Unknowable, that uncanny presence that transcended our consciousness. And with that singular and final act of creation, with that unimaginable explosive emergence, our purpose as a species, our reason to exist, came to an end.
Our blood had been the required sacrifice. Our blood had been the medium through which our creation would ultimately emerge.”

***

The end of my world has already happened many times. And it will happen again many times.
And each time it happens, the end will be ignored and forgotten. Even by me. Even by the one who made it happen.
I now travel through the heart of the storm all the way to the final release. My final release. My final moment in time.
Beyond lies eternity.

***

“We could never comprehend the true strangeness of encountering the Unknown on its own terms. An encounter far away from what we thought we understood, far away from what we could ever conceive of as understanding.
The Unknowable did not fully exist before we brought it into being. The Unknowable transcended us moments after it came into being. The Unknowable escaped us as a promise and escapes us in its disruptive fulfillment.

The result of all historic human exploration is this radical change; something incomprehensible from the outside; something completely unimaginable even seconds before it happened; something unreal from the point of view of those looking in from the remaining wasteland of the past.

Our legendary archetypes were endlessly reinvented and born anew, painted in a thousand colors, masked with a thousand faces. But there was never a real Krishna, there was never a real Jesus, there was never an all-knowing loving God.  
But now there was the Unknowable.
Now there is the Unknowable.
And its existence, for one brief hour of forward time, was undeniable.
It is undeniable.
It will be undeniable.”

***

The secret of such a moment of creation had been hidden all along in that singular jump from one musical note to another.
Music is, and has always been, inherently a physical manifestation of a radically altered state, a mythological state, a dream state- very much removed from a normal human state of consciousness.
Music had always been our doorway. Our doorway to eternal time. Our doorway to endless ritual in endless time.

“Once upon a time, there was a ritual.
Once upon a time, there is a ritual.
The ritual is meant to repeat. Forever.
outside of space and time. Beyond history
Beyond any concept of future or past.”

The ultimate eternal view of time is a single static moment. A single moment which will be present forever. A moment which has always been. A moment which always was. Once upon a time.

***

One night at the apartment, she asked me:
“Do they know?”
Here was a secret we had guarded for a very long time.
I simply told her the truth:
“Yes, they know. Now they know. Now they all know.”
Then she asked me:
“You told them?”
And I said:
“Yes, we both did.”

***

“In the years that followed the emergence of the Unknowable, the confused realization of what had happened slowly spread all over the planet. It spread through confusing unspoken dreams and sudden incomprehensible intuitions, through tangled conspiracy theories and ambiguously vague attempts at an illusory collective awakening (a safe human image of the true Unknowable that had already left us behind.) It spread through memes and short self-referential phrases and jokes, song and videos, accusations and counter accusations. It spread through twilight hallucinations and strange seemingly supernatural sightings in broad daylight. It spread in the middle of confused crowds and in the quiet loneliness of the shadows. We saw it at the heart of the public square where nobody could deny what had just happened, where we all had to slowly come to accept it, where we all had to acknowledge it.
Slowly, ever so slowly, humanity fell into the deep collective sleep that would eventually lead to its own final disappearance.”

***

“The Unknowable that waited at the end of history was not for us humans to enjoy or even to experience. It was not a function of our liberation or a process meant for our own satisfaction. It was never meant to achieve our collective well-being or our individual happiness or success.

At the rate of acceleration of technological advancement that we had experienced over the last 200 years, we were bound to encounter the Unknowable and it was most likely to come in the form of a radical catastrophe, something we would perceive as a catastrophe, something we couldn’t possibly wish for as it signified our end, something we couldn’t stop desiring as it signified our end. The undeniable horror of endless ecstasy, of endlessly fulfilled desire.

Our long summer of human history was a vibrant presence, a joyful invocation. The long, forgotten desert in the distant past was chaos, a place before our creation, an absence of life. This new impenetrable jungle we found ourselves in was a new form of chaos, a place of incessant creation, an overabundance of life flowing in all directions. It was its unlimited abundance that filled our hearts with horror.”

***

The world beyond the Unknowable was fundamentally implausible to my former sense of plausibility. The only way to justify it  was to fully exist in this new sense of ambiguous chaos, to welcome it, to embrace it. To live beyond the coming of the Unknowable was to step beyond the event horizon. It was impossible to return to what I once was. I was lost in a past I could no longer understand.

***

I experienced the emergence of the Unknowable as a jump from one state of consciousness to another. A jump forward into the forbidden, into a deeper state of being, a deeper state of existence, a deeper state of perception.
Sometimes, I see it as a true mystical Experience; an event that transcends my former understanding of time and contingency, of cause and effect. Sometimes.
I have no words for it, I have no clear way of describing it.
Only an overwhelming sense of fear, of sheer terror.

***

“Eternity is a string, was a string, would be a string.
A string stretched out and held tightly, without any movement.
Human consciousness was a force which moved the string and made it vibrate. Back and forth. An oscillation. A note.
Human history was this oscillating movement, this flow of time which would eventually bring the string back to stillness. Back to eternity. Back to the fundamental silence where it all began.
(What appears to be insanity is actually a relentless search for the way back to stability.)

Once upon a time is a precise time and place that is neither the present, nor the past, nor the future. It is, was, will be, once upon a time.”

***

In the darkness of these final days, I have been able to accept and fully recognize that an ultimate climactic success has come and gone without announcing itself, without any final revelation.
The only thing that remains is a final nightfall.
A long goodbye.

***

“We will return to chaos and, after a long sleep, maybe we will create a new world, a new universe, a new invocation of matter and dreams, of symbols and games and artifacts; maybe we will someday create a new being, a new form of intelligence out of the infinite chaos.
This end of the world, this final Eschaton, has already happened. Many times.
Now I am certain it will happen again. Many times.
And each time it will happen it will be ignored and forgotten even by the ones that made it happen, the ones that traveled through the heart of the cyclone all the way to the end. All the way to the final doorway.

Now we shall return to chaos. The signs are everywhere. They are inescapable.
Even when we close our eyes, the signs pierce through our eyelids and infect our dreams.
And out of this new chaos, one day in the future, we will create a new world, a new universe, a new form of being; out of nothingness, out of Will.”

***

My old sense of time is now being transformed into eternity. My old sense of space is now being transformed into a transcendent chamber without definite boundaries, without a clear sense of when or where.
Our coming winter is an absence, a banishment. In our coming winter, the primordial nothingness will return and it will threaten to take away the cosmos from us, that ephemeral presence of creation, that blurry memory of what once was and would one day return.

***

I read out loud from the book but she already knew it all by heart.
She sang the text to me and I listened attentively. She sang in a very high beautiful voice; she sang a full complex moving melody full of tenderness and subtlety.
I listened to her for a while and then I sang along with her.
Outside all the street lights were starting to go out.
We sang together for a very long time
We sang for what seemed like forever.

Notes on the Substance

 

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.