Chomu and Patchwork Earth have been friends since the site's inception, so I'm grateful to caretakers Justin Isis and Quentin S. Crisp for not only allowing me to contribute from time to rare time, but also for sponsoring this little project - "Scramble City" will be a novella simulcast at both websites, This today is the first three segments of the novella, with more to follow at a likely irregular schedule.
------------------
Scramble City
A Mash'Em Up
I.
The usual spot, beneath the passing 'rail. The setting sun cast the spires in fading gold. Rocky kicked aside an old packing crate, a translucent garbage bag. The tape around his forearms was shredded, hung in loose ribbons. Beneath one foot, an octet of failed Polaroids; purplish and bubbled. Beneath a cracked and tar-papered skateboard, he found it: the familiar weight, the curve of the chamber, the key with its chain wound about the trigger guard like a rosary. The monorail roared above, eclipsing the whole alley.
II.
The story is known to most: once, there was a great wolf, a fierce and brave hunter, who fell in love with the sun. But wolves cannot court the sun, for they are all promised to the moon, pay tribute in song every time the moon waxes. And indeed, this wolf bore over one ear a white patch of fur in the shape of a crescent moon, signaling his betrothal. Wolves are creatures of the shadows, and disappear as the sun rises. The warmth of the sun was saved for the children of Bastet, who could curl in slices of the sun that fell upon the ground and purr to their heart's content. Such a love should never be, and yet it was so.
This wolf was cunning, as all wolves are, and so he hatched a plan to stay tethered to his love for all his life. He went to the Forger, a dirty man who was the source of all the world's watered steel, and weapons of great power. This wolf entreated the Forger to make a chain that could not be broken, that he could chain himself to the sun.
The Forger was cunning, though, as well, and even the fangs of a wolf paled before the ferocity of the weapons of man, and so he who formed them of the earth. What use have I for your love, he sneered, and taunted the wolf with figures in the coin of the realm – for wolves had no use for money. And so the wolf offered his song in trade instead, for he'd have no cause to serenade the moon anon. The Forger accepted this boon, and he got to work.
It was dangerous work indeed, for to make a chain that would stand the heat of the sun itself, it would have to be struck against the Anvil of Dawn, which existed only at the border of the sun's and the moon's domains.
And so it was, that now Rocky was dressed in the leather breeches of The Forger; with children's delight in his every snarl, as he pulled the lever that sent their carriages through the doors into the Anvil of Dawn. There was a squeal from a little girl, quickly stifled by her mother, as the doors closed in preparation for the next group. Another carriage rolled into place, as a pair of lovers disembarked. The summer heat was soaked into every ground-laid brick, and the light splayed across the labyrinth of metal cordons. At the far end of the line, a dancing performer in a thick felt tanooki suit looked woozy.
The weapon was tucked into his waistband, the key dancing awkwardly against his member.
He helped strap in a pair of twins, who wrestling over a one tangle of cotton candy between them, and when he turned back to regard the crowd, he saw a figure slumped against a tree. The sun was in Rocky's eyes, and he couldn't be sure until the figure turned slightly and he saw that it was indeed a man with his arm in a sling; a man who was now regarding a black squirrel who'd come down the tree to beg for popcorn scraps.
The man was waiting for something, and Rocky closed his eyes, twitched his lips a bit, and then took an unscheduled break.
III.
Another day passed, and Rocky was passing through Little Lyons, in the hopes of seeing Naomi stroll through the Promise Garden which lay beyond its borders. Each storefront in Little Lyons was connected from the inside, with the varied buildings displayed on the exterior as a sort of façade, and the entrances more like turnstiles. Everything was wooden, and that thick, browned wood at that. The displays and shelving looked hewn from ancient, impressive furniture. A cashier in Baroque stylings was ringing up a brace of plastic missiles and an appliqué t-shirt.
“Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings?” A man was beside him, flipping through a book. Rocky started, but this was a man that he had never met before. “But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?”
“I don't understand.” He was allowed to speak, within the city, unlike the tanooki or the kappa, but this was as much a weakness as a strength. Rocky tended not to speak much at all, if he could avoid it. The man smoothed out his scarf, which bore the repeated emblem of Britannia, and smiled.
“I've heard it said that one who knows nothing can understand nothing. Which I suppose is a poetic way of saying 'if you don't know, don't ask.' Personally, I always encourage the asking of questions.”
“Okay, sure.” His hands were sweating. “Did you want an autograph or something, then?”
“So quick to sign your name! What sort of devil are you, pray tell?”
There was a shriek, and they both turned. A young babe was bawling into her mother's shoulder, shaking her head over and over. The woman's shirt was changing color. “Sorry! She's just a little... 'You' were very scary in your movie.”
“Right. I'll just be heading on.” Before the other man could address him further, Rocky was out a back exit, which (owing to the ambiance of the store's thematic conceit) was perhaps the only exit to backstage which was labeled “employees only.”
There was a snake's width of space between the borders of the Capitalized Lands, and he slipped through that space until he felt he'd gotten sufficient distance, and then realized that he was holding the book that the man had been reading. He placed it under his arm. He'd be sent to the White Room if they believed him a thief.
He'd missed his chance to see Naomi. He tried to picture the folds of her crinoline dress, tried to calm down. But he'd been expected.
“You've been avoiding me.” The man in the sling was waiting there. His undamaged arm was flexing around a tourniquet. The man didn't look up, but they knew each other's faces well enough by now.
“What do you want, Nick?”
Nick just shook his head, held open his palm. A trio of chalky pills lay flat in his hand. At least one of them bore a familiar sprite. “You using?”
“Naw. Naw, I'm clean.” Nick shrugged, popped all three of the one-ups into his mouth, mumbled “for the blood,” and then fished out the leather case with the syringe. For a junkie, Nick was a well-supplied and orderly sort. It begged the sort of questions that Rocky did not want to answer.
“They can see us,” he hissed, and grabbed Nick's arm – the needle-target, not the broken one – and hauled him up to his feet. “You can't do this here.”
“What happened to you, Rocky?” Nick lolled his head. “Don't you remember who you are?”
The snake's width was obscured from the Lands beyond with fencework, tall hedges, trees, pitch tarp, and whatever else would obscure the infrastructure. The design, however, was such that there were many viewing ports available, only visible from the interior. Through one of these, now, Rocky saw a figure that could only be a lawman, far out of his jurisdiction if he was patrolling the Capitalized Lands. He was searching for something, or someone. Rocky looked at Nick, who wasn't noticing a lot – the tube of the syringe bounced against his forearm from where it was stuck.
When Rocky closed his eyes this time, it was as if he could hear the thousand thousand eyes of The Architect watching him.
He left Nick behind, walking the length of the borderground as The Forger once had in the legend, the wolf at his heels, approaching the Anvil.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Justin Isis - Philip Larkin Debuts Princess Style™
I'm tired of writing poems about masturbating.
I wish I'd been born a girl.
They told me only girls could wear pretty clothes.
Why can't I be a fucking princess too?
I want to wear Jesus Diamante clothes and stand outside a hostess bar.
I'd have to give up my investigations into topological vector spaces, but that's okay.
Philip, want to do a photoshoot with me?
OH GOD YES
TSUU-CHAN, YOU'RE THE GREATEST!
Philip, what the fuck are you doing!
Get your ass back to the research center and finish your paper on Cauchy-Riemann equations.
Can't I do my photoshoot first?
NO
Dammit, Kingsley
I'm sick of you pressuring me to finish my research.
No one cares about the Fields Medal, only the Nobel Prize. And there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics.
That's because Alfred Nobel was a wanker who couldn't INTEGRATE.
...?
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Meditation II: Oneironaut, by Quentin S. Crisp
Meditation II: Oneironaut
O, children of a future age,
Reading this bewildered page,
Know that in a former time,
Dream, sweet dream, was deemed a lie.
But children of the future age, you are not separate; or only so because you know there is no future. And so you sit inside the circle, and I must begin my address across time with the O that cancels time, dialling zero with nothing on the non-existent, telepathic oneirophone. And who is the oneironaut, and who is on the ground, I do not know.
The dreams began in caves - stalactited space capsules. In future, as past, physical travel is obsolete, only the transition of the present moves. I see the cockpit cave where future and past are a single sky of Dreamtime, viewed through a scanner of rock and paint, navigated by serpents and rainbows, steered by song.
There are not two serpents, only one. Watch their writhing closely, and the double image is resolved into single. There is only this rock. There has only ever been this rock. We have not moved an inch. Where can we go? But only close your eyes and a jungle of possibles leaps upon the screen of nothing.
There are no controls upon the console of this rock, but only close your eyes...
The sand is the same in this box, but the patterns change. The colours are continous, but the dream-clouds rearrange themselves with greater ease than mercury, in an endless series of complete transformations, night after night.
I am the oneironaut. There seems to be a problem - a malfunction somewhere. I am aware of distance. I drift in space and since I must breathe, a tube connects me to the base I cannot see. Only through this thin tube, twisting into the distance where it disappears, do I live and breathe. Suddenly, I realise, as any oneironaut must, that this umbilical cord is a serpent.
It writhes, and sinks its fangs into my stomach, injecting the necessary venom. Without this poison there is nowhere to go. The scales of the serpent are a rainbow. They change colours like the pigment of a cuttlefish, flashing a virulent code whose language will be translated in the body of the oneironaut - translated by pain and fever. Now my helmet fills with images of dream. They slide across my visor, like a film upon a screen. I see nothing else. This helmet has become a magic lantern, suffocating me with alien landscapes, other-dimensional skies, pavilions of telepathic conference where invertebrate dignitaries of dream federations recallibrate my concepts and perceptions with wreathes of synaesthetic incense, geometrical dances of universal pandemonium, biological catacombs connecting worlds, fireworks of synchronistic superclusters building to the crashing of a fractal wave, Disney deities promulgating abundant cartoon universes, primogenitors of strange aeons who are mere bacteria in a microcosmic slime culture beneath the dewlaps of primogenitors, which wheels-within-wheels break when the Tao becomes not-Tao into strange aeons curving to vaster cycles that become once more the Tao, from which there crawl and slobber the primogenitors of strange aeons,
At this point the message was interrupted. There is only crackle from the receiver.
The skeleton of the oneironaut, suited, drifts through space, the dreams still playing in flickering colours, an aurora borealis of beyond, across the screen of the visor.
O, children of a future age,
Reading this bewildered page,
Know that in a former time,
Dream, sweet dream, was deemed a lie.
But children of the future age, you are not separate; or only so because you know there is no future. And so you sit inside the circle, and I must begin my address across time with the O that cancels time, dialling zero with nothing on the non-existent, telepathic oneirophone. And who is the oneironaut, and who is on the ground, I do not know.
The dreams began in caves - stalactited space capsules. In future, as past, physical travel is obsolete, only the transition of the present moves. I see the cockpit cave where future and past are a single sky of Dreamtime, viewed through a scanner of rock and paint, navigated by serpents and rainbows, steered by song.
There are not two serpents, only one. Watch their writhing closely, and the double image is resolved into single. There is only this rock. There has only ever been this rock. We have not moved an inch. Where can we go? But only close your eyes and a jungle of possibles leaps upon the screen of nothing.
There are no controls upon the console of this rock, but only close your eyes...
The sand is the same in this box, but the patterns change. The colours are continous, but the dream-clouds rearrange themselves with greater ease than mercury, in an endless series of complete transformations, night after night.
I am the oneironaut. There seems to be a problem - a malfunction somewhere. I am aware of distance. I drift in space and since I must breathe, a tube connects me to the base I cannot see. Only through this thin tube, twisting into the distance where it disappears, do I live and breathe. Suddenly, I realise, as any oneironaut must, that this umbilical cord is a serpent.
It writhes, and sinks its fangs into my stomach, injecting the necessary venom. Without this poison there is nowhere to go. The scales of the serpent are a rainbow. They change colours like the pigment of a cuttlefish, flashing a virulent code whose language will be translated in the body of the oneironaut - translated by pain and fever. Now my helmet fills with images of dream. They slide across my visor, like a film upon a screen. I see nothing else. This helmet has become a magic lantern, suffocating me with alien landscapes, other-dimensional skies, pavilions of telepathic conference where invertebrate dignitaries of dream federations recallibrate my concepts and perceptions with wreathes of synaesthetic incense, geometrical dances of universal pandemonium, biological catacombs connecting worlds, fireworks of synchronistic superclusters building to the crashing of a fractal wave, Disney deities promulgating abundant cartoon universes, primogenitors of strange aeons who are mere bacteria in a microcosmic slime culture beneath the dewlaps of primogenitors, which wheels-within-wheels break when the Tao becomes not-Tao into strange aeons curving to vaster cycles that become once more the Tao, from which there crawl and slobber the primogenitors of strange aeons,
At this point the message was interrupted. There is only crackle from the receiver.
The skeleton of the oneironaut, suited, drifts through space, the dreams still playing in flickering colours, an aurora borealis of beyond, across the screen of the visor.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Justin Isis - Kingsley Amis is Tired of Life
Life under late capitalism offers few pleasures.
I spend my days watching Korean dramas and imagine myself sodomising the leads.
'Lovers in Paris' left me in tears.
I wish Satan existed so I could sell my soul for fifteen minutes of licking Kim Jung-Eun.
I try to apply myself to mathematics, to the investigation of Calabi-Yau spaces.
But the Fields Medal won't get me popular in Korea either.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Justin Isis - I Attain To the Level of Fucking Your Basic Hairdresser
A: Okay man, right now I'm talking to you, right, but I mean I'm not really saying anything, you know, I'm just trying to make it seem like we're really having a conversation
A: I mean if you just see one guy sitting there alone it's like...but if there's two guys, right, that are talking
A: ...then it's cool because they obviously have some kind of, I guess, point of interest. Right now we're just getting that down. Say something back.
B: Something.
A: Right.
A: It's like, I read this review of 2001, cant remember who wrote it, but the guy was saying how...okay, you know how there's really no big dialogue in the movie?
B: Yeah.
A: Well like, he was saying that most of the time when people are talking in that movie, it's just to show people talking. Like it doesn't move the plot or anything, it's just kind of the idea.
B: Kind of interesting. So the conversations aren't for exposition; they just create a kind of iconic idea of communication.
C: Hey.
C: Are you guys having one of those metaconversations?
A: What?
C: One of those self-referential conversations.
A: Yeah.
A: You know about them?
B: Wait, no.
B: We were talking about 2001. The conversation started off as self-referential like you said, but then it changed.
A: I thought we were just trying to keep it going.
C: So you're saying the conversation evolved.
B: It seemed to be, yes.
B: But then you jumped in and altered the conversation's dynamic. It went from an extrapolation of the original, to use your term, meta-conversation, to a conversation about the nature of the original conversation.
C: Is that a distinction?
B: Well, of course. Before your intervention, the conversation had arguably turned into a legitimate conversation, that is, a verbal exchange of ideas facilitating genuine communication; but then you subverted that possibility by reverting to talking about the nature of the conversation.
A: What's your name?
C: Alyssa
C: Okay, I see your point, but the current conversation has that expression of ideas too. I think it's still developing.
B: We're talking about the conversation, though.
B: It's become self-referential again. Before when we were talking about 2001, that was a legitimate conversation. Right now, we're having a metaconversation.
A: So, have you seen 2001?
C: Uh
C: Your argument's flawed. We're talking now about the conversation you guys were having before I joined in. We're not talking about the current conversation, therefore the current conversation is not a metaconversation.
B: That's because when you joined in you changed its course.
C: So
C: You admit the conversation has evolved after all; it's not the dead end you thought I made it.
B: Um...no.
B: The first conversation didn't end; it was just continued.
C: If that's true, then my presence in the conversation didn't affect its course as a conversation developing from a metaconversation to a regular conversation. If it was a separate conversation, then this conversation isn't a metaconversation because it refers to a previous conversation, not itself. Logically, you've contradicted yourself.
B: So you think, but by discussing whether or not the current conversation is a metaconversation, it's been turned into one by referring to itself.
A: So yeah,
A: I liked the part in 2001 where that computer flipped the fuck out and took everyone out.
A: Alyssa, what are you doing this weekend?
A: I mean if you just see one guy sitting there alone it's like...but if there's two guys, right, that are talking
A: ...then it's cool because they obviously have some kind of, I guess, point of interest. Right now we're just getting that down. Say something back.
B: Something.
A: Right.
A: It's like, I read this review of 2001, cant remember who wrote it, but the guy was saying how...okay, you know how there's really no big dialogue in the movie?
B: Yeah.
A: Well like, he was saying that most of the time when people are talking in that movie, it's just to show people talking. Like it doesn't move the plot or anything, it's just kind of the idea.
B: Kind of interesting. So the conversations aren't for exposition; they just create a kind of iconic idea of communication.
C: Hey.
C: Are you guys having one of those metaconversations?
A: What?
C: One of those self-referential conversations.
A: Yeah.
A: You know about them?
B: Wait, no.
B: We were talking about 2001. The conversation started off as self-referential like you said, but then it changed.
A: I thought we were just trying to keep it going.
C: So you're saying the conversation evolved.
B: It seemed to be, yes.
B: But then you jumped in and altered the conversation's dynamic. It went from an extrapolation of the original, to use your term, meta-conversation, to a conversation about the nature of the original conversation.
C: Is that a distinction?
B: Well, of course. Before your intervention, the conversation had arguably turned into a legitimate conversation, that is, a verbal exchange of ideas facilitating genuine communication; but then you subverted that possibility by reverting to talking about the nature of the conversation.
A: What's your name?
C: Alyssa
C: Okay, I see your point, but the current conversation has that expression of ideas too. I think it's still developing.
B: We're talking about the conversation, though.
B: It's become self-referential again. Before when we were talking about 2001, that was a legitimate conversation. Right now, we're having a metaconversation.
A: So, have you seen 2001?
C: Uh
C: Your argument's flawed. We're talking now about the conversation you guys were having before I joined in. We're not talking about the current conversation, therefore the current conversation is not a metaconversation.
B: That's because when you joined in you changed its course.
C: So
C: You admit the conversation has evolved after all; it's not the dead end you thought I made it.
B: Um...no.
B: The first conversation didn't end; it was just continued.
C: If that's true, then my presence in the conversation didn't affect its course as a conversation developing from a metaconversation to a regular conversation. If it was a separate conversation, then this conversation isn't a metaconversation because it refers to a previous conversation, not itself. Logically, you've contradicted yourself.
B: So you think, but by discussing whether or not the current conversation is a metaconversation, it's been turned into one by referring to itself.
A: So yeah,
A: I liked the part in 2001 where that computer flipped the fuck out and took everyone out.
A: Alyssa, what are you doing this weekend?
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Meditation I: A Cloud in a Teapot, by Quentin S. Crisp
Meditation I: A Cloud in a Teapot
An aerial view of my teapot - simple china circles bellied over the straight lines of bare floorboards. The blue flowers on the delicate pale-blue background seem blurred by a wash of moving water, like ornamental goldfish. Everything here is hard and intact, crisply focused, as if it could not be any other way, and all the world is reduced to this self-contained minimalism.
The glaze of the teapot gleams. This is the discipline of beauty. The china of the empty pot is cold to the touch, but filled with tea it conducts heat quickly, and when its hot round belly is cupped in the palm of my hand, I could almost believe this was still malleable clay. From the spout there is a suggestion of steam. There is such potential here in this thing so inert and fixed.
This is the main accessory of my ritual when I write. I pinch the knob of the lid between thumb and forefinger, turning it upside down as I remove it to view the contents. There is the swamp water, and drowned beneath, a swirling canopy of green, all of it turning to rising steam. These leaves have been shipped or flown or teleported from one intersection of latitude and longitude to another. They have come to me like a dream comes in the precipitation of sleep, from the evaporation of the sea of unbeing. Pouring hot water onto these leaves, I have brewed up a new cloud containing mountains, forested slopes and streams. When I pour from this pot it will be the curling clouds of the Immortals as seen in ancient scroll paintings that pour from the spout, since within this portalled matrix of bellying circles, every latitude and longitude intersects in infinite steaming potential.
Looking at the spout now, I see the dark brown stains just inside its lip. This is the precious and elegant filth of all culture. This is the stained and wrinkled cheek of the matriarch of a dying tribe. Most of her teeth are gone now, though she still chews the betelnut until her tongue is red. These stains are the superstition and the love which together form the magic keeping the tribe vital and alive. Something is happening now, and the numbers of the tribe are dwindling. She looks out from the treehouse at the mist rising up from the valley, and to the cataract beyond. Where will the spirits of the ancestors go now with no one to honour them in life? A fragile rainbow rises from the falls. The souls are disappearing, one by one, beyond the falls, going into seclusion. Soon only the waterfall will remain. Mist rises, the valley seems to break open.
The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name, and with strange aeons even death may die. O Gaia! O Tao! O Great Cthulhu! The smaller cycle is disrupted, shed like a skin, a shape green and monstrous erupts through the shaking canopy of trees from its sleep - the new shapeless shape of eternity, the ever-mutating Way, the self-transcending forever nameless Name, the root and the mud, the darkness within darkness, the subterrene flow, the gateway and the spawn. A sticky yinyang all tentacled with Tao-slime, beyond Good and Evil.
That probiscidean face!
Now the inside of the spout is revealed in the human experience of time. Time is twisted and turns inside-out. It buckles and chasms, and from out of the chasm comes the cubist rainbow of Dreamtime.
Dreamtime!
The body of the Great Old One, the Tao, is a viscous cloud of green, and the claws are a deluge. Pandemonium foams down the filthy brown spout. I am sitting at a desk in a darkened study, and sheets of paper fill with inky code telegraphed straight from the nightmare of ultimate and infinite blackness in a warning that can save no one. This poetry that purports to uncover the truth of a great doom, can neither confront nor reveal, though the blackness of the ink is the very same blackness as the endless night that swallows all. The message is lost in the vast night of the truth, and the truth is lost in the enfolding meaning of the tiny writing of the message, and there is only an awesome redundancy in this script found in the pitchy void, a redundancy like the scent of a candle snuffed out by a breath of nighted eternity.
The claws of the deluge come. Dreamtime. Pandemonium. The pages are scattered. The last of the tribe. The ancestral spirits gone behind the waterfall.
I pour some more tea in my ritual and uselessly, compulsively, as if enslaved by a telegraph signal from some dreaming darkness too vast to pour through me, I write.
And with strange aeons, even Dao may die. And in Dreamtime, even death may dao.
An aerial view of my teapot - simple china circles bellied over the straight lines of bare floorboards. The blue flowers on the delicate pale-blue background seem blurred by a wash of moving water, like ornamental goldfish. Everything here is hard and intact, crisply focused, as if it could not be any other way, and all the world is reduced to this self-contained minimalism.
The glaze of the teapot gleams. This is the discipline of beauty. The china of the empty pot is cold to the touch, but filled with tea it conducts heat quickly, and when its hot round belly is cupped in the palm of my hand, I could almost believe this was still malleable clay. From the spout there is a suggestion of steam. There is such potential here in this thing so inert and fixed.
This is the main accessory of my ritual when I write. I pinch the knob of the lid between thumb and forefinger, turning it upside down as I remove it to view the contents. There is the swamp water, and drowned beneath, a swirling canopy of green, all of it turning to rising steam. These leaves have been shipped or flown or teleported from one intersection of latitude and longitude to another. They have come to me like a dream comes in the precipitation of sleep, from the evaporation of the sea of unbeing. Pouring hot water onto these leaves, I have brewed up a new cloud containing mountains, forested slopes and streams. When I pour from this pot it will be the curling clouds of the Immortals as seen in ancient scroll paintings that pour from the spout, since within this portalled matrix of bellying circles, every latitude and longitude intersects in infinite steaming potential.
Looking at the spout now, I see the dark brown stains just inside its lip. This is the precious and elegant filth of all culture. This is the stained and wrinkled cheek of the matriarch of a dying tribe. Most of her teeth are gone now, though she still chews the betelnut until her tongue is red. These stains are the superstition and the love which together form the magic keeping the tribe vital and alive. Something is happening now, and the numbers of the tribe are dwindling. She looks out from the treehouse at the mist rising up from the valley, and to the cataract beyond. Where will the spirits of the ancestors go now with no one to honour them in life? A fragile rainbow rises from the falls. The souls are disappearing, one by one, beyond the falls, going into seclusion. Soon only the waterfall will remain. Mist rises, the valley seems to break open.
The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name, and with strange aeons even death may die. O Gaia! O Tao! O Great Cthulhu! The smaller cycle is disrupted, shed like a skin, a shape green and monstrous erupts through the shaking canopy of trees from its sleep - the new shapeless shape of eternity, the ever-mutating Way, the self-transcending forever nameless Name, the root and the mud, the darkness within darkness, the subterrene flow, the gateway and the spawn. A sticky yinyang all tentacled with Tao-slime, beyond Good and Evil.
That probiscidean face!
Now the inside of the spout is revealed in the human experience of time. Time is twisted and turns inside-out. It buckles and chasms, and from out of the chasm comes the cubist rainbow of Dreamtime.
Dreamtime!
The body of the Great Old One, the Tao, is a viscous cloud of green, and the claws are a deluge. Pandemonium foams down the filthy brown spout. I am sitting at a desk in a darkened study, and sheets of paper fill with inky code telegraphed straight from the nightmare of ultimate and infinite blackness in a warning that can save no one. This poetry that purports to uncover the truth of a great doom, can neither confront nor reveal, though the blackness of the ink is the very same blackness as the endless night that swallows all. The message is lost in the vast night of the truth, and the truth is lost in the enfolding meaning of the tiny writing of the message, and there is only an awesome redundancy in this script found in the pitchy void, a redundancy like the scent of a candle snuffed out by a breath of nighted eternity.
The claws of the deluge come. Dreamtime. Pandemonium. The pages are scattered. The last of the tribe. The ancestral spirits gone behind the waterfall.
I pour some more tea in my ritual and uselessly, compulsively, as if enslaved by a telegraph signal from some dreaming darkness too vast to pour through me, I write.
And with strange aeons, even Dao may die. And in Dreamtime, even death may dao.
The Dream Cycle
In July, 2007, I started, in my Moleskine notebook, a series of what might be described as prose-poems, which I decided to call meditations. To be honest, I wasn't really sure what they should be called as a literary form. I wrote down five titles, and wrote pieces for two of them. Then other parts of life encroached in such a way that I never wrote the other three. In fact, I even had an idea for a sixth piece, whose title I didn't even write down, though I remember it.
I have decided to start posting these pieces here on Chomu in the hope this will encourage me to finish them, and because I also need to give more attention to Chomu.
I have also decided, for now, to call all the pieces, collectively, The Dream Cycle. These are the five titles I wrote in the notebook:
I: A Cloud in a Teapot
II: Oneironaut
III: The Magic of Childhood
IV: Presence
V: The Last Word
The sixth meditation, which I might have been intending to insert at some point, rather than tag on the end, was called, 'The Serpent'.
I have decided to start posting these pieces here on Chomu in the hope this will encourage me to finish them, and because I also need to give more attention to Chomu.
I have also decided, for now, to call all the pieces, collectively, The Dream Cycle. These are the five titles I wrote in the notebook:
I: A Cloud in a Teapot
II: Oneironaut
III: The Magic of Childhood
IV: Presence
V: The Last Word
The sixth meditation, which I might have been intending to insert at some point, rather than tag on the end, was called, 'The Serpent'.
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