Literature
Doorways, arches, and gates.
Magic.
My repetitions are a fact.
Tree roots gnarl like the five fingers of one hand.
Wisps of ether become yours in the visible spectrum.
Everyday.
Plain
Magic.
It is in our air.
Scandalous fleshed exposure of a barely leafed tree.
How can you feel on stage in a clearing alone?
Prowling.
Stalking words on stilts over creeks.
Let us fly our kites here.
My stone panther re-enlivens from winter as a summer moss.
Humid and heavy on the trees.
The high wind shook and shimmied the foliage-heavy forest like a candle flickers the refraction of light on my white door.
Cotton(wood) splays itself across the path like nymphs waiting to be swept up in collection. Spattering of coral-esque moss. Sea foam green.
My spine becomes alit. Some exhalations come out like breath on a cold day.
The first few days of summer in the forest, we see as ampersand from below before we can see from above.
Death of the early summer days. Dead moleskin leathering in the sun. Pecked out banana slugs, the spoils of the war of the early birds.
Snakes sun mid-path, unconcerned with your intrusion.
Ten feet later this sun vanishes. Ten minutes, later on, it returns.
I cross eight and one half bridges. But, there are only five bridges.
Life begins as rabbits run into brambles. Fresh, with ears not fully grown.
(Groan).
Ducklings fatten on the now enshallowed Salmon Ladder pond.
I still espy you, sweet and lovely dummy.
Seated among the tall grass like a forested catacomb.
The first of the summer berries ripen.
Ruddy gold.
Bloody red.
Some
(already em-)purpled.
The serpent’s red eyes open.
I cannot
me
I want to
Music hooks my attention. If ‘decent,’ it moves through my spine like currents.
Time changes.
Threaded to be unwound
Like a record’s groove.
Linear thread to unwind in the minotaur’s maze.
Did you bring your own thread this time?
Trying to attune to the ephemeral and corporeal energetic grid.
Doing in contribution, perhaps sight unseen.
Tao.
Tao of the mystic
Doubt everything and everyone
while
simultaneously
trusting people and things to be who and what they ‘are.’
Method of attempted peace and openness.
“It cannot possibly be true, so I won’t even trouble you with the notion,” he said.
“What notion?”
“Well, the Orwellian idea that America is a corporation. But it cannot possibly be true.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, you know the curse of ‘why not’?”
Words are, for some, living creatures.
They persist in being and as such they insist on being noticed. The bound and covered, silent sirens contained on the leaves between the book’s cover.
If words live, then literature can possess.
If I read and share the a sentence that crossed Plato’s eye and mind too, has time and distanced ceased?
If most celebrated literature spouts from the community of dead authors, their words become free of their original sin of the author(s) having possessed physical existence. The sentences are not devalued by the messy work of the author living his/her life at this point. The lens becomes free from the shackles of selfhood. The lines now belong to the public. There is no greater authority to which they may appeal, who will explicate their “true” meaning.
Why had she said so much?
Why did she not listen?
Again? Selfish?
She knew it kinda hurt.
So, she wo/andered as she wa/ondered.
Could 24 hours of her silence help her hear?
Speak, please.
If you wilt.
She is patient.
She did not put the coffee on until twelve past twelve.
She ‘got up’ at half seven, but the a.m. sprinklers
Churned themselves from their subterranean domain
They sounded like hard rain.
Her hair was in a state.
She did not get that kettle she kept intending.
One cup at a time. Sensible.
And she liked the noise.
She wrote she five times about herself.
Too much.
Time to take to toes.
Audacious but also perspicacious.
You are specious?
Mavericks engage, enjoin, but remain unbranded unless approached.
Preempting pretensions of perhaps not.
Predating any prior existing periodicity,
Yet, í would still underwrite your risk again.
She keeps the tiny medal from your coat’s
Attached to original brown bag wrapping.
She sleeps by it every night.
The true meaning of í am almost always thinking of you
Right,
exactly,
Now.
She had learned sleeping is tiresome.
Right side, fetal about the pillow to consider this
Left side to mediate the other side.
On my back when a moment is needed.
That it hurts a little.
That mystery of an unknown answer holds me fast and securely.
Could he and it too quicken?
The gestures of cabals coalesced into pure essences, last night. They were aswirl, tangled, hurt, confused. Friction turned into chaos of animals eating their legs right off to escape perceived traps.
Trap-doors.
I dreamt the resolution of vermillion and onyx is a lava flow. I conjuncted yellows and all others into the medley.
Menhirs via heated igneous.
Potentialize
energy
Music ampersand Words resonate:
by 1) virtue of the tension existing within a stretched string (take stringed instruments as but one example) and by 2) virtue of the inexorable vibrations, with their resultant, at times, compounding resonance in space, which the musician (or even more rarely, a mæstro) utilizes to coax into, onto, and then out-of that tension. The musician and/or mæstro (this does not include those you might assume-some cannot even play instruments) may exploit this energetic potential existing in a strung string:
A string strung between two anchor objects.
I passed a snake sunnjng its belly on the path.
Unconcerned and un-aggressive.
I passed two small, white-tailed hares that quickly scampered home into the bramble.
I cried for a man i miss painfully today.
Is it just the alchemical appartus comprising a story? An alchemical apparatus used to drive the plot, scaffold the structure, and act as a skeleton key to unlock meaning?
Such an apparatus drives the substance of letters and words towards catharsis. Our story-tech equipment enables a bunch of words to be read by an audience. The collection of words becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This is a non-linear phenomenon, akin to complexity theory.
Confluence. Convergence.
This is how the array of letters constituting the matrix of each page transmutates scrawlings into Art.
The reader undergoes the cathartic process like catalytic enzymes provoking biological reactions.
Fiery breath smokes the air.
I inhale through my mouth and hold the air fast,
And hold myself still.
My eyes roll backwards as my shoulder stretches,
Strumming a tendon into tremors
producing in me
trembles from the
strange vibrations.
Shades drawn tight against the sky’s night.
Cicadas chirpin’ lazy protest.
I espy a note on my coffee table:
“Ruin your own show. Don’t feed me soft words, when my eyes go hard.”
My cheeks burn vermillion in the morning air.
Sly smile.
I will wear my hair straight today.
The Sufi tradition practices a personalized method of aspiring to study the alchemical arts. Raised as a member of a Methodist church as a youngster, I became disillusioned with organized religions during my teenage years. Studying physical/medical anthropological at university, I came to realize that the practice of Academia faculty seemed quite similar to religious institutions. I grew disillusioned seeing how much more interest professors appeared to put towards their own research. Perhaps, these are burdens imposed on them by the administration. PhD candidates and grad students served as substitute teachers and ghostwriters.
Coming from the Dirty South, the debate between religion and science gets a little extra hairy. Scientists were speaking with the same pomp and pretense and puffery as those they were accusing of being ignorant. University professors preoccupied with needing to make tenure. University professors who made tenure and should have retired long ago. I then investigated the esoteric, hermetic groups and loved their texts and mythos, but I do not like secrets.
Sometimes the appearance of a secret is more alarming than the content of the secret itself.
I came across several wonderful texts by Sufi writers over the last three years. What resounded most for me was the simplicity of the practices recommended. There is no dogma to be institutionalized, no one forces their thoughts on others, but neither do they fear engaging in a lively discussion. These practices are so wildly simple. They made such a substantial difference in my life over the last year that I wanted to share some broad strokes.
BREATHWORK
Four fundamental models of breathing correspond to four fundamental alchemical processes.
Consider each mode of breath as a re-attunement to the world around you.
Perform each mode of breath three to five times before moving to the next breath.
Each mode of breath begins on the exhalation.
The rhythm of breathing must be natural. No retention of breath.
(i) Filtering: exhale through your nose/inhale through your nose. EARTH. Yellow Square. Taurus sigil. North.
(ii) Liquifying: exhale through your mouth/inhale through your nose. WATER. Silver Crescent. Scorpio sigil. West.
(iii) Burnishing: exhale through nose/inhale through your mouth. FIRE. Red Triangle. Leo sigil. South.
(iv) Distilling: exhale through your mouth/inhale through your mouth. AIR. Blue circle. Aquarius sigil. East.
On breathing, think to yourself: I am turning within; withdrawing from any external environment and into myself. I am drawing the environment into myself to convert and transmute it.
Between inhalations and exhalations, suspend any thoughts other than preparing to resume your breath. Note that there will be a rest, a tacet/tacit pause in between the inhalation and exhalation & again between the exhalation and the inhalation. Feel that slight pause and think only of preparing to change the direction of your breath.
“Sense the emergence in yourself of something new–not the way you ingest the environment–but something that lay in wait within you and that emerges when catalyzed by its counterpart in the environment. We are recurrently reborn” (p40).
The Ecstasy Beyond Knowing: A Manual of MeditationBook by Inayat Khan
The line is not: You pay for what you get.
The steganographia is not the encryption is not the transcryption,
Nor is it the ostensible coding.
Encoding=scribing.
The poison is the dose.
The doz>s>e is the poison.
The map is not the region.
“Here I do have a theory: Perhaps we got across because we sailed on the ocean and not on a map.”
THE RA EXPEDITIONS
Thor Heyerdahl
DOUBLEDAY publishing
Page (ostensibly) 341 aka M(42)
Imagine that ( x ) = x in subSCRIPT
Here you find (sub)SCrypçione
The lyric is: you get what you pay for.
“Eff abstinent. I want you to be obstinate for me,” he said.
“If it cannot be with guns, they will do it with chains/aws/ & stones,” he said.
Rejoinder: “You become a chimp from being a chump, when í substitite an i for a u.” I think Abraham Lincoln said that. Giggle.
Rerejoinder: “We turn o to a and from a crone comes the crane.”
Anyone watched Suspiria yet?
No rights, pure homage.
A person mentioned this song recently.
It suits my day today.
Of course, there is always Joni song that suits any given day.
Cheers.
Someone said to her, “get off your high horse.”
She recoiled into the obligatory southern american gal moment of embarrassment.
She winced twice because trying your best can hurt when you do not express your mind well.
Shame was dispensed heavily during her childhood domestication.
She used to ride a high horse up to her ivory tower.
They preferred her then.
Then the horse’s hooves were hacked off by wildlings. So she took to being (a) pedestrian and horse caretaker.
Humbled like the hobbled.
On occassion she would stand on her toes
Just to try and get closer to eye level with her contemporaries who still sat atop unhobbled mounts.
She must look nuts in the midst of the herd and hoard.
But, many of them allowed their high horses to be rode hard and put up wet.
And, though it appeared she was on toes to walk on the eggshells of her little life, she walked on toes to break her feet in, like a proper bolt of denim should be.
Her pride had been broken several times before, in nearly fatal, near death moments that the universe presented suddenly.
She woke from society’s dreams to find herself a strange bird in a strange land with the zen archer behind her, bow pulled taut and ready to wake her again.
Thankfully, as she now knew, she could handle embarrassing herself and rebuilding from scratch.
Hard work.
She wonders.
Do the people telling her to get off her phantom steed know that-
To her mind’sí-
They are equestrians of horses fifteen hands high themselves?
Moreover, did they know that it is okay to have high horses as well as to go it by dint of one’s own feet and breath too?
She could stay out of sight and out of mind, but she would still care for the horses of all, to the best of her ability.
Horses are put into boxes called stalls.
People are stalled by the prescriptive boxes placed around them by others.
Antimony parsimony came in a dream.
Hoarding of elemental medicine in the loam of the gods.
Midden mounds dotting figures lying recumbent underground pushing forth the skin of the earth.
Ancient open secrets waiting for uncovered discovery.
Effie here. Hiya. Recovered notes from Parçiful are transcribed below. These are the earliest of journal entries that speak to her metaphysical confusion.
From VVönderland.
(Note: this is transcribed directly as it was found.)
She knew they were disappointed, angry perhaps, that she had not told them what they thought she knew. She was disappointed no one spoke directly to her. She was a strange bird. She shape shifted her appearance, she had odd eyes when lost in thought. She had been so sugary sweet for so long, people had come to expect it of her. Her family viewed it as unhappiness because she used to be so happy. Well, yeah, we all were once many things. She began remembering strange things. She began knowing things that were impossible for her to know. She carried memories of others that they could not remember. She overcame her disdain of silicon only to find the internet stranger than she remembered. But then again, maybe she had never used it.
We live in a pool of energy. Your consciousness is at once in your mind and all minds. Your attention is the key. You can live lives without memory if your consciousness was not there, not attuned.
She could not understand her own opinions on drug use, much less explicate a formal point of view. However, she started rattling off every synonym for sanctuary she could think of when she smoked, for a while. The idea that drug taking was a sacrifice for the sanctuary of others crossed her mind. A little self harm balancing the world of pain and sensation. Maybe that was backwards, maybe drug taking hurt other people.
Her senses might have been too highly attenuated. Too much fight or flight. She felt observed by Socratic circles. She felt like an A&R man who would get fired at any moment. She felt like she had been used again and again. She did not deny she was imperfect. She never claimed to be the perfect partner. She could turn codependent if she was not careful. She could retreat into her mind for weeks and leave her partner floundering alone.
She felt she had a special thing with words. Reading them. Sometimes, as she took notes, what she wrote read like someone else talking to her. But, what a crazy, unspeakable notion, the kind they call women crazy for asserting. She tried to speak of it to her father and sister, but it did not go well. She explained her thoughts on the magicians use of the mystics to N.
The mystics had been played, tooled with, used, and judged. Many people with mystic proclivities seemed unaware and frequently received diagnoses and medication that had little to do with an ailment. The magicians had a questionable stance regarding their right to use others. They knew this though and she had a strange intuition that she was new. Go figure. So, they were trying to level the playing field, but she could tell they were scared of her, of what she might say. Ludicrous. She would not be believed. No one would listen anyway.
She sent a single page email and was told that it was long. Made her right sad to hear. One page? If only she could figure out how to use effing memes to get the point across. What would these idiots do without their wifi?
She was over it. She had been ready to share and speak for ten years. Hopeful she could, in fact. But, now she was tired, alone. She did not care for what the world had become. She felt so old compared to her contemporaries. Their fun just was not hers. Once you read too much, there is no going back.
WrittenCasey 