Hyper-Carbolating the Furtive Gates of Becoming 2: Between

   Now she changed her shape
dared to become someone else.
   She took up five scythes
   six hoes past their prime:
she fashioned them into claws
fitted them to be her feet;
the shattered part of the craft
   she put under her;
the sides she slapped into wings
the rudder to be her tail;
put a hundred men under a wing
a thousand at her tail tip --
   the hundred swordsmen
the thousand fellows who shot.
And she spread her wings to fly 
as an eagle lifted off...
     -- The Kalevala

Swami Chandraputra/Dr. Challenger/znore (a quintessential unreliable narrator) continues to tell his(?) dubious tale:

In the back chamber of the cavern, the “Snake-Den,” Randolph Carter approached the “pylon” gate and commenced the ritual that would open it:

Then he drew forth the Silver Key, and made motions and intonations whose source he could only dimly remember. Was anything forgotten? He knew only that he wished to cross the barrier to the untrammelled land of his dreams and the gulfs where all dimensions dissolve in the absolute.

Four things in particular stand out in this quote, and these four indicate that Carter is explicitly conducting a form of magic that is universally found throughout the cultures and ages of this world. To open the gate Carter requires a key, ritual movement and arcane intonations. These three elements are extremely important, but the fourth is even more so: intent. His expressed desire and wish is to cross into the realm of his dreams and then beyond this into the absolute.

The order of Carter’s intentions here is at the crux of Lovecraft’s whole creative project, and it has implications for all such journeys over the threshold. Carter’s primary concern, as we’ll find out, is to bodily enter the lost kingdoms of his dreams. His desire to merge into the infinite or eternal beyond both space and time is also a fundamental motivation, but is not the initial propelling force.



Carter, who is certainly Lovecraft, is driven by his dreams. It is the astral “extension” of this world through the first gate that he is really seeking, the origin and location of “dreams,” and not, at least in the beginning, the inexplicable absolute that beckons behind the second.

To really understand Carter’s intentions requires going further back into Lovecraft’s series of stories about Randolph Carter, and to show within these how the mind of Lovecraft is directly reflected in that of his favourite character.

But before going there let’s return to the cow pastures at the edge of the Colombian rain forest. This involves a leap, or an overlay, of time from October 7, 1928 to March 4, 1971, and a magical flight from Arkham to the Amazon.

The efficacy of the Experiment at La Chorrera -- an ad hoc magical working couched in pseudo-scientific terminology and methods -- was also dependent on the four preconditions pinpointed above.

The experiment itself was highly ritualized. The setting, time, motions, etc. were chosen not to conform with the scientific method, despite the lip service given to it, but according to synchronistic or magical correspondence. The crucial use of sound and vocal intonation -- supposedly activating "electron spin resonance" -- also finds a match in Carter's incantations. Finally, the ayahuasca plus psilocybin mushrooms together constituted the silver key.

The stated intention of the experiment, however, appears to have been quite different. The exploration of the dream realm was never an expressed aim of the McKenna brothers. The intermediary dimension was not the primary destination. Instead, the goal was the creation of a alchemical hyper-object that was a fusion of both matter and spirit.

This may turn out to be an important distinction as this exploration proceeds. However similar the Arkham and Amazon workings were structurally, Carter's/Lovecraft's intent was quite unique.

Homesick For Ethereal Lands

Yet Randolph Carter is not exactly H.P. Lovecraft. Carter is said to have been fifty-four years old when he disappeared in 1928. At this time Lovecraft would have been only twenty-seven, a difference of also 27 years. But it is in the inner lives of the two men -- author and character -- and quite apart from differences in age or other superficial considerations, where the deep parallels become evident.



Carter, like Lovecraft, is a writer of weird fiction and it is suspected in both cases that these stories are not as fictional as they let on to be. From Through the Gates of the Silver Key:

His career had been a strange and lonely one, and there were those who inferred from his curious novels many episodes more bizarre than any in his recorded history.

And many of these bizarre episodes occurred, for the two men, while dreaming. In both his letters and in his poetry, which give the feeling of direct autobiographical experience, Lovecraft extols the importance of his dreams. According to his letters he was not a user of drugs or psychedelic plants, as the McKenna brothers and many other inner explorers certainly were and are, but he considered his dreams to be a far superior key to these realms.

The occultist Kenneth Grant quotes from one such letter of Lovecraft’s in The Magical Revival, in which Lovecraft is claiming not to need opium, as did Thomas de Quincey, in order to achieve visions of other times and worlds.

I never took opium, but if I can't beat him [de Quincey] for dreams for the age of three or four up, I am a dashed liar! Space, strange cities, weird landscapes, unknown monsters, hideous ceremonies, Oriental and Egyptian gorgeousness, and indefinable mysteries of life, death, and torment, were daily -- or rather nightly -- commonplaces to me before I was six years old. Today it is the same, save for a slightly increased objectivity.

 

At some stage, however, if we continue the comparison of Lovecraft with Carter, it seems that HPL’s capacity to dream in this deeply visionary manner did nearly dry up. Lovecraft wrote a whole series of stories about the life and adventures of Randolph Carter, beginning with The Statement of Randolph Carter in 1919 on up to Through the Gates of the Silver Key in 1932-3, but it is in the second last Carter story, The Silver Key, where the process of alienation from dream is best described. This story begins:

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether.

Perhaps something similar happened to Lovecraft at some stage in his adult life. Certainly there is a conflict evident in his writing, in both his fiction and his letters, between the visionary awareness arising from his dreams and his hard stance of scientific materialism and skepticism. And at the age of thirty, at least in Carter’s life, the latter had for the moment won out.

Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions.

Although Carter strove to take an interest in scientific discoveries and in the materialist culture of his peers, invariably he was dissatisfied. Nothing compared to the incredible and extraordinary scenes and adventures of his youthful dreams.

He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find.

Science was too limited. Religion was a scam. Bohemian nonconformity was even more contrived, and thus more unappealing, than traditional conformity. Earthly travel was merely a mockery of the beautiful and sublime places he used to visit in dreams. The Great War, likewise, was a pale comparison in terms of excitement. His friends bored him with their circumscribed imaginations.



Carter began to actively seek out the bizarre and uncanny, but soon found that even popular occultism was too commonplace for him. He delved deeper and weirder, to the very depths of the esoteric and the arcane, becoming an expert in this lore. And in this he did encounter supernatural and horrible things, as told in the other Carter stories, but again these exploits fell far short of what he had known in his dreams.

Eventually, sick of his world-weariness, he made vague plans to kill himself, yet even suicide required an energy and interest that he no longer possessed or cared to possess. He wholly retreated into memories of the dreams of his youth and, to his surprise, he began to dream again. Then, as related in the last essay, his grandfather appeared and told him where to find the silver key.

And so started the chain of events that led to his disappearance in October of 1928. The account of The Silver Key is really the account of Carter’s associate Ward Phillips, who later attended the meeting concerning Carter’s estate in New Orleans. At the end of The Silver Key, Phillips presents his own theory of what may have happened:

There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter’s estate among his heirs, but I shall stand firmly against this course because I do not believe he is dead. There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come back, I cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream he had lost, and yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I somehow believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.

According to Phillips, Carter (and by extension Lovecraft himself) had returned in body to realms that he had previously visited only in dream. And this may have been the case. There is no indication in Phillips’ story, assuming that he wrote it as nonfiction, that Carter had anything further or more profound in mind. And there is no talk of the second gate.

But Phillips, as insightful as he is, also gives no indication that he has any idea of what really happened after Carter left from his car with the silver key in hand. Four years later in New Orleans, however, Swami Chandraputra did claim to possess such knowledge.

The Limited Supply of Whirling Fancy

Thus, according to this account, Randolph Carter stepped beyond the first gate, well beyond our “narrow, rigid, objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic.” Once inside, the inner cave and its arched gate neither existed nor ceased to exist. He himself was simultaneously both the man of 1928 and the boy of 1883. He had entered a “space” of contradiction and paradox.

By the time the rite was over Carter knew that he was in no region whose place could be told by earth’s geographers, and in no age whose date history could fix. For the nature of what was happening was not wholly unfamiliar to him... A gate had been unlocked—not indeed the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.

The scenes that he witnessed, that he participated in, in this “extension of earth” were both like his dreams yet very unlike them. All was in flux, in a state of becoming. He was unsure of even his own form.

There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which he somehow linked with earth’s primal, aeon-forgotten past. Monstrous living things moved deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork that no sane dream ever held, and landscapes bore incredible vegetation and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no human pattern. There were cities under the sea, and denizens thereof; and towers in great deserts where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot off into space or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter grasped, though the images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had no stable form or position, but only such shifting hints of form and position as his whirling fancy supplied.

The familiar places and landscapes of his dreams were nowhere to found. Those places had names and definite outlines and borders. These new places, in comparison, were entirely unknown and undefined, almost as if it was from these primal locales of the imagination that all other places, both in dream and in “reality,” emerged.

He had wished to find the enchanted regions of his boyhood dreams, where galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, and elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled beyond forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns that sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon. Now, intoxicated with wider visions, he scarcely knew what he sought.

Tales Told of Stone and Stem

Carter had entered the gate into the astral extension of the Earth through a cave, and the cave has always been an entry portal for shamanic initiation. Another traditional point of entry, though, is the tree, and at La Chorrera it was after an ascent of the tree when the gate opened.

Dennis's story was the classic description of a shamanic night journey. He said that he had gone to the chorro and had meditated in the mission cemetery we had visited before. He had begun to return to camp when he confronted a particularly large Inga tree near where the path skirted the edge of the mission. On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point in his ascent, something that he called "the vortex" opened ahead of him — a swirling, enormous doorway into time.

And from within the treetop vortex, scenes from humanity’s ancient past, of the pyramids and Stonehenge, and scenes from the even more archaic past of distant worlds were visible. These scenes are strikingly similar to what Carter beheld after passing beyond the first gate.



The German anthropologist, Hans Peter Duerr, noted in his incredible book, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, the sacred connection between the tree and the cave:

At the cave of Höll am Warscheneck one finds on the wall of the rock just past the crawl stone a small tree with a cross-shaped root. We are reminded how even much later the tree of the world, the axis mundi, guarded the entrance to the lower world. Representations of trees are seen quite often at entrances to caves.

It is at these points, at these sacred junctures indicated by caves and trees, that a space/non-space of transition, of in-between-ness, of rapid flux and transformation suddenly opens up. And from the earliest days of the Paleolithic, shamanic initiations have been held at these sites. The gates leading from this world to the next are found at these feared and hallowed spots, and it is clear that the Snake-Den cavern on the outskirts of Arkham was one of these.

That Randolph Carter was undergoing shamanic initiation becomes obvious with the news of his first encounter beyond the gate. His whirling visions began to somewhat stabilize and he witnessed a circle of towering stone pedestals. On each was seated an as yet indiscernible form.



But hovering lower and just before the pedestals was a similar form which began to communicate directly to Carter’s mind. Carter at once knew the identity of this terrible figure, for his long occult studies had prepared him well for this meeting. He recalled the words of the “monstrous” Necronomicon:

...all these Blacknesses are lesser than HE Who guardeth the Gateway; HE Who will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnamable Devourers. For HE is ’UMR AT-TAWIL, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe rendereth as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE.

And sure enough this was the guard of the gateway, the lurker at the threshold, the master of all transitions:

For this Shape was nothing less than that which all the world has feared since Lomar rose out of the sea and the Winged Ones came to earth to teach the Elder Lore to man. It was indeed the frightful Guide and Guardian of the Gate -- ’Umr at-Tawil...

But in worldwide shamanic lore this personage has yet another title, the "Master of Animals". Duerr provides a fairly typical account of a meeting with this intimidating presence deriving from the Desana Indians of, appropriately enough, the rain forest of Colombia. The Desana are avid users of ayahuasca.

The Desana Indians of the Vaupés river possibly possess a similar view of the world. After aspirating the hallucinogenic vihó powder, the shaman climbs into a cave in the surrounding hills in order to meet with Vihó-mahsë, the master of animals. With him, he exchanges animals for the souls of dead fellow tribesmen who then enter into the cave in order to maintain the balance of nature, as it were.

A principal function of the Master of Animals is to bestow upon the shaman the power of becoming, and specifically the power of becoming animal. The initiate, passing beyond the first gate and not yet arriving at -- or choosing not to approach -- the more formidable second gate receives from the Master the ability, the siddhi, to transform his or her own physical form.



This ability, akin and in tandem with the mastery over dreams, suffuses the threshold realm of the “extension,” which is often also called in occultism the astral plane.

The shaman or the sorcerer, then, who passes beyond the first gate brings his or her knowledge of the astral -- the knowledge that the world is composed of the stuff that dreams are made of -- back into this physical plane. The sorcerer demonstrates that the becomings of this world are not firmly fixed by law but can, as in a lucid dream, be altered by will.

Echidnaing Thru the Interkingdoms

It is in three sub-sections, entitled “Memories of a Sorcerer,” of the plateau “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...,” that Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, return to their discussion of Lovecraft. In the opening sentence of the first of these sections the duo both characterize this variety of becoming and admit their own roles in relation to it:

A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have always known that.

Each one of the protagonists under investigation here, each a possessor of the silver key -- Lovecraft, the McKennas, Deleuze and Guattari -- are revealing themselves as sorcerers. Each, it seems, has opened the gate and crossed the threshold to the space/non-space of transition, of in-between-ness, of rapid flux and transformation. And each is providing clues, in his own fashion and capacity, of what this space is like.

To D&G the becoming in question is always a becoming of multiplicity. Animals always roam and howl in packs, and in the deepest circles of the unconscious -- being simultaneously furthest out into the extension, the wilderness, the “dreamtime,” -- the animal is coupled with the multiple.



The sorcerous takes us to a level far deeper than the single Oedipal animals or “pets” of Freud -- in no sense can they be reduced to the Father or the Mother -- and deeper still than the heraldic or “State” animals, the archetypal animals, of Jung. Instead, these animals are manifold, swarming, shape-shifting, bewildering and, in a word, demonic. The sorcerers, Deleuze and Guattari, quote Lovecraft:

Lovecraft applies the term "Outsider" to this thing or entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear yet multiple, "teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horror."

It is this “nameless horror,” which passes beyond the edge, into the realm of dreams, into the astral, that the shaman-sorcerer inevitably merges into. He or she becomes many, becomes demonic (or daemonic to avoid the moral overtones of the prior), and the boundaries between him or her (or him and her) begin to blur with other demonic beings.

Each becomes less of what we think of as a thing, or a noun, and more like a process, a verb. Thus, a wolfing, a lousing, a moosing, a flamingoing. Past the gate, after initiation from the Master of Animals, identity begins to break down. Boundaries are crossed.



D&G speak of “interkingdoms,” of strange participations with other species. Fluid, many-sided, inter-penetrating, porous, furred, clawed, horned, antennaed; wriggling, twitching, droning, chirping, screeching. And at times an artist or a writer slips across unprepared, without intending to do so. Fervent imagination alone provides the key.

And for even the most equipped, as Randolph Carter certainly was, the journey is entirely dangerous, but for the unaware it is very often deadly:

If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc. We will have to explain why. Many suicides by writers are explained by these unnatural participations, these unnatural nuptials. Writers are sorcerers because they experience the animal as the only population before which they are responsible in principle.

Throngs, Packs and Covens

The “unnatural nuptials” part of this is particularly unnerving. Sexual energy is the primary energy of the astral. It is what fuels all dreams, breaks down all barriers, and there is no force more powerful (especially when it is fully sublimated as pure love -- but this still lies beyond the second gate) or more fatal. Duerr comments on Paleolithic cave art:

The figures presumed to be shamans, such as the famous one of Lascaux, are sometimes represented with an erect penis... This maybe means that his flight into the other world was above all a sexual event.

The archaic significance of the cave and the tree becomes absolutely unmistakable here. Layer after layer of animals, painted one upon the other for thousands of years in the darkest depths of primeval caves, signified a force far more fundamental than mere “hunting magic.”

 

The womb of the Earth is the source and birthplace of all physical and imaginative forms. The sorcerer, the artist, the would-be-creator, worships and attempts to beget here, but he provides only a spark, only a match to see in the dark, just as the boy Carter strikes in the Snake-Den.

He (and in this case always “he”) is but one of a series, like Molly Bloom’s many -- actual or envisioned -- lovers, arriving in humility and cast off later. The Creator is the ultimate Cuck. The real creation has occurred long before, the song has already been sung. But even to arrive here, one must pass over the threshold, become betwixt and between, and here every boundary is erased.

Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation. The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous... the demon does not himself have the ability to procreate, he must adopt indirect means (for example, being the female succubus of a man and then becoming the male incubus of a woman, to whom he transmits the man's semen).

Yet this is by no means the occupation solely of men. On the contrary it was women who performed this role of intermediary between the worlds for far longer. It is the figure of the witch especially that is exemplary here, and Duerr briefly outlines the part the witch plays in history:

As late as the Middle Ages, the witch was still the hagazussa, a being that sat on the Hag, the fence, which passed behind the gardens and separated the village from the wilderness. She was a being who participated in both worlds. As we might say today, she was semi-demonic. In time, however, she lost her double features and evolved more and more into a representation of what was being expelled from culture, only to return, distorted, in the night.

And what followed, as we know, are the truly horrific witch hunts and trials leading to the slaughter of millions of innocent women. This mostly occurred not, as commonly supposed, in the Middle Ages, but in the Renaissance and especially in the Reformation/Counter-Reformation period when the assault on the imagination was at its most fierce.



Male hermeticists, “heretics,” also suffered during this period and beyond (most infamously Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake in Rome in 1600), but they mostly fared far better than women. The hermetic/occult tradition, to the extent that it survived, largely became dominated by men, and the sexual current within it became deeply buried.

Pile On

This began to change during the very late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Kenneth Grant, in Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, explains how this new current (called the “93 current” by Croweyites) was ushered in by Crowley and how he employed this in a similar way to the sorcerers of the Old Stone Age:

The Scarlet Woman, as representative of Nuit, is the gateway to the Void. She is the magical embodiment of that stellar goddess whose metaphysical symbol is Infinite Space typified as the night-sky sewn with stars. She is the "yoni strewn with flowers" imaged in the Hymn to Kali, for the stars of Nuit and the flowers of the nubile virgin goddess are identical. Babalon -- literally the Gate of the Sun or solar-phallic energy -- is therefore the terrestrial formula of Nuit, and her vulva is the pylon through which the cosmic forces sweep into manifestation when the magical seals (mudras) have been opened.

The “pylon” that Grant mentions here must have been directly taken from Lovecraft, a massive influence on Grant, and in the quote we see how the gate is opened and the passage made.



Another occultist, a contemporary of Crowley’s and the actual teacher of Grant, who applied these techniques was Austin Osman Spare. Spare, a visual artist and ceremonial magician, provided a working definition of sorcery. He is quoted by Grant in The Magical Revival:

Sorcery is a deliberate act of causing metamorphoses by the employment of elementals. It forges a link with the powers of middle nature, or the ether, the astrals of great trees and of animals of every kind. Will is our medium, Belief is the vehicle, and Desire is the force combining with the elemental. Cryptograms are our talismans and protectors. The will, or nervous energy, must be suppressed in order to create tension, and released only at the psychological moment.

For Spare, as with Crowley and Grant, this forged link with “the powers of the middle nature,” dwelling in the intermediary astral plane or Earth’s extension, was often explicitly sexual. But for Lovecraft -- Victorian as he essentially was -- the sexual element of these “unnatural nuptials” was obscured if not wholly absent. The sexual, for Lovecraft, was entirely sublimated to the imaginative.

Fictional Disguises

Yet regardless of this apparent prudishness, and in spite of Lovecraft’s declared skeptical materialism, Grant was fully convinced of Lovecraft’s occult knowledge. Grant claimed (in Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God) that in fact Lovecraft’s varied and abundant occult experiences were “disguised as fiction,” and in light of Lovecraft’s admitted "literary" influences his esoteric affiliations become evident:

Lovecraft numbered Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood among his compères; this in itself is an admission of contact with dimensions outside those which Lovecraft accepted as scientifically permissible, for both Machen and Blackwood were at one time members of the Golden Dawn. The former was a close friend of Arthur Waite, whose effusions are too well known to need comment. Lovecraft deplored Machen's style, so it was not a literary influence that he acknowledged. What he really acknowledged was a magical influence that streamed, via the Golden Dawn and MacGregor Mathers, direct from the Draconian Tradition that in all its outward manifestations Lovecraft categorically denied and rejected.

In The Magical Revival, Grants devotes a couple of pages of direct, side-by-side comparisons of the work of Lovecraft and Crowley, although there is no evidence that the writer had any knowledge of the English magician.

Among the points listed in parallel are Lovecraft’s Al Azif - The Book of the Arab with Crowley’s Al vel Legis - The Book of the Law, Yog-Sothoth with Sut-Thoth, and the deep dreaming of Cthulhu in R’lyeh with the “Primal Sleep” of Crowley’s “Great Ones of the Night of Time.”



But in Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, Grant explains that the more fundamental similarity of the magical methodology of Lovecraft with that of more open occultists like Crowley and Spare lies in his mastery of dream control:

Crowley's Aiwass Current, Spare's Zos Kia Cultus and Lovecraft's Cthulhu Cult are different manifestations of an identical formula -- that of dream control. Each of these magicians lived their lives within the context of cosmic dream myths which, somehow, they relayed or transmitted to man from other dimensions. The formula of dream control is in a sense used by all creative artists, though few succeed in bringing human consciousness into such close
proximity with other spheres.

Grant further explains that the manner by which several magicians transmitted their knowledge of these dreams realms, as shamans earlier conveyed it to their tribe through song, was through fiction. This is certainly the case with Machen, Blackwood and Lovecraft.

Fiction, as a vehicle, has often been used by occultists. Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni and A Strange Story have set many a person on the ultimate Quest. Ideas not acceptable to the everyday mind, limited by prejudice and spoiled by a "bread-winning" education, can be made to slip past the censor, and by means of the novel, the poem, the short story be effectually planted in soil that would otherwise reject or destroy them. Writers such as Arthur Machen, Brodie Innes, Algernon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft are in this category.  (Magical Revival)

This, however, does not necessarily imply that such authors are conscious transmitters of these ideas. Often it is the case that these notions and images might slip by existing internal censors as well. An author might be fully aware of the power of his or her work, but he or she may have no idea to what extent this was granted from beyond, and even of its true worth.



In fact, Grant argues that the less a writer is aware of exactly where and how his or her work originated then the greater that work is likely to be. Genius, in other words, is -- as in its original meaning -- quite apart from ego.

It is a well-known fact that few artists, even among the great, are capable of fully understanding the true nature and worth of their best work. The reason for this state of affairs is not so well known; it is because the artist is not responsible for his work. The degree of his achievement is in direct ratio to the degree of his absence when the work is performed. (Hidden God)

From Lovecraft’s letters it seems that he also had this experience of the unconscious transmission of genius. An essay by Patricia MacCormack, “Lovecraft through Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,” quotes one such letter in which Lovecraft confesses the presence of “some strange and perhaps terrible mediation”:

I am not even certain how I am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard.

Whether or not Lovecraft was an active shaman or sorcerer, a conscious practitioner of dream control, and/or an actual initiate or affiliate of esoteric orders like the Golden Dawn, his work has profoundly resonated with subsequent inner explorers like the McKenna brothers and Deleuze and Guattari.

.../...

Hyper-Carbolating the Furtive Gates of Becoming 1: Before

But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red -- even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say anything in articulate words again? -- save that it fades, save that it undergoes a gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk, habitual -- this scene also. 

-- The Waves, Virginia Woolf

It all started this time with two strange books, widely different and seemingly unrelated, both containing pivotal references to an even stranger third book.

The first two books are A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna. Each, somewhat surprisingly, give significant mention to H.P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction story, Through the Gates of the Silver Key. The three, taken as a set, illuminate one another. Each is a gate unlocked by the same key, gates beyond space and time and comprehension.

The opening sections of Through the Gates of the Silver Key, written by Lovecraft with assistance from E. Hoffmann Price in 1932-3, can be briefly summarized more or less as follows:

Randolph Carter, a recurrent protagonist in Lovecraft’s stories and dream cycles, is a writer of strange fiction, a former (and future) prodigious and lucid dreamer, and a mystic and occult explorer of some renown. At the outset of the story, and carrying on the narrative of an earlier Lovecraft tale, The Silver Key (1926), four men are gathered at a New Orleans home to discuss the possible sale and division of Carter’s estate.

Carter himself has been missing for four years and is now widely presumed to be dead. This is certainly the opinion of Ernest B. Aspinwall, a hard-nosed and “apoplectic” attorney representing Carter’s distant maternal cousins who desire that the rich Carter estate be divided among themselves.



Aspinall, though, is opposed in this view by the three other attendees of the gathering: the host and executor of the will, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, also a friend and mystic associate of Carter’s; Ward Phillips, another old occult buddy; and the exotic yet awkward, Swami Chandraputra, “an adept from Benares with important information to give.” The consensus of these three, contra Aspinwall, is that Carter is not dead at all but is alive in some form in another realm or dimension.

The four first discuss the established facts of Carter’s disappearance. Carter’s car was discovered parked and unoccupied alongside a country road leading to the deserted Carter homestead adjacent to the wooded hills “behind hoary and witch-accursed Arkham.” Inside the car was found an ancient and sinisterly carved wooden box containing an untranslatable and equally ancient parchment.

Missing from the box -- which Carter had previously informed the three mystics about -- was a large silver key, although both de Marigny and Phillips possessed photographs of it. Presumably Carter removed the key from the box and took it with him on his hike to the old homestead and beyond into a haunted cavern, known locally as the “Snake-Den.”

Nothing was known of what happened to Carter, if anything, in the cavern. But largely dismissed rumours of Arkham rustics spoke of the discovery of footprints in the shape of the squared-toed boots that the ten-year-old Carter used to wear when visiting his now-deceased relatives at the homestead. And these, however paltry and unsatisfying, were the official facts of the case.

From here, however, Chandraputra took up the thread of the story, claiming to have somehow heard Carter’s account directly. Wielding the singular key, Carter tramped his way to the “Snake-Den,” and then entered an even more hidden chamber at the back of the cave that Carter had discovered as a boy. Carter knew that this inner chamber contained a “pylon” -- a kind of ancient temple gateway -- which could, he felt certain, be opened by the silver key.



Along this journey, however, Carter’s fifty-year-old adult form mysteriously merged in simultaneity with his ten-year-old previous self, perhaps explaining the puzzling footprints. With the key Carter managed to open the pylon gate and then entered into another dimension, a kind of threshold realm or an “extension” of our own world, but not yet the infinite which howls beyond the distant second gate.

What happened then is scarcely to be described in words. It is full of those paradoxes, contradictions, and anomalies which have no place in waking life, but which fill our more fantastic dreams, and are taken as matters of course till we return to our narrow, rigid, objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic.

And it is in this scarcely describable passage through the first and second gates that Lovecraft’s story begins to intersect with the accounts, autobiographical and philosophical, of both McKenna and Deleuze/Guattari. A very similar passage is described in all three texts.

Terence McKenna’s tale of the “experiment at La Chorrera” has now passed into legend, becoming at once an idealized archetype of similar epic psychedelic or “shamanic” journeys undertaken by serious psychonauts since the 1960s, and as a particularized precursor of what was to have taken place (and/or is still in the process of happening?) on the Winter Solstice of 2012.

Put briefly, True Hallucinations tells the tale of how Terence and his brother Dennis, along with three other friends, made an expedition to the Colombian Amazon in the early months of 1971 to experiment with indigenous psychedelic plants.



As it turned out they did not find the specific plant they were seeking, but instead encountered and ingested both ayahuasca and copious amounts of psilocybin mushrooms. And the “experiment” they devised, partially or fully inspired by the “Logos” of the Mushroom itself, went far beyond anything they could have imagined previously. Terence McKenna quotes from Dennis' journal from March 2, 1971:

The opus can now be briefly summarized: 

• The mushroom must be taken and heard. 

• The ayahuasca must be taken and charged with overtonal ESR of the psilocybin via voice-imparted, amplified sound. 

• The ESR resonance of the psilocybin in the mushrooms will be canceled and will drop into a superconducting state; a small portion of the physical matter of the mushroom will be obliterated. 

• The superconductively charged psilocybin will pick up the ESR harmonic of the ayahuasca complex; this energy will be instantly and completely absorbed by the higher-dimensional tryptamine template. It will be transferred to the mushroom as vocal sound and condensed onto the psilocybin as a bonded complex of superconductive harmine-psilocybin-DNA.

This is Dennis's own summary of the experiment, but what would conceivably result was extrapolated by Terence after many hours of intense and manic conversation with his brother. Terence recorded his brother's ideas of what was expected to happen in True Hallucinations:

More, however, than a chant-induced, collective synesthesia was promised. He was saying that the laws of acoustics and low amperage bioelectrical phenomena, and our bodies, could be manipulated to give the experimenter a doorway into exploring states of matter and realms of physics involving high energy and low temperature that are, currently at least, supposed to be the exclusive province of researchers totally dependent on extremely sophisticated and powerful instruments.

Instead of requiring these expensive and cutting edge technologies, however, Dennis had discovered, in agreement with shamans of old, that the human body itself was the most advanced instrument available. All that was needed was the body, the imagination, the voice, and the plants that would synergize and activate the process. And with these "tools," already at hand, the experiment could be conducted and the whole of reality be alchemically altered.

But this is what Dennis was saying: We had somehow stumbled upon or been led to the trigger experience for the entire human world that would transform the ontological basis of reality so that mind and matter everywhere would become the same thing and reflect the human will perfectly.

Yet the experiment did not produce the anticipated results. The Stone was not immediately revealed. The “concrescence” -- a kind of Whiteheadian version of the Singularity -- did not readily occur. But arguably something far more uncanny happened. In varied yet complementary ways the McKenna brothers went “mad,” and the impact of their madness continues to reverberate today.

Dennis, especially, became unhinged; to the point where two of his alarmed companions wanted to get him out of the jungle as quickly as possible and into the care of a mental “health” institution. He lost all sense of himself as a separate individual, as a human being, as bound to this Earth, and as being materially embodied at all.

And it is Dennis’ journey from psychic dissolution and back again that most closely resonates with Carter’s own passage through the gates of the silver key. And curiously this is also the point where both of these stories overlap with ideas expressed within the most mind-shattering and difficult work of Deleuze and Guattari.



A Thousand Plateaus cannot be easily or even adequately summarized so I won’t even try, but it’s worth narrowing in on the sections of this dense tome which discuss Lovecraft, and specifically Through the Gates of the Silver Key.

There are precisely five references to the horror writer and his story in A Thousand Plateaus. Four of these occur in a relatively famous chapter or “plateau” of the book entitled “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...” which is explicitly concerned with the psychic and physical transformations and transmutations of the artist or shaman or sorcerer.

But the earliest reference is contained in an opening chapter, setting the stage for the whole book. The third plateau, “10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?),” is explicitly framed as a lecture by a Lovecraftian protagonist. The lecturing professor, Dr. Challenger, is clearly a version of Randolph Carter as well as being a weird fiction adaption of Deleuze/Guattari themselves.

He (?) claimed to have invented a discipline he referred to by various names: rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, microploitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities. Yet no one clearly understood what the goals, method, or principles of this discipline were. 

The names of this “discipline” are of course names which D&G alternately use throughout the book in order to characterize their own ideas. These names are essentially synonymous, although each contain particular nuances and pertain to different yet converging orders or fields of knowledge/existence. They are at once playfully absurd and seriously precise.

While to definitively explain the philosophy of A Thousand Plateaus is far beyond the scope of the present exploration, it is centrally related to our narrative so a few words should be attempted. This philosophy could be called a “pantheism,” but it would be a pantheism that rejects the absolute inclusion and sameness of the All of “pan,” as well as the transcendence and centralized authority of “theos” or God, and it would especially refuse the systemic or ideological implications of the “ism.”

A pantheism, therefore, without pantheism. A comprehensively anarchic non-system that favours immanence over transcendence, openness over closure, becoming over being, the excluded and the marginalized over the dominant and privileged, the fluid over the fixed, rhizomes over trees and roots, radical horizontality over vertical hierarchy, plateaus and planes over peaks, the crazy over the sane.



It is a sort of all-embracing dynamic systems theory that includes but is not reducible to geology, biology, sociology, history, linguistics, semiology, technology, politics, states of consciousness and sorcery. And it is this last aspect or field of study which most resonates with Lovecraft and McKenna.

Sorcery, although it is not explicitly mentioned until the later “Becoming-Intense...” chapter, is all about transformation and becoming, and this is first demonstrated in the Challenger lecture/plateau.

In fact, what is primary is an absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of flight, however complex or multiple -- that of the plane of consistency or body without organs (the Earth, the absolutely deterritorialized). 

Again, all of the above terms -- “deterritorialization,” “line of flight,” “plane of consistency,” “body without organs” -- allude to a similar thing: to a multi-contextual process of continuous becoming that is free of territory, category, central organization, strict definition. This is really the “subject” of Dr. Challenger’s lecture, but as he proceeds his audience, increasingly disturbed or scandalized, gradually leaves.

The only ones left were the mathematicians, accustomed to other follies, along with a few astrologers, archaeologists, and scattered individuals. 

And even these few, not altogether non-hostile, begin to notice changes in the professor. His (?) discussion of lines of flight, etc. appear to be affecting certain changes in his own person. His voice, broken with “an apish cough,” is becoming hoarser, more mechanical, and finally his body itself seems to be breaking apart.

The double-articulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and the tunic from which liquids escaped. As they streamed away they seemed to eat at the strata of the lecture hall, which was filled with fumes of olibanum and “hung with strangely figured arras.” Disarticulated, deterritorialized, Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him, that he was leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden. 

Challenger is then described as slowly hurrying towards the “plane of consistency,” escaping through a particle Clock. D&G then quote a slightly modified long passage from the final section of Through the Gates of the Silver Key:

The figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock....The turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it.... The abnormal clicking [ticking] went on, beating out the dark cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings.

In the story, it is the Swami Chandraputra -- who may or may not have been unmasked as the returned Randolph Carter and/or a tapir-snouted, crustacean-clawed wizard from the extremely distant planet Yaddith -- who may have vanished through the coffin-shaped clock in de Marigny's parlour. But most fascinatingly, tagged onto the end of this quote in A Thousand Plateaus is “-- the Mechanosphere, or the rhizosphere,” as if it is this which also "underlies all mystical gate-openings."

But what is the Mechanosphere, and what gate-openings does it underlie? Within the chapter containing Challenger's lecture the term is "defined":

What we call the mechanosphere is the set of all abstract machines and machinic assemblages outside the strata, on the strata, or between strata.

As clear as mud, right? It sounds like a sample of Dennis McKenna's 1971 trip journal or the ravings of a Lovecraftian lunatic high on his own necrotic theories. But A Thousand Plateaus is a very methodical lunacy.   



Abstract machines, in turn, are characterized within the final section of the text as always being "singular and immanent" as opposed to Platonic ideas which are defined as "transcendent, universal, eternal." Accordingly, abstract machines "know nothing of forms and substances."

Abstract machines consist of unformed matters and nonformal functions. Every abstract machine is a consolidated aggregate of matters-functions.

Abstract machines, then, are singular and particular flows of both material and function, temporarily consolidated clusters of becoming and intensity in contrast with the fixed and defined structures that D&G call "strata." And the abstract machines that flow outside, on and in between these strata -- which may only be fixed and defined in an apparent sense -- are potentially everywhere. And the whole or the set of all of these abstract machines is the Mechanosphere, subsuming everything.

There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere.

And the Mechanosphere is such an crucial concept that it is actually the very last word in the body of A Thousand Plateaus:

Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic -- perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic -- but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.

This begins, then, to give us a clue of what to expect beyond the gates of the silver key. All becomings start to converge on this point and all flow out of it. It is both everywhere and at every moment present, but it is generally imperceptible to most people at most times.

Only with very enhanced perception, and only with the necessary formula, the ritual and the key will its secrets become unlocked, will it be grasped as experience. And this involves total transformation of the self, to the point where the self becomes obliterated. Yet this process, perhaps, follows stages which can be somewhat mapped out.



On passing through the gate, which we will get to next, Dennis McKenna may have also passed beyond the confines of time and space, as well as the limits of his own mind/body.

Quite apparently, he became telepathic, he had knowledge of events in the past and future that he did not witness personally, and he seemed to have some ability to alter physical reality and even manifest objects at will. And at one point, just days after the "experiment," he seemingly produced out of nowhere a silver key:

He reminded me that one of our alchemical analogues for the philosopher's stone, which we shared in our private code of associations as children, was a certain, small, silver key to a box of inlaid wood with a secret compartment that had belonged to our grandfather. I reminded him that the key had been lost since our childhood. I said that the ability to produce that key right then would prove the reality of Dennis's shamanic powers and ability to transcend normal space and time. 

It is instructive to pause McKenna's account for a moment to examine Lovecraft's own story on the origin of the key which is told, appropriately enough, in The Silver Key:

Then one night his grandfather reminded him [in a dream] of a key. The grey old scholar, as vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their ancient line, and of the strange visions of the delicate and sensitive men who composed it.... He spoke ... of that Edmund Carter who had just escaped hanging in the Salem witchcraft trials, and who had placed in an antique box a great silver key handed down from his ancestors. Before Carter awoke, the gentle visitant had told him where to find that box; that carved oak box of archaic wonder whose grotesque lid no hand had raised for two centuries. 

In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and forgotten at the back of a drawer in a tall chest.

The coincidence of both the McKennas and Randolph Carter finding an old wooden box once owned by their grandfathers and connected with a silver key is sufficiently strange, but stranger still was how this key (the same one??) suddenly appeared on the edge of the Colombian Amazon. McKenna continues:

The conversation took the form of a question-and-answer session that ended with Dennis demanding that I hold out my hand, and then, slapping his closed hand into my open one, letting out a loud, ludicrous squawk, and depositing in my palm a small, silver key.

At the time I was thunderstruck. We were hundreds of miles from anywhere. He was practically naked, yet the key before me was indistinguishable from the key of my childhood memories. Had he saved that key over all those years to produce it now, in the middle of the Amazon, to completely distort my notion of reality? Or was this only a similar key that Dennis had been carrying when he arrived in South America, but that I had somehow not noticed until he produced it? This seemed unlikely. He was confined to a room far from our stored equipment, and it was difficult to conceive of him becoming calm and organized enough to go to the baggage and carefully sort through it to find the secreted key. And anyway, it was I who had conceived of asking for the key; had he somehow tricked me into asking for the one object that he had brought with him to deceive me? This matter of the silver key, whether it was the original key or not, has never been satisfactorily settled. The original box was lost long ago, so the key was never tested. 

In his 2012 book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, Dennis McKenna gives his own take on the episode of the silver key:

Once, when I got tired of Terence demanding that I produce the stone, I produced instead a tiny silver key. We had been talking about that key, or one just like it, which opened an inlaid wooden box with a secret compartment that had once belonged to our grandfather. Terence was keenly aware of the key’s special importance in our childhood as one of our earliest “alchemical analogues of the philosopher’s stone.” It was he who challenged me to produce the key as a way to prove my new skills, so I did, placing it in his hand. He was shocked. We had assumed the key had long since disappeared, along with the box, and to this day I have no idea how I conjured it, or at the very least one just like it. Interestingly, while rummaging through some stored family boxes recently, untouched for decades, I stumbled on this box, but not the key. Presumably it has disappeared back down whatever wormhole had coughed it up that day in the pasture.

Evidently Dennis' account largely agrees with his brother, but with the added detail that he happened to stumble upon the long lost wooden box. Alas, on this occasion the key was not present so the "test" was again not conducted. What Dennis neglects to mention, though, that Terence provides is the influence on both of Through the Gates of the Silver Key.

A final ironic note is added to the episode by the fact that both Dennis and I are fans of the stories of H. P. Lovecraft and so were aware of his story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," a tale seething with many dimensions, strange beings, a cosmic time scale, and reckless, oddball adventurers like ourselves.

And in both of the brothers' accounts of this revelation of the silver key it is coupled with Dennis' insistence that the uncanny post-experiment pocket of the world that they were then inhabiting was somehow fashioned by James Joyce. Joyce was the local Demiurge in the form of a cock and his wife Nora -- in the fashion of a hen -- was co-creatrix. HCE and ALP. Inexplicably the brothers McKenna had burst into, or made physically realized, the pages of Finnegans Wake.

And significantly the key (or keys) also turns up precisely as the Wake closes and cycles on once more to its opening. Hidden also, perhaps, is a sly nod to A Thousand Plateaus embedded precisely into the cyclic turnover that D&G, as we'll see, criticize about Joyce's writing.

Till thousandthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's...

The key has been given, passed on down from mystic ancestors summoned in dreams and/or materialized out of thin air. The ritual has been performed, the key has been fitted into the lock of the pylon gate and turned. And we step across the threshold and through the first gate. Welcome to the Mechanosphere. Eh? The McKennasphere?

Unearthed Hitchhiking Fragments

Guatemala--Texas--Bangkok

They lived in a heap of trash. Rusted mufflers, flaking corrosion, broken light tubes with jagged edges, brackish pools of kitchen stench, half-dented cans of bug death caught in coils of wiring, thorns, sofa springs, styrofoam snow, vacuum tube linoleum piercings, saranwrapped decapitated mannequins at odd angles...

Everything heaved with ants, termites, rats gorging on festering TV entrées, dead things, misplaced compost. Other things moved. Cyborg pinheads with gasoline belches engaged in amplexus with giant purple iguanas.

"Don't force it," one grunted, "and it will all slide."

Pterodactyls swooped down to catch sewer gnomes. Some of these retaliated with catapults and fiery swamp gas projectiles. A ptero ignited and plunged into the mud. Insane, horned, gyro-geeks spiraled around, smashed things and vended their wares.

"Antibiotics!"
 "Compact discs!"
 "Garden slugs!"
 "Customized jet-packs!"

Heads appeared out of holes.

"I'll have three pornstars and a sack of beans, please."
"We're out of beans but our pornstars are still fresh."
"Well how about them for a stack of Popular Mechanics?"

The market was in full force. All the best of jungle, swamp and slag-heap for your every desire. The heap sprawled on for miles. Anti-gravity faeries surfed on Tesla waves, warping the sounds and pictures. The Song worked furiously in their condo lint-nests, frantically splicing genes and snorting coke.

Buzz saws, explosions, mad cackles punctuated the subtle music of Aeolian piano-wire harps. An orange neon sign flashed: "God was here." Scrap metal sculptures reached for the sky. Everyday they added on to themselves.

Then the drums sounded. Jaundice skinned trolls bashing empty oil barrels, tribespeople pounding polyrhythms on djembes. Grandpa Dragonfly blew the conch shell three times. The gathering had commenced.

With astonishing speed they arrived at the salt flats. At first they formed a circle, joining hands, tentacles, talons, paws, mechanical clutches, hose, branches and hooks and faced each other. Then they reached across and further connected their limbs. This accelerated quickly. A game of frenzy twister ensued. A circle to a web to a cluster to a ball. Heads over tails over hooves. The ball rolled, shook, undulated, bounced, howled, giggled, ejaculated, vomited, spun and finally stood still. Everyone was comfortable.

From the centre, Grandpa Dragonfly called the meeting to order. Most of this happened in silence, but then it was time to translate for the non-telepaths. Of course this started an argument. What language to use?

"Gutter-Creole!"
"Latin!"
"Enochian!"
"Canine Five!"
"Delphinese!"

The ball began to roll and sputter. After much hassle and nose-wrangling, consensus was reached and bolo-tongue was chosen as the most universally applicable. Grandpa Dragonfly spoke first, not because he was accepted as any kind of "leader," -- Fish forbid -- but only because it was he who called the meeting.

"Things are becoming way too strange," his raspy voice tickled many eardrums, "there seems to be a constant buzz in the air. A low almost moaning deep within the Earth. A subterranean didgeridoo. A hungry belly. It's as if something is waking up. Some huge thing. We all know that things are already crazier than anyone could have imagined."

Here he delved into something he called "history."

"The states melted. The weather went AWOL. The gene-pool went public. Nanoids running amok. Everyone mutating for kicks. The Trans-Corpse went organic. Money disappeared. Anarchy was unleashed. All desires manifested in some reality or another."

Most of the younger gatherers had no idea what he was talking about and even the older ones found it hard to remember. He continued.

"But now things are even faster, more tangled and more surprising. There is a great sense of culmination and climax."

"We all felt that before," an old pirate wheezed from the bottom of the ball, "but it all just kept goin' on. It's nuthin' new!" He seemed annoyed.

"Ah, though, this time it's different," the dragonfly's voice rose in volume and graveness, "this time complete Omega is coming. Mama's giving birth. The Trans-Corpse knows and they're divided. Some are afraid of losing control, some are helping to bring it on. But I don't know why or what is exactly happening!"

The linearity was too boring for most. The cacophony began...



The scene changed once again. He was sitting at a large circular oak table. The table was the only feature in a vast dark hall of stone. The only light came from several white candles situated in a chandelier which hung nearly touching the centre of the table. Around the table sat the philosophers, completely engaged in grave council.

Only the wisest were assembled: Metaphysicians, epistemologists, political scientists, cosmologists, pataphysicians, neo-alchemists, psychobiologists, pansurrealists, post-post-Kantians, lumpen-Nietzsceans, Zen dance masters, retro-transvestites, Baptists, überconformists, cyberpunks, flower skinheads, Hindu gods, Marxist priests, Pythagorean hipsters, evangelical agnostics, postsexuals, Taoist slaves, old dead bearded white men, radical lesbian separatists, nihilists, cat lovers, a holographic projection of Snuffleupagus.

In front of each was a pewter goblet of red wine. He took a sip of wine. It was thick, spicy and slightly bitter. He began to focus on what was being said.

"...Insofar as we know there is no equivalent to genetic replication in dustbunnies!" an extremely hairy man bellowed angrily, slamming his fist on the table. His outburst provoked further anger and a goblet and a set of false teeth flew at him from opposite sides of the table. A woman stood up on her chair.

"What right have you to speak for the inaminate??" she screamed. This started a heated debate in several languages which everyone took part in, but nobody fully understood. A small green man refilled the goblets with wine for the ninth time that evening.

An überconformist spun up a handful of blunts, lit them, and passed them to his neighbours on his left and right. In the midst of foul-mouthed and fiery discourse all assembled became thoroughly karped.

Voices filled the hall ebbing and flowing like ocean waves. Nasal high-pitched whines. Operatic disclamations. Buzz saw peals of sarcasm. Sadistic punbursts. Oxymoronic wailing guffaws. Grunts, snickers, accusations, lamentations, belches, diatribes, death threats, interrupted monologues. Giggle fits and sighing ecstasy. The occasional well-punctuated fart. The gritting of teeth. The crackling of knuckles. The pulling of hair. And then there was silence.

After an eternity a voice spoke. It was barely a flutter, soft but clear. It came from a weenie of a man, a member of a dissenting yet conservative faction of flower skinheads. The weenie looked straight at him and spoke:

"It's all up to you." Now all eyes focused on him.

"You alone are left to tell us the answer to all of our inquiries. The culmination of this great debate. The answer that will set our minds at rest, that verily will determine the future of this planet. The answer that will once and for all result in the eternal triumph of good over evil, or however our minds choose to formulate this metaphor.

"Your answer shall be both a synthesis and transcendence of the uttermost important thoughts of these great intellects gathered here. Once spoken it shall be shouted from the rooftops. Choirs will sing its refrain. Whole nations will reform to its message. The gods will return to this Earth and clarity will shine brilliant in the eyes of all. We anxiously yet patiently await your response. Answer us: What is going on?"

He blushed and sweated in horror as he shrank from the eyes of the great. He had no idea how he had even arrived in the hall. He had forgotten who he was and the wine and the spliffs only added to his confusion. But he swallowed his fear, cleared his throat, stood on the table and spoke:

"There is no meaning anywhere in the universe except that which we choose to give to it. Beyond this there is only the combined conceptions, perceptions and actions of every other entity in the universe including the universe itself. Nothing is stable. All is in movement. All is in a condition of perpetual creativity which emerges from the chaos of infinite possibilities.

"All of our categories, ideologies, thought experiments and even language itself is total bullshit. Only by freeing ourselves from these clinging notions can we ever hope to evolve beyond the mess we have made for ourselves. Only by our reemergence, and conscious reemergence, with this chaos can we find our way out. For in truth there is nothing but chaos. Nothing except interconnected flows of living energy.

"Everything is simply doing its own thing in order to sustain and expand itself. Each does this by collecting food, energy, information or money in whatever way is easiest. Everything is natural. We are free to do anything. Morality is a control myth, although certain actions are more fluid, balanced and inconsequential than others. It just so happens that these actions correspond with the moral dicta of most religions.

"At the base of all religions is the flow of of energy be it expressed as light, love, information or obedience to God. In fact there is no God but this God. All authority and control are all illusions and we often willingly give ourselves to these myths. In this way we ensure our own slavery. We need to smash or soar beyond all idols at all levels of perception and conception.

"There is only evolution and this is the creator, the created and the act of creation. Every atom of the universe is the entire universe and we have only to realize this to make it manifest. There are no limits. Everything is funny. There exists worlds beyond our comprehension for our exploration. The flow is best surfed with respect for the total. Space, time, mind, matter and energy are one. This, of course, is only my viewpoint and there is no truth."

He finished, stepped off the table and was instantly seized by the philosopher mob. They had not enjoyed a word. They took him outside to a tree and hung him by the neck until he died. He had already left his body. His crime was boredom. Civilization soon collapsed. Meanwhile, two cockroaches who had heard him in the hall and saw him die on the tree decided to start a religion...




The ruckus gurgled out of the sewer grates inspiring crippled toads to clear their obscured vision and sputter forth past rows of moss bungalows oozing with organic furry clarity charity for the unsatoried few who sit bored on couches munching cheezies and bragging about last Saturday night everything went wrong face planted into the pavement neon stars around his head in turned orbited by tiny worlds teeming with mutant life such as a bizarre species of hamster who do nothing but ponder their own place in the cosmos, who pay no attention to the physical world but spend all their short lives in their own unique thought dimension where they are God, all-knowing, all-powerful and immortal. All was blissful in these private utopias until they were warped into by humanoid reality surfers, the ultimate incarnation of a long succession of Lamarckian subcultural evolution way past uber-punk, post post-mortem, biodegradable extropic ideology-fuckers and bird-callers, drooling theo-morons, power-hippies, deep ravers, plurfs and ironic neo-squiffs who feasted on phosphorescent lichen leaving so-called consensus reality altogether beaming right naked down to the exclusive universe of the hamster demi-gods who fought them flicking snot and spreading paranoia. Eventually once the gate was crashed the joint was swamped by the worst type of curiousity-seeking wankers getting fat and establishing posh resorts where you can get your earlobes sucked while you intravenously absorb a sweet euphoric nectar that makes your whole body seem like one big penis whilst unbeknown to you you are being genetically reprogrammed to become the perfect automaton work, consume, watch TV, sleep. Fortunately some suburban computer geek introduced a nanoid virus into the soup further reprogramming the hapless penis zombies into fiery-eyed mall-smashing iconoclasts, nihilist mayhem addicts, sado-masochistic pleasure freaks, burning, bombing, looting, plundering yuppie vikings, New Age vandals, rabid brigands of the laundromats, cultural toxicity, window-shopping cancer, glamour girls sweating perfect plastic drops, their world had gone amok the rodents mentally paralysed by a wave of existential angst were unable to do anything. Their divinities stripped their powers forgotten ripples of confusion spun out from their heads back to the noösphere of the home world in beams of light to the neon stars which shone like a halo around the bruised toothless head of the alcoholic moss-dweller catching the attention of the wandering toads who in turn slapped the bum back into consciousness -- the beer-gutted redneck awoke from his stupor whole dimensions disappeared the hamster gods vanished the surfers were left without a home again the ruckus slinked back into the sewer chuckling softly...



 

What is the Material World and is it Dead?

There is no god
apart from poppies and the flying fish,
men singing songs, and women brushing their hair in the sun.
The lovely things are god that has come to pass, like Jesus came.
The rest, the undiscoverable, is the demiurge.

-- "The Body of God," D.H. Lawrence

It is important to notice that Lawrence is not denying the existence of God. Instead he is saying that no deity exists apart from and beyond nature. The divine is immanent, in other words, and transcendent only as far as the transcendent is just another perspective on the immanent. A question of epistemology and not ontology. Two truths as opposed to two worlds.

Songs, fish, flowers, flowing hair are patterns and rhythms of the World Soul. They are fluctuations and potentialities, meeting points of forces and messages, that take on recognizable forms for a moment. All perception is continually created and destroyed in like manner. No form resists transformation or penetration from others.

The World Soul is an immense sphere of spheres. A toroidal flux of doubling circulation. A "tantric egg" with its unattainable polar extremes -- pure subjectivity and pure objectivity, God and Nature -- snipped off and allowing movement both without and within. The demiurgic whirling outward, amnesiac of its own origins, and the christic swirling to the centre inside.

The Newtonian God -- the God who made a clockwork-like universe, wound it, and withdrew -- died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.

Anyone who is looking around for a simulated icon of the deity in Newtonian guise might well be disappointed. The phrase "God is dead" applies aptly, correctly, validly to the Newtonian universe which is dead. The groundrule of that universe, upon which so much of our Western world is built, has dissolved.

-- The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan rightly interprets Nietzsche here, and as usual brings the story forward. The clockwork cosmos was always a fiction, a linear and causal fable stemming from our adoption of the printing press and the clock as metaphors for all things. The gears have rusted and the springs have sprung. The cuckoo is spasming on the living room carpet. The line of the horizon has indeed been sponged away.



Every compass needle spins like a weathercock in a strong wind. Our navigation systems cause us to drive into the sea. This God has died. There is nothing above that is not also below. Electronic media coils us all together in a fashion that is entirely disorienting, "a brand-new world of allatonceness" that is also archaic and tribal. The old laws etched in stone or bound in leather no longer make sense.

To the savage this stone or tree or yam has mana or orenda, that is what concerns him; but gradually, -- and this is another high road to impersonation -- from the multitude of things that have mana, there arises the notion of a sort of continuum of mana, a world of unseen power lying behind the visible universe, a world which is the sphere, as will be seen, of magical activity and the medium of mysticism.

-- Themis, Jane Ellen Harrison

Yet the primal songlines and resonance fields remain. Points of intersection, spots made sacred as sites of epiphany and ordeal, rare instants spun up or down by accelerated extropy or entropy and allowing a break thru. These uncanny rocks or bushes or pieces of art ring off of each other, a sound audible for the attuned, richening in colour and contrast. A continuum of mana.

The plane or sphere (the geometry is dual and in motion) of immanence is here given character, provided with eyes and ears. Harrison goes on to explain that this continuum subsequently became synonymous with the World Soul. Its transcendent qualities are attributed only much later.

 

God  -- plural and feminine and animal and multi-desiring -- once swam through mineral and fire and dream and speech. And still does. All pronouns break down at this stage. Verbs enfold each person, place and thing mistakenly classed as discrete and inviolable. Adjectives and adverbs burst out of these bright bundles of noise as sparks and flares.

The treetops absorb sunlight through language. Fungal fibres secrete verse and prose to cliff-clinging roots. Imagination circles through this medium -- creation and procreation -- not visible but felt and smelt (who dealt it?) keenly and with the constant premonition of possible danger.

We think the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another. What regulates the obligatory, necessary, or permitted interminglings of bodies is above all an alimentary regime and a sexual regime. Even technology makes the mistake of considering tools in in isolation: tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible.

-- A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari

"...the libido suffuses everything." The continuum is above all a continuum of desire. Libido, orgone, chi, mana, mojo, kundalini, groove, beat. There is no isolation. All systems -- musical, geological, linguistic, historical, ecological, make-believe, technical, political-economical, poetic -- mingle together in sometimes discernible overlays and juxtapositions. Bodies before goods, creation before production.

 

There is foreplay and long drawn out planes of intensity and slight but shattering ruptures of climax. Things newly spawned at each juncture. Hybrids and miscegenations and mutations, beautiful half-breeds and freaks, purity and finalized order really a death wish of the ignorant and afraid. Overwhelming kaleidoscopic becomings and recomings of food and sex.

Tubules, satyrs, striations, murmurings, the "ping" frog in the deep jungle a couple hours before dawn. Mating, eating, fucking, migrating, trading, swapping, frolicking, composing, dissolving, congealing. All "fixed" and "stable" towers of control become decentred, uncertain, disinformed by their very attempt to reassemble the clockwork organism and its spurious species, races, nations, roles. 

In this light, the embodiment of the soul and the tension caused by its separation from divinity was not a fall or an error but the sine qua non to stimulate the circulation of Eros. For only in the embodied soul, in its self-alienation and inversion, could the divine genuinely experience separation, and consequently, an eros for itself.

-- Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, Gregory Shaw

There is no fall but the autumn, drifting gently downwards to welcome sleep and dissolution and escape from the cold. God willed a mate and enabled Her to possess absolute freedom. His desire -- love and lust and something far beyond both, the stellar force and urge -- impelled Him to redeem the cosmos, a painful hunger for eventual and impossible unity, perfect bliss.



Yet, in the telling of Mater Matter, God himself is a toy. Nothing was willed that was not always already there. The cycle is only the process of the so-called Creator regaining his memory. Her eros is both constant and on the move. The circulation of souls is the inhalation and exhalation of the greater continuum.

"What planet in this?" It is all planets everywhere. Both open and closed, infinite and finite, plane and sphere, transcendent and immanent, fueled and charged by desire alone. The demiurge lost in the gaze of his own reflection, a pinwheel blown by winds that never were not.

Seeing himself [a Fairy] in my possession, thus he answer'd me:
"My master, I am yours! command me, for I must obey."

"Then tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead?"
He, laughing, answer'd: "I will write a book on leaves of flowers,
If you will feed me on love-thoughts & give me now and then
A cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so when I am tipsie,
I'll sing to you this soft lute, and shew you all alive
The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy."

-- "Europe: A Prophecy," -- William Blake  

The very elementals, fed from thoughts of love and the musings of poetry. Photosynthesis as erosynthesis. Now they have retreated, turned inward, burrowed and burrowing. They still wait patiently for someone with an offering, with an intention or a rite. Long centuries of waiting has affected certain changes both in outline and in attitude.



Those dustbunnies appearing mysteriously -- seemingly out of nowhere -- in the irregularly swept corners of train stations, some as big as hamsters, composed of insect legs, dandruff, congealed breath, lint, radiation, crumbs, morgellons fibres, electronic components, body hair, leaves, ragged q-tips, loneliness, world domination plots, condoms, tsunamis, skin cells, intoxication, broken dreams, smoke, aftertastes and coloured threads, are every one of them alive and sentient, witnesses to the joyless commuter parade.

Sprites and nixies in a former incarnation. Neglected and malformed by the Nothing, by the grey belief that the material world is dead.  

Let me feel the mud and the heavens in my lotus. Let me feel the heavy, silting, sucking mud, the spinning of sky winds. Let me feel them both in purest contact, the nakedness of sucking weight, nakedly passing radiance. Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don't give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. The immediate moment is not a drop of water running downstream. It is the source  and issue, the bubbling up of the stream. Here, in this very instant moment, up bubbles the stream of time, out of the wells of futurity, flowing on to the oceans of the past. The source, the issue, the creative quick.

-- Preface to the American Edition of New Poems (1920), D.H. Lawrence

With all this comes the humus-bed of new growth. At the tip of the spear, the allatonceness, the spring-fed well of the cave, the moment without bottom. From the mud and the shit and the cataclysm and the supernova, completely novel assemblages jump up naked for their time in the sun. Stories branch out from much older epics and sagas.



Ulysses telling of his final attempt to storm Mount Purgatory, sentenced thereafter to perpetual torment for his treachery and cunning within the deepest gyres of the Inferno. Closest to Satan's horned and icy schlong, but by grace reborn on the banks of the Liffey. Arthur springing from the courts of love, descendant of the child of Venus who brought the bough to the same dark halls, but now also awaiting return.

The inevitable conclusion is that the entire hierarchy of being (which includes the graded hierarchy of transcendence and immanence), when regarded as a display of the One, is equivalent to a kind of miraculous divine 'myth'. This 'myth', revealed in the form of the all-embracing and dynamic cosmic agalma (hieratic statue, image, shrine) is analogous to the obscuring power of maya which (in the Trika philosophy of Kashmir), though being an aspect of Parama Shiva, acts as a veil thrown over the supreme ineffable Principle.

-- Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity, Algis Uždavinys

The entire Neoplatonic hierarchy, the spectral palette of creation from form to matter, now Brunoized into a endless multi-centred chaosmos. Shiva blowing chillums and spouting Mother Ganga milk-jizm from the top of his head in every mote of dust floating and sparkling in the light of day. The veil of maya, the girdle of Aphrodite, the gilded prison, Penelope's woven shroud, is constructed entirely of perception.



Dulled eyes, stuffed ears, runny noses, scalded tongues, skin stretched and scraped and lotioned out of all sensitivity. Yet just one chapter in the ongoing myth. The reign of dullness and quantity. When mud is nothing other than mud. When perpetual accumulation is somehow figured in to mollify the primal and holy Lack. A Nemean Lion infinitely more ferocious and difficult to slay than filling up the Grand Canyon with broken and discarded TVs. Like trying to satisfy the hunger of a black hole. Like trying to open up Valhalla in the Preta World.

But the wind does not teach despair. There is music. There are colours. There is sunlight. There are absorbing wonders in every crevice and crossroad. Read the stories anew. The scents and emotions of other times and feelings still pass through pages, personalities pass through, and nobody yet knows how this happens. Ciphers, symbols, images, formulas, postures, songs, statues -- all emit rays invisible yet biological, whispering together, sometimes screaming. The veil is also the principle.

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of

-- The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson

Maximus of Tyre, Maximus the Neoplatonic philosopher, Maximus the homo maximus -- the man/woman that envelopes the All. Adam and Finn and Albion and Ymir and Pangu and Tiamat and Old Angel Midnight. But a One that is not one. Many eyes, multiple stamens and pistils fire great spoogy pollen clouds to blanket the fields, all endowed with sight, every speck in constant communication with the others.

Slide on down the rhizome tubes, each bend and twist takes us deeper into the ground, further into the past. Reverse evolution (although she never only moved in a "forward" direction anyway). Back to the juncture -- in scientific fable -- of when humanity branched off from the other higher primates. And then go deeper and older. To the fork in the road of mammal-becoming and bird-becoming, of vertebrates and invertebrates, of vegetable and mineral, of tangible and intangible.




And worm yer way back up. Take any route you like. Get lost in there. Emerge as amoeba, as cheetah, as scorpion, as slime mold, as diamond, as werewolf, as ant colony, as Richard the Third. Death is not the prerequisite for this journey. And the trip is not even necessary. What is the incredible and total vista from within of eyes watching eyes watching eyes watching eyes?

Those among us us who have been ordained priests believe that they have the power to summon up the real presence of gods, demons, angels, heroes and spirits. But such theurgy cannot be brought about without the order of the universe being disturbed in some way. When gods descend to the earth the sun or the moon hides for a short time from the sight of mortals.

-- The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Jan Potocki

Those priests and priestesses, in a more civilized era given the time to contemplate and observe outside the requirements of production, began to notice (very many centuries before our present quantum chapter) that their own imaginings became instantly reflected externally. "Began to notice" -- began to codify and reflect upon what was simply experience and embodied/ensouled existence for their archaic ancestors.

Theurgy is the knowledge and practice that rites and images are the keys to discovering and even manipulating the divinity of matter. The rhizomatic tendrils also extend upwards, to the subtle fire and to the super-lunar orbs and fields. An alchemy of ritual, of hues and shapes and movements and noises, attracting currents through likeness and seduction.



Internally becoming the calm pool around which the fay gather to gaze at their mirrorings. The gravity of eros finding a new conduit, thru the cardiac synthesizer, and affecting even the orbits of stars. The gods are shaken in their halls. Have the Hundred-Eyed Ones awoken again? Yog-sothoth. Beings pour in through the open silver gate.

Iamblichus plays with this subtle and prolific fire. His wisdom and warnings find their way into the texts of the Aeropagite, casting a theurgical glimmer on all subsequent Christian mysticism and eventually retreating into the mountain caverns of Spain, where the Alumbrados fused with radical Ismailis, heretical Kabbalists, gypsy crypto-Kali adherents and even pre-Roman autochthonic antinomians.

And this is the milieu that Polish author and adept, Jan Potocki, discovered there just before he -- terrified by his own werewolf-becoming -- shot himself in the head with a sanctified silver bullet. The very universe was disturbed.

 "But why all the vile rheum -- like r-h-e-u-m."

"I'm shitting out my educated Middlewest background for once and for all. It's a matter of catharsis where I say the most horrible thing I can think of -- Realize that, the most horrible dirty slimy awful niggardliest posture possible -- By the time I finish this book I'll be as pure as an angel, my dear. These great existential anarchists and terrorists so-called never even their own drippy fly mentioneth, dear -- They should poke sticks thru their shit and analyze that for social progress."

"But where'll all that shit get us?"

"Simply get rid of shit, really Jack."

-- Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac

And at another nexus point -- the Interzone of Tangier (the cavern passages extend under the Mediterranean to exits in opium dens, majoun parlors and tea houses) -- interplanetary agents also assemble. Peyotl to William James to Gertrude Stein to Paul Bowles to Burroughs to Kerouac and Ginsberg. This being only the mostly human lineage.

Analyzed shit. Floods of rectal mucus. Alimentary regimes, circulations and continua in full motion. Saxophone blowouts and assaults from the scorpion and crustacean overlords. And it is entirely about purgation. Post-yage jungle hangovers now transferred to the desert. Junk is Image. Image is Junk. Cut-up as cosmic insurrection. Splice the Word that has become co-opted by priestly hierarchies who are very aware that their trickery is not indefinite.

 

Bodhisattvas sent to Earth to prevent total psychic supernova. Agents on all sides, pedaling every variety of elixir, a worse swindle than the Pantheon Bar at the base of Mount Analogue, some leading to bliss and some to oblivion or worse. The CIA is only a trifle.

And Ti Jean shipped in right smack in the middle of it with his typing skills, excavating, spelunking-out word gems from piles of scraps of papers and used syringes, his own Mother devotion soon overriding all desire for novelty. But what about the anarchists who do mention their drippy flies?    

Deleuze does not mention Iamblichus in his account of the roots of expressionism, but Iamblichus's position, of all those in Neoplatonism, has perhaps the most proximity to Deleuze's own. For Iamblichus, the ritual practice of pagan theurgy, in which the material world is ordered so as to be rendered "fitting" for the divine, is not a constraining of the spiritual in the material, let alone a coercion of gods by humans. In fact, Iamblichus argues that theurgy is such a powerful form of cooperation and communion that it is not on the basis of contemplation (nous), but through theurgy itself that the soul returns to the One.

-- The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal, Joshua Ramey

Deleuze and Guattari, themselves students of Kerouac and Burroughs and Castaneda and Artaud and Lawrence and Virginia Woolf and Joyce, are relatively recent lovers of Hermetic wisdom. They draw sap from this lineage that does stretch back to Iamblichus, and further back to grandmaster Plato himself and, as Uždavinys documents, all the way back to the initiates of ancient Egypt and beyond. 

This is at once a marginal, underground counter-tradition and at the very core of both Eastern and Western official philosophy. It is simultaneously royal science and nomad science, reterritorializing and deterritorializing. 

Philosophy, in its essence, is theurgy. It is embodied and initiatic. It requires ordeals and sacrifices to Sophia, Mary and Kali-Ma. It stagnates and gums up when it concerns itself with opinion and the ratio, when like science it attempts to present the "objective," the general grey staleness that is common to every severed and over-coded part. 



Philosophy fractures the spectrum of perception when it limits itself to precise definition, to impeccable logic, to single-vision, to Euclidean abstraction, axioms and the grammar of reason. Instead, the love of this goddess is forever bound up with poetry, with metaphor and word games, with breath and feeling, with lived experience and struggle. 

We, dominated by the reign of quantity, think of these two as being sundered. The poets have already been expelled from the Republic, or at least mostly ignored, taken as entertainers rather than co-makers of the cosmos. And the "poets" themselves have also mostly forgotten this calling, as fallen as the "philosophers." Yet when these two brotherhoods/sisterhoods recombine -- the spiritual in the material -- the culture will be shaken and the gods will smile.  

Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth? These are the words of liars cowards collaborators traitors. Liars who want time for more lies. Cowards who can not face your "dogs" your " gooks" your "errand boys" your "human animals" with the truth. Collaborators with the Insect People with Vegetable People. With any people anywhere who offer you a body forever. To shit forever. For this you have sold out your sons. Sold the ground from unborn feet. Traitors to souls everywhere.

-- Nova Express, William S. Burroughs 

Through theurgy, then, -- through philosophy as poetry -- souls re-spiral back to the One. And what is stopping them? Surely it isn't possible that anything could stop them? This is true, but it is also true that at some point in the cycle -- the low point, the winter point, the dull point, our point -- the process becomes perceived as having stopped. 

The waste land stretches on to the horizon and it has been thus for as long as living memory. No knight has returned with the Grail. But as we find out in every fairy story -- from Dorothy's journey to Oz and onward -- the eternal reward has been right with us from the get go. "Once upon a time" already implies "happily ever after." If this is the case, what is preventing us from reassembling our perception, from rediscovering the "assemblage point"? 

Blockages, traitors, cowards, lies, collaborators. Vegetative and insectoid only in the sense that basic human warmth, basic mammalian warmth, seems absent in them. Men in Grey, cigar-puffing the petals of hour-flowers, who suck the heat out of any room, or at least temporarily blot it out. Thieves of time. Bodies forever, new stuff forever, youthful skin forever, poor counterfeits of what we already have in overflowing abundance. 



What truly is more rich, more generous than perception itself? The boards and syndicates con us in this way by manufacturing a false sense of Self. This is the foundational or bedrock lie. All other lies -- the State, capitalism, religion -- are scaffolded on top of this. 

The Self, naturally, is not everything (oh, but it is!) so naturally it experiences Lack (see David Loy). Whereas previously lack was perceived as being the bonds that bind all things together in dynamic harmony, now it is experienced as intolerable unfulfillment. Our own sense of self commands us to attempt to fill up the hole of our being. Once more, an impossible task. The trick that defeats this trick, however, is to let yourself go. Don't buy for a while. Don't consume. Don't trim yer toenails. 

The centre of control is located somewhere within. This is where the infernal King of the World radiates commands. All external archons and agencies ultimately take their orders from this central and hidden axis. 

There are the basic needs of the body that are usually relatively easy to meet (exempting the growing pockets of extreme poverty and misery that exist to keep the entire global system in fear), and there are the artificial "needs" manufactured by the conjurers of lack. And these later "needs" often block out the actual needs of the soul. 

It is this organized body, the body with organs, the body that shits with guilt, the body that clings on to existence in a schizophrenic split from the soul, that is the manipulated robot. Dead souls in a dead world. Killed from within, puppeteered from without.       

Thus, in contrast to Aristotle, Bruno does not believe matter receives its life from form. Form is not the only principle of the individual; soul is not the only life of the body. Rather an individual is alive because a form of the world soul has been contracted by matter. Matter is thus alive, and the entire universe is animated. All things are living in a univocal sense, and there is no longer a hierarchy of rational, animal, sensate, and insensate forms of being. Humans are not distinguished by their rational capacities but by the particular kinds of bodies they have -- the particular matter which has attracted and contracted the World Soul.

-- The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal, Joshua Ramey

Matter is expressed form, form is virtual matter. Lightning strikes from ground to cloud and from cloud to ground. All action happens between the poles and through them. The imaginative process by which we create the gods is the same process by which the gods create our world.

The ascent up and down through the hierarchy of being, in a further reiteration, is identical to the veil of maya. Its story is the story of myths. The soul, in its apparent experience of separation from God, is already swept up in this story. The "fall" only happens so that a "redemption" is possible. And this entire circling, spiraling erotic dance makes up the vast body of the World Soul.

Not an atom of it is not alive, not aware, not already positioned on every rung of the ladder of being. From every split second of perception springs the perfect projection of a world of sense onto the void and reenacts this story. The Good News. The eucatastrophe. Finnegans Wake. Seasons of bebop and seasons of free jazz. Bubbling up from the wells of futurity.



Heroes and demons and elementals and Olympians. All interchangeable, musical notes and scents and flashes of colour. Machinic mandalas of incandescent iconography. Every squirming, heaving, spurting, bleeding, blossoming Christ-synthesis, ripping apart and flailing with abandon, crazed animal conversation, a pole of shit and a pole of gold. 

In "I, Maximus of Gloucester" he seeks to respond instant by instant to the measure of the breath. The cycle from one turning of the sun to next, however, is the totality of time, as the literal, graspable earth is the totality of space. Maximus's measure is now what seems almost the breath or rhythm of the earth.

-- Charles Olson's Maximus, Don Byrd 

There is no transcendent only immanence, spans of time and space measured by breaths and paces. The tantric egg surrounding us, extending finitely in six directions, is the entirety. It shifts with the inflation and contraction of our lungs.

At very high altitudes, as in the Tibetan plateau, your vision pulses with blood. The heartbeat of the teeming multitude of animals, and the equivalent photosynthetic sap-rhythm of plants, feeds the very gamut of solar maximum and minimum, as Lawrence knew.

The radiance of the stars blood-vesseling towards us, as witnessed from the earthly perspective of our own within. The star is only its own light which, when reaching our eyes, is already inside of us. Our vision, through precisely these same filaments of light, reaches back to the stars grounding the charge, feeding the circuit. All powered by erotic engines, by love.

The writings of the "young Marx", first published in English only in 1959, clearly reveal the philosopher's Romantic roots. The central problem of capitalism is in its fostering of alienation. The worker is alienated from the process of production, from the fruits of his or her labour, from fellow workers, from the rest of nature, from his or her own self.



This analysis has been furthered during the second half of the last century. We are, primarily, alienated from our desires. We have, because of advertising, political propaganda, the stress of the daily grind, etc., lost our ability to even know what these desires are. D&G deepen this perspective greatly. What does it mean to be alienated from desire? What is desire? This post has explored these questions.

Desire is crucially the desire for becoming. For constant becoming. For a becoming that is fully immanent, but that perpetually transcends every category or classification it is placed within. It is sorcerous. The vile rheum. Only wizard poetry which feeds the sun, which transforms men into birds into jotuns into algae blooms, is sufficient to unblock these flows of desire.

Travel back in thought to the split of Hegel and Hölderlin -- let alone to that of Marx and Proudhon -- back to the branching of Goethe and Kleist, further back to the Kalevala and the Upanishads, to a time when the poets and the gods were not fully distinguishable from one another. Only through the imagination is there genuine liberation.

Olson, in his maximal bulk, fully realized this. Verse, coursing back along these same channels of sense and light, is projective. As in a film projector. As in at every instant reediting the movie of the world. Creating the radical and democratic cantos of the everyday. The song of the geological and the daily news, the galactic and the local. Reuniting Pangaea.    

But a naked man, a stranger, leaned on the gate
with his cloak over his arm, waiting to be asked in.
So I called him: Come in, if you will! --
He came in slowly, and sat down by the hearth.
I said to him: And what is your name? --
He looked at me without answer, but with such a loveliness
entered me, I smiled to myself, saying: He is God!
So he said: Hermes!
God is older than the sun and moon
and the eye cannot behold him
nor the voice describe him:
and still, this is the God Hermes, sitting by my hearth.

-- "Maximus," D.H. Lawrence

In Lawrence's Collected Poems, it no coincidence that this poem "Maximus" is immediately followed by "The Man of Tyre." Olson was his spiritual disciple.

Naked Hermes at our hearth. This electric deity flows through all of this. The messenger of the gods to humanity, the lightning bolt itself, the rainbow, the arrow of Eros. And also the vajra weapon. The pulsing vessel of flesh completing the circuit of Sun and Moon. Thoth and quicksilver. The principle deity of Stephen Dedalus and Jack Duluoz. The thrice-greatest inspiration of all prose and verse, and also trickster retrogradic magus of miscommunication and noise. We pray to Thee.

Burroughs in bed, Deleuze on the train, Olson on the toilet, Kerouac in the cracks of the day. Bodies without organs, waves and wombs without end, Molly Bloom's long succession of lovers, possessed by none, possessing all. Nothing remains dead. Just Zen shit.

In a universe of waves quel difference betwixt one wave & t'other? T s all the same wavehood & every little unlocatable electron is a Tathagata pouring electromagnetic gravitational light at the constant speed of light (which can be heard in the sound of silence) & so this endless radiation of mysterious radiance is merely the minutia magnificent endless Tathagata Womb manifesting itself multiply & so not at all, for, all things are no-things but if this bores you it's because you want bricks in your soup. Empty.

-- Old Angel Midnight, Jack Kerouac