by Xuk Shupe
I had a friend in
college who was doing research on the writings of schizophrenics. It was
amazing stuff– expelled straight from the communal sub-conscious.
Reading it was like staring out onto a vast quiet ocean of language and
symbols. There are connections between events that we cannot even begin
to fathom. Tripping, I could catch glimpses of these depths, but to gain
a full understanding, complete knowledge, you HAVE to be insane. Or maybe
it’s the reverse. If you can TRULY SEE, it will drive you mad. It’s
an old conceit in horror fiction, going back at least to Lovecraft, with
his achromatic nuclear chaos and his sanity-blasting ancient tomes.
The bibliography of the damned: The accursed “Necronomicon”
of the mad Arab Abd al-Azrad, the Comte d’Erlette’s rightfully
infamous “Cultes des Ghoules”, the terrible “Unausprechlichen
Kulten” by Friedrich Wilheim Von Jutz, may God have mercy upon his
soul. All fictional works created by Lovecraft, all supposedly detailing
the kind of primal messiness that terrified him– it is not surprising
that the figure that most haunted his fiction was the demon sultan Azathoth,
the writhing idiot god sitting at the center of creation, surrounded by
his insensate piping minions and blind servitors, unable to see or to
even comprehend what he creates or destroys– a twentieth century
atomic Demiurge, predating Hiroshima by twenty five years.
This is the horror Einstein was unable to face: God not only plays dice,
God IS the dice. This is the collapse of boundaries between discrete objects
and events, the realization that nothing IS, nothing EXISTS, but everything
is BECOMING and everything is CONNECTED. Those with ordered, rigid, minds
are rightly horrified by the idea, because it means that the word “is”
is meaningless. Complex events become intertwined in ways we cannot fathom.
The first atomic explosion at the Trinity, New Mexico: 33 degrees latitude.
The Kennedy assassination at the triple underpass: 33 degrees latitude.
The first mission to the moon launched from Cape Canaveral: 33 degrees
latitude. The presence of “The Catcher in the Rye” at the scenes
of both Kennedy assassinations, the Reagan assassination attempt, the
Lennon assassination, and the Henson assassination. Some attribute this
kind of synchronicity to active planning by aliens, or to the machinations
of the CIA or the Masons’ secret masters, the Illuminati (may humankind
curse their name forever). It’s not that simple. This sort of thing
is an integral part of creation– a manifestation of Azathoth (if
you assume it to be malignant), the mysterious poetry of the eternal Tao
(if you understand “it” for what “it” “is”).
There is the reality we perceive day to day, minute to minute, and then
there are the pelagic depths we float upon, bobbing like cork. And the
web of connection exists on all levels, from macro events like the Kennedy
assassination, to micro events like what I ate for lunch yesterday, or
which direction relative to true north a specific butterfly in Akron,
Ohio chooses to fly as it leaves its perch, a wild-flower upon which it
has rested for a moment, gathering its strength. The destruction wreaked
by the Taliban is crucial component of a centuries old ritual designed
to negatively influence my sex life. They are trying to get me to masturbate
less, those pig-dogs, and blasting those statues to rubble just might
do it, too, if I hadn’t taken the precaution, years ago, of ordering
all those pizzas. In Harper’s I read an account written by a fundamentalist
preacher. When he was a boy, he first learned to masturbate in a neighbor’s
barn. On the very next night, the barn was struck by lightning and burned
to the ground, because he masturbated there. He was absolutely right in
that respect; the two events were intimately connected. The only mistake
he made was attributing the fire to the wrath of Cotton Mather’s
Angry God‰. And he made the mistake of causality– the statements
“Lightning struck the barn because he first masturbated there,”
and “He first masturbated there because lightning was to strike the
barn” are both equally valid, equally correct. In his rigid, linear
thinking he was unable to see the truth, and now lives in constant fear
that people may be masturbating somewhere, because he does not understand
the Tao.
There are crucial nodes, intersections, knots in the web: the sacking
of Solomon’s Temple, the dissolution of the Knights Templar and the
burning of Jacques deMolay, the unleashing of Azathoth at Hiroshima, the
Kennedy / King / Lennon / Henson assassinations, the geometric correlation
between Lewinsky’s lips and Clinton’s glans penis, the exact
angle of insertion and depth of penetration (in inches and centimeters),
the pounds per square inch of pressure applied, the difference between
the ambient temperature and a humid ninety-eight-point-six degrees, the
viscosity of female saliva, the rate of absorption of ejaculate into cotton
fabric (weave count?) treated with a specific indol-derived blue dye (the
blowjob that rippled through time and space, eternally altering the fabric
of reality forever– the unfortunate extinction of the North Eastern
red-toed newt is now inevitable, and, in the past, a German commandant
feels the war weigh heavy upon him, and wonders if he will ever feel clean).
Any event that attracts the attention and imagination of thousands can
become such a node. The Kennedy assassination sits on the intersection
of so many strands that the event itself is obscured by them– it
is eternally unknowable. The fact that Kennedy is actually dead can only
be inferred from Jimi Hendrix’s performance at Woodstock, a slight
but statistically significant decrease in the number of suicides between
the years 1982 and 1987, the existence of “CoolWhip”, and the
patterns I see in broken glass on asphalt at night, reflecting light from
the streetlamps in a quiet plea for redemption.
Every body piercing done, by myself or by others, is done to complete
a ritual, what the final result will be centuries hence, I cannot say.
What transfiguration are we working towards? I shudder to imagine.
Do you understand now? How can you understand if you haven’t SEEN?
The ritual Sex/Death of John Denver (the phallic airplane in a tantric
union with the womb of the Pacific Ocean, recapitulating the primal theatre,
both pene/vagina and sperm/ovum) and the assassination of Jim Henson are
crucial events, directly causing the rise in popularity of such bands
as Korn and Limp Bizcuit, not to mention an increase in the per-capita
consumption of Mountain Dew.
Am I the only one who caught the symbolism at the end of “Star Wars”.
The sperm X-Wings attempting to penetrate the defenses of the giant ovum
Death Star (Kali– the destroyer of planets) and inseminate her? The
symbolic union of opposites, male and female, Rebel Alliance and Empire,
life and death, yin / yang. The explosion was the explosion of all possibility,
the birth of the universe, and the birth of unified consciousness–
the white light of Kundalini. You have to wonder about the effects that
giant, world wide, tantric ritual orgasm had on the evolution of human
consciousness. Everyone in all those movie theatres in every country of
the world was having sex, whether they knew it or not– the biggest
on-going psychic orgy ever.
One time when I was tripping on too much acid, I drank some orange juice
and spilled it down the front of my shirt. I cleaned myself up and threw
away the used paper towel. On it’s way into the trash, it STOPPED
DEAD IN THE AIR AND HUNG THERE, defying both sanity and gravity. There
was a sound like cellophane tearing, and in a flash I saw: 1) Every tree
that had ever been cut down to make a paper towel, the conversion of light
into Adenosine Tri-Phosphate in their chloroplasts, the conversion of
nutrients into cellulose, the cycling of water from the soil, up through
the xylem, and evaporating out the leaves into the atmosphere, the fixing
of nitrogen by the symbiotic fungi within their root hairs, the eco-community
of lichens, insects, small mammals, and birds contained with their branches.
2) All the men and women who worked cutting down trees, their families,
their hopes and dreams, their trucks, their nights out on the town, their
hangovers. 3) All the employees at the papermills, and all the machinery.
The people who pulped the wood, the people who maintained the machines,
the janitors who cleaned the bathrooms. Their families, and the communities
they lived in. The stores they spent their paychecks at, and the people
who could work there because of them. 4) The truck drivers who drove the
paper towels to the supermarkets. 5) All the people who worked at the
supermarkets selling paper towels. 6) The first person to look at a cloth
towel and say to themselves “Hmm. It would be much better if we made
these out of paper. Then we could just throw these out.” 7) The landfills
where paper towels sat slowly converting back into soil. All this information
hit my brain simultaneously, in the space of less than a second I saw
it ALL. I broke. It was all so ridiculous, so absurd, so horrifying that
all this actually went on, on a daily basis, that I was inconsolable for
three hours. I was filled with a deep sorrow the like of which I had never
known before, and I could not stop crying. Society exists solely so that
I can clean my face with a disposable paper product. This is the great
beast, the horror at the core of everything. To Mega Therion. I forget
the author, but I remember reading about a similar epiphany. He was a
British officer, WWI. He was shipping prosthetic limbs to the front lines,
for a battle that hadn’t even occurred yet. When the horror hit him–
he was transporting replacements for legs that hadn’t even been blown
off yet!– he was stricken for hours. And there’s nothing you
can do but press on. There’s nowhere else to go. This is the horror
that Colonel Kurtz ranted about, the darkness in “The Heart of Darkness”,
but no-one understood him. Existence, on an atomic level, is a terrible
thing. It– everything, all creation– should not be, and yet
it is. And that is the mystery that cannot be explained, only lived.
Well, I hope that makes
everything clearer.
