Metapsychosis

Journal of Consciousness, Literature, and Art

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 1

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Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 1
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Readers Underground: Spheres: Globes: Volume 2

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 1

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Feature Image: fdecomite, Eclipses [via Flickr, CC-BY]
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Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 1
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This is the first in series of conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, Volume 2: Globes.

We kick off the second round of our Spheres reading group, with our first conversation on Volume 2: Globes: Macrospherology.

In this session, we catch up and welcome a new member, discuss our plans for the reading and desired outcomes, and exploring the initial sections of the book:

Prologue: Intense Idyll
Introduction: Geometry in the Monstrous
Access: Anthropic Climate

Pages 13–151.

Participants:

Marco V Morelli
Geoffrey Edwards
TJ Williams
John Davis
Heather Fester

Recorded: 11/30/2017

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The Goddess as Active Listener (Parts 1-3)

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The Goddess as Active Listener (Parts 1-3)

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Feature Image: Tomb of Ramses VI, North Wall (detail)
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Editor’s Note: The full text of this work comes in ten parts, which we are releasing in three installments over three consecutive weeks. Here is Installment 1: Parts 1–3.
 
Tomb of Ramses VI, North Wall

Tomb of Ramses VI, North Wall

1

When I was first introduced to my wife, I told her that I had always missed her but had never realized it until we finally met. She was present as a kind of pregnant absence. I was aware on some alternate level of the self of a kind of negative space, like the shape of a missing puzzle part, to which her image corresponded, and into which it would one day lock to complete the predetermined structure. We might certainly wish that this process were more foolproof than it is, that so many things could not potentially go wrong, and yet, in its own wonderfully slipshod way, this tendency of linked fragments to reassemble themselves into an image sometimes takes us where we need to go.

Are we meant to have certain experiences, or to connect with certain people rather than with others? At a multidimensional intersection—at a 19th Century train station as designed by Giorgio de Chirico, let’s say, where the newly arriving and newly departed search for their respective tracks—it is possible to see how precarious forces constellate, not always to our advantage. Habit is not harmony. Safety is an illusion of the microcosm.

Listen, and I will whisper in your ear. Perhaps earth-shattering events happen every day around you, more or less invisibly, as you brush past in your haste to buy a donut. A catastrophe that occurred in 9800 BC is only just now informing you of the whereabouts of your heart. After so much time it has decided to return, again to advocate for its role as the seat of true intelligence. If you do not “stop the world,” for just a moment, to talk to the stranger standing next to you at the Pan Am luggage-belt, it could be that you have thrown away your one and only chance to meet that significant Other. A mutual friend may demand to introduce you to a soul mate, or else he or she may turn suddenly around a corner at the Museum of Modern Art, with a puzzled expression, to ask a pregnant question about Kandinsky. But where was the music of the occluded sphere hiding, and why did love’s messengers take so long to appear? No doubt you are bad.

The more romantic among us are used to thinking that there may be one true soul-mate for each person. It is less common to imagine that friends or teachers may also play their parts in this apparent drama of predestination. Perhaps the meeting with the teacher had all along been programmed by a bird at the Institute of Interplanetary Symbols. Each student of a good teacher might well view the meeting as a one of a kind event. Such interventions by the avian programmer most often have about them a great sense of “uncanniness”; the world has changed, and it is not possible to return to your earlier and simpler view of existence. The experience of transformation can go so deep that it forces you to invent a mythological cause. A kind of right to left reversal then alters your mode of vision. This mythological cause then becomes the origin of all of the wrong turns and disjunctions that led you to the teacher. You might ask, let’s say, “How do you know when a bird has scheduled a key meeting?” And I would answer, “It is enough that you would know. You would know because such a meeting should never have occurred at all.”

Where you first exclaimed “Aha!” and breathed a sigh of relief, you later are forced to read through the person to the presence just beyond, to a presence that you suspect might see your every flaw, to a presence still sympathetic but also more demanding. The seers of the World Maritime Empire had once given you a thread, before their lines of transmission were disrupted by a comet. This presence demands to know if you have taken care to preserve it. “Speak!” she says. “Is your thread in working order? Have any of its three strands started to come unwound?” The person hands you a copy of Par Lagerkvist’s The Sybil. The presence reaches into the center of your skull, where the pineal gland is located, massaging it in such a way that it almost stops your heart. The person reassures, but the presence regrets to inform you that all your nightmares must hatch out, that your mind is an unopened oyster, that no one seems to have bothered to teach you how to breathe, and that there are valid reasons for your enemies to hate you. Oh, and by the way, some two-thirds of what you take to be your good habits are a joke. The seers of the World Maritime Empire shake their heads. They had hoped for more, and they are unsure which mishap or mutilation should come next.

Perhaps the soul’s alignments can be best explained as just an accident of geography, but so often such accidents would appear to erupt on schedule. Do those special people remind you of someone in your past, or do they remind you, much more strangely, of themselves? When you encounter a person who is meant to be important to you, it can expose a need that, until then, you did not consciously know to exist. The ache that you felt but did not know that you felt becomes somehow pleasurable in becoming more acute. There is nowhere left to hide. There is no need to avoid the pain that has tied a knot in your solar plexus, a knot that is as inscrutable as it is essential to your being.

Yes, “mistakes were made,” as the hoard of your nameless accusers has suggested, although not quite in those words. By accident, no doubt, you have killed those persons whom you loved, those causes for which you vowed to give your life. This has led to some degree of paranoia. You have learned to assume the worst about those who have come to teach you. Why else should you be so terrified of the chanting that now streams from the horizon?

Your error was not the atrocity itself but rather your refusal to see the action clearly. “What do we have here?” a kind but terrifying presence asks, a slight smile on her lips. As a finger points to a wound, there is no reason to be embarrassed. A touch sets the healing sap in motion. One simple look communicates the lost history of an era, reversing the great wheel of devolution, and freeing you from the crimes of the last 52,000 years. Green buds open on the derelict branch. Hallucinatory blossoms are not long in arriving. Messengers bring fruit from a tree already old when the first Earth had contracted from a dream.

2

Head from Nepalese scroll, 17th Century

Of whom does the inner teacher remind us? Perhaps the outer teacher is a key to unlock the inner teacher’s door, beyond which breathes the most luminous of shadows. Demanding that the code of silence be removed, each synchronistic meeting is like a knock that echoes through the Hall of Records, that hall that our Antediluvian betters once built from the skull of Akasha. “Who is there?” asks one of the bird-headed eunuchs who attend to its every need. We are usually too busy talking to respond. And if we do put aside our distractions and take a moment to respond, we will probably say something stupid like, “Who is asking?”

This may be one of the key functions that good friends perform for each other. Our first meeting with such friends can be a shock, a slap to the face of our common sense, which shows us how things can make sense without having to make any sense. We are called to develop talents that we thought belonged to others. And, just as easily, the magnetic force that attracts two friends can later push them apart. If there were no parting, we might never gain the distance necessary to come to terms with their influence.

A good teacher is not a friend, as such. Unlike a good friend, a good teacher is never more than partially accessible, a moon of which we can only see the cusp, and yet, being gone, he/she is still capable of answering a question. If the inner teacher can justly be called “good,” this goodness may depend on us. We have only to redefine the meaning of the term. We have only to find some way to invoke this teacher’s presence, in such a way that our question can be posed, in such a way that the absent can answer, in such a way that student and teacher are speaking the same language. In a strange land, our lips must form the words of a song that we learned in childhood; this time around, however, its effect will not be innocent. This song may sound like the howling of a ghost; like the gasping of a city’s population, buried while alive; like the banging of a door in the blood-drenched beer-hall of the gods; like the whisper of the rivers of mercury in the tomb of the first Chin emperor.

Let us posit that the inner teacher is led by the hand of the preexistent one, that teacher as demanding as he/she is omniscient, whose influence is most often not seen nor heard but rather felt in the peculiarities of external circumstance. Is there any moment at which the teacher behind the teacher is not present? Yes and No. There are those who say that no good teacher would throw away his student, that cruelty is not love, that she would not leave him, cold and naked, with only a few well-worn platitudes to chew on. How absurd! There is a grammar to such silence, which the teacher expects the student to remember how to parse.

If the bird-headed eunuchs subject us to surveillance, if their wide eyes do not blink, if there is no way to escape from the life-pattern that they guard, the teacher may yet serve as an articulate ambassador. In pushing the student to come to terms with this life-pattern, the teacher may leave him with no choice but to rebel. There are few actions that will lead in a straight line. Threads can be cut without warning. Whole cultures can be ripped from their coasts. As intimate as the breath, as well-positioned as the tongue behind the teeth, the teacher subtly supports. To the dead student, this type of support is a mixed blessing. It may not, at first, be of use.

3
Omphalos

Fresco from the Temple of Isis, Pompei, 1st Century A.D.

Each of us starts life as a world center, indifferent to the laws of time and space, sure that our call will result in a response. At first, our solar plexuses have only a few shadows, like the cities on the sun. Our unconscious minds are as inhabited by symbols as an ocean is by fish. New sensory data float on the surface. We are everywhere, but in need of much.

Soon enough, we are shocked. We find, as we steadily expand the sphere of our discovery, that the world does not cooperate in affirming our self-image. Maddeningly, few recognize our age. There are theorists who dismiss our clearly audible demands as no more than mechanical reflexes. Q: “Does the young world center feel pain?” A: “No, of course not. He is only a pouch of biochemical intersections, whose random spurts of electricity cause him to make noise.” Donations from the maternal breast aside, perhaps there is something wrong here. It is not that others do not also come to kneel, or offer tribute, or express their joy and wonder. They do, but their actions are unpredictable. Colored toys revolve like intoxicated planets. When we dream of other lives, our hands no longer return with the objects that they clutch. It is necessary for light to fall on objects in order that we should see them, and it is more difficult to see at night than in the morning. Some whisper that we are “cute.” Doors open and close for no reason. A revolt is imminent, perhaps, and we note that, one by one, our caretakers have begun to disobey.

Earth is cold and wet. Life will kill you. It is probably better to keep the real story of your predestination hidden, even from yourself. Once consciousness was big. There was no fear. By sharing songs all species could communicate. Little art was needed to interpret the self-dramatizing image, the self-illuminating text. There was a mountain that rose from the bowels of the deep. To stand on it was to scan each period of history, like a landscape. The new body in which you find yourself is small. The mask that you wear cannot mediate between incompatible scales. After all, it is a mask. The bigger you get the less of your original face can be remembered.

As humans, we are not the puppets of the gods; no, we played a part in the creation of the world as well as all of the other bands of emanation. The human function goes as far back as the Bindu, as the primal point of origin, and then even possibly beyond. These bodies are the most recent version of an archetype. The human role remains the same; it is only its associated powers that may expand or contract.

You had come with a gift. It was not like any other gift, and there was no one else who could offer it to the world. It was not that you were special, as this word is normally understood; no, you were anonymous, and each person ever born had brought some particular gift, however much they may not have remembered what it was. This gift was not an object, at least not in the usual sense. It was an aboriginal totem on the move, a baroque feat of geometry, the fixation of one of the sub-powers of the zodiac, a kneeling of the wind before the wind, a monstrous prodigy of disinformation, the opening of a clean, well-lighted space, an offering from a child of the gods to the beyond; it was, in short, an individuated Uroboros, whose tale, from the first of days, was hidden in its mouth.

How strange that it took the form of a not-yet-spoken story. Already close to perfect, it went in search of a new audience. Such a gift could not be separated from your nature. It simply was, a matter of fact, beyond argument, and also was why you were here. There was a task to perform for which no one else was suitable. You should find some way to make a living, yes, but there were other, more complex obligations.

There was a task to perform for which no one else was suitable, or perhaps, for which no one else had been dumb enough to volunteer. Each year, the path back to the instructions in the seed would grow more and more circuitous. Not many of your goals would be achieved. That, too, is something that you would earlier have known. For obscure reasons, like the other 6 ½ billion people on the planet, you had picked this time and place. Leaps of imagination would be waiting to transport you, if and when they chose. This was not at all convenient. You could hear the ticking on an inner clock. This had led you to regard your more personal objectives as irrelevant, to the extent that you had the sanity to judge. It would have been so much easier not to care at all, not to sense the growing disturbance in your bones. There were many modern devices to which you could have turned.

To not have to see with your eyes: what a joy! To not have to hear with your ears: what a joy! You were broken, perhaps. There was some sort of a screw loose, or an extra piece or a piece that did not fit. Once, the spirits had collaborated in taking you apart. They had shown great skill. They were much less certain about putting you together. Was your vision accurate or was it not? That would be for good swimmers to say.

In the end, what luck was yours. What an influx from the dark side of the sun, where you had once, so pleasantly, had sex. You no longer had to depend upon your own imagination; there was no way to determine whose imagination it was. You could hear the ticking of an inner clock; the dead, with their long shadows, laughing; the Earth cracking along its geometric seams; the birds weeping; the plants of the Amazon shriveling up; the cities buzzing like white nuclear reactors; the gods getting drunk; the hedge fund managers jumping out of windows; the chiming of the eight-dimensional vimanas in the clouds; the zombies gnashing; the snails roaring; the oceans whispering as they plotted their long-delayed return. It would be useful to be able to figure out how to diagram a sentence. Some help would be offered, but not, of course, in a form that you were ready to accept.

Tales of a Venezuelan Expat: Dispatch #1 (Don’t cry for me, Argentina)

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Tales of a Venezuelan Expat: Dispatch #1 (Don’t cry for me, Argentina)

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Feature Image: Image via Time magazine article, "Inside Colombia and Venezuela's Border and Refugee Crisis" (published September 8, 2015)
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I’m lost in space. Lost. As it turns out the poets were right, you can’t go back home again. The Venezuela that raised me doesn’t exist anymore, that much everybody knows, but the situation got so unendurable that I’m finally aware of my limits. As it turns out I’m not an indestructible machine but a leaf floating in the wind, directionless and at the mercy of the gods.

I haven’t admitted to myself that I left my country for good. If you ask me, I’m on vacations, looking for business opportunities and establishing contact with likeminded people. Everyone I’ve met told me not to go back, to at least get some kind of legal documentation from another country, to spread my wings. They all want to talk about the crisis, most of them ask me for possible solutions I don’t have and look at me with understated pity. And I understand.

On one hand the stories you see on the media are way off and exaggerate some aspects of the whole. On the other, the situation is much more desperate and hopeless than reported. I equate it with watching a loved one go through a slow death, losing all of its faculties one by one, becoming a shadow of its former self. It’s incredibly sad and frustrating, what can you really do? If people from other nations knew just how deep an economy could sink…

As Kramer once said, “I’m out there, Jerry, and I’m loving every minute of it!” I’ve been thinking about leaving for a long time and here I am, loose in the world, out in the wild. I had to pull the trigger without a plan though. I’d been searching for prices and alternative ways to leave Venezuela, fantasized on doing it by bus, briefly considered a bicycle, I was just looking around aimlessly and a promotion for an airplane ticket to the exact place I wanted to go for almost half the price came up. I packed my bags and off to Córdoba, Argentina I went. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

I don’t feel comfortable discussing politics or economics, but I’ll say that every article I read about Venezuela’s situation, from both sides of the conflict, feels shallow and agenda driven. I wouldn’t even consider the opinion of an outsider that gets its information from the media, I’m talking about high level journalists that live inside the country. All of their analysis seems to be evading basic truths, facts, causes. They seem to ignore the macro, the big picture, and what a small but crucial dot in the grand chessboard Venezuela is.

Tightrope

There’s no way around it, I don’t have a safety net underneath anymore. I live on the tightrope now. There’s no room for error and every step counts. I have to stay on the right side of the law and don’t overstay my welcome in any country, I have to keep moving until my number comes up and I can present my case before a jury of my peers. Luckily, in this brave new world people can work on and through the Internet and not break any laws, but still, my situation is risky. Or it would be, if I had left Venezuela for good, which I haven’t.

The most pessimistic analysts fell short on their predictions, they imagined the future held an unmitigated disaster and we all got the fall of Atlantis. You’ve probably read about the merciless devaluation of the Bolívar, about the scarcity and the infinite lines of people begging to buy bread, about the four months of protests and the savage response they got. What you don’t know about are the brutalized faces, the denial, the resignation, the empty streets at eight o’clock, the desert it all became. Everyone left and now their parents are trying to sell their houses to follow them.

I seriously doubt they have a fate similar to Venezuela in store, but I arrived at an Argentina shaking with turmoil. The price of the Dollar raising by the minute, the public Universities on strike, protests in the streets every other day. Concern in the voices, stress on the faces, newspapers screaming bloody murder. And I feel like I’m in a resort. If people here knew just how awful the situation could get. If they knew how good they have it. If they knew how deep the sinkhole goes. I can’t express it in words, and when I try I sense nobody believes me, they think I’m exaggerating for dramatic purposes. It’s usually the other way around.

The other day I was in Buenos Aires, the city had me in a hurry and I got an Uber for the first time in my life. The driver was Venezuelan. He told me that he dreams of returning to the country every day. His mom is there. He was as puzzled as I was on a new law that came up that seems to prevent people abroad from sending money home, a law I still don’t understand and shouldn’t be discussing. Still, what could possibly be the reasoning behind something as nefarious as that? Dark entities lie in the shadows, creeping behind every corner.

Warehouse

We used to be very proud of our heritage but nowadays Venezuelans are the scorn of the earth. When our nation exported tourists with full wallets everybody received us with open arms, as migrants the scenario is a little different. And I understand. It’s too much, we’re too many, we’re everywhere. And we’ll do anything for half the price. We have nothing to lose and nowhere to go back to, so we have to make it happen.

I have to make it happen. Soon. I used to make fun of the social media pictures of recent migrants in supermarkets, so surprised by the variety of products offered in their destination that they felt compelled to immortalize the moment. I’m currently staying in a remote town in the mountains and my first visit to the local shop almost made me faint, I faked it and kept my cool but it was an experience. I’m near the edge of the world and there’s everything here, how can Venezuela be empty?

Before leaving, I kept the same job for several years. It’s hard to process that it allowed me to live by myself and eat out every other day, nowadays with that salary I couldn’t even take my girl out to dinner once. It effectively equates to two or three Dollars. If by some miracle I could afford the date, the food would probably be terrible. Money is so tight that the restaurant business is on the outs; and they have to make money somehow, so both quality and quantity have taken a hit. And if they used some imported product as an ingredient, forget it, that flavor is long gone.

One would think that those last few years in Venezuela would have taught me how to be poor, but I don’t have a clue. How do people do this? Work as a freelancer online is fleeting and the two clients I had put me on hold weeks before my escape. They both couldn’t afford to blog until their respective business picked up, what are the odds on that one? Also, they both used to pay me on Bitcoin and we all know how low that price is. I would love to work on a bar or as a waiter in a cheap restaurant, but the law doesn’t allow me to do it yet and I’m too old to break it.

I asked for my DNI appointment and they gave it to me for a year from now. Too many Venezuelans broke the system, a year ago the whole process took two or three months. I’m broke and my tourist status expires the first days of November, but I’m sure something will come up. My situation is not dire at all, I’m enjoying my holydays and nothing more. Don’t cry for me Argentina. And no, this article is not a cheap ploy to stir up sympathy and get some reader to offer me a job updating his or her company’s blog, how can you even suggest that? I still have my dignity.

The last time I set foot in Caracas it offered me a sad and creepy spectacle. It was a Saturday and a shopping mall I used to walk by frequently when I lived there was almost deserted, most of the shops were closed and only a few lost souls were there. The streets weren’t empty, but they weren’t exactly beaming with life, and the traffic was so light you might as well have been in a frontier town. And the faces, oh, the broken faces… As it turns out, Venezuela is an abandoned warehouse with barricaded doors and several leaks on the roof. There’s structural damage and the whole building could collapse any minute. And I can’t wait to get back in there.

Consuelos de Cocina

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Consuelos de Cocina

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Feature Image: Photo by Arthur Savary on Unsplash
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Hands of the dead here in my living hands
as I split stony squash with a crack of the blade,

scoop seeds, oil flesh for the fire—hands
of women and men in my hands, generations

repeating these gestures, the old pleasure
of sliding squash into fiery oven, testing

impatiently for tenderness—the first bite
that singes the tongue, the voluptuous

swallow whetting lust for another, for heat,
the gravity of a full warm belly, irradiating

bones of the face and chest as this fruity vegetable
deity becomes human flesh—

offspring of sun and hairy vine strung with leaves,
gives winter calor y sabor, consoles our doubt

our solitude, consuelos de muertos, de silencios
y dolores here in my kitchen this morning, gracias

for this dark Mexican mound, this creamy
piedra with its gold miracle turning

inside out, singing the blood of the living
and the dead, changing

hunger to praise.

–

Maia
Fall 2018

Notes: Cucurbita moschata, Butternut squash, is a native of Mexico
On the Spanish: articles in Spanish omitted deliberately for rhythmic simplicity
-Consuelos: consolations -Cocina: can mean kitchen, cuisine, cookery, cooking, stove/oven, and I mean all of them here -calor y sabor: heat and savor -consuelos de muertos: consolations of or from the dead -de silencios y dolores: of silences and the pains of yearning, grieving, missing -piedra: rock or stone

The Glory of Groove

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The Glory of Groove

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Feature Image: Liane Gabora, The Glory of Groove (view full image)
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Sidney woke to the distant sound of blissful sighs, and then sank back into a dream about a funky mama strutting her stuff to a groovy number, sporting a swanky frock with tiny pockets. Coins bounced out of the pockets as her hips swayed to and fro. Some coins landed and spun in time to the music. One by one they toppled over, except for one, a penny that was gyrating in a lopsided way because it was chipped. Instead of, “In God We Trust” it read, “In Groove We Trust”! The penny swerved, almost toppling, but kept going. Its Lincoln, who had a pierced nose, was nodding in time to the music. In a booming voice he said: “Keep spinning, Sidney, no matter how chipped you are. Glory to Groove!”

“Ahhhhhhh!” It was a ferocious, almost caveman-like moan of pleasure. Unmistakably Bruno. Coming from Alyzia’s room, which was next to hers.

Sidney crushed her pillow over her ears to muffle the sound.

But she had to pee.

On her way to the bathroom, a poignant high-pitched carnal cry emanated from behind Alyzia’s closed door.

Sidney slammed the bathroom door and peed. Peeing made her think about gravity, which made her think about gravitational lensing, the phenomenon wherein a large mass bends light as it travels from a distant object to an observer, potentially even blocking that distant object from view though it is in the observer’s line of sight. She imagined how, in Bruno’s mind, she was blocked out by Alyzia. And in Alyzia’s mind she was obscured by Bruno. She felt betrayed by them both. You’re not supposed to shift your interest from one person to her best friend. And the best friend isn’t supposed to go along with it. Especially when you live together!

She stared up at a paper maché mermaid hanging from the ceiling, trembling. There was a timid knock on the bathroom door.

“Sidney,” Alyzia called out softly.

Alyzia must have seen Bruno’s tattoo of the number tau, Sidney thought. She looked down at the tiny π engraved in the tender skin of her left breast, just above her heart. Should she show Alyzia the number pi on her own chest? That might make her stop and think.

More knocking. This time a little more urgent.

She couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever.

When Sidney opened the door, the first thing she saw was Bruno’s plaid shirt, inside out, on Alyzia’s small frame. Alyzia was sporting a strikingly pretty, disheveled, freshly-fucked look. Her face was flushed, and her long blonde curls were in disarray.

“Hi,” Alyzia said.

There was something in her voice that Sidney had never heard before. A note of guilt, or pity, or both. It was shocking to learn that Alyzia was capable of speaking like that, and doubly shocking she could speak that way to her. It was repulsive.

Sidney couldn’t go back to sleep. She put on her housecoat, lit a candle, and walked down the hardwood stairs, toward Olive, a mannequin at the front door with a styrofoam scalp and pimento-olives-on-toothpicks hairdo, the handiwork of Alyzia. Olive’s left arm was outstretched as if in greeting, but in the flickering candlelight both arms grew and shrank and shifted direction, as if in warning. Her heart pounded as she walked past Olive. She nestled herself in the paisley couch and thought back to the events in that room that had led to this moment.

Exactly one year later, the Sacred Scribe would describe this night for her listeners as her first real encounter with Groove.

π

Sidney kept finding herself looking up from the exams she was marking to catch glimpses of Bruno in a somewhat ridiculous frilly apron with images of floating frying pans splayed across it. She was sunk into a salmon-colored corduroy beanbag chair in the living room, which was partially separated from the kitchen by a waist-high partition. The house was run-down, with chipped paint and worn surfaces, but it held unexpected pleasures like stained glass panels above the windows. Curled up at her feet on the braided multicolor rug were Glimmer, a mostly white calico cat, and Inkling, an almost-black Bengal cat.

Sidney felt the beanbag chair smush into a different shape as Alyzia curled up next to her with a book. With Alyzia’s baby-fine, moon-colored curls rippling across Sidney’s shoulder, and the scent of Alyzia’s ylang ylang oil enveloping them like a bubble, the world seemed to soften. Boundaries melted, metaphorical meanings glimmered.

Raj was bundling newspapers and arranging sticks into a teepee in the fireplace. Once the fire was lit, he went over to investigate the stereo system, which was intermittently, and with varying degrees of distortion, playing ‘Water from a Grape Vine’ by William Orbit.

“Nice fire, Raj,” Alyzia said.

“Fire is primal,” Raj said, his eyes glinting like drops of maple syrup. “People have been hanging out around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years.”

Sidney stared into the fire and fantasized about cave people. A man and woman cuddled up together before a blazing fire, wrapped in furs, stars twinkling above, grateful for the plentitude of their little world. Og and Oga. Objectively they were ugly, but they beheld one another as the most exquisitely magical creation of the universe. Not that they treated each other like china. Og was a caveman, after all…

“Too bad we’re too cheap and too broke to buy electronics that actually work,” Raj said.

They laughed.

“Only a DJ would hear the difference between this stereo system and a thousand dollar one,” Bruno said. “The problem is that the music’s so languid it’s causing the speakers to melt.”

Sidney watched Bruno’s broad hands roll a lump of pastry dough. She was watching the pastry dough flatten so intently that she became it. It was her that Bruno was draping over the pie dish, her softly yielding to the touch of those capable knuckles with curly golden-red hairs.

The amplifier emitted an earsplitting screech. Sidney put her hands over her ears. The cats leaped in surprise and fled under the paisley chesterfield. The music stopped. Raj frowned.

“Sid, what do you make of this,” Alyzia said, looking up from her book. “It says: Without explicitly looking at it, focus your attention on his private parts and feel yourself to be a delicate flower that is waiting, living only in anticipation of the moment he will open you.”

“What are you reading, Al?” Raj asked. He was fiddling with the stereo system again. His dark skin had a golden gleam in the light of the now-blazing fire.

“A Girl’s Special Guide to Intimacy. Written in the 1950s. Banned due to scandalous content.”

Sunk in this primal cradle of warmth, with Alyzia’s clothing draped about her in filmy shadows, Sidney watched, entranced, as Bruno cut off the scraps of dough that hung around the edges of the pie plate. He carefully coaxed a mixture of rich, red loganberries into the waiting pie shells, and then placed the pies on the divider between the kitchen and living room. She remembered hearing that humans acquired red hair by breeding with Neanderthals, and that although most humans have only 2% Neanderthal DNA, some people have up to 4%. She suspected Bruno had closer to 4%.

The music came on.

“Success!” Raj said. He started dancing, hip-hop style.

Alyzia got up and joined him. Her multicolored scarf and long red skirt billowed as she swirled. Sidney missed being curled up with her, but she liked how her silhouette moved with hypnotic fluidity against the flickering reflection of firelight in the windowpanes.

“Hey Raj,” Bruno said, “how did your DJ gig go?”

“Incredible!” Raj said.

“Too bad you missed it, Bruno,” Sidney said. “Some colorful characters called in to talk on the air with Raj about life, religion, the groovy tunes he was playing…”

“We celebrated the glory of Groove, my friend,” Raj said.

“Aha!” Bruno exclaimed. “Some hungry devil has already dug into my pie. And it’s still raw!”

“The glory of Groove,” Alyzia said in a thoughtful voice. “You know, since ancient times music has been seen as a means of tuning into the divine—bringing it down to the human plane.”

“Raj,” Bruno called out, “Was it you who took a bite of my uncooked pie?”

The front door screeched open. “Hello!” Seung Gong said cheerily, peeling off a knapsack. He had large, kind eyes that sparkled appreciatively when he looked around the room and saw that everyone was there. Last year, shortly after he moved in with them, when he spoke virtually no English, one of the first things he said was “my family,” gesturing to everyone present.

“About time!” Bruno called out, looking up from the cheese he was grating.

“Very sorry to be late!” Seung Gong said earnestly. “Today was the deadline to finish our documentary. But now I cook.”

“I’m the cook tonight!” Bruno called out, looking up from the cheese he was grating. “I eat at you guys’ place so often I figure it’s the least I could do. You can boil the corn if you want. The rest is under control.”

“I don’t know about that,” Raj said. “The kitchen looks completely dysfunctional to me. Every nook and cranny of available counter space is stacked with dishes.”

“Dishfunctional you mean,” Bruno said, carefully tucking a layer of noodles into a lasagna pan. “Perhaps a tad. Sign of a good cook.”

“Come to think of it,” Sidney mused, “music isn’t the only groove worth glorifying. Deep down, everything is Groove.”

“…and Groove is God,” Bruno said, pouring a thick white mixture onto the lasagna.

“Groove works in mysterious ways,” Raj said, with a half-embarrassed, half-delighted smirk.

Sidney looked at the mountain of papers she had left to grade. “Could Groove and its devotees dampen their vibrations a bit so I could get some work done?” she said.

They were quiet for a while, until the smell of lasagna wafted through the house. The heat sensitive tiles above the stove were shimmering through a kaleidoscope of colors.

“I’ll set the table,” Raj said.

He went to the cupboard in the dining area—which was part of the L-shaped living room—and gathered some chipped, mismatched garage-sale dishes. He put the pink plate with a fading rose in the center in Sidney’s spot, since she once said she liked it, and put the vanilla-bean-colored pottery plate in the guest spot where Bruno would sit. Everyone else got square green glass plates that would have been considered modern in the 1970s.

“What are you writing, oh sacred scribe?” Alyzia asked.

“I’m grading cosmology exams.”

“The Sacred Scribe of Cosmic Vibe!” Bruno cried out. He bounded over to Sidney, kneeled before her, and kissed her toes. A hunk of white lasagna goop somehow landed on her ankle. She left it there and smiled beguilingly.

“We could have a radio show,” Raj suggested as he placed king-sized goblets on the dining table. “An inspirational hour with the Goddess of Groove, played by Al, and the Sacred Scribe of Cosmic Vibe, played by Sid.”

Sidney and Alyzia smiled at each other. Every nuance of expression had infinite meaning for the other. Sidney couldn’t have imagined someone so like her yet so unlike her.

“So God Almighty becomes Groove Almighty,” Alyzia said. “It has a ring to it. But what’s the point?”

“What’s the point?” Raj said. “I’ll tell you the point. If there’s something God-like in the universe it’s vibration, it’s Groove. Groove is a more appealing Almighty than God.

Alyzia danced over to the kitchen, picked up a cooked lasagna noodle from the counter, and started twirling it. Strands of blonde hair bounced as she mockingly swayed her head in time to the movement of the lasagna noodle. The motion made Sidney think of Alyzia’s love of words like ‘tendrils’ and ‘flourishes’.

“No really,” Raj said, “I think I’m on to something. After all, everything is vibration.” He touched the tine of a fork to a goblet and it went ‘ting’. He raised one eyebrow. “Everything we do touches everything else. The flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Kugluktuk can affect a hurricane in Africa. The vibration of your spinning lasagna noodle will reach the Pleiades one day. Right Sid?”

“There’s a glimmer of truth to that.” Sidney suddenly felt as if she were about to make a tiny wrong move that could set off a chain reaction of wrong moves.

“See? The Sacred Scribe is already providing scientific content for the show.”

“What does the Goddess of Groove do?” Alyzia asked.

“You read devotional passages replacing the word ‘God’ with ‘Groove’,” Raj said. “Science meets spirituality. It’s profane yet profound.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Sidney said.

“Maybe,” Alyzia said, “But wouldn’t it be fun?”

“Ugh!” Bruno cried out. “What’s that green stuff? You’ll ruin my masterpiece.”

“Stop, you fool,” Seung Gong said affectionately. “Yellow pepper is a most delicate, fragrant vegetable. It will barely taste at all.”

Sidney watched Seung Gong carefully cut a pepper into thin, circular cross-sectional slices, starting from one side of the pepper and working inward toward the stem, the place where the cross-section was Q-shaped. Then he cut away the stem and seeds, turning the Q into a U. It occurred to her that she had never seen a word with a Q but no U. It’s intriguing, she mused, how the letter Q is big and round and complete-looking, yet dependent on the letter U, which is hollow and empty, yet manages perfectly well without Q. She liked how Q and U combine to create an emergent sound that transcended the sounds of other letters.

“Come dance with me Sid,” Alyzia said.

“Dancing is sinful. Leads one astray off the narrow path of grooviness, you know.”

“No Sidney!” said Raj. “That’s the point. Everyone knows it’s not sinful to dance, or screw someone you’re not married to, or eat green eggs and ham on Sunday. Everyone knows the God thing is dead. Groove gives us something new to believe in.”

“Great heavenly father of Mary,” said Bruno raising his floury hands in feigned horror. “This may be cosmic truth, but it’s irreverent! Where are my rosary beads? Where is my bible?”

“The bible is just a story,” Raj said. His voice was intense, yet controlled and precise.

“What I would like to know,” Seung Gong said, “is who bites pie before it cooks? Sorry to change topic,” he added apologetically.

“No problem,” Bruno said, as he put the pies in the oven. “Your tangent struck a chord in me. Heh! Get it? Damn, I hate it when my brilliant moments of mathematical amusement fall dead on the ears of artsy fartsies like you guys.”

“Got it,” Sidney said, glancing at Bruno to savor the in-joke with him, but he was smiling at Alyzia. First fleeting moment of jealousy.

“Luke and Matthew just made the bible up!” Raj said. “Well, they didn’t make it all up. Some of it they copied from a now-missing document called Q.”

The letter Q again, thought Sidney. Great letter, actually. Reminiscent of a heart with an arrow through it, but less voluptuous, less vulnerable, without a cleft threatening to break it in two.

“Dinner ready!” Seung Gong announced.

“Groove is great, groove is good, let us thank it for this food,” Raj said, hip-hopping to the table.

Sidney looked down at her chipped pink dinner plate with the faded rose on it. It must have been around for decades. She imagined generations of children listening to their fathers say grace, looking at the gentle beauty of that plate and wondering how it was possible that a world with such a beautiful plate could be ruled by a harsh, vindictive God.

“You will see, Bruno, how good can the vegetables be!” Seung Gong exclaimed eagerly, placing the steaming lasagna on the table.

Bruno raised an eyebrow, and poured five glasses of wine.

“Here’s to Raj’s new DJ gig and the Glory of Groove!” Alyzia said.

They clinked glasses.

“This corn is, um, interesting,” Raj said.

“Corn, that’s the one vegetable I do like,” Bruno said. “I picked this corn myself.”

Alyzia bit in. A look of surprise spread across her face.

“What’s the matter?” Bruno said.

“It’s sort of, like, a pre-Columbian experience,” Alzyia said.

Bruno took a bite.

“A bit, um, woody, I admit,” he said. “It’s the kind of food that in order to really appreciate it you have to pin a lizard to your chest and sacrifice a virgin or two.”

They burst into laughter.

Sidney became aware of the almost-too-sweet aroma of loganberry pie. The aroma matched how she felt, with Bruno glancing over at her from across the table. Like a delicate flower waiting. But she also had a foreboding feeling that had to do with the effect men sometimes have on women, including herself. It was shockingly easy for a smart, together woman to become a satellite, to let her wavefunction flatten into a phony, two-dimensional roadkill of her former self. Right now her thesis demanded her total attention. Once she finished it she had the whole rest of her life to find a man if that’s what she wanted.

She was wearing a deep red blouse that brought compliments but the buttons opened a little too readily. She checked to make sure none of them had popped open. They hadn’t.

“And now,” Bruno said, proudly setting a golden-crusted masterpiece in the middle of the table, “I present you with the pinnacle of my culinary abilities.”

“Mmmm!” Alyzia said. “I love pie!”

“Me too,” Sidney said. “One of my favorite numbers.”

Bruno cut into the pie. Purple loganberries, warm and luscious and vulnerable in their translucent goo, spilled out. Sidney winced at this act of penetration. It occurred to her that the word ‘pie’ could be penetrated in such a way that it dished up not just her favorite number, pi, but also her second favorite number, e. And she realized: the fascinating thing about the letter Q is that it is caught in the act of being penetrated.

π

After dinner Sidney and Bruno cleaned up. She liked the streamlined way they worked as a team, but it seemed that as the kitchen got cleaner her life was getting messier.

“Maybe Raj is onto something with that Groove idea,” she said.

“Why would a radio station bother with a skit cooked up by freaks like us?” Bruno asked, raising one of his bushy orange eyebrows.

“Not any radio station. The university station where Raj works, on his late-night show. The people who listen to the radio at that hour need something to laugh at and believe in. To most of them God is probably a meaningless concept, but not Groove, the substrate of reality itself.”

“People who feel isolated could try sex,” Bruno suggested with a sheepish smirk.

Sidney was embarrassed that such a dumb comment made her blush. She dried the lasagna dish and put it in the cupboard. “Having sex might make them feel even more isolated if they’re not really connecting with each other.”

“They could get drunk first,” Bruno said. He looked at her intently.

He filled her half-empty goblet and held it out to her. She took it, almost dropping it. Her hands had gone clammy.

“I think we’re done,” he said, suddenly switching to a softer voice. “Let’s go to the living room.”

Everyone else had gone to bed but the fire was still ablaze. They sat on the couch.

“I never noticed your eyes before,” he said. “The right one is blue and the left one is kind of thundercloud grey, almost purple. Awesome!”

Sidney felt self-conscious about her weirdo eyes. Strands of espresso-colored hair fell across her pixie face. Strange how quickly her heart was beating. Her mind was fishing out memories of Bruno… telling some funny story so enthusiastically that he didn’t notice bits of egg salad falling from his sandwich… helping Raj fix his bike…

Hesitantly but tenderly, Bruno put his arms around her. A blaze of scintillation ran through her and she was suddenly aware of how hungry she was for human touch. He leaned back against the side of the couch and she leaned against him so that she was half-sitting, half-lying. His large nostrils seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the air in the vicinity of his nose, so she turned her face from his a little and looked into the fire. She listened to his steady breathing, feeling slightly awkward and slightly ecstatic at this newfound intimacy. She heard Raj shuffle to the bathroom. His bedroom was on the main floor. She wondered if he could hear them.

Bruno gently caressed her arm and shoulder. A log collapsed. Tangerine sparks flitted upward. Sidney’s heart fluttered; she felt disoriented. Bruno’s hand was above her left breast. She took his hand into her own, and sure enough it felt like the hand of a caveman: large and rough, but gentle. When Bruno started to release her hand, as if to continue exploring her, she tightened her grip on his. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go further, but the firelight was bright enough that he would see the π etched on her breast, and she felt self-conscious about Raj hearing them. She considered suggesting they go upstairs to her bedroom, but Bruno’s entire body was now perfectly still. Perhaps he was wary of crossing her boundaries, or perhaps there was some other reason. She was smitten with longing, but it was probably best to take things one step at a time.

In the middle of the night she awoke to a tremendous crackle from the fire. She was so startled she almost fell off the couch. There was reaching and clutching and the next thing she knew she was lying entangled with Bruno, her blouse mostly unbuttoned. She wished she had worn a camisole, or at least a more substantial bra, but it was too late. He was staring at the π just above her heart.

“Your favorite number!” he exclaimed. “Sid, that is so awesome. It’s an unusual tattoo, not just because it’s pi but… it couldn’t possibly be a birthmark shaped like pi, is it?”

“I feel exposed.”

“It’s beautiful.” He buttoned up her blouse and looking at her adoringly. “I should maybe go home,” he said hesitantly.

“I do have an important meeting with my PhD supervisor first thing in the morning.”

“Ok.” He kissed her softly. “I look forward to seeing you soon.”

It was so long since the last time she’d been kissed that it took her by surprise, and she didn’t kiss him back. But she liked the feel of his lips on hers. “Me too,” she said with a shy smile.

Bruno let himself out the front door as quietly as he could.

As Sidney walked upstairs she could still feel him and smell him. The dream she’d been having before they woke up came back to her. It was about the letter Q. She had seen that the tail of a Q isn’t necessarily long and pointed after all. It was like how, if you took one of those magnetic letter Qs that children put on the fridge and held it perpendicular to the light, the shadow it cast would be a straight line, though it itself is Q-shaped. Sidney now saw that the tail of one Q could be the shadow of another Q, each Q harboring the cue that leads to the next. Perhaps every Q is just the initial, relatively corporeal link in an endless chain of increasingly transcendent Qs.

It would have piQued her interest to know that she was the heroine of a story about the trials and tribulations of an alienated youth who finds meaning in a seemingly meaningless world by cultivating a personal relationship with Groove.

π

The Glory of Groove radio show rehearsals gave Sidney periodic breaks from the quantum level of reality, gave her a sense of purpose. The first thing she thought of every morning was whether or not there would be a rehearsal that evening. And if there was, the whole day sparkled.

But beneath the sparkle was tension. Bruno often put his strong arms around her, or took her hand in his, and it took her breath away to imagine making love to him. But in some indefinable way he seemed to be keeping her at bay. Whenever they were on the brink of feeling close, a veil would fall across his amber-green eyes, and he would say something clever and irrelevant, or caress her with startling rapidity, or clown around. It was driving her crazy. She shouldn’t be thinking so much about a man right now; she should be thinking about her thesis.

One evening Sidney was sitting on the porch working. She had a feeling Bruno would drop by. Sure enough, she looked up and saw Bruno walking toward the house. He sat down next to her, and the dilapidated sofa dipped to accommodate his stocky build. She braced herself so as not to fall onto him.

“You don’t look so happy, Sacred Scribe,” he said.

Sidney smiled wanly at the phrase ‘Sacred Scribe’. She shivered, and noticed that the afghan had fallen off. She didn’t want to pull it back around her because he might expect her to pull it up around both of them, and she wasn’t sure about what that might lead to. She had a feeling that this was supposed to be the night they would make love for the first time. But she was—for once—making progress on her thesis, and it was good to be on a roll.

“I think you’re great,” Bruno said, pulling her close.

“I think you’re great too. Although… I do have a lot on my plate right now,” Sidney faltered.

Bruno clearly registered this. Then he perked up. “I got a new tattoo. I think you’ll like it.” He lifted up his shirt and revealed a ד tattooed on his chest.

“Tau!” Sidney said, genuinely surprised and somewhat flattered. “In the same spot as my pi.”

Sidney had etched her π into her skin years ago with a razor blade. It had been both horrendously painful and stupendously satisfying.

“Tau equals two pi,” Sidney said thoughtfully. “Two pi’s together…”

She tried to read Bruno’s expression to see what significance this held for him. He was looking at her with a tenderness she had never encountered before.

She looked down at the π in the equation she’d been struggling with on her laptop. She realized with surprise that the equation looked like gibberish. She looked back to the preceding equation, and then the one before that, and she couldn’t make heads nor tails of them either. Then she remembered: she had to submit the first chapter of her Ph.D. thesis by the end of the week. Bruno had pulled her into a state of mind that was worlds away from the state of mind she needed to be in to write her thesis.

She and Bruno were no longer sitting snug against each other, though she hadn’t noticed him pull away. She was startled by how quickly he’d gone from friend to romantic possibility, imbued with significance. A feeling of certainty washed over her that she was at a bifurcation, a fork in the road, and if she took the wrong fork the consequences could be devastating. She thought of all the women throughout history who had sacrificed their interests, their career, their independence, for a man.

Suddenly Bruno stood up. “Well, don’t want to distract you,” he said, patting her on the knee.

Sidney opened her mouth to ask him to stay, but no words came out. She watched him stroll into the suburban blandscape, tingling with desire and a confused sense of regret. She tried to turn her attention back to her thesis. She was midway through the section on the ‘measurement effect’. It explained how the state of a quantum entity evolves as a superposition of many potential states, described by an equation called a wavefunction. But the instant it is observed, it collapses to one particular, definite state. A good thing about being single, she thought, is it’s easier to evolve as your own free wavefunction, to be yourself without getting collapsed into someone else’s conception of you.

So then why did she feel like she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life?

π

“Get down here, Scribe!” Raj called one Saturday morning. “We’re all waiting.”

Before the science-infused comedic spoof on religion had taken over their lives she’d cleaned her room every Saturday morning while listening to the ‘Quirks and Quarks’ science show on the radio. Now her bedroom was always a mess. Finally she found her Sacred Scribe gown. It didn’t matter how she looked for a radio show rehearsal, but she wouldn’t feel the part without it. Sapphire blue silk with a V-neckline and flowing sleeves. Alyzia had found it at a thrift shop. As she put on the gown her sins and follies seemed to drop away. Walking carefully down the staircase so as not to trip over the long robe, she saw Bruno laughing and gesturing, looking in full command. Her skin tingled when he looked up and saw her.

“Let’s get started!” Bruno said.

Sidney took her place on a tasseled cushion a few feet from the Goddess of Groove, who was on her own tasseled cushion, looking regal in red velvet.

“In ancient times,” Raj said in a deep, reverberating voice, “Music and dance were forms of worship, the earliest expressions of devotion to the Groove. Let us now pay tribute to this legacy with The Glory of Groove. Testimonial evidence reveals that this radio show guides the woebegone, the pilgrim on a rhythm quest, to cultivate a personal relationship with Groove.”

“Good morning devotees of the Groove!” Alyzia said, smiling at Sidney.

“Glory to Groove in the highest,” Sidney said, smiling back.

“Today’s reading is from The Tao of Groove,” Alyzia said, opening up a notebook adorned with dried flowers. “And Groove said: Let there be music. And there was music. And Groove said: Now let there be funky-ass music! And the people danced to the music, and all was groovy.”

“Well chosen, Goddess,” Sidney said enthusiastically. “That passage truly aligns the spirit with the will of Groove.”

“Sacred Scribe, please tell us: what is Groove from a scientific point of view?”

Sidney unfurled her hands in the air suggestively. “Well,” she said, “every massive object absorbs and emits a stream of virtual ‘gravitons’, the mass of which is determined by the ratio of absorption to emission…”

“Whoa,” Alyzia said. “Your gravitons are streaming ahead of mine. What are gravitons exactly?”

“They’re not like anything we know of. They act like waves until the instant they’re measured by bombarding them with another mass. Then suddenly they act like solid particles.”

“I get it,” said Bruno. He clasped his hands above his head and slithered goofily toward Sidney. “Now I’m a wave!”

“You look more like a sperm,” Raj said.

Bruno bumped into Sidney and looked up at her, beaming. “Now I’m a particle!”

“You boson,” Sidney said. “That’s ridiculous.”

Bruno turned around the other way. “Now I’m a wave again,” he said, slithering the other direction until he bumped into Alyzia.

Alyzia smiled. “Bruno this is a radio show,” she said. “No one would see that.”

He stood up authoritatively, put one foot on the stage, and leaned toward Alyzia. “Ring dingy ding,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Alyzia whispered.

“I’m testing your ability to improvise,” Bruno whispered back. “Goddess,” he said loudly, “Am I on the air?”

“A listener is calling in with a question,” Alyzia said. “Yes earthling, we hear you.”

Bruno gently took Alyzia’s microphone. “Could you tell me if there’s life on other planets?” he asked, and held the mic in front of Alyzia.

“That’s a question for the Sacred Scribe of Cosmic Vibe,” Alyzia said, passing the mic to Sidney.

“There is life out there,” Sidney said theatrically, “But it doesn’t need a planet to walk around on. It’s based in another dimension.”

“Marvelous!” Bruno said. “Is it benevolent?”

Sidney grinned. “Temperamental is a better word. Full of divine radiance, but prone to contamination and darkness. It’s very curious about us. It enters those who provide it with a portal.”

“What kind of portal?”

“An opening. A flaw. A vulnerability.”

Bruno smirked, almost imperceptibly. “Thank you Goddesses!” he said, and pretended to put down a phone. “Ok, let’s go back to the bit where Al talks about music.”

Sidney didn’t like being cast out of Bruno’s limelight. She played her expected role, casting forth pearls of scientific knowledge at the right moments, but her thoughts kept turning to him. The more he lured her in with his bodily magnetism, the more he seemed to barricade himself. Or was she imagining it?

“Seekers,” Alyzia was saying, “The time has come for us to return to more sanctified realms. Stay tuned next week when Swami Salami joins us to talk about… what was it, Swami?”

Bruno sat down next to Alyzia and looked her in the eye. “Tantric enlightenment and weapons of mass seduction,” he said.

“Right,” said Alyzia. “Until then, may Groove be with you.”

“Cut!” said Bruno with a flamboyant hand wave. “Good. Our listeners will be eternally grateful for the heightened communion with Groove reverberating through their bodies.”

“Swami Salami?” Raj said incredulously. “What was that about?”

Alyzia giggled and looked at Bruno. He winked back at her. Sidney cringed.

π

Over the next few weeks Raj started dropping hints on the air about something special he had in store for his listeners: ‘Groove is great. Groove’s our fix. Let us thank it for the mix!’

Sidney often worked late at the university, where she could get more done than at home. Sometimes she was there for Raj’s entire shift at the university radio station. They would drive home together in the pre-dawn hour.

“What was that you said on air?” she asked. “Groove’s our mix’…”

“You haven’t heard anything yet.” He slowed down as they approached the top of a hill, and the darkness was broken by an ethereal splendor of distant lights. “Groove is great. A smash sensation. Let us thank it for this radio station!”

Sidney managed a feeble smile. “Don’t give up your DJ gig to be a poet.”

Raj looked over at her with concern. “Hey, you doing ok?”

“Whad’ya mean?”

“Well… I wasn’t sure how you felt about Bruno and Alyzia flirting.”

“They were?” Sidney said, suddenly sitting up straight.

“I could have been imagining it,” Raj said.

Sidney frowned.

“I heard you together that night he made dinner at our place. And you didn’t seem so happy at the rehearsal.”

It occurred to Sidney that she’d never told Alyzia about that night. She’d never even told her she was interested in him. Usually they told each other everything. Alyzia had always admiringly ‘collapsed’ her into the archetype of a strong, independent woman, an archetype that wasn’t compatible with how vulnerable Bruno made her feel.

“Are you saying there’s something going on between them?”

“I may have jumped to conclusions,” Raj said quickly, glancing in his rear-view mirror.

They drove in awkward silence. The fluorescent lighting of new condos reflected eerily across the bay. Sidney thought about how little time she’d been spending at home, and how much Bruno liked to hang out there. Men are like electrons, she thought. If there’s only one slit for an electron to pass through, it just passes through the slit, no problem. But if there’s two or more possibilities the electron goes haywire. There’s no predicting what it will do.

π

The next rehearsal went badly. It felt staged and awkward. They kept starting from the beginning and everyone got irritable. Sidney made mistakes. She thought it was because she and Bruno hadn’t talked. They needed to clarify whether they were just friends or something more.

He seemed to have come to the same conclusion. They found themselves alone in the living room after the rehearsal, sitting on the makeshift stage.

“I sometimes think of cave people,” Sidney said. “Og and Oga. A couple.”

Bruno looked baffled.

“Are we… moving in the direction of becoming a couple?” she blurted.

Bruno looked down. “I thought you were avoiding me.”

Sidney’s pulse raced. “I thought you were avoiding me! And I’ve been super busy with my thesis.”

“That’s important.”

This was more painful than Sidney had imagined it would be. She put her hand on his.

“I gotta go,” he said suddenly, removing her hand.

It was the second time that Sidney was watching him walk away, wanting to run after him. If she’d done it the first time, everything would have been great. Now it was too late. Her heart ached. Could it have been her pushing him away? She laid her head in her hands and listened to the faint sizzle of the ailing sound system.

π

Sidney started arriving late to rehearsals, or skipping them entirely. It didn’t exactly make her feel groovy watching Bruno and Alyzia pretend not to fawn over each other. What hurt most was the soft voices they used with each other, the cherishing looks. No barricades.

The Groove rehearsals became stagnant. They argued about the theme song.

“How about that song by Delight, ‘Groove is in the heart’?” Alyzia suggested.

“Groove forbid!” Raj said. He blew on a small flame in the fireplace.

“‘Shake Your Groove Thing’ by Peaches and Herb?” Sidney suggested.

“I was thinking something with a gospel vibe,” Bruno said. “An occasional ‘Hallelujah’. Something devotional, powerful.”

“Yeah,” Raj said. “The Goddesses need to come across stronger. The kind of beings that snap their fingers and thunder roars and lightning bolts through the sky.”

“Gimme a break,” Alyzia said. She was sitting at the couch with newspaper spread across the table constructing something that looked like a paper maché groundhog with wings.

“What I mean,” Raj said, “is Sidney acts too cosmic. Spaced out. And Alyzia giggles and bats her eyes. You’re supposed to be Goddesses, above this petty world.”

Sidney flinched.

Bruno began to sing ‘Groove is in the heart’ and dance around the room in a silly manner. Except that he didn’t really know the words, so he was just singing “Doop dooby do be do doop be dooby dooby dooby ….”

Alyzia opened her mouth as if she were about to start singing along with him.

“For the love of Groove, shut the fuck up!” Sidney snapped. What right did they have to try to diffuse the tension when they were the ones who had caused it?

She wondered why she was hanging out watching her best friend and ex-almost-boyfriend flirt when she had a doctoral thesis to write. How had she ever had the nerve to consider herself a divine being when she was so full of jealousy and bitterness? Not to mention she had no acting experience whatsoever.

Thus, the Glory of Groove damped to a standstill before making it on the air.

π

A week later, Sidney was sitting on the front porch (the only place one could get some peace and quiet!) projecting observables onto eigenstates represented by self-adjoint operators on a Hilbert space, when through the open living room window she heard Raj say, “She can be prickly.”

“Prickly?” Seung Gong said.

“An irritable pain in the ass.”

She went inside. She could tell by the way they looked at her that they had been talking about her. The hairs on her arms stood on end. She felt prickly even to herself.

That evening, Alyzia waved Sidney into her room.

“Look at my latest lonely endeavor,” Alyzia said, holding up a seasoned pair of jeans newly adorned with a flourish of yellow rickrack.

Sidney didn’t feel like marveling, but the word ‘lonely’ caught her attention. She had assumed she was the only one feeling lonely. Had Alyzia been missing her too?

“The rickrack is great,” Sidney said, trying to sound cheerful but not pulling it off.

“I have some left over,” Alyzia said. “You can decorate your pants too.”

Sidney spotted Bruno’s argyle vest hanging over Alyzia’s chair.

“No thanks,” Sidney said.

π

Sidney picked up her guitar and started strumming it just loud enough to block out any lovemaking sounds that might make their way through the thin living room ceiling, but soft enough so as not to awaken Raj and Seung Gong. She was impressed by how expressively she was improvising despite playing so softly.

As she played, a feeling of grace descended upon her, and her thoughts began to coalesce. It began with glimpsing an understanding of Groove at an abstract level. Groove, she thought, incorporates the totality of all possible impressions of all possible things from all possible viewpoints.

Then a more personal understanding of Groove dawned upon her. Even if your best friends let you down and lose all interest in you, that doesn’t mean you’re crap, because they’re limited by their particular perspectives. Beyond all the ‘collapsed’ opinions and impressions of humans lies a universe of potential perspectives from which she—or anything else—could be seen. Having a personal relationship with Groove meant not relying too much on what other humans think but bathing in this infinitely rich reservoir of untapped vibrations, going through life knowing it’s there and feeling it in your heart. She’d heard this kind of message before, but now that she understood it in her own terms it didn’t seem so hokey.

Last came the most inexplicable part of the experience: a certainty that Groove loved her and believed in her.

There were tears in her eyes and a fledgling melody gasping itself into existence in her brain. While they were doing the rehearsals, she hadn’t had time to play the guitar. On a whim, she turned it upside down so that her left hand plucked the strings. She was, after all, left-handed. It sounded terrible because the strings were upside down. But it felt right.

Memories of Glory of Groove rehearsals permeated the living room and seeped their way into the slowly emerging melody. Though the unfamiliar string arrangement made her fingers fumble, playing the guitar left-handed put her into a state of mind in which she was composing music more poignant and authentic than anything she’d ever come up with before. It almost sounded as if it had been composed by a Sacred Scribe of Cosmic Vibe. Except for the lyrics, which were about a funky mama with coins spilling out of her pocket.

Addendum:

Sidney continued composing music all night long. You can hear the next song she composed here: https://soundcloud.com/liane-gabora/be-you-2018-09-28-1107-pm. (It’s on a piano, since unlike Sidney the author doesn’t play the guitar sung. It was recorded without a mic, with my untrained voice, using GarageBand, but hopefully sufficient to give a musical glimpse into the feeling that washed over Sidney that night.)

When she finished this second song, the first rays of dawn were streaming down on Olive, who, to Sidney’s surprise, was attired in Alyzia’s Goddess of Groove robe, and sported a new hairdo: marshmallows and raisins.

Sidney smiled. “May I still call you Olive?” she whispered.

 

The Face

By

The Face

By  | 
Feature Image: Drawing by author Ian Cumings
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As the face fell down through countless dimensions into timelines which were tighter and spaces which were more self-contained, it had a chance to see itself. One of its sparks was experiencing a highly heightened state of consciousness. The face was being pulled towards that moment. It was being summoned by the splintered version of itself. It was about to be revealed.

The face felt its age, somewhere between 30 and 35 years old. It saw how male it was. Rugged, sun-dried skin but attractive features. A bald head, sometimes by choice, sometimes by design, and dark, thick eyebrows above chaotic brown and hazel eyes. There was always a single piercing in the left earlobe. Whether it was utilized or not depended on the personality in charge of that specific lifetime. The nose was large but not out of place, wider than it was long and always a little skewed to the right side of the face. The nose fell down to the mustache which hugged the upper lip tightly and snuggly. It made a smile appear devious and a smirk appear obvious. The teeth were bright and distinct despite a lack of care. There was a space between the front two which added character where none was needed. The jaw was covered with a strong, masculine beard made of jet black hair. The face knew this area was there to be constantly groomed when deep thoughts or heavy contemplation occurred.

The most striking thing though was not the way the face looked but the way it stayed consistent throughout lifetimes and dimensions. Whether the face was inhabiting its highest self or squirming through its most minuscule life, the features remained similarly distinguished.

The splintered self had not been aware of this reality. In fact, his amnesia had been so complete that he believed that his own face was his and his alone. That it was not borrowed or part of a larger creature’s reality. But now, looking in his mirror, on a heroic dose of LSD, he saw the reality morph and his face became new and different while remaining exactly the same. He saw that the face was not his alone. Or, he saw that he was more than his face and that the bigger his awareness became the more his previous concept of selfhood diminished.

With each breath his awareness grew.

He climbed up the pathway that the face had created for him during its fall. He breathed and he climbed and he grew until he couldn’t see the face anymore. Instead, he was the face and the face was him. He acclimated himself to this new space, finding great power in the simple rise and fall of his breath. It was life.

With each breath in, a new creation. With each breath out, a new creation. The small space between breaths was transitionary.

A birth, a death. It didn’t matter. Nothing was lost, nothing was gained.

It was as it is.

He breathed.

Slower, quieter, stronger. Silence. Peace. Suddenly, he felt himself falling back down. He looked up and saw the face looking down at him. It got smaller as he fell. He reached his hand out but couldn’t touch it. It had disappeared.

As his high wore off, he fell through countless dimensions, slowly returning to his body. Upon landing, he lamented, breathing shallowly. He was stranded here, in this body, in this small space, in this little envelope of reality. He was himself again, splintered off, isolated, alone.

But he remembered.

He was but a breath, a simple creation of some greater existence. Nothing implied, nothing necessary, nothing required. Just a breath. As was the face. And is the face. And always will be the face.

Just a breath.

In. Out.

Up. Down.

Slow. Savor.

In. Out.

Candy Countdown

By

Candy Countdown

By  | 
Feature Image: Elevator, Old Post Office Pavilion by Steve Snodgrass. [CC]
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“I’m a character in a story.”

“Of course you are,” Daniel says, like that’s obvious.

“So I’m fictitious.”

“No.”

“Wait. I’m a real person?”

“Define real.”

“You bastard.”

“Is that a question?”

“Seriously, am I real?”

“You are to me.”

“I’m a real person, but I’m also a character in a story.”

“Exactly.”

The game is Candy Countdown, and I’m losing to Daniel. Candy Countdown is our private version of Twenty Questions. We’re at the Maria Negra, a run-down coffee shop on the unfashionable end of Avenida Allende, right next to the Tobogán subway station. They have decent coffee though, and it doesn’t get too busy, at least not in the daytime. We always find a table there, and it’s quiet enough to have a conversation.

Today, we’re sitting at a tiny table between the out-of-order jukebox and the out-of-tune piano. On the table, there is a small bowl filled with Galaxy Minstrels, the kind of candy you can always eat another piece of, no matter how many you have already had. Every time I ask Daniel a question about my assigned identity, he eats one of the Minstrels. If I find out who I am before the bowl is empty, I get to eat what’s left in the bowl. One time, we tried playing with Jelly Beans, but Daniel threw up before I got anywhere near finding out I was Zaphod Beeblebrox. We have stuck to Minstrels ever since. Right now, the bowl is half full, or half empty, depending on how you look at it.

“Am I famous?”

“As famous as it gets.”

“Would my parents know who I am?”

“Absolutely.”

“Am I alive?”

“No.”

“I am dead.”

“Yes.”

“Did I die a long time ago?”

“Not by cosmic standards.”

Daniel grins. He likes to show off.

“More than a thousand years ago?”

“Yes.”

“More than two thousand years ago?”

“No.”

“Did I live around the time Jesus Christ was born?”

“Yes.”

“Am I Jesus Christ?”

“No. Are you crazy?”

“You tell me.”

“You wish.”

“I’m a famous person who walked the earth two thousand years ago, and I am also a character in a story, but I’m not Jesus Christ.”

“That’s right.”

Daniel is munching Minstrels while I’m wasting precious questions reiterating what I already know. It isn’t much. I have no idea who I am, or what the story is. The level of Minstrels in the bowl is getting dangerously low, but I won’t go down without a fight.

“I don’t think I’ve read the story I’m in.”

“I know you have.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Just take my word for it.”

“Will it help me to find out about my profession?”

“No.”

Daniel reaches for the bowl and grabs a Minstrel.

“That was not a question,” I protest.

“It sounded like one to me.”

“I hate you.”

“It’s only a game,” Daniel says.

I know he doesn’t mean it, and he knows that I know. He really cares about this game. Paradoxically, he doesn’t like Minstrels very much. He’s not a candy person. But I love candy, and Daniel loves to see me suffer. There are now only three Minstrels left in the bowl.

“Did I live in the Middle East?”

“Yes.”

“Did I travel a lot?”

“Yes.”

“Did I know Jesus Christ?”

“Yes.”

Daniel eats the last Minstrel.

“Am I Joseph of Nazareth?”

“No more questions.”

Daniel points to the empty bowl.

“Seriously? You won’t tell me who I am?”

“That would be against the rules.”

“Since when do you care about the rules?”

“I do when it’s fun.”

It’s cold outside, but not as cold as I expected. I decide to walk home. I don’t like the subway anyway. I put my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. While I walk up Avenida Allende, I wrack my brain about my identity, but my thoughts are going round in circles. Without really knowing how I got there, I find myself in front of Dan’s Deli, one door down from where I live. It’s late, but Dan is still there. I go in to pick up a bottle of his homemade smoked chipotle sauce. It comes in three varieties: hot, hideous, and hellfire. I go for the hellfire. There is nothing in this world that fire won’t improve.

I fish for my key, let myself into the lobby, and check the mailbox. Today is Saturday. The mailman doesn’t come on weekends. I check the mailbox anyway. I always do. You never know. And sure enough, there is a little envelope. Somebody must have put it in the mailbox while I was out. There is no sender and no address. On the back of the envelope, there is some sort of logo—a pair of crossed hockey sticks, or tennis rackets, or bowling pins. I can’t really tell in the dimly lit hallway. It’s probably from one of the sports clubs in the neighborhood. It’s the kind of thing I tend to throw away unopened, but something about this envelope makes me curious. I tear it open. Inside, there is a little card, about three by four inches in size—larger than a credit card, but smaller than a postcard. On one side of the card, there is a message in an old-fashioned typeface. The message reads TAKE THE ELEVATOR. That’s all it says. The other side of the card is blank. I crumple up the envelope and throw it away, but I hold on to the card.

I never take the elevator, although my apartment is on the top floor. Taking the stairs is good exercise, and I don’t like the tiny car. I take the stairs. It’s a hundred steps in total, twenty steps for every floor. I count them out, like I always do. I unlock the door to my apartment and put the little card on the table. I heat up what is left of last night’s pasta casserole, fusilli with fried red onion and cherry tomatoes. I spice it up with a big splash of Dan’s hot sauce. It tastes much better than it did yesterday. I eat it standing up, right out of the pan. I wash the pan and go to bed, feeling very warm inside.

I’m in an elevator. How did I get here? The doors are closed, but the car isn’t moving. I reach for the OPEN DOOR button, but it isn’t there. There are only two buttons, shaped like arrows, one pointing up and one pointing down. That doesn’t make sense. These are the kinds of buttons you would normally find on the outside, in the lobby, to call the elevator. But inside the car? I haven’t taken an elevator in ages, but I could swear there are usually more than two buttons: one to open the door, one to close it, one for each floor, and one to call for help. I press the button with the arrow pointing up. The car jolts to a start. I can’t tell whether it is going up or down. It rumbles along for a while, and then it stops. The door opens with a menacing screech. Just as I am about to step out, the elevator dissolves around me. I’m back in my bed.

Did I dream it all? I guess I did.

But then I see the card on the table. I pick it up. It feels real.

TAKE THE ELEVATOR, it says.

Did I?

I call Daniel. He picks up on the first ring.

“I won’t tell you who you are.”

“That’s not why I’m calling.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m serious. Can we talk?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“I need to show you something.”

“What is it?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“I can’t wait to see it.”

“The Maria Negra, around three?”

“It’s a date.”

When I get to the Maria Negra, Daniel is already there, reading a battered paperback. There is an empty coffee cup on the table in front of him.

“Have you been waiting long?”

“I was early.”

“Any good?” I ask, pointing at the book.

“I just started. It’s too early to tell.”

“More coffee?”

“You read my mind.”

I signal the barista. Daniel closes the book and puts it on the table. The title is TRANSIT, spelt out in large red letters on a dark background. I can’t make out the author’s name.

I sit down across from Daniel and hand him the card.

“This is what you wanted to show me?”

“Yes. It was in mailbox when I got home last night.”

“Just like that? No address?”

“It was in an envelope, but there was no address.”

“A blank envelope?”

“It had a logo on it.”

“Do you still have the envelope?”

“No. I threw it out. I didn’t think it was important.”

“What did the logo look like?”

“I didn’t really get a good look at it.”

I try to draw the logo on a napkin, but it comes out looking like a bashed-up butterfly.

“That’s not really what it looked like.”

Daniel nods and examines the card very closely, front and back. I half expect him to bring out a magnifying glass.

“You said it came yesterday?”

“That’s when I found it.”

“Yesterday was Saturday.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you get mail on Saturdays?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Was there any other mail?”

“No.”

Our coffees arrive. Daniel drinks his down in one gulp. He takes another look at the
card.

“The typeface looks like Abbot Old Style.”

“I didn’t know that you knew anything about typesetting.”

“I’m not an expert. I could be wrong. I probably am.”

“What’s Abbot Old Style anyway?”

“It was popular in the Seventies. George Harrison used it on his album covers. I haven’t seen it in a long time though.”

Daniel pulls out his phone and taps the screen a few times, nodding to himself. “That’s what I thought.”

“What?”

“It’s not a standard font on any system. It looks like you can’t even buy it online.”

“So are you saying this thing could be old? As in decades old?”

“I doubt it. The card looks new, and the ink hasn’t faded.”

“Suppose someone had kept it under museum conditions?”

“Why would they?”

“I have no idea.”

Daniel hands the card back to me. I put it in the inside pocket of my coat.

“As you said, it’s probably nothing. I think you are seeing ghosts.”

“But somebody put it in my mailbox.”

“A kid’s prank maybe?”

“Too elaborate.”

“Why don’t you just take the elevator? See what happens?”

He’s right. How bad can it be? My neighbors take the elevator all the time.

I walk home and check the mailbox. It’s empty. I go to the elevator and press the call button. The door slides open. The car is already there, as if it had been waiting for me. I step inside. The elevator is even tinier than I remember it. The permit says it will hold up to ten people, but I don’t see how that could work. Unlike the elevator in my dream, this one has a panel with numbered buttons and a single-digit display. I press the number six button for my floor. The button lights up red, and the car starts to move. I keep my eyes trained on the display. It counts up, but it feels like the car is going down. When the display hits six, it flickers and jumps right back to one. The car stops and the door slides open. I am back in the lobby, facing the message board. A note is pinned to the board. I don’t think it was there before, but I’m not sure. I have lived in this building for five years, and I have never seen anything of interest on that board.

The note says HOLD ON TIGHT in what looks a lot like Abbot Old Style. But before I can go check it out, the door slams shut, and the car drops like the cable has been cut. The speed-up is so abrupt that I crash, head first, into the light fixture. I pass out. When I come around, I’m eye to eye with the key panel. Its dull red glow is the only source of light now. Apparently, I have knocked out both myself and the light above. I guess I should have held on tight. I have no idea how long I have been unconscious. The elevator is still moving, so it can’t have been long. Just as I try to get up, the car stops so abruptly that I fall right back down. The car must have hit the bottom of the shaft. The door slowly slides open. I scramble out. The door slams shut behind me.

I am on some sort of platform. It’s no more than five feet deep and about a hundred feet wide. There is a vaulted ceiling overhead, held up by a row of cast-iron columns. Beyond the platform, there is a single set of tracks. I had no idea my house had its own subway station. The tracks look dull, like no train has come through here in a long time. A timetable is bolted to one of the columns. There is only one entry:

SUNDAY SPECIAL—departs as needed.

The second I read this, the tunnel lights up and the platform starts to tremble. A sorry looking train pulls in. It consists of a rusty engine and a single passenger car. A door swings open. I wasn’t planning to take a trip, but what choice do I have? The elevator door is shut, and there is no button to bring it back.

I get on the train. I am the only passenger. The door slams shut and the train starts to move. It quickly gathers speed. I sit down by a window and look at my reflection in the glass. There is a cut on my forehead, and blood has run down the side of my face. I wipe it off with the sleeve of my coat. I take off the coat and use it as a cushion. I try to get some sleep, but I’m wide awake. I go to the door at the front of the car. Maybe I can get to the engine, talk to the driver, get some answers. But to my surprise, the door leads to another car. I could have sworn there was only one car. Then I see a crumpled-up coat lying on a seat by the window. I go to look at it. It’s my coat! I’m back in the car that I just left. How is that possible? I return to the door that I just went through, open it, and look over my shoulder. There is someone at the other end of the car. It takes me a second to realize that I am looking at the back of my own head. What is going on?

“Wake up,” I hear someone saying.

I’m back in my seat, feeling sleepy. A shortish man with a wild head of curly hair and some serious razor stubble is standing right in front of me. There is a smell of brandy on his breath. He’s in a conductor’s uniform that looks like it was made for a much bigger man. By contrast, his hat is so small that it’s almost swallowed by his curls. Something about him reminds me of Daniel, although he doesn’t look like Daniel at all. Daniel is tall and tidy, and he always smells like he just stepped out of the shower.

“Ticket please,” the conductor says.

Now what? I dig for the card in my coat and hand it to him. He nods and hands it back to me. He doesn’t seem to mind that it isn’t a proper ticket. I put it back into my pocket. “Have a good trip,” he says and tips his hat.

He disappears before I can ask him what kind of train this is, or where it is going. It’s pitch dark outside. I can’t tell whether we are in a tunnel or above ground. There are no stars. No moon either. No lights at all. What time is it? I have no idea how long I have been traveling, or how much further I have to go. It feels like the train is rolling down a ramp, or a long slope, taking me deeper into darkness. I go back to sleep.

When I wake up, the train has stopped. There is no sign of the conductor. I put on my coat and open the door. We are still underground, in a tunnel that isn’t much wider than the train. The air is very cold. I button up my coat and climb onto the narrow walkway that runs along the tunnel wall. I go to the front of the train. Apparently, we’ve come to the end of the line. There’s no more track ahead. On the wall, there is an arrow-shaped sign that reads HOTEL TERMINUS. It points to a recess in the wall. In the recess, there is a revolving door, all polished brass and frosted glass. It looks out of place in the grim tunnel. An ornate coat of arms is etched into the glass. It’s a pair of crossed keys with the teeth pointing up. I have seen it before somewhere. I wrack my brain trying to remember where it was. Of course! It looks just like the logo on the envelope that I threw away. It seems I’ve come to the right place without really meaning to, or knowing how I did it. I go through the door. Behind the door, there is a red curtain. I pull aside the curtain, and I’m in another world. It looks like a gentlemen’s club. Friendly flames are dancing in an open fireplace. The walls are lined with books. Newspapers in wooden holders are lined up on a marble-topped sideboard. A magazine is spread open on a coffee table, as if the reader had just been called away. In the middle of the room, there is a wooden reception desk, gently lit by a pair of floor lamps with honey-colored shades. I walk up to the desk. The tufted carpet swallows the sound of my steps.

A small man appears from the back office. He looks a lot like the conductor, but he is much more carefully groomed. His hair is cut short and his face is clean-shaven. He is wearing a white shirt, a silk tie, a dark suit, and a pair of polished lace-up leather shoes. “Welcome to the Terminus,” he says.

The badge on his lapel reads S. PETER. This is when it hits me. I am Simon Peter. The prince of the apostles. The rock of the church. The first pope. How did I not see this? I’m famous. I’m dead. I traveled with Jesus Christ. And I’m a character in the gospel.

“I’ve solved it!”

“Excuse me, Sir?”

“Never mind.”

“May I show you to your room, Sir?”

“Won’t I have to register?”

“Everything has been taken care of, Sir.”

“It has?”

“Follow me, Sir.”

He leads the way to a door off to the side of the lobby. It opens automatically as we approach. I take a peek inside. The floor is polished hardwood. The walls are covered in a lustrous orange weave. In one of the corners, there is an easy chair. Next to the chair, there is a low table. On the table, there is a little silver tray. On the tray, there is a snacksized pack of Minstrels, the kind you would find in a vending machine or a minibar.

“This looks very nice.”

“I’m glad you like it, Sir.”

“But where is the bed?”

Mr. Peter laughs. His teeth are very white.

“Oh, this is not your room, Sir. This is just the elevator to your floor.”

Now I laugh.

“I can’t afford this.” I gesticulate at the elevator. “Any of this.”

“Everything has been taken care of, Sir.”

“You keep saying that. It worries me.”

“It shouldn’t, Sir. Take a seat. Have a Minstrel. Relax.”

Mr. Peter sounds very persuasive. People in his line of work always do. I want to trust him, but I can’t help thinking that this trip will put me in debt for the rest of my life. This hotel looks like the kind of place that will charge you a fortune for every little thing.

“What about incidentals?”

“Everything is included in your rate, Sir.”

“I don’t get it. I haven’t even made a reservation.”

“Let’s just say it’s on the house, Sir.”

“Well, I guess it can’t hurt to take a look at the room.”

“I promise you won’t regret it, Sir.”

“How will I know when to get off?”

“The elevator will take you directly to your floor.”

“And when I get there, how will I find my room?”

“There is only one room on your floor. It’s a private floor.”

“How will I get into the room?”

“Just hold the keycard up to the doorknob, Sir.”

“Keycard? What keycard?”

“It was mailed to you I believe.”

I reach into my pocket and bring out the card that reads TAKE THE ELEVATOR.

“This thing?”

“That’s the one, Sir.”

I get into the elevator.

“Enjoy your stay, Sir.”

The door slides shut while I’m still wondering whether I should tip Mr. Peter, and what amount would be appropriate. Too late now. There is no OPEN DOOR button. There are no buttons here at all. I feel like I’ve stepped into one of Daniel’s paperbacks. I drop into the easy chair. It’s so comfortable I almost fall asleep again. But I don’t want to miss any of this. I open the pack of Minstrels and start eating them. The elevator accelerates swiftly, but smoothly. That’s what it must feel like to ride in a Rolls Royce. Just when I’m down to the last Minstrel, the elevator stops. The door slides open. I put the last Minstrel in my mouth, get up, and get out. I’m in a corridor that leads to a single door. I walk up to the door. The carpet here is even thicker than in the lobby. There is no lock on the door, but the doorknob is pulsing red. I take the card from my pocket and hold it up to the doorknob. Its color changes from red to green. I open the door.

Come Again

By

Come Again

By  | 
Feature Image: Why I Am a Christian, No author attribution.
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The visitor scrapes the dirt off his broken-down shoes, steps into the gleaming entrance hall, returns the usher’s smile. Unlike the usher, he keep his lips shut—understandably, if his teeth differ from the usher’s as much as his clothes do.

The usher gestures him into the sanctuary. He stops just inside the door, staring at the banks of seats, the spotlighted stage, the screens filled with the rapt faces of singers whose music, prodigiously amplified, pulses in his head, flutters in his empty stomach. “I will bring praise; no weapon formed against me shall remain…” People in the congregation sing and sway. The visitor remembers men standing and swaying to the chant of prayer in another time and place; the words were different, but the movement was much the same.

Another greeter smiles in his face, gestures him to a seat in the back row. For a while he looks down at his hands. Then he takes a deep breath and looks around him again.

The music has stopped. The screens show the preacher’s face. The preacher’s eyes shine like his teeth; his arms sweep out in a wide gesture of welcome. “Have you believed the lies of this world?” the preacher asks. “Have you let the Enemy establish a beachhead in your mind? Have you let him tell you that you’re no good, that you’re poor, that you’re sick, that you’ve done terrible things? Have you let Satan tell you that Jesus doesn’t want you? Well, let me tell you the truth. Jesus wants you. Jesus came for you.”

The congregation leans into the promise. The visitor remembers another crowd leaning in as though it were midwinter and the words were fire, their eyes full of the hunger which bites as deep as the hunger for bread. Leaning toward him.

“Maybe you’re thinking, ‘That’s easy for him to say. He’s a minister of the Word, he’s a righteous man, he’s got a nice house, a good life—how does he know what my life is like? How does he know Jesus wants me?’” The congregation waits eagerly for the answer.

“I know,” the preacher assures them. “I know, because I wasn’t always the man you see before you now. If you knew the way I grew up… Brothers and sisters, believe me, whatever you’ve been through, it’s no worse than that.”

The visitor rubs his right thumb over the scar on his left hand, focuses on the preacher’s words to keep the memories at bay.

“I’ve known poverty. I’ve known sin. Drinking, porn … you name it, I tried it. I was lost, friends, I was lost in the darkness. I was destroying my health, I was bankrupt, but worse than that: my soul was dark and hollow, and I was a stranger to God.”

The congregation listens as though this is the first time they have heard his account of how the preacher hit bottom, fell to his knees and asked Jesus into his heart. The visitor studies the preacher’s face as though trying to remember something.

“And he came to me. He came to me, and He filled my life, He filled it with blessings, just the way he promised in his precious Word. Do you know what it says there? It says that God has plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to prosper you. Friends, that word is for you, for every blessing you need in your life. If you open your life to the power of God, if you surrender to His precious will, He will shower you with blessings. When you let God into your heart, then the blessings come until your cup overflows, until you think you can’t take any more blessing—and still they come! When you let God arise, he scatters every enemy. No more sickness, no more poverty, no more sadness, no more pain. When you let God arise, then health comes, then joy comes, then prosperity comes. The path of the righteous gets brighter and brighter. God will give you the victory. God will give you the victory in everything.”

The congregation laughs, claps, shouts out loud. The visitor in the back row clutches his left side with his right hand. The wound there is old, should be healed, but sometimes the memories bring the pain back. Drops of sweat fall from his forehead to the carpet.

“Are you ready?” the preacher calls. “Are you ready to say yes to the blessing? Are you ready to say yes to God, to put your life in his hands and let him fill your cup with every good thing? Then stand with me and tell our Heavenly Father…”

The congregation rises like a wave. The visitor rocks back and forth like a piece of flotsam battered by the tide. Words tumble from his mouth in fragments: Father…this cup…your will…your hands…

The visitor edges toward the nearest aisle; the people he has to pass by let him through, wrinkling their noses as he passes. His stomach growls, and as the preacher’s voice rises in prayer he makes his way to the exit, head bowed.

He stands on the steps for a few minutes, watching two sparrows chasing each other through the branches of the hawthorn tree by the door. Slowly he lifts his hands. One of the sparrows perches on his crooked finger, turns a bright eye on him, flies away singing.

Later he sits at a long gray table, one in a crowd of shabbily dressed people eating macaroni and hot dogs from paper plates inside the Good Shepherd Soup Kitchen. He looks around at his fellow diners. No one looks back at him. Some bend over their food. Others look toward the TV screen on the wall.

“I thank God for finally sending us a President who truly values and protects Christians,” the man on the screen says. His compelling blue eyes stare directly at his listeners. “Our Lord Jesus Christ told us that the world would hate us because we bear His name. We see that every day, don’t we? Look at the violent Islamists massacring Christians for their faith. Look at the terrorists who hate America, who hate us just because we’re free, we’re Christian, we’re blessed by God…”

“Amen!” says one of the diners. The visitor looks at her snaggled teeth and hair, the cross pinned to her sweatshirt, the hunger in her eyes.

He looks back at the screen as the interviewer asks about the church people who criticize the President for turning away refugees.

“That simply isn’t a Bible issue,” the interviewee says. “A country has laws, a country has the duty to protect its own. That means not letting in people who want to kill us.”

The visitor no longer sees the speaker on the screen. The memories are on him again. Earlier memories, this time. His mother’s hand over his mouth as they creep out of the village in the dead of night, and again every time a patrol might be passing near them. The heat beating down, the hurt in his dry throat and empty gut, the long, long journey through the desert. And when they arrive… His father—at least, the man he always called father–asking directions, first in the language of the country they fled from, then, awkwardly, brokenly, in the language of the new land. People not answering. People laughing, a hard-edged laughter. People answering—he didn’t know their language then, but he understood You are not wanted . That is one of the first messages any child learns to understand, especially a child of refugees.

He was a small boy then; many people would say he was too young to remember. Nevertheless he remembers. He also remembers what anyone would say he should not, what he was not there to see, what they fled, what happened just after they escaped the village. The soldiers shouting; the women wailing; the children screaming briefly, then silenced; the soft thuds of bodies dropped in the dust; the silence among the living that followed the soldiers’ departure, broken occasionally by a curse, a prayer, a sob, then settling again like dust over the hopeless and the dead…
“Hey, what’s wrong with him?” a voice asks. “What’s he staring at?” He pulls himself out of the memories far enough to see the faces of his fellow diners turned toward him, far enough to see the fear that stirs behind the faces. Some of them are looking at his dark troubled eyes. Some are looking at his brown skin, long beard and hooked nose. “Hey, where are you from, anyway?” the first speaker asks. He doesn’t answer. “Has anyone heard him say anything?”

“Yeah, I was behind him in line. He said he was hungry. Said he didn’t want a hot dog. Wouldn’t say why. He had a funny accent.”

“Don’t you eat pork?”

“Where are you from?”

“I was a stranger…” he begins; bites the rest off.

“What kind of accent is that? What kind of stranger are you? What’re you here for, anyway?”

“This place is to feed Americans.”

That look in their eyes. He remembers that look. He pushes himself back from the table, walks away, leaving his food uneaten. They don’t follow him. Their voices do, and their fear. The servers don’t look at him; they are still busy scooping food onto plates for newer arrivals.

Most of the diners don’t look either; they keep their eyes down, their bodies curled around their own treasures and wounds. A woman with a beaky face and a tangle of grey hair fumbles in her jacket pocket until the pocket tears out. Coins ring and roll. Scraps of paper covered in spiky writing flutter in several directions; her attempts to grab them make eddies in the air that only push them further away.

He kneels beside her, catching the papers as they fall. A girl with dark makeup around her eyes and a dark bruise on her jaw crouches on the woman’s other side, raking coins together. The woman screams, a high tearing sound. “No!” she cries. “Those are mine!”

“I know,” he says. She darts a glance at him. Looks away. Looks back, steadying her eyes on his; takes a deep breath; doesn’t start screaming again.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. I’m sorry.” And to the well-dressed man hurrying over from the server’s line, “No, it’s all right. He’s helping. They’re both helping. I didn’t know.”

The girl bundles the coins back into the woman’s remaining pocket. The visitor holds the papers up to the woman in his cupped hands. She reaches down to take them. Leaves her hands in his while her breath comes deeper and slower. He feels something stirring inside him, something that comes from beyond him.

“You’ll be all right,” he says to her, knowing it for the truth.

She nods. “Will you be?”

He has no answer. He releases her hands gently, goes out the back door. Pauses to pick up a sheet of paper from the table by the door: The Daily Word, it says across the top. The woman at the table smiles encouragingly at him as he carries it out into the light.

The man from the television screen looks into his eyes from the paper. He reads the curly script under the photo: Hebrews 13:17. “Submit to your leaders and those in authority.”

“Listen, all of you, black or white or any other color. There’s no reason for you to be afraid of the police,” the message begins. The reader remembers other words like that: Have no fear of those who can kill the body… The words trail shadows, remembered fears. He shakes his head to clear it, looks back at the words on the page. “There’s a simple way to keep safe: OBEY. Follow God’s guidance. Submit to your leaders and those in authority. If a policeman tells you to do something, you do it. If they say freeze, you freeze. If they say lie down, you lie down. Obey. Don’t argue, whether or not you think they’re right—OBEY, as God commanded you. Remember Romans 13, the opening verses: Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except what God has established… He who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will not escape judgment… Authorities hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.”

The reader crumples the paper in his hand. He’s not seeing the printed words now, he’s seeing the images from his childhood: the bodies nailed to posts along the roadside as a warning from the authorities, a sign to strike terror into the hearts of would-be rebels.

He shakes his head. That was another country and another time, he tells himself. In this land, in this time, when the authorities kill they may leave the bodies lying in the road for hours, but they don’t stick them up beside the road for days. Well, they hardly need to, now that the images of the bodies can pass from screen to screen in an instant, so that everyone sees and remembers what they can do to you if…

The memories catch him, drag him forward. He is a man, not a boy, back in that other country. He is a man, but the guards treat him like a beast; they have taken his clothes away, they have blindfolded him, they are hitting him again and again. They are authorities. They say he has rebelled. This is the beginning of the judgment.

He clutches at his side again. Sits curled around the wound and also around that presence like a fire in his bones.

A shadow falls across him and he flinches. The woman standing over him flinches too, drops something on the ground in front of him—on purpose, he thinks it’s on purpose—and backs away. He looks at her: the fish with the name JESUS on her sweatshirt front, the shirt’s frayed neck, the kindness and the fear in her face. She turns and hurries down the street.

He picks up the thing she dropped, examines it. There’s a portrait of a bewigged man over the words ONE DOLLAR. He flips it over. There’s an eagle, a bunch of arrows, the emblems the armies of the occupiers used in his other country. But the inscription says IN GOD WE TRUST. He looks back and forth between the pictures and the words. To whom does this belong? Who does she think he is, that she has rendered it to him?

The back of the Daily Word sheet is printed with the addresses of local churches that support the soup kitchen. The church he went to earlier is there. So is another church on the same street as the soup kitchen—a church with an afternoon service.

He walks to that church. Music spills from an open door. He waits in the foyer until the music stops; goes in quietly and takes a seat in the back as people sit back down and the preacher stands to speak.

By the time he has quieted his memories she is well launched into her message. She wears white robes and gold earrings; she speaks eagerly and warmly.

“Don’t let anyone lay a burden on you,” she says. “Those problems you think you have? God has already taken them away. They’re not yours any more. All good things are yours through the power of Jesus.” She makes a sudden gesture of throwing down. “There is no burden for those who believe!” she says. “Jesus took it all on himself. Jesus took all the evil on himself, so all the good was left for us. Jesus was wounded so we could be healed! Jesus took on our poverty so we could have God’s rich abundance! Jesus became a curse so we could have the blessing! Jesus died so we could live!”

It is only in his mind, the visitor knows—or in their minds; the distinction is not absolute—that the people of the congregation answer Yes. Yes, the blessing is for us. Let the foreigners stay in their bloody hungry countries: the richness of this land is for us. Let the rebellious die in the streets: the protection is for us. Let the people who didn’t get the blessing go hungry; we will want for nothing. Let Jesus suffer and die. We are the living, we are the prosperous, we will inherit the earth.

The visitor unclenches his fist, tears his gaze away from the preacher, looks above her to the crimson curtain and the empty cross that hangs in front of it, waiting. He flinches, looks back down, shutting his teeth against the phantom pain.

But it’s not just his own pain that moves through him now. It’s the pain of the people around him, the strain under their smiles. Their desperation. Their certainty that the curse remains, that if they ever set aside their armor of insistent faith in being blessed, if they ever relax their conviction that they deserve more than the rest, it might lay hold of them. He remembers that fear as well from the other country and the other time.

He knew words for that. Woe to you rich… Give to the poor, and then come, follow me… Woe to you when all speak well of you… Take up your cross and follow me… My kingdom is not of this world… Have no fear of those who kill the body… Be not afraid… Perfect love drives out all fear… Love your neighbor…Love your enemy… I was a stranger and you welcomed me… Enter into the joy of your Lord…

These people in the church with him today have heard all those words over and over, they can’t really hear them any more. He remembers other words: If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

And yet, and yet…

He rises. The wound in his side is still throbbing, but the wind is blowing through him now, the light is shining. As their faces turn toward him, he opens his mouth to speak again.

grammatological monster

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grammatological monster

 
 
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grammatological monster

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Jef Safi, Toroidal trigonomorphosis of the centripetal illusion of Being through the n‑sphere of the centrifugal In-Between in-formation outlining a Vanishing-Line in the virtual lineaments of the Path (dào) half-opened by the Median Void (taìjítú) Breath (qì). [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

grammatological monster

 
 

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Author’s note

I was feeling restless one morning, and while meditating got the idea to experiment with writing a poem that would openly break with objective grammar and even semantic meaning. I was inspired by our recent Cosmos Café on Jean Gebser’s 1941 essay, “The Grammatical Mirror,” which argues that subtle changes in language are evidence of a mutation in consciousness which he calls the “integral.”

During the call, I noted that since the time of Gebser, our ‘grammatical mirror’ has exploded (while remaining mostly mentally fixated) but that we might ‘update’ Gebser by finding evidence of the post-postmodern (integral) now. This text (and accompanying audio) is meant to illustrate that point. This might also be an extreme example of the ‘crytopoetic’ style. It’s also fairly influenced by recent readings in Peter Sloterdijk (i.e., ‘spheropoetics’).

download

if
as
were
to a-
light
in fine-like
for lake eyes turn
resembles
collapsing string quartet

deliver in
sync per containeresque
tear,
listening;
medicine sliver
boy-
fawn, dell-hollers, crow in-signifies
bottles, little
why

wave sign equanimous
sole
crustaceous skull crack, climb
c-
sector nyne time(s)
three whales
softs
calamity
alive—caught—a lips, a part

()

find me a fin, ye fall sunlappers, cry all a fine liner thru Cancer arc continued, form kind stranger, find me! define if i will (cram the finer) slide black blue bellower Calypso eye field a fill to fall with in turning-bind, triple-helix (spiral-O) sorrows—

as, as

be find me, kind stranger. remind silver moonson: penumbra doll, armed siren, illiterate sage. turn turn a-little, bedeviled; lava so, kissed-over, tucked away

beloved

.

Performed by Marco V Morelli
Music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Ró (excerpt)

Interpreting Darren Aronofsky’s ‘mother!’

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Interpreting Darren Aronofsky’s ‘mother!’

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A series of writing and conversations exploring the many layers, folds, complexities, and intensities of director Darren Aronofsky’s disturbing tale of home invasion: mother!

interpreting mother! – conversation 2

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Interpreting Darren Aronofsky's 'mother!':

interpreting mother! – conversation 2

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Feature Image: Still image from Darren Aronofsky's 'mother!'
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There is a problem with the video, though the audio is fine. We are working on a fix. -Editor.

disparate minds meet to discuss Darren Aronfsky’s feature film, mother!

with: brigid burke, mark jabbour, marco v morelli, natalia anthony

recorded: june 13, 2018

see also:

interpreting mother! – convo 1

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Interpreting Darren Aronofsky's 'mother!':

interpreting mother! – convo 1

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disparate minds meet to discuss Darren Aronfsky’s feature film, mother!

with: jf martel, caroline savery, john davis, geoffrey edwards, and marco v morelli

recorded: may 12, 2018

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The Mythology of Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!”

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Interpreting Darren Aronofsky's 'mother!':

The Mythology of Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!”

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I first learned of Darren Aronofsky’s film “mother!” from a friend, who felt I should watch it because it was “heavy with symbolism,” yet warned me it was “very disturbing.” I’ve since heard a similar sentiment almost universally from anyone who has seen the film. The official synopsis scarcely hints at how deep the disturbance goes: “A couple’s relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence.”1https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5109784/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 None of the characters have names—the main character is Mother, her husband is only known as Him, and the couple who disrupts their tranquility in the early part of the film are only known as Man and Woman.

There are really two disruptions in this film. The first is by Man and Woman, whose appearance, early in the film, sets off a series of events that lead to a murder and a memorial service in the home. In the second part of the film, Mother gets pregnant, and her husband, Him, a poet who had been suffering from writer’s block, finally finishes and publishes his magnum opus. Cue the second disruption, as adoring fans appear on the couple’s doorstep just as they are about to have a romantic dinner celebrating his success. This new and even more bizarre series of events leads to more death, including all-out mayhem and even cannibalism, and ultimately the destruction of their home.

It is clear that the plot of the film is multi-layered. Critics have noted that the film’s events are more than just an extended pregnancy metaphor;2http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/mother-is-a-second-rate-self-aggrandizing-tour-de-force.html another reviewer called it a scathing attack on Christianity.3https://www.pluggedin.com/movie-reviews/mother-2017/ These observations only scratch the surface of a film highly packed with archetypal, mythological, and religious symbolism. One popular view is that this is a full-scale allegory of the entire Bible. This seems to be a popular reading of the symbolism, so let’s look at that idea before moving into the less apparent archetypal and mythological themes.

Biblical “Allegory”

If we view this as an extended retelling of the Bible, then Man and Woman are Adam and Eve, the crystallized “heart” in the husband’s study is the forbidden fruit, the fighting sons are Cain and Abel. We could see “Him” as the Creator, his writing as scripture, his newly-finished work that is “born” when his son is conceived as the New Testament, and the son as Jesus. There is even a scene with a flood at the end of the funeral scene that might be compared to the great flood of Genesis 7.

Still image from ‘mother!’

However, the parallels to the Bible are not as nice and neat as they appear on the surface. The cannibalized baby cannot be a true Jesus figure; he’s not old enough to have an important role. He is more like Freud’s totem sacrifice (discussed below). The character of Him is nothing like Yahweh in disposition—it is as though Aronofsky merges Yahweh and Jesus into that character, when they are very definite, separate personalities. The orgiastic violence of the revelers/worshippers may be a social commentary on religious followers, but it’s hardly Biblical in nature. Most importantly–the central presence of Mother is a problem if this is an allegory of a book that contains few references to any kind of creative female; you could make it fit, but it’s uncomfortable. After all, the film is “mother!” not “father!” This could be a film about a creative male, but Yahweh’s creation does not involve a female in any version of the story. One might argue that Mother’s relegation to the background by other characters in the movie makes her like Sophia, the “holy wisdom,” who was present at creation and venerated, but otherwise ignored. But Jennifer Lawrence’s character does not have the traits of a Sophia, either in the traditional or Gnostic versions of that female figure. It makes more sense to view her as an archetype of the Feminine.

Feminine Archetypes: The Great Container, the Anima, and the Terrible Mother

Erich Neumann describes an archetype as “not … any concrete image existing in space and time, but … an inward image at work in the human psyche.”4The Great Mother: an analysis of the archetype / by Erich Neumann. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1955], 3. Our stories, emotions, feelings, and beliefs are all tied up in archetypes, according to Jungian psychology. They are manifestations of our collective unconscious, and we only know them by their effects. Falling in love is one example of an archetype projecting itself; the person we fall in love with matches some internal ideal image, and often the real person has little to do with the qualities the lover projects onto him or her. When we see the beloved for who they “really” are, we may fall “out of love.” The archetypal image is always an ideal that cannot be reached, and we can never really “know” what it is.

The lead character in the film, played by Jennifer Lawrence, expresses all the main feminine archetypes—the positive and negative manifestations of the Mother, as well as the Anima, the female “soul” within a man. The feminine mother archetype represents both the beginning and the end, and is often represented as an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its tail. Neumann refers to this archetype as the Great Container, or Great Round, and says it represents undifferentiated consciousness.5 Neumann, 18. It is Adam and Eve before they ate the forbidden fruit; there is no difference between male and female in this womb-like state. While life as we know it takes place in space and time, and is experienced through differences, ending in death, the womb of the Mother archetype precedes this kind of awareness. According to archetypal psychology, the child is attached to the mother in early life, but develops its own identity and becomes an individual. However, a deep image of the mother remains and the male child will later encounter the Anima as the mysterious “woman” who is the source of his creativity, and will see this archetype in any woman he loves. The Anima has the power to make the man whole, by integrating the masculine and feminine sides of his being. However, a fear of the loss of ego or identity makes the man rebel against the Anima, fearing a return to the undifferentiated state, or emasculation. The man wishes to be a force in his own right, without feminine influence. Unfortunately for him this isn’t really possible, at least not in the world of archetypes; an imbalance occurs when the feminine is rejected. This can bring about a manifestation of the destructive feminine, or Terrible Mother, who can be both a protector and a killer, usually both at the same time. Think  of the mother bear who goes after a human messing with her cubs—that gives an idea of how the archetype can manifest.

Introvert/Extrovert: The House and the Marriage

The house is an important part of this film, and in psychoanalysis and dream work, the house generally represents the personality. Anything happening to the house in a dream is a reflection of a conflict or concern within the psyche—often a threat to the personality. In the film, Mother wants to keep the house as a quiet refuge for herself and Him. Her husband wants to bring in outsiders, and always without her consent. She is the introvert, he is the extrovert, and their characteristics line up with the traditional aspects of femininity and masculinity respectively. Though she is there, and has rebuilt his house that burned down, he claims early on to be inspired by Man, who is an intellectual and stirs ideas in him. When Mother tells him that she also loves his work, he says, “Yes, I know you do” rather dismissively. He is outward focused, interested in socializing and in exchanging ideas. He comes across as magnanimous, but in reality he is just narcissistic; all of these invaders are his adoring fans, and they feed his ego.

Still image from ‘mother!’

Mother is interested in keeping a protected, loving, and nurturing environment—and in keeping strangers out. However, she yields to Him when he opens their doors, albeit reluctantly. At the end of the first disruption, they have an argument—Him says to Mother, “I want to open this house and let others in. You are suffocating me in this place. Things don’t always happen the way you expect them to.” She responds by saying her life was not what she expected—he says he wants a child, but won’t have sex with her. He responds by passionately making love to her. This interim period represents the only true unity in the film, the only time masculine and feminine come together, in conflict and then in love.

Mythological Themes

Creation and Destruction: Sati (or Shakti)

The first major theme is that of creation and destruction—the end of the film is like the beginning (recall the ouroboros mentioned above), and the woman who lovingly builds the house is also the one who destroys it through immolation. This recalls the Indian myth of Sati, the wife of Siva. When Sati and Siva marry, her father does not approve, as he does not like that Siva is dirty, lives in the woods, and does not properly bow before him. Her father cuts her off from the family, and does not invite her to the yagna ritual (i.e., sacrifice to the gods). When she comes anyway he insults her and her husband. She responds by immolating herself; the grisly ritual called Sati that is now outlawed in India required a widow to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre in remembrance of this, as it is said Sati did this in her grief at insults to her husband. When Siva learns of his wife’s death, he begins a dance of destruction, destroying the earth.

Daksha-Yajna-Nasha (“destruction of Daksha’s sacrifice”), artist unknown

The immolation scene in the movie is about the offenses of Him, rather than a response to anyone offending Him. This leads us to the next theme.

The Athena Syndrome: Ajax of Telamon

The next theme is expressed in Greek mythology through the story of Ajax of Telamon. This Ajax, also known as “Ajax the Greater,” was one of the great Trojan War heroes of the Iliad. When the hero Achilles dies, there are contests at his funeral, and the prizes are his personal possessions. When Ajax competes with Odysseus for Achilles’ armor, it is awarded to Odysseus. Ajax is furious, as he does not regard Odysseus as a “real” warrior; he feels Odysseus’ success comes through manipulation and cunning. As a result, he vows to torture and kill the Achaean (Greek) leaders. However, the goddess Athena intervenes, and causes him to kill a bunch of cattle instead. When Ajax realizes what he has done—and that the Achaean generals discovered his intentions—he falls on his sword and kills himself.

Antonio Zanchi (1631-1722), The Death of Ajax

It may not be obvious what this has to do with the film; however, Sophocles gives us a hint in the play entitled “Ajax.” When the characters in the play fear that Ajax has done the worst by killing himself, a messenger appears, explaining that Ajax brought doom upon himself by refusing Athena’s help on the battlefield. Athena is associated with fairness and justice, so it is jarring to see her deluding and manipulating Ajax in the first scene. Athena is the “anima” aspect of the warrior, and the real source of his success and strength. Athena battles the god of war, Ares, in a scene in the Iliad. She beats him so severely that he goes to their father, Zeus, and asks him to “restrain his crazy daughter.” By rejecting her help, Ajax puts his ego before his Anima; he is “better” than the goddess, and this is an act of hubris (pride). Thus, Athena becomes the Terrible Mother: no act of hubris in Greek myth goes unpunished, and neither does the metaphorical equivalent in this film. It is the out-of-control ego of Him that makes him dismiss his wife’s gifts in favor of the adulation of all these strangers who make him into a god, and they are all immolated as a result.

The Appearance of Man and Woman: Xenia and the story of Penelope

If Aronofsky is critiquing traditional religious ideas and values in this film, then he starts with a very old one: xenia, or guest-friendship. This is one of the core values of the ancient Greeks—a guest seeking shelter is invited in and showered with hospitality. Penelope in the Odyssey is the ultimate female embodiment of xenia; she puts up with the suitors when her husband doesn’t return home, even though they have taken over and are eating up all their resources. In fact, the chaos of Odysseus’ household might have a parallel in this film, when strangers enter the house without any respect or concern for those living there. The ideal is for the host to treat the guest well in spite of their behavior, and disorderly guests are punished by the gods. In the film, Mother is doing her duty, but it is Him who appears to be the hospitable one. She is not a Penelope; she is more than ready to eject the unruly guests when they are out of line, though it is clear she is too weak to do so. Woman’s response is clear—you (i.e., Mother) want us out, but Him does not. Him is in charge. Mother is constantly made to feel she is a bad hostess, and Woman goes as far as to say she has no feelings because she has no children. Hospitality is tied up with nurturing.

However, xenia and gift-giving are not always selfless acts, and this is the critique of the film. Him invites people in—perhaps at first because he longs for male company, but in the later part of the film it is because his ego has become gorged on the deity-like admiration of the invaders. In the same way that people may obsess over how many “likes” they have on social media, Him has entirely given up his authentic self in favor of pleasing the crowd. There is a sense of power that comes with this adulation.

Louis-Vincent-Leon Palliere, The Slaughter of the Suitors by Odysseus and Telemachus, 1812

The instructive Greek mythical scene that comes to mind is the embassy to Achilles in the Iliad. The Iliad starts with the “rage of Achilles,” who withdraws his troops and support when he is betrayed by Agamemnon. When the Achaean army is badly pummeled, Agamemnon sends Odysseus and several others with gifts and promises of marriage to Agamemnon’s daughter to Achilles if he would accept Agamemnon’s apology and return as a comrade. Achilles will have none of it. Why not? “Go back and proclaim to him all that I tell you, openly, so other Achaians may turn against him in anger if he hopes yet one more time to swindle some other Danaan, wrapped as he is forever in shamelessness…”6The Iliad / by Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 226. While it appears that Agamemnon is being humble, he is in fact putting Achilles in a position of obligation. By accepting gifts, Agamemnon now has a kind of power over Achilles, and if Achilles is a decent person, he will accept his obligations. Achilles will not allow Agamemnon to manipulate him. In the film, hospitality is extended to Man and Woman, and they dutifully behave in a worshipful fashion toward their host.

There is a side commentary here on the “famous” person. Often when someone is famous, fans feel that they are “owed” something; their devotion justifies crossing private boundaries. Often celebrities with newfound fame go to ridiculous excesses to gain adulation, but soon realize that they have no privacy as paparazzi and other invaders feel perfectly free to invade their personal boundaries once the gates are opened. The lust for ego gratification and social power has a destructive price.

The Battling Sons: Seven Against Thebes

When Mother and Him are on the point of ejecting Man and Woman from the house, the Older Son and Younger Son rush into the house; these are the children of Man and Woman. Apparently Man has changed his will in such a way that Older Son loses out, and he is furious. Arguing ensues, and then Older Son fights with Younger Son, killing him in the process. The pooled blood leaves a mark on the floor that looks like a vulva, or a heart. The battle between brothers for succession is the last tragic part of the Oedipus myth. Freud’s Oedipus Complex is built on the notion that young boys want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. This is interpreted by Otto Rank as a fantasy manifestation of the special or Divine Child—the father is threatened and tries to do away with the son, but the son survives and goes back to challenge the father.7The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings / by Otto Rank. Edited by Philip Freund. New York: Vintage Books, 1964. This is one of the basic elements of Campbell’s “monomyth,” the journey of the hero. But this is not heroic; the chaos that ensues after it is discovered that Oedipus has indeed killed his father and married his mother is a better parallel to the film—the battle between Eteocles and Polynices, the sons of Oedipus, for succession, in a myth known as the Seven Against Thebes.  Oedipus curses both of his sons and they die in battle. While this does not precisely mirror the events of the film, the narrative of the battling brothers for succession is a clear motif.

On a related note, the funerary oration for the dead son is almost grotesque in its lack of authenticity. This may be a commentary on the artificial way in which we cope with grief as a society, and a critique of the idea of unconditional love in the family. The reality is that most families are “broken” somewhere, and often we see the cracks in the façade of unity when money or succession is involved—usually when someone dies.

The Bacchanal: Dionysus and Jesus

We finally come to the latter part of the movie, the most disturbing and horrifying. There are large groups of “devotees” of Him, the newly successful author, and all of their actions suggest they have come to worship him—they tell him they have come from a long way to see him. Rather than respect his pregnant wife and their planned intimate evening, the throng ends up invading the house, and a festival of blood, sex, and violence ensues. Him revels in all the attention, even as his horrified wife tries to unsuccessfully maintain boundaries in the house. The combination of religious fervor and violence is reminiscent of a Bacchanal, the orgiastic celebration of the god Dionysus (or Bacchus). Bacchanals featured gratuitous sex, drinking, dancing, and the tearing of animals from limb to limb, in addition to general disorderliness.

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrik van Balen, A Bacchanal (c. 1608-1616)

What people don’t often realize about Dionysus is that he is a direct predecessor to Jesus—the similarities between the god-figures are striking. Dionysus worship in the mystery cults addressed the idea of being saved after death, an idea not present in Greek religion. The Orphics, who had their own cosmogony of Dionysus, painted him as the son of Zeus and his successor on Olympus. The Titans got jealous, lured the child Dionysus with toys, and then tore him apart, cooked him, and ate him. He was resurrected when Athena saved his heart, and Zeus reduced the Titans to ashes, out of which came the first mortals. While the movie’s ending is not a direct recounting of this myth, the focus on saving the heart and reducing the house to ashes is a parallel that is hard to discount.

The Jesus connection goes deeper than death, eating flesh, and resurrection. Dionysus changed water into wine long before Jesus did, and much of Jesus’ life and mission centered around gaining credibility—the religious establishment would not accept him as the Messiah, who is not technically a god, but later interpreted as such in Christian doctrine. Most of the mythology of Dionysus revolves around his being a “foreign” god not accepted as a real god by established kings.8For more examples see: Taylor-Perry, Rosemary. God Who Comes: Dionysian Mysteries Reclaimed. New York: Algora Publishing, 2003. Given the popularity of the Dionysus (Bacchus) cult at the time when Christianity was new, and the amount of mixing between religions at that time, this is not as strange as it seems at first.

The Jesus story is known by most of us, and Freud picked up the theme of eating the flesh of the god in his work Totem and Taboo.9Totem and taboo: resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics / Sigmund Freud. New York: Vintage Books, 1946. Freud suggests that eating the flesh assuages the guilt of the son murdering the father in the Oedipal myth. Again, that does not directly translate here; yet, it is clear that the child of Him, who is the “divinity,” is sacrificed, most likely to assuage the guilt of the murder of the young son in his house. In fact, the same lines are repeated: “Here there is life!” when discussing both the death of the younger son and the baby boy. There is also a clear allusion to Jesus when Him tells Mother that she needs to “forgive” the crowd for dismembering and eating their son. And yet this is more than a critique of Jesus; it is drawing a direct line between Dionysus and Jesus, whether Aronofsky intended it or not. There is a cannibalistic savagery that underlies Christianity—it underlies Western mythology. In Greek myth, the Mycenaean saga of the House of Atreus actually begins with Tantalus, the founder of the line. Tantalus cooks his son Pelops and feeds him to the Olympian gods. They are all horrified and refuse to eat, except for the goddess Demeter, who takes a bite of his shoulder. Pelops is regenerated, but Tantalus is banished to Tartarus, where he suffers eternal hunger and thirst for his crime. Later, Pelops’ successors in Mycenae, Thyestes and Atreus, fight over kingship. Both men cheat to lay claim to the throne, but Atreus eventually wins. He gets revenge on Thyestes for his deceptions by killing his son and feeding his body to him at a feast that was allegedly meant as a truce. Thyestes goes to the Oracle at Delphi, and is told to have a child with his daughter; this child (Aegisthus) would avenge him for the cannibalistic crime. Aegisthus and  his sister-in-law Clytemnestra would go on to murder Atreus’ son Agamemnon when he returned home from the Trojan War. This left Agamemnon’s son Orestes with the horrible conundrum of having to kill his mother to avenge his father. In this case, cannibalism is a desire by the father or brother to gain power over the son or younger brother, with permanently destructive results for the family.

Still image from ‘mother!’

In an ideal world, myths of mothers, fathers, and families are meant to be stories of expansion. Marriage and childbirth are supposed to enrich the world—they bring opposites together, and are creative rather than destructive. Greek myths show how incest and cannibalism subvert this process and destroy the family, and hence the world. In the psychology of myth, incest and cannibalism represent fear, narcissism, and the desire for domination, to the detriment of the healthy psyche. We have only seen the latter taboo in the themes of this film; however, it is clear that Aronofsky’s use of the cannibalism of the “Divine Child” falls into this mythical narrative.

Conclusion

This essay only begins to unpack the mythical layers of this film; perhaps readers will be able to tease out more from looking at the details. In this rather complex stew of mythologies and female archetypes, there is no doubt a social critique of the status of women, and the role of religion and tradition in creating that social situation. If I admire any particular thing about the film, it is the way in which it presents a feminine narrative exactly as it is—confounding and complicated. Joseph Campbell identified four functions of mythology—the numinous/mystical, the cosmological, the social, and the psychological. This movie touches them all—the mystery of life and its closeness to death, the creation of new worlds, the social critique of the status of women and relationships, and the impact on the individuals involved.

The movie begins and ends with Him holding a beautiful stone with a fiery line through it, placed lovingly on a mini-pedestal by Him in his writing studio. We discover that this stone is actually Mother’s heart, taken from the ashes of her dying body, and Him is more fascinated with the object than the real Feminine behind it. Like another set of Greek myths—those of Pygmalion and Galatea (bringing a stone woman to life) and its reverse, Medusa (turning a live human to stone), there is much to consider regarding the lack of real relationship to the Feminine, which is often patronized and objectified. It is also the drama of the Anima, in which the man is fascinated with the image projected onto his beloved, while ignoring the real woman beyond it. The film is truly disturbing, and the normative reality its symbolism portrays and critiques is also truly disturbing.

Editor’s Note: For more perspectives on the the film, see interpreting mother! on Infinite Conversations.

Notes   [ + ]

1. ↑ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5109784/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
2. ↑ http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/mother-is-a-second-rate-self-aggrandizing-tour-de-force.html
3. ↑ https://www.pluggedin.com/movie-reviews/mother-2017/
4. ↑ The Great Mother: an analysis of the archetype / by Erich Neumann. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1955], 3.
5. ↑  Neumann, 18.
6. ↑ The Iliad / by Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 226.
7. ↑ The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings / by Otto Rank. Edited by Philip Freund. New York: Vintage Books, 1964.
8. ↑ For more examples see: Taylor-Perry, Rosemary. God Who Comes: Dionysian Mysteries Reclaimed. New York: Algora Publishing, 2003.
9. ↑ Totem and taboo: resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics / Sigmund Freud. New York: Vintage Books, 1946.

A Precoded Message of Damage

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A Precoded Message of Damage

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Feature Image: Kai C. Schwarzer, Mehr Rue [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0]
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The subject was discovered on a routine gravimetric exploration approximately one mile beneath the Earth’s surface in a small cavern rich in copper. Dwelling in complete darkness and surrounded by approximately 3500 urns of various shapes and sizes, the age of the subject remains indeterminate. Subsequent testing revealed the age of the urns to be approximately 500,000 years old. Due to the absence of illumination, the subject is effectively blind. It was initially thought the subject was also deaf and mute, but prolonged interaction revealed otherwise. Months of interaction with the subject initially through sound and eventually through the development of a kind of pidgin shared between subject and researchers yielded the following information. This information was conveyed over many months, the results being less a dialogue and more the externalization of what appeared to be a continuous inner monologue on the part of the subject. Initial contact was made February 11, 2014.

April 22, 2015: It is dark. It is always dark, but since dark has no meaning it just is. Vibrations send out dark. Vibrations send out light is not dark. But dark is not dark just is.

August 15, 2015: Movement. Vibrations send out slowly. But slowly has no meaning. Movement is movement not slowly. Movement just is.

December 6, 2015: Textures. Each not other textures. Empty but full. Textures and textures. Vibrations say everyday, but everyday has no meaning. Textures just is.

March 3, 2016: It is spoke that textures are urns. Each different from the other. Each hollow but full. It is said that each urn is touched once everyday. It is said that each urn is touched once everyday in order. But order has no meaning. Everyday has no meaning. Urns are touch just is. Movement and texture and urns.

July 28, 2016: It is spoke that everyday is one day another day another day. But this just is. It is spoke that the urns are task. Task is done day another day another day. But task just is. Not different another and another. Task is task. Dark is dark. Movement is movement. Texture is texture.

September 9, 2016: It is told that sound is heard as urns are touched, as movement is, as texture is touched. It is told that sound comes from touch, but sound and touch just is. Sound is touch is movement is texture is urn.

November 12, 2016: Sounds are words, I am told. I am told nodding means understanding. I am told I understand. I am told words are language. I am told I understand. I am told language has taken a long long day to understand. Long long day has no meaning. Just is. Understanding is like texture, each one different from the other but just is. Each other different from I. But texture just is and I just is. Different from has no meaning. Just is.

January 22, 2017: I am told that I am form. But form has no meaning as dark has no meaning as task has no meaning as day has no meaning as movement has no meaning as texture is texture as is just is. I am told I understand. I nod, but nod just is.

February 8, 2017: I am told that things like texture have names. Names are words, each one a different word. But texture just is. I am told they name me Uruk. I nod, but I understand no difference between I and texture and urn and dark and task. Just is.

March 3, 2017: I am told I can speak. Speak just is, but speak means that I understand and they understand. I nod. They tell me they nod. I speak just is but they do not understand. They point out Uruk is different from the urns. Different from the dark. Form different from movement. They speak out urns, each one different, each one a different name. But names do not feel like texture. Names are words. Texture just is. Each one different from the other.

April 13, 2017: I neglected the urns today. No texture, just words. Names. Words. I am asked about how I understand. How I understand the dark, the texture, the task, the urns. I nod. I am told that my words are like texture. That words can be touched again and again. But texture is not again and again, texture just is. I understand, but they do not. They do not say they nod. They ask, I tell, but they do not say they nod. Words are not sound. Sound is urns and movement and texture. I neglected the urns today.

April 25, 2017: It is dark. It is always dark. Dark is the absence of light.

At this point there was a prolonged break in communication as the subject fell silent for one year and twelve days.

May 8, 2018: The urns have long since decayed, many of them broken and spilling out onto the cave floor mixing with the dust. I am told that the oils from my hand preserved them, kept them in a state of hibernation, with a potential for change. But that is no longer possible. I am told that each urn contains the ashes of a lost civilization. Hundreds, thousands, gone. Lost to time. Lost to dust. Their textures faded, their memories no more. My hands crack and wither and decay like the urns. I am no longer just is. I am now and now is decay. But I am told that by speaking is can be preserved, can survive through time to a future I could once not imagine. Is became then became now became then. Just is became words became names became things became difference became. Texture and urn and hand and movement and sound and form and task and dark is not is, but was.

At this point in the research the subject abruptly stopped all communication and as of August 1, 2024 has not moved or spoken.