Feb 6 2013

Raw Materials

It is a terrible thing to be in the thrall of one of the Fearless Ones. Their smiles edge you toward your own animosities, and make your nightmares sweet as the scent of their skin. Your raw materials, while frequently forgotten, were at least appreciated.

He’d been on a secondary avenue when they’d collided. He’d slipped on peacock feathers trailing from her skirt, and he dropped everything; cracked cell phone, torn jacket, and shattered glasses lay on the grimy pavement.

She, the emerald beauty, said, “I’m an artist,” and whisked him to her lair where she built a collage of his glass, fibers, and silicon splinters. He hadn’t asked for recompense, so she gave him this object, which she laughingly titled “Window into Fearlessness.”

It didn’t seem strange that they talked, nor that she poured aged wine into antique glasses. Later they danced under throbbing starlight amidst freaks and beauties, and it seemed natural. He slept in her bed for the next five months, wine bottles and empty vials rattling underneath when he shifted. Someone may have called, but, he had no phone to pick up. If anything looked like artifice, his myopia concealed it. And she’d taken his jacket, so he stayed close to absorb her glittering warmth, pressing so near that sometimes he burned.

Through her feathered eyelashes, she watched him unravel his mind and body. He had given her so much raw material, so she continued to build with the debris of his life. He, blood-soaked and dazzled, watched as she unfolded her 10,000 dimensions, each spiraling into the breath of gods and the mathematics of the universe. He lay back and watched cross-eyed as she knit tesseracts with his hair, looping and pulling until he was used, rendering him an obscure mathematical concept necessary for her unorthodox construction. The ghetto streets outside, so built up with detritus and shallow ambition, became stairways of junk under her hand, ascending into gardens and tide pools, columns of numbers and lines of linguistics. A fragile but scalable mess, propped up with his broken bones. He hadn’t even felt them break.

Eventually, she climbed over this towering mass toward her now-realized goal: the Primary Avenue out of this tertiary world. She looked back over her shoulder as she crossed, but of course she had already forgotten his theorem and anyway, what was left of him was blind and buried. For her kind, looking back at all was remarkable.

 

Musical Inspiration: Crystal Castles– Suffocation

I love the name Crystal Castles because the name makes me think of my third grade Trapper Keeper, which featured a unicorn blazing across space exiting the sparkly rainbow castle hovering somewhere near Saturn.  But when I actually listen to Crystal Castles, it seems like the unicorn has been pieced together and reanimated after a brutal dissection, and the castle is inhabited by an ice fairy on heroin.


 

Photo Credits: Jenniffer ClarOscura

This photo is of my friend Jenniffer ClarOscura of Dream Pioneers.  She is much sweeter and kinder than the character in the story, and extremely knowledgeable about dreams and lucid dreaming.

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Apr 28 2011

The Tulpa (and a new game)

I’ve been asking some of my favorite creatives–artists, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, etc–to recommend some of their favorite otherworldly tunes to me. Today’s story was inspired by Oingo Boingo‘s “Insanity.”  More on the song, recommended by musician Dave Goff (aka DRBIOR) after this story.

I spent 1917 in a series of anonymous seaside cottages, bunking with proper socialites so that I might press their gowns and wash their teacups.  The daughters of London lords taught me to summon Baphomet, and I taught them to hex each other’s tea.  They had not been sent to learn such low-brow spellcraft, but the convenience of sympathetic magic wormed its way into their drawing room studies.
I think of those girls now, in their white frocks and tidy pompadours, and wonder if any survived.  You must forgive their mothers and fathers for sending them to such ungodly work.  You must consider the times, in which young women of means had only marriage to aspire to, and the War had already devoured so many eligible bachelors.  A certain kind of free-thinking parent might indeed send a bright young woman to learn the ways of the occult, ensuring her independence and safety by way of the will and the mind only.  And of those noble qualities, they were greatly blessed.

And a certain kind of school mistress might indeed take pity on an orphan girl and wish to save her from the indignities of the streets and the men that congregate there.  She might, from good intent and kindness, give the child a too-large maid’s uniform and a bed of straw in the lean-to, seeing nothing but the girl’s sweetness and little of the girl’s cunning, created by generations of village witchery.

To say I did not mean to create it would be untrue.  To say I did not intend its effects would be more accurate.  If a young lady spoke snidely to me (a regular occurrence,as any Irish girl from a Catholic parish can tell you), I would turn a quick hex as my great-aunt had taught me.  Then fearfully thinking of my parish priest and his dire warnings, I would throw the ugly thing in the corner of our bunk house where its bright red light would dwindle as I watched.

The fact of the dying embers of vengeance and spite congregating and growing under the floorboards … well, if I had attended the lectures with the students, perhaps I would have guarded against this.  Instead, I scrubbed their garments outside the open windows of their classrooms, catching half-phrases and incomplete diatribes.

What did it do, I wonder, all those years?  As I grew into a bewitching woman with ever-increasing power and none of the restraints of nobility, what was it doing?  Did it travel to far-off lands to feed off the mad and the shell-shocked?  Did it don a fringed dress and long beads and dance the Charleston, driving starlets to suicide and automobile accidents?  Did it stalk the refugees of the Dust Bowl, blowing the Black Blizzards into the minds of poor farmers’ wives?

Did it dare enter Germany during its dark years?  France?  Spain?

I cannot bring myself to think of it.  I know its excesses fed me, though I did not understand at the time and thought my allure and financial power to be wholly self-made.  And in a way, I was correct, for I made the tulpa.

Away for so many decades, the tulpa has returned to its creator.  It lurks behind the grandfather clock, ostensibly doing little but ‘breathing” in my earshot.  It does this deliberately and unnecessarily, as it has no organs or breathing apparatus.  I tell myself that it waits for a command, and that I’ve grown so old that I don’t recall what I must tell it, my indecision dooming it to an eternity of bated breath.  It is a pitiable creature, but there is nothing to be done, save to ignore it.

Over the past several months, those young ladies at the summer  cottages troubled me.  I had a mind to use the power of this “Information Age” to look them up, old as I am.  I stopped after the fifth girl I could recall.  None had survived past age forty.  One of particular beauty and cruelty had died in a madhouse as it caught fire.  If others are still alive, I do not want to know of them.

The surf crashes below my house, the sky a permanent gray.  I have learned, of course, that there is no God, only spirits more good than evil.  They will not speak to me now, not with that creature constantly near.  Therefore, I have no one to confess to, and no one to absolve me.  I have thought of suicide, but my tulpa’s presence feeds my vitality and I start to wonder if perhaps I cannot die, and if this is the eternal state of my existence.

And if that is true, without direction, we will remain together in this fearful stasis forever.

I must give it a task.  Cautiously, I offer innocuous but challenging activities.  Its breathing does not change. It does not respond until out of desperation I shout, “Make a proud and lovely girl hang herself!  There!  Is that what you want, you loathsome thing? To feed on the vibrant and healthy?”

Yes, my mistress.  Thank you, my mistress.

***


Those of you who aren’t familiar with Oingo Boingo might recognize the influence of the band’s singer, Danny Elfman, in several movie music scores, such as “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Check out this video–while I think the radio edit totally mangled the song (a black magic song if I ever heard one), the creepy video successfully depicts the festering underbelly* of religion, politics, and social norms. I watched it after writing “The Tulpa” and was  taken aback by the girls in white, who match up with the my story.  Stop-motion video just lends itself to creepiness.  Watch it here:

Hard to know how to classify this song.  Oingo Boingo‘s often known as a New Wave band, but this is practically gothic.  If you like the song, download it in the Otherworldly Music Store.

Thanks, Dave, for this recommendation.  To check out Dave’s  equally-weird music (recorded under DRBIOR), visit www.drbior.com.  Dave also runs Gestalt Digital, which provides digital distribution for independent musicians.  Contact him at www.gestaltdigital.com if you want to get your music into iTunes, Amazon, etc.  even if you don’t have a CD pressed.

*Ok, I just wanted to use the word “underbelly” in a sentence.  Makes you inadvertently picture the rest of the beast, doesn’t it?  What’s it look like to you?  I just saw a disgusting-yet-fascinating live nautilus at an aquarium last week, so I’m voting for Chthulu.

Photo by Splarks, art “The Vampire” is by Philip Burne-Jones, 1897

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Oct 11 2010

Loyal Friends and Light Portals

At midday, Becky races through the tree-lined streets, pack swinging and bubblegum snapping.  She’s vowed to arrive on time to chem class.    Her skirt swishes at her knees and she smiles at the street bums, singing with the airy pop song playing through her headphones.  A palm-reader once claimed that Becky’s life purpose was distributing joy to God’s creatures, and her bliss-generating duties are keen:  dazzling smile, soaring soprano, and endless encouraging words.  But watch out, Becky!  A light portal crossed your path!    One sneaker-clad foot sinks into liquid transdimensional light, which feasts first on bone, then on flesh.  Oh dear, that’s the end.  Regrettably, these light portals originate from a mean dimension.  They glitter prettily in the sun, but they’re greedy things, always manifesting at inopportune times and gobbling up organic molecules, the sweeter the better. Her shoes melt, and her eyes freeze in disbelief and bodily failure.  Her headphones bleat as the metal wires corrode, but the plastic remains whole, synthetic and safe.  The pop song dissolves and abandons its linearity, but Becky’s melting brain ruins her cognizance of this metamorphosis.

I saw it all, Professor!  I, her loyal friend, was helpless to intervene.  It was awful, especially because she’d worked on her term paper all night.  I’ve been crying all morning!  One of the theoretical physics students thinks he can retrieve her with a complicated quantum formula and a particle accelerator.  If he’s successful, you don’t mind if she drops off her paper late, do you?  We’ll just slide it under your office door.  I’ll make sure she washes her hands really well so the light doesn’t get into your files.

***

Musical Inspiration: No. 6 Von Karman Street by A Sunny Day in Glasgow.  Chaotic, yet perky and undoubtably assailing any synaethesic listeners with a shower of unrelated colors and tastes. As I wrote this, I couldn’t help but think of the “lovely things” style blogs that I enjoy perusing at times (some favorites include Daydream Lily and That Unreliable Girl).  They contain many photos of beautiful young girls in feminine clothing doing romantic things like twirling in a meadow or draping themselves artistically across old furniture.  Lovely imagery!  And then my morbid side emerges and I imagine an unfortunate future for the beautiful girl.  The furniture sprouts teeth and devours her, or the tranquil meadow turns into a howling abyss from which the Old Ones emerge (she’s snack number one of 6.5 billion).

My attempt to recreate the latter scene is above. Fortunately, I (yes, that’s me) have yet to be eaten by the plush Chthulu.

I’ve given up on making excuses for my brain.  I just let it entertain me.

As for the band that inspired the song, I admit to looking them up because of Dr. LadySounds review in Scary Go Round.  The “guitars that go FWONNNNG WROOONK BROOOONNG” line is probably what encouraged me.  It’s like someone took an old-school shoegazer song and applied the literary cut-up technique to it.  Love it.

Photo “Snack of the Old Ones” by Splarks and Co.

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