I’m still in the car. You’ve left the kitchen and the two of you are sitting on the floor, cross-legged, facing each other. There’s a pile of peanut husks on the dashboard which shake as my feet kick against the door. You run your fingers across his forehead, looking for something. I press down on the insides of my palms, opening and closing veins. The air is filled with overgrown suburban rot, too many pets, a smell of old oranges and cut grass and brackish still pondwater. You push your fingers in a ridge in his skull until you feel your fingers push through into his head. I feel a space open in the bottom of my body. You’re in his head up to your knuckles now. I can see three moving creatures as shadows falling behind the trees. He has an emptiness in his eyes now and you start to feel a little scared. The car door opens and I find I am held down by what looks like a hairless ape, bruises and sores crawling across its body. I assume there are more in the dark. You think about going to close the blinds but you would stain the cord. The ape reaches down and presses a lump in my esophagus, which sends waves of nausea through my chest. The others watch from its back, holding my feet. You reach around inside the man’s skull searching for something you lost years ago, something a young boy knocked clean out of your body, something you find yourself looking for in hidden corners, in the silence between words, in memory. My ribs begin to pull apart like the petals of a flower, my skin tears, blood fills the cracks of the seat. By pushing on soft spots inside the skull you find a means by which to control time. One of the other apes reaches into my body and finds something, crystal and coral, something I’ve never seen before. Days pass. The false ape holds my eyes open with its fingers and pulls its tongue across my eyes, effectively blinding me. I am finally allowed to spasm. You jerk your hand from the man’s skull and he begins to fugue, standing up, running around, nowhere to go. I shake and shiver and fall asleep on the floorboard of the car, where you join me after you put the man to bed, and we dream.

(This is a section from And So On For Ever. I believe I wrote this in 1997 when I was living in the basement of the Minnesota house — I think I still have the typewritten first draft somewhere.)

I cut across Euclid, stopped in the grocery to pick up some refreshing beverage, and walked through North Playground, where elementary-age kids had taken to spending their nights since the school flooded. There was one girl who had self-drawn upside-down clouds on her dress. She would spin around and around until her legs gave and she fell, in a heap, on the ground. She instantly stood and began spinning again. I remember this, the secret purpose of spinning, from when I was young; the girl is trying to ascend into the sky. She will spin and spin until her body cannot stand the motion, until her brain blocks her from the attempt, until she spends unquiet nights awake so many years later wondering what terrible things must haunt her dreams to keep her awake at night. The pushing of bones through the tips of the fingers and set in a pile and mixed as the children close their eyes, pick up bones, and push them back into their skin. This was how we made friends. The bones in my hands are still, to this day, not my own. When I was seven I got married to a girl I knew from the neighborhood. We had a ceremony towards the far end of the playground. The last I heard this girl was going to school somewhere in Wisconsin. I think she still has the ring I gave her, and I still have the ring she gave me. Sometimes I find myself wearing it, the purple plastic band attracting some attention, but I don’t explain. Someday I’ll bump into her, and well both be wearing our rings, and we’ll be together forever. In my sleep I will feed her on opiated milk-sugar and she will feed me on black honey and we will make a home in the caves beneath the surface of the burial pond. Our teacher taught us in whispers how to form symbols and shapes from snow. The wind was so fierce it would pull you from the ground if you didn’t put rocks in your shoes. We slept on dishtowels and were hung by the laces of those shoes on hooks behind the blackboard by our teacher. There was a boy named Jimmy whose mother made him wear galoshes and a raincoat no matter the weather, just in case, and he was elected to be the class historian, and we sealed up his mouth and eyes and buried him a couple feet from the flagpole so one hundred years later the schoolchildren could dig him up and he would tell them what life was like for us. There was a graveyard across the street from our school and at night we went there and tried to speak to the dead, lying spread-eagled across the mounds. You could see the devil if you stared long enough into mirrors. We all got free combs on picture day. For a long time I remember being afraid of certain furniture in my house, that the plumbing was trying to suck me inside and down, that the chairs wanted to eat me alive. The birds must have been diseased that summer because the playground was filled with feathers; we compared them at recess. Later in the fall we began to wear them, tucked behind our ears, sewn to our jackets by our mothers. Out on the lake, where no less than a year earlier we were building boats of balsa wood and paper and sinking them with rocks, we now floated naked under the moon, letting the dead seep into our small heads. We were just beginning to see shapes in clouds. I remember being afraid of the cranes, because the cranes were crazy. The spinning girl spun and spun and finally gave up, staring up into the sky, gasping.

First they appeared as the wind, the chill that comes up through your clothes, the ripple across the raised bumps on your skin. Then they appeared in a child’s dream, masks and shadows, something in the dark, and they smiled as the child began to cry. Then they appeared as a mouse that crawled through a hole in the foundation into a nest made of leaves and pink insulation where it had carried a ring and hidden it away. Then they appeared as the frozen pixels across the flatscreen, the eye held while the face moves, contorted into sigils of future blasphemies against the integrity of the flesh. Then they disappeared, and where they have gone you cannot follow.

You can’t tell anyone this, but you know it’s a fact. You know when you sit here like this, your legs spread, high as shit, absolutely open to the cosmos, that you make magic when you touch yourself. You feel the focus of your will and know this is the magician’s path, the creation of the unreal, the visualization of that which has not and will never exist except in the minds of the people you touch when you enter their subconscious chambers through the power of language. All language is magic. You know this. You know what it means to have a song stuck in your head, or to be fascinated for hours with the daydreams of what seems to be junk data but you know it’s meaningful, you know there is a place in yourself for this, even if you can’t speak of it, and that is all that is required. The great secret is are you willing to believe? It’s not for everyone, honestly. Prayer is visualization is fantasy is the imagination is the subconscious is the place where we are together and can never be divided. You know it’s true because you’ve felt it, and that’s real science, empirical data. This is the great flaw in western science: the void observer. What seperates the alchemist from the chemist is the former’s willingness to admit they are a part of that process, involved, integral. The key to alchemy is trust yourself. More on this shortly.

“The first of this series (and the only one to include the actual container-box) is The White Vaettir Is Dead: The Shrunken Ballet of Juliette Levana, a form of miniature dance performance utilizing magnets, trained insects, automata, camera obscura, geode stages and shadow puppetry. The box contains a biography, summaries of performances, information on primary performers, figurines, preserved insects and a small stage which can be used to re-enact performances. The box has a speaker system based upon two small sinewave oscillators connected to a modified walkman, into which loop-tapes can be inserted, the speed and possible distortion of which is controlled by the solar cell light source found on the exterior of the box (and also by body contacts along the side) which will also control interior lighting (if you remember those drone-lamps I built last year, this is kinda the same idea). Each installment will also include a cdr containing field recordings, music and related material. I’m still working on the dummy box (built from an old jewelry box), so the details are still being fleshed out, but I hope to be able to make ten or so of these by this summer. I’m finding the key to box-projects is to stay focused, so I’m not all over the map like I was with the Kitab al-A’rad. I’ve been reading a lot of Gerard de Nerval lately, so I suspect that’s a big influence on this.”

Within the arcade stuffed with naumachia and oracles and saint’s tongues wired to amplifying horns and partial beasts painted upon ostrich eggs there is a box covered in red silk and honeycomb with a place to place your eyes, and as the sound of the crowds fades beneath a hum of gearwork and hidden bladders the lenses pivot and the blinders rise and in the light across the back of the eyes slides the shadow of the woman who was the fox who was the woman who wore the name of the sunrise who kept her bones folded over her form when she walked among demons and collected apocrypha and mysterious histories and the secret operations of natural powers from the hidden places of her island but as she could not cross the river she lived the whole of her eight hundred years digging holes into the island so hollowed in burrows and tunnels which led to every corner of the kingdom that it was less an island than a nest of dens and in the center of her elaborate labyrinth she developed the reed-whistling script which cannot be read by sunlight so that scholars from temples over every ocean crawled into the burrows and exploited the light of diabolic mirrors and bononian stones to study her wisdom, and were so made wise, but years lived beneath the earth grew strange and the burrow-scholars could not find a way to the surface, carving substudies into the basalt decorated with cosmograms drawn in dogs blood and mutton fat white jade until the island was a hive of depraved and mistranslated knowledge and the woman who was the fox who was the woman who wore the name of the sunrise burrowed deeper into antechambers where unformed souls were stored and great storehouses of abandoned futures and mountains of teeth and orchids and diyu of unspeakable horrors seeking a place where she could find an incorruptible truth and there at earth’s end there was and remains a gate into which the woman who was the fox who was the woman who wore the name of the sunrise climbed inside and though you turn to look at the edges of the lenses this is a place where you cannot follow.

As a child she followed the street to its end, down a two-rut path to a nest of machine sheds and dismantled threshers, back along the fence that cut between the fields to a copse of trees where the rusted shells of Model As formed a gamelan when it rained, back further to where the trees grew around the metal of the fence until it burst, back further to a small pond ringed with trees and hunter’s shacks, where she stripped to her skin and swam to a tiny island in the center, swimming over shattered statuary she could only see in the winter when the ice was so clear she could see to the bottom, and there on the island was a bush with a fruit that smelled the way her armpits smelled when she was sick and feverish, and if she gathered and chewed the fruit for long enough it would attract fireflies, a lesson she learned after overeating the fruit and vomiting it in an incresingly luminescent puddle at her feet. She would use this fruit-bolus in the center of handmade paper lanterns inscribed with her imagined adventures, and the fireflies would come in through the windows and illuminate her face, veiled behind hair the color of distant galaxies, the only part of her not buried in blankets, and the fireflies would tell her in her dreams of their history for fear one day there would be no firefly left to recite and remember, a history which she then told to me, and which I will tell to you, one day, but not today.

I learned in CCD that the org chart of the superluminal intelligences is baroque and often recursive; when people tell you of the One True God (whom we’ll call OTG) that’s *technically* true, but there’s not much sense in praying to OTG any more than writing Obama to fix the potholes in front of your house. It’s not that OTG doesn’t care, exactly, but that level of power is meant to deal with issues on a time scale you can’t really comprehend. Go far enough down the chain of command, however, and you’ll eventually get to Terminus, the local annex overseer of Earth Prime and subsequent pan-dimensional variants, each of which has its own network, but unless you want a specifically localized alteration on, say, Earth II Ceti (decommissioned planet) you’ll have to figure out ramifications for all chained universes and that shit is for marker huffers and plebes. Terminus makes alterations to the entire Earth network through the Fourfold Erasure System, which consists of four agents: Apoc, Nihil, Un, and Aeute. Some of you may remember this from my earlier lectures. There’s a backup with all earlier versions of the Earth network which exists outside of human comprehension, but there has been an attempt over time to build a model of that backup known as the Universal Memory Project. Since it looks like the online archive is kaput, I’ll add relevant chunks of this material here when I get the time.

There will be roadshow demonstrations, spookshows, dancehalls, re-enactments of historical atrocities, mermaid shows, brain-altering noise booths, carnival rides to nowhere, endless haunted houses, possession-state seances with EEG meters and biofeedback machines, live electronic audio-visual scores Group Ongaku style, experimental animals, ultraviolet masses, flicker-systems, difficult foods, cosmological maps painted in squid ink overlaid atop pornographic ero-guro grand guignol butoh performances. It will be a circus like in Snake Woman’s Curse, like in Sexual Witchcraft, the dark side of Luna Park.

The MPA album I Am An Empty House Longing To Be Haunted will be released shortly, and as usual there will be a bonus album included with copies bought from me. It will be titled Suffer A Witch To Live, and will include two long and extremely dense remixes of unused material from the album. These two songs are dedicated to Jhon Balance and Peter Christopherson; while they began as Time Machine type drones they mutated into Nasa Arab/First Dark Ride style psychedelic freakouts. I’m putting together collage videos for both tracks which I hope to have up in January. Both songs have narration by April Larson from the stories on this tumblr. This album will include these stories (and more) in the usual fragment-text style along with photographs, maps, fetish items and talismans, each unique, all of which will be included with the Empty House 2x60 cassettes release on Black Horizons and additional materials in a box of some sort. I’m not sure how much James is charging for tapes, but it’ll probably only be a couple bucks more to buy from me. If you think you might want one, let me know and I’ll be sure to hold one for you. More on this when the album is officially released. Thank you for your continued indulgence.