A rusty knight riding at full tilt on a yellow charger, brandishing a guitar. (A RebelYella Fender Strat, of course) Coming from the sky, I hear the words:
The sun blazes with a lemony hue. The earth is covered with buttercups and golden trees. Not autumn gold, but metallic gold covering the bark, like they had been gold leafed. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The bite of lemons twisted my nostrils and I felt my flaxen hair shudder. Lymph pools gathered in my eyes, ran down my cheeks and, changing into yellow jackets, buzzed away angrily. E flat major.
I lay back in the flowers. "So this is what entropy is like," I thought to myself. I took a nap. I woke up and ate a light supper of summer squash and saffron rice, washing it down with lemonade. Around me, cowardly lawyers took notes on yellow legal pads. My pocket knife flipped open and shut, open and shut in my pocket. I was cut only slightly.
In the distance, I saw her approaching. She took her sweet time. By the time she reached me, tendrils had embraced my legs and my knees were numb from lack of circulation. I chided her on her languors. I tisked.
Her long hair was very blonde. She was about nine years old and smiled a virginal smile of trusting friendliness. Grown women cannot smile that way any longer, cannot trust that way any more. I shed a tear.
She held a small golden cube, which she tossed into the air in front of me, where it hung and spun without any visible means of support. A soft humming descended around me, and crop circles appeared in the grass. I smiled back.
"Hello," I said.
Her eyes twinkled.
"You're silly," she blurted out.
"I am not."
"Yes you are."
"No, I'm not."
"Uh-huh."
"Nope."
She stuck her tongue out at me. It too, had an ink blot on it, but it was, of course, yellow ink.
"Why don't you get up out of the flowers, silly?"
"I can't, the tendrils have spoken."
She looked down at my legs and, seeing the creepers holding them, giggled and snapped her fingers. Immediately, the creepers withdrew into the earth.
"Thank you," I said, getting to my feet and brushing the golden hay from my pants. "Who are you that you can command the plants of the earth?"
She giggled again and pinched my arm. "You know."
"No I don't."
"Yes you do."
"No, I don't."
She paused and looked at me sideways, trying to figure out if I was serious, or if I was playing. The she blew a raspberry at me and pinched my leg, hard.
"Ouch!"
"That's for being silly, silly!"
Her lips turned upwards at the corners, and downwards, simultaneously.
"Come on." she said, "It's time to go."
"Where are we going?"
"You know, silly." she giggled.
She took my hand and the golden landscape around us disappeared.
I was driving in a car by a volcanic crater. Beside me sat a young Asian woman, with long straight hair, wearing sunglasses. On the car radio was a language lesson: "Olaawakii. The Hawaiian word for coverlet." Then a child's voice, repeating, "The Hawaiian word for coverlet is Olaawakii." I stopped the car and we got out and walked the short distance to the crater. Steam rose from numerous vents all across the expanse, which must have stretched a mile or more. There was a faint smell of sulphur in the air. By some of the vents from which steam was rising I could see offerings of gin and fish left by Pele's worshipers. Overhead, huge black cloud masses rolled and rolled, and a warm wind blew our hair around our faces.
I turned to the woman and noticed tears streaming from below her sunglasses. We embraced, and the steam rose from the vents and flowed into the grey sky.
I sighed, as the silence of the place took me and fell into a light sleep.
Then I woke up, or at least that is what I assumed had happened, for generally when one is conscious, he or she is bound to find that they are awake. At least this had been my experience up to that point. This time, I felt awake, but I also felt different. We are all familiar with being awake, and also with the dream state. When we sleep beyond dreams, we are not aware at all, at least not with our surface consciousness, but these three states are certainly familiar to us.
Awaking that day in the tent, I knew immediately and without question that I was in a different state of consciousness, one that I had never experienced before, and I was terrified. The "unknownness" of this state overwhelmed me, and I was beside myself. Literally. It seemed at one moment that I was bumping around inside the tent, then suddenly I would be on the floor again. I wondered where my guitar was, even though I knew full well that it was 3000 miles away in New York City.
I had a distinct impression that there was someone outside the tent, and I tried to call out, but the words turned to liquid pain in my throat and spilled out of the front of my neck. Finally, I produced a garbled "Who's there?", and immediately came a very calm reply from right outside the tent, "It's John."
I struggled to the front of the tent, and tried to go through the opening, but as soon as I was outside I felt even more disoriented. I could not raise my eyes to see above the ground, as if the upper lids of my eyes were dragging downwards. Afraid of becoming lost, I quickly went back inside. I knew, or it seemed certain to me, that if I could only go to sleep, I would escape this terrible zone where angles were askew under the filtered blue light.
I lay back down on the sleeping bag to do just that, but instead I simply opened my eyes and "woke up". There was no break of continuity between where I was before and where I was now, my eyes had simply opened, and normal waking had been reattained. I immediately sat up and chain-smoked a pack of Marlboros, while I looked out of the tent at the green forest dripping with rain.
I held the hand of a woman, one with medium length dark hair that swept around a face of Venus herself. She wore a billowy skirt and had several extraordinary necklaces circling her, of jasper, lapis, amber, and untold other treasures. Her flowing smile bathed me in a sweetness like nothing I had ever felt before, so that I knew at once that her and I had planned this meeting a long time before, and it was now time to get down to business. What that business might have been, of course I had no idea at that time.
We seemed to be in an industrial loft, but one converted to living space, like so many in lower Manhattan. Sun shone in through the ten foot windows, and spread out on walls covered with backdrops from old opera productions. In the corner, two cats fought in a whirlwind, with dander flying everywhere.
"Another glass of wine?" she asked, with a definite glint in her eye.
"Sure." I said, and lit another cigarette.
As she poured the blood red wine into my glass, I saw that her hands were flames. A ring on her finger melted, and the liquid gold flowed onto the starched white table cloth. A small stone, a garnet, I think, bounced and rolled onto the floor. Everywhere there was music, "Les Nuits D'Ete" by Berlioz.
I leaned back and sighed, watching the smoke ring that I had just emitted slowly drift into the shape of a spiral galaxy, then twist suddenly as a draft caught it and float away in a hundred directions.
"So many galaxies, so many planets, so much life." I thought to myself, although I noticed at once that the thought was vapid.
Across from me, the woman had her elbow on the table and was leaning her chin on her hand. She eyed me quizzically.
"What is it?" she asked.
I drank my wine in one draught, and felt it burn into my stomach.
"What am I doing here?" I said, half rhetorically.
She smiled. "You know."
I searched for signs on her face which would tell me if she really thought I knew, or was just being coy. There were none.
She got up and went into another room. I waited and smoked.
In a few minutes she called for me to go to her.
I went through the door into the bedroom. She sat upon the bed, naked except for all her necklaces, which draped between, over, and around her breasts. She was holding a rectangular wooden box, and she opened it. Inside were small jars holding various colors, and a brush. She handed me the box with a smile and lay back on the bed, stretching her hands over her head and arching her back. She purred like a panther. Then she relaxed and lay quite still.
I opened the jar of red paint and using the brush, I began to paint a wavy line on her left leg. It began by her hip and flowed down to her ankle. I painted a similar line on her right leg, in yellow. I interrupted my inscriptions to kiss her toes, which at the time seemed the greatest honor that could befall a mortal man. When I was through I painted a bright red dot, crucifixion-style on each instep. "This is Thy Body."
Next, I painted a red gash under her right breast. "This is where, presently, water, blood, semen, wine and milk shall flow forth. Aristotle believed women turned a man's semen into blood for their own use, the excess becoming menstrual fluid."
"What the fuck did he know? Shut up and paint."
"Avec le plaisir d'un roi."
To match the red slit under the one breast, I mirrored it with a yellow one under the other. "This is where prana enters and exits." I did not place any marks upon her breasts. They were already perfect.
She smiled. Then she said, like she had memorized it last week and had been practicing since then:
This joining pertains
All.
Not wept, even
solemn -
anointed,
our beauty.
We sought
us,
now we are
this.
We beckon to
ourselves
to become
this.
Now.