McCloud turned his home into a museum he referred to as the “Institute of Illegal Images.” The blotters were magnificent: one contained a telegraph from Allen Ginsberg pleading for Timothy Leary’s release, another of Tweety Bird, some of Saturn, and armadillos. He explained how most of them dated back to when you still had to reduce the size of larger images to fit the tab, manually. I asked McCloud if he still collected despite having been raided by the DEA a couple times, and he assured me that “It only gets better!” I wanted to reach and touch the blotters all over the wall, eat them, trip on them. There was a palpable temptation to ravage everything in the room and melt into the walls, the history, the authenticity of it all. On our way out, McCloud hugged us and said, “There is no more West to go than California; it's the edge.” 

            I think we were in on it. Museo de McCloud felt like an initiation before hanging with Erik, as if I had acquired new signs and symbols to play with. I imagine it like the Ichthys, the symbol of the fish that Christians under Roman persecution would draw in the dirt with their foot to signal they were in on Jesus. Philip K Dick writes about seeing a golden pendant of the Ichthys in Exegesis, “The (golden) fish sign causes you to remember. Remember what?…Your celestial origins; this has to do with the DNA because the memory is located in the DNA…You remember your real nature…The Gnostic Gnosis: You are here in this world in a thrown condition but are not of this world.” Erik writes on this in High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences, in which he investigates the threads between the works of Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson for that palpable weirdness that guided people during the age of new psychedelic spirituality to engage with reality differently. He called Dick’s fish experience a ‘trigger for gnosis.’ I felt desperate for this grand trigger of gnosis; there was so much I was hungry to remember and reveal, even if it cost me my sanity. I was resentful because it felt that the evolving normative coloring of psychedelics had completely changed the experience it previously offered. Now, there are plenty of institutions built around cannabis, LSD, and ayahuasca, all seeming to have misguided agendas. 

I showed Erik my weed pen, which looked like it was made by Microsoft. In his essay, “Teenage Head,” which he wrote when he was not much older than me, he says, “What greater rebellion is there than rewiring one’s experience of the world?” As Erik inspected my pen and gawked at its strange design, I asked him, “Is pot even rebellion anymore? We have stoner movies made for weed, and you don’t even have to roll up mid anymore in secret; there are these kooky pens that they sell at kitschy smoke shops all over California.” Erik understood my nostalgia and described rolling a joint and smoking as a teenager, walking around through the suburbs, and feeling something magical. He didn’t completely fall into my pessimistic trap, but he agreed that whether the drug is socially tolerated charges the experience in a certain direction. With drugs, he said, “You must go through some process of your own kind of identification with them. There were certainly some very good things about drugs being illegal.”  

My journey to meet Eric felt a bit neo-luddite. Admittedly, I craved some sort of beatnik adventure when I set out to San Francisco. And things were going my way. The whole experience had been filled with signs. After the logistics of my initial plan to meet Erik were upended, I serendipitously ended up hitching a ride to San Francisco with a painter I met at a Hermetic Qabalah church in Los Angeles a few weeks prior. We lost our way more than once trying to get on the PCH, but each time we would end up at a different coordinate along the California coast, staring out at the tremendous mist hovering across the edge of the world. My editor and accomplice on this mission shared my feeling of kismet. We were on our way to San Francisco without confirmation that Erik would have the time to sit with us, but there was something perfect and trustworthy about our mission. We even brought with us some acid, giddily anticipating our grandest trip yet. The day I stumbled into the Philosophical Research Society and found a copy of TechGnosis gleamed with newfound significance. This was my divine metaphor; I had been found. The book had a similar demand to Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectics of Enlightenment—in the wake of intense technological change, and post-war transformations of how we experience freedom, there is still a strange and unpredictable world left to decipher. Erik writes specifically on gnostic inheritance in America, Californiaism, and the development of spiritual counter culture that led to the rise of the hippie movement. TechGnosis lays the foundation to challenge the information superhighway as a silk road to disillusionment and spiritual disfigurement, and asks us to become curious about the old and new kinds of strangeness that pervades modernity. 

            As I walked with Erik, I asked him if he had ever had a 2-3-74 moment, referring to Phillip K. Dick’s Exegesis, where powerful hallucinations unlocked a lost gnostic memory. He tells me, “My everyday life is interwoven with signs. I don’t have much hope that a special experience will change me or make everything better. It’s more of a daily preparation for the glimpses of things that signs can offer. People seek signs in superficial places, especially with psychedelics. Sure, they can be valuable. Those big experiences, those encounters with extraordinary spaces and mythic stories of aliens and gods and the jungle spirits and tricksters and all that stuff, it’s like getting off and getting high. But there is this temptation or tendency to take those signs for granted and get attached to them. You have to trust the signs while not losing the plot, but these spiritual awakenings happen to people who aren’t prepared. It brings so much shadow stuff out, and people believe that there are sorcerers igniting spiritual warfare and the city is run with devils; Satan is back! And all the gods and the spirits of the earth and all the weird alien forces are nibbling little demons, bringing us closer to this tremendous hollowness. We always yearn for something more real and connected, but still, I find myself distrusting my following of signs.”

            My question alluded to a desire that my personal pilgrimage might be my own spiritual, aha! moment. I was mildly disappointed to hear a sense of skepticism about the grandiose possibilities of psychedelic and spiritual experiences from the scholar of mysticism whom I had been searching for. However, between the lines of his hesitancy, Erik was introducing something much more philosophical and quietly life-changing: 

“The big experiences are inspiring, like great literature or art. I remember an experience I had at the rainbow gathering, where I did a bunch of acid. The most profound thing I took away from it was trying to find my camp at night without a light in a thunderstorm. Every time the lightning would strike, I would take a snapshot of the landscape so I could navigate my way. I was walking in the darkness through the pictures in my head. Those flashes that helped me navigate are like the flashes of inspiration you get from a trip. Those become a lodestar for the everyday. And those good emotions you feel help you charge up for the difficulties ahead. I drink up the feelings that I normally don’t feel on a trip, and perhaps I won’t really remember that feeling again, but it gives you a moment of deep faith and connection to all the possibility and intimacy. That’s more meaningful than a grand rush or thrill; those don’t last, and you can’t absorb it into the bones.”

​            Erik was asking me to listen to the details. When I was thrust into the demanding world of McCloud’s where Erik played wallflower, it was an opportunity for me to authentically ‘drink up’ the novelty before me. In Techgnosis, Erik writes that the value of information has to do with a combination of familiarity and novelty. There must be redundant syntactical rules so that information is transmittable, but for us to find meaning, there must be something new and random about the information. The meaningful bits of information often lie in the entropic chaos of ambiguity and randomness, and McCloud had an intuitive grasp of this. 

​            This attunement to the powerful randomness dressed all over a world highly saturated with information is what Erik described to us as “enchantment.” Psychedelics, for him, are tools to enchant the immediate scenario. As we sat at the bottom of the Hippie Hill at the Golden Gate Park, Erik pondered the magical synchronicities that strike people and what to make of them in a world that demands realism. Attention to the details will lead us down either a road to enchantment, disenchantment or—worst of all—schizophrenia. 

He elaborated, “This dialectic between enchantment and disenchantment has become more refined now, as I have had to live with the head and the heart at the same time for a while now in this one life. It’s something like being a romantic realist or a realistic romantic. Even looking at the “better times” of history, sometimes a fantasy or false nostalgia that we dream of is an indication of what we long for and where our heart is. In the face of all the desires coming your way, there is something to pursue and cultivate. You never really know if those desires are true, so there is another way of navigating the world that has to do with clarity and honesty. People can get stuck in skepticism, but there is a balance.” 

Erik, in the flesh, surprised me with his austere demeanor despite having written some of the most cutting-edge books about drugs and Gnosticism and counterculture. While still a scholar, with every observation he made, the rebellious subcultural streak would cut through. Regarding the youth today, he astutely responded, “You guys love nonsense. I love that. It’s a play on metaphors and intuition to trace things together. Sometimes the new stuff is bad, and I can’t get through it, but the grasp of nonsense and irony that some of this new internet speak has, really draws me in.” The interview had now turned into dinner, and as I sat across from him, I could finally see his face as he spoke. He moved gently and precisely with a quiet streak of mischief, like a DMT elf. He had begun to laugh more, and his face had softened. 

I read TechGnosis for the first time on the drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I had initially been reading Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, but it was giving me a headache. While parsing through a thick swamp of Kantian nonsense, which felt ridiculous as I sat in the passenger seat, looking out of the window at the lawless expanse of California: the wild cows in Ojai grazing wherever they pleased, the fast cars along the winding cliffside roads, the vans parked along the coast where sandy-skinned surfers sank their feet into the mud. I switched to TechGnosis, which begins: 

“This book is written in the shadow of the millennium, that arbitrary but incontestable line that the Western imagination has drawn in the sands of time. It is also written in the conviction that one hardly needs to be decked out in biblical sandwich boards or wired to the gills with the latest cyborg gear to feel the glittering void of possibility and threat growing at the heart of our profoundly technologized society. Even as many of us spend our days, in that now universal Californiaism surfing the datastream, we can hardly ignore the deeper, more powerful and more ominous undertows that tug beneath the froth of our lives and labor.”

The opening alone attuned me to the world with much sharper eyes. I felt the glittering void before me, cardinally North, into Silicon Valley. After soaking up every couple of pages of the book, I would scroll through Tiktok, and my algorithm was committed to showing me videos of teenagers experiencing the newest wave of satanic panic over the diabolical energies behind 5G, the Kardashians, and TikTok itself.  And what started as my passive hunger for brain-rotting content gradually turned into an investigation of the spiritual landscape of Tiktok. I began thinking about the festivals in Idyllwild, the occult shops in Los Feliz, and the group content creator houses in the Valley. California was constantly melting deeper and deeper into the strange games, languages, and imagery from online. TechGnosis planted the seed for me to begin making new connections in the sweep of our technological obsessions and the spiritual imagination that feeds it. The nonsense of internet schizophrenia-speak is spiritually inclined. Of course, Erik was drawn to those competing machinations and modes of language. And he was right: behind the heaps of internet trash and the oversaturation of information, there is a salvageable eloquence.

Erik asked me how things were in LA, and I mentioned that there is a new kind of tech bro, called the Gundo Boys, who work on defense tech startups along the beaches in El Segundo, recording videos of missile launches for Twitter content. El Segundo is home to all kinds of weirdness predating the Gundo Boys: the Los Angeles Air Force Base, the only active duty installation in the county, and Space Force, the new sixth branch of the military that the Trump administration ushered into existence. It’s a part of LA that feels like the edge of the universe, as the blue skies suddenly turn into low-hanging fog. I described seeing a lone seal at the edge of the docks and driving up to Playa Vista, a tech suburb just north where everything is gray. I explained how Playa Vista was once the last untouched wetlands in Los Angeles. We joked about the swamp’s ghosts haunting the Gundo Boys. He had already heard of all this (Erik stays tapped in). 

“There are these forces here that led to this kind of energy happening. California culture and history always keeps spitting up symptoms of its own condition. It’s constantly allegorizing itself again, so that the natural disasters here have an end-of-civilization archetypal effect. There is something about the psycho-geographic space; the landscape feels like destiny. This is what happens when you have the longest fault line on the planet. That’s what you get when you eradicate the most populous Native American space in Northern America. It’s haunted. And the industries that developed here have a kind of transcendental oomph in them, whether they are film and media, information revolution, and aerospace. No one ever really talks about aerospace. What is it? It’s a materialization of going to the heavens, and the whole dynamic and vocation of the war machine as a kind of galactic force. It is the edge of the West, this unique historical event. The growth of capitalism, detachment of science from religion, the production of new technologies, the da-da-da. The hunger, greed, and horror of the whole thing have some historical destiny. And it runs into the apocalyptic Californian geology and breeds this story of disaster and exploration and cosmic materialism.”

There was something dazzling about the tableau Erik was creating: a spiritual, human, and technological ecology, populated with a unique hierarchy of ghouls and goblins. He took seriously my whining pontifications about the Gundo Bros and led me through the details of what the land inherited and the cosmic intertwining that brings us here. This was my “gnostic trigger,” a renewed sense of awe was instilled in me for the land and the visionary quest of California and the modern world. Like when I read TechGnosis, I was faced with minor perspectival changes that have sharpened my search for answers tenfold. This is enchantment, ​obsession, psychedelia. It is the attention to detail, the curiosity and the authenticity that makes the ugliness and muteness around us eloquent. 

I had found myself at the very beginning, paralleling the universe of McCloud’s house. Quiet and observant, I enchanted myself with the colors, and the goblins on the machines, and the flashing grabs of attention. I felt a gnostic trigger on the history of technology and the mind-melting psychedelic imagery that moved people to conceive of this new world. 

I came to San Francisco prepared to do acid with Erik, to learn the truths of the universe, and instead I stood next to Erik at the arcade, thoughtful and sober. My desire to reveal only led to more mystery and curiosity in the quiet details of our material world. It was a psychedelic experience, and it required immense humility and intellectual attunement. 

 I asked Erik what he was up to now, and he said, “I have been in a somewhat retrospective mood. What has this thing been about? What is the thread? There is a deeper dance I need to stand back and look at and deeper current behind my enchantment. Sometimes, enchanting things are only the surface of the picture, and what’s behind is more uncertainty. I’ve got to deal with the existential demand of ‘Not Erik Davis’. You know, who’s that? I don’t know yet.” He had what seemed like a serene acceptance of not knowing where it all comes from, but it was cut with an investigative instinct to keep discovering himself, the thread, the voice. I thought about his website, levity.com. It made sense, Erik was serious about his irreverence, intense about his lightness, and wavered between enchantment and disenchantment with the world around him. And that is what opened my heart to the nonsense and the giddy details, the note of levity behind the apocalypse; that is where the great moments hide.

Now that we are all citizens of this thing, the internet, and connected by the deep and vast networks of the information age, humanity begs new questions. The demands are less clear of how to proceed and how to find beauty and meaning, despite the trash heaps of information and the suffering and the ennui. In our shared plight as mystic refugees surfing the infinite scroll, there is certainly something to be found, mysteries to be revealed. It’s not all damned, we belong to the magic. There are new borders to explore, ways to belong, history to inherit, and dimensions to transcend…there’s  even new drugs to try. As I took the offramp back into the streets of Los Angeles, I wanted to reach out and touch the mountains and the billboards, eat them even. There was a palpable temptation to ravage the city and melt into the soil, the history, the authenticity of it all. 

One time I was with some boy on acid. And I remembered this scene from this HBO show where this girl gets on her knees on acid. And they’re fighting. And she says ‘See… This is why it will never work, Bret. You’re up there with the clouds, and I’m down on earth.” And then she proceeds to rub dirt all over her face.’ I was like wow that’s cool. And then I did it to this guy while we were on acid, but we weren’t fighting. We had just met. And the guy was like, “Yo are you r-worded?” And I freaked out and lied. “Sorry I’m just having a moment. My mom is dead.”

Anyways that’s how Black Agassi and I started dating. He was crazy. Actually, he inadvertently framed me, because I only ate the challah at Shabbat, and he roofied the brisket I’m pretty sure, with the diarrhetic herbs. And for some reason he ate the brisket after roofying it. So, I was the only person who didn’t get the diarrhea which was pretty fucked up because they don’t invite me to Shabbat dinner anymore and my Entertainment/Hollywood career faced a couple setbacks.

And then Black Agassi tried to burn my house down. I saw him on my porch with kerosene that I love the smell of. And then I was like “What are you doing? “And he was like “Burning your house down.” And I was like “Why?” And he was like “Ants.” Because I had an ant problem.

And then after college, Black got me a job at the Chinese hospital in Chinatown, and I was his assistant for a while. One time I came into work with some grapes, and Black was like “Can I have one?” And I gave him one and he was like, “What is it?” And I said “Uhhhhhhhhh grapes?” And he said, “Grape.” And then I had to bring him grapes every day to work.

One time I was lying next to Black Agassi, and I had a dream that Mark Zuckerberg had Kanye West assassinated. And I woke up kind of freaked out. It was a stress dream; my adrenaline was gushing. And then, I turned to Black for comfort, and he said, “Stay woke. Anything is possible.”

After I quit the Chinese hospital job, our relationship became strained. We saw less of each other. He was very busy. He had two patients, but they were a handful. They both had cancer, but it wasn’t going away. I helped Black Agassi order multiple boxes of 50 mg Nicotine patches from Alibaba for the two cancer patients, but by the time they arrived, one of the patients had died.

Black introduced me to his parents during our rough patch. They were going to have us over for dinner, but Black had recently set the house on fire after an ant problem. Instead, we went to a buffet, and I joked about Black putting the diarrhetic herbs in the food, and his parents looked at me in confusion and then Black texted me that his parents thought he was an entrepreneur, and I asked him what kind of business, and he said ‘in the Energy sector’. Anyways, it was awkward, the silence was deafening. I could feel the silence sticking to me like glue and I kept scratching my arms. Eventually Black said, “Riska has a really good MLK impression.” And after just enough coercion, I tightened my posture and started… “I have a dream” and then they laughed, and it wasn’t as weird as you probably think because the Agassi’s were Armenian and not Black.

The dinner went well enough, but there was still a dread, and a distance between us. It didn’t matter that his parents liked me or my MLK impression. Black spoke tersely, in riddles, and I spoke in haunted tongues. He was of the clouds, and I? I was just dirt (rub hands all over face).

Eventually, I left for India during the Holidays.  I had thought that a couple months away from Black would be good. My parents didn’t like Black mostly because of the ant incident, but also because of his job which is a Chinese medicine doctor which is weird because Indian people love doctors. They told me we were attending a wedding, but it was a machination for my arranged marriage. I was forlorn that Black had not wrote to me since the beginning of my trip and that he kept posting clips from local comedy clubs on his instagram story, so I had finally agreed to a meeting with a groom.

The first groom we met was an Indian doctor, neurosurgeon. Neurosurgeons are the highest paid doctors which I thought was cool. He was also handsome which was very interesting and liked to talk a lot about poetry, and artistic pornos and cinemas and stuff. This is man who knew what he deserved and liked to get it how he wanted. And you’re not going to believe this, his was name was White, White Malhotra. He was so cool. I loved him so much. My heart was exploding.

We set the date for the wedding, and he came back with me to America.

I tried my best to avoid Black. I soft blocked him on Instagram, moved neighborhoods, changed phone numbers, got a blowout, dyed my hair. And White and I felt pretty settled in to our way of live. We got into an argument and I pointed to the sky and told him he was like the clouds, and opened the back door and went into the yard and grabbed a handful of mulch and rubbed it all over my face, And “Im down here, in the dirt.” And he grabbed my shoulders to a stand, and told me, ‘I’m the letters, you’re the words, I’m the wind, you’re the ocean, I’m nothing, you’re everything, I’m over here and you’re over there. Together we are the world. Wow. Just wow. White Malhotra was a poet, and a neurosurgeon. Our house was expensive, and had lots of poetry books.

Because of White Malhotra’s charm and love of Israel, we got invited back to Shabbat dinner as a couple. Everyone loved how he was a real doctor and how he loved Israel so much as an Indian guy and we brought pie from the grocery store that had a holistic philosophy, instead of the bad grocery store where poor people and regular people go.

As the dinner came to an end, Black was parked outside in a leather jacket. I ran to him and asked what was going on, and he said, “Why did you never reach out to me?” I saw his arms, they were covered in nicotine patches. And inside the car there was a pitcher of a green liquid. It was Kratom sludge. And he had lost a lot of weight. He dangled an empty bag of diarrhetic herbs in my face. “I’ve been taking these, trying to cleanse myself of you, but I can’t. You’re there in me, stuck forever.” He said. And I was like “Im with White Malhotra now. Im sorry, Black Agassi, I really am.”

He went to the trunk of his car and pulled out two fencing swords. And he threw one at White. He said, “May the best man win, Dr. White.” White picked up the sword, “On guard” He yelled. Boy they fenced, they fenced so hard. My head was spinning. I thought to myself about all the times with Black, and the way he didn’t say much. And all the herbs, and the Armenian food, and our college days. And the grapes, he loved those grapes. And then there was White, he had a job, and he was smart and fancy. As I felt the pull of the two men in my heart, I tuned back into the battle. It was getting gruesome. And then I heard a slimey sound of a sword piercing through skin. The two men fell to the ground in a puddle, White’s head was at Black’s feet, and Black’s was at white’s. It looked familiar, like a, like a, like the Yin Yang. The yin and yang, the white and the black. Together they were complete, in their desire for me  and pain for me and misery for me, all about me. I walked over to see who had won the fight and my heart. White Malhotra was wounded with a slice, that later caused him to die because it was rusty. And the nicotine patches Black’s chest stopped the sword from piercing his skin.

It was tragic and beautiful. I never thought I would recover. Black and I eventually broke up because after he burned our house down from the ants, he started to get really distant and manipulative and gaslighty.

I explained for the fifth time in my life to my psychoanalyst how I think that Camila is the real cuckold in the Don Quixote story, “The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious.” These two friends, Lothario and Anselmo are talking up Anselmo’s wife as this pinnacle of chastity and wonder. Anselmo, a neurotic, schemes with his friend to test his wife’s virtue by suggesting that Lothario seduce her. Lothario is initially like WTF, but then he eventually agrees and begins to fall in love with his friend’s wife, Camila. She rejects him until he glazes her so hard that she falls prey to her own vanity. They have an affair and when Anselmo finds out, the two of them flee with shame. My favorite reading of the story is that Anselmo is gay for his friend and uses his wife as a surrogate to consummate his love for Lothario. If that is the case, Anselmo acts out of desire for Lothario and Lothario acts out of desire for Camila, and both consummate a desire even if its reckless. The two men devised their own misery, as man does at his destined hour. However their plans all pass through Camila, who falls to the temptation of a glazer, delivered to evil. There is nothing of Camila’s desire, she is at their whim; she vanishes in the distance –scathed, divorced, uncurious, and passive.

Along the Cascade mountains, with view of the skyline and of the trees, on the plateau, between a bed of roses and a bed of jasmine, from a table overlooking the window that sees the street, I watched the vlogger on my phone hitchhiking from Southampton to South Africa. He says ‘south’ like souf. He picked up a girl traveler along the way who is now accompanying him, and everyone in the comments wants them to reveal that they are a couple. They say they are just friends. Yesterday, after I came home from the airport, my dad, my cousin and I watched Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho.  My dad really liked the eccentric German trick, Hans. The first time I watched the movie, I was a teenager, and I was with a bunch of gay people. This time, I happened to go to the bathroom or to the kitchen during most of the gay sex scenes. And this time, I became attached to River Phoenix’s character who has narcolepsy. I have it too, but mine is mild-mannered. The movie weaves home footage into his dreams during his narcoleptic episode, fixating on his childhood ranch home in Idaho and his missing mother. Then there is his love interest, played by Keanu, whose storyline is the plot of Henry IV. Keanu’s character is full of everything, rebellion, duty, virility, sex, Shakespearean prose. River’s character is fragile and interior, and not part of Shakespeare’s world, constantly disappearing into a sleep, into the thin mountains and the plateaus and the vignettes of his childhood. He never gets the boy, Keanu, nor does he find his mother. Banished, scathed, asleep, alone, away from the play taking place in the city, he vanishes into the distance.

My friend, who grew up on the same roads as I did, always monologued about leaving. He would describe the routes he would take, passing through the Olympic rain forest, into the rolling hills and volcanic soil. He would talk about pubs and strip clubs along the way, and the friends he would visit. He would talk about how nice it would be to shit with a view, like in Kings of the Road. And all his planning would lead to Las Vegas. I don’t know why he wanted to stop there, when he could have kept driving all the way to New York. I don’t think he has ever left the Pacific Northwest, though no one has heard from him in years.

When I return to my childhood home, I feel cucked by the soil I grew from. The mazes through the mountains, the distant harbors, the people, the cars. Apparently, it’s still the nation’s saddest large metro area. According to a survey, 45% of Seattle adults are depressed. Although, Seattle adults are also just the type of people to report that they are depressed in a survey.

I’m not really from Seattle; I think the farther east you go, people are slightly happier, looser, aspirational, home-seeking. A reddit thread called them hillbillies with teeth, wannabe cowboys.  I’ve never fallen in love here, though I love the rain. I’ve wondered, maybe people who are born here, are born unhappy. But I’m often happy, maybe because I was born a little East.

As a teenager, I used to fall asleep at stop lights driving home. Briefly, I would slip into graphic dreams of Parisian riots, nymphs having sex behind trees, Ancient Athenian courts. Civilization took place elsewhere; there was no action or decision here.  Now, even in the throes of love, my sleeping mind instead wanders off to home, into this quiet, passive decision-less place.  My dreams take place watching people behind a window in my childhood bedroom. Sometimes they will call out to me, point at me, but I can never figure out how to reach them back.

Pisando del amor la alegre senda
quando más de velar tuve cuidado,
un sueño me acomete mal criado
en medio de la amorosa alta contienda

I stuck my tongue into the wooden air and tasted clotted blood and cream. Freckled light from a fat window passed through the atrium and pressed against my cheek. London, licking against the tip of my tongue in circles, like a muddy wet dog. Bent over the kitchen sink, I looked at a new window, and the light, now farther away, shone on a little fox. He napped on the branches, his friend lapped in circles. Perhaps it was one of their tongues against mine. I saw myself in the sunny reflection, like a little fox, my eyes squinted, orange and slim. Eyes were pressed against me while I was watching the foxes. I was promised that when I left, the foxes would dream of me, that they’d wake up smiling.

The inside air was warm with epicurean sweat…black pepper, cumin, some paint. The idyllic London room felt so stationary and poised compared to my heartbeat, my vaporwave, upsizing, bullish heartbeat. Obsessive, relentless, apologetic. I could go on. I watched coffee being made, and the duck get its salting… in slow motion. Trumpets melted the air, and I couldn’t seem to speak. The taste of dinner was devastating.

The new LaGuardia looked awesome, pairing beautifully with my pinned-up hair tightly tucked behind my ears and my silk skirt and my briefcase filled with curds and jams. Like a stupid bipedal bear, I slumped into the airport. I became the nostalgic American traveler, awoken and ungrateful. Every inch of The Banal came all over me, even the taxi home was black instead of yellow.

Every photo of earth from space is doctored. I can’t bring myself to say that I know what the earth looks like when I am not standing on it, for those pictures mean something else. Straddled like a dog in between two points on an alien planet I must call home, a spectacle in an uncentered universe. Contrails deepening in the azure, we must call it home. Though between the corners of London and the two dimensional brick of New York, I’ve decided home is such that I can see it from where I stand, clear on the horizon as an outward spectacle. Air travel broadens horizons too far. We walk across a tightrope that we eventually become, a sturdied cable stretched until broken. Caught by a stupid old net, lost and remorseful. Where is the summit where all aims are clear?

Born, unhappy and desperate. Caked with desire, babies are released unto an alien world of nobodys and nothings, no words to tell the faces apart. And then time passes, up scales and down spirals until we are left to die wanting. Life is spent inventing choices: breakfast or lunch, truth or obscurity, dry hands or dirty suntans. Choices invented so that we can pretend to know that we want something, even though we can’t quite have it. Living to die wanting…wanting what’s over there and not getting it, spending every day compensating for it.

I want to see those sexy foxes in the bushels of dead leaves outside my apartment window and taste the duck broiling in my American oven. Instead of lentils, I’d want apples and prunes stuffed inside, spilling out like Autumnal gore. I want beachy sand to trickle into my toes as I step onto my cold third story balcony, while I smoke and spy on the mating pigeons. I want airplanes to disappear, I want to travel on a boat. I want to be certain that who I am traveling the seas to meet will still remember me when I get there. Enough. Insatiable want has splattered on the page, into my legs. I want to smell the London mud while cradled in my mother’s warm and boney lap, in my father’s old, carpeted apartment on the first floor that held tightly the smell of coconut and asafetida; where she never bothered to visit. No, I want to smell the rainy London mud in a lap I have never slept in, on a bench that has not been built, in a city that I can’t remember the name of.

If you asked me now, I couldn’t talk to London anymore. The knots in my mouth worsened, and my tongue couldn’t eat or drink or order beer at the airport lounge. When I looked back, the mist hid London from me. I landed, and my mouth was stuffed with cheeseburgers and white salt. I ate shit for a few days after. Full mouthed, I could only gurgle half words. I showed everyone the foxes, silently. The heat blistered the corners of my tongue, which felt so repulsively fat in my mouth like a blister itself throbbing out of my throat. I burned each meager little freckle off my face and the baby’s hair coating my cheeks started to fall off, leaving behind trails of hot fuzz.

These are fragments from a dense three page single spaced 10 pt helvetica review of the new Laguardia airport. If this post does okay, I’ll release the thicker, dryer Laguardia sections.

Top: Musk Rose, Linoleum

Middle: Bergamot, Oily scalp, Stale books

Base: Aged pinewood, Gourmand, Sandalwood

There is this porcelain Chinese pen that sits on my desk in a silk case. The body is creamy and white, and the ends are Prussian blue. Next to it, a new notebook - Unopened but filthy with tobacco and scratches from sitting in my stale old bag. My aphasia continues despite the new notebook and the new pen. I open it every day. Rejected by my own constipation, my sentences obscure into languagelessness, my lethargy ebbing against the flow of thought. When I finally pick up the beautiful pen to write, it is not smooth. A thing so pretty but unable to perform its task, still, so pretty that I try with brute force to make it write, pressing its nub onto the page and wearing it down. Something so beautiful that it leaves everything in its scope to be desired, and when it can’t do for you what you wish, you have no choice but to hope and keep wearing it down, or to throw it away.

This constipation of mine, it’s like a waking up from a dream with no one near to recall it to. A dream that you must not forget but can’t seem to remember either. Or feeling you have an anus but being unable to find it.  After a while of trying to write with the impotent pen, I start to wonder if something so beautiful must obviously not work. A pen so impossibly elegant; I want it so bad; I need it to write. A pen that sits on my desk waiting for me to write, teasing me. And when I finally cave, it’s useless. Of course, it doesn’t work, I only want it to write because I know it doesn’t work. The utter lottery of whether an old porcelain pen from China is going to work or not is a harsh phenomenon against my imagination. The contingency: what a shame this beautiful pen does not write… But to me, it doesn’t seem to work precisely because it is not supposed to. It cannot work, it must not. Maybe I can keep trying for the rest of my life, maybe it's the ink cartridge or the tip. Maybe I can rebuild the pen. The pen’s fate, if it is predestined, elevates its own impotence. A beautiful and clean impotence. This pen is not supposed to write, it must not write because if it could write, it wouldn’t be beautiful. A beautiful and broken pen. If the pen is broken, and I am constipated, all I can do is wait to speak. A serene acceptance, I must be voiceless today. Another day shall pass.

As I am impaired in my own flesh, My boy, he picks up the pen and tickles it around his mouth. The caps of his fingers are roughed like a schoolboy even though his hands are honey soft. I take his hands to my face, biting the callouses on each finger. He yelps, yawns. Silent again, I smell the androsterone on his scalp, and his chest. Sweet, sweet…rigid limbs that pickle the traces of dust and linoleum, onions between his nails from the kitchen, and the metallic steel knives on his shirt. I could smell the callouses. Sweet old bergamot in the pot on the fire, the heat sweats the pine walls. The sweating wood, the bouquet of dinner scents stored in its walls, and the sandalwood soaps. Delicious nausea and silence. I need to shit so bad. The books, the piles, and heaps of books. All those books of his fingered and scarred by him. His eyes are like venus, rotating and ambient  And my own fertility, ripe and rosie. I never sweat with him, always powdery and alive like a bunny rabbit’s cheeks in the spring, stuffed with sweet hay and flowers. Barely an animal, unable to shit out anything but saccharine hay.

#2  Oud del Cucciola

Top: Jasmine, Hairy sweat, Ink

Middle: Blood, Fog machine

Base: Oud, Moss, Dog breath

When you follow a man around like his puppy, he will let you lick his ass.

All that I needed to do to find my own anus, was to smell one. Cumin, civet, manure, feces. I could recheck the plumbing, I could eat ass, I could go to the perfume store or wait outside the public restrooms on Chrystie and Hester. I could go to a nightclub and stay until closing. The harder I searched and pressed down the pen brought me farther away from anal release. Words would not play, and thoughts continued to escape my control. I could only keep walking, and waiting for a laxative that was perhaps entirely contingent, and out of my control. Incontinence felt like a possibility, a relief. It could be uninhibited, painful, life-giving pleasure —jouissance.

After awhile in New York, you can start to discern the notes of the trash. You can tell if it’s going to rain if the air smells like mud, and you’ll run into an ex if you smell tomatoes. On warm summer days, you can smell ass. Human ass. It’s a base note. It’s addicting but hard to discern. If you’re not in the mood, you’ll hate it. But there is no other smell like it when the day is good.

I walked down Clinton following the smells, and as I moved widely and haggardly, I could feel the metal ball inside my ankle. The metallic weight pulled me into a crouch. I crouched onto my knees and my palm hit the payment. I had no choice but to crawl, on my knees like a dog. Panting and smelling my own breath. Crawling, my thong pulling at me. I could start to feel it, lifting me. Refusing to be hung out to dry by my underwear, I grabbed the concrete for deal life. I squished it. Bleeding out, I kept crawling. I was being pulled by my underwear helicopter wedgie and I had to hold myself down. I had no idea who or what was pulling my thong, or if it was pulling itself. I crawled all the way down to the park, next to the rats. Perched from their windows, they all watched me. On E Broadway, I could feel it, first in my uterus, then in my button and in my spine and my tailbone, and into my heart and breasts, and then up and up into my throat, and I felt it come out. It was going to come out. I used my third arm to grab the pen so I could catch whatever came out on the pages of my new notebook. And when I saw the pen I was so hungry that I swallowed it. And then my third arm disappeared and the pen was gone, and whatever was going to come out was stuck in my throat, as if it was the metal ball in my ankle choking me inside. I collapsed from my knees, onto my stomach. I lost the pen. I’m now constipated AND choking. And I can’t speak or write, or shit or come.

And then I could smell it. OUD! Fuck me, Oud. I found him, the oud. He was like an Arab gent in an old elevator or a cave temple set on fire. I couldn’t quite see anything. My eyes were wide open, and they were closed. And I could see it with my nose. My stomach sunk into my legs, and I could feel nothing in my body but my genitals. And I could feel the hair growing out of the concrete, thick and pubic. Throbbing, and in control. I did it. I tightened myself and released. Sweet anal release. I could hear barking in the distance, but it was not my own. I tried to speak over the dog, but all that came out was a scream. So ghastly and pitch perfect, I could hear all the rats leave the park. I was completely alone, even the watchers from the windows turned away. I reached under myself and felt it, my anus. Circular and clear, and I could feel whatever was stuck. Not words, nor shit. I pulled out a blue and white porcelain pen. The white was so clear, and creamy that I could see a boy’s face inside of it. I bit the blue tip, and took it to my nose. It smelled like Jasmine.

3. It does not take an advanced sense of abstract reasoning to feel the color of things. You may need some of that sense to color things in yourself.

   • noble suffering, perfect blue, eternal joy, larger-than-life red, depressing yellow, easy white, God forsaken life, muggy morning, existential cul-de-sac, annoying wife

4. A set of words, illocutions1, obscured over and over again, through a cryptic crossword, as if the words have been through a charkha2 and the linear slimness of the thread is now a sleek sheet of khadi3. The spinning of the charkha that weaves the cotton fibers is repetitive, the beginning and end is unclear though each piecemeal section of fibre is completely visible when it goes through the wheel . When finished, the patterns are romantic and the thread is uniform to touch. The khadi is draped over a blouse and skirt. The words are now propped up and creased into form. A podavai4.

5. When a poem is finished, it is a brief pause, shorter than a comma, between two thoughts. A poem does not ask for a discourse, or any response aside from solving it like a riddle. It is taken as an object. The activity that creates a poem is grueling and puzzling, and it is followed by a brief moment of fullness. When the poem is finished, the task is complete until the stillness erupts into a new activity. Poetry is the pretense of restrained language, language for its own sake, useless and perfect.

#1 Two In One

Up, out of place

              The life of reason, lived

Castor oil, as a taste

              The mammalian instinct to swim.

Urine, has no feel

              The gods of Greece, willed

What a myth that it can heal

                    Sisyphus, Dedalus, hill.

Kale, noisy symphony

                    The elixir of life, ichor

Nutrition, bigger than bigotry

                  Boring, eternal nectar.

6. Before the khadi has any form, more precisely — when the intended use is unclear, it is often kept neatly in a bureau. If its owner is lavish, the piles of fabric stack into an ornament worth showing off. Sometimes silk, not just cotton. The colors, rarely subdued, highlight the shelves of the bureau. It’s hard to imagine them worn; the stacks collect dust.

   What purpose could be discerned of the accumulating piles of khadi in an old swank’s bureau?

   • I’ve also seen such gorgeous fabrics used as bed sheets, curtains, mops, table cloths. I adore this khadi towel I’ve used to dry my hair since I was a child. My father uses an identical towel to dry our steel dishes. The khadi comes alive through dynamic activity.

   • In the opening of Kandukondain Kandukondain5, Meena (who spends her time learning classical Tamil poetry and music) dreams of swinging on a jhula6 tied to a tree placed precisely in the center of a vast countryside. In her pastoral fantasy of a Tamil countryside in the Nilgiri hills, she is wearing an azure pattu pavadai7. The fabric floats and glides against the breeze. Her hair, usually plaited, is now free from the triple bondage.

     

     

7. A word that is uniformly used is stale. Its dormant meaning is like khadi that eternally sits in a bureau collecting dust.

   • My mother uses the word “makka” for when food tastes stale or rancid. When I sit across from her at the table and we share a plate, it is perfectly clear to me what she means by makka because the food tastes stale. To me, “makka” is just a more expressive way of saying something is stale (especially in public, since she can say it loudly without insulting anyone). To my mother, it is a Tamil word, or maybe it is from Kannada, though I am not entirely sure and online dictionaries aren’t helpful for informal words. “Makka” does not precisely mean ‘stale’ or ‘rancid’ to my mother, or at the very least, she is not using ‘makka’ as a translated stand-in for an English word. She did not begin to consider the word’s definition until I asked her what it meant in English. We mostly speak English to each other, but certain Tamil words are used for evocation. Sometimes that kind of emphatic-use feels particularly poetic. And it would mean ‘Makka’ is not, in any practically regard, equivalent to ‘stale’ or ‘rancid’ unless I use it as such.

8. A dormant word poked and prodded to be made alive — jealousy. The poetic activity of jealousy: jealousy colored by poetic language: poetic language-use to “convey” jealousy

   • “I hope you are happy and drunk, all alone and thinking of me like a silent egg.”

   • “I hope the only charm in your pocket is mine, and not a stray hair or a dust bunny souvenir.”

   • “I hope you’re not laughing with some toothless Mile End whore as she shows you the flesh inside her overnight bag.”

   • “If you’re naked, I hope your body is colder than when you’re clothed.”

   • “I hope you wake up lonely and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes, and love me too much.”

   • “I hope you’re not too busy to look out the noiseless window and think of your neighbor cat and picture me calling out to her with the name we gave her.”

   • “I hope your only company tonight are your thorny bones, a low hanging chandelier, and an ashtray beside your bed.”

   • “I hope you remembered to hang my khadi towel to dry.”

I was considering getting married while I had first read The Year of Magical Thinking.  Barely twenty, I sat with my knees against my chest on the F going downtown. A keenly hot day, I was thankful to be getting off before the Manhattan Bridge. I finished the book; I was on my way to wander from Seward Park to the piers while eating an Italian sub. I got off the train and walked while staring at my feet.

I pulled out my phone and pretended to talk to someone about the book.

I used to do this quite a bit. I enjoyed the company. “I love Joan Didion, but the problem is women everywhere love her and want to be her, and that’s why all these lady writers aren’t writing good anymore. Everyone wants to write about their boring lives, don’t they?”

I felt absolutely reckless. I was grieving a husband that I did not have, or that I might have soon (if this engagement of mine really did amount to anything). More than anything, I felt old.  I was running out of time, and I had too much time. All of my twenties to waste on running out of time. I spritzed my face with lavender water that my father had sent me. Rubbing my fatigue-fattened eyes and checking my fingers for black dust, the memory of a train ride disappeared from my senses as if I had transported from the West Village to East Broadway. A bit of guilt gripped on to me, just for three seconds, the time it takes to skip up the station stairs. For I had wasted another day chasing something unremarkable and extraordinary.

Every scent I caught hold of that summer felt totalizing. The sweet musk in the subway was perplexing. The draft of rotting sea creatures was angering and reminded me that I missed my mom. The samples from Santa Maria Novella that I had kept in my pockets were delicious, especially after a coat of loose tobacco. And discerning everything at once, the lilac and garbage and expensive perfume, was tremendous.

When you’re twenty, “you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance.” That summer I was self-consciously bright-eyed, and extraordinary. Self-conscious because I wanted to skip through it all, I felt like I was teetering around self-annihilation. Marriage could pull me away. I resented every sweet impulse towards reveling in my youth, even when I couldn’t help but lean in. I decided I was different from everyone else, understated and evolved. I was a straight shot towards ladyhood. But I was absolutely not. Obviously not.

Same, same but different.  New York is magical for its effortless feeling of congruence. Amidst all of its perfectly uniform street corners to nestle yourself into, each block is different by its name and signpost. Discerning yourself is easy in New York. Performing some vague idea of originality is easy, despite the rather unadorned and simple routine of the city. This routine…it grabs you so tightly, a thick embrace that trains your waist and slims you down. It’s a lovely pirouette.  Walking around the city, guided by one foot curled up to perfection. The other foot searching, twisting, contorting into an impossible life.

Élan vital.

Some summers had passed, though I have to admit, not enough for this kind of retrospection. Perhaps there is a fond regret in my voice, though it was not any kind of regret that provoked my memory. Now…I was waiting for the F, this time at a different station going uptown. Stale wind fanned my coattail, my leg pressed against his leg because we stood so close, just an inch from embrace. The impossible, extraordinary unknowable-ness of my twenties felt simple and conventional. We were on the way to read philosophy at the library, our bones sick and insides warmed by a hangover.

An old man was playing the erhu beautifully, but it was quickly interrupted by a Moves Like Jagger dubstep remix. It demolished the ambience and I quickly looked for its source who was nearby. A man was sitting on top of a speaker with the intention of drowning out the erhu-player. The jackass dominated the station against our will with his nasty drumming, while the old man quietly packed up his things and left. It was the saddest I had felt in so long.

I cried into my companion’s chest. He was angry for the old man, even considering confrontation. When the train arrived, I felt freed from the moment. He stood, and I sat with my knees pressed against my chest. All I could think about was the man playing the ehru. His steady, wrinkled fingers wrapped around its neck, the elegant bow gently stroking the strings, barely touching, inches from embrace. Subdued contact produces the most beautiful sounds. The sadness I felt for something so beautiful, smothered, murdered in front of me, it melted into the same sadness I felt when I mourned Joan Didion’s husband. I’m not justified in my melodrama, but everything I had endured melted into that moment. Just a reader, a passive observer on the subway, I may not be entitled to feel so much, but my vital pulse was touched nonetheless, by Didion and the old man and the strange city before me.

Retrospection doesn’t seem to be about retracing our footsteps in order, placing our present selves against the grain of the past. It’s a glimpse of a thread’s tangled knot, continuously growing, it’s origin unknown. The first time I smelled the city, it felt like a familiar note, a memory provoked. And each time since I have come to learn that the subtle contours, when noticed, transform the smell as if it was completely new. Infinite ingredients. The interrupted beauty of the ehru, the endless feeling of aging, the distance between his leg and mine, all sharp fragments of the same duration.

Touching my inner essence, investigating, and evolving.

“A true empiricism is that which proposes to get as near to the original itself as possible, to search deeply into its life, and so, by a kind of intellectual auscultation, to feel the throbbings of its soul” (Introduction to Metaphysics, Henri Bergson).

Is this a kind of spiritual oneness, an occult mantra, a dangerous trap? All the stories I tell about myself, around in circles I go. I place a stethoscope on my soul and hear nothing until I turn it around and hear a perfect rhythm. Aging kindly and sweetly, married, or unmarried, reckless, or prudent, each moment passes in an endless bargain with uniformity. Indeterminate origin and meaning are no longer a crime when you endure the incommensurable assembly of the city.  If you walk a few more blocks, the smell will change even if the deli has the same old rotting fruit.

Wittgenstein said things are occult to philosophers because they inflict onto the world (which is everything that is) a system with a single common construct. Philosophy, he says, is like trying to escape from a room, not noticing the door is already open. But everything is in plain view, everything we can know is familiar to us and is not one.

Adorno said that we feared the occult, and through modernity we have disenchanted ourselves with the world. Simply it is a close-mindedness that allows for the occult. The new order is that “there shall be neither mystery nor any desire to reveal mystery.” And yet, for Adorno what is feared is only opaque in relation to the claim to be total. Art however can reveal to us what appears to be occult because “if the language of nature is mute, art seeks to make this muteness eloquent.” Maybe everything is not in plain view, but for Adorno we can grasp it all.

To me, seduction is occult. And mystery is what compels us to move in the world passionately. To allow for mystery means inflicting yourself onto reality instead of just watching it go by. I like Baudrillard for this. I agree, I think the world is more and more like a simulacrum. I think even the occult has tried to become schema. Witchy culture is just a boring reaction to math and science and masculinity and enlightenment. Funnily enough, Baudrillard was a Manichaean. Anyways, what I was saying about seduction is that I think it is at least metaphysically occult. Which is why romance is suffering, because it is a threat to the banality and symbols and the overtly familiar things that make this world go around. Romance and seduction can only be explained in ways that are not common right now.

If there was an ultimate truth construct, it is that everything is always how it is supposed to be. Even when it is this simulacrum, or like late-stage capitalism or whatever. It is hard to believe this, but I think it is true. Sometimes true things are not easy to believe. Sometimes it is important to believe in things because it makes you feel more, not feel good. Like love… I know someone who “brings out the best in me,” I’m selfless and kind for them, but it is not because it makes me feel particularly good all the time. I love them because I cannot stop thinking of them, and I suffer out of fear of losing them all the time, and it is thrilling to put someone on pedestal and at the same time see them as flawed. Love is never easy, but it is true, just like it is true that everything is supposed to be…

Heraclitus said that “The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.” I think divinity is a random sweeping, and so is war and kink, and math and seduction. So is truth and suffering and easy and hard. I love Heraclitus’ fragmentary writing; I was just reading him so that is probably why this journal entry is shit.

People willingly embrace signs and symbols that are ugly and suck, and then become woke. Symbols can obviously be poignant, but sometimes they lead to mass psychopathology and umm…banality. Ambiguous symbols are dismissed as nonsense, like a one true God or soil, the wild wild west, third world countries or Ancient Greek pederasty. But people will embrace loveless symbols because they can wrap themselves with it and be called a leftist or a nazi or a cunt.

(loveless american symbols: Antifa flag, hammer and sickle [was cool but now is primitive and boring], swastikas, abortion, guns, astrology, the big eyes emoji, twinks, slurs, eating disorders, diaspora, negative space art, high school, new york, foucault [no hard feelings], porn, dating profiles, camouflage pants, pronouns)

I am sorry for how disorganized and hateful this journal is. I do not know yet if I will post it, I must share it with my confidant first. I am still incredibly uncertain of myself because I am so young and inexperienced, that is probably why I am so hateful as well. But everything is the way it is supposed to be. The way up and the way down are one and the same. You can’t step in the same river twice. And I am only filled with hate because I know that there is more out there for me to see, and I cannot let my passion die in this world, because there is so much mystery to reveal.

(Japanese tourist’s pilgrimage to Dostoevsky’s grave; his epitaph is John 12:24)

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