lightning garden

Cosmic juggalo jokers plying the hyperspatial pathways, hunting for commerce, for unprotected ideas, for free-floating numina... pirates of the Jungian unconscious.

Picture the scene: a flytrap in the shape of a voluptuous human figure, a Venus of Willendorf only the head that of a carnivorous plant, swaying in a beguiling rhythm, unmistakably sexual, vagina like a pitcher plant... Would you? All sex is fundamentally murder, the mantis only makes it a little more literal than most. The Headless One exists in a state of continual orgasm, better yet beyond that, beyond the black river and the reed shore.... Osiris-Made-Beautiful/Perfect. The T-pillars at Göbekli Tepe, the earliest known temple, built and buried before agriculture, before domestication, before the wheel — priests came first, then kings, then society around them — a landing strip for the astral juggalos? A theory suggests it was buried without being ever used, a sacrifice of cyclopean proportions committed to the bosom of the earth... The animal decorations a kind of language, a hallucinogen, a trip embedded in stone... A roadmap for the shamanic consciousness.

Such is the streamlining of the hyperspaceship, the astral vessel... Carved and engraved to produce vortices as it jams the etheric winds, adding stability and lift, enabling it to brave the vast storms of outer limbo and the event horizons of the exoma... The crew all in mimetic disguise, clown makeup we should call it, the Fool-Magician archetype, made strange and inhuman, patterned like a Rorschach, like a blit basilisk, melding into the environment, a spacesuit painted to the skin. Some shamans tattoo the cosmos on their bodies, their legs the underworld, their spine the world-tree, eagles and sun-crows ringing the domes of their heads, thus becoming the cosmic man, becoming the multidimensional interface between the microcosm and the macrocosm... This, too, a kind of streamlining, a kind of a travelling machine. The body itself is no machine, it has no parts, no teleology, no function except what it does, by definition. It is by demarcating, painting, scarifying, cutting it is given a purpose, made into a thing-for-something... It is by pointing out the gods residing in every organ, hollow, and pore that the Daoist practises their spiritual alchemy. It's a god-machine, like the pyramids are, like burial mounds are: a technological womb for the assembling of the Golden Fetus, the promised child — the seed of immortality. It is such trade the pirate, the joker, the astral shark quickening on aer cosmic ship, the mobile temple preys on... And this, too, of course, an organism, a machine of a second order.

These are ideas, and ideas are not yet parts, they are raw materials... Fractal bifurcation, the accumulation of difference, branches on the linguistic tree. Only by force do they become existent, only by necessity do they attain power, only by restraint do they gain freedom. Such is the knife's edge ran by the crisis magician and the pirate alike, the thin golden path between ice and water trod by the magician-fool, the voice of the Buddha-to-Come urging them on and the voice of the Buddha-that-Was whispering reassurance... all lies, of course. The mantis bows xer head in solemn prayer before inputting the hyperspatial code sequence specifying a junction in the fractal web of Atlach-Nacha, the spider of Neither-Neither, and giving the order to go, launching xer ship upon the imaginal winds and the yawning gulfs between impossible stars wherein frogs and the impossible larvae of the Outer Ones turn and cavort a sluggish dance.

This vignette previously appeared in Earthly Delights Ogdo issue 4.