Early Days in the Vortex/ Part Three

In March of 1975, I went with two friends to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Harvard. It was there that I met an intelligent five-foot matrix of quartz. My skull hummed. Voices swelled from the Hypogeum on Malta. A python hissed from his crevice at Delphi. Gargoyles roared from their ledges on Notre Dame. Trembling, I did my best to write down what I heard. There was a scent of nuclear fallout in the air, of sandalwood mixed with ash from the Battle of Kurukshetra. My hands were cold. I could barely hold my pencil. The museum guards wouldn’t let me rest my notebook on a display case. The babbling swelled, and then continued to grow louder. If only these beings were not speaking in so many different languages! 

 In these early days in the vortex, the inner and the outer worlds frequently changed places. I not only felt that I belonged to a community of artists, I also felt I was part of a living universe that was itself a form of art, in which artist and work were the alternate aspects of one seemingly atonal but harmonious process, in which the living differed from the dead mostly in being subject to the law of gravity (except for those of us who were evolved, of course). The way to grasp the psychotic complexity of this web was to plunge without looking towards the depths of the confusion. Joy was the key to the City of the Ancients. Once, the whole of the world could be fit inside my heart. Facts in the foreground led to the conundrum of the infinite, as the figure eight revealed—if only to cover it up again—the erotic subtext of the Eon. False rulers had corrupted the translucency of the records. It was our job to remember how to read.

 Lacunae were like oceans, once thought by archaeologists to create barriers between continents, which our hairier prototypes were too stupid to overcome. More recent theories suggest that such “barriers” could be a means of transportation. The very opacity of the sign was an indication that something big was going on. The more absurd, the better. The sign suggested, it did not denote, and the further we had to go to wrap our minds around it the more radical, in the end, would be the change in our awareness. It was good to be puzzled, at the mercy of the currents and the winds. It was possible that our own breath was the thread that led from the labyrinth, whose exit, now too tiny to see, was located on a foreign shore.

 The rate of coincidence exploded. For example, at 6 AM one day I was awakened from a dream, as I heard, forced from my lips, the Mayan word “Xibalba.” At 8:30, when I left for school, I found that some passerby had written “Xibalba” on the steps of my apartment building. How often does that happen? A coincidence, or so the scientist says, of which one normally does not bother to take note. And yet…This was the only day, out of the thousands before and since, on which some passerby has written a Mayan word by my door.

 Continue reading: https://www.scene4.com/0523/briangeorge0523.html

Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, my first book of essays, is available through Untimely Books: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/