With and Without Those Rites

Once accused of dubious practices on the fringes of the cityscape, the gang of everything but onlookers couldn’t help but dig deeper into the allegedly obfuscating  techniques of rendering redundant common wisdom that saw such elated activities as evidence of (1) plurality of the mind; (2) instrumental mind. The reason for such a response on behalf of the notorious kids was to say Fuck off! to whatever acted as an invitation to justify righteousness of their actions, simultaneously transfiguring the original Яάscall vocabulary into a socially pleasing statement about technology as the pioneering force of moral advancement.

The Kids detected conspiracy in the seemingly well-intentioned provocations. They dug that the condemnations addressing the obscurity of their collaborative artistic mathematics were nothing but parasitic philosophizing. It was a different way of saying: ”Should you agree to negative the signal in the communication channel, not only will you do a favor to your good selves, but also win a voice of support of the public majority.” To that the Kids replied: ”Fuck off freaks! Even if it turns out that our practice contradicts your views, that will happen because we think what we think! Because we do what is right—not because it was a righteous response to your fucking challenge. Further, if you are so short-sighted as not to be able to see a very simple fact that to say that there is electricity in brain, but also an experience lived out differently from what the electric current is, does not necessarily entail a presumption about schizoid being. 

Also, if you—sorry attempts at proving the truth of a human being being a thinking animal—self-righteously claim that what one does cannot be divorced from what one wants/desires, etc., then you are sadly right to imagine that such a standpoint can lead anywhere. More precisely, to perceive intention to be as inevitable as holding a value-charged opinion is in your case a sorrowfully misleading pattern of mentally processing input from the external world. Seen from there, certain phenomena seem to be describable solely by the means available within that territory. That leaves you hopelessly confined within a hallucination of being immaculately rational, while failing to see the very critical angle from which that rationality can be suspected. Unless, i.e., you turn out to be intolerant to cultish exclusion and…well…decide to, ehem, dive in! Bloodsuckers…Revengeful  mind is unlikely…Apologetic tongue unknown…Numberless motives imaginable. Until then, fuck off  creeps and amuse yourselves testing amongst your ghastly lowliest selves falsifiability of your somnambulism and make our fucking day by, actually, proving corrosive effects of a denial / lack / absence of the gift for metaphorical thinking.”

In other words, they kept gathering inside the ruinous factory walls and, constantly raided by severe winds, persevered in keeping the tradition created within such tiny space of time charged and alive. They would assemble at around 4 PM every day in front of the former factory. The comrades would first strategize the operation. That would take circa half an hour. It was necessary to have a precise plan of action in order to sneak into the abutting backyard unnoticed . They crawled in order to reach the green area that from above looked as if fine yellow dust had been spilled over it. The effect was made thanks to the optical deviation of the central part of its flower seen from above.

Having had all the stages carefully elaborated, they’d tiptoe along the driveway till they’d get to the heart of the action. Then, the tiny, yet skillful fingers would engage in picking up the flowers and lay them on each other’s palms. Then each of them would stuff as many flowers as possible in one’s pocket. They’d rush out of the garden, back to the factory. They spent the rest of the afternoon submerged in the depths of the remaining part of the ritual. First they’d  pour some water in a pot, let it boil, throw the herbs in, and watch it simmer for a couple of seconds. Following this was the act of putting a lid over the pot’s opening. They’d allow it to steep for about fifteen minutes. Then they’d drink it. The rest is…childhood.

They knew the name of the herb was chamomile. They knew that they were, actually, not stealing it. They are not criminals. Because crime is not possible. Because everything has been legalized. Everything is allowed. And nothing is free. It was available to them and free to be taken and consumed at one’s leisure. Alternatively, one could also buy it in a store at a price not higher than that of a candy or something…But, for some reason, they wouldn’t give up on the customs. Somehow it felt right to continue doing it the way they did. Because that’s the way we do it. Because ceremony is highly praised. Because the infusion made from the herbs obtained from somebody else’s backyard is good. Because stuff from a store suX. In fact, they tried getting it from a store. Brewing it was somewhat similar to watching one’s image in a curved mirror. It felt creepy! Bizarre. Because distorted mirror images threat’n 2 stay imprinted in the deepest areas of one’s psyche. And it’s not fucking funny.

Instead, fun was to be had by means of persistent ritualing. Whose opening was of the approximately following content: The Kids, holding each other’s hands, forming in circle, close their eyes and in unison recite  from memory verses written in the unwritten manual:

XXh--ale Sylvan Souls!

And then a splash of golden on a beige canvass and then a dollop of ketch up on one’s nose and then handful of soil smeared over one’s cheex and then a snotty slap across one’s forehead and then hazy crimson mucus dripping into one’s nostrils and then sticky drops trickling along one’s earlobes and then a melting eyeball devouring the mouth and then cherry-picking gore-coated hair and then peeling encrusted edema till it starts spurting a gelatinous geyser and then the jet lavishly watering the desert and then a fountain of transcellular fluid stream knocking down pitiable obstacle and then the wild, high-velocity liquid hose snaking through the pores drilling a miniscule hole in the cranium abundantly aired at the moment the gliding flow penetrates the cerebral cortex breathlessly speeding deeper towards the temporal lobe syncopated heart beat of a locomotive approaching the soft tissue further towards cerebellum hissing sound announcing the arrival of the train long due…Staring  from the micro slide at the scientist’s eye.

A Panapocalyptic Manifesto

My friend barely knew Bizzare. But it didn’t prevent him from obtaining knowledge about the mystical socio-shamanistic agenda immaculately elaborated via a fruitful and persistent communal collaboration. Mainly, zarry(E) was that fabulous source of information. As a mother, she shared that secular-sacred epistemological treasure out of an unquestioned sense of responsibility towards someone who’d most probably stay on this planet longer than she. Should natural order preclude accidents from creating a different scenario.  Or, just out of a strong sense of being a mother.

A gang of poets, free thinkers, chancers, passers by, philosophers by nature, critics by vocation, theologians by decree, doctors by degree, rascals by pedigree, smooth operators by innate predilection, rokkaz by choice, literati by birth, neuro-linguists by blood, christened into psychoanalysis, resurrected from the ashes of ego into the haze of superego , former junkies-turned-economy-heads, cannibalistic worshippers of the military-entertainment shrine, stock market hobbyists, mathematicians of desire, students of deskilling, fragile verbal buds, painters of golden splashes on beige canvasses, love haters, rough maters, dark matters. To hell with darkness, was their motto. To fuck with everything else, was everybody’s everyday. Life was the other. The other was everywhere. I questioned that reciprocity a few years after.

The dream of life as it would be imagined by the fulfilled before they reached nirvana was the thing this crew, crudely thrown into the abysmal jaws of robozomboid reality, were obsessed with. Free exchange of an ethereal flow generated an agenda of revelatory dimensions. Minds in full swing, hearts in full bloom. Hurled into the eddies of the mother earth’s black leather ornamented loins, propagated the idea of happiness based neither on prosperity nor on content. But both. They advocated for a communal life thriving on radiance created from the magnetic coil, short circuiting the noise blooming from static electricity. From self-sustaining and, simultaneously, self-suspending interior combustion engines. They believed in multigamy as a counteract to calcified polygamy. They praised technology as the pioneering force of moral advancement.The sun of their galaxy was free will. Their bodies were the temples of that sun.

They put tremendous effort in the pursuit of annihilation of the monetary system. Barter or nothing at all, was one of the slogans that could be found on the ruins of old factory buildings swaying like trees on grim, windy mornings. The belief in the power of graffiti was to survive their peril physical existence and emanate into the world tales born from spray can embryos. Color of the rising sun was their coat of arms. Gentle whisper- kiss of the sunset their lullaby. In noman’s land: between day and night, neither inside, nor outside. The air was yellow. The streets alien. Other worlds unknown, ungraspable, and unlivable  from that insular reality of the school of deskilling.

The beauty of the Arctic gradually etching a new genetic map on their chromosomes. The sea’s seductively misty depths inscribing a fresh texture on the epithelium. The lab and the welcoming micro slides an ever inspiring hypodermal wellspring of élan vital. Bizzare was king of that scientific-experimental empire. My friend barely knew him. He was a torchbearer for the life-generating panapocalyptic  dream. zarry(E) was his sidekick. She was my friend’s mother. She was hard-wierded to the greenery of nature. She knew a lot.

Legal Frictions

The kids were hanging out with the bunch from the suburb college of deskilling. Strolling through the labyrinth constructed of discarded sofas covered with dust, stained refrigerators ornamented with grease dripping from melting icicles, boxes full of rotting debris of twenty McDonald’s meals, icing formed from encrusted puke over moldy  beefstew. 

They are not criminals. Because crime is not possible. Because everything has been legalized. Everything is allowed. And nothing is free. Only the streets. Cold. Hostile. But, at least, far from the restrictive classroom walls. Far enough from school uniforms. In the haven encircled by eroding façades and shaky foundations. Where to be free means to be somewhere. Be it even the vapor from a garbage can hiding a disintegrating corpse on the hottest of summer nights. Be it an exhale of a parasite thought on the tiny remaining part of the brain ravaged by the viral tsunami.

They were hanging out on the ocean shore, in Café Club. Bizzare lived at 25 E Half All(e)y, not far from that epicenter of deskilling. He suffered from something that most accurately could be defined as postcoital-depression-phobia. For that reason his mission aimed at taking all the necessary measures for preventing such sentiment. That entailed creating situations that would exceed feared emotions, thereby excluding a possibility that reality could ever overdo intentionally created conditions. This endeavor required participation of other people and it, as a rule, happened without their knowing it. At least this unawareness continued until their lowlife profile was irrevocably fixed by their low-level potential for recuperation of joyous communication with life.

My friend’s mother was one of the contributors to Bizzare’s strange pursuit. She was of hybrid origin: Indian male and Scottish female predecessors crossbred with the lineage that migrated to the north from Iberian Peninsula as early as eleventh century A.D. Nature presented her with a pair of small feet. Her voice was the sound of a harp’s strings moved by a whisper of a Sagittarius’s satellite. Her hair a golden carpet spread around a welcoming chain of galaxies. She could run fast. Lying on her back, she’d spend deaf nights sound asleep. Dreaming a dream that flourished from an echo of Bizzare’s inviting smile. Her name is zarry(E). She was my friend’s mother. His name is not important.

That Obscure Colossus

No matter how obscurely one lived, the legend lives on, shining brightly, sometimes even blinding the eyes of archive enthusiasts who are reconstructing the past from the ashy imprints on old photographs and texts of all sorts. From the sources even more obscure than the lives about which they testify, speaks a shadow of that shady underground king. Rumor has it that his mother’s antecedents came from Appenine Peninsula, whilst his father’s lineage was a peculiar crossbreed of Welsh females and Chinese males. Strange, but, according to the sources available, true is the fact that no female Chinese nor Welsh male was known to spoil this intricate genetic pattern.

His name was Bizzare. He grew up in a tropical country far away from the place of birth. His childhood was carefree. His thoughts were uninhibited. His games knew no frontiers. He later reminisced it as follows: “It felt like bloody heaven to be alive and a child.” Few believed such a confession. Many were prone to interpret it as a nostalgia for the loss of innocence. But he knew they knew close to nothing about nostalgia. Let alone loss. Upon successful completion of high school, that coincided with his parents’  diplomatic term, he returned to his native Iceland. There he came to realize that the beauty of the Arctic was not only  inaccessible to the majority who boasted about having an impressive aesthetic background, but also undecodable to many of those who happened to be fishing in those domestic seas colder than a demon’s heart.

He was a teenager whose bodily thermodynamics allowed him to even swim in that soulless  aquaemeriVM. He learnt how to appreciate the exchange of energy between the body and the world. He decided he was going to take it as the axiom upon which to base a manifesto of the new mind. Early experiences of diving into the freezing depths of the frozenhearted universe colored his gates of perception with such vividness that later, when he found himself at the threshold of adulthood, he decided that no natural stimuli available could beat that underwater psychedelia. That’s how he became a devout admirer of science.

Mid height and minute, yet strong muscular system that secured good posture didn’t leave his body long after most of his acquaintances   left this world, more often than not under the circumstances shadier than the inside of a monster’s eyelid. He found himself increasingly believing in the power of laboratory—lonesome diver into the kaleidoscopic ocean of the art of micro slides. There he found a universe greater than any canvass decorated with the ultimate, signature imaginative faculty.


By that time he already nailed for himself the status of the unbeatable countercultural poet-cum-ideologue. His darkish complexion highlighted by a fierce pair of eyes emanated an air of easy-going heaviness. That was the mind writing itself into a program for new living within suspicious boundaries, all the while relentlessly anticipating their contestation.


During his wild adolescent years, he was the leader of the gang of the kids from suburbia who only knew run-down outskirts of the metropolis covered with an irreparably grey veil exhausted from the contaminated lungs of the urban giant. The slums these kids were forced to call homes were more reminiscent of the psyche of a person suffering from a severe, decades-long depression than of a monument to an architect’s expertise. Dawns were murky there. Noons dim-lit. Evenings darker than the tomb of a serial killer. There was no midnight.


Only aimless wandering along the faceless concrete surfaces. No site to occupy imagination. No sun to rupture the cement curtain above. No smile to break the spell of cyclic lives. Only perpetual lightless noon. On the way to and from school. That was not one. And a gang of idle-paced kids whose steps bridge the vapid space between the doorstep of the dormitory called home and the vurtual school. Endless journey through the city of indistinguishable days and nights.


Only the subtonic layers of the lingering buzz feature different registers. Those impalpable areas speak in different keys. Or, more precisely, can speak in different keys, should the thoughts be capable of creating the signature tone. Typically, that’s unlikely. All the buzz was just that. And, yet there was a frequency striking the air differently.


His name is Bizzare--king of original duplicity. And he knew it. If he hadn’t, he would have never offered to the world the Unforgettable Ten Musts:

1.      The idea of safety MUST be equated with the frequency of visits of club goers to the  hottest dance hubs in the city;

2.      Job MUST be understood as anything an individual does in order to support the development of small and medium businesses;

3.      The concept of job,  thus, includes the not-for-profit sector, thereby subverting traditional perception of employment;

4.      Equality MUST be understood in incremental class terms;

5.      Military-entertainment complex MUST be read in a freudian key;

6.      Peace MUST be tightly woven with, but at the same time diametrically disproportionate to, inflation;

7.      Tradition MUST be either smashed at a stroke or preserved within a fortress-like bubble;

8.      Art MUST be either totally free or there will be none;

9.      Citizenship MUST be a matter the bloodline, unquestionably founded in legislature;

10.  The degrees of humanity MUST be implemented in the health program  defined in architectural terms.

      

Charing Cross Encounters

A couple of years ago, I met a friend at CharingCross. From there, we decided to explore the area during an idle walk. We crossed the street and from Tottenham Court Road slid to Soho. We strolled through its streets without an intention to stop at any of the places we passed by. And yet, some things seem to be irresistible. One such topos occurred to be the record store, where I heard a track that now in my memory exists only as a signpost in the story that was exchanged as we walked. The actual sound of what I think was the saxophone (but it can as well be a fantasy fabricated to supersede the lost experience) remains a lingering veil over that afternoon safely lulled in the embrace of the past.

My friend told me about his ant with whom he grew up, having been abandoned by his mother after her decision to dedicate her life to a serious investigation of the shady side of life. Her decision was reinforced by a newly established relationship with a guy who happened to be a key figure in the 1960s London underground scenes. Not only was he nocturnally charming, but his charismatic personality was a centripetal force in the circles generally inclined to dispersion. The mother fell into the category of the particles of that universe undeniably attracted to and held by the gravity of that demimonde colossus.

Sooner rather than later, she discovered her secret passions. One of them was unsatiable  hunger for digging layers of consciousness with occasional excursions into the unconscious. She joined a dance collective whose philosophy predictably drew from the ancient Vedas. With a strong predilection for eclecticism, the group combined the Sanskrit wisdom with extremist shamanistic, trance-inducing practices. Later, this was to be recognized as kernel in the descendant subcultures founded in the philosophy of immediacy, apolitical social agenda, and corporeal metaphysics. Before the time of these contemporary gregarious enthusiasts came, my friend’s mother and her mates were grooving and steaming in a feverish anticipation of being combusted out of livelihood and from life.

They were against the division between inner and external world. Instead, they preferred to understand the world as an extension of a human being. That enabled them to freely link their bodies to whatever surrounding and to sustain communication between what is typically perceived as two realms of existence. Their denial of such boundaries found fruitful justification in allowing an intake of a radically versatile character to freely nourish intercellular spaces of their bodies. That, coupled with the abovementioned artistic bodily practices, ensured that phenomena such as levitation be but a warm up exercise in the series of mind-expanding experiences. To live such life meant not to want to stop even for a second to be exposed to those meditative ecstasies. Players’n’mounteneers at heart, they projected passions onto either exalted speech or elevated states of mind. To persevere in exercising that bottomless body of spiritual research was to be ready to leave behind everything and anything that could preclude advancement  on the trajectory to the ever-exciting unknown. She died like the rest of the like-minded from the circles—in the flame of the hearts irrevocably committed to the transcendental expansion of the body.

What was striking to me about that testimonial is, like in most of them, the tangential content of the message. In this particular one, delivered by my friend, it is the marginal remark about incessant correspondence between him and his mother until she died. The letters, according to him, were emotionally charged and not easy to handle for a young soul struggling with demons of abandonment, guilt, and self-abhorring. This, in fact, turns out to be slightly paradoxical, since the content of her letters was most decisively targeted to proving her positive feelings for her son. And yet, the most powerful effect had her insistence on coping with the agony of living with the knowledge that she couldn’t bring happiness into the life that she herself gave to someone. “As your child, I am not supposed to be your agony!” That struck me as the moral of that Charing Cross encounter.

Genre-Bending Lullaby

My care-takers spoke in voices sometimes unrecognizable even to myself. At their best, they were as close to an average performer as they got. At their worst, they’d eat alive all the miserable attempts to reconfigure the notion of performativity. I like them either way. Because regardless of the performative aspect, the act of reading requires serious engagement in an active interaction with the narrative. They were both particularly fond of surgical interventions in the realm of genre bending. They’d do it with an awe-inspiring appetite for making themselves at home wherever they went, in whatever storyline they’d dwell. All the way equipping me-good-self with the same skill.

On one such occasion, I was again told a story in which I heard an echo of the enigmatic whisper that was wondering about technology, playfulness, essence, totality, and everything else. In the key of kitch’n’sink mystery-meets-horror, the tale seductively drew me into its meandering tunnels. I saw a boyish young man, sickly rich and rhetorically sick. S/he inherited from his quote-unquote father the language called the marbled swarm. S/he comes to the chateau that s/he is about to buy. The family who are selling the haunted castle immediately reveal the presence of the ghost of their late son to be part of the reason for deciding to sell it. Their other son soon befriends the future owner. Having shaken on that one, they see the deal opening up the avenues for addressing the mysterious death,  that could have even been suicide. Or, something like that.

That story to me was “a most unsightly daydream in which a beet-red, hyperventilating infant gave birth toanother crimson, screaming infant.” I had one of such daydreams one day in June when somebody’s dead mother’s corpse was found in the attic of that person’s house inhabited by the children whose parents lived in a pocket of the shirt of an overdosed celebrity called Bizzare. They lived at 25 E Half All(e)y.

The kids were hanging out with the bunch from the suburb college of deskilling. Strolling through the labyrinth constructed of discarded sofas covered with dust, stained refrigerators ornamented with grease dripping from the melting icicles, boxes full of rotting debris of twenty McDonald’s meals, icing formed from encrusted puke over moldy   beefstew.  They often think:” Owning property affords someone a house in which to be at home, at the price of being homeless.”

They are not criminals. Because crime is not possible. Because everything has been legalized. Everything is allowed. And nothing is free. Only the streets. Cold. Hostile. But, at least, far from the restrictive classroom walls. Far enough from school uniforms. In the haven encircled by eroding façades and shaky foundations. Where to be free means to be somewhere. Be it even the vapor from the garbage can hiding a disintegrating corpse on the hottest of summer nights. Be it the exhale of a parasite thought on the tiny remaining part of the brain ravaged by the viral tsunami, “if that mixture of recalcitrance and focus is even possible.”

Bedtime Fables

Walking past a park on one of my not so bright mornings, a glance at one of the cypresses, whose impressive upright detachment radiated an air of warmth, brought the melody of the fables that lulled me to sleep every night when me was a wee ladsdei. One of me care-takers (or the other, coz they’d either take turns or act in unison on that demanding mission called put the wee ladsdei to sleep) would assume the voices of the characters and of the connective narrative tissue alike in order to distract my fast running fantasy fueled by the intake of daily adventures. The fable the cypress reminded me of (or it was the same story night in, night out) is the one about a bunch of kids living in the city suburbs. The run-down outskirts of the metropolis were covered with an irreparably grey veil exhausted from the contaminated lungs of the urbane giant. The slums these kids were forced to call homes were more reminiscent of the psyche of a person suffering from a severe, decade-long depression than of a monument to an architect’s expertise. Dawns were murky there. Noons dim-lit. Evenings darker than the tomb of a serial killer. There was no midnight. When the next day started one would know only by the sound of the alarm, bringing another 24-hours long misery run.

On one of such mornings, on their way to school, before they diverted from the route, the kids were walking in usual silence. That was not one. Because there was a brooding buzz over their heads…buzz of swarmed remnants of sleepless nights. Sleepless because somebody’s neighbor was more drunk than on any other day, because somebody’s fist punched the wife’s face more vehemently than on other nights, because somebody was too sick to wait for the next day to come, mild fever grew into a burning hurricane ravishing the damaged liver, eating up the decomposing blood vessels…the skin beyond irritable…bloodshot eyes popping out at a slightest touch of the hostile, cold air…the brain like a beehive about to explode and send the outburst of germs to spread throughout the world smearing every corner of the universe with the signature infectious jelly called wretchedness.

Sleepless nights bore humming mornings. School is an unreachable destination on such days. And they are all the same. So diversion and routine are being confusedly practiced in aimless attempts to just be somewhere between what should be waking up and going to bed. Aimless wandering along the faceless concrete surfaces. No site to occupy imagination. No sun to rupture the cement curtain above. No smile to break the spell of cyclic lives. Only perpetual lightless noon. On the way to and from school. That was not one. And a gang of idle-paced kids whose steps bridge the vapidous space between the doorstep of the dormitory called home and the vurtual school. Noone can distinguish steps from one another. There is no way to tell the difference between the way this leg walks and that leg making a step on the endless journey through the city of indistinguishable days and nights.

Only the subtonic layers of the lingering buzz feature different registers. Those impalpable areas speak in different keys. Or, more precisely, can speak in different keys, should the thoughts be capable of creating signature tone. Typically, that’s unlikely. All the buzz was just that. And, yet there was a frequency striking the air differently. I remember that frequency from my care-taker’s engaging performance. It is of the approximately following content: “The essence of technology is nothing technical. But could it be something playful? Could it be a way, not of instrumentalzing nature, but of producing a new relation to it, as a totality?” Well, but who is the character that utters these words…is an enigma to me.