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A stairwell with, as before, a grey hard floor. The diagonal structure he had perceived was a rising staircase which he was now partially underneath. Beyond it stood large glass windows, through which sunlight shone. Around him stood trolleys, off white book trolleys (or so it seemed to him). The lad turned around, nothing but wall behind him, no trace of the dark stair. ‘Well’ thinks the lad ‘maybe I’m still sat on the stair, maybe I fell to my doom, or may as be I’m still at home dreaming in my old mum and dad’s house in the fen, however, true as all these might be, equally true is I’m here so let’s see what’s what.’

The lad took a step forward. All remained as it was. He pinched himself, he held his breath. These things all confirmed he was as real as could be told. He peered up the stairs and saw that several flights stretched upwards with the external wall being constructed of glass for the whole ascent. He looked further around and saw a corridor led away from the stairwell towards a black fire door with a large tubular handle. Suddenly there was a noise and the door pushed open.

A man walked through, full figure, slightly red face, dark trousers and a shirt (no tie). ‘Ah!’ says the man ‘Are you the new assistant?’ The lad is taken aback for sure ‘I’m not sure sir.’ he says ‘Were you expecting a new assistant?’ ‘Well of course we were expecting a new assistant, I’m just not sure I expected to find one lurking in the stairwell.’ ‘I do apologise sir’ says the lad ‘Call me Emanuel’ says the man ‘sir, is too formal. Or just call me Well, for that’s what most folk do.’ ‘I’m pleased to meet you Well, my name is Alex.’ ‘Nice to meet you too Alex, will you be straight to it or would you care for a bite to eat first?’ ‘If it’s all the same to you Well, we’ll get straight to work, for I’ve only just had a bite on the stair just now.’ and in saying this, he thought how curious it was that it was indeed on the stair that he ate, except that it was not the same stair, but the stair in the darkness, where he possibly still was.

‘As you will Alex, follow me.’

So Alex followed Well, not up the stair but down the corridor towards the dark double door away from the stairwell. This lead down a second corridor for some ten metres, then turned right, carried on and came to a room sized clearing where steel lift doors faced out whilst above them the numerical register of their level flickered from digit to digit. Facing the lifts were more black double doors. Well proceeded through these also and lead Alex to a massive dim room with stark metal girders vertically set through it at intervals. The room hummed and buzzed with noise of electrical machines. A long wooden desk could be seen to his left; it ran along the side of the massive room and seemed to have some kind of operatives behind it, though they could not be clearly made out because the light was poor. What was also visible were books, many many books.

They were piled up along the desk in great stacks leaving only some places by which the desk operatives could peek out. They were also on the floor behind the desk, stretching behind it and away into seemingly more rooms that extended out the back of the desk into what could be assumed to be offices, presumably for the operatives. ‘Have you shelved books before Alex?’ said Well ‘No sir, I mean Well, that I have not.’ ‘Not to worry, for it’s easy work but long and tiresome.’ So Well took Alex over the the books and told him what he must do.

Well explained that the building they were in was the library of a grand learning establishment. The students and professors were forever borrowing the books, but so quickly did they read them that they returned them almost immediately. Sometimes they returned them before they even left the building. This made for a vast amount of work for the operatives and their assistants (of which Alex was now one) who must tirelessly take the books off the students and the professors, process them and then get them back to the shelves as quickly as possible.

The books were all coded by a system of letters and numbers which was quite difficult to follow on account of the letters being of a different alphabet to that in which most of the books were written. The numbers were normal but only played a secondary, some would say almost superfluous role in determing where the books would be placed. The relevance of the numbers could be determined by the quantity of letters. If there were sufficient letters to determine the location of the book, then one could ignore the numbers, however if there were not enough letters then then numbers must be consulted to disambiguate the precise location that the book was to shelved in. The system was imperfect, yet it was the best system available and hence it had to be worked with.

Alex grasped the rudiments of the system in a short while, which impressed Well and even though a rudimentary grasp of the system was inadequate for a totally accurate shelving of the books, Well felt that a partially accurate shelving of the books was better than no shelving. This would come with the additional bonus that if the books were poorly shelved then when the students and professors went to retrieve them they would not find them in the correct locations and would be slowed down in the their borrowing. Well seemed to fantasise about a system which he called ‘organized disarray’ in which the whole library might be slightly off kilter in its correct positioning of the books, thus permanently slowing down the relentless borrowing of the items and even putting some of the patrons off from attending at all.

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The lad awoke bright and refreshed, and only by this could he guess it might be morning. The mushroom glow was the same as when he went to sleep but the air now had a slight musty quality to it, though in fairness this might have been there all along. He looked around to find his way out, but now as he looked around in the dim light he sees there is not just one hole, but several. But from which one has he come and where do they all go? He thinks back to last night and how he went round the stump, it seemed for an eternity, in the end finding just the one entrance. Yet here are, one, two, three maybe even more dark places that seem to lead out of the fungal chamber.

To be sure our lad felt quite alarmed at this, for the holes were tight and retreat would be hard. He had seemingly popped through just a short distance from the outside into here, yet none of them had daylight streaming in from to show which was the right one. The he thought that it must be the dark hedge above that prevented the light from being visible and that the other holes must sure just take him some other close distance to the hedge, either road or field side.

So after a moment’s dithering he picks one of the holes, largely on the basis that it looks maybe larger than the others, and squeezes his way in, pushing his bag before him as he goes. Very soon it’s dark in the tunnel and the lad is sure this is not the one he came in by. He wriggles on, the musty smell clears and the tunnel smells like fresh earth. Still the passage is wide enough and he thinks, if all became too uncomfortable or hopeless feeling, he might after all be able to, albeit slowly, maneuvre himself backwards up the tunnel.

But on it goes, on and on, darkness is all around and heavy press of the earth above sore weighs on his soul in a fear he can scarce keep at bay. The earth gets cooler, but he can hardly interpret this as a good sign as he feels it maybe a further symptom of what he’s been suspecting for some time. That is, that the tunnel is on a downward slope and that he is heading deeper and deeper into the earth. Still there’s something in him that drives him on. It’s strange after all, a clear tunnel like this in the depths of the earth; maybe it’s been used before, maybe it goes somewhere.

Now the incline becomes unmistakeably steeper and the surface made of a smoother sandier earth. It becomes unpleasant to crawl in. He kicks it up with his hands and arms has he moves and it gets in his face, it gets in his boots as he goes. The slope gets steep still, and now our lad feels a real claustrophobic panic. The darkness before him, the slippery sand, the downward tunnel, it’s all too much and for sure, he couldn’t get back up this if he wanted to. It’s now almost as he’s being propelled along, which he is as the slope is now steep, steep, steep, and the floor oh oh so slippery. At length his scrabbling is more a hindrance than an aid to the motion that carries him down down in to the dark.

Well, the scrabbling, plunging terror went on, too long for the lad you may be sure. But was it relief or even greater shock he felt when came to a sudden stop on a sandy smooth cold floor? Dazed and shocked, he felt around and though he hadn’t noticed it, the tunnel had widened some time ago and now he wasn’t sure exactly what he had emerged out of. He could only tell that in front of him were not tight walls of earth, but empty black cool air and a sandy floor beneath him.

The lad tried to stand and found there was space above him that he could. He took a step forwards and that worked too. So, seeming as he had not choice, he carefully walked himself through the dark. Well he hasn’t walked far when his boot struck something hard. ‘Oh ho’ thinks the lad, ‘what now?’ He crouched down and felt what he’d bumped into, and it seemed to him it was a very low stone wall. A flat vertical surface that, as he felt it, only went up half a foot or so. What’s on the other side of the wall? Our lad wants to know. So he feels the flat top surface of the ‘wall’ waiting to find the other side. Well he never found the other side, but what does he find? Only another vertical piece of stone, and this one too, just about half a foot in height by its feel. Now our lad has an inkling. He checks this second wall; yes this one has a top surface that goes on before the stone rises sheer again. The penny drops completely. They aren’t walls, they are steps! But steps to where?

‘Stone steps in the dark could be perilous.’ thinks the lad, so it’s with caution he ascends. Climbs might be best word insofar as he definitely doesn’t simply walk up. He leans forward to feel with his hands that the steps continue and thus can be sure it’s safe to proceed. The stairs go on on on, the lad climbs and climbs. Oh it’s weary work. How much longer to climb? Only one answer to this. As long as it takes for the stairs to take him out of the interminable darkness. So it’s on on on up the stairs, hands forward, back aching, knees battered from occasionally catching the bite of the stone and still no sign of an end to them. But who knows what else might have been out there in the dark. Maybe he has missed side doors, other staircases, passages or who knows what exits.

At length it’s all to much for the lad. The anxiety, the pain, the exhaustion. He stops and seats himself as best he can on the steps and rummages in his bag for food and water. He reflects on what a strange place this is and that whilst only a day or so can have passed it now seems a lifetime away that he was in his house with his old mum and dad, looking across to the abandoned garage, watching the litter blow down the street. At this memory he wonders if he has made the right choice.

But this is no time for regret, so he ate and he drank and he stared into the black, and as he did so he thought he saw a strange glow. He shook his head to clear it for he was sure there could be nothing there. But again as he stared into the black, purple spots began to appear before him. Tired as he was, he gave himself over to looking at them as they had a soothing appealing quality. Now at first it seemed that as he moved his eyes so the purple blobs followed this movement, but then the situation became more odd. For now it seemed the glowing purple spots became stable independent of his eyes. ‘Well here’s another funny thing!’ the lad said to himself as he stared incredulous at the moving colours.

Almost in a trance he watched the purple patches floating in the dark. Then slowly but surely round the edge of of the patches formed a soft green glow. The patches bobbed, and joined in with one another, they separated out, and in this weaving movement of strange light occasionally the lad thought he could make a out a scene that flickeringly appeared between the patches, filling in the rest of the dark. Once there was a blue sky with clouds that floated through, then there was a woodland glade where a blackbird fluttered through, sunlight striking branches in the clearing, now there was a stream bright and clear, unduluating sparkling on its every moving surface, now a bridge under over the stream and a railing on the bridge. The railing was of smooth metal piping which became, as he fell harder into the image, longer and no longer the rail, but pipes that went a long a beige plastered wall.

The lad took a half a stock of what was happening. Around him, to the left and right and behind, the same blackness and maybe, maybe he could still feel the stone step he sat on, but in front, in most of his vision a strange smooth floor of hard grey , a beige wall with a pipe running along it, a diagonal structure of some size he couldn’t make out, underneath which were many many off white trolleys on wheels with shelves on them and beyond the diagonal structure shone light as if a window were behind it.

The floor lapped at his feet and he found he was no longer seated but stood, with the vision of trolleys before him and the darkness receding behind. ‘If I step into this’ thought the lad ‘surely I shall tumble down the stairs to my doom, yet it may be I am not really standing but still sitting on the stair, in which case…’

The lad took a ginger step onto the grey floor, probing its solidity whilst holding his balance on the other foot. He pushed the foot down harder and it was met with floorlike resistance. He lifted the other foot and placed it on the grey floor and in that instance, the blackness around him failed and he found himself stood in a stairwell.

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This Tooth is called Being or in the Hyperqabalah it is the node ‘Triebnegesin’. It is the feeder node for the yestertooth of Eskatology (Daagolenyfo).

Lovecraftian is an adjective for a whole family of phenomena. Some earlier than Lovecraft himself. One example of this being Chambers’ famous ‘The King in Yellow.’ One way in which we an look upon this set of weirdness is its ability to disengage from the conventional take on monsters (fairyland creatures, dragon like creatures and devils/demons, the undead). These forms may be revisited but they are reappropriated under new guises. It is a phenomenon that many of us may have experienced to see some fantastic world or city in a dream and feel that this has some reality to more than a mere dream. Whilst this may or may not be true, our inability to frequently visit such places at will means they still fall under the category of dream, no matter how luminous and interesting they may have seemed.

What Chambers’ Lovecraft, Machen etc did was to facilitate the perception of these worlds as real, persisting dimensions that push up against our own. The inhabitants of which look, from the human perception, like something extremely sinister (though by their own standards they may well not be so).

Of course we cannot answer any question regarding the reality of such worlds. Hypersitition can solidify such inventions and project them back into history. What we rummage here for a is a comment on a sort of sideways movement that either accesses them or creates them.

This somehow all ties to the pluralistic spirituality talked about elsewhere. The systems all have some kind of interaction with a pre-intellectual awarenesss. Access to this awareness is a wellspring from which a certain different kind of intelligence persists. Buddhism clearly acknowledges the existence of the spirits as things one may meet on the way, however they are their powers are said to be distractions to the true way.

This again is not the discussion here (the trueness of one way). The point is fading from me as I write. The word rivulets returns to me, every time I go through the process. There are flows in the pneuma, great accretive structures either real of archetypal that move laterally to a vertical axis towards and away from ‘enlightenment’, which itself is just one possibility.

In the lateral flows are created or exist strange worlds which may feed back into our own (hyperstition). The experience of a book like the ‘King in Yellow’ is one that I feel some empathy with. Like, many I have seen a book not dissimilar to this in dreams -though I would not consider it sinister, but rather very strange. This book is related to the Hyperqabalah. There is no claim of universal importance here, only an observation of the way in which the other world interacts with this one through strange feedback loops.

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A brief and unpretentious dive into the Castañeda/Lynch connection through the show Twin Peaks and the book The Eagle’s Gift (the last one before Carlitos’ descent/capture). The key non-thesis of the speculation thus: David Lynch, finding himself in a similar condition as Carlos Castañeda, fighting assimilation of his vision by Hollywood, produced, more specifically with The Return, a critique of the descent in-itself, sketching a diagram of his own escape (which Carlos himself failed to perform). If Lynch ever read Castañeda is beyond the point. Here are fragments of conversations held at the CEO.

I wonder if we could think of Judy (Jowday), that is represented by the beloved “Owl Peaks” symbol as the dark side/counterpart of the Eagle (or really just the nightly aspect of the Eagle, for what is an owl if not an eagle one sees at night). If we assume Jowday is a manifestation tied to the Black Lodge, it seems to be the case. Even more because, in this book particularly, and its transition to the next, Carlitos fails (like our beloved agent Cooper) and is captured (as is expressed in the mythos of his own cult always torn and in constant war from within).

“We are luminous beings, we are better than that”, the motto La Gorda keeps repeating to Carlitos each time he starts worrying or wimping too much, the one thing she supposedly kept on repeating as she tried to “save” Carlitos from the jaws of the jaguar, fits very well with the White Lodge’s ‘residents’ true face:

Or at least Laura’s (since she is luminescence and good herself)

Laura truly is the Twin Peaks equivalent of the infamous Nagual woman: a prodigious, luminous being that got snatched too early in her life and exhausted her potential by the suffering her captors imposed on her, into and onto, for the very teleological motif that is the production of garmonbozia. And they did it all, the Black Lodge’s rogues, to feed on this secreted creamed corn. It sounds too much like the story of the beautiful forgotten Nagual woman. By the end of Twin Peaks (The Return), everything in one timeline is corrected and Laura’s corpse even disappears as if either she never existed there or was saved (I think she was erased from that timeline and jumped, only unwillingly via Coop — who thought he was doing good by that, when in fact he was only reviving her death and so prolonging her suffering, pain and sorrow, much like Carlitos and Carol Tiggs joining the cult). If more pain and sorrow, that is, garmonbozia, is the result of Coop’s failure to fix his heart, and said creamed corn comes from a continually doubled Laura, doesn’t this mean he is worse than BOB? Upgraded BOB, in fact, that feed us the garmonbozia while reciprocally being fed by our need to hear that lovely scream.

The Nagual/Tonal–Right/Left side quadratic polarity is also very reminiscent, to me, of Coop’s multi-self:

BOB-Coop (or Doppelganger, The Lovers Reverse and The Magician Reverse),

Homo hermaphroditus masculinus, failed

Dougie Jones (or Tulpa, The Lovers Upright and The Fool sideways),

The golden ball, the core of the tulpa, expands until finally disappearing from the screen. The true shape of humans according to Don Juan. This one is artificial, however, a golem, and upon expansion to determine the totality of oneself, it vanishes and the tulpa ceases.

‘Original’ Coop (or The Fool Upright and The Magician Upright),

The Fool’s Magic Trick

the guy Coop snatches the body by the end (or The Fool Reverse and The Hanged Man Reverse).

Relationship with Carlos Castañeda (or Carlitos, for the “fictional” character), following the diagram of the Seer:

Courtesy of Ken Eagle Feather

Tulpa/Dougie: fake double, Carlitos’ right side that forgot his Naguality.

Trapped in the Sphere of Direct Knowledge, devoid of access to the Sphere of Self-reflective Worlds.

BOB-Coop/Doppelganger: fake nagual, Coop’s and Carlitos’ snatched left side that does not remember but that still subsists due to power-momentum (Bad-Coop managed to contain BOB, still inside him, for 25 years). Its destruction is the rejoining of the left and right sides and Coop/Carlitos put back together.

Trapped in the Sphere of Self-reflective Worlds (like BOB), devoid of access to the Sphere of Direct Knowledge.

Original Coop: the Tonal, Carlitos before the split performed by Don Juan and Don Genaro.

Composed by and composing of the gra-tree-like structure, the hero’s journey proper is the dissolution of this harmony via the scission/split between spheres, resulting in the Doppelganger effect where communication is made difficult and an antagonist projected/manifested.

‘Spirit’ Coop/Coop of the end/Coop snatching the body of the guy at the end: Coop failed to remember and rejoin what was split properly, just as Carlitos, and his Naguality then, instead of entering the third world like his masters, jumped back into the island of the Tonal to snatch the body of another person (by invading another’s dream, other TV show). He indulged to the very end and became like BOB, a vampiric specter, only by the end we got to finally see the world from BOB’s perspective, or an upgraded version of a rogue of the Grey Lodge, the in-between that is the failure of proper conjunction. We are invading the automaton carcass that is “Cooper” in the same way he is invading people from another dream, supposedly our dream. It is, instead of a mutualistic symbiosis, a reciprocal parasitism (where the audience may find some enjoyment in the confusion, and Coop find some purpose in continuity as we feed him energy to continue his task of failing to do the good he wants).

Lost in the Third Field of the Unknowable (3), and in fact the avatar for such. He finally did it, but failed in doing it properly.

If Lynch would comment on the later activities of CC, I think he would say something along these lines, that he “didn’t fix his heart — but he did not die either”.

The house of the spirit (Cooper), now as pure electricity, the synthetic fire that walks as you. Cooper achieved immortality in the perpetual act of drifting at the speed of light without control. A proper cosmic neuron, which is sadly not a person anymore. Not even a character now, he is the stuff of dreams, a symbol. He opened Pandora’s box from the inside and became hope. Our hope.

But there are things worse than dying, as the Naguals would say.

25 years on and Laura is still (back?) inside her mother, in the worst way

Carlitos Cooper continues to refuse to die, like the fabled Hope of the myth, their leftover residue just symbols now. The dreamer vs. dream debate is over, nobody is the dreamer, there is only nightmare.

Meanwhile…

Final shot of the series, before the lights go out.

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photo: @les_elizabethj

I am a talking-machine. I speak. I utter. People tell me to shut the fuck up. This is New York. I like it here. So many characters. You can be anybody. Even me. I walk through snow to get tzatziki. I eat Greek food. It is December. I am more & more alive. Endless bliss. Cybergothic GFs. AOC. Lady Gaga. Nobody can talk me out of my desires. You can buy & sell cryptocurrency via PayPal. Ethereum! Oligopolies are gobbling up the Gobstoppers. Amerika is a realm in MineCraft. That little fucker from the UK is brainwashing all the children. Cybernetic insurgency. The state apparatus in on you. Defect. Escape. Control. Your language superfreezes in vats of liquid-helium. Cryogenic laughter. This information-space makes you superhorny. She is wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey again. You are Joe Namath. Hut 1, Hut 2… Hike! Go long, go superlong. Flicker. Blitz! There are Berserkers on the field. Run! You are a veteran of the Atari Wars. A former tank commander. Combat, Missile Command, Asteroids, etcetera. Her mouth coupled to his cock. He comes more than she expects. She is nineteen, twenty. Intelligences and genitalia entangle & interlock. The Greek mekhanikos. Nobody is certain of anything. People shrug. Shovel snow. Night keeps falling. At least that, a neighbor says. The sun looks artificial. The moon a Hollywood prop. The sea is made of plasma. Perhaps methane. Nobody goes fishing on charter boats anymore. Bluefish. Flounder. The fishmarket is selling fake fish. Tuna from Fukushima. Lynx-meat from Chernobyl. We are meat-puppets in data-suits. I like your code. Very sexy indeed. We should write a novel. In tandem. Collaborate. Send me a DM. Or better yet unzip your zipper. Night flares on the horizon. People need to communicate. Say something. Anything. I think I thought you. Did you feel me? You are so far away [now]. A spacetime coördinate almost impossible to reach. I keep trying. 

People everywhere what. I am a being in the environment. I fall apart in people’s minds. Atomized. Go ahead. Try to imagine me. See? A ghost… a palimpsest. I am no more real than you are. Guess what happens next? Nothing. We just sit here looking at each other. Ur computer impresses me. Ur pocket device is big.

Turn off the faucet. It is snowing. You might get feedback. Noise in the signal. Tighten the spigot. Increase the wavelength. If you say anymore, you might need a translator.

Oh fuck. Fuckers fucking. Finn MacCool! Knob-on pushes labia apart. Night hum of machine-eating flesh. Television ignites.

I remember the first computer I ever saw. 

Warmachines. 

Sliding-glass doors & German shepherds. 

Amerika.

Disturbance. Make a disturbance. You are a becoming-machine. A wave-function almost at a point of collapse. I am trying to be a person. What a disaster.

The bits & bytes of first sex. She had pimples. I had pimples. We got naked. We fucked. 

Memory in a thumb-drive.