Managing Meta Physical Material
Unravelling the speaking out of the story has confounded her. And while trying to be in the place of systematic telling, still more unfolds to be told. It’s been so epic, so huge, mystical, the truly mysterious implemented through momentary enactment of daily, diligent, detailed practical matter minutia, with the mere mundane manifesting collateral complexities of compound cosmological treatise necessitating continual decoding. Infinite realities, multiple value systems, manifold philosophical frameworks, personal to eternal mythography correlations demanding repeated re-defining in constant, massive brainwork. To walk universal, eternal in incessant putting together of the very factual, the genuinely actual, the really happened, and then consistently be faced with persistent incredulity – it’s intolerable. Few are imbued with sufficient perspicacity to conceive enough possibility – it does all just sit in the realm of unbelievable juxtaposed to the world ordinary where there’s a humanity, non-receptive, linear, uni-dimensional, ensconced in foregone, mind manipulated, stipulation; and words. Words, words, words, divergent, deviating, conflicting, contradictory, contrary, where, were she solely an immersing of self soulfulness, the fractalling molecular of texture in texture of texture would beam a she all one with one, cohesive, synchronised, flow component as joy, inner and outer indivisibility operating neutral delight.
Thus has been gained her entrance eligibility to Acerbica, a vast, desolate space of resonant wisdom, multi-sense, supreme sensibility, redolent order, cogent beauty and staple grandeur. Conscious that other dwellers must reside there, inhabitants send out coherent frequencies receptive to greeting that may locate substantial meeting.
She has, in the interim, maintained living without the experience of compatible talk to call on, by which, her telling habits have been prescribed, patterned by indifference that understands that parts and whole are irrelevant without each other; she meanders perimeters, pausing upon knowing streaming from interiors, she fumbles the fetch of fragments, tosses them out, disjointed, bits that don’t mean much unless a listener with capacity for investment and resource of perception to navigate internally, acquires picture and says ‘go on’.
Acerbican identity has brought the longed for relief of being confronted with authentic audient. She’s encouraged, cajoled, exhorted, brought back to go, to departure, a mark that may be the beginning to let non-stop freeing, in a roll.
“I suppose ‘Rising’ is where it all started*1. Or perhaps, I suppose, that is where a greater unfolding started offering the measuring of an external mirror of some sort of collective intellisense that corroborated my own exponentialising, intensely immense and immensely intense musings. We’ve touched on it before.”*2
As if it will pare away to the mental strand she is tracking, staring at her hand, she’s scratching her skin. Nails are long, manicure tapered, strong, their entre nous intent alternating, possibly, between useful tool, ornamental parlance, offensive defence, protective defiance?
“That thing with the cows.” She shakes her head. “1994. England. And getting told something so outrageously ludicrous, that then awestruck, dumbstruck, astonishingly came true when my sceptic was just daring it to be proven ruse. But a whole lot had gone on before that.
I’d been fluking about in a flush little scenario, wife of a really, swiftly upwardly mobile attorney. He later went on to become the 75th top earner in the country in 2007. Back in the 80’s when I was in that marriage, you know, wafting veiled down the aisle dragging a train behind a long, white, dressmaker sewn gown on father’s giving-away arm, chattelled over to some suitable male prospect, back then, the prospect was still in the phase of career emerging. I supplemented him economically and domestically during his articles to be admitted to the legal association and I’d been learning the rules and practice of professional social climbing – Larousse Gastronomique study book,*3 correct grocery buying, practising recipes, onwardly upgrading and titivating the home – everything that opens and shuts, switches on and off and matches, menus, cooking, entertaining, hostessing, style, looks, daily stint at the gym, fashion magazines, couture cosmetics, beauty parlours, hairdressers, shop till you drop wardrobe attainment with colour coded shoe and accessory assortment ever at the ready for a variety of high class engagements, cocktails, intimate dinners, formal dinners, parties, dances, award functions, celeb events, office conferences, conventions . . . I became proficient at effecting all of it reasonably consistently, turning myself out good, got used to always needing to have new garb at the ready – especially get-ups previously unviewed by the regularly circulating crowd in the coagulant clique. I had some outfits I was finely fond of, a strappy, sexy bodice matching a long, lacy skirt worn under a tight, silky, buttoned black mini that rendered me overall mermaiden; bags matching many, many high, high-heels, all snug, Italian leather of course, cleverly collected on sales, night blue, dusty pink, gold, ocean green, a dinky orange pair I remember fondly – I can still stand in front of a ‘Sex and The City’ type shoe store and ogle with appreciative longing for footwear art form.
I had started crossing over into flat flunk for the alter, drama school persona and then, after the children started arriving, I gave all the fancy, high stuff away. Since then, the only soles I walk on are strictly horizontal.
I’d always sung, performed, my debut from the age of three, it was programmed into me that this was what I had, what I should do with myself, it was certainly expected of me that I would automatically give of my ‘gift’ to please others. At times I would chase it, then, at regular intervals there’d be an inversion and it would hound me trying to flee from it, so, there I was, stilettoed on the arm of a man scaling the social perpendicular and, in the irregular spaces that randomly resumed to off-duty wife of a husband quite accustomed to eighteen hour work days and unstructured appearances and absences, covert curator over my flat feeted words, music and drama. It was theatre set design that got me drawing too, which I discovered I loved to do.
We’d begun our couplehood as shining leaders of the evangelical, charismatic, fundamentalist Christian church-going community, and I found the obligatory ecclesiastics of big business, facia acquisition irreconcilable with Jesus’ teachings and standing against the savagery, atrocity, degradation and cruelty of apartheid. He became known as an anti-apartheid luminary in the course of his professional duty as legal, censorship advisor to the media, but his escalating personal allegiance to BMW / Rolex-type accessory indulgence display as necessity for success in the high class game soon came to hold presiding sway. I couldn’t mediate the conflict, the rifts had set in and the intention for lifelong union before god began to go awry.
And that’s when the visions began, or rather, when the childhood world began churning and cranking the inner screen to blink again. One wonders how come it urges itself to recur? There are clear ideas as to why it shuts down. Some say the sacrament of infant baptism concluded at confirmation is specifically designed to lock the pineal gland to halt the human’s psychic, spiritual abilities? When my first born was a golden, curly-locked, three year old and we showed him photos of his baptism, his small fingers retracted on the page, he turned and looked up at us with his little eyes flaring and his mouth tensing and he hissed, ‘don’t you ever do that to me again’. We had the ceremony to honour the in-laws’ tradition; not that it did evoke any iota of reciprocal tolerance, but we tried. Flew in a priest with more lateral views on divorce, held the event in the garden, out under the trees, three godmothers; for what is was worth, two of them Roman Catholic and the Father did say I was liturgical – I was dressed in deep purple. I thought it was a sublime gathering at the time. Subsequently we conducted some rituals of our own to ameliorate any negative effects that might have been intoned.
Nowadays I see the mainstream engrossed in the genre of fantasy and I’m amazed, the books, the games, the movies, vehicular consorts to the purveying of supernatural archetypal character and story, magical powers, enchanted weapons, talismanic tools, charms and spells, species genetic diversification dream, creatures proverbially great, grotesque, majestic and small, every possible faculty, facility and feature combination of colour, texture, shape, size, speak and form; every joe, jammy or jim surfing the imagining of his or her own trip in a devising destined to be the ultimate original, definitive, new and untold world. ‘Make your avatar, make your avatar, make your avatar’. All these little alters not liably bilocating around, getting up to who knows what. Might be some good booty for future, legal bounty hunters.
Never mind only hearing Bob Dylan for the first time in my thirties, people have been nonplussed that I didn’t have a clue of what fantasy was until only recently in my later days. Yeah sure, I’d watched Gene Kelly dancing with animations in MGM musical movies and The Hobbit*4 was a text book read in standard six, but I couldn’t get it. It was just this weird fog of descriptions I couldn’t assimilate, I couldn’t place, it wasn’t real. No one said to me, ‘it’s made up’ or ‘this is fiction’ or ‘it’s from another dimension, time and space other than this reality and somebody went there and came back to relay the story, it’s from another world and there are other worlds which people see in their inner worlds and then write down as a story’.
There’s such overwhelming enquiry and debate as to what imagination is anyway, manifesting what may be, or memory of what was, or seeing what is ‘elsewhere’, or, a combination of all with touches of ingenuity? I used to play in the garden with my friends that only I could see and hear and talk to, then that got shut down and locked up. Deserted city. I can see it in photos of me, well situated inside a gorgeous little girl, bright face, soft, falling tresses, then there’s a replacement, an ugly, short haired vacant captured awkward through the lens. Some commentators claim the human reaches an age where innocence automatically splits into dualism and this loss of wholeness, this straddling, can be untenable.
I know disharmony to be a precipitating factor, conflict and violence in the home, especially when it’s in the first seven years. I know it didn’t help being born into a population segment that just didn’t know what to do with an artist soul. And it certainly didn’t help that the family and neighbours called me a funny, strange little girl because I used to dance and sing on the lawn. And then there was the national Calvinist education system.
When I was putting some of the pieces together I had sensory recall of my ‘imaginary’ friends being exiled from me by the removal of water and, with photos of the childhood home I managed to work out that one day I would have gone to where I used to meet with them to discover that the workmen that had been on the property had been demolishing the fish pond and replacing it with a dry rockery planted with aloes. The sonic of the shutting sensation is still with me, like the closing clunk of a giant iron door in an underground vault. Then, interminable looking, looking for something you simply expected to be where you left it, but it vanished, so you don’t know what you were looking for but you carry on looking for what you were looking for anyway and you’re only going to know what you were looking for when you find it but you can’t find it so you carry on looking.
Whether the division between before and after shut down was a series of events or a single incident, there was definitely a deadening thump, an insatiable echo that left me battling a blank, nothing, bland, directionless funk in matter-of-fact trudge through a whole lot of unrelated banalities that didn’t ever add to anything decipherable. School uniforms, school bells, school halls, school assembly, school principals, school teachers, school doctors, school girls, school hymn books, school hymns, school classrooms, school desks, school blackboards, school chalk, school books, school pens, school break, school English, Afrikaans, French, Maths, Biology, Science, Geography, History, Art, Music, Hockey, Tennis, Netball, Swimming, Gym, Cake and Candy Sales, Tuck Shop, Drama Society, Debating Society, Choir and, waiting for mother everyday to fetch me from the bus stop to take me home to what, I really don’t know. There was just strife there and interminable boredom with not being able to articulate that I was trying to get back to the point where I left off the space where I could see and feel meaningful interaction; I suppose I must have enlisted a portion of myself to exist in a place where I just knew to get on with homework because I did get my matric certificate rather perfunctorily.
It was ten years later that my self somehow took me back across to the other side of the barrier where my inner world was locked away inside me behind the echoing, closing clunk that had reverberated on and on – that was after getting my infant baptism confirmed as a Methodist teenager and being ‘born again’ and going through two universities and church youth groups and going across the US on Greyhounds for three months and working for an American missions organisation and going to a missions convention and getting home again to a fiancé in basic military conscription training, following which, his spirit self never returned near me again that I could tell, and walking down the aisle into sophisticate servitude and going to live on an airforce base and encountering apartheid*5 and churches filled with racism and going back to university again interspersed with having to don yet another splendid outfit to meet the boss’ wife in the members’ enclosure at the races and try and quickly interpret what a ‘Ladies’ Table P.A.’ was,*6 with the visions of me dancing at Stonehenge interrupting more and more conspicuously while I was rendering them into mammoth compositions and a dramatic lyric in music for staging.”*7
She’s pulling her hair in a mellifluous mindfall, whirlwind chasms, mergings, life up-turning surgings, the time she’s speeding by making Alice’s adventures*8 seem commonplace and neat by comparison, “I’d left the golden haired two year old in Austria with his father, my new guy and I was off to meet the author of ‘Rising’*1 on a tour of the sacred sites of England. And that’s where this thing with the cows happened.
Eating meat was always incongruous for me, sometimes excruciating, but my father sometimes used to make me sit at the table all Sunday afternoon if I didn’t finish every last lick of my dinner; even if I was retching there would often be no pity. I remember. The thing is, my mind mouth can’t always handle the sensation of smelling, tasting and masticating the texture of flesh that was once part of a living being that got murdered, skinned, sawed and sliced up. It can and does happen when I am chewing, that I will see round, soft, brown, subtly lashed eyes staring at me like I am looking into begging, heart rending pools. So I got by in life by laying into the apple sauce for pork, the horse radish and mustard for beef, the mint or curry for lamb and mutton and the mayonnaise for chicken. I just bore my ‘eating disorder’ bravely, skirting all the self-conscious recriminations, definitely learning to attempt to avoid causing any meal discrepancy situation where I would be pounced on and ridiculed for being odd, or, ‘a fussy child’; I got good at turning off, unconsciously grinding in my cheeks, smiling and swallowing. I hadn’t heard that there was such a thing as a vegetarian, I mean, imagine, by conscience, preference, choice, being able to, being allowed to, decide, for oneself, that one did not have to eat flesh. Ever. If one did not want to, for whatever reason.
It was in a graveyard in a small village on the way to Devon that I found out. I’d ordered a beef and Stilton cheese pie from the local deli, I was trying to ignore that the meat, visually, was rather dark, but I was munching in customary, conditioned regularity and then the small group conversation started swirling a conceptual portal in my head: there was surprise, they were expressing, that I was EATING a MEAT pie, and it seemed very strange to them that I was having great difficulty trying to apply the notion that my mouth was perfectly entitled to, yeah veritably permitted to deny consumption of flesh! Of course, in one’s thirties, learning the practice of healthy vegetarian living when departing from an upbringing of wholesome, animal imbibing western tradition can take what’s left of the lifetime, but those days of that next thirtnight of travel were like undergoing cranial fission. The freedom to release my mandibles from the preparation for precarious, mandatory gulp down became a seriously focused, mental command re-programme mission. Yes, I could order JUST a Greek salad, chew and taste, luxuriously, indulgently and with unambiguous delight, each and every morsel and bite, AND feel good about it, and also feel good about me in harmony in coexisting company!
So we’d gone the Michael and Mary Ley Lines westwards, power points and sacred sites, The Cheese Hurlers, Michael Mount, Mevagissey, The Merry Maidens stone circle, Cornish Quoits and standing stones, St Ives, Tintagel, Glastonbury – The Chalice Well, The Tor, Avebury, Silbury, Stonehenge, the epitome of a personal, halcyon, in-heaven haze and, concluding my tour time with the author, Peter, on the last evening, we were strolling discursively through a meadow. There were cows, of course there were cows, a herd, going about whatever they go about, our ambling feet were dodging their dung and then, I don’t know how it started happening, one of them had gotten really close to me, she began to nudge me with her side, gently, bump me, other cows were coming in closer and in some kind of cow body language and speak, the particular cow turned, shooed the others away and then continued her engagement with me, in a kind of intimacy, like she was trying to caress me. Out came her extended tongue and she began to lick at me, on the chest of my jersey. It was the first time I’d been close to a real, live cow, in situ.”
Suddenly, palms cupping her face, her fingers across closed lids, nailtips pressing her eyebrows, she is sobbing the recall, “it was so potent, so real, so unexpectedly out of the blue, that huge animal was talking to me and I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know to talk back to her, pat her, sing to her, whisper to her, listen to her, look into those round, brown eyes that had always stared at me when I was eating her…”. She rubs her face, pulls her hair sideways, nudges a bent knuckle under both eyes.
“She was really statuesque, a giant by ratio to me and she was getting insistent. So Peter instinctively tapped her hard on the rump and she backed off, which was really sad for me. But I was emotionally overwhelmed and getting into a bit of a physical pickle by her sheer weight and size. As we walked on with me quite stunned, Peter said, ‘you know, of course, for profit margins, as standard, more and more, cows are being fed the offal of their own kind. This is serious affront to their vegetarian physiology and the collective consciousness of their species has had enough mal-treatment. The cow population is going to commit mass suicide’.
I knew Peter was connected within the esoteric movement, in a network of channelling, dowsing, psychic colleagues, but the concept of clear cut messages from other realms and dimensions? Such had been forbidden from my frame of reference. So I couldn’t simply accept that prophetic information and I stored it away till I could discern what I thought about what he had to say.
The following day, London. Trafalgar square. A display. Two cubicles. One filled with hay, a mother cow, her calves, suckling. The other, like a portable butcher, animal carcasses skinned, chopped up, hooked and hanging red. High above the square, on a small wooden podium on a pedestal, an Eastern man, kneeling, so the signs said, to make prayerful intercession for all the souls of slaughtered animals.
Back in Little Germany with my child and the new man, reeling from so much encounter, including the entity of The Hag of Silbury appearing to me, the mundane mush of mainstream in-law family hit me, or rather hit my stomach. ‘No, vee don’t itt a lawt uff mitt’, they would say, meaning roasts or chunks of chops, or hunks of fresh fried thick steak, or fowl portions on the bone, but, there was the flesh, at every meal, three times a day, cold cuts, smoked bacon, sausages – not considered meat, as such. It was just simply not possible to immediately continue owning my newly found nutritional freedom so that, one week later, cycling along the banks of the Danube on squeaking children’s bikes, with smart Germans on sleek, silent machines whifting by effortlessly and remarking gutturally, ‘braucht Ol’,*9 our guts were hanging like they were central emissions machines at a burger manufacturing plant.
At home in southern climes again, with adventure memories not necessarily receding, I was running the sound hire company and learning more about cooking with beans and inadvertently germinating crop circle corn and playing blocks with the three year old. I don’t know how long it was after the tour,*10 but it was when the height of mad cow disease hit. One evening I was abruptly standing stupefied in front of the television screen, watching on the news, mound after mound of dead cows, carcasses piled up high across England, burning. And something deftly slipped into place on my inner screen.
It’s crazy to know now, retrospectively, that the deepest, most serious, most pertinent traverses were yet to come after that. And then so many more after those.”
She picks up her tobacco pouch, unravels it, takes her papers and gerrick material, lays them out, opens the pouch and begins to ply strands of tobacco between her thumbs and forefingers. “Only 420 days left of the Mayan Calendar;*11 then their lease is up on planet Earth. No wonder they are in such a seething, tizzing panic.
Graham Hancock*12 comes across as a really lucid man, as a character in committed denouement. He talks about his research for his book on Shamans, his journey into realms of concurrent dimensions through sacred sessions of seeing with the plant Ayahuasca. He’s powerful in his stand on our immutable rights to traverse our own consciousness; my frequencies are grateful, I circulate on his words a lot. An interview – with Hendrik – Palmgren, Red Ice Radio.”
In her documents folder on the screen, she double clicks the yellow square titled, ‘current research folder’. In the new window she double clicks a black square, ‘Red Ice Radio’*13. Another window, another double click, on an .mp3 icon and sound emanates a man’s confident voice through the speakers.*14
Ambrasia Kurtz
Conversings in Acerbica
notes
*1 Rising out of Chaos, Simon Peter Fuller, Kima-Global Publishers
*2 Sending Fief(5b) “too hot to handle” http://www.mutantspace.com/sendings
*3 Larousse Gastronomique – a gastronomy – useful, comprehensive, cuisine reference
*4 The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
*5 the mutation, February 2010, ‘Sendings from Acerbica’
Sending Sticks(6II) “Reaching Orhovelani in Thulamahashe – part II”,
http://www.mutantspace.com/reaching-orhovelani-in-thulamahashe
*6 ‘Ladies’ Table P.A.’ – a place accumulator bet – horse racing
*7 “Red Stones”, a song, from the album and staged show: “. . . and on the way I dropped it. – aotwidi”
a dramatic lyric in music, eco music factory, WOoden family publishing, 1993, all rights reserved
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1469150/red%20stones%20151009.mp3
*8 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
*9 translation from German: ‘needs oil’
*10 http://www.wholisticworldvision.org – Celtic Odyssey Tours
*11 The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, Carl Johan Calleman, Ph.D
Bear & Company, Vermont, 2004 http://www.calleman.com – for download of a calendar calculator
*12 http://www.grahamhancock.com
*13 http://www.redicecreations.com
*14 Graham Hancock speaking, from an interview with Hendrik Palmgren :
“. . . Shamans, in the Amazon . . . they said, it’s extremely straight forward, the West has severed it’s connection with Spirit, you have to reconnect with Spirit, or you’re doomed. . . . we do not define ourselves in terms of our inner landscape . . . the ability to use your consciousness to explore mysteries. If I live in a society that does not allow me to have the keys to my own consciousness, then I can’t claim to be free at all in any way. It is part of our birthright as adults, to explore the consciousness that this amazing universe has given us . . . I will remain a campaigner on this matter for the rest of my days.”
.mp3 download available from Red Ice Radio website, see *12
*15 ’art by angela’, exhibit : ‘Saved from the Fire’, series i-xiv :
Series iv : dénouement in 12, Anatomy of a Gestation
(early 1990’s through 1994, ‘Gauteng’;
including the ebullient emergence inspired by theatre set design studies)
featured : iv3 eye, I [water colour on paper, 64 x 50]
series pic: iv10 Tintagel from Silbury [ink, pencil, pencil crayon, water colour, pastel,
on paper, lighting gel, papier mâché, building insulation sheets, 29 x 21]
598 total views, 1 today
from WOoden family publishing, correction to:
Conversings in Acerbica 4 – “Managing Meta Physical Material”
text referenced at note *9:
‘Ol’ should be written ‘Ől’