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For Sale: 1 Ritual Libation Cup
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: For Sale
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I have scant memories of my beginning, time out of mind. Mind, you see, is shaped by culture, and before culture there is nothing. My earliest memory, that of sitting about a fire and listening to a tale I would later know as that of Orion and the Pleiades. Then there were Eight. From there I drifted, always the hot climes where none would suspect, there are so many inexplicable deaths that one or a dozen will raise no questions. And when the questions are raised I move on.
You are what you eat, and Protean I was, becoming each of the races I hunted, a month and I might change my shape enough to pass for half-blooded, 2 months and the people would think that I had been thereabouts born and bred.
I learned to fly ahead of the plagues; I was not cheating death, merely hastening it; those young pale virgins, their quality of innocence, this is what sustained me. I was Mercy itself, for the pestilences that followed me were never as kind, and every one of their lives prolonged my own, and I lived first hundreds, then thousands of years. And when I was particularly moved by some tender prey I might visit her a few nights, allow her the slow lingering sleeping sickness or aching consumption, before resurrecting her with a few drops of my own. What privilege to be able to choose your children!
Where only I dined, the pale morning death like the petals of a flower laid out upon the clay, the faintest smile upon their lips; if life is suffering then let their deaths be made sweet; always I have been the considerate guest; and the anguished keening carried to me on the morning breeze foretold the plagues to follow.
Travelling routes that took me from: Ur, Bagdad, Cairo, Tangiers, Athens, Rome, Venice, Carthage; a tour of centuries, a hundred other cities where there lies now only sand and sea, then later with ships, and steam ships and then aeroplanes and the American South, Savannah to New Orleans, time and again running into my little proteges, our tastes now the same, with families and roosts of their own, twirling ringlet curls: “And how do you like this gift?…”,
I have wondered at the fear our race have provoked in you, the Sumerians and their Pazuzu, the Greeks with their Gorgons, your priests with their crosses, yet the cattle don’t fear the farmer, nor is the shepherd feared by his flock. And while my race has been feared because of a few degenerate examples I have never been one.
First of all manners. What manner of beast laps up the blood of his victims? Only the most depraved, I have always stood upon ritual, table manners, while I’ve needed no fork and knife, and have shortened a great many lives I have given others the chance of immortality. In my estimation this balances out.
Which brings us to the cup. So much talk of progress, first the automobile, then the aeroplane, now it’s all rocket-ships and cell-phones. Mankind, once so noble and filled with aspirations and dreams has become a degenerate race, the world in general infected with a curious depravity, and where with Gilgamesh I could have filled it a hundred times with Poetry, Innocence, Grace and Kindness now I could travel the world and never fill it once. This immortality, well, it’s been a good run, but while reddit offers a ready and willing diet of virgins such is the quality that I would prefer to go hungry. Recall that you are what you eat and never would I deign to become one of those fiends, those withered and gibbering horrors that hang in derelict mansions, or those underground lairs they claw beneath tombs and graveyards, devoided of all language, custom and manners, that have outlived time itself, insatiable, insensible imbeciles, ears filled with crickets and blind eye sockets with star jelly, and yet still, still refusing to die…
Remember the fastidious Count of St. Germain, with his “Who would suspect ME, a vegetarian”?; I ran into him again in New Orleans, not even a hundred years ago, the American diet had taken it’s toll and if he were still alive today I have no doubt he’d be in Congress or Secretary of Health and Human Services.
There is naught left in this world that would quench my thirst, and when the time comes I will wait patiently on the balcony for the morning sun. But pardon my digressions.
For sale: 1 ritual libation cup. Pewter.
I’d prefer to meet at night as the sun irritates my skin, “Solar Urticaria” my physician tells me (and that I need to eat more vegetables)…
For Sale: 1 Magical Glass Trumpet Mouthpiece
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: For Sale
- Hits: 205
What I can only imagine to be the mouthpiece to a Magical glass trumpet. From its condition I’m guessing the prior owner was a real “Bleeding Gums Murphy” type. Perfect for summoning angels, unicorns or heralding the Apocalypse. Found left as a gift in my car the same evening a variety of things suspiciously went missing. Don’t know where the rest of the trumpet is but I’m pretty sure if you wander the alleys around Baker at sunset somebody will be able to point you in the right direction…
The COPD Club & Other
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 303
The COPD club, they meet outside at the electrical box in the parking lot for the hotel. The building actually built a shelter for the smokers, but nobody likes to use it. Nowhere to sit.
They're all the same age, my age, but to look at them you get a widely varying picture of biological ages. 2 of them, barely able to walk, coughing up lungs. The other, my upstairs neighbour.
It's the water cooler of community housing.
Upstairs neighbour is on the outs with her boyfriend, she can't support him, he's not pulling his weight, he's bought groceries but he gets them at Dollarama, buys the cheap Neopolitan Ice Cream, she's had enough. He has to get a job.
This is rich, given it's been 30 years since she worked, on disability but she's never offered to explain just how or why...
And running into him, now inspired to get work, hilariously he's been working on the truck at the thrift shop, he's got to have a talk with her, they get along well enough, only - well, she's a handful and wants it all...
Since he's been out of the picture she's made me a "Friendship Bracelet", the kind with all sorts of various beads, colourful, the beads, plastic, wood, glass, some rocks, like what you might exchange at a Taylor Swift concert...
If the pink shirts didn't make me suspicious looking enough the bracelet will cement things.
I pop by to check in on the Other Neighbour, she's been on the down low, broke and in one of her self-pitying humours, her place slowly drifting into a messy oblivion, coffee table littered with empty canned cocktails and mini-liquors, she's stopped asking to borrow money as she has no way to repay it and so I just e-transfer her some cash, community housing means your pay cheque is community as well, which I don't mind in trifling sums but I have bills as well...
She let herself in this morning only to demand that I carry her table, outside on the landing for 2 weeks now, downstairs to donate to the thrift shop. Management must have sent her an email. I could see all this being "the helpful neighbour" growing old real quick...
***
The restaurant, busy ever night except (oddly enough) on Friday and Saturday. Last night, passing through, a refugee from Shambala, the streets are filled with these lost souls, loving the vibe, sleeping in the alleys and doorways, this one, clearly not yet come to his senses, dancing, looking at the menu, dancing some more, I’m too busy for this. I leave him alone, attend the paying customers, it’s a hectic night. When finally I get around to asking him if he’d like to order he tells me the …. looks good, and I ask - just to confirm - if he’s able to pay. He digs through his bag, and after a few minutes shows me a couple of rocks. Just rocks, not crystals, not polished, just river-worn rocks that somehow caught his fancy. Now he must know his audience, because I’m intrigued, but too busy for this at the moment, in the afternoon we could have talked but now I’m hopping, not the time, and so I send him packing and he takes it in good nature…
***
And, out for coffee, the town has a new superhero, the "Unicyclist", tall and made taller by the Unicycle, in full on leather biker gear, reflective motorcycle helmet with full visor, speeding down Ward on his electric unicycle, he makes it look easy, all you have to do is keep your balance...he'd make a great community safety officer, speeding around and administering Naloxone to all the sleeping beauties...
Cosmic Consciousness (Finished)
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 327
Bloody hell this took forever.
Anyways, overall, an interesting idea that spurred a lot of thought, but the source material, well - OK. Nonetheless I'll outline it again and then make my notes.
First and again, the author is arguing that Man is in the process of evolving from a period of "Self Consciousness" to a higher plain of Universal or "Cosmic Consciousness" in which he will be able to experience the divine as part of his day-to-day experience. As substantiation for his arguments he provides a long list of people he believe's have (at certain times, and for certain periods) experienced it, with quotes from both them and those people who knew them.
Beginning with Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, etc. and ending with a more contemporary list of people; some of whom are listed by their initials only, others of whom are named, all of whom really loved Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass". I may have to give it a read.
A partial list follows, linked to their respective Wikipedia Pages, some of which make for more interesting reads than others.
And too many more to list. Now the author, as a Psychiatrist had a privileged insight into a lot of patients/inmates personality’s and experiences, unusual states of mind, and doubtless some of the acquaintances he made in his career influenced his observations. But - while not entirely doubting him, it doesn't hurt to be a little bit skeptical. The whole "I've achieved enlightenment and this is how it feels and perhaps you should/would benefit from it as well..." highlights the perils of self reporting, for what man doesn’t report himself better than his peers? And the belief that this is somehow an Aryan thing, or beyond the ken of more "primitive" tribes and civilizations does them a disservice, for only after we had destroyed their cultures and displaced them from their homes did we take a look at their spiritual practices. Language, culture, and the timed distance we put between them and our own understandings make it unlikely we'll ever know, but - from the books I've read, first hand and pertaining to North American and Australian Indigenous peoples they were far more in that zone than we are, and so (since we report on the extraordinary and rarely the ordinary) they have as much claim to this evolution as anyone.
As well the author overlooks that the mind can be trained to experience these things, as in Buddhist or Hindu traditions, and that indirectly the Christian tradition prepares one for the same epiphanies.
But, ignoring these criticisms, it's of it's age. Instead take the idea that you can somehow reframe and rewire and experience a world you had only hitherto suspected. Discarding the drugs (MDMA, ACID, MUSHROOMS, KETAMINE, Too many others to list) there are abundant instances in our current age where you can be "transformed" with an attenuation of sense you had never suspected.
Try for example Color Blind Glasses (Link provided to people getting colour blind glasses...). Clearly the experience is one that is both transformational - an invisible world becomes apparent. Or babies getting glasses or babies getting hearing aids.
Or lying between 2 giant trumpets in the forest to have all those quiet noises that lie beneath your perception made audible.
But these are technological remedies to sensory deficits. Consider that human beings have had colour cones since we were apes (they share a similar eye biology), yet only relatively recently did these distinctions make it into language.
Gladstone's colour theory postulates that Man/Humankind did not evolve a colour sense until relatively recently is undermined by the fact that the Ancient Egyptians were using Blue as a pigment as early as 2500 BCE. It's late entry into language, though, is suspicious, or curious - and the abundant studies of certain tribes and cultures that could not differentiate shades of blue/green until they were taught. But - their hardware (cones, rods) is the same, it is only that they have been bounded or restrained by language. So - while our hardware (bodies) are relatively the same; our software (thinking and language) are different.
When language expands, so do concepts and our ability to think. Which suggests that just as we hope to upgrade our software (language) we can hope to expand our experience(s) of the world.
Consider then Tetrachromats, with 4 types of cones in their eyes and a much vaster spectrum of colour than language will provide. Factually a different hardware, running on legacy code. Or synesthetes, who's experience of vision or sound is tied to another sensory input, "seeing" red as a colour and experiencing it as noise or a taste or touch sensation of some sort. Old hardware, new code. Imagining that you are the first to achieve this hyper-attenuation, a new cell in your eye that expands your spectrum, sharpen your vision to that of a Mantis Shrimp, with it's ability to see in ultraviolet and polarized rays, or a Hawk or Eagle, evolve the olfactory sensibility of a dog, the hearing of a whale, every enhancement of sense demanding a correlating enhancement in the brain to process and - in time, language to express and share it.
Or Supertasters, of which I'm sure my neighbour is one, you have only to watch her face as she bites into a dessert to know that her experience of it is so far beyond my own, but then words fail her in describing...
And consider the vocabularies of taste and smell - 5 basic tastes, Umami, Salty, Sweet, Sour and Bitter, after which everything is described in terms that can only make sense if you have prior experience of the taste or food it's referencing. And the same with scent - one theory lists the seven primary scents as "camphoraceous, musky, floral, pungent, ethereal, minty and putrid", almost all of which require some experience of items similarly described.
Contrast this with numbers - I have the theory of numbers, the experience of small numbers, and I can generalize from this up to larger numbers. I don't need the entire infinitude of integers or fractions to make sense of the world. But - the vocabulary of scent, taste, is meaningless without experience of these things.
...which is making me think of language as a virus, something that exists beyond us, a parasite that needs 2 hosts in order to evolve itself, grow, a parasite with a will and direction of it's own.
Consider LLM's, with their evolving "intelligence", AI is a little hyped and overused but their building upon the language of code and numbers and grow their "software" based on their interactions with others.
IN time, presumably, they will have to update their "hardware" to process these new ideas that they're creating...
Which makes curious, the stages of a babies psychological development, the child then of a magician who never learns object permanence, how then is their experience of the world? What narrative of their existence? Or a cat, just discovering (gingerly, slow pats of the salt shaker while sat upon the cupboard) discovering gravity? And wonder at the worlds of angels, fairies, elves and demons beyond our ken, coloured in shades beyond our perception...
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