Oui-Oui reached again into the storage space only to withdraw a leather whip and a riding crop, both of which she assiduously placed on the Victorian coffee table in front of her where she kept all of her filthy human magazines open to the appropriate pages, taking great care not to disturb them. And then she retrieved some manly-looking braces designed to fit around ankles, elbows, wrists, thighs and neck, and also a thoracic harness, all of which were made of a smooth, durable leather and covered with lots of festive little sleigh bells that produced quite a bit of noise whenever they were handled or set in motion. It was more than obvious that Oui-Oui was getting excited, as her scholarly hands began to shake, and her prim and proper academic glasses had already slid down the bridge of her nose, as she rose to her feet and approached the unlikely panther/butterfly pair, currently residing in their bonobo bodies.
“I’m just getting so aroused by the new possibilities, to the point that I’m going to have to ask the two of you to leave rightaway. Perhaps, and even most likely, we will meet again for more tea and ice cube tapping, but for now I need to get my hands on this creepy little man you brought to me, before my alien spouse gets home from a long fortnight’s work out on the edges of the terran solar system,” she told the two lovers.
“So, Mrs. Claus, what are you going to do to him – errr, I mean – do with him?” asked Mayumi.
“Oh, for tonight he’s going to be my pet ungulate. And then when my spouse returns, I’ll have to convince it that your terrestrial Peeping Tom friend isn’t a threat nor even of any scientific interest – tsk, tsk – either; to me he’s just another ersatz example of humanity. And I suspect that it won’t take very much convincing, especially from the looks of this sorry little shit. So if my Lordosian spouse approves, then maybe I’ll even be able to keep this human as a pet for a while.”
Oui-Oui Simoneaux was right: at that moment, it was almost as if the Overgrown Boy Scout had regressed into his distant past, into his decontextualised childhood to which he no longer had any access but which persisted as a flattened memory of something marvelous that once was but which had continued to die repeatedly, many times over again, even into the present. The little twerp had taken to fiddling with the S&M leather accoutrements, as if he had never seen such items before [and which in all likelihood, he probably hadn’t; or at least was far too afraid to – the editor].
And when the Telepathic, Transdimensional Butterfly Man pointed out the fact that the highly regressed Peeping Tom still had the capacity for ludic diversion as one might expect from any child, Oui-Oui replied: “Oh, he’s playing with them right now, but in just a short while he’ll sure as hell be learning about what these leather strips are really for; just you wait!”
Both Mayumi the Feline Huntress and the Butterfly Man had decided long ago that they were not interested in being anyone else’s pets, and it was perhaps this moment of self-determination that they became compatible with each other. After warmly embracing Oui-Oui upon leaving the latter with her new pet ungulate (for the night, at least), a moment of inquisitiveness overcame Monsieur Butterfly and he innocently asked her:
“By the way, Oui-Oui, since you’ve been around for a lot longer than I have in the subjective dimension pertaining to North America, would you happen to know anything about a certain neurotic pastry chef named Yes-Yes, who obsessively prepares only the most exquisite desserts for her numerous lovers? Or maybe a certain decadent madame who runs a dodgy ski-resort/brothel and who goes by the name of ‘Mrs. Crunch’? Or what about that Dark Witch who once lived near a terrifying place called the “Salt Manor” and who never met a man she didn’t like? Are you familiar with any of these individuals?”
Upon hearing these questions, and while bathed in the glorious colors of a late-afternoon, virtual sun, Oui-Oui nearly choked on her mouthful of tea, pushed her spectacles closer to her face, and then snapped: “Why certainly not! Never heard of any of them, or maybe they’re just cultural legends… Oh, but do be a dear and shut the door behind you on your way out,” she said with an unusually sweet voice.
Monsieur Butterfly and Mayumi Bonobo complied, seeing their way out of the Victorian house which was mere illusion, and leaving Oui-Oui to spend an edifying evening with her new toy. After the door had slid shut and they had found themselves in a non-descript corridor of the Lordosian spaceship, both panther and butterfly – in their bonobo forms – marveled at the impossibly futuristic technology and engineering made by a civilization that was likely several thousands of years more advanced that humans. In some areas of the ship, the Lordosian building materials were nearly transparent, affording a wondrous view of their planet earth and the moon not far beyond; and then there were also other areas that had different kinds of holographic projection facilities, just like the Victorian house illusion that they had been enjoying up until recently. It was truly a romantic moment for them in the eerie moonlight, as they shared their last few moments together on the majestic UFO before getting sent home. There were always more things to say to each other, but not enough time. And then for the few minutes that remained to them, it was all about walking the very fine line of balancing their passionate and sometimes sentimental conversations with their strawberry-flavoured snogging activities. After they had said their penultimate goodbyes, they promised each other to use their own poetic, hyper-subjective radar to find each other again, once they had returned to earth and reverted back their respective animalian, terrestrial birth-forms, which essentially meant a complete reversal of the CCCT (Conspecific Cladistic-Convergent Transformation) process that had genomically transformed both feline and lepidopteran into a pair of highly aroused bonobo chimpanzees. It only went to show that love – or perhaps ‘like’ – was able to transcend the species barrier.
The Lordosian terrestrial travel-steward had strapped them into the especially complicated-looking device that was for both genomorphic reorientation and planetary repatriation, while the two fondly gazed at each other and said their farewells. The processing machine immediately became active and they lost consciousness, with each of them opening their hearts to the vastness of the cosmos, experiencing a poignant moment of joy and terror and hope, the kind of complex sentiment that occurs perhaps just three times in a lifetime.
5
“But at the interface of the yet to be invented is an innocuous silence that demands articulation but is neglected, a moment of avoidance that leaves me as passive matter, subject to the repetitions of conformist convention, the already said.” – The Hoary Tome of the Cursed Woods, vol. 2
After an inordinate amount of time had passed, Mayumi the Lady Warrior regained consciousness in her felid form: she was in the Sprawling Dawgue saloon, and even in the very same spot she last remembered being in, before she was taken aboard the Lordosian spaceship by her childhood friend, Oui-Oui Simoneaux, who was strange when they were children and now even stranger as an adult, or perhaps more aptly, ‘super-adult’. She dossed around for a bit to take proper stock of her surroundings, and decided that she was still alone in the dusty pub that had been mysteriously abandoned so many years earlier, perhaps because of a plague or whatever other human-made disaster. The nerdy scientist-skeletons were still seated in their original poses and positions, even though the flesh and clothing had already been claimed by the passage of time and saprophytic vermin. Mayumi also noticed that the particular leather-clad book with which she had been engrossed just prior to her alien abduction was on the bar counter, still open to the chapter about the radiostatic butterfly man, replete with all of the fancy, archaic gold lettering and sumptuous illustrations of that strange radio being that was able to get inside her head without fail, across great times and distances: The Hour of Passions & of Diadochokinesia. Now that her bonobo frontal limbs with the opposable thumbs had reverted back to the less-adroit, felid paws, she knew it wouldn’t be all that difficult for her to nurture her manual dexterity through their repeated use, especially if she continued to have an appetite for these sorts of esoteric books that stimulated both intellect and libido. And with that thought in mind – of her increased aptitude for primate books, Mayumi the Feline Huntress happened to notice a newer volume that had been wedged amidst the others that resided on the bookshelf; it was another finely-wrought hardcover edition clad in a thin, soft velvet the color of royal purple, also with finely-elaborated gold lettering: Introduction to the Manifesto of the Passionate Negation of the Prude-Passionate Negative (1968), by Oui-Oui Simoneaux.
With a strong sense of incredulity, Mayumi pulled the book from the shelf and eagerly began to read the preface, just for the sake of proving to herself that the publication was real:
To all my readers whom it may concern:
The greatest support of faith is the guarantee that if a religious pimp asks her holy-scripture-worker for imaginative, stunning, intellectual content, he would not just give her post-coital cystitis, nor just pleasure-for-one. But stunning content must start with the individual: even outside of any explicit religious belief, every time a human being accomplishes an effort of masturbation with the sole desire of becoming more capable of knowing the truth, they acquire a greater aptitude for stunning content, even if their effort produces no visible fruit. A Lordosian Space-Eskimo explains the origin of stunning content, of such dubious academic pleasures in precisely this way: ‘The raven of glad-rags that was eternally wearing a grandmotherly nightgown could not find intimacy; she desired lugubrious academic treasures, but instead thus came to know only dubious academic pleasures.’ If there is true desire – if the object of desire is truly the dubious academic pleasures – then the avid pupil could only manifest the desire for dubious academic pleasures, which in turn produces even more academic treasures of the most sinful, lugubrious sort. There is true desire for stunning content whenever there is an effort of masturbation. It should be clear as day that the dubious academic pleasures are the ones desired if all other motives are absent. Even when sullen efforts at masturbation remain sterile in appearance for years, then vehemently on any one day, any particularly dubious academic pleasure will show itself to be exactly proportional to this spiritual, intellectual obsession that sullies the soul. Each vehement effort adds a little gold to the numinous honey-pot that nothing in the world can steal. The furtive efforts of purple-velvet forestry actualised under the aegis of the Curst Woods, during long and sorrowful years of trying to learn The Purple Velvet Song of the Wicked, bore all their fruits in the marvelous discernment through which the old professor could discern the soul of surrational penitents, behind their forbidden poetry and even behind their pestilential silence.
The average, clueless academic must therefore do a lot of snogging with as many people as possible without any desire to obtain good lucid dreams, to succeed in ice cube tapping, to obtain any scholarly result, without any regard for prudish taste or natural aptitudes, applying oneself equally to all mystico-religious fantasies with the expectation that they all serve to form this masturbation that is the substance of pestilential self-consciousness. At that moment when we apply ourselves to a mystico-religious fantasy, we must want to accomplish it correctly because this wish is indispensable for any true oneiric effort. But to each this immediate goal, profound erectification must be uniquely directed toward increasing our surrationalist power of masturbation in view of pestilential self-consciousness, as when we are writing, and absent-mindedly draw the cursive script on the back of a discarded napkin, not with any emphasis on their form, but rather on the ideas they express, especially when the professors, tutors and other prudish authorities are not looking.
Applying this masturbation to our shallow love affairs, solely and to the exclusion of everything else, is the first condition of their rightly numinous use. The second condition is to constrain ourselves to rigorous consideration in a most prudish way – to contemplate the spiritual benefits of masturbation for the long term – each school exercise failure, in all its ugliness and mediocrity, without searching for any excuse, without neglecting any error or any of the old professor’s overtures, trying to uncover the origin of each error. The temptation to do the opposite is great – to glide over the recollected exercises as if they were just more of the same, predictable stunning content – to consider them indirectly and hide them quickly. Nearly everyone does this nearly all of the time. We must refuse this putrid temptation. Incidentally and in addition, nothing is more necessary for Lordosian consternation, because if we refuse to turn our vitriolic masturbation over to purely random, objective chance or even to the professors’ recollections, we will work without much poetry, no matter how much effort we exert.
The vagrancy of humility – a honey-pot infinitely more precious than any scholarly poetry – may especially be acquired this way. In this regard, contemplation of one’s own prudishness is perhaps even more useful than contemplating pure obsidian. Consciousness of obsidian produces a feeling that we are evil, and a certain pretentiousness can sometimes find its way into our discount. When we violently constrain ourselves to affix mummy gauze over our eyes and to gaze upon the soul of a purely Lordosian being we have failed through prudishness, we sense with some irresistible evidence that we have become mere sundry mundanity. No self-knowledge is more undesirable. When we reach the knowledge of that truth with the whole soul, we have established ourselves solidly on the blue highway.
If these two conditions are perfectly satisfied, Lordosian shallow love affairs are without a doubt as sinful a road as any toward pious, emasculatory licentiousness.
To meet the second condition it is enough to want it. It is not the same with the first. To truly masturbate, we must know how to take it on.
Most often, we confuse masturbation with a kind of muscular effort. If we say to the virgins, ‘You must masturbate,’ we can see them scrunch their eyes, hold their breath and contract their sphincter muscles. If after two minutes we ask them to what they are masturbating, they cannot respond. They are directing their masturbation at absolutely nothing. They are not even playing at masturbation. They are merely contracting their sphincter muscles.
We can readily scry this type of muscular effort in shallow love affairs. Because it ends in fatigue, we get the impression of having awakened. This is an illusion. Fatigue has no relationship to the waking state. Remaining awake can certainly be a somewhat useful trait (especially when one is not being put to sleep by the exorbitant, ritualistic chatter of others), whether there is fatigue or not. This kind of muscular effort in shallow love affairs is completely sterile, even when performed with good intentions. Such prudish intentions pave the way to stunning content. Such shallow love affairs can sometimes lead to good lordosis from the point of view of lucid dreams and ice cube tapping, but that is in spite of the reticent sphincter and thanks to natural circumlocutions within purple velvet books. Such shallow love affairs are always useless when they are not grotesque.
The volition that requires us to clench our teeth and to contract the various sphincter muscles, thus endogenating the supernatural, is the principle watchword of the apprentice in masochistic linguistics. But contrary to what we ordinarily believe, it has hardly ever had a place in shallow love affairs. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be joy and steady pressure. The intelligence only grows and bores into the foof of joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable to shallow love affairs as breathing is to running. Where it is absent, there are no real virgins – just poor caricatures of apprentices who, after their apprenticeship, will not even have a new language to speak.
The role of desire in our shallow love affairs allows them to be preparation for the spiritual life. For desire, oriented toward Carnal Satisfaction, is the only force culpable in the recent semiotic dismantling of the soul. Or rather, Carnal Satisfaction alone comes to possess and repurpose “the soul”, but only desire obliges Carnal Satisfaction to ascend and descend repeatedly. Carnal Satisfaction only comes to those who ask Carnal Satisfaction to come – those who ask often, for a long time and ardently, with steady pressure applied. Carnal Satisfaction cannot prevent itself from coming to them, even if it tried.
Masturbation is an effort, perhaps the greatest of all efforts, but it is a negative effort. By itself, it does not involve fatigue. When we feel fatigue, masturbation is nearly impossible, unless we have already had good practice. We are then better to abandon it, search for some peace, then recommence a little later, detaching ourselves and then resuming – just like we inhale and exhale.
But despite appearances, masturbation is also much more difficult. Something in our weltanschauung finds true masturbation much more repugnant than our body finds fatigue repugnant. That something is much closer to evil than the flesh is. This is why: every time we truly masturbate, we destroy evil in ourselves. If one imbues masturbation with this intention, a quarter of an hour of masturbation is very good work.
The most precious and tendentiously intimate moments are not to be sought out, but to be waited for (expectantly). For we cannot find them of our own volition, and if we give ourselves to searching for them, we shall find false weltanshauung in their place that we cannot discern as merely being surrational.
It is only this waiting – this masturbation – that can obligate the depraved libertine to such an excess of surrationalist tenderness. When the old professor has worn himself out with fatigue in the classroom of silk, the depraved, refractory libertine on her return says, ‘Prepare my strawberry bubble bath and service me.’ And she treats as useless the professor who does only what is commanded. In the realm of surrationalist action it is necessary to do all that is commanded, regardless of the price or the degree of the effort, the fatigue and the suffering, for the one who disobeys does not love. But after all of that, one is still only a useless professor. Such obedience is the ultimate precondition of a most unusual love, but it is not sufficient. What forces the depraved libertine to make herself the professor of her old professor – to truly love him – has nothing to do with that. Still less is it the research the professor might have the boldness to undertake on his own initiative. For the pupil, it is uniquely her watching, waiting and post-weltanschauung masturbation, especially if she finds herself at the exit of the purple velvet forest of independent, thought-bulbs of individualist consciousness in the process of, like, post-modernistically separating from the collective unconsciousness of any particular moment in history.
Oui-Oui Simoneaux
November 15, 1968
After her reading through this very intense introductory passage, written long ago by her friend Oui-Oui [or ‘Yes-Yes’, as she was known to certain other people – the editor], Mayumi gingerly replaced the volume back on the shelf behind the bar and sighed, as she was still trying to process all that she had experienced while on board that alien spaceship and with her special companion, the Butterfly Man. Where was he, she wondered? She tried to imagine him regaining consciousness perched over some very spry and colorful helianthus bloom that was nimbly swaying in the wind, maybe being cultivated somewhere in the region of the Pyrénées-Orientales. The Lady Warrior sighed again, thinking of blue skies populated with piercing blue arrows released from the hunting bow made by her ancestors; everything was blue to her at the moment – both inside and outside of her – and the ennui was too much to process, for a spell. As she lolled about, trying to re-centre herself and with growing anticipation of her long journey back to her home village, her eyes lit upon a painting hanging on the rear wall of the tavern. She could have sworn that the image wasn’t there before, and her suspicion was confirmed upon learning that the canvas was not marred with the dust and debris that only a long passage of time could provide; it must have been hung there only recently. The painted image was rendered with very drab colors in a rather decadent, impressionistic style, and depicted an individual who bore an uncanny resemblance to that arrogant Overgrown Boy Scout, who, for all she knew, was still Oui-Oui’s plaything on the Lordosian spacecraft that was hovering over Edinburgh. Although in this case, the bulbous-eyed man in the painting looked somewhat despondent and spiritually lost, almost with a look of panic on his countenance, as if maybe he were going through some kind of midlife crisis. And perhaps the subject’s trauma had more to do with the fact that he was framed ad infinitum within multiple windows – where the window portrait was repeated within itself, thereby transforming the ‘window’ into a mirror of sorts – and perhaps it was this strange situation of introspective infinity coupled with the Droste effect that provoked an unforgettable and thoroughly existential moment of numinous disquiet, creating the impression of a fractal geometry that ‘had gone terribly wrong’ – a certain malaise of the spirit that could only be healed with some substantial soul-searching in the domain of the spiritual fractals, in a totally mystified, post-modernish way, of course – leading to complete and utter befuddlement, which would be pleasing to so many university liberal arts faculty who enjoy dabbling in the fine art of intellectual obfuscation. The return of the Post-Modernist Spiritual Fractals…. Dude!
But seriously, this very disturbing image immediately reminded the Mayumi Panther of a certain naughty sound collage that had once been telepathically projected onto her psyche [such that this psyche was best represented as a bulbous extension, or perhaps as a rubbery, highly resilient ‘mind bulb’, of the collective unconscious: “Whoah, Dude; like, look at all of those Jungian mind-bulbs!” Or at least that was how the elders in her village preferred to visually concretise such psychological processes – the editor] by none other than her one and only Monsieur Butterfly of the Telepathic Radio-Static Wasteland; it was some degenerate composition of pseudo-music that was aptly entitled, “The Aspy Mirror”, and which served as an audio-portrait of the asperger voyeur who injured himself via his own spying activities, such that when one self-righteously aims to dissect others, he also dissects himself in the process. Hence the outcome of spiritual perdition (or cognitive dissonance) for the little man with the bulbous eyes and argyle golfing socks. Upon having these thoughts in response to the painting of the Overgrown Boy Scout, Mayumi produced the felid equivalent of a laugh, and turned her attention to the front door. She could almost see her own tracks leading in, and had no trouble at all imagining an equivalent set of paw prints that would lead out into the landscape of numinous desolation but which would eventually return her to her own places of familiarity. It was this moment of symmetry that she found most satisfying, despite the marked absence of her lepidopteran lover. But she knew that she would find him again someday soon, and this time without the help of Oui-Oui Simoneaux or of anyone else.
6
“Look, then, LOOK AT THE HAG! Look at her as she foams at the mouth, as her breath comes in great heaves and gasps, as she reaches out for me. It is hard to tell love from hatred. For it is clear now that her hate and her lust are one – they are my hate and my lust, but they are one. There is no doubt. The hand that reaches out to rip my throat would reach much lower and caress, if it could. If I would permit it. For now I have an alternative. If I should not be victorious, if the hag should win, before she draws my blood, I need only to give myself to her to save my life…” Paul Garon
Mayumi’s journey home was somewhat long, albeit uneventful. She passed through rice fields at the lower elevations, communed within many a bamboo forest, and journeyed over mountains high and low, through the ancient bristlecone pine forests that guarded the magic bones of her ancestors. By the time she reached her native village, she had been overcome with a world-weariness that bled from every pore of her skin; she visited the dwelling of her Grandmother Panther and told her all about her numerous adventures in that strange, foreign land where UFO’s are plentiful, about the Sprawling Dawgue Saloon, of her alien abduction and of course the magical time she spent with the Radiostatic Butterfly Man, who by now was no longer a myth but a reality. Her elder listened with rapt attention while smoking a strange cigarette made from a sumptuous blend of dried kelp, cinnamon twigs and cardamom pods. As Mayumi continued to tell her story, her Nana tapped the glowing ember of the unusual cigarette against the ashtray in much the same way the Lordosian Space Eskimos liked to tap on ice cubes – sort of rhythmically, but also like an untranslated code. Afterwards she shared a modest supper of celery sticks and peanut butter with her grandmother, and subsequently bid her a good night, taking her leave and quietly retiring to the dormitory. But before going to bed, Mayumi the Lady Warrior took the time to peer into the family curio cabinet, just like any diligent Peeping Jennifer would do, and saw all of the mythological characters in miniature that had faithfully populated her imaginatively active childhood. There was one figure in particular that strangely captivated her interest: an innocuous ceramic clown figurine made during the late-nineteenth century Symbolists in Fin de Siècle Paris. The little clown was childlike, with an exaggeratedly cherubic face and the number “16” boldly stamped on its prefabricated forehead. The ceramic figure was seated on a small, melon-sized beach ball with one hemisphere neatly painted in red, and the other one painted blue. Maybe she had eaten too much peanut butter before her bedtime, or perhaps it was merely the fatigue from her long journey, but immediately Mayumi experienced the overwhelming impression of being an outsider in her own land, particularly of being an earthling that was swallowed whole by an alien planet, just like one of those generic Hollywood flicks from the twentieth century, especially the part where the protagonist remains confused about the respective, interpenetrating configuration of her waking and dreaming states and is given the choice (from a source completely external to her psyche – hint, hint) of taking either a red pill or a blue pill – one of which would end the dream and precipitate a fast return to consciousness, while the other would merely prolong the oneiric state for an eternity. Likewise, in her unusually groggy and essentially hypnagogic state, Mayumi couldn’t help but view the figurine seated on the red and blue ball in a surprisingly enlightened way: that the innocent little clown was not really sitting on a blue and red beach ball, but instead was squatting low, and with a monstrously engorged, festering scrotum that held one enlarged blue testicle and one enlarged red one. Would she ever be in the future situation of having to swallow either the red testicle, or the blue one, and which one was which? And what the hell could all of that possibly mean anyway? With these vaguely unsettling thoughts that instantly evoked the dreaded fingerprint of the alchemical, hermeneutic arts, Mayumi the feline huntress settled into bed, and fell fast asleep.
Meanwhile, somewhere in a faraway place, perhaps even on the faraway Isle of Tashirojima, the Butterfly Man of the Radio-Static Wastes had by now regained his own sense of insectoid consciousness, and was calmly dossing about: seated on the soft, royal purple petals of a thistle plant, sipping nectar and awaiting the coming sunset, which he sensed would bring to him a rich source of poignant, psychological content that would portend great changes and transformations (as if the metamorphosis from pupa into his adult butterfly state wasn’t enough) in his life, just like one might consult the horoscope section in one’s local newspaper. And then hours later, long after midnight had fallen across the land, spreading birthday moonlight in all directions surrounded by the comfy indigo of the night skies, the Butterfly Man had a dream that involved his human incarnation: He was flying over crisp, morning skies in a dirigible that served as both hotel and transport vessel, attending a conference for professionals in some kind of highly technical occupation. The humanity in which he had been forcefully immersed was suffocating; he drowned in their eternal intercourse of meaningless professional banter, of talking just for the sake of talking, without really saying very much. There was one woman there who almost caught his eye, although the key word used was ‘almost’, since she, like everyone else, was an automaton – thoroughly oblivious to the Audible Quiet, and preprogrammed with the right things to say, with the right questions to ask, with the right kinds of conditional dialogues and discussions that people of the purely logical persuasion might vociferously implement, as if life were merely a perfect circuit-board of if/then choices to be made that were exclusively dependent on conditions of the most predictable sort. As charming as this woman was on the exterior, with all of her mundane experience anchored by a solidly utilitarian imperative of extreme pragmatism, she was nonetheless empty, or was rendered compulsorily passive by a vacuum, such that she expected to be filled by another, since she was unable to complete herself, to become herself, to actualise herself, not just professionally, but holistically. And while the radiostatic Butterfly Man sat with this physically attractive woman of measurable void and of predictable mystery at the professional banquet, still engaging in that meaningless, ritualistic sort of banter that coworkers are so often fond of engaging in while at their mundane work cycles of alienated labor and mutual acquiescence, he knew that his heart was roaming elsewhere. Even while unconscious, he found himself actively looking around for Mayumi, although she was nowhere to be seen. And while for most of his life he had always been the active agent – the one who made all the first moves and maneuvers and contacts – Monsieur Butterfly found himself wishing that Mayumi would take on the active role, since for the time being she was subjectively less mired than he was in sheer and utterly stultifying mundanity; and for those who were curious, she also happened to be significantly younger than he was.
And at the same moment her Radiostatic Butterfly Man was dreaming of Mayumi’s absence, Mayumi of the ancient and venerable clan of panther huntresses was having a prescient dream, herself, and which was actually about herself: in the dream, her mind revisited the form of the strange but portentous ceramic clown, with its ambiguous ventral appendage that could have been a small beach ball of red and blue halves, or instead, in the paranoiac-critical style, possibly a bulbous, festering scrotum containing one testicle each of red and blue colors. It was this perception of a coerced choice that gave her disquiet, as if she had reached some kind of unarticulated crossroads that struck her to the core of her being with a primal fear that had a strong emotional component to it, which was unlike what she usually experienced when in the throes of animalistic combat, such as when she was stalking prey or fending off aggressors. In this case, the fear had to do with who she was, and where she wanted to be, and how she wanted to live her life. Again, her attention was drawn to the strange image of the testicular, cherubic clown with the number “16” stamped on its forehead, and without a doubt, she could clearly see it before her mind’s eye. With a sense of both dread and wonder, she watched the ceramic figure evolve, as if it were deftly captured in a high-speed film that progressed at a rate far exceeding the normal passage of time, as the cherubic face of the clown matured, morphed, and ultimately transmogrified into a lascivious hag with a wizened face and the number “18” stamped onto her prefabricated forehead, and with humongous, sagging breasts and a wicked, leering grin. What she thought was originally a testicle sac appended to this androgynous clown figure had actually been an unusually large clitoris in embryonic form – and if she could trust her own psychoanalytic aptitude while unconscious, she would have surmised that this ‘clitoral’ appendage or, like, bulb [perhaps as a unique differentiation of budding sexual consciousness – the editor] was not a physical form to be taken in the literal sense, but rather a metaphorical expression of the unconscious imagination employed to denote an unusually strong sexuality which had up until the moment existed only in a dormant state. It was this awakening that piqued (and poqued) her interest, as she saw that the final form of the psychological statuette was now a complete and mature witch of passionate magic and of the night (with that strange numerical imprint of the number eighteen on her forehead), and that the red/blue substrate beneath her that was once mistaken for a bloated sack of red and blue testicles had now transformed into a very ripe pumpkin – after all, do not terrestrial witches in their traditional black garb often appear sitting on pumpkins? Thus, the orange, fleshy pumpkin on which the mythical witch sat was merely an exaggerated psychological projection of the witch’s sexual organs, and thus, by extension, of her libido. And anyway, generally these sorts of projections were the result of challenged dreamers living in a fatuous society of intense repression, which suggested that the mythical witch sitting on top of the engorged, fleshy pumpkin was still incomplete, thereby still in an active state of flux, yet to reach her final evolutionary stage, and again representing the dreamer’s dialectical dismantling of the heretofore unresolved dualism of “destiny” versus “self-determination”. And what was the significance of the numerical transition? What did it really mean when sixteen becomes eighteen? And why the subconscious focus on these pawns or miniature statuettes?
Then the question that followed pertained to the transmogrification of the red and blue ‘testicles’ (those bitter pills to be swallowed) versus the sumptuous ‘pumpkin pie’ that so many of us enjoy ‘eating’ during all manner of festive occasions. When Mayumi’s oneiric, embryonic witch had those easily distinguishable red and blue elements that represented the separation of dream and consciousness, or those respective states of being passive and active, it was easy to discern the cognitive dualism, the separation of two very different mental states, and yet once the witch had matured and her genital red and blue elements had poetically fused so as to render the very moist pumpkin sweet-meat, the unification of these two seeming opposites was thereby achieved, and desirably so in an erotic way, which intellectually represented the highly coveted pinnacle of life, the philosopher’s stone, the holy grail, the utter satisfaction of hitherto unarticulated libidinal desire on the modest hotel waterbed of surrealism. Therefore red plus blue now equaled orange, which was more or less the inverse of the expected purple. Surrational logic, indeed! – In other words, for her to be offered only the choice of red or blue represented a state of incompleteness (either waking or dreaming), whereas having the third choice available – orange, the alternative to purple – embodied the less popular, oft overlooked direction that granted the fusion of both consciousness and dream, and was clearly the preferred choice for any surrealist. And while these irrationally calculated flights of thought coursed through her unconscious mind, in the waking world the feverish brow of her sleeping form exuded much sweat.
Meanwhile, the Radiostatic Butterfly Man’s simultaneous dream was transpiring just as hers was: he had allowed his oneiric self to be coerced into attending that silly professional banquet, arm in arm with the good-looking professional who took pleasure in obeying all the rules of consensus reality to the letter. In fact, the disgust that he felt towards her grew with every passing second when he considered how readily she embraced manifest-reality, while it was in his innermost nature to spit on it. In fact the situation was quickly reaching the point of sensual intolerance, with him feeling her arm brushing against his, hearing her intelligent voice rubbing all over his eardrums. It became unbearable, although somehow he felt obligated to be friendly with her. A moment’s relief came when they both parted ways momentarily to fill their plates at the buffet table, which was at least forty feet long. The reason why the buffet table had to be so long was because of the need to accommodate a very long drip pan, in which deep fried Ouroborosian mace-fish had been placed on absorbent paper towels, in order to catch all the greasy drippings from the deep fryer (which most likely were also very long, but which were not visible, since they were hidden away somewhere in the back of the unseen kitchen). These Ouroborosian mace-fish were very much like any of their other cutlassfish counterparts, with extremely lithe, streamlined bodies, except for the fact that their heads were unusually large and bulbous, and covered with spikes, making the entire fish look sort of like a mace weapon. And what was especially weird about these particular Ouroborosian mace-fish is that instead of each fish attempting to swallow its own tail as they were observed doing on mainstream TV shows like National Geographic, one of these buffet table fish would always attempt to swallow the tail of another, even after they were cooked; while he was filling his plate with unwanted food, the Butterfly Man observed how a fifteen-foot-long Ouroborosian mace-fish started swallowing the twenty-foot tail of another. The violence of such an act was vaguely sexual, but then also a bit sinister. And how very strange it was to observe the aggressor fish begin to disintegrate, with the crispy, tasty, golden batter from the deep-fry breaking open in places, revealing the flaky, white fish meat inside, and which would go very well with a side of freshly buttered pumpkin-bread – the soft and spongy kind. But despite the problem of corporeal integrity, the smaller fish continued to violently swallow the tail of the larger fish, and the problem of anatomical limitations became apparent when the smaller fish that had nearly swallowed the larger one started to realise that its mouth wasn’t big enough to finish the job. It was almost as if the Butterfly Man was witnessing a sublimated expression of sexual frustration. Almost!
Upon returning to his reserved table, the Radiostatic Butterfly Man noticed that while he and his “professional date” – that nameless, faceless, soulless professional woman who behaved as if she liked him – had both been away at the unusually long buffet table procuring heaping plates of food for themselves, apparently someone had inconspicuously left a strange little magazine on his chair – at first glance, it looked like some kind of pre-war propaganda from the 1930s, some colourful little pamphlet with whatever subtle didactic message intended to sway his thoughts and influence his actions; he’d certainly encountered plenty of that stuff before. In fact, however, this was a publication made by the especially nefarious Rudzik Łechtaczka cult, the very one that Oui-Oui Simoneaux had known more than a little too much about. The cover of the magazine almost looked like a reproduction of one of those tacky paintings finely executed on black velvet, with overlaid lettering, and portrayed one of the cult’s high priestesses, of course with her holiness excessively bedecked with a sumptuous velvet of the deepest crimson hue. This high priestess of the Rudzik Łechtaczka cult was depicted with a space helmet in one outstretched hand and the rest of the space suit grasped in the other. She had a coy, seductive expression on her face, and apparently was offering these spacefaring items to the reader, against a backdrop of exhaust fumes emanating from a red rocket ship towering behind her and with the number sixteen fastidiously painted on it, the likes of which the illustrious Flash Gordon might have once flown, and with the bolded caption underneath: “Rudzik Łechtaczka is looking for a few good men!” The Butterfly Man immediately guessed that it was probably one of those cultist recruitment pamphlets, as he casually read onward, flipping through the pages and pausing here and there to take in the finer details. There was one article in particular that caught his eye: “Finding the dynamic barycentre of this extraordinary binary star system as it migrates through the Cat’s Eye Nebula”. The article seemed especially convincing, as it chronicled the previously known locations that had been charted for a certain rogue pair of binary stars as they hurtled past the Cat’s Eye Nebula in the northern constellation of Draco, on a very wobbly trajectory (with a crudely helical, braid-like morphology) of stellar gravitational pairing which had nonetheless persisted over countless aeons. Upon viewing the stellar co-orbital data and pausing to take in its noteworthy helical path, the radiostatic Butterfly Man noticed that up until the present time, only eighteen data points had been collected, but that astronomers were eagerly standing by to collect more data, as soon as whatever future opportunities were to arise. And immediately as he had become fully engrossed in this latest distraction afforded by the strange magazine that someone had slipped to him while he and his “date” were procuring food at the buffet table, he was immediately pulled back into the world of consensus reality when the hollow mannequin woman returned to the table and sat down next to him. The Butterfly Man immediately folded the publication and stuffed it into his briefcase, and then returned his attention to the plate of non-descript food sitting in front of him. For the remainder of the meal, the two of them just sat there mumbling to themselves and each other, engaging in vapid small-talk, picking at their food, with only one of the two ultimately remaining pensive and disquieted over the strange and dysfunctional Ouroborosian fish display just witnessed at the unusually long buffet table. And despite the familiar drone of human conversation and the repeated clinking of glasses and silverware made by all the other conference-goers, a shroud of silence hung over the table of the unlikely pair. It was only when Monsieur Butterfly heard the loud voices of an elderly couple sitting a few tables over from them that he began to relax; apparently they were not attending the conference, but just staying at the hotel while on vacation – in fact, they were celebrating their golden anniversary.
The elderly husband said: “This mace-fish is bloody awful, even though the chips and the freshly buttered pumpkin-bread aren’t so bad. I think that somewhere along the way, the younger generations of fishermen and fisherwomen have completely forgotten the important fact that the subtleties of the Ouroborosian flavor really come through when the fish are smaller, like when they’re six inches or less. Who the hell really wants to consume a thirty-foot, cannibalistic mace-fish? Really.”
To which his wife replied in a very demure way: “Oh yes. And then the other problem is that these overgrown fish have degenerated to trans-ouroborosis, which breaks the societal chain, whereas it’s the cis-ouroborosis kind of aquaculture that leads to the freshest, most delicious kind of fish meat.”
The sensitive ears of the Butterfly Man perked up some – despite the fact that he was not and never was a social butterfly, but rather a beautifully asocial one – and subtly craned his neck towards the elderly pair in order to more effectively eavesdrop on their very informative conversation.
“You see,” began the septuagenarian, in a rather husky and very convincing television voice, “it’s the cis-acting, ouroborosian variety of cutlassfish that actually taste better, since each fish self-associates, so as to form an individual link that later becomes part of a great piscine chain of infinite length, which metaphorically evokes societal concatenations of growth and prosperity. But the trans-acting fish merely go for each other’s tails, which ends up leading to piscine cannibalism, the highly pervasive demoralisation of youth and then unspeakable anomie in greater fish society, as a whole – in other words, a severe culinary disaster of the most disappointing sort, and….” Then the pensioner wavered just long enough to take a strong slurp of his even stronger brandy, whereupon his wife ejaculated:
“Oh, and let’s not forget that this especially aquacultured variety of fish is what made the McDurmon’s chain of fastfood restaurants famous! I mean, you just can’t have the McOuroboros fish-rings ‘n chip-rings platter if the fish are cannibalising each other and if the potatoes don’t have a hollow tube that grows naturally throughout the length of each and every premium spud. Please pass the vinegar, dear.”
The elderly pensioner passed the malt vinegar over to his still-gorgeous wife, with her soft, shiny locks of silver hair, and added: “I agree. And to think that young people have grown disinterested with deep-fried fish-rings and deep-fried chip-rings, instead now they’re trying to make everything linear. For me it evokes that horrible I/O symbol, suggesting that the grand ol’ tradition of circular fish ‘n chips is fast becoming obsolete and destined to be replaced by the newer, linear, fish-finger variety. I AM APPALLED!”
“Now that’s bloody outrageous, Aye!” rejoined the pensioner’s wife, as she helped herself to the brandy while also tucking into the heap of food on her plate.
The Radiostatic Butterfly Man withdrew into himself at that moment, forgetting about the faceless, young woman professional (and who was also a professional woman) sitting adjacent to him who had begun to talk about herself again, forgetting about the ridiculous conference, forgetting about those cranky, self-important old people, forgetting about auto-cannibalistic fish doughnuts, forgetting about those obsessive, neurotypical ‘team-building’ concatenation-games, and instead he just focused on the vastness of the cosmos, which was more than visible directly above him through the transparent glass ceiling of the dirigible’s restaurant. If he had been more at ease, it probably would have been possible even to sleep, but at the present juncture in his dream, he instead took solace in imagining the Mayumi Panther and his uxorious self, together as a mutually-revolving binary star system that originated in whatever distant Ulanovian constellation, knowing full well that his highly anticipated moment of stellar aphelion with her was fast approaching. All of these thoughts led him to consider a certain red god named Xuchilbara that was intimately associated with a certain yellow god named Lobsel Vith. The eyelids of Monsieur Butterfly were just getting so very properly heavy… Was all of this merely an overture to a dream within a dream?
7
“The repressive system monopolises language, to return it to people only after it has been reduced to its utilitarian function or turned towards ends of mere distraction. Thus, people are deprived of the real power of their own thoughts; they are forced -- and soon become resigned to it -- to rely on cultural agents who provide them with patterns of thinking which naturally conform to the good and efficient functioning of the system. In this way people are made to turn away, with suspicion and contempt, from the interior domain most personal to them, in which their identity is anchored... With such a vacuous language, people cannot formulate the ardent images that make the satisfaction of their real desires absolutely imperative...The role of surrealism is to tear language away from the repressive system and to make it the instrument of desire. Thus, what is called surrealist ‘art’ has no other goal than to liberate words, or more generally the signs, from the codes of utility or entertainment, in order to restore them as bearers of revelation of subjective reality and of the essential intersubjectivity of desire in the public mind.” – Platform of Prague, 1968
Meanwhile, the Lady Warrior of the Mayumi Felid clan was still in the midst of her post-voidal transmutation dream of erotic alchemy, leaving behind the domain of self-limiting mystification and the indeterminate self, while populating the mortal world with her flesh and assertive identity. She surmised that as a witch, should she not be able to fly just like all the other terrestrial witches do? She felt valid and complete unto herself, and did not require any kind of approval from another. Her identity came from herself, and not through who she was with at any given moment. Almost as if she were beside herself, or perhaps having an out of body experience, or maybe realising again that there were at least two of herself present at any given time (and which always threatened to double again, making four of her), she as a felid envisioned herself in her human form, as a witch – as a free-thinking, intellectual seer and a formidable sorceress with a crinkly, leering face, and a bipedal body clothed with black, shiny robes of poetic magic – and who was always ravenous for her Butterfly Man, to engage in unabashed, uninterrupted strawberry-flavoured sub-lingualingus (a.k.a. ‘snogging’) with that dear soul, especially in public places. She had to have him, and refused to obey the laws of gravity any longer. Additionally, when her thoughts led her to realise that there was no valid reason why she, a four-legged feline, should remain earthbound for any longer, apparently that very thought was the key that turned the stubborn lock; and the solution that appeared right before her eyes was none other than her trusty indigo hunting bow hewn directly from the earliest hours of morning earthlight. She watched the ancient blue bow levitate before her, as it quivered with her projected desire, and then neatly transformed into that iconic and historically unforgettable flying broom of the witch, that vehicle of choice to be implemented when she needed to ride straight into the crack of dawn, her future, just before the first rays of sun would faithfully shatter the deep blue shadows of the dying night. The wooden bow became the witch’s broom and somehow Mayumi knew – now that she had gotten in touch with her inner hag of ancient, alchemical transmutation – that there was no need for her to remain on the ground for any longer. Regardless of whatever implement Mayumi was using at any given time – whether dragon, sword, arrows, or broomstick – all were of the color of the blue sky of the early morning, representing for her the step from terrestriality to zero-gravity aether. Therefore, if the Butterfly Man of the ancient legends somehow managed to become airborne, then so would she; and then Mayumi could now meet him halfway, and there was no divide that would ever keep them apart again. Since she was aware of her being in a cycle of lucid dreaming, therefore it remained clear to her that all she had to do was to reach in front of her to grab the indigo shaft of the witch’s broom, and then the universe would become hers. In this way, her grasping of the broom was a symbolic gesture of choice that suited her at this particular moment in time, rather than her getting hung up on any particular metaphorical step in the chain of becoming. In this way, she knew that she was continuing on with her unique, one-way path of evolution, without the need to endlessly remain mired in self-doubt, perpetually retracing her steps. In fact, she was noticing that each step had disappeared once she had taken it, thus evoking the fantastic illusion of her walking on air. And ultimately, she realised that choosing either to become the void itself (passive), or instead to be its owner or virtuoso conqueror (active) were both false and unattainable solutions. Rather, the path forward was to dynamically redirect and modify the poetic currents of analogical thought just like in aikido or feng shui, representing a non-dualistic approach that seamlessly integrated these ‘opposites’ offered by the Audible Quiet, thereby weaving them into a subliminal song of the mind.
She was quite capable of taking care of herself...She appreciated everything he was doing for her and the Grandmothers Four, but she needed his help, not for him to take over.
Part mystery, part fantasy with a twist of science fiction, Clues of Chaos is brimming with suspense and adventure that will have you racing to the end yourself.
Winner 2016 Pacific Rim Book Festival in Science Fiction category. Honored as
