Portrait of An Artist

As a Young She-Man

The sun does, through the clouds, free

A world of too many shrouds

Inside the blue whale…

-This is how it always begins, Stephen says to himself inside the Digital Cathedral.

Here is where he will unravel the yarn of his own death and resurrection. "But first, " he says aloud and on the occasion of his emancipation from the rogues that have seen fit to unburden their shoulder chips and call them religions.

-Only the soul can heal itself. Everything else is the wailing and piercing grief we call the loss of God.

Stephen Dedalus stands erect, hurling but one golden wing of an epithet at the spired halls which are his present home in eternity...

-But wait, the Master is in, cries the Sunset Raven.

And echoes thrill the man, cloaked in red and black, standing at the axis mundi.

-Already forgotten, cries the Raven. Gone before its time.

-And nevermore.

Stephen raises the staff of Mercury and one sapphire stem twinkles in the morning light.

-Once,...Twice....Three times I beseech the Heathen. Come to me, quickened by my pulse, through the path of that unholy beast which is the fate of all mankind.

-In sickness. And in health. Make me to imbibe the sweet elixir of mine own heart...

Three crashing reverbs shudder through the stained glass hall before Stephen Dedalus, child mother of the man, even realizes what he has done.

Summoned into dream by a waking he has never known, drums and the thick stench of poison beckon him with a thirst uncommon to the recollection of madmen, thieves, or men who murder hope.

Is not the question: to be or not to be equal to the question: to regard or not to regard? and, if so. do we not then hold in our purview the ground of all being?

There is , to quote one sager sort, a judgement to all art, akin to poetry , that being that which is known being ever propitious to that which is unknown, the dance of the Body Electric is the "tuft and applause of science" and love is just that, a science. *grin

Therefore I hold in no sublimer regard the shadows that paint my world with the stroke of the first Artist's brush

Therefore I ascribe to joy that ignoble grief which is that loss of our Mother tongue, the world and its "sights and shapes and sounds unholy"

...in stygian cave forlorn...

Necromantic songs of innocence and experience breathe in the crystalline water running down the mountain from the cave of Merlin

One simple gesture...of a cloud...or a leaf of grass...flourishes the mind of madness in a whimper and sigh...demonic wonders in the letters of this hoary scribe.

 Entering World Religion Chat Room…

Stirring from some place neither within nor without rose a melodious cacophony of wheel on light, like silver chards of some ancient crystal cascading through a cathedral of

Within-ness and without-ness.

All of a sudden the air became alive, or was already alive and has now arisen from some timeless slumber, coiling now through his ears, nostrils, neck, like only a fantasy born of archaic need only ever partially uttered (like a crescent moon frozen in a lake and hung on a wall) can do.

Still standing erect yet feeble, Stephen feels borne upon a ground, soft and fertile immeasurable oh my! like none other yet strangely oddly attractive to his deepest darkest memory of an ancient glen and phantoms that wave in the light mouthing, "nevermore"...."nevermore"....

With the twisted luminosity of train on steel, steel on backs of mortally wounded angels, Stephen Dedalus...

gleans a picture of a soul...

-The tongue is the salt o thee earth aye it is. *grin

-There was a guy named Dorsil used to come around these here parts. Really smart character. Here’s to you, Dorsil.

Stephen raises one sun drenched shot of tequila and proceeds to collapse upon the schorch-ed desart ocean.

-We are growin, aye, this tree are we not, matees lol

-I can see for me self what from wrong and what real, i can see thee light, the dream too aye

-Imagination is just as important as love, that be my contention aye aye yes siree bob's me uncle e is.

“...In Zoroastrian terms, you must go beyond Good and Evil, the intertwining serpents, to the posture of the lion-man. ...In biblical terms, the state of humankind before the Fall..." Occidental Mythology, J. Campbell p290

-When we lived in communion with the earth the sun the moon and all the stars and Orion sat with us at the feast.

-The Axis Mundi of all that came before it and all that would come after, the Last Supper

-Our faint superstitions can but recall as through a glass very darkly the apocalyptic premonitions that foreshadow the resurrection of the technology of soul in the mind light of the hearts of human kind.

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust..."

-For the lives that live us eat when they are hungry, drink when they are thirsty and die when they bloody well like.

-Wake up in the dawn

-Drink the blood and water

-Say goodbye to Father

-Say goodbye to Mother

-Goodbye...to the Earth and Sun

-Goodbye to each other...

-We are waiting in

-the stars above

-To turn the blood to light

-To ride our serpent sunshine

-Into the endless night

-We want eternal pleasure

-In the garden of your fear

-You sexy solar serpents

-So it all begins right here

-Kiss us with your Solar Tongue

-Of Memory and Night

-Kiss hell and heav'n on the lips

-With your fucking heart of sight

-Remember the future

-In waves of ecstasy

-All our words will come to nothing but

-The sound of fucking free...

-All you need to see is in my blood

-Your blood

-The darkest liquid light.

Stephen made the old red Ford throw a desert blast from its hindquarter. Pacifica was a small Native Indian commune (or "soulune" they said) in the hinterlands of west Texas and getting there quickly was just about the only fun Don Quixote planned on having this weekend in late August.

When he had left the office at U of T he had been thinking about Keaton's new book, "The New Reality".

"It comes from a place that is neither within nor without..." So read the inscription inside the cover. As of yet, Stephen Dedalus, Professor in Emeritus of Theosophy, just couldn't place the reference.

Now, with a road ahead not unlike that of his old friend Terry Graham...

He was content to find the music inside the moment and ride where it always goes, forever.