Vishnu symbolizes preservation and the unending flow of things, or rather, of processes. Thus, he sits comfortably between Brahma the Creator and Shiva the Destroyer, according to the Puranas, written roughly 1,700 years ago. Vishnu also enjoys descending into the human world too much, donning different flesh costumes depending on the situation, in order to extinguish evil and chaos and restore balance to the hearts and brains of mankind. These flesh costumes are called avataras and are ten in number, starting from Matsya the Fish and ending, supposedly, with Kalki, the divine perfect human being, protector of mankind during the Age of Darkness called Kali Yuga.

From fish to almost-God, mankind sweats and toils to fit into the mold of Time, unable to accept the existence of a Total Nothing. And why should we? Why should we bend over and spread our ass-cheeks to this supposed Total Nothing, inviting nihilism into territory where previously only feces dwelled before? Beats me, dear reader.

I'm on the fence, really. My heart hopes for an afterlife, or, at least, a chance to return as part of a greater whole. Let me help the soil grow as a tiny fragment of leftover energy, released from my material bonds. But my brain demands that I realize how outlandishly stupid this claim is, and that nothing awaits after death except Nothing: the same Nothing that gave birth to our faculties, and thus to our spirit-free existence.

Well.

This is why I choose, in my late thirties, to have a brain of the heart and a heart of the brain, dear reader. So that I can rein in my lust for the possibility of the death of inexistence, and at the same time seduce my turbo-nihilist tendencies with the lust of that very same possibility. This whole theatre of the absurd demands that one learn to walk between the Aristotelian bullshit of logic's so-called "yes or no" pseudo-commandment.

How about "maybe", motherfucker?

"Maybe." What a wonderful wor(l)d. A world of Maybe.

Vishnu doesn't deal in maybes, though. Vishnu is yes or no, black or white. More importantly, Vishnu is also Narasimha, his fourth avatara and an invaluable Grand Idea that has accompanied my magical, artistic, and everyday quests for more than a decade now.

Man, I love Narasimha like I love Ararita.

In a way, Narasimha is the male pillar to Ararita's female one, and this helps keep things in perspective. Every bum like myself who has experimented with chaos magic and patchwork invocations without possessing any real talent for either can attest to the truth of the following claim: you have to adopt a maybe-mentality when dealing with concepts that the general consensus dismisses as irrational garbage, yet whose life-altering spark of vitality and intellect becomes increasingly difficult to deny the more one works with them.

It's not about faith in god or gods. Faith is the cesspool of stupidity, since it eradicates the maybes as well. It's also not strictly about self-tripping, even though that's always a possibility one cannot easily discard. Mostly, it's about self-programming oneself to open the door and greet Love.

Love is the eradicator of Nonexistence.

At least until you die. Then? Who knows. Until then?

Welcome, my Love. Welcome, my Love.

Ah, I'm rambling again, dear reader. I ask for your forgiveness, though, since I rarely write anymore. This text started as a tribute to Narasimha and the tremendous role he played in the evolution of my magical worldview. Now the hash-and-beer combo is beginning to take its toll on my writing skills, which are already somewhat win-it-or-fuck-it in their whims. I start throwing around terms that have meaning only within my own solipsistic self-indulgence.

But at the same time, we as a species are already jacking off to AI-generated pornography, thus coming full circle in Baudrillard's simulacra theory. We are no longer lusting after flesh, nor even after images of flesh. We are lusting after images generated from images of desire itself. Or rather, we no longer consume substitutes for desire; we consume desire generated from substitutes.

So why is it so irrational to accept that, deep within our private imagination-space, certain thoughtforms can be recognized and communicated with? That through constant repetition of acts of will, these thoughtforms linger and acquire a kind of life of their own?

Beats me.

That's that, then, dear reader. 

Until next time:

om ksraun narasimhaya namaha

and have a fucking good night.

It's Saturday night, baby, so how about a cheap koan fix straight from the Deluge Nations? 

If you, like me, find yourself drifting closer and closer each passing year to what I call the "William Blake sphere of influence", the artist-visionary's modus operandi, if not modus vivendi, that is, if you're attracted to the sort of brilliance that gives birth to cosmogenies as real as a lover's kiss or a toothache, then you may safely retitle this essay:

Something like "Proverbs of Hell".

Or, if you prefer:

The Proverbs of the Deluge Nations.

"What is a deluge nation, motherfucker?" you protest, rightly so. "I cannot keep up with this shit. Words are meant to portray, not dissolve." Yeah, well, tough luck, dear reader. I don the mantle of the Fool when I'm full of wunderbar, and tonight I am positively convulsing with the stuff. Man, what a life! What a glorious Saturday night!

So, without further ado:

THE PROVERBS OF THE DELUGE NATIONS

1)A boulder does what a boulder must. Yet even a boulder cannot act if the surface reflects nothing.

2)A dead man once asked a living man, "What is the meaning of life?" The living man screamed in terror and died on the spot. The dead man stared in angry disbelief, for he was certain that the man had merely avoided the question.

3)A sphinx asks, a man answers, a woman generates, a child forms.

4)Throw me in coals, dip me in the river, let me dry in tempest and then bury me under a great white rock: still I'll resume my duties and pray for convenient solutions to my death.

5)My heart of hearts, my brain of brains, my heart within the brain and my brain within the heart: to suppress them is sin.

6)If Titans bred like locusts, earth would be a little garden. Yet locusts should never be as enormous as a Titan.

7)An old woman traverses a dead wasteland every morning in order to water her lilies. One day she arrived only to find them eaten by a goat. She slashed the goat's neck and skinned its hide. She then wore the hide and proceeded to eat the remaining lilies herself.

8)Some believe that the end is near; some believe that the near is ending.

9)No matter the motion, the lines obey.

10)You cannot have a newborn's smile without a corpse's stillness. You cannot praise the living and ignore the dead. You cannot sing a hymn to the sun without paying respects to the entrails.

11)Shed your skin for this world.

As for the Deluge Nations: we are all full of little people, inhabitants of our own vast inner landscapes. Some of them eventually drown, yet drowning does not silence them.

I suppose this is where I'll leave you for tonight, dear reader.

Until next time: be fruitful and full of demons. Be barren and proud of it too.

As I grow older, I understand that what we call “weather” these days is akin to a Russian roulette game played by a bunch of blind and deaf people. One day you get scorched alive by the ravenous rays and the cement mirroring the sun’s radiation, BOOM, straight into your face, and the next day you need to wear a coat because of the rain. Weirdly enough, though, the gaunt heat accompanying this subtle rain since noon hasn’t managed to sever the Orphic aorta doing the humpin’ and pumpin’ between my eyes and the heart of my brain. On the contrary, it fits like a glove.

This whole conundrum of subtleties signaling celerity, that moment of clarity in which a moment crystallizes within the backroom dungeon-temple, is what I call “the wunderbar.”

“But what is a wunderbar?” I hear you wondering, dear reader, or voice in my head (you are one and the same, amen). So I reckon I should try to describe this magnificent quality to the best of my abilities.

Imagine eating a peanut and leaving the broken shell pieces on the table. If you isolate them in your perception and observe them for what they “are,” they become horrendously dangerous, almost eldritch. They look alien, out of place, like fossils of vicious entities. Wunderbar can be described as the inversion of this.

Wunderbar becomes the glue that keeps the seed and the shell together, regardless of their current whereabouts. Wunderbar is the memory of the taste of the seed in conjunction with the violent cracking and permanent disabling of the shell, plus the antithesis between the light yellowish-beige of the shell and the blue handkerchief upon which it rests, atop a shiny oaken-brown table, plus the geometrical tyranny of the still-under-construction hotel directly across from your apartment, covered in blue nylon mesh while the moody grey skies still piss and piss and piss, and then a little green parrot flies past your balcony.

All this is wunderbar, and this is the fuel for Ararita.

Here’s how Ararita operates: she becomes invisible, a spirit of air and lies and smoke, when my wunderbar reservoirs run low. She floats like a memory supercharged by nostalgia. Then, when the warmth returns and fills me with wunderbar, during those rare moments where the membrane separating things grows thin enough for everything to bleed together, Ararita descends.

She descends, and she becomes me.

She drains me dry. She drinks and suckles the wunderbar out of my system. I become a lesser creature. I become a mule. I become what I am without the wunderbar, and even less, since I now perceive the absence of wunderbar as a material loss.

And Ararita shines.

She becomes the Sun. She becomes, yes, she becomes.

And I am content, because I have something important to handle, so the World is not a meaningless exercise in blind tragicomedy for a while. But the downside is that I am no longer a holder of wunderbar. I exist only to scribe. I am the scribe.

And then she disappears. Typical creation-story behavior.

Up to a point, this is what magic is supposed to achieve: the short-circuiting of ordinary correspondences, so that brand-new idea-pulp may fertilize the thoughtforms lurking in imagination-space, waiting for a fertile field to colonize. I am at that point in my life where people whisper to themselves, “The Devil is twelve-hour work and four-hour life,” but Ararita persists.

When I say that Ararita is necessary, I am not walking on clouds. The fact that Ararita persists is confirmation that magic itself still persists.

And that is a wunderbar in its own right.

It's May and still I haven’t found an alternative way to funnel my counterintuitive fantasies. But consider this: there’s no more honest way to describe an artist at the moment of inspiration than as “a vessel that is full.” Inspiration shares fluid qualities with what we call God, gods, godforms, Great Ideas, vibes, energy, the universe conspiring for your well-being… no, scratch that last part. It’s unbearable. I can’t take seriously the notion of a personalized, servile universe that pretends you matter. In our heart of hearts, we wander, feed, and multiply, hoping that invisible, gargantuan hands arrange our actions five moves ahead of this week’s tragedy. But in our mind of minds, we suspect that what we call the universe is an empty throne. No, scratch that too, a “throne” demands royal buttocks; otherwise, it’s just a stool.

What a sweet afternoon. What a friendly night. The weather is shit but also friendly enough to permit some space for self-flaggelation. Bah! Enough with the defeatist mentality of the hermit. A city hermit. A cement hermit. A semen hermit, oh boy can you imagine?

-Well, what did you expect? I’ve been standing on a twenty-foot pillar for twenty-three years! What would you do?”

-Isn’t the whole point of hermitism to resist earthly passions?”

-It's also good for the prostate, and I'm not getting younger you know!

-How can a man of faith succumb to self-pleasure? It's illogical.

-You know what? Fuck it. Starting now, not only will I masturbate, I’ll also spray you from up here.”

-But isn’t wasting your seed a grave—”

-Here it comes, oh Lord, here it comes!”

-All right, all right, I’m leaving. Jesus!”

Still, I stand by it: the artist is a vessel that is full.

I’m a vessel, and so are you. If, by reading this text, you cultivate the thought-forms of your mind like flowers, or better yet, like cods… flowers and cods! What a line. Absolutely lame, absolutely perfect. Many a poem has been built on a ludicrous starting position like this. Or perhaps no poem at all, which is a shame, and dare I say, an insult that needs to be addressed.

So here it goes: I manifest this automatic poem in accordance with the laws and customs of the northern regions of Al-Takum. I leave you, dear reader, to join our dance of ephemeral curiosities, constructs of the foggy mind, exciting new failures that keep the blood pumping. Till next time.

“The Flower and the Cod”

Round Round Round along the jeweled fields,
the lily wanders and the poppy springs.
Aroused by the honey nectar they excrete,
the flowers dance in fertile need, yet—

Down Down Down into the deepest depths,
the cods rejoice in violent death.
The bigger fish devours them all;
for them, the sun is useless scrawl.