The World, Like a Pop-Up Greeting Card

I never saw the world around me in three dimensions until I was seven years old. I was born with bilateral strabismus, which means I saw through only one eye at a time. Every few minutes, my brain would switch over to the other eye, which led to more than a few spilled glasses of milk when I was a kid. Clumsy? No, it was just my eyes, that glass of milk isn't where it was a moment ago. If this condition isn't fixed by surgery, eventually by age 13 or 14 the brain gets tired of playing hopscotch and shuts one eye off permanently.

So, age seven, in between semesters of second grade, I went in to Madison General Hospital for eye surgery. I was in the hospital five days, I still remember parts of it. It was right before Christmas, Santa came to visit the hospital, he gave me a set of dominoes which I still have.

I will never forget when they took the bandages off my eyes. I looked around me, and for the first time in my life I saw things in three dimensions. As I put it at the time, it was like the whole world around me becoming like one of those pop-up greeting cards. You know, the kind you open up and a little scene pops up from inside in 3D.

A new dimension opened up in the world around me, a dimension the likes of which I'd never dreamed of before in my life. A new dimension, a depth dimension opening up out into. I think that was one of the sources of my later interest in signs and symbols, and of how in more subtle ways new dimensions of depth can open up in a symbol. The whole world around me, opened up and transformed like nothing I ever would've imagined possible.

Black Boiling Fuzz

Last night I was browsing through The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959 and I ran across the following rather arresting passage:

What is happening now is that I literally turn into someone else, not a human creature but man-like: He wears some sort of green uniform. The face is full of black boiling fuzz and what most people would call evil—silly word. I have been seeing him for some time in the mirror. This is nothing, of course. But when other people start seeing him without being briefed or influenced in any way, then something is really there. So far, Brion has seen him (or it). And so has Stern. But Stern left at the wrong time, since it is just in last few weeks that he comes through so clear that people stare at me in restaurants. Enclosed picture will give you some idea.

Somehow this reminds me of back when I was in my early teens, and there was a large mirror on the wall down in the basement, and I would go down there and stare at myself in that mirror. I would stare in the mirror until I began to space out, and things fuzzed out, and then in the mirror my facial features would start winking in and out, disappearing and reappearing one at a time. It was freaky, like some form of self-hypnosis, like an alteration of reality. No black boiling fuzz, though.

Ball Games That Never Were

The first game started coming to me when I was ten or twelve. I would see dim glimpses of it in my mind's eye as I was drifting off to sleep at night. Brief glimpses of a game played on a long narrow grassy field, played with a ball somewhat larger than a soccer ball.

Played on a field with three or four large posts, like telephone poles, running down the center of the field from one goal to the other. In some views, these "trees" or poles were actual trees. Three or four of them down the center of the field. Then two or three poles somewhere on the left half of the field, and two or three on the right half.

Treeball. Poleball. Trébol. Players running, kicking the ball. The ball ricocheting off the poles. It was a foul for a player to touch a pole, or knock another player into a pole. But sending the ball caroming off a pole was an important part of the game. And sometimes a player would even take the ball in his hands, and throw it so it bounced off a pole.

For many years the rules were not at all clear to me, I would get only glimpses of the game. A playing field studded with poles like an obstacle course. Viewed in sudden glimpses when I was halfway asleep.

The second game started coming to me in my early twenties. A ballpark in New England, in the America of some alternate history. A ball diamond, or rather, not a diamond but a hexagon. Not four bases but six. First, second, third, fourth, fifth, and home. And sometimes there were other bases further out, into the outfield, beyond first or third or fifth base.

Glimpses in my mind as I was drifting off to sleep, unclear how the game worked. Pitcher throwing the ball underhand. Batsman with a flat bat like a boat's oar, like a cricketer. Hitting the ball as in baseball, as in cricket. Then running the bases. More than one way to run the bases. Running to any of the other bases in the hexagon and then back home again, that was the simplest way to score. Higher scores for running triangular patterns, home to second to fourth to home. Or for running out in a straight line to bases in the outfield, running out to third base and then to "further third" base, back down to third and home. Or running around the hexagon, all six bases.

Often there were half a dozen men or more on base. Each running his own intricate pattern. Men with mutton chop whiskers, flat-topped caps like ball players from 1900.

And other odd touches. Pitcher throwing a player out by knocking wooden bits off posts behind home plate. Bonus points scored by hitting the ball through wire wickets in the outfield. Fugitive glimpses in the dark of night, there was more to this ball game than I could fathom.

Lately it's been a third game flitting through my mind's eye as I'm halfway asleep. A game played on a vast flat field, in the frozen lands of the Great White North. Men in heavy suits, some of them wearing big padded gloves running up their forearms like gauntlets. Others carrying big rackets strung with sinew, like snowshoes. Well over a dozen men on each team.

Running on the field, chasing the ball. And the ball is a dark crimson leather ball, near large as a softball, with a long knotted tail streaming out behind it, a tail with feathers on it. Ball flies through the air, a man will catch it in his gauntlet, run with it, throw it. Or swing it by its tail and send it flying. A man will catch the ball in his racket, whirl around and send it through the air, or run with it balancing on the racket. The ball is dead if it touches the ground, then referee throwing it aloft, players rushing in with rackets or gauntlets as if in a scrimmage.

Goal the netted goal cage, ball streaks in, goalie let it through, the crowd goes wild! This is the game that was played in Winnipeg, in Medicine Hat, in Moose Jaw, back in 1922. People coming to see the game, riding in two-wheeled wooden oxcarts, over rutted dirt roads frozen hard. And down south of the border, in Mandan, North Dakota, and in Miles City and Bozeman, Montana. The Polar League versus the Plains League. Spectators on splintery bleachers shivering beneath Hudson's Bay point blankets at the North American championship match, held in Regina. Announcers barking over the loudspeaker in English, in French, in Gaelic, in Michif.

Dark blood-red ball flying through the air with its feathered tail streaming behind, like a little comet. Still not clear just what the rules are. I see it in brief snatches and glimpses, more than half asleep, in the watches of the night.

Up in Sky Kingdom

A flash movie. Yeah, vaguely Sixties. "Birds Are Brothers," what is that?! Check it out.

Patterns in the Tiles

Am I the only person who sees patterns in the tiles, everywhere I go? Sometimes the patterns are related to different colors in the tiles. Sometimes the patterns bear no relation to anything that's there in the tiles— I mean, I just see the patterns, three tiles by three, or five by five with the (2,2), (2,4), (4,2), (4,4) tiles omitted, like a small parchisi board. Or a string of several tiles in a row. Or tiles arranged in a cross, or something like a snowflake... the patterns just stand out, often nothing you could capture with a camera. I simply have eyes to see, and so I see the patterns in the tiles.

Drives me nuts in a public restroom with tiles on the floor.

Then there are the patterns on wallpaper or wall paneling. When I was a kid, there was an odd-shaped chip out of the paint on the kitchen wall. I was convinced it was a cat lying in a wicker basket. Not just looked like, but was. On the walls of my bathroom today, I could point out to you the diving lion flying down out of the sky, and the pinhead clown walking a dog, and the red cardinal in an athletic uniform, and Abe Lincoln, and the Olmec face. Not that you could necessarily see them, 'cause like I say, you've gotta have eyes to see. But I can see them.

Seems somewhere I read that paranoia amounts to seeing patterns where there are no patterns to be seen. But in truth, patterns are everywhere in potential. What would be, is, under appropriate conditions. "If you can look into the sands of time, and say which seed will grow," then you're seeing as truly as any of us. To see is to see what is. Even in unmarked tile patterns on a tile floor, or in a diving lion with its front paws spread wide, flying down out of the sky.

As R.D. Laing put it in the closing words of "The Bird of Paradise":

City lights at night, from the air, receding, like these words, atoms each containing its own world and every other world. Each a fuse to set you off...

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.

"...It Is Thundering..."

I'm afraid this flash video reminds me all too much of the sort of stuff that is cycling through my imagination all the time.

The Other Rainbow

Here's another one of those odd items that's always been there floating around in my head, dating way back to when I was a kid: I've always known that there are really two rainbows.

One is the ordinary rainbow, the one you see in the sky. You know, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. (And I'll thank you not to forget Indigo, if you please.)

The other is, well, the other rainbow, which has nine colors: White, Yellow, Orange, Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Brown, Black. (In some tellings, Blue comes before Green; and the rainbow runs from White on the inside of the arch, to Black on the outside.)

It's not quite clear to me what kind of a rainbow I thought this other rainbow, with its nine colors, was. Plainly not a rainbow you see in the sky. Maybe more like Black Elk's "red and blue days at the end of the world"? Or more, I think, like the way I always knew what color each day of the week is: "Monday is light brown, Tuesday is violet, Wednesday is red, Thursday is moss green, Friday is yellow, Saturday is luminous red, and Sunday is white."

Something more like that. I always just knew about the other rainbow, White, Yellow, Orange, Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Brown, Black.

Colors

I've always been fascinated with colors, and with the feelings and characteristics which conglomerate themselves with colors. It seems to me almost like synaesthesia, perhaps because I've always known what color each day of the week is.

Colors, their shadows and their penumbras... Red with anger, red with shame. Yellow cowardice. Green with envy, or just a greenhorn. Pure as the white-driven snow, terror white as a sheet. A black mark against his name.

Purple and orange don't resonate so much, but I suspect that's because you don't run into these colors until you hit a language which has names for a good many colors. (Sapir and Whorf, take a bow.) Purple and orange are Johnny-come-latelies. Black and white and red, those you find in any language which names at least three colors. I forget which various colors may come fourth, but I do believe blue is always fifth. Seems I've read that somewhere, blue always comes fifth.

Blue is also the color that has by far the widest range of emotional and characteristical and linguistical conglomerations. Some years back, William Gass wrote a book entitled On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, which begins more or less as follows:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings... that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit— dumps, mopes, Mondays— all that's dismal— low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch... blue bottles... social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese...

More blue things and para-things than you can shake a stick at.

Alexander Theroux wrote a book entitled The Primary Colors; and another volume called The Secondary Colors, wherein orange and purple come into their own, at greater length than you might imagine possible.

Of course you know me, philosophical realist that I am: I still dare, in a nominalistic age, to think that beneath all this colorly conglomeration— in and with and under it, so to speak— there lurk deep truths and dark mysteries which a reductive and controlling technocratic age would rather that we neither name nor ponder. A person who is concerned to fathom the manifold mysteries of which blue is a natural sacramental, is a person who is just that much less easy to control and to trammel within the confines of good citizensheep. Or as Number 6 put it: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered... I am not a number— I am a free man."

In his Theory of Colors, Goethe said, "Colors are the deeds and the sufferings of light." My favorite color is red. There's something exalted, and at the same time strong and comforting to me, about red. Once when I was six years old I had a dream that I got an infected tooth, and I died and went to heaven. Everything in heaven was red, a bright luminous red lit up from within. I cannot read paragraph 919 of Goethe's Theory of Colors without thinking of that dream:

When we see them bring forth green below and red above, it will be hard to resist the thought that the green is connected with the earthly creation of the Elohim, and the red with their heavenly creation.

My favorite color is red. Oddly enough, my favorite two-color combination is yellow and black. When I see something colored yellow and black, it often sends a tingle up my spine, particularly if it is something at all artistic or aesthetic. But my favorite color is red.

The Kaleidoscope Within

My mind has always been a kaleidoscopic torrent of surreal imagery: think Salvador Dali music video on fast forward. The images flash and flow, faster than I can note them all down:

• Dude gliding through the air on a yellow rocking horse that has sleigh runners instead of rockers. He lands on the snowy downhill of a ski slope, and in a spray of loose snow goes skiing down the slope on the rocking horse.
  

• The furry snake with wings, reared and snarling. Hsssss!!
  

• Yellow five-pointed stars, as if cut out of construction paper, on a blue background; and laid over it all, a translucent layer of vibrant bright red.
  

• My apartment in Durham, North Carolina, circa 1990: looking down on the old overstuffed armchair in the living room, as if from somewhere up near the ceiling.
  

• In my own Hermetic language: "Ai, vorthoz ir iclnithis?" Rough translate: "Hey, why set it out on the lawn?"
  

• Abstract image of a cowboy twirling a lasso in the air, surrounded by freehand "boomerang" or "kidney" outline shapes, part of the "early 1960s coffee table" design on a sheet of light yellow Formica.
  

• Dark bronze sun in the sky, with a triskellion-medallion image stamped on the face of the sun. Dull metallic sound of a hammer being struck repeatedly on an anvil.
  

• Marble pillar, like a Corinthian column six feet tall, standing in a back alley of a large city like Philadelphia. Few know of the pillar; but those who do, will come to the pillar in the back alley with a sense of wonder.
  

• Ben Franklin, on a $100 bill, wearing sunglasses.
  

• A gigantic reindeer, 8 or 10 feet tall at the shoulder, wearing a harness with bells and charging down the winter street at night. Reindeer antlers, snowflakes drifting down beneath the streetlights. People scrambling in terror to get out of the way.
  

• A hail of winged boots falling out of the sky. Red boots, yellow wings, like winged Mercury boots, like something in a cartoon.
  

• In my old high school math classroom, a man and a woman hold a large paper-covered hoop between them. A tiger jumps out of the hoop, through the paper, from nowhere.
  

• The sound of piano music drifting across the moonlit lawn and down the slope to the river, back in the 1920s.

And that's not the half of it, those are just the items I catch in my net while many others flash by, uncaught. And as they pass in cavalcade, they're much more melded and melted together in the flow than breaking them out in a list makes them seem: flowed together, flowing one into another, in a vast quick-moving Neapolitan swirl.

An intricate tableau in my mind's eye, and I think if only I could catch or sketch or paint that on canvas, but then I despair 'cause it's gone, to be replaced by other tableaux just as vivid...

I mean, that's what the inside of my mind is like. Like a roiling multimedia equivalent of the Beatles' Revolution 9. And it goes on and on and on, a perpetual background to my mental processes. Like Revolution 9: 6:24-6:40 Intelligible speech (John/George, right): John: "Personality complex... industrial output... financial imbalance... the Watusi... the Twist..." George (left): "Eldorado" 6:32 George (right): "...pushing it between his shoulderblades..." Backwards piano loop (intro reversed?) 6:42 Marching band (left) 6:43-6:44 Intelligible speech (John): "Take this brother, may it serve you well..."

Hard to tell whether this is anything like what goes through the minds of other people, or whether it's just one more peculiar feature of my ongoing "radioactive core meltdown of the imagination." From conversations I've had with people on this point, I gather that some individuals think more in visual terms; others think more in verbal terms; some think in a mixture. But generally not in this churning, volcanic, cavalcade-parade hypersurreal flux...

Oh, I do find hints of it, and resonances with it, in some quarters: in Dali's paintings; in the pyrotechnic roman-candle prose of Jack Kerouac; in the occasional piece of rock music; in the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's account of "Firstness"; in Goethe's Farbenlehre, in poets as diverse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Dylan Thomas. And it's densely interwoven with certain other elements of my soul, my experiences with synaesthesia, "music" in repetitive background noise, hypnagogic and hypnopompic dreams, and mystical experience; to say nothing of my nigh-synaesthetic reactions to board games and card games, listening to the radio, slide rules, and the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Plus, last but not least, that language I created starting at age 13.

Still, it's just damn peculiar. To say nothing of its being an instant source of inward preoccupation on a quiet evening when I've nothing else to do. Watching the kaleidoscope inside my own head is better than watching a movie.

"Numbah nine... numbah nine... numbah nine... numbah nine..."

Drone Download Project

Look, let me make one thing clear from the outset: I am pretty much clueless when it comes to music. I have something of a feel for "moldy oldies" rock music from, oh, the mid 60s to the early to mid 80s. Any other kind of music, I may listen, I may vaguely enjoy, but I just don't get it. In fact, country music, I just don't get, period.

When it comes to my reactions to, ummmm, noise, I'm rather strange. Among other things, I have always been strangely moved by the noise of a vacuum cleaner motor running. The noise of a vacuum cleaner has an effect on me, something like the effect music may have on you. Well, no, not exactly like music; more like a tingle up the spine, Jack Frost at the windowpane, wool blanket and mug of hot chocolate on a dark, cold, and desolate winter night. It feels almost like being in touch with some strange alternate dimension of reality.

Anyhow. A while back, I stumbled across an online radio station called Darkdrone Radio, on Live365. And it sounded to me, and affected me, much like the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Music only a few steps above sheer noise. Music that is almost all background, and hardly any foreground. I'm far too dense about music to know what kind of music this was, though I think the description at Live365 included reference to something like "drone music" or "ambient music." Or whatever.

Darkdrone Radio has since joined the ever-growing list of stations at Live365 for which you now have to pay a subscription fee if you want to listen. So. I searched around, and ran across another site which carries tons of this kind of music. For free. Plus also CDs for sale.

Dark Duck Records: "Established in 1988, Dark Duck Records is an independent record label featuring ambient, deep chill, minimal techno, glitch, dark ambience, minimalism, environmental ambient, experimental electronica, click, and other 'electronic' music." Okay, I'll take their word for it, I freely admit I have no idea what they're talking about.

But their music is cool. Like the sound of a vacuum cleaner, or so it seems to me. And if you check out their Drone Download Project, you will find, like I say, drone music, or ambient music, or whatever, available for download. For free. They don't have limitless resources, they can't keep hosting it all forever, but the project has been running for almost four years, and the past year or so of music is still available for download, free.

If you want to get the droning, buzzing, whanging, wowing and mumming music that was posted earlier on, you can order it from Dark Duck Records on CD. With never-before-posted bonus tracks thrown in for free. I ordered the first three years of the Drone Download Project. A total of 24 hours of music. In fact, when it arrived I found they'd even thrown in an extra CD for free.

Like I say, I call it "vacuum cleaner music." Like the noise of a vacuum cleaner motor running. But then, I'm rather strange.

Thursday Is Moss Green

Odd but true fact: I've always known which color each day of the week is.

Monday is light brown, Tuesday is violet, Wednesday is red, Thursday is moss green, Friday is yellow, Saturday is luminous red, and Sunday is white.

Somehow in this schema Monday is the first day of the week. Oh, and Thursday's "moss green" is sort of a variegated mix of different shades of green. The "luminous red" of Saturday is a red lit up from within, as if by shining light, versus Wednesday's red, which is just a plain red.

An interesting example of the psychological phenomenon of synaesthesia.

"My Name Is Lloyd Vacuum"

"I'd like to purchase these books, please."

Terry looked up from the cash register at the customer, a tall elderly man who looked to be in his 70s, long lined face with a leonine shock of white hair. Terry rang up the books. "Cash, check, or credit card?"

The man was fishing in a loose, oversized billfold. "My name... is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

"Ummmm, credit card? Master Card or Visa?"

The man repeated more loudly, now in a somewhat imperious tone of voice: "My name is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

Terry didn't know quite what to say. There was something subtly wrong about the cut of the man's sweater vest, the weave of his shirt. At last the man triumphantly produced a card and handed it to Terry. With an air of assurance: "My name is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

Terry looked down at the card, couldn't make heads nor tails of whatever odd font it was printed in. For that matter, he couldn't identify the card. There... the man's name... but it was hard to read... it looked like... "W... That's 'Vacuum,' V-A-C-W-M?"

Now the elderly man seemed agitated. "No, my name is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

"Oh." Terry suddenly noticed with unease that Lloyd Vacuum was growing. Initially he had been about six feet tall. Now he was standing nearly seven feet. "Say, I can't help but notice. It seems as if every time you say your name, you grow a couple of inches."

Lloyd Vacuum drew himself up to his full height. A good seven feet. "As the moon hath its phases, so hath Lloyd Vacuum his changes in height." Now at least seven foot two. "You will see me another time in ever so variant a guise."

Terry looked down at the man's... credit card? But how do you ring up a card you can't even read?

Then Terry looked up again... to see a young fellow, college age, standing there in place of Lloyd Vacuum. Dressed in an odd outfit of yellow wool trimmed with red, and a yellow wool hat like some Sherpa guide's hat. And with something like tribal tattoos up the left side of his face. The young fellow spoke, in that same voice, younger, less rough, but definitely the same voice: "Yes, my name is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

As the young man said this, no mistaking it, he grew at least two inches.

"You're... Lloyd Vacuum? But... you..." Terry glanced down at the card, and when he looked back up, young Lloyd Vacuum was gone. Vanished into thin air.

Terry inspected the card. No, that font, was that even our alphabet? Something like it, but maybe more like Russian... or Cherokee? Then Terry somehow tripped a catch on one edge of the card, and it opened up and unfolded like the covers of a book. Revealing more unreadable printing within. More unreadable printing, and no fewer than a dozen photo IDs. There was the old man, and there was the young tattooed fellow. Some of the photos were of recognizable transforms of Lloyd Vacuum. Some looked radically different. One didn't even look human.

"Well, if that don't beat all. 'Lloyd Vacuum. Double L. Double U.'"

"The Poor Mimic the Blind"

I have certain snippets and forms of words which have drifted around in my mind like flotsam and jetsam for decades now. In some cases I have no idea what they mean, or where they came from.

One such meaningless slogan is "The poor mimic the blind." That one's been bouncing around in my head for over 20 years.

And I haven't a clue what it means.

• "The poor mimic the blind"
  
  
• "Ignore alien orders!"
  
  
• "Relax, Frankie, don't do it!"
  
  
• "Who takes up dumby, may call for trumps."
  
  
• "Slowgan on the highway is a speedster in town."
  
  
• "The bigger the wheel, the ranger the forest."

Random sayings which have been knocking around in my skull, some of them, since before Nixon's jowls departed for San Clemency.

Haiku'd

I see I've been haiku'd by Dean Esmay. LOL!

BTW, those leather-soled wool-sock slippers of mine are striped blue, red, yellow, and green on white, just like my Hudson's Bay Point Blanket. (Which is also wool, if you hadn't guessed.)

Sun and Moon

If the sun is gold, then the moon is silver. That's obvious. But if the sun is bronze, then what is the moon? Don't tell me aluminum, they didn't have aluminum back then. Maybe if the sun is bronze, then the moon is tin? Or quicksilver, yeah, maybe the moon is quicksilver.

Admit it, you know what I'm talking about. Moreover, in your more lucid moments you know that much if not most of our human knowledge is of a piece with bronze suns and quicksilver moons. And it is meaningful and valid and truthful, for all that. Without it we would be blind and deaf and dumb.

Now ponder for a minute how many of our modern philosophies have been designed with the express purpose of barring the gate against such suns and moons, as if against a marauding criminal horde. As if to say, "You shall come in through the front gate only, single file, no jostling; and then only when we deign to admit you. No crawling in over the back fence, please!"

Of course, the deep-seated need to be a gatekeeper (and such a stringent and authoritarian gatekeeper, at that) must never be spoken of: if one were a psychologist, one would suspect there are "control issues" in play here.

Metaphor and symbol and sign are the Morpheus and the Trinity and the Neo in this Matrix. But what of they who have appointed themselves the Agents?

The Morning Star

I've been noticing lately that Venus is once again the morning star. When I step out the front door in the dark of early dawn, there I see her, bright in the southeastern sky.

From everything in the natural world we drink in beauty; and not only beauty but also truth; and not only truth and beauty, but also goodness. The astronomer shows us the truth about the world, but so also does the poet. This take on things, which was once a commonplace in Western culture, has been systemically and needlessly filtered out in recent centuries, in the name of Man the Controller; and I sometimes think I must be the last man in the West to whom this older perspective comes naturally; naturally, as a birthright, and neither as a late acquisition nor as an oriental import.

I'm not talking daily horoscope or Coast to Coast AM here; no, far from it! I'm talking more like Coleridge. Coleridge the poet, and also Coleridge the philosopher of imagination as the tertium aliquid which alone is able to bind perception and conception together. Think of all the world around us as a seamless web of signification; and think of the process of signification as being structurally driven always by the object signified rather than by the interpretant, always by the morning star rather than by the seeing eye; and you'll be close to where I'm coming from.

This visible nature, and this common world,
Is all too narrow: yea, a deeper import
Lurks in the legend told my infant years...
The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason!
But still the heart doth need a language, still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names,
And to yon starry world they now are gone,
Spirits or gods, that used to share this earth
With man as with their friend; and to the lover
Yonder they move, from yonder visible sky
Shoot influence down: and even at this day
'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great,
And Venus who brings every thing that's fair!
  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from The Piccolomini

Vacuum Cleaner Radio

I'm weird, I've always had a thing for the noise of a vacuum cleaner. The sound of a vacuum cleaner motor running, the vvvvmmmmmm, hmmmmmmmmm as it sweeps back and forth across the carpet... it just sends a chill up my spine.

When I was a very young kid, I remember I was afraid of the vacuum cleaner. So my dad would sing to me while my mom was vacuuming. I eventually came to like the sound of a vacuum cleaner. It does something to me, it's hard to put it into words. It's like a mug of hot chocolate, it's like being curled up beneath a warm blanket on the davenport on a cold winter night while the winds blow and howl in the dark outside.

I know this is out of the ordinary. But then, in a lot ways I seem to be out of the ordinary, you know? I'm weird.

Vvvvvmmmmmmmm, hmmmmmmmm, vvvmmmmmmm, brrrrrrap! That vacuum cleaner noise, it's not like the sound— as if of music from another room— that I sometimes hear in the humming and thrumming of a fan motor. That's more quaint and curious and distant. The noise of a vacuum cleaner is more like tingling up my spine and in the nape of my neck. The far music in a fan motor is soft pastel; the vacuum cleaner noise is all sharp needles of Jack Frost on a January morning.

A vacuum cleaner strikes me more like the way I'm moved by listening to radio voices through the crackly static, from Denver and from Boston and from Nashville and from Calgary and from San Antone. Tuning up and down the radio dial on a cold winter night, fishing those voices out of the ether, has always felt to me like being in touch with some alternate dimension of reality. The noise of a vacuum cleaner affects me much like that.

It's hard to find the words. I think we're treading here on the march realms of synaesthesia.

And it should come to you as no surprise that I still own that old vacuum cleaner from my childhood. It's a Eureka upright. It's older than I am, early 1950s vintage. Its maroon paint is chipped and scratched, but it still runs just fine. And it makes, you know, that magical vacuum cleaner noise, vvvvmmmmmmm, hmmmmmmmmmmm...

Which brings us to what I call "vacuum cleaner radio." On the Internet I've stumbled across an online radio station called Darkdrone Radio. (You may have to log in to Live365 to listen, I long since bookmarked it from my free Live365 account.) I'm too dense about music to know just what kind of music is being played on Darkdrone Radio: "the world's best drone, world, experimental, and ambient music," it says.

Well, to me that doesn't mean jack. All I know is, a lot of what they play on "Darkdrone Radio" sounds to me wonderfully like the noise of a vacuum cleaner. I call it "vacuum cleaner music."

They play something of a variety of music. But a lot of it sounds only half a step above sheer noise. Imagine the droning buzz of a World War II airplane engine. Imagine the background murmur of the in-between spots on a radio dial, late at night. Imagine white noise almost drowning out the faint background chanting of a distant medicine man. Imagine mechanical factory clank over the ringing and clicking of long-distance phone relays. Imagine soft repetitive brass-cymbal clanging, playing counterpoint to the buzzing thrum of a motor's noise. The wowing and the mumming of vaguely clashing noises, and it goes on and on with only the most subtle of variation, almost all background and hardly any foreground.

Like the noise of a vacuum cleaner. And it has much the same effect on me. "Vacuum cleaner music." Darkdrone Radio. Like I say, I'm weird...

Weird Dreams

As any regular reader of this blog is already well aware, I have some rather weird dreams. Always have. We could include here some really weird dreams, such as the dream when I was seven or eight which consisted of nothing but the sound of a fire siren (when I woke up, there was no fire siren). Or the dream when I was nine which consisted of nothing but a vision of plaidlike burgundy fabric. I mean, it was just this plaid pattern, motionless, burgundy with metallic gold threads woven through it— that was the entire dream.

I remember one very early dream, back around age three, where the Speedy Alka-Seltzer Man, only about six inches tall, came out of a hole in the wall. And he was threatening to take my toys away.

From age four up to about age seven, I also had recurrent nightmares about the Ide-Dide Clown. Pronounced "idee-didee." Usually in these dreams, I would be sitting on my bed in my bedroom, and I would hear footsteps coming down the upstairs hallway. Then the Ide-Dide Clown would come into view, walking down the hallway toward my bedroom, and he would go, "I am the Ide-Dide Clown. Ide-Dide!!!" I would wake up terrified, in a panic.

These dreams for years gave me a bad case of clownophobia. I remember one clown nightmare— non-Ide-Dide— where a clown came out of the closet in my bedroom, and his eyes looked like little disks, one black and one white. Or there was another nightmare about a parade going down the street outside our house, and there was this gigantic clown on stilts, and he reached out toward me with a white-gloved hand, and I tried to punch the hand, only it was all soft and sticky like roasted marshmallows.

Actually, the odd thing is, in my dreams the Ide-Dide Clown didn't look like a clown at all. He looked like a robot built out of blue cardboard boxes, with a pressure gauge in the middle of his chest, and jelly beans on wires sticking out of the top of his head. I managed to end these dreams quite abruptly at age seven: the nightmare began as usual, with the sound of the footsteps coming down the hallway. Only this time I went out into the hall to meet the Ide-Dide Clown, and I punched him in the chest, and he exploded in shreds of blue cardboard flying all over the place. That was the last time I ever had a clown nightmare.

I've also had some really, really weird dreams. This is where we get into hypnagogic and hypnopompic dreams— dreams where you experience visual or auditory hallucinations while falling asleep (hypnagogia) or waking up (hypnopompia). I think my first dreams of this sort date back to around age eight or nine (the furry ball with a hundred legs spinning around on top of my dresser when I woke up). They extended up into my mid-thirties. Probably the most intense period of such dreams for me was in my early twenties, when my brother and I were sharing an apartment on Langdon Street in Madison, Wisconsin.

I went through a real phase of hearing music playing in the room when I was drifting off, halfway asleep. This is not the sort of distant music you may sometimes hear in the buzz of a fan motor, or the thrumming of a car engine. No, this was like a stereo playing right there in the room at medium volume; though the music was often muffled and distorted.

I remember one particularly terrifying hypnagogic experience I had in that apartment. I was partway asleep, still quite aware of lying there on my bed. Then the music came, and it was like muffled Beatles music. Then, from off on the far side of the room, I heard a voice, like someone speaking, only it was muffled and garbled. Then suddenly the speaking voice approached rapidly across the apartment, until it was coming from just off to the side of the foot of my bed. Muffled music playing loudly in the apartment, this muffled but loud voice speaking angrily next to the bed... and I couldn't move! I was lying there, as much awake as asleep. And I couldn't move!

This is, of course, the well-known phenomenon of sleep paralysis, which is sometimes known to accompany hypnagogia or hypnopompia. I know this sounds quite weird to someone who's never experienced it, but psychologists tell us it's not uncommon— something like 30% to 40% of people experience hypnagogic or hypnopompic dreams at least once in their life. For me, things soon trailed off from that stretch in my early twenties, and I haven't had a dream of that sort in a good 15 years now.

Though I still do tend sometimes to have, shall we say, rather colorful dreams. As anyone who follows this blog is well aware.

The 27th Letter of the Alphabet

When I was in first grade, my friend Kelly and I made up a new letter of the alphabet. It was called "key," and it came at the end of the alphabet, after Z. The letter "key" was silent, it had no sound of its own. It was supposed to come at the end of certain words, though the only example I can think of is that I made up a bunch of planets out beyond Pluto, and some of these planets had the letter "key" at the end of their names.

It was 1962. Planets beyond Pluto were not popular: back then science fiction was still a small, grubby, unpopular genre, sort of like detective novels or true crime stories, only moreso. A 27th letter of the alphabet was not popular: creativity and imagination were for grubby beatniks and other dangerous outlaws, not for first-graders (though I already had long hair back then, even before the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan).

But it was too late. It was around age six that my "radioactive core meltdown of the imagination" began, I think initially as a psychological defense against an unhappy grade school existence. I was already making up my own superheroes, like the Scarlet Streak, and drawing regular monthly comic books about them. I was drawing intricate diagrams of underground tunnels filled with dangerous spikes, traps, and pools of acid, like a precognition of the perils of Indiana Jones. I was designing my own fire departments, with fleets of red, yellow, and even blue fire trucks. I was designing my own space ships.

Soon (age nine) I would be making up my own imaginary continent of countries, with their own history and customs, and even their own board games. Soon (age thirteen) I would be creating an entire intricate language of my own. Soon (high school) I would be writings piles of science fiction stories about my own future history, as intricate as Robert Heinlein's future history, with the colonization of the Alpha Centauri system, and the 3000 year interstellar war between the Clitonians and the Wolfites, and the Coming of the Darkness, and Simon Athelstan, Emperor of the Seven Stars and Lord of the Princes of the Vanmoor.

Back in those days, people just didn't use their imagination like this. It was unheard of. It was downright radioactive. If word of this 27th letter of the alphabet had reached Washington, I can just imagine the man at the desk of the nameless security agency (so top secret that nobody's ever even heard of it) dispatching a ninja SWAT team to hunt me down. But the Scarlet Streak comes smashing right through the brick wall! Bullets just bounce right off him!! The skies darken with fleets of spaceships, the friendly aliens from Saturn come to the rescue!!!

The letter "key," 27th letter of the alphabet! My "radioactive core meltdown of the imagination" had begun; and in truth it's never really let up, to this day.

The Aweful Platonic Mystery That Burns at the Heart of All Games

I've always been a fanatic about games. What we might call classical table games— the games that grow up more or less spontaneously out of a culture, and are played sitting at a table with special equipment. Board games. Card games. Throw in various tile games and dice games, too.


I learned chess at an early age. Checkers too, of course. And backgammon. Chinese checkers. Parcheesi. Nine men's morris. All these board games fascinated— no, more than just fascinated me. They drew me. Drew me with a magnetic attraction toward some hidden, uncanny polar magnetic north.


It was the same with playing cards. I started learning card games before I was in school. Then in grade school I discovered an edition of Hoyle's Rules of Card Games. Other Hoyles out of the public library. And I proceeded over the years to learn one card game after another, straight out of the book. Euchre. Cribbage. Pinochle. Five Hundred. Canasta. Poker. Rummy. Gin Rummy. Bezique. Cassino. Cinch. Pedro. Black Jack. Faro. Sheepshead. Skat. Piquet. Auction Pitch. Oh Hell. Seven-Up. California Jack. Hearts. Kalabriasz. Spoil Five. Napoleon. Whist. Gaigel. Boston Whist. Ombre. Calabrasella.


I remember when I was nine, sitting there and playing bezique with my dad, who was sick in bed. (Some version of bezique, I forget which, was the favorite card game of Winston Churchill.) There was something about playing cards which drew, almost mesmerized me. Yes, the bright colors, the curious designs. Yes, the thrill and the strategy and the Gemütlichkeit of a good game of cards. But there was something more to it than that. Some aweful, awesome, burning mystery which was glimmering through the cards and their play, like some whispered clue to a vast and hidden realm.

It almost felt to me, with card games and board games, like I was entering some alternate level of reality. To be immersed in a game of chess, sheepshead, nine men's morris, two-handed pinochle, was to be steeped in something like another world. A world bathed in an unearthly light. A world perfused with some ineffable secret.

I found the same in dice games as well. And in tile games like dominoes and Mah Jongg. I didn't find it in most proprietary games, like Monopoly or Stratego, even though I enjoyed playing these. And I had (and have) virtually no interest in sports. But classical board games and card games were another matter.


Then around age 14 or 15 I discovered a Dover reprint of Edward Falkener's Games Ancient and Oriental and How to Play Them (1892). And I absolutely went nuts. The game of Shogi, or Japanese chess! Siang K'i, or Chinese chess! Tamerlane's chess! Here were board games more alien and more wondrous than anything I had ever imagined!

There weren't many books like this available back in those days, but I hunted down what I could find. John Gollon's Chess Variations, Ancient, Regional, and Modern: I had correspondence with Mr. Gollon concerning a fine detail of the rules of the game of Jetan, or Barsoomian chess, out of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Chessmen of Mars. Several books on Shogi, Mah Jongg, and the game of Go. And a hardcover reprint of H.J.R. Murray's classic A History of Chess (1913)— I can remember literally dancing for joy the day that book arrived in the mail!


In high school art class, I made sets for many of these exotic board games. Boards were generally leather (it helps to have an uncle who was a salesman for a leather company). Pieces were cannibalized, recombined, and spray painted from various store boughten Staunton chess sets, or in some instances hand made. Mike W. and I always used to play Tamerlane's chess (112-square board, 28 pieces on each side) in the high school commons.

I eventually did manage to find store boughten Go and Shogi sets. It was hard to find such things. It was hard to find anything on such games. Games like these were much further out of the cultural mainstream 30 years ago than they would be today.


From a certain age on up, I also started making up board games and card games of my own. Some, like my game of Blue Pinochle, were "in the ballpark." Some, like the Quintuple Arcana (in my own Hermetic language, Mna Jondir-Pantho Zinisa) were like nothing you've ever seen or heard of before— above is the Quintuple Arcana set I made in my college years.

From early on up, I collected playing cards. Ended up with a collection which today amounts to hundreds of card decks. I also haunted the used bookstores for books about board games and card games. These today fill two large bookcases, and include such curiosities as an old Hoyle printed in Philadelphia in 1838 by Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co.; H.J.R. Murray's A History of Board Games Other Than Chess; Foster's Skat Manual; Cavendish on Piquet; Fukumensi Mihori, Japanese Game of "Go" (Board of Tourist Industry, Japanese Government Railways, 1939); Von Leyden, Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India; and a crumbling booklet on Four Chess, a four-handed chess variation, printed by the Senior University Chess Club, Cambridge University, 1892.


But the main thing is, that aweful Platonic mystery that burns at the heart of all games. I can set up one of my board games, and just sit there meditating on it, literally for hours. Or sit there imagining possible moves of unheard-of mutant chess pieces, or board games curious and unconceived.

I often have dreams about strange unknown board games or card games, or finding unusual card decks in a heretofore undiscovered secret room in the house. Sometimes these dreams find their way into reality: when I was only seven, I had a dream about a chess variation where one chess piece enabled other pieces on the board to have special moves when they were in alignment. This feature later found its way into a chesslike game I invented.

Games aren't the only thing that can trigger that uncanny feeling within me, that sensation as if of being connected to some alternate reality. I've always found a similar experience in listening to the radio. I don't know quite what to make of it, I've never known anyone else who has such a reaction to such specific cues. It seems almost like an abstract form of synaesthesia.