One sees strange fantasies in the water . . . .

"You will not remember what I show you now, and yet I shall awaken memories of love . . . and crime . . . and death."
The Mummy (1932)

Like all the really wonderful, old-time horror movies, The Mummy wasn't about the mummy at all, it was about a human theme, in this instance interwar zeitgeist and alienation and the ever-present, universal feeling, "I don't belong . . .", not here, not there, not anywhere one can really name, but that there is such a place one never doubts. The gawkers gathered around the central image of your movie (you) never fail to fail to understand what idea is driving the script, the simulation, if you will, that you are running to hopefully unveil a few answers (42). There was a piece in the New York Times (14/08/07) on the philosophical musing that what WE really are, down here on Earth, scurrying around and living our lives, are virtual beings in a vast sim running somewhere else in the interest of historical observation, or anthropology, or curiosity, or even just plain old boredom (think teenagers desultorily playing a war simulation game). We can not know the difference between "virtual" and "real" because being a subset of one of the terms negates understanding. And, according to the article's author, it answers a big question: Why does God allow so much evil and violence? Because, fool, goodness and peace are BORING. Therefore if you are the Big Programmer, why would you run a dull, boring sim when you could have some fun? And nobody is really getting hurt, after all, it's just a sim . . . .

I sometimes feel like I'm a character in a chapter of "Mother Hélène and the Wiccans", the clueless buffoon who enters the scene knowing nothing about Mother Hélène's eternal fight against the barbarism and ignorance of the inhabitants of the French village where she has opened a convent mission. Adrift on a sea of medieval superstition and chillingly cool casuistry, Mother Hélène forges along on her raft of faith and hard work with little time to explain things to a late arrival. The villagers, for their part, continue to daub themselves with woad, gather in sacred groves at night and with infinite pagan kindness humor Mother Hélène and her eccentric penchant for logic. The buffoon more often than not sympathizes with the villagers, but there are moments when the beacon of reason illuminates Plato's cave and he is yanked back into the fluorescent existence of being a signifier instead of the signified (ha! take THAT de Saussure!). It is an horrible example of basic semiotics, but it serves a purpose in highlighting the "sheer shear" we encounter when a sudden irruption of the discombobulated reasoning Up There is revealed. Like the boy in the fairy tale, we abruptly realize that the emperor is wearing no clothes and that we were complicit in the lie. How long? we fret, how long have we been collaborating? But it doesn't matter, because the narcotic sensorium gas soon makes us forget our moment of lucidity and sink back down into the Mathmos (watch Barbarella). Or creep back into the cave, to round off the much-mangled metaphor.

So there we were, sitting on the banks of the Brahmaputra, spinning wool from the lint of past lives, when Devi turns to me and says, "Say there, whatever happened to Kalki ? Isn't he running late?" I should say he's running late! That's him over there, in the left column of the blog, the blue chap on Devadatta, the winged white horse. He is the 10th and final avatar of Vishnu, his purpose to destroy the Kali Yuga, "The Age of Darkness and Destruction" (in which we are living), to destroy the suffering of Kalyug and usher in a new age. Um hmm, sounds distressingly familiar. I say 'distressingly' because these apocalyptic saviors are never around when you know they should be, destroying demons and cleaning house for the new regime. I suppose that we can thank one of them for 'casting out the demon' Rove, he of the porcine face and Amityville eyes. President Bush reminds me of a latter-day Faust who has finally arrived at the tag end of his pact, his diabolically engineered "sim" breaking down around him and the yawning abyss of "game over, you lose" looming ever closer. If one riffs a little on the apocalyptic theme, surely we have had enough Antichrists in the last 100 years to provoke at least one of the saviors to lead a cavalry charge. If it has NOT been enough then I shudder to think of what awaits us just around the corner. I am neither an eschatologist nor a religious End Timer, but really, it does seem that things are so far out of hand that they are irrecoverable through any possible human agency; thus, perhaps, throwing confetti and smoke at the Divine is as appropriate a response as any.

Writing of smoke and the divine, I notice that we shall soon have access, here in the technological backwaters of the West, to an already favorite Asian gadget called the e-cigarette (Reuters). Powered by a Motorola© chip, vaporizing the content of nicotine cartridges to an inhale-able smoke, looking like a normal cigarette holder, it will give us immediate, legal access to mainlining pure nicotine without the worrisome side effect of, say, cancer. It is manufactured by the Golden Dragon Group of Hong Kong, those smoky-nostrilled fiends. At around $208 a pop, plus the cost of the cartridges, it surely isn't a fag for the masses, but then again look at what is charged for game boxes, e-toys, etc. Aside from the initial purchase, it is hard to see exactly where existing governments are going to bandage the massive economic hemorrhaging that will occur if tobacco sales fall - it would be unfeasible to tax the cartridges enough to make up the difference. But what am I thinking, silly me? Surely Big Tobacco already owns the patents, at the very least distribution rights, as well as factories just waiting to rush name-branded cartridges into production. All your favorite brand names (with absolutely no underlying difference in chemical composition) painstakingly jet-inked onto billions of compressed narcotic mini-canisters. Which do you inhale, Camel© or Marlboro©? Aieee! Aieee! My head hurts, too much smoke, not enough confetti . . . .

There was an odd little synchronicity in my morning ritual: coffee, a cigarette, e-mail & the news. The synchronicity arrived as I was idly observing one of my cats rimming her brother, the pure glittering garnet ambrosia of my coffee momentarily forgotten, when my gaze was attracted to an article in Le Monde about Cecilia Sarkozy having to "render account of herself" to the government if she is going to act as she did in Libya. Ahahaha. Fancy trying to fly that past Mme. Sarkozy - I think not. If Nick the Ripper leaves her alone, why would anyone else fare differently? She is no one's idea of a First Lady except, perhaps, her own, and not likely to fix a republican cocarde to her hat just because her husband is the French president. The French press won't even touch her, which says volumes about how dangerously explosive she is for the establishment of which she is now queen. Let the government bray all it likes, she won't even send them brioche, of that I'm sure. Oh, the synchronicity? It was between the cat, the coffee and the chippie in the news - all shiningly exquisite examples of a pure essence being nothing but itself. Or as CZ might say herself, "Je ne suis pas bobonne, je ne fais pas le yucca." She's running a sim of her own that has nothing to do with her husband, politics or public opinion, it only has to do with her, which is exactly how she prefers it. Just ask Barbara Bush.

Muller: " 'Death, eternal punishment, for...anyone... who... opens... this... casket. In the name of Amon-Ra, the king of the gods.' Good heavens, what a terrible curse!"
Assistant: " Well, let's see what's inside!"

With the big push currently on for all news Chinese, I read that 5 people were struck and killed by lightning at a funeral somewhere in China. Okay, if you were an economic & nuclear powerhouse with a gloss of hard-line Communism disguising the heart of a 19th-century robber baron, crouching crablike in a cesspool of cruelty and corruption, where would you focus the media organs? All of this unseemly curiosity to "see inside the real China" as the Olympic games approach is simply a genre of voyeurism which shall reap its own rewards. Mr & Mrs Occidental Citizen really aren't ready to "see the real China", of that I am sure. Medieval poverty and massive, institutionalized chain-gangs do not lend themselves to Disneyfication. Lest the West get the wrong idea, we are told as well that the manager of the factory responsible for the lead painted toys recall has committed suicide out of shame (hey, wait!! Isn't that trick supposed to be Japanese?). It doesn't take a lot of imagination to picture that scene - government officials, discarded wrappers from fried shameballs, empty bottles of Tsing Tao© rolling under the chairs, a "loaned" gun to avoid paying the round-eyed foreign devil at the register . . . . . While on the other side of the world, a really rather nice person died in NYC, Brooke Astor (NYT). Mega-philanthropist, she worked long and hard to make life better for others and rarely in visible ways. She attained 105 years, which is, of course, far too long, especially ill and not in possession of all her faculties, but if the Bonus Life LED had to blink for someone, why not her? Ugly stories followed, of course, with her family squabbling publicly over this or that, I can only hope she left the majority of her estate to the foundation she directed for so long. Better than many she knew that money only works when you get rid of it, but she was careful where she threw it, knowing that it corrupts everything it touches, like a virus in the program.

Ardath Bey: "Your pardon. I dislike to be touched. . . an Eastern prejudice."

The Tarot gave me The Chariot, reversed, as my indicator for the day. Not necessarily a good sign, to say the least, but not alarming, other than the fact that every day lately has produced a Major Arcana card, a sure sign that things are shakin' on my space/time gaming platform. Today's card is didactic, an effective "warning", or filter, with which to screen my actions and motivations of the day. I like doing that, using divinatory 'hints' as gels which highlight the game board, much the same effect as using meditation or prayer points to focus your day (à chacun son goût). Like all programs, I carry the seed of my own virus, my own destruction, within myself, so after I killed the demon under the bridge & won the chest with the cards, I may now use them to access "admin" functions under "player options". Every aide counts when the program is this overwritten and code-heavy, and I plan on having a word with the Programmer when I get the chance, provided I can pry his/her attention away from the sim . . . .
Leducdor