So:

And yes – the title is quite deliberate in its woolliness; its fuzzy/hairy rhizomatic maybeness.

Fuzzy like my beard, like the hair upon my head. See?

So:

And yes – wreathed in dead keratin, people have given me nicknames. My dear old Mum calls me the Wild Man of Borneo. Rasputin is another I have borne with a smile – which you cannot always see beneath my beard. I am told by intimates that the smile reaches my eyes; independently verified as wicked, they have a habit of changing colour depending where you stand.

And yes, roots have hairs, don\’t they?

Fuzzy little bastards. stretching through the cracks, pulsing their way through the concrete. Uprooting mankine\’s designs and sometimes crushing them too. Because in the words of Jeff Goldblum & Sam Neill in Jurassic Park:

Life finds a way.

If anything, that is one of the definitive characteristics of Life; except, of course it seems like life cannot be defined. It seems as if we\’re constantly being surprised by it, revising our definitions. And maybe they hold for a century or so, but that\’s just peanuts to life. There\’s plankton on the International Space Station for goodness sake. Or if you prefer, there\’s new forms of bacterial life being found in Antarctica.

So:

And yes – there\’s a rhythm to this.

Mankine was not a typo, by the by. I know I make them often, but that\’s because my fingers never match the speed and intensity of the flow, so sometimes they just skip words, leaping across the semantic gap. Pole vaulters arcing and over, but there is no bar to raise. Life just gets on with business, a vital impulse that spins up out of raw physics.

Life is weird. It\’s the hairy eyeball that the kosmos gives you when you dare to think you\’ve got it all mapped out. So when you start taking about natural and unnatural, possible and impossible, Life laughs in your face like a hyena.

Hooting and hollering, it points the finger and gives you the rudest of understandings. And that\’s OK, because we all have something secret that we\’ve forgotten. Something that\’s been concreted by structure and form and map and canal.

And Life in all its hairy madness gives no fucks at all. 

So:

And yes – that includes the weird, because the vital impulse of daimonic reality gives no fucks. It\’s fuzzy and monstrous and portentous and rolls on in an endless golden unfurling. So when I steal from myself, when I ask you my readers to listen, think not of repetition but spiralling helixes. Because I already wrote this, and it\’s all weaving together like a vine:

Let me tell you something, confidential like.

We think we’re far gone. We think we’re exiled. Some of us think we’re making a Black Pilgrimage to the Lady in the Mountain, trying to find the hidden door.

Some of us raise our heads and yearn to join the shades that stream across the starry sky, with all their smoke and pipe and drum and battle fury.

But here’s the quiet secret, oh best beloved.

We are already in the Mountain. Did you think that Lady of the Lake stuck us in the Tree as punishment? No, that bewitchment is endlessly simple, for time circles like a noose about the neck of a wild and frenzied one, full of fury.

And the King sleeps ‘neath the Mountain, or so they say. Under hill, lain beneath the mound. But those with eyes to see and ears to hear know that in sleep, buried and close to the land, so the King may rise, so the Dux may  haul abroad his warband. For is it not said that the wizards may fall- down-as-dead, and rise to walk the winds faster than an arrow?

For down amongst the dead men, we see the fires light the starry-cave, and hear the songs raised by sweet voices and fairer folk. Drink deep of the Mysteries; the orgia of intoxicating honey singing in your veins.

For behold; it is the craftsmen of the Deep Below which may present us with tablets of gold and weapons of gods; Totenpass and totenkopf mark the way, oh best beloved. The severed heads of prophets breathe with a great hissing of snakes and rushing winds borne of a black eagle’s wing.

All about us ring the signs, stars encircling; bull’s bloody haunch flung heavenward to bless us all with blot.

And all the while, Hermes herds us with whispered words: As above, so Below. 

See Hephaistos drink from the vine-god’s cup, he who was hurled down from Olympos. Watch the crippled god smile ruefully at the bitter truth of unmoving nature; see him teach vengeance to she who doomed him, now held immobile upon her throne.

Yet, cock your head, lose one eye and you shall see the headless truth; Her blessing pours forth from milk-white breast, and so we fall inward, like a kid, seeing doom and vengeance transformed into living vibrant lesson.

Sly Hermes, liar and thief of Apollo’s cattle! But what a trade wrought upon those poor benighted beasts by way of music; raised by lute and syrinx, all in piping rhythm. Such a song, with its endless scales, as summons lost Orpheus, reborn once more in Pythagorean gold.

Pashu rising and descending; Herakleitos marks the path, and weeping and swollen, so he smears the dung upon himself, the shite of those that do not see. Obscuring himself forever, yet trusting to Sun’s bright fire, his wisdom is revealed!

Witness as, all unrecognized, he is torn apart by blackened hounds – the commonest of all deaths.

And at the crossroads, so the hero strokes the hide of Kerberos, a head on every road. Hermes passes by, whispers the sign with rod aloft, to be met with countersign.

Hodos ano kato.

Rejoice, oh best beloved. For this? This is the middle-world. Here, truly you may, by root and branch, ride the terrible fury of Being and horse the terror of existence!

Troubled by a wound that shall never heal, so we plunge ourselves deep into the roaring well of wyrd, noosed by the norns which bind our fate. Only then, to comprehend with tears of salt, the sweetest secret.

A splash of imagery here, a dash of salted depression there. I wonder what would happen, were you to meditate on the foregoing in the chambers of your heart? Would such a cavalcade of myth lead you anywhere, or is it merely composed of names and forms? It\’s entirely up to you, really.

Yet, what if, for a moment, even those names and forms were seen and known as brightly painted masks? What if they gave ingress to characters – unknown things becoming  embodied? Perhaps, like wine poured into jars – into toted amphorae – they are capable of intoxicating us. Though we need not know the grain of every cup, the curl of every horn, they nevertheless become necessary things of texture and aesthesis – inseparable from our sudden pulsing onrush of experience.

So:

And yes: I ask the question, quite clearly – have you ever been drunk? Felt the way the world begins to sway, the smooth flow and ripple of fluid impacts upon your senses. For the world becomes fluid then; the blood of the grape or the body of the hops and the barley, smoke of the peat or bite of fruit. The coming-coming together of loosened tongues suddenly smooth in their slurring stumble.

Life is a thing of fluid then, a fire that engulfs and flows; fire upon deep and flame upon the waters. To understand this is to comprehend that existence is a daimonic flux, a drunken frenzy full of maenadic, bacchic fury.

I ask the question, quite clearly – have you ever been drunk? Every been tasted, supped and swallowed down whole by greedy throats? Ever set salted blood afire?

Igne Natura Renovatur Integra – Nature renewed by fire made whole, I wrote that four years ago.

Because there is, as I said, a precise rhythm to this – a precision of golden Pythagorean understanding. And lest you think I speak only of Dionysian revels allow me to correct you – for it is the lyre so cunningly wrought by Hermes, best of all liars and thieves, and given to Apollo to which we return again, and to the skill of Orpheus and his severed head:

[S]ay: \’I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my birth: this you know yourselves. I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.\’ Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will themselves give you water from the spring divine; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory. After that you will rule amongst the other heroes. – Golden Tablet of Orpheus

So:

And yes:

The inevitability of death rears its ugly head to shake its gory locks – the immortal heroes precisely mortal; their transition to the golden ichor first requiring audience with the goddess who dwells below, she who despatches the Daughters of the Sun to retrieve us from the mortal realm with the hissing and piping of the syrinx.

And who do they retrieve but their equal, their brother? For  though the mask remains, the  tale told may be infinite in its variety; we do not cast aside Dionysos, he our onrushing patron! Nor though, do we  eschew the sole honour of the Sun; the burning arrows of plague and healing set to fly by bright Apollo pierce our hearts and make us bleed.

We follow the wolf-lord who is the bright one of music and song. We leap and sing and wail our laments as we are presented with she who reveals the unmoving axis, the sole eye of perception by which we make, weave and twist the desires of mortals together to form a yoke.

The smooth mask of bright Apollo cracks then to reveal the ever youthful initiate, the curls of his hair thickening into Dionysian vines; smoothness furs then, rhizomatic tendrils waving in the cold northern breeze. Hyperborea calls and then the face shifts anew; contorts into shamanistic disciplines of fettered fury!

The single eye burns bright in its socket; a burning sun at midnight deep within the earth.

Across the steppe come the riders, come the bowmen and the horselords and the witches with tears of burning amber. Ten thousand faces slide away, as chained words rise up to stand, strengthened by smoke.

Consider then – if you are not who you think you are, what of gods?

When is Apollo not Apollo? When is Artemis not Artemis? When is Dionysos not Dionysos?

Interpretatio graecae. Interpetatio romana. They burn like paper in the face of an awful actuality.

  For the daimonic there is not distinction between same and not-same. The onrush of Being never moves – it has no origin, and comes from all directions. It can and is experienced everywhere – the peculiar requirement of death for immortality necessitates the destruction and reconstitution of our awareness.

How can this fuzzy in-betweeness of Vitalistic Death, this resurrection into New Creation, be seen? Quite simply, in a couple of months. On November 11th – Rememberance or Veterans Day, which this year will no doubt bring attention to the First World War which began a century ago – something is going to happen.

Something potentially amazing may occur on this day of Remembering the millions upon millions of dead – because that is when the Rosetta spacecraft will land on a comet and possibly change human history regarding the origin of life. The comet is as old as the solar system, and should help us answer the question of whether Life came from the stars.

As its namesake helped us unlock the Mysteries of Egypt, perhaps the Rosetta will unlock much more.

A child of Earth and starry Heaven.

Weird, no?