There is a woman in a red dress who haunts me in my dreams. Never the same dress; never the same woman, but always a woman in a red dress. I have seen her many times. I have been her many times. I have been her while my body was another character in the dream, and I have fucked my body, and I have murdered my body.



Tanja and Annan are handfasted -- wedlocked in a Royal Marriage. No sense of perversion, but I still can't shake the oddity, can't help but question the necessity of gender, of blood. They are each one, and they are each two, and together they are four -- yet, still I must question the identity of the child three...

[insert picture of equilateral triangle]



"And never more upwards to joy I yearn."
--Thomas Mann, "Faust," page 197

A phrase at random from a random page of a random book off the shelf, and yet the synchronicity is uncanny... my own shattering of the gods and the archetypes... the all-consuming agnostici...



Act II:
A canvas on the floor, the artist hunched over, paint dripping from the brush to leave electric blue puddles randomly over a Baltimore landscape. The landscape still wet, she paints the side of her face a neon pink and lies her dead down on Baltimore and falls asleep.



A flurry of madcaps seasoning the House of Lies


Deep jungles. Deep jungles. It is indigenous to be human here, but still only fauna. Yage running through the brain like it isn't. Dr. Leary, I presume?


Francesco Bernadone, o holy man, finding no man willing to listen, turns to the birds and together sing unmistakeable divinity. This is the way of the aesthetic and ecstatic -- the green east -- so wholly Christian he was scourged by the nine inch nails...


Synchronicities and Normalcy: I met a man today, training at the convenience store -- a musician who quotes Lao Tzu with ease and claims to follow The Way. He doesn't know the man he has replaced -- a musician who quotes Lao Tzu with ease and claims to follow The Way.

Every Thursday night, the poets and musicians and Shakespeareans of the area, as many as 50 a night, converge on this one bar. We are Buddhists, Taoists, Agnostics, Atheists, Wiccans, alchemists, Discordians, anarchists, Jews, Kabalists, Sufis, Gnostics, Pleiadians, Scientologists, Freemasons, Eclectics, natural philosophers, Evolutionists, and three Methodists and a Catholic, who is an ex-Franciscan nun who now quotes Crowley with glee. THEY say two out of every five Americans is a Christian. THEY say artists and philosophers speak in the present what man of the future will believe. But, we all know what THEY say about the implications of this milieu.
The visual artists don't conglomerate here (save for a curator and a documentary filmmaker). They amass in a particular gay club, and they are largely Atheist, Agnostic or Jewish. And gay, through and through.


Aristotlian physics dominated the Western paradigm until the 18th Century. It states that everything in the universe is a particular proportion of four elements: hot, cold, wet, dry. In theory, one could adjust the proportions of one material to copy the proportions of another material and thus create the second... ie, lead into gold.



There is something primal and bestial in the act of killing another living creature -- smearing hir still-warm blood on your face -- your body -- that musky scent of blood and death -- the adrenaline coursing through the veins -- the rush of power and control -- mastery over the Black Lady -- you are a god -- you are a goddess -- you have escaped death by becoming death -- death becomes you -- to take that warm flesh into your mouth -- energy feeding energy -- completing the daisy-chain of life -- gnawing on human bones between your teeth -- gnashing -- this is murder -- this is religion -- this is worshipping the prey and becoming life --



They say that every seven years every iota and smidgen of molecular and subatomic particles within our body has been replaced. Every seven years, our body has undergone a complete rebirth. And, yet... if every seven years we have completely new brain cells, how can we remember anything from more than seven years ago


Blank -- the chronicler and the chronicle fall subject to strange maneouvers. Direction? Where there once was, there now is not; ambiguities and paradox seem tantamount to normalcy.


Question everything, even the questioning, even the questioner.

.


"Technology Was Here" spray-painted on the atmosphere -- a shoddy graffiti presence.


Act II:
The painter has met the paintress and croons to her:
"Mine eyes of gaiety look on thee/cast away the shadows pale/curb this dark of night/let love and lovers prevail".
From the orchestral pit, a single cello plays a single note, long and sustained. Deep. Distortion twists this singular note into a reverberation echoing through the hall like a deep throaty moan. The paintress, with painting dried and stuck to her face, looks blatantly unamused, but the painter is unaware. Hidden in the backlight, the ballerina has stopped dancing and has busted out the window and is using the glass to slice her wrists, deep and red. This is scripted, and this is not a snuff film. It is the ballerina sacrificing herself in the name of Art.
"Merry, merry dance for me/dance so full of life/bounce carefree/and sing down our lives//merry, merry dance for me/dance like a casbah queen/merry, merry dance for me/in dance you set my soul so free/so free//" The painter, now, is traipsing around the paintress, singing gayly and oblivious. His voice cracks on the high second 'free.'


Reminiscere miserationum tuarum, Domine, et misericordiarum tuarum quae a saeculo sunt.


Catnip brewed in a tea makes an excellent sedative.


Enoch 7:1-3
"It happened after the sons of men had multiplied in those days, that daughters were born to them, elegant and beautiful. And when the angels, the sons of heaven, beheld them, they became enamored of them, saying to each other, Come, let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children. Then their leader Samyaza said to them; I fear that you may perhaps be indisposed to the performance of this enterprise;"


Act II:
The paintress no longer watches the painter flapping around in pompous gaiety, but instead watches the blood running on the floor by the ballerina's lifeless body. This is not corn syrup dyed red. This is all part of the act. The paintress peels her painting off her face and hangs it upside down on the wall. This is all part of the act, but there is no encore, no second performance.


Someone from the audience is singing the aria 'Circa mera pectora' from the Carmina Burana.


In an alley in Little Italy, a freshly lit cigarette rolls with the wind on the ground in an otherwise deserted street.





previously published as the second half of the story 'Madness Insipid' at "Megaera"