History Endeth Thus

The great trees rode the wind, catching mad air on enormous silken sails, and the treeriders sailed with them, from the shores of the wooded and mysterious Lost Coast of the North, where the jade and the rivers and the Redwoods were, all the way across the great dry desert of the Southwest above deep crimson-red canyons and towers, all the way to the High Mountains of the West that touched the sky and hid many magical kingdoms, and on the eastern side of these high mountains, which eternally caught the reddening dawn of the rising of the Great Eastern Sun, the treeriders landed their great trees, Sequoia Sempervirens, enormous rootballs gently bouncing to a slow rest as the mighty sails wrapped overhead to form a great pavilion, about which the treeriders began playing music and beneath which both treeriders and root gnomes began the immediate work of creating a self-cleaning ecology: microclimate planting, drainage and irrigation, compost and heat.

They'd come from beyond the great Ocean of the West, riding mighty giant whales across the seas of the forever setting Great Western Sun, singing deep, mythical songs of an ancient Time and an eternal and omnipresent Way. Beyond fear, beyond laughter, beyond time and space, the songs reverberated with implacable and unerring harmonic convergence, ushering in a new Age and a bold, deathless, new and forever-remembered way of being. They sang songs of an intelligence long forgotten and never extinguishable, songs without language, songs of the Myth of Time. And with them rode the Death of the Kali Yuga.

They were immortals, avatars incarnate, all-victorious beings transcendent over victory itself. They were beyond conflict: from their communal and collaborative spirit rang the invincible resonance of the one truth of One Love. The Whales had said they were going to leave, but at the last second they stuck around for the show and the trees had actually been waiting patiently this whole time, it turns out. Redwoods loved to go sailing; they were really good at it.

The treeriders landed, and explained to the ecstatic crowd that no, Bastante wasn't with them. He'd sailed South on his tree, following the coastline, and only a few treeriders had sailed with him. Don't worry, he's coming, they kept saying, and avoided the topic of when. The main expeditionary force wasn't going to cross the Desert this winter; some kind of logistical problem; they said. Maybe in the spring. The treeriders shook their heads; a lot of worked needed to get done and there wasn't much History left.

Motivation to culturally transmogrify was low in South Kali-Land, where the living was already ridiculously easy and no one ever had any real reason to complain, or change. Bastante was going to speak out for action in South Kali-Land, in the heart of Mordor, Santa Babylon. He was going to speak motivationally, and rally the indefatigable Babylonians. Needless to say, he was terrified.

little did anyone anticipate the events that happened next...

a clumsy beginning

"Oh, who is Bastante Solipsis Marquez,
with the green-grey moustache
and the feather-boa fez?

"...for he says what he means,
and he does what he says!

oh, that wily coyote, ole' B.S. Marquez!"

Bastante spat. He peed on a tree. the sun shone gloriously, and he looked around.
Hell yeah. Nice day.

He started to walk. He didn't know what the day would bring. And that was just how he liked to start them...

the Art of Love

"laughter probably is the best medicine," Bastante muttered under his breath, "but good hygiene takes a close second." He hadn't showered in weeks. Stranded in Babylon, he didn't have the kind of connections that got a man work, or got a man laid, or even kept a man from falling in the streets. And truthfully, he didn't care.

In a world full of hypocrites, he preferred to sit it out. But Bastante shook his head. Times had changed. Being in the world, not being of the world - tricky situation. Most folks in Babylon wrote him off as wasted talent, selfish, self-absorbed, and lazy. They were right, of course, but it was only half the story.

Bastante was an aghori - a left-handed tantrik. He was a gigolo sannyasin, an ascetic devotee of the Goddess, who had renounced all attachment, even attachment to renunciation. His was the path of Tantra - no teacher, no student, no self, only relationship. There was no destination, and the celebration of the journey was both his job and his religion.

Tantrik sannyasins were a dime a dozen, of course, and Bastante was more irresponsible than most, but it didn't change things any. It was his calling, and he had no recourse but to improve his game.

Hence the comparison between humor and hygiene. Without a dakini, he got no shower, but without a shower, he got no dakini. He shook his head. He would have smoked a cigarette, but he'd quit, which infuriated him. Most things did, these days. He had a lot of built up angst; it made his pants bulge.

Life embarrassed him a great deal; he was a yogi and an ascetic and had a reputation of being a great renunciate, when in fact he found himself to be terribly bourgeois and too coddled to ever effectively stand up for himself. The whole argument was pointless: the art of love always attracts attention...

whoa

Caffeine. the man pointlessly regurgitated thoughts, watching his mind roil. It made no sense; mind invented sense, not the other way around. He was exhausted from thinking.



He looked for a job.



He looked for a job the way a chicken with its head cut off looked for its head. he looked for a job pointlessly, directionlessly, without knowing what he was doing or why he was doing it, or even what he would do if he found what he was looking for. He didn't know what he was looking for. He was just looking around. Whe people asked him what he was doing, he struggled to sound purposeful.
"Oh, I'm just looking around," he would say vaguely. He was lazy, and stoned.

They all hated it, and thought he was lazy, which was a kick. He couldn't get over that one.

When we left off...

... the man woke up groggy, confused. instinctively, he tried to fall back asleep, horrified of the solidity that permeated the patrix. no use. he woke up. and looked around.

the patrix. The man's thinking mind perceived reality though a matrix of geometric symbols called language. He did not perceive reality as it is - rather, he perceived reality through the symbolic representation of names. He saw, but even as he saw, his mind read. In wakefulness, the world became as he thought it was. He perceived colors and shapes and motion and energy; these vibrations he perceived with his heart. Yet even as he perceived these phenomena, his mind named them, and categorized them as things. His heart perceived, yet his thinking mind named and labeled and judged and categorized and separated. The unified, vibrating whole of reality fractalized into separate named objects. out of formlessness congealed the conceptual matrix of space and time.

Ego. His mind clamped down on the possibilities of the infinite and reality closed in on him. Energy congealed into matter, and the room became solid, definite, inevitable. And as the room congealed from possibility to probability to inevitability, so did his mind congeal from infinite to finite to concrete. formless perception evolved into perception of form, and he became his name. undifferentiated awareness evolved into the room, and him in it.

oh, well. This was the nature of waking up. Or rather, this was the nature of the patrix. It was ok, really. The patrix was on its way out.