Great clouds of water have been discovered passing in outer space.
These are the debris of light; these are the raw substance of planets and
suns and local lakes. These are a shield beyond which we cannot see our
own ends, but a magic that is pure energy, pure gravitation, raining down
upon us.
The images are in the temple are in order; the trees are in the field;
the field is planted beneath, and beneath the field the seasons are planted;
the sky is sown; this is the city of Hermes, of the sun.
What are the stars?
Are they the forgotten kingdoms of earth? Are they living beings, the
anima, to which we in the microcosm correspond? Are they the limitations,
end-points of the universe? Or the marks that anywhere, any point given
as center, Adocentyn, is limitless, its possibilities infinite? Does size
(macro-micro) matter? Or is the universe the same everywhere, from a star
to droplet, winding thru local skies deep into the density of consciousness?
Is a bee hive also the city of the sun?
The stars are a veil, an arras that hangs down over another universe;
it appears to be a curtain woven with flowers, a tapestry of horsemen and
castle; it appears to be a gown, a robe sewn with the zodiac, but as we
approach it, it is too hot to touch; it dissolves into planets and suns;
we thought we were within an arm's length of touching it, but now it lies
beyond us a billion, and a billion more, light years away. We take a step
back, and the curtain hangs loosely, hiding an adjacent room. We are born
and find the stars at hopeless distances, but behind them is another universe,
closer to the earth, one that we can hold in our hands as a deck of cards,
and deal, one after another, without changing our place, star by star coming
up into the masked sky. Lift the veil, and beneath it is a woman's face,
a fire burning, a bright yellow field of grain; a king sits on his throne
motionless for twenty-five thousand years; this is a star; this is one portion
of the mapped sky. Lift the angel on the Star Card and the five senses are
lifted too, plucked like buds from their earthly counterparts; it is a single
picture, but the cards drawn from it are unlimited. The tarot clings like
flesh to the throbbing underbelly, the exposed sheath of nerves; rip up
the card and the blood flows from the wound; a spring dance of odd colors
forms, a mushroom grows. The card lies over an always-burning fire, and
the veil is made not of red pomegranates but electrons, and we cannot touch
them and cannot eat them. The card lies between neuron and image, between
astrum and star. Lift the card without touching it; look thru the image
into another image; the woman becomes a naked dancer, a winged sorceress;
the woman opens the door of a constellation and lets you into a room. You
climb the staircase to an attic, and out beyond it lies a field, a sky above
the sky. The lines along which the universe opens are infinite. Behind Botticelli's
canvas lies the surface of the planet Venus, a surface unknown to the scientists
and obscured by hot clouds; from deep beneath the mists (just today) a spaceship
suddenly stops sending, and enters totally the arcanum. Twenty-six million
miles and a boiling chamber of clouds lie between the astronomer and the
birth of Venus in foam; he cannot go there in his body; he sends a spaceship;
the sensual coordinates are confused; the distances are too great; the primavera
is missed and the spaceship smashes. The planet lies on the surface of astral
magic, is visible thru a pagan rite, the Two Flute Maidens dancing jewels
and corn. And beneath the Mariner craters is another surface of Mars, a
series of towns and lakes, boats on the canals, a series of optical illusions
named continents and oceans after famous astronomers, Kepler Land, Hooke
Sea. This is not the telescope, but the dissolution of a black sky in a
blue sky, a dark chemical solution in which a dark crystal grows, a mirror,
a deck of sunny day-cards. This is the deeper image of which Robert Kelly
once wrote, and still is engaged in ceaseless production of shape thru his
own instrument. These are local magical exercises tuning in a cosmic power
greater than locale.
The sun is in the grass: thousands of dandelions over a hill, Seurat's
orange dots of materia. The pagan curtain of color and growth covers the
hillside, the landing of the orange star. The power of the universe lies
behind this image; the power of the universe generates and sustains it.
From the ninth floor of the Physics-Astronomy Building the dandelions in
the field are dense as stars, galaxies clustering where land, moisture is
more fertile, spread out from the immediate source, bright orange of suns
burning wherever they are.
And by the forest the first phlox, soft purple containers of a slow
seeding; down the hill are trilliums, three white petals, monocot leaves.
We climb down to the stream itself, muddily flowing, almost a marsh; the
marigolds are bright yellow with the marsh salts, the powers that flood
downstream; a big bullfrog sits on the cistern, croaking, blowing himself
up; the first leaves of skunk cabbage line the far bank; in the distance
a clump of early may-apple leaves. We climb the hill and walk back up the
road, past redbud, past bluebells, a few sprouts of asparagus coming up
thru leaves beside last year's tall thready stems. The apple tree is blossoming
with thousands of stamens and the petals are falling to the wind. In the
distance another redbud, the flowers loose like haze on the shape of the
tree, and the whole misty appearance like the opening of a door into mythology.
It is the penetration [of all this] we seek.
We are now in an old garden, where the asparagus once grew and from
where the few seeds scattered to the road-side. The ochre is wild mustard;
the light greens are mixed, carrot-tops, the beginnings of Queen Anne's
Lace, and a few Dutchman's Britches. A tether-ball game lies silent, semi-wound;
five kittens are running in the flowerbeds, a decaying fence, and in the
distance, haze, like myth, redbud.
We drive back along the river where the poor people sit catching carp
and catflsh. The first stars are quickly covered by low-flying clouds, lightning,
the planet sealing. A scrape of static runs across the announcer as he gives
the Reds at bat in the top of the third, Gary Gentry pitching for the Mets.
It is dark, and a hard wind blows thousands of seeds across our windshield,
across our dinner table as we sit on the porch, seeds in the iced tea and
the potatoes, seeds of all the trees crossing in the storm. There is no
light, but the seeds are light, or they contain it; they contain a grove
of trees, an endless clone of planets. There is no light but for two candles
and lightning which reveals a chemically-unstable world. And then the soft
fall of seeds is burst by the heavier fall of rain. We are inside, the dishes
are washing, the cats come rushing in the window, wet, and lie on the red
rug licking their fur.
There are clouds of water and the crystal itself is wet, the darkness
where we cannot go but are already, body I call to, penetration, sleep,
dream, where the powers are concentrated like juice, oak seeds and maple
seeds, light of another sugary summer, planet on top of sun; we come together,
come, and fall apart, into legumes, and melt back into a previous sleep,
body, that is always previous, there always. We are here only as long as,
we are here in a circle, we are here and have certain powers, the rains
return/the stream returns, the seasons each year.
There is first a physical magic, and it streams with orgasm; the stars
are giant hydrogen furnaces showering the earth with information so dense
and ambiguous it takes total consciousness and fifty generations to sop
up one second; we cannot escape this hot breath, physical proximity of the
heavens, carnal nearness of one star. It is mutational, tidal, magnetic:
physical, and all our thoughts are anyway part of the chemical flux of the
body; the chemical downstream is unbroken from galaxy to brain, single carbon
atoms in interstellar stellar wastes, sparkling as water, milk, plasm, air,
eye, from brain back to galaxy.
But there is an astral magic which seeks, by the power of talismans
and imagos, earthbound and made of light, to penetrate light, change the
birth signs and the malefics. There is an astral magic which seeks to leave
the body and become light, at which speed the ends of the universe become
the walls we pass thru, a thin haze, myth, and then dream. In astral magic
the stars are the deeper images which the pilgrim must learn; their power
as stars, enough to light and bombard the universe, is trivial compared
to the angelic power of the astrals that lies behind them or thru them.
Is not this power physical too?
Physical magic starts at the flesh and moves in, and back, moves thru
the wet orgasm to the amniotic waters of our race, of all protein species
on earth. Physical magic begins with a physical first cause, as genes, or
a binary code for deeper structures (to n-deep) on the brain. In physical
magic man cannot survive the power of the stars and the planets closer to
the sun, and on those further from the sun he will freeze. Astral magic
lays upon these stars, and the flesh, a series of cards, decans, a stellar
and constellar sequence of images, and on these cards are pictures, highly
stylized, of what we could not otherwise know, are climates of rich dark
magic in which we could never physically live; and beneath the cards, placed
just so on the lap of the magician, lies not just his flesh, but the flesh/fabric
of the universe; beneath his gown of suns and moons are the powers of suns
and moons, are his molecules and electrons, are (because he wears it).
Astral magic ignores sociopolitical realities and seeks the millenium
at once, as the Ghost Dance bringing back the buffalo; the magician, by
his magic, cleanses the face of the sky and builds a temple; the ancient
stars are returned to power. But the temple lies in counter-reformation
Italy, denying all that is real, that exists, Spain's power as well (which,
if the stars are right, will be channelled into prior nodes).
In physical magic the words find their power in the resounding chambers
of the lungs, in the re-echoing of sound, and sound, thru the tonal cartilege
of the body. This is the chant of Orpheus, of Moses in the Egyptian temple.
In astral magic the words have another terrific power because their link
to the past is unbroken, and they go back and back like a chain of pure
links, and we pull on the whole chain strung in deep waters thru which we
cannot see, and the words we speak reach the words at the bottom, the pelagic
depths, the base of the neural pool in the Star Card, and there they go
further, back like Bridey Murphy remembering a previous life in a hypnotic
spell, back into a previous form of the same language, Old Irish. The words
become prelinguistic fragments and take on velocity; they leave the earth
because they define such a departure; they become large and summon the angels
and archangels of our beginning, and other debris, all that lies in the
chain. It is astral magic, for it cuts the worldweave in a circle, a Fluddian
cosmos with elements of symmetry and heliocentricity the eye cannot see
and the numbers of ordinary mathematics cannot find. There are relationships
hidden in relationships, and anagrams come flying out of the pod, flowers
that are contained within a dark earth, as seeds buried in a hot sky, and
never flower, except with the changing climate, bloom among old stars. When
Bruno speaks of the infinite universe, he means the infinite zoological
spiritual life of the universe, the endless centers of spirits and influences,
the Pawnee psuche kosmou.
There are conditions and operants, and beyond the sphere of the body
lies another sphere, air; man is a monkey, a clever animal with power over
the magicals; he has means; beyond air, air is fire, the sphere of the sun
passes within; outside it, planets; outside them, stars; beyond all such
physical spheres, the invisible reigns, the lesser angels followed by the
magical names and superior powers.
The homeopath drinks from the flower the accumulated deposit of six
billion years of starlight on protoplasm, is healed by the physical substance;
the magician receives his power immediately and directly and without six
billion years in between. The power is in the collection of talismans, not
the actual body of Christ, but ikons, seals, Renaissance paintings, Pleistocene
Christ on cave walls. The lovers stand in the forest and the planet Jupiter
is above their heads, magnified fifty times its visible size, with four
moons. The power of Venus whizzes thru the pagan spring, above our heads
the watery planet in the astrals, its power pulled thru by a chain of words,
talismans, abracadabra to the weak. There is a demonic compulsion to astral
magic; the magician tugs and tugs, by words and charms, at something he
knows is there, a second body of light. But beyond the angels lies, must
lie the source of physical matter itself, and the passage from there to
here can only be physical. It becomes a puppet show, and a mechanical demon
is worked by an incredible assortment of cogs, wheels, springs, and strings,
a stage prop demon; he fools the populace that knows nothing of the non-stellar
properties of numbers and believes all such workings to be the same violent
trade magic. The hermetic brings his mathesis into the world of mechanics
and idols, hence begins the current use of the word "magic." Here
the power of the talisman ceases, for the magician has sold the greater
possibility to a lesser flurry of spooky effects. He had traded the powerful
star dragons for harmless Halloween witches, and he will be seen years later
lost in an infinite universe of another's making and playing with rocket
ships rather than astral bodies. Bruno's infinite is reached in a flash
of invocation, of proper conjunction; the egg zero cracks and the numbers
dance thru each other. It is a hermetic (not a Copernican) truth that the
sun is in the center no matter where we stand, and once we know this, the
rest of the numbers fall into place (as they did for Copernicus), and the
earth moves because it could not possibly, in the midst of such magic, stand
still. We seek out the associations of the bullfrog with angels, not by
his direct bodily power (for in that case we would note how large he is
puffed, how he will frighten the female into submission by such distension,
torsion of organs); we are not talking about the immediate and wet frog;
we are speaking of stars, which are really fires billions of times his size;
the frog is a suppliant, a sign; thru being aware of his shape and its associations
with other shapes we are closer to the stars already. And the universe is
expanding, pouring out thru its debris at the edges, disappearing into another
universe where the stars become the astrals and demonology replaces astrology.
The universe is expanding, destroying its suburbs in fantastic explosions,
but the earth is part of the contracting universe, that runs from the distance
of the galaxies and falls, splashes in the stream, with utter tautness,
pumping heart motion, contracts from nameless clouds of fire and water,
croaks, gives sperm, midges clinging to rocks beneath waterfalls and sucking
the food that rushes by. Here the zodiac is retained; here are retained
the harmonies of the planets; here we live as angels among pans, inhabitants
of local fields and streams, vedas, rains, lightnings, winds, markers of
a chain which also, clonally, by germ plasm, is unbroken, and goes back
to the beginning, a physical magic whose etymology also lies in the stars.
The stars become the astrals; physical magic becomes astral magic, and the
angels appear simultaneously as products of our erotic bodies and mathesis
of emblems and ikons; the angels are our lovers on earth; the angels also
lie behind them, reclining numerically. Thru Botticelli is revealed a pagan
and undiscovered planet, a hidden moon of the Renaissance, mapped but unnamed,
beyond Iceland and closer to the sun, Isis retaining all her points in an
expanding universe, retaining her Hebrew and Egyptian ties even as she is
a Navaho corn goddess and sits in a church in New Mexico, even as she is
the virgin planet of the Pope and the mother of Aeneas. The chain is unbroken
though the universe expands and the galaxies are torn apart. The chain is
unbroken, the grape juice hardening in wine bottles, the dandelion wine
fermenting in the urn, storing the physic of this particular sun. The power
crosses the whole chain, connecting the origins and ends of the expanding
universe with the propinquity of the contracting universe and all its lesser
powers; there is no distinction between the food we eat and the power too
lethal to touch. The initial goal of all magic is true moisture, orgasm;
protein begins by replicating itself, an endless mirror of flesh, at the
end of which a man stands in the desert chanting. The star leads six billion
years to a star. As bloody beings we cannot escape powers we are made of;
the Shakesperian stage dummies have led to whole moving circuses, great
machineries running unattended in the factories; the power of lightning
is sucked in thru a talisman, a kite, into a key, the Rosetta Stone, to
Egyptian, the dating of Hermes as an A.D. magus; what is drawn in thru the
key becomes tame house current and runs the affairs of the church as well.
The whole machinery of our civilization is demonic. But even as we are magicians,
our magic is linked to a physical tide, the full orgiastic burst, rosewater
and rain in the atmosphere, our cloudy atmospheric bodies; we must run off
downstream and we must convert all our organs to one flood; and still we
are not allowed to forget that this flood is the world ocean we have never
left chemically, is filled with lizards, snails, starfish, the magician's,
or accompanist; and still our whole body is renewed, autonomically, without
the magician's conscious exercise, and this is what we are made of, this
is our power, why we make magic, and still we cannot escape this body. As
the girl said, sometimes it is so overpowering it is as though my body were
someone else and it were compelling me, so the motions of childbirth compel
us to breathe, breathe, and not to push, or the dream without bottom that
follows the world ocean and in which all magicians swim like salty fish;
this is Bruno's dream: animals, zoas indistinguishable from stars, angelics,
qabbalistic angels, made of light and falling thru light, the bullfrog blown
up to effect, the powers released into a stream; on a carpet of blood the
baby flows out, the magus in his lifesuit; body opens the gates.....