i’d like to leave some brief words for the record on this occasion: this project brings to a closure the study of the whole esoteric tradition (aka mysticism) and the human emotional workings (aka psychology) that i’ve been involved with since i was a child. in hindsight, i find it rather strange but back then i just started to read up everything i could get hold of about the world of magic and mystery and the insanely intricate workings of the human psyche – i’d say, ever since about the age of 12. leaving aside gaps during more engaging ‘live involvements’ with people (relationships in other words), this quest for knowledge and understanding has usurped my conscience throughout most of what i’ve been doing. ‘truth’ was simply too fascinating and life thus too serious to possibly miss the whole point.

as i confidently say in my pitch on the back, this book, in the process of unfoldment for more than ten years, finally contains the entire wealth of the western tradition right at your fingertips.

hope you cherish and enjoy  :)

london, autumn 2011

finally new work again. feels great. as i’ve been saying to my friends that ever since finishing the astrology book, i feel like starting my whole life anew. part of this is redefining my stance to art and illustration. somehow the ultimate test and opportunity came along through an inspiring ‘call for entry’ by STERZ, an austrian literature magazine …

we have my ‘old’ style handing over to my ‘new’ style here in this surreal double-spread clash of filmic imagery. colours are not longer needed, at least for the time being. the ink layer and tracing paper (which always reminded me of condoms for some mad reason) are now gone as well, freeing up more time and thus lessening my karmic burden, i guess. what’s left is a more thorough and sensual treatment of lines into the actual matter of paper.

as to the story, i originally had the idea of contrasting an unredeemably depraved babylon with a ‘golden city of jerusalem’ from scriptures. and then there was the association with a woman being like a city, in a way (again we have babylon there and also frank miller/ willl eisner’s ‘spirit’ which also references such gnostic metaphors). it all went from there. hope you like and feel inspired. there’s plenty to look at and to discover for those who are looking and able to see :)

london, autumn 2011

looking at it with a bit of the distance that comes with time (i started working on it back in 2004), the underlying content is, i suppose, fairly devastating to all those living in complete denial. as my poet friend paul said the other day, “all the ugliness and ignorance in this world can be brought down to child abuse, really. everything else are just the glittering sparkles on the surface of a lake.”

*   *   *

it’s £ 1 £/ $/ € (plus vat, strangely enough for ebooks!) depending on where you live. i’ve also used this opportunity to experiment a bit with pricing policies. generally i feel that books shall keep their value, preferrably increase them (they do, as abebooks and some of the specialised vintage market-stalls run by true ‘gnostics’ prove). the tendency to inflate them with ridiculous print runs and distribution and marketing frenzies obviously can’t do justice to the true value of knowledge and wisdom. with ebooks, the situation changes only insofar as there are no print and dsitribution costs but the value of information still stays the same. so to stay about 20 – 50 % below the hardcopy sales price makes a lot of sense to me.

on the other hand, some products are just special and perhaps can be easily priced rather metaphorically in such an electronic environment. that’s why i’ve chosen the 1 ‘unit’ option for now. let’s see …

london, 31st may 2011

here we go then, with a new, more behind-the-scenes description of those two ‘mountains’ :)

SYSTEMICS is a neat collection of non-fiction. in fact, it contains all the work i’ve done in this field and in all likelihood all that i will ever do. why this is so, is explained through the peculiar time-reversed structure of the book. although the subject-matters are culture, society, beliefs and psychology (and while stylisically it is laid-out along the lines of humorous, polemic pop-journalism) the sub-context of the book is outright philosophical, based on aristotelian notions of common sense and bridging, over the vast, black pool of conspiracy, spirituality, psychology and human predicament, into eastern ideas of the dao. i guess, the more someone has already looked into the ‘truth’ about ‘us’ (which is, this time and age, possible for the first time, i’d say) the more ‘fun’ they will have reading despite all the seriousness …

the same is also true with LOVE ETC, only that it requires prior knowledge that has more specifically to do with psychology and the whole mystery of the battle-of-the-sexes in order to unfold its innate, often hysterical, humour. this book is purely fiction (which, as you meanwhile know, is indeed the main focus of my work) and contains six short-stories with a theatre-play at the core. though each piece is ambitiously crafted in terms of technique (an entirely different tone-of-voice and thus style carrying forward each narrative), the book itself is primarily an exercise in a perhaps more kafkaesque tradition, that is – to convey certain unspeakable ‘truths’ about our human nature through purpusefully customised fictional tales …

london, 30th march 2011
© 2011, all rights reserved

—> from ocober 2010 also running at ELECTROCOMICS

here are a few sample strips of the new series. hope you enjoy =)

———————————–———————————–———————————–———————————–———————————–———————————–———————————–———————————–

reinhard schleining
© 2007 – 2010, all rights reserved

for any professional enquiries please contact the movie producer (and initiator of the project :), john richardson, on john.richardson@fsmail.net.

———————————————

Synopsis

This is the story of MARTIN, a disturbed and withdrawn thirteen-year-old boy, who in the midst of a severely malfunctioning environment is coming to use his prodigious skills at Nanotechnology to spread mayhem and disaster around him. As his increasingly destructive inventions grow in scale and power, government ploys of even vaster significance spring up almost simultaneously, putting his childish ventures in catastrophe into the broader context of anyway looming global deterioration of values and meaning. A world of lies and deceit falls entirely apart as the detrimental danger of Nanotechnology displays its true face to everyone.

Played out as a morally unbiased mixture between dark comedy and classical disaster movie we witness each character’s tragic trajectories towards failure. We’re being gripped by the increased urgency to bring to a halt complete world destruction – when in a surprising twist NANOBOY suddenly enlightens in a beatific paraphrase of Buddhahood. His final, most devilish concoct of a Nanovirus, meant to be rendering everyone into an identical copy of himself, turns out to be the literal and metaphorical ‘seed of salvation’. NANOBOY’s suffering and ultimately innocent journeying of Truth enables Mankind to be truly set free and ascend.

reinhard schleining
london, june 2009 – january 2010

————————————————-

following are the beginning of the script until the end of the opening credits. enjoy!

1 EXT. WOODLANDS ON A HILL – NIGHT / FULL MOON

MARTIN, a cute but withdrawn boy – NANOBOY – sits crouched at a damp tree trunk in the woods, shivering from cold and fear. The MOON is full and tinting the SCENE in a SILVERY LIGHT.

A horde of WOLVES surrounds MARTIN, growling and howling. ONE of them approaches him fiercely, snout snapping, saliva dripping.

MARTIN tightly embraces his legs and bends his head down on his knees as the WOLF closes in on him with grinding, bared teeth.

CUT TO:

2 INT. NANOBOY’S ROOM – NIGHT

MARTIN wakes up from a nightmare, bathed in sweat. His hair is a mess and he is shaking uncontrollably.

His room is a stereotypical cliché of any nerd’s surroundings. Collectibles and merchandise are scattered everywhere.

MARTIN is still shivering as he almost sleepwalks towards his Pokemoney-branded laptop. He opens the lid.

With the ease of an accomplished pianist NANOBOY concocts something on an application. We cannot quite follow what kind of programme he uses but we see three-dimensional objects reminiscent of Origamis. He spins them about and alters them, while a window to the right of the screen keeps updating a picture, too quick for us to make out what it shows.

As soon as he finishes the screen renders the final image: it is a WOLF, not unlike those we saw in the dream earlier.

MARTIN presses the ‘print’ button.

2A INT. A4 SHEET OF FURMULAS – CLOSE UP

A page of indiscernible formulas is spewn out into a print tray.

2 (CONT’D) INT. MARTIN’S ROOM – NIGHT

MARTIN closes the laptop and goes back to sleep. He is visibly relieved of a great burden.

CUT TO:

3 INT. NANOBOY’S SCHOOL – CLASSROOM – DAY

We are in a class of about 15 – 20 people. MARTIN, the NANOBOY, sits amongst them, withdrawn in his own world and not paying attention to what their teacher, MS FABIAN, rattles on about.

Some of the PUPILS listen, others fool around cunningly.

MS FABIAN
… so when Napoleon took his army on Russian soil, he didn’t really know what he was doing. He just followed a call, an inner voice telling him “conquer”. And do you know what happened? Jason? Any ideas? What about you, Alice? No? Martin, have you been listening? Any ideas what happened to Napoleon in Russia?

MARTIN hardly shows any reaction when MS FABIAN calls him up. As to the question he has no any idea and in actuality could not care less. He just stares at her, vainly, with a hint of the detest he feels towards his teacher.

MS FABIAN
Don’t just stare at me. Would you mind sharing some of your insights with the class?

LAUGHTER ripples through the class about the idea that their strange, withdrawn colleague had any capacity for insight.

MARTIN’s expression does not change though. He is not at all intimidated by the obvious attempt of his teacher to push some of his buttons.

MS FABIAN
No? Very well, then? Anyone else?

A GIRL further back raises her hand.

MS FABIAN
Yes, Ellie?

ELLIE
They got defeated by nature …

MS FABIAN
Yes! Thanks, Ellie, that is a very good answer. “They got defeated by nature.” That would seem to apply also for our colleague here …

… aiming at MARTIN.

Again the class bursts out in LAUGHTER. They obviously scapegoat MARTIN for their own creeping insecurities. But again, NANOBOY, at least outwardly, remains his calm, unmoved by the ritual pecking.

When MARTIN’s eye catches ELLIE, the girl who just gave the right answer, he sees that she has also joined the collective ridicule. Only then does he flinch and we get to understand that he obviously likes the girl.

CUT TO:

4 EXT. FRONT GARDEN OF NANOBOY’S HOME – DAY

MARTIN arrives at his home from school. There is POLICE and AMBULANCE at his next door neighbour. Lots of PEOPLE gather around, flustered, gesticulating. SOMEONE in uniform lies on the grass, bleeding.

MARTIN walks past without acknowledging any of this – as if he knows all of it anyway. He enters the front door of his parent’s house.

The CAMERA continues to capture footage of the SCENE in a hand-held, multi-angled style. We dive through WITNESSES reporting to note-taking POLICE OFFICERS.

We can hear traces of what they say:

WITNESS 1 (male)
… there was a growl … bitten … the postman …

WITNESS 2 (female)
… such a nice dog … always stroked it …

WITNESS 3 (male)
… blood everywhere … still can’t believe it …

WITNESS 4 (female)
… never be the same … something changed forever …

A jigsaw puzzle of SHOTS paints a shaky pastiche of the SCENE:

MOUTHS gaping open, eager to see more …

RESCUE TEAMS trying to squeeze through with their stretchers …

PEOPLE shouting at each other, panicky gesticulating …

CLOSE UP of a POSTMAN lying on the grass, bleeding heavily …

SIGNAL LIGHTS of police and ambulance …

NANOBOY’s NEIGHBOUR crying on her doorstep and her HUSBAND consoling her with his arm wrapped around her …

Several CU’s of PEOPLE staring both at the scene and into introspective infinity, like news footage from a major collective catastrophe …

The RESCUE TEAM picking up the presumably dead POSTMAN, shoving the stretcher through the crowds back to the van …

… until we finally dive through a series of legs in a LOW CAMERA ANGLE to reach the dead neighbour’s DOG in a CLOSE UP. It has been transformed into one of the WOLVES from NANOBOY’s dream. Its fangs are dripping with bubbly saliva while its head bleeds from several gunshots into the vibrant green of a freshly-mown suburban front-yard.

CUT TO:

OPENING TITLES COMPOSED ON:

5 INT. NANOBOY’S HOME – LIVING ROOM – DAY

MARTIN has crashed on the couch watching daytime television. He nibbles on some crisps and a peanut butter sandwich with dried tomatoes. Every now and again he sips from a can of fizzy energy drink branded ‘Guaragantuan’.

During the TITLES we get to see what he is watching:

It is a PROGRAMME featuring mud-wrestling AMPUTEES. There are several SHOTS of them as they grapple and slide off each other.

They are INTER-CUT with the show’s host KEVIN, a somewhat tacky, jeans-clad nice-guy who explains with subtle tongue-in-cheek humour who is doing what to whom. Who is leading and who is about to lose.

6 INT. WRESTLING COMPETITION ON TV – DAY

The TV programme is CUT TO judges holding up numbers. The judges represent a variety of the populace – from serious guys in suits to teenage cheerleaders to Kurdish kebab shop owners to black female religious fanatics to Chinese Mafia.

CUT TO a prettyish woman, although perhaps not the brightest, sitting in a Disneyesque, pseudo-gothic golden throne near the wrestlers. The throne is covered with a plethora of company logos. She is identified via subcaptions as ‘Miss Nebraska’ and a date with her is the main trophy for the winner of the game.

CUT TO applauding STUDIO AUDIENCE. Like the jury the audience is made up of people from a huge variety of angles – even intellectuals, seen to be watching the event with a mixture of awe and reverence.

Every now and again: CUT TO SCENE 5 – NANOBOY eating and drinking but not necessarily following what is happening on the screen.

CUT TO the show host KEVIN again, excitedly announcing the winner of a round, before we see more SHOTS of the mud fight.

CLOSE UPS of JURY, AUDIENCE, FIGHTERS, TROPHY – as well as every so often SHOTS of a fizzy ENERGY DRINK, the same one MARTIN is drinking.

As soon as the TITLES are finished, the PHONE in the living room starts to ring.

….

¶

¶¶¶¶

© 2009, all rights reserved
¶

¶

LIKE A SALT-CRYSTAL, or a colony of ants, every framework has its structure. The structure of our human journey has been the societal network of Rank and Status. We spend our lives mainly chasing illusory promises and dreams within this structure, ultimately moulding ourselves into the Persona / Profile / Stereotype which our parental, cultural and sociological programmes compel us to become. These mechanisms are what game theory utilises. A loophole of human consciousness. We’re predictable. We’re not free at all. The Paradigm of Outside-answers, Outside-blame, runs through most of our Human Endeavours. We can ‘do whatever we want’ (capitalist piss-take freedom) as long as we’re not looking Inside, discover ‘something’ (Truth) Inside of ourselves, lest the ultimate punishment of social segregation is awaiting.

That there is an actual human dilemma becomes clear only when we experience the sadness that all we see and all we want from each other are only the social advantages that come from affiliation with Rank and Status. Nobody can truly see each other (and even if we can, we’re not really supposed to). We might as well exist only virtually, through Google, Facebook, Twitter and e-mailed CV’s. We might as well entirely wrap ourselves in stickers of systemic ‘achievements’, rub shoulders (and what not) with anything rich and apparently sexy (Rolex, Nikeswoosh, Bankers, Celebrities). But at no time explore the actual Reality that lies within the Mysteries of our own Selves and other Human Beings. Except sometimes scratching the surface with our favourite pastime game Relationships (i.e. emotional scripts ‘saving us’ from the lurking prospects of loneliness and boredom).

So why can we not truly be free? Is it fear? That our vital systemic environment might deteriorate into anarchy and chaos? That we might in the end face the fact that we’re not as free as we’d like to believe – never will be? That we don’t actually know how to interact with each other except through those game-playing routines we consider ‘normal’ exchanges of thoughts and emotions? Or are we just being kept as sheep and actually ‘innocent’ victims of much higher agendas? Are we perhaps just born into a prison and the perfected illusion of freedom is what we now call the ‘civilised world’?

Psychologically speaking, we can see other Selves only inasmuch as we can see our own Selves properly. Only understanding our inner workings and our true place within the Universal Whole enable us to approach and interact with others authentically and confidently. We’re ultimately chained through our System of Beliefs on the one hand and our Experience of Intimacy on the other and only the Autonomy thereof form the basis of what we like to contemplate as our human capacity of Free Will.

Replacing the current Paradigm of self-prohibition and emotional disenfranchise, a more organic structure, based on individual Core Truths and Insights, might as well bring about a more beautiful human framework in the future. In there, we’ll be able to embrace every other genuine Self from the bottom of our hearts, with all their differences, mysteries, frailties and treasures – and there will surely be a societal place we afford to each other, though rather qualifiedly than quantifiably.

Whilst at no point will we be looking back to the fake-comfort of our conditioned responses to ranks, roles and power games as they’re played-out – and hyped – today.

¶

=========================================================

communication. introspection. mobility. kindness. 
integrity. interaction. modesty. virtue. 
openmindedness. beauty. interest. insight.
reenfranchising. reconcilement. renegotiation. reconstitution. 
anger-management. time-management. 
transparency. truth. reempowerment.
agenda-loss. belief-reflection. reinvestigation. 
healing. perseverance. forgiveness. solitude. merging.
headspace-reclamation. 

¶

London, May 2009
© 2009, all rights reserved

as a further illustration reference (but also because i think this is one of the maddest images i’ve done to this day) – i’ve decided to put the actual artwork online whose purpose was to combine all seven different angles of the book into one key visual …

for more info go to the book’s official site —> LOVE ETC

¶

¶

I

THE LAUNCH

¶

The man and the woman in silver space-suits kiss goodbye to their families in front of live-television cameras. Adam attends to his wife and his lovely two daughters while Lilith consoles her husband with whom she hasn’t got any children. They’re brother and sister, space-bound cosmo-biologists, and it’s been put on their shoulders, on behalf of mankind, to head for this truly bold mission. Tears are being shed in close-up around the steel-clad visitor’s cubicle although everyone’s had plenty of time during the past couple of months to prepare for this precocious moment in time. For Adam and Lilith, due to their arduous psychological training, the whole process has now become only a mere formality. Sternly they glance towards what to cameras would seem like the horizon, with professionally limpid faces, at the right moment, at the right angle. Lilith kisses her husband’s cheeks tenderly. Then an embrace. Adam has slung his arm around one daughter’s waist whilst on his knee keeps sobbing the other. Occasionally he peeks up between them, with a futile sense of compassion, to pay tribute to his photogenically grieving wife crouching in front of him.
Then the customary signal sallies forth. The time has come for take-off. Leaving perhaps everything forever behind, Adam and Lilith slide across a network of vacuous steel corridors, every now and again trespassing fibre-glass slots where more cameras and crew have lined-up to watch. The longer they journey, the smoother their movements progress. Until they stand face-to-face with the very last bridge – arching across nervously fuming jet-propulsion engines and the vain, tremblingly lurking launch-pad abyss. Up in the sky, fluffy clouds hover across a pristinely ultra-violet sky, maybe they’re a bit too swift, too cheerful or daunting …

Adam and Lilith inhale a last mouthful of ozone-rich air before crawling into the dimly-lit core of their vessel. The push of a button closes the gate. They chain themselves to their seats, seal tight their helmets – and for a good while their gloved hands gracefully dance among numerous fluorescent sensors neatly laid-out around them. They’ve done all of this several thousand times. The countdown is now only an alpha-wave peaking during their mental ability to relax and stay sharp at the very same time.
The take-off is smooth. By the time they’re being sprawled into their seats from the rocketing gravitational force, they already know – it’s a guts feeling – that everything went well during the most crucial part of the sequence. They’re on their way now. They’re rising.
And the sudden hormonal surges of bliss draw a sly grin on their wantonly contorting faces, as for the first time today they’ve got a proper chance to look at each other.

¶
¶

II

OUTER SPACE

¶

“Hahaha” – Lilith stepped on one of the sensors around the main lab-entrance of Outer Space Eden Project and found the extremely responsive auto-attunements of the climate generators really amusing. Adam could see her point but was also aware that by now, as they were beginning to get into their day-to-day routines on the station, new gates inside their heads had cracked open, inviting what could only be described as Euphoria. They felt both extraordinarily cheerful and started to better get to know each other. Much better than they had ever had a chance during their years of growing-up together. Somehow up here, with mighty Saturn and Jupiter imposing themselves through the giant glass-dome of the lab, their relationship seemed to transpire a magic they had both never felt before. Every now and again, for brief and still moments, they looked at each other and smiled.
Continuous low-frequency buzz from omnipresent machinery permeated the station twenty-four hours. Yet there was also a strange, ghastly silence around – much more than they would’ve expected during their countless simulation sessions. They had been given the option to air some of their music but for now they had decided to not to. In the lab itself, the whirring of climate generators joined the general base-line of unobtrusively humming background noises. At the other end of the hall, from the animal section, faint sounds of erratic squeaking and squirming could also be heard. Each cage, monkeys, rats, even termites and squid, as well as the area itself, had actually been sealed with sound-proof isolation equipment. But particularly the rhesuses turned out to be keenly excited space-cadets and expressed this with all-sorts-of weird shrieks and rumbles which somehow managed to penetrate through.

Lilith, still fooling around, shovelled more leaves on the sensors to cheat them.
“So you think it’s time to start improvising a bit, huh?”, Adam asked her casually, watching her incredibly sweet movements. She was prancing around the scene-of-crime on her long, silver-clad legs.
“Yeah, I think it’s time. I think the plants will love it if we give them a bit more tropical flavour tonight. Doesn’t matter scientifially, it’s just again random change patterns and anyway, all recorded in the log-file. One way or the other, we’ll always churn out more data, haha “, Lilith said, glancing at him over her shoulder.
“Sure. Fine with me Lilith, haha.” He leaned on the damp trunk of a rubber-tree and jotted some infos into the pod they did pretty much everything with. It was so strange. He had never felt more light-hearted and safe before. Yes, they loved their job and yes, they were both considering themselves to be really good at it. But there was more to it. The roots of the pounding excitement laid actually deeper, he found. Somehow being here, working as a scientific team up in space, rendered everything else in the world uncannily unreal. They were nothing. And yet they were everything also. Every single moment up here was unquestioningly lovely and sweet.

¶
¶

III

NIGHT TIME

¶

For the nights, they were supposed to share a sleeping cabin, supposedly for them to not feel too alone during the supposedly loneliest times of their journey. Or perhaps it was meant as a peculiar security precaution. Either way, it suited them. They did feel less alone and experiencing the other person awaking and falling asleep on the other side was indeed very comforting. Although it was not a particularly large cabin, it was all-the-more cosy and neat. Minimalist and yet broadmindedly engineered. Every other day Lilith would cut some fresh flowers from the lab, different ones each time, to put them into the stainless-steel vases firmly stuck on their bedside tables. Their beds were about five metres away from each other, invisibly mounted to each opposite wall of the room. Down to their feet were a couple of wheeled wall-panels for them to get changed and-so-on in relative privacy should they decide to not do all of this in the bathroom already.
Adam was already lying in bed when Lilith stepped out from behind one of the panels. His head was turned against the wall so that she could only see his hair sprouting from underneath the crumpled tinfoil-style bed-cover. Her brother. What a beautiful guy. They had also used to share the same bedroom when they were little but now she could hardly remember. By the time she was five, everyone had already had their own, and one could safely say that they’d lost touch with each other ever since. Funny Life.
She slid underneath the crackling blanket, easing herself into her favourite position – on the side, with her knees bent and her hands comfortingly clenched between her warm thighs – to surrender herself to the vacuous world of a good night’s sleep.

¶

¶

IV

MONKEYS

¶

Adam was observing the mating process of two rhesuses while Lilith was logging new data by the Ylang-Ylangs. All their research tasks were pretty straightforward procedures as their pods recorded footage, comments and environmental parameters to convert them into academically accurate digits stored on the server.
After a while, Lilith joined Adam. Two of the monkeys were in the gist of copulating in the most discomforting frenzy. Adam looked at her vainly. Somehow, the instinctual responses the monkeys displayed in their mating were not as they usually were on Earth. They seemed to be magnified, imbued with an eerily elevated intensity. Both Adam and Lilith stared at the monkeys with uneasy bafflement. The lewd sensation of shame kept crawling up between them, so strong that their knees bent, trembling.
For Adam, the fascinating phenomenon of space-altered copulatory behaviour had meanwhile established itself to be the core-topic of his zoological observations. Although normally he had the professional verve to stare at two mammals’ humping with the same detachedness as watching two particles colliding – with Lilith next to him, a completely different scene – or ‘reality’ even – presented itself in front of him. Everything he had thus far perceived was miraculously wiped-off a slate. He had to try hard, in fact, to keep reality altogether from fading.
“Interesting stuff you’re working on there”, Lilith finally said, long after the monkeys had finished their thing, intoning it with a well-nurtured but nonetheless heartfelt and sweet laughter. She looked far away, to her flowers, in order to eloquently avoid eye-contact with her brother.
“Haha, thanks, I know. Something very strange is happening here. Can’t tell you any more yet. It’s not just the outer space, it’s probably also got to do with the whole environment, the garden, the ship, me and you, everything …”
“Hm, would make sense, I guess.” She paused. “Listen, I’m going to grab some food – wanna join?”
“You go ahead. I still need to finish this. Perhaps you’re still there …”

Not necessarily wanting to look into her eyes for probably the rest of the week, he took his time in note-taking. And only after he felt pretty sure that she wouldn’t be there anymore did he eventually go for a brake himself.

¶
¶

V

DINNER

¶

At dinner, they turned on the news-feed. Footage of piling-up tensions between Jewish and Muslim factions on Earth imposingly flickered across the kitchen-wall. As they always did, they turned-off the sound to better cherish their shared pleasure of eating. Today, Adam went for something vegetarian which he level-headedly selected from what increasingly seemed their ‘god-sent’ titanium food-dispenser. Lilith treated herself to a lean, juicy steak. They had been given only a few of them and they were therefore quite precious. Fried in her own, funky style there was still blood spurting out, basically soaking the baby-potatoes whenever she stuck her fork in. She was in a very cheerful mood.
As Lilith, chewing, kept taking-in images of awfully concerned officials and panicky gesticulating crowds, she suddenly spat-out the mad cough of uncontrollable laughter. Adam did not look anywhere except on the bean-sprouts in front of him, but despite every effort he finally couldn’t help himself but to join. Her outburst was clearly addictive and the full gist of it soon swept them away. It was a hysterical, unarticulated symphony – punctuated by gruelling, incubating patches of silence – which they spastically conducted between them and which they shamelessly elaborated into countless musical variations. It finally presented the much-needed cathartic relief that they had both longed for all day – freeing them from all unspoken-of, pent-up tensions and awkwardness. It was essentially Nature at work and its power of utter unburdening clearly beyond words.

¶

¶

VI

DREAMS

¶

That night, in their shared cabin, they both had at various times fiercely intense dreams about each other. They were clearly what was commonly referred to as of erotic nature.
When Lilith woke up, she found herself silently touching herself, her skin, her breasts, her belly, her thighs. In the darkness, the person who slept over on the other side did not necessarily seem to be her brother. It could’ve been anybody in fact. A warm, male, beautiful body asleep. Her insurgent feelings out-spaced the confines of this cell, of the spaceship, of the entire universe perhaps – to the point that it frightened her at the same time as it made her passionately shiver.

On the other side, Adam woke up just as Lilith fell again soundly asleep. With his eyes wide open, staring into the looming infinity of darkness above, he remembered the staggering beauty of his bare-naked sister as she was walking towards him, with her usual confident smile, in his dream, on a beach, waves ticklingly licking-away on their soft, sand-powdered feet. She began to touch him. Warm, eager tenderness …
He sat up and looked over on the other side. Another person was sleeping there, the colleague he worked with on the ship. As much as he tried, while leaving the room, he couldn’t help himself but to furtively glimpse at the immaculate chisel of cheekbones, carved-out through traces of distant sunlight, peacefully resting on a white, box-shaped pillow. This person looked like his sister.
He was brimming inside as he fluctuated between various corridors on the station. Somehow, he felt compelled to go into the garden, sit down somewhere, maybe on a stone, and think.

¶
¶

VII

THE SNAKE

¶

The climate was synced to their chosen daily routine, so it was kind-of-dark in the lab when he approached it. Something quite strange was going on, he had an almost crystal-clear sense about it. Also the animals in the back behaved pretty agitated. There was enough light coming through the dome from the far-away sun to roughly discern most of the contours. The Asteroid Belt scattered its fractured pieces in a sharp angle to the ship’s horizon.
Adam awkwardly stepped into the forest following the main path they had strewn out of pebbles right from the beginning. For a brief, frightening moment, the animals had turned completely silent. It was then that he heard the rustling noise in front of him.
A snake.
It sullenly slithered across his way, from right to the left, only to disappear in the bushes again, leaving behind the devastating afterglow of ominous emptiness. But this quickly dissolved, as though his pupils were hooked onto something, into the vivid imagery of surface refraction, sparkling through leaves and bushes, as the snake-skin skittered further away from him.
There was no snake on the ship.
A hand touched his shoulder and the renewed hit of Adrenaline made him cough bullets of air. He cringed.
It was Lilith and she looked like a mask.
She had also seen it.
Refocusing his mind to properly face his sister, he could pick-up a smile trembling around her mouth. This right on the spot brought him back to himself. Back to Reality. The animals had meanwhile also gone silent.

Lilith stepped forth to give him a hug. Then stepped back and looked at him straight from her heart. Let’s just forget about it, Adam. It didn’t matter. They began walking towards the animals where turmoil had yet picked-up again.
There they stood then, Lilith facing her brother and smiling. She put a hand on his shoulder and looked at him. Yes, there seemed to be a snake on board and no, it didn’t matter. Just ignore it. Have no fear. No afterthought. No agenda. Stay true to yourself and your mission – their mission. And yes, I’m Lilith, your sister, but I’m also a woman and I love you. Ooops, here it is. But it’s true. No big deal. These things can happen. Take earthly matters lightly, my dear, adorable brother.
He wavered there, frailly. But gathered. And at the same time as his mind chose irrevocable obliviousness regarding to what he might had seen just a few moments ago, the animals miraculously calmed-down as well. As if connected. Funny, he thought, and drowsily let himself drop into his warm sister’s embrace like a relaxed but tired little boy after a long, long day out.

¶

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VIII

BREAKFAST

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He decided to prepare something really nice for their breakfast, definitely something special. The ventilators had to work extra in order to dispel the smells his frying eggs, sausages, tomatoes and mushrooms were causing.
“Oh wow, that’s so amazing”, said Lilith from behind, sitting at the table with a plate in front of her. She clasped her hands in awe while she serenely watched him fiddling and stirring. She had draped a few cute braids into her hair and also with her more poignant gestures and fairy demeanour completely looked like a girl.
“I love the smell of the tomatoes”, he casually threw back. A bit too serious, he thought, while the words had already come out. He also wouldn’t mind going into some sort-of child mode. By losing the need to ostensibly agree on their anyway obvious excitement, he could relax instead and just carry-on cooking. There was no need of being self-conscious and therefore no place for any form of embarrassment.

Whilst they were eating and rejoicingly stroking each other’s souls with bountiful exchanges of tenderness, the muted backdrop of news-feeds indicated the situation on Earth to have worsened. The footage of warheads this time captured them flying high-up in the sky, sometimes crashing into what looked like densely populated criss-crossings of infrastructure. It then cut to mutilated bodies, crying, bloodstained children and women – some with, some without veil – covering their from shame and pain forever displaced faces.

Both Adam and Lilith had increasingly lost touch with much of what was happening back home. The world they had up here was too entirely different from the world they and everyone else had had down on Earth. Sure, they’ve initially been doing their job for people back there and their loved ones might at some point very well be in danger. It was just that after many, many weeks, both their comfortably absorbing research tasks as well as the sheer incredible atmosphere between them, had eventually uplifted them into a maybe-a-bit-scary but nonetheless noble Elatedness. One could say, and Lilith would’ve been the first one to do so, that this experience was ultimately Spritual. It was, in many, many ways, the profound sensation of Awakening.
Therefore did it occur only after Adam had long left for his monkeys, and only after she’d finally managed to disintegrate the merciless screen with her all-in-one pod, that Lilith suddenly felt the subterranean urge for a cheese-cake – which the nearby titanium dispenser at the push of a button cheerfully provided.

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IX

A KISS

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They bumped into each other again at the bamboo-site. The fragrances of humidity, roots and orchids hung like an intoxicating, seductive cloud around them. Lilith kneeled next to one of the ponds, one hand logging infos into her pod, the other investigating a fragile fern-weed sticking its tiny feathers out of the water. Her fingers combed through the plant ever-so-softly.
“That’s so amazing, Adam”, she almost whispered, bending her head up to him. He felt pulled to kneel-down next to her.
“You remember, we took those spores from GH 355? That’s the plant”, she said. “Isn’t it amazing? It’s alive again. A species from another world …” Lilith was shaking from the thrills of impellent reality.
“That is so absolutely beautiful. So intricate and yet confident. And with colours refracting an invisible rainbow”, Adam said. He had also to touch it. They both crouched, their hands caressing the plant. Waves of shiver showered pulsatingly through them, forever binding them into this sacred experience together.
“I think I’ll call it Feathery Star. What do you think?”
“Sounds deserving”, Adam hoarsely whispered.
As they both kept touching the Feathery Star, they noticed that at least some of these madwaves of bliss seemed to be emanating from the plant, actually. It was like touching an immeasurably frail miracle, contrived of countless invisible veins. As if their hands were being bathed in an electrocuting foam, brandishing ripples of delight in their fizzying, unabashedly welcoming nervous systems. Every now and again, they looked up at each other with the helpless expression of excruciating ecstasy. They shared this. They laughed. They laughed out loud and incessantly and their bodies bumped loosely together. And then Lilith moved in on him, kissed him, just a bit at first, but then with more determination. Both her hands were firmly clutching on to his neck.
Adam gave in without any resistance, letting his body eagerly slide into a passionate embrace at the same pace as their lips were boldly entwining. In fact, he could see now, whatever had happened so far on their journey, for him carried the perfectly clear tenure of fate and inevitability. As the arm, which still carried the itching aftermath of the Feathery Star, drew the woman in his arms closer towards him – her heat innocently bursting into his body – he had nothing to fear and nowhere to go. He was already where he was supposed to be.
The actual kiss must’ve been only a moment (two or three seconds?) – and as sudden as the embrace came about they had already split again. They knelt beside each other, their heads bent, both quietly smiling. And then they were touching the plant again. Play some more. Reality at work.
Later, Adam stood up and – whistling – strolled back to his monkeys.
Lilith stayed a bit more, carried entirely away in a world of no worries and pain. A world of complete perfection.

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X

TOUCHING DOWN

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Adam was almost asleep, but not quite, when Lilith came to enter their chamber. His head was still spinning while she crawled under her rustling bed-sheets, moving quietly like a mouse. A lurid sexual tension with the stench of lurking embarrassment stretched-out between them, all-encumbering, immutable. Lilith tried to turn away from it, face the wall, only to find herself excessively biting her knuckles. She decided to let it happen as it helped her to keep a lid on new waves of inarticulate and totally inappropriate laughter. Although some giggles burst eventually through, she managed to more-or-less constrain them into what could’ve been distant whispers of machinery, fairies or ants, perhaps.
Adam, despite having heard her, pretended to be asleep. He did this, although he knew that she knew that he was not and that she even knew that he knew all of this also. He maintained this stance throughout what seemed like ages, for among all the options it just seemed to him the most reasonable, really. He also honestly didn’t mind too much feeling a bit awkward. And it worked, as he eventually faded into his sleep, departing into the unfathomable mysteries of Darkness.

Only to be awakened by Lilith’s warm body as she was unobtrusively harking onto him. It was then that he understood that the time has finally come to become real to the fullest extent. Was this Manhood?
“Hey”, she smiled, touching his cheek, her fingers garlanding through his hair gently. He smiled back. Only awe could describe what they saw in each other’s eyes. So they better closed them. Drawn-in by the same force, they allowed themselves to glide towards where they would have anyway naturally fallen. Everything else was gone now, only this moment in time existed. The sudden cessation of sadness and solitude. The compulsive merging of two into one.
Adam and Lilith disappeared into the nurturing hole that the other benevolently provided and their heated bodies were anointed with tears as the most resourceful expression of their love that night.

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london, march 2009
© 2009, all rights reserved

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I – CONDITIONS

WE’RE BORN naked. We die naked. As not only religion but also logic suggest, no matter how much funds we raise throughout our worldly journey, in the face of Ultimate Reality, even the most beautiful diamonds and castles merely amount to worthless chunks of mud. There is of course the argument of safeguarding relatives and loved ones, putting our kids on golden thrones and what not – but, honestly, can we really ease their various, vastly unpredictable hardships – emotional havoc, political corruption, abusive encounters, ageing, deterioration, madness – with monetary ailments? Besides, are we doing such an apparently altruistic act really unconditionally, with only their best interests in mind, or do we actually expect a return-of-investment, where we need them to do certain things in exchange, behave in certain ways, before our hard-earned juices will change bank accounts at the end of the day? As most of us haven’t been loved by our parents unconditionally, there is usually a wicked agenda behind the way how we interact with each other. Most exchanges are burdened with crooked meanings underneath and beyond the actual surface transactions. Like the sticky fingerprints we leave as soon as we touch it, Money involved in human transaction inherently corrupts any relationship through its conscious and unconscious strings attached – its Conditions.

Looking at this dilemma from the diametrical opposite side we can say that for the most important things in life, the things that make us innately human – virtue, integrity, loyalty, love, warmth, grace, comfort, in short everything coming straight from the heart – cannot possibly be paid for with any amount of money. How could they? They wouldn’t be what they are – unconditional, uncorrupted, honest and pure Energy, radiating from deep within us. Primal, unspoilt, adamantine Truth.

The monetary system currently in place, bolstered via banks and their ever tightening grip through outright quack game theory (pioneer John Nash later refuted its applicability to human beings) has led to an ever widening gap between us, castrating our exchange of something genuine and honest. We are increasingly entangled in a world of lies and abuse, which at its very end leads to a complete breakdown of any real intimate bonding. We are essentially artificially rendered into monkeys in a giant chess game in which the only way to solve our ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ is to always lie, no matter what. Under the pretext of a shamelessly capitalist biased Darwinism we have been coldly theorised into mere rats, stumbling around in a maze with trap-doors continuously threatening to sack us, compelled to fight for the limited resources of cheese with our equally trapped game-playing peers. If we manage to achieve the game master’s ever increasing targets we might be rewarded with the ‘bonus’ of proceeding to the next level, an even tighter but tauntingly more ‘rewarding’ maze. So much as to ‘survival of the fittest’.

Basically living our lives in the present framework means that any virtue we have, any internal values dear to us, we better keep hidden from everyone else. Not only would we dangerously embarrass ourselves with vulnerability and openness. In the instigated rat race, the more of those values we might display, the more jealousy and patronising we attract from our co-players. Competition is tough, artificial competition even tougher, and we better silently swallow the generically prescribed Prozacs to successfully keep the spirit of internal alienation alive. In a way, through the absence of any higher beliefs ‘career’ and ‘money’ have gained a ludicrously spiritual dimension. We’re conditioned to be thoroughly empty inside and instead stick fake external values on our ageing hulls like glittering medals distracting from the suffering zombie underneath.

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II – REALITY

WAKING UP TO this grim and fearsome reality we frankly ask ourselves:

Why should we really care about targets or bonuses or other bizarrely dehumanising agendas? Why should we care about yet another reality-tv show or other mind-numbing crap we’re supposed to watch on our brand-new, giant plasma screens? Why should we care about any supposedly bigger picture of the world the media blasts into our incessantly washed-out brains? Ultimately, why should we care about this or that or any other political rhetoric, conjured up to ensure ‘social stability’ and ‘economic growth’, for that matter?

Since the only Reality relevant to us is how we feel about ourselves and – as a result – how we interact with people around us. Who are we affiliating with and how genuine are those bonds? Are we not because of (programmed!) insecurities trying to escape any real, intimate contacts with other people? Are we compensating our lack of self-esteem and inner values with an inexhaustible hunger for status and money in order to be ‘loved’? Are we caught up in a seemingly inescapable cycle of conditional interactions and therefore unable to ever relax with people, open up and trust? 

Is there a way out? If there is then it is definitely not an easy one as money has become the binding agent, firmly cementing the prison walls between us. Perhaps re-evaluating our internal, intrinsically human assets is a start. But this requires purifying ourself in the midst of daily survival and this can’t be done without our full attention and commitment. Myriads of old, deeply ingrained patterns need to be changed. Only then can we regain control over matters of time, headspace, virtue, health or integrity. In other words – if there really is any (Darwinian?) struggle in life then it is the one inside of our Selves.

But then again, the abandoning of illusory external values means also that we’re set up against everyone else still fiercely subscribing to them. Nobody really wants us to succeed with breaking free as it would make the trap everyone’s stuck in all the more more painfully obvious. 

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III – FREEDOM

HOW COULD WE then survive the revolutionary act of breaking free from it all? Also how is it going to work out, in the end, for those who eventually make it? How about those who stay put? What new, all-improved framework can ensure bread and preferably butter, as well as a roof atop our although now clearer, unfortunately also more vulnerable heads? Will those in power, the game masters / bullies, ever step down to just let us get on with our lives? Well, if the ‘victims’ stop being victims they’ll bloody well have to. Those patronising others into their values and beliefs are ‘happy’ only on the surface they’ve compulsively created for themselves. Because of the nature of of their internal emotional reality – distrust, anxieties and the lack of ever being genuinely loved by anyone without ifs and buts, unconditionally – they have to exlusively resort to forced entries into other people’s minds and bodies . These ‘body counters’ therefore have got an equally hard time to ever escape their very own prisons – even though they might look like glittering palaces from the outside. Every bully has to doggedly monitor their tight grip on others, day-in and dayout, and it’ll be exactly when they are worn out by too much of those entanglements / ‘reponsibilities’, when their victims will suddenly turn the tables and let go. Complete abandonment and the realisation that everything they seem to possess has been built on a lie is definitely not an easy task to take on board. Whereas those who manage to simply walk away will instead regain nothing less than their priceless virtue and integrity. Unconditional freedom – a higher, although perhaps initially harsher, since unknown reality – is awaiting.

True, some of us might not survive the free fall into such existential freedom. But more likely than not we will, having gone through the life-long coercion of rat-race prison, as our hitherto trapped confidence and authenticity will attract other like-minded people who’ve only been waiting, like ourselves, for the time to come when they can be real again – meet and mingle with all their unearthed purity, innocence and vitality.

As to how exactly this will work, there is no definite answer. It won’t be an easy journey, that’s for sure. True freedom, per definition, means that everyone has to find an answer for themselves, really. All we have to do is reach the Other Shore, the shore of becoming Human again, where we can be giving and receiving unconditionally. It’ll be an utopian, paradisiacal island where we as truth-seeking, blossoming children are free to experience our individual slices of reality. Maybe we will die on the way there, drowned in the vast sea of the Unknown. But also maybe Life and Death are ultimately even more serious than we have thus far come to believe and reaching the Promised Land inside of ourselves is our only chance and goal.

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© 2008, all rights reserved

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SO WE’VE HAD the first hit, from around new year’s eve up until a couple of weeks back. Several aspects of what it means, Pluto in Capricorn, have already shown their first, subtle glimpse. Since Pluto is now back in Sagittarius again, until later on in November, we have a chance to reconsider our stance towards those passing Jupiter related issues (Jupiter as the ruler of Sagittarius), which we’ve had to integrate into our  collective framework since 1992. The overindulging, celebrity-worshipping credit-card-spenders compulsively feeding on cultural and culinary junk food, as well as the Viagra-popping whore-humpers earning big bucks under the magic wings of multinational corporations will both have to cut down quite a bit on their life-styles. The learning outcome, according to modern Astrology, will be for us to be stripped bare of any illusions and hopes [JUPITER] which do not adhere to the ultimate, naked truth at this time and age [PLUTO]. We’re asked to display a healthy, mature attitude towards our vision of growth [JUPITER] and this way understand our actual role in what we commonly perceive as our fate or destiny [PLUTO]. Any over-inflated ego might easily burst like a bubble, leaving behind the bleakness of what is left, without fake, glitter and fame.

This streamlining of excess during the next couple of months will pave the way neatly for what is about to come, once Pluto will finally start its full journey through Capricorn. Capricorn’s ruler, Saturn, is an Astrological symbol for our concept of Reality, of the Framework, the perception of Time passing. It also stands for our internal fabric, the wiring in our brain as well as the molecular structure of our DNA. Everything we perceive as the visible, tangible reality around us, is traditionally associated with Saturn (it is also the furthest away Planet we can still see via the retina on our flesh eyes). Saturn is also The System, the political / social structure. Psychology, the mechanics of our day-to-day interactions, is therefore also a Saturn related issue. Boundaries are Saturn. The skin as the interface between Me and You is also Saturn related, as well as the bones, the structure we stand on. To express the planetary transit in a nutshell we could say that Pluto would probe into our understanding of Reality [SATURN] and squeeze out the essence of what we need to do [PLUTO] in order to keep growing as a human society [PLUTO, SATURN]. Part of the truth is that everyone is connected with everyone else, we’re all in the same boat – namely a planet which can go, from time to time, through some really serious trouble. Whilst at the same time, our brains are making this all up, aren’t they, inexplicably wired into the Holo-movement of what we have come to call the Universe (according to the ingenious Quantum Physicist / Philosopher David Bohm – 1).

Let’s try and coin this Pluto / Saturn constellation into more practical terms: All our defence mechanisms to face the truth about ourselves and other people [SATURN] will be ruthlessly disintegrated [PLUTO]. How will this happen? Through the public awareness that Psychological Literacy is paramount in order to live a healthy and balanced life – not money, status, guns or religions. Because at the end of the day, what we call ‘our reality’ are simply those people around us, how they treat us and see us and how we ourselves feel about them. The eventual insight into our unhappiness – the psycho-mechanics of it – will compel us to get a grip on the reasons why our Life Scripts keep running the way how they do (as one of the true heroes of modern psychotherapy, Eric Berne, calls the emotional patterns set in place – through mother’s breast, family bathroom and dinner table – all before we even reach the age of six – 2).

Where does this lead us? It would point exactly at the ‘collective rise of consciousness’ as the more serious predictive sources would usually claim. And as a consequence, the breakdown of any too-rigid frameworks (corporate / religious / political) incapable to cope with this ever accelerating speed of collective growth. Through gaining psychological / emotional literacy we would be able to heal inside [MOON], work through our insecurities, anger and sadness, whilst we increasingly feel the need to do our own thing [SUN], whatever that means to us, in our sadly too-short life. A lot has to do with regaining the freedom to do what we should, according to what our heart really tells us. Failing it would result in an increase of pain [SATURN] as long as the deterioration of our core potential [PLUTO] continues. In a general public climate of emotional maturity, feelings like jealousy will increasingly come across as silly, embarrassing or even pathetic. In a world of ignorance, devilishly fuelled by the mystery of a cycle-of-abuse, there is simply no one to blame for any painful buttons being pushed on our fragile emotional space-suits. We just have to let go of any invalid suits – get real / naked – and all of a sudden we could be happy even under the cheapest, shabbiest of duvets. Instead of compensating with money the constant craving for a hot piece of meat (men) or hopefully one day meet somebody special to enter symbiotic salvation (women), we feel it is alright to accept the truth that we’re all alone in this Life – as soon as we can relax and actually enjoy it.

And yet, Psychology is of course not the highest plane of what we, this time and age, perceive as Ultimate Reality. There are many Planes, many Angles, many Dimensions. Each of us has vastly different ones and they furthermore even change all the time. Preferably, our Planes / Views are supposed to be constantly rising, so everything makes more sense as we look back on our own, individual growth patterns and thus become able to clearly identify many of the others around us. In the end, we need to subscribe to Beliefs and Values which are as much in touch with the Truth as ‘humanly’ possible. As long as they can convincingly describe what we really feel inside, we should be absolutely fine. But if not, we’ve got a problem, since any decisions we arrive at from those subscribed Beliefs and Values are essentially political. They systemically pave our way into a quite predictable outcome of personal – and therefore, however marginal, collective – future. I feel that this is somewhat the crux in our historical development as a society, that psychology, culture and politics are in fact intrinsically linked. Any political concept, be it Socialism, Capitalism, Democracy, will be bound to fail if it cannot ensure the psycho-hygiene of its people, thus creating the fertile cultural soil from which society can be successfully nourished from within, grow in the most beautiful way.

It would be difficult enough to achieve such an Utopian state of society. But there are quite a few other things involved, it seems. Stargates, other dimensions, extra-terrestrials, timespaces and space-times. Sub-quantums, holographic universes and shuffle brains. All sorts of sometimes more, sometimes less reasonable conspiracy blurb, as well as fairly inexplicable post-ice-age sudden seeding of knowledge – not to mention 2012, of course.

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II – 2012

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WHAT’S THE latest story on this? According to David Wilcock, anyone who’s either been gifted enough by supernatural abilities, or by otherwise using one of the apparently existing time-travel devices (reverse-engineered from the pineal gland and UFO navigation chairs found back in the forties!!!) only encountered White Light as they hit the date 21st of December 2012 on their journeys. Whilst further down the timeline they’d all see entirely different futures. Like so many other mythologically encoded clues embedded in our culture, this reminds us of a scene in a movie. In this case it is Luke Skywalker having to face the illusion of Darth Vader in a small cave on Yoda’s planet where whatever he takes with him into the cave is what he is eventually going to be confronted with. Could this be the way how it works? Are we really – to such an mind-boggling extent – creating our very own futures? 

In this light, it is definitely important for the existence of timetravel technology to be kept strictly secret, since our flawed ego-states would inevitably lead to rather horrifying, selffulfilling time-feedback loops, the closer we would get to the 2012 date. But on the other hand, perhaps that is what’s already happening, the White Light is the shrieking feedback, and perhaps it is true, that we can be anything we want to be, a grain of sand, a superhero or a galaxy, as we roll over the galactic centre on that miraculous date. It would be a paradigm-shift indeed …

I personally quite like the idea, however radical, so instead of going on about global catastrophes, conspiracies, aliens and the likes, let’s stick with the White Light for the moment. It also ties in nicely with the general concept of psychology, that through our emotional outlook we are masters (or slaves) of our very own, customised future. This way, a paradigm-shift would already mean that maybe external growth – doggedly pursuing our worldly interests – will not be that important anymore. It happens on its own anyway, as time passes, people come and go and new overall growth patterns are constantly being created, even in ‘stillness’. And then, perhaps, our lives will be more about internal growth – self-cultivation – about becoming a ‘better’ human being. “Returning to our True Selves”, as the Dao School, for Millennia, has succinctly described it. Could there be something like ‘salvation’, then, in the end?

Why not? Perhaps major religions do actually allow us to cultivate our Souls / Selves into different unitary Paradises (as contemporary Master of both the Dao and the Buddha School, Mr. Li Hongzhi, suggests – 3). And so do perhaps other, more solitary pagan / shamanic cultivation ways of mind and body. Perhaps we can arrive in Heaven even within our lifetime, as preferrably conceptualised in the East, when we for instance reach Enlightenment / Consummation / Unlocking through successfully cultivating Buddhahood or the Dao. We would then be able to use our Third Eye to see the Ultimate Truth and our real place within the hitherto unfathomable Fabric of the Universe. Perhaps it is then all really true, as Sages throughout thousands of years have always adamantly been claiming, that what we see with our flesh eyes (or telescopes and microscopes) is only a veil, a ‘deception’, covering ‘hermetically’ what actually, really is there.

Being born into blindness, without ever being able to see before we inevitably crash into ingorant death, sounds like a rather cruel predicament, doesn’t it? It might therefore as well be that Earth is in fact a ‘prison planet’, as many of a counter-historian is bold enough to claim. But also, perhaps, it’s just the way how it is, that we’ve completely lost touch with our True Nature, on our hefty sail-ride throughout History. The truth is, we don’t know anything about our True History. We’ve only been given hints through scripture and by ourselves came up with all sorts of funny theories. Behind the back of the currently envogue Darwinist Canon, for instance, there is an entire ‘Hidden History of the Human Race’, reaching back Hundreds of Millions of Years (all meticulously recorded in a book by the same name). In this staggering scope, we’ve certainly been faced with total annihilation numerous times, lately not long ago, only between 15.000 – 7.500 BC, the most recent ice-age. In the more remote past, there must’ve been many meteorites, tsunamis, volcanoes, earth quakes, continental drifts – even earth-crust replacements or tectonic shifts could have taken place. There also used to be an atmosphere on Mars, in most likelihood, to remind us of the reality of complete planetary annihilation. And the asteroid belt could’ve been part of our Earth once, as well as our dear, beautiful Moon. Maybe a tenth planet hit us and split us apart, we simply don’t know.

Countless theories have been put forward to shed light into the entire Mystery of ‘why we are here’. But the word ‘theory’, as David Bohm wisely points out, comes from the Greek word for theatre. It is being put forward, presented on stage and it is therefore only another angle which happens to make sense – seems to be real – to the rest of us, at one particular time-spacecoordinate on our galactic journey. Without having our third eye / pineal gland open, and by being trapped in the Three Realms of our concurrent dimensional plane, we can only perceive as Reality what our alleged monkey-brains allow us to ‘see’. In terms of Quantum Physics, the torrent / stream of Matter, the Explicate Order (David Bohm), persistently permeates Us Beings – and is thus being decoded in realtime, like a flickering movie, by our desperately grasping Consciousness / Mind – before it dissolves back into the unfathomable Implicate Order of the Ground (God, the Aristotelean Unmoved Mover) where everything originally comes from.

Contemplating all of this, perhaps those who until the 2012 deadline, either through science, religion or self-cultivation, can penetrate through the illusory curtain of in-your-face reality, will be able to truly ascend on that prodigous day. Perhaps some of them will be levitating in ‘broad daylight’, perhaps with a glass of champagne in their hand, over a planet which has just been saved from extinction by everyone’s collective efforts. Or perhaps nothing will happen at all and life goes on as usual, similar to back in 1999, when no ‘millennium-bug’ brought everything to a worldwide, hyped-up standstill.

In any case, the planets will keep moving. From around 2011 to 2015, for instance, electrifying Uranus will join deep-grinding Pluto in a tensional square to unearth the same issues which the Hippies first raised during the conjunction of the 1960’s. Whether by then we’ll be throwing computer-generated Molotov cocktails into fascist corporate mainframes or whether we’ll have successfully learned how to ‘fly’ – be truly free – the likely reality will largely depend on how we cultivate / conduct ourselves in the years to come. Pluto’s next stop in Aquarius at around 2024 will then give us a lift into yet more lofty realms of existence. By then, everything should be eventually ready to progress into the 2.160 years of the next Precessional Age – the long-anticipated Age of Aquarius – which will be ruled by emotionally detached, but utterly collective-conscious Air-planet Uranus. 

The bottom line is that our future is entirely up to us, really. My final prognosis therefore is:

We Shall See!

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1 – David Bohm, ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’, 1980 & ‘The Ending of Time’ (with J. Krishnamurti), 1985

2 – Eric Berne, ‘Games People Play’, 1964 & ‘What Do You Say After You Say Hello?’, 1972

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SERIOUS FREAK SEX

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THIS IS A serious movie. Very serious. Quite sad, in a way, that it has somehow ended up in the ‘porn’ pigeonhole, or even in the so hysterically called ‘exploitation’ niche (as if the rest of the movie industry were in fact based on altruism :). This complete misconception certainly stems from the nerve it hits, which with its dark, shocking cocktail of power and sex reverberates deeply in our collective psyche, so that people could easily feel intimidated, even ashamed of themselves, for possibly opening up to it – perhaps even liking it – and they therefore have to resort to scapegoating it instead. Another reason could be its blatant political impact, its shrill post-68 outcry of anger against a continuously repressive environment, which might have been simply ‘too much’ for many political corners and therefore reason enough to belittle and suppress it.

In any case, for those who haven’t seen the film, briefly the plot: In a 1936 Berlin, the Nazis have the splendid idea to set up a high-class brothel, in order to spy on its clients and gather all sorts of embarrassing information about them. The idea involves not to use professional hookers and then train them in ‘intelligence’ but instead to opt for girls, as suggested by ‘himself’, the Fuhrer, who display an unshakeable faith in national socialist ideology – and then train them in both, servicing sex and sucking off vital political clues. So far, all of this actually happened. Brass then wrote a story of true love in-between where one of the girls, Margherita, falls for a German pilot and he really falls for her, too. But he’s subsequently being annihilated by the Nazis after telling his lover about his decision to surrender to truth instead of killing another bunch of people for a mere political lie. This is all centred around the strangely elevated power freak Wallenberg who’s in charge of setting up the whole thing. Within his underlying, secret belief not in ideology at all but purely in power, he also feels that he can find love through blackmail and sexual enslavement. In the end, as it is usually the case with power, the sword has always got two sides and it is only a matter of time until it eventually turns against him.

With Salon Kitty Tinto Brass unfolds an eerie tale of messed-up and messing-up people, stuck in their manmade human tragedies, as they play along ‘games’ related to power, in a world of blind belief, hatred and fear. The naked human, whether physical or psychological, is the canvas upon which the wickedness and perversion of the political agenda unfolds. The seamless interweaving of cabaret songs, seedy boudoirs, Nazi stuff, true love and ‘fucked-up’, explicit sex scenes is absolutely priceless. As a director, Brass’ psychological insights and attention to emotional details are staggering and not many in the industry can claim to see equally far – or deep for that matter (except perhaps someone like Todd Solondz with Happiness, Palindromes and Storytelling or Julia Davis with her powerful British comedy series Human Remains and Nighty Night).

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FRAMEWORK FOR FUCKING

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THE MOST FRIGHTENING aspect of Salon Kitty is its depiction of how sex can be ‘institutionalised’ so bloody easily, in order to meet any whatsoever surreal political ends. If it hasn’t already been before, in a movie like this it becomes perfectly clear again that romantic / sexual love is the ultimate system-subversive trait of us humans and therefore has to be carefully kept in check. Sex / love can be ‘allowed’ or ‘sanctioned’ only within a particular framework for fucking which political (slash religious) systems hand down to its people. Of course, somewhere down the line, love in itself is such a deep-rooted force that it always has to be at least insinuated as an incentive to carry on with our lives. Like winning the lottery, it is the dream-come-true for those of us who’re really ‘lucky’ in life, whilst in reality it hasn’t got much to do with luck at all, but mainly emotional health, confidence and maturity. But even health and maturity, in a screwed-up, viciously grinding-away system, does not guarantee fulfilment of such an actually modest human need. You could easily end up on a meat hook instead (like Margherita’s lover) because your jealous comrades scapegoat you for their own political and therefore personal failure. Or quite literally as a ‘hooker’, a neurotic repetitor, if you erratically attempt to escape the world of your brainwashed parents. Since whether you do what they tell you or just the complete opposite doesn’t make much difference in terms of the psycho-mechanical laws of destiny.

The scene where the women are being lined up in the huge Nazi gym, saluting naked with Heil Hitlers, before the SS guys are marched in to test their feasibility for providing uninhibited sexual favours, while the ‘authorities’ play some demented propaganda tunes on the grand Steinway, is easily one of the most startling I’ve ever seen. It is being closely followed by another one (censored for most of the movie’s history) where some of the girls undergo further testing in sterile, kafkaesque prison cells, having to please all sorts of ‘real freaks’ in order to show their blind determination to the political cause. Sometimes, having been born into a ‘liberate’ climate, the impact of blatant political force is quite easy to forget. And yet, even today, in a way we still are trapped in a world of sexual / emotional abuse – and that is exactly the deep nerve this movie is hitting. Only that today, instead of concentration camps, socialism / communism / dictatorship and brainwashing / propaganda, the abuse is being masqueraded as broken homes,capitalism / consumerism or one of the many other contemporary ways of abuse / prostitution for economic, corporate, personal, political, intellectual – or even religious ‘causes’.

But the most underlying message of Salon Kitty is how power, in the end, will always be corrupting people, why power is so attractive to already corrupted people in the first place – and above all, why it is so incredibly sad, for power-freaks having to resort to killing, breaking and raping in order to create the illusion that they are being loved by someone (or even by many, haha) – although they deep down bloody well know that this is not at all the case. Obviously, there is an element of power involved in any form of sexual attraction – taken, being taken et cetera – but the separation between sex and love, in other words the assertion of power to achieve intimacy with another person, is psychologically an irresolvable dilemma. Perversion, or better ‘deterioration from core humanity’ (for when it comes to sex itself, according to Brass, there is no such thing as perversion) is without a doubt the ugliest manifestation of our tragic human condition. Its mechanics compel that anything healthy and pure must be defiled and destroyed in order to keep the dream / madness alive, feed it with ever more blood and despair.

Perhaps therefore the movie for its time did go too far, and this is the reason, why after his hassle with trying to make Caligula work, Brass left any political messages completely aside in his later work, almost overnight, in order to put his attention entirely on sex itself with the production of real, honest Erotica in which he purposefully avoids “using sex as a metaphor for something else”. For such a talented person as Brass this must have been quite a radical step to take. But in another way also probably quite a reasonable one. Sexuality has just been repressed for too long throughout our history and keeping this repression alive is what provides some of the strongest hooks for any system built mainly on power. What is therefore needed, more than anything else before ‘real’ political awareness can happen, is plain simply sexual / emotional healing. And this is exactly what Tinto Brass’ later work offers. The permission to explore sexual / emotional self-expression for those of us who’re kind of stuck in boring or otherwise institutionalised love lives. Once we are free to open up fully to the right person, at the right time, without getting hurt or abused or otherwise ‘fucked’, we can still dig out another movie milestone from the dusty archive, Michelangelo Antonioni’s incredible Zabriskie Point (which is, interestingly enough for such a cinematographic masterpiece, very difficult to get hold of at the time of writing) and proceed with matters of personal political responsibility from there.

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=================

CONCEPT:

From amongst all the characters, features and scenes within the world of THE COOL, there is one detail, one element of the story, which I felt has an extraordinarily powerful potential, conceptually and emotionally. I thought it could serve as the red thread, ‘the key’ if you will, on which we can build the whole purpose and incentive of our game:

It is THE LETTER, written by MICHAEL YOUNG HISTORY’s eight-year-old sister.

By arranging three different episodes, on two pages of graphic novel narrative each, we have THE LETTER prominently featured as the pivotal mystery of the underlying story. Both LUPE FIASCO and THE STREETS are continuously trying to get hold of it (although for obviously completely different reasons). Its content, the innocent writings of merely a little girl, wield a power none of the evil forces will ever be able to content with. It is brimming of genuine, unconditional LOVE.

Each of the three scenes ends on a question related to THE LETTER and the successful answers results in various payoffs (perhaps also the access code to be able to continue the story). For the last one, whose correct answer is “LOVE”, the audience gets to download a secret track in which the lyrics of the letter are featured to create an emotionally moving piece of music (perhaps with a little girl featured as a voice?). It is a ballad of love and loss, hope and despair, brotherly and sisterly love. Innocence and its tragic loss forever.

=================

SCRIPT:

EPISODE I: THE GRAVE

1 – EXT. AN INNER-CITY GRAVEYARD – NIGHT

LUPE FIASCO is standing in front of MICHAEL YOUNG HISTORY’S grave. He is wearing a black leather coat and completely withdrawn in his thoughts.

LUPE FIASCO

(to himself)

so stupid. so motherfucking stupid …

from behind bushes, THE STREETS is sneaking up towards him. he doesn’t seem to hear her.

LUPE FIASCO

you could still be here, MICHAEL. (pause). we could still be friends …

THE STREETS is now directly behind him, he still hasn’t noticed. she puts her hand on his shoulder. he turns his head to vaguely acknowledge her presence, not more. there is a hint of contempt in his eyes.

THE STREETS

poor boy, huh? his brain just dropped into his pants as soon as he saw me, hahahahaha.

she tries to touch some of LUPE’s sensitive parts but he grabs her wrist and pushes her hand away. his hyper-cool composure hasn’t changed at all. she flings her arm out of his tight grip and soothingly rubs the wrist while she stares at him fiercely.

THE STREETS

don’t you dare touching me, LUPEY. and don’t pretend to be sorry about your mate’s death. you just feel sorry for yourself, you pathetic piece of shit.

LUPE FIASCO is turning his attention back to the grave, basically ignoring her. THE STREETS is furious.

THE STREETS

have you read his little sister’s letter? its soooo heartbreaking, apparently, ahahahaha.

she laughs hysterically. this time she has caught his attention. he turns round to face her.

LUPE FIASCO

(angrily)

where is it? where is the fucking letter, you goddamned bitch?

THE STREETS

hahaha. did i finally get your honorary attention, LUPEY? i don’t have it. trust me. you can search me if you want.

she spins around in front of him, her arms lasciviously raised above her head. LUPE doesn’t move. he looks away, disgusted.

THE STREETS

what you’re waiting for, big man. haven’t you got the balls to touch me, hahahahaha?

END OF EPISODE I

OVERLAY:

“WHO HAS GOT THE LETTER?”

(correct answer: “THE COOL has it”)

—————————————————————-

EPISODE II: THE COOL

2 – EXT. DARK FUCKED UP STREETS IN THE CITY – NIGHT

THE COOL is roaming the streets. it’s raining. he’s just been hit by one of his attacks of excruciating pain, stemming from three bullets forever stuck in his undead brain, heart and throat. they turn up quite often, these attacks, and cause him to go down on his knees, clenching his head and howling like a sick animal. the sounds seamlessly blend into the countless police sirens we can hear in the background. he tumbles into an remote alleyway and crashes between the rubbish.

THE COOL

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh.

just as the pain seizes, THE STREET stands in front of him, arms on her hips, her legs spread apart. she’s wearing a devilishly short mini-skirt and stares down on him with a cynical, vicious smile. she kicks his head with one of her long legs.

THE STREETS

give me the letter, COOLIE boy, baby.

THE GAME suddenly turns up from behind her, sporting his golden teeth with a broad grin. grabbing her upper arms he sticks his giant head next to hers, resting it on her bare shoulder. he hisses down to the green-bleeding THE COOL with a hoarse, almost inaudible voice.

THE GAME

you better do what the lady says, boy. looks like you’ve had enough shit to put up with for today. (pause). can also probably get someone to fix some of your problems, you see.

THE COOL’s skeletal hand stretches out as if to shy them away. for every ‘normal’ person this would have worked, for THE STREETS and THE GAME this gesture seems utterly pathetic.

THE COOL

i don’t know what you’re talking about.

THE STREETS

shut up, COOLIE, baby.

she kicks him in the head again, a nasty strike with her left leg this time. more green blood pours down his rotten face. she turns round to THE GAME, putting her arms around his neck. they kiss passionately. THE GAME grabs her buttocks and reveals them bare naked by shoving his hands up her skirt. witnessing this, another attack hits THE COOL and he throws himself down to the asphalt again, screaming.

THE COOL

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh. stop it, please, i beg you. you’ve won, you bastards. here is what you want …

THE STREETS and THE GAME are entwined, carried away by their dark lust.

END OF EPISODE II

OVERLAY

“WHERE IS HE HIDING THE LETTER?”

(correct answer: “strapped on his chest like a gun”)

—————————————————————-

EPISODE III:

3 – INT. A HUGE INDUSTRIAL LOFT SHELL – NIGHT

THE GAME is standing against the window wall of his lair, looking out into the busy, rough street of the city. there are bars between him and the window, a surreal element of imprisonment in the midst of his spacious empire. he is thinking about his lost son.

THE GAME

(thinking)

HEROINE, are you out there? somewhere? i know you’re still alive …

somewhat melancholic he walks over to his huge desk. a mountain of white powder sits on top. his dimmed, faint blood vessels shiver as he sticks his head into it. as he looks up again, the veins on his neck are pumping in ecstasy. THE STREETS comes in, swayingly, wearing yet another one of her sick, sexy outfits. he looks up at her, his face is a mask of artificial hysteria.

THE GAME

have you read it?

she sticks her finger into the pile of coke and vacantly rubs it into her teeth.

THE STREETS

no. not yet. (pause). it scares me.

LUPE FIASCO comes into the room suddenly. his leather coat waves in his wake as he walks towards the two. THE STREETS just smiles eerily. THE GAME is hyped-up and unimpressed.

THE GAME

i do admire your balls, LUPE.

LUPE FIASCO

i’d rather you cut them off your mind, GAME.

THE STREETS laughs hysterically. a horde of goons storm in. they have pig’s heads and are wearing kinky, black latex uniforms. they nervously wave their neon-pink dildo machine guns at LUPE but he doesn’t care. THE STREETS laughs out loud again and he uses this as a clue to just grab her. a brief moment of panic is flooding the whole room. the pigs don’t dare to move. LUPE swiftly extracts THE LETTER from THE STREET’s wide open cleavage and holds it up in the air. nobody moves. there is complete silence. THE STREETS has buried her face in her hands and looks through her fingers in fear.

END OF EPISODE III

OVERLAY:

“WHAT IS EVERYBODY AFRAID OF?”

(correct answer: “LOVE”)

—————————————

reinhard schleining

first draft
london, 29th november 2007
© 2007, all rights reserved

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¶¶¶

I

THE ENCOUNTER

¶

I certainly didn’t expect this to happen, but that’s always how it goes, isn’t it? In the midst of another insanely crowded Shoreditch steel-wood-and-glass bar. This awesome girl. She kind-of wades forward, smiling, through a vast ocean of faceless, chatty, after-work binge-drinkers. Venus rising from a foam shell. But draped in a scarlet-red, laser-cut cocktail dress. The most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. At first I think I’m dreaming this, it can’t be me she’s moving towards, smiling at. But she adamantly floats precisely to the place where I’m standing. On invisible angel wings or something. And a couple of seconds later, now only a few steps away from me, she still hasn’t stopped smiling. My knees feel like butter and the situation hits me with utmost sincerity. Hair stiffening on the back of my neck. Fucking hell, I must be dreaming this. Jesus, how unbelievably beautiful this girl is. I’ve never ever seen anyone like her. Black hair,white skin, green eyes. I almost drop my drink, almost shit in my pants, really really really.
“You look very sweet, babee. Wanna buy me a drink?”, she says, still smiling. Every-word-is-on-the-beat – wow!
“Sure.What you fancy?”
“Bloody Mary?”
“Sure, of course. Don’t move.”
Pause. “I won’t.”

The first thing I notice once we start talking is that she doesn’t seem to care about what I’m doing, nor where I’m coming from. Pretty well-off, I suppose. I’m still not sure whether I’m not dreaming all of this. Her name is Amanda, she says, and somehow hearing her say the name feels strangely comforting. Her voice reverberates all-the-way through my body. Singer? Actress? In any case, it has probably the same effect as pinching myself. I’m most definitely wide awake, not dreaming.
“How’s the drink?”, I ask in an attempt to stir-up some more stimulated conversation. She’s still smiling at me, never stopped really. The most beautiful girl in the world’s just standing right in front of me, Bloody Mary in her hand, and she can’t stop smiling at me. Madness.
“Great, thanks. I just luuuv anything red.”
“Hahaha, having been bathed in blood as a newborn or something?”
“Hahaha, yeah, something like that.”
It quite stuns me that she didn’t actually think my joke was too dark or otherwise tasteless but I briskly whisk away the creepy feeling. “I really like your dress, by the way”, I say instead.
“Thanks. You’re really very sweet, babee. What’s your name?”
“Tom”, I say, shaking the ice-cubes in my quadruple Jack Daniel’s.
“Nice name.”
She keeps smiling at me. Her lips, her mouth, her eyes, her face, her legs, her breasts. Her posture, her confidence, her elevatedness. It is all so incomprehensibly beautiful that I still have to put-in a lot of effort to not just shit in my pants, right here, right now.

Keep calm, man. Take it easy. Easy. Jesus, I’ve met many interesting girls in my life – that’s, well, just the way how it goes when you’re successful as a DJ-Producer. Quite a few of them were above-the-line confident and sexy. But Amanda’s something else completely and I can’t quite put it down really. It’s everything about her. Everything’s like out of a dream or something. From another planet. I’m done, I’m afraid. I’ve fallen for her the first split-second I saw her, gliding all the way through the sea of binge-drinking mortals at the other end of the room. Should I be worrying about ‘why me’? Well, I say, go with the flow, man. Ride the waves of the moment. I don’t think it’s vanity. And I’m definitely a cool enough guy to not think that she’s an outrageously astute hooker, either.
“You’re very nice too”, I say. “Unbelievably awesome, actually.”
She doesn’t answer. Just smiles. And then gently moves in to my lips for a long, soft, wet kiss.

On the streets back to mine we also don’t speak very much. We’re both quite a bit turned-on by now. I’m in fact a bloody boiling steam tank, to be honest. Walking with her by my side through the Friday night crowd is actually pretty awkward. Every head we pass turns. They check us out. Something doesn’t seem right. They perhaps don’t like the idea of seeing someone so stunningly beautiful next to a just ‘decent looking guy’ or something. It bothers them or something. And although Amanda’s kisses earlier-on have given me all the confidence I’d ever need in this world, I still feel strangely insecure from their hostility and in a way almost undeserving. What if they’re right? What if I shouldn’t be going to my place with someone like her? Perhaps even have sex – blimey?
Amanda slings both her arms around my neck, just in time before I’m getting too self-deprecating. She hisses a “you make me so hot” in my ear, giggling from all the Bloody Marys she’s had. Her voice slithers into my brain like pungent lava. My ear is almost falling off. But it’s definitely done the trick and I’m straight back into the vibes. I grab her waist and pull her towards me. What a wonderful drug. There’s nothing else to be said. Other people cease to exist. She’s licking my ear now and since I’ve always found it quite tricky to walk straight with a hard-on we have to slow down now, take it easy, chill.

¶

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II

THE ACT

¶

Straight upon entering my flat we need to split, though. Breathe, Tom, breathe, I panicky keep telling myself. This is all too freaking intense. I lean against the wall, apologising and smiling. I beg her to sit down on the comfy leather lounge. Then I walk over to the kitchen-bit where I consult my flash mini-bar next to the fridge.
“What about Campari with blood-orange juice. Would make sense, wouldn’t it?”, I ask as formally as I can muster.
“Mmmmmhhh”, comes her reply. She’s again smiling at me but obliviously someplace else. The bottom of her dress has come-up to reveal her deliciously juicy alabaster thighs. I force myself to look away but can’t quite manage. My head seems to be stuck on her as if to an all-powerful magnet. I bring her the cocktail and jog-dial a really cool playlist from my pod.
“That is nice”, she says when some of my own stuff comes up.
“Thanks”, I mutter. I’m definitely not sure whether I should not join her on the sofa. It’s all so intense – Jesus Fucking Christ. My armpits are soaking. I bloody well know that I’ll be done right away if I go anywhere near her. Therefore, I casually place myself leaning against the wall facing her. I pretend to be staring out of the window. A few drunks pass by on the street, pissing and shouting aimlessly.
“How did you spot me, back then in the bar?”, I finally ask her, trying to keep acting casual, one hand in my pocket, the other one grabbing my drink. But even before I finish my question I already regret having asked it since I must come across like an insecure twat.
“I told you. You looked so sweet”, she says and there’s a comforting undertone in her voice as if she were to say that I might be insecure. But not a twat.
Silence again. I sip away on my drink and keep gazing out of the window. Luckily, I’m quite hammered by now.
She gets up from the sofa and comes over to me. She sticks her hand under my shirt and caresses my back softly. An electric shock pierces through me. My knees bend. Next thing I know are our mouths stuck on each other’s. Tongues rampaging. Hands fondling. We’re lying entwined on the floor. Nothing really matters anymore. My dear, precious playlist has morphed into merely the echoing, squirming stutter from a far, far away galaxy.

Multiple orgasmic waves shoot through my pent-up nervous system. We’re glowing. We’re splashed-out on the floor like salty and sticky seaweed. I don’t know what I’m doing at all, everything just happens on its own. Our tongues snake in and out of whatever orifice they can possibly find. Legs part. Nipples contort. Cheeks shiver. We’re melting together. We’re forming a unit. We’re lost in each other and my flat has become a waiting-lounge for all sorts of heavenly noise transmissions. We groan, utter, hiss, sigh. Everything is blurred. Everything is spinning. Our skins have become so incredibly soft that we squeak and convulse with even the gentlest of touches. Another series of orgasmic waves shoots through my body – crystallising like sugary, sparkly confetti into our mutual aura. I feel that I want to totally give-up myself, hand over my life to this person I’ve only just met. Unconditionally. Wholeheartedly. Irrevocably.

And just before I can completely immerse myself into this feeling, sullenly, lusciously slide into it. I spot through my dreary, faint eyes how Amanda – both her hands rapturously grabbing my gurkin – suddenly reveals long, pearl-white fangs with her smile. They’re very long. I haven’t really noticed them before.
While she sinks those fangs into the moist skin of my steeled shaft, with delirious lust in her glazed, spaced-out eyes – I don’t think at all that I’m hallucinating this. I’m also not scared or shocked or repulsed in any way whatsoever. Instead, I simply can’t stop shivering with delight. There’s a brief, tangy sting from her bite, radiating all the way down to the lower end of my spine. Several orgasmic explosions, different this time, spark-up my brain again. My face is gleaming. I’m burning.
Amanda’s still grabbing my shaft, rivulets of blood pour down her hands. Her mouth comes up towards mine. Our tongues meet. She bites into my lips, without the sting, without the blood and we just suck on each other. ‘Eat me, you beautiful demon’, I’m thinking and at the same time burst out laughing in ecstasy. I can hear my playlist again, but I’ve never heard it that way before. I’m transformed. I’ve become a new person.
Another wave of orgasms and laughter. And then I fall back into the floor – deep, dark, dreary. I spread out my arms and legs as wide as I can. Whatever you want from me, whatever you need. Take it all, baby. I’m yours. Truly and wholly yours. I suppose, till death us part or something. Hahahahaha …

¶

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III

THE AFTERMATH

¶

When I wake up, she’s gone. The withdrawal symptoms hit me with sheer phenomenal power. I’m cringing, cuddling-up myself. I’m shaking, shivering. Cold sweat. My heart is beating erratically. My nerves are itching with featureless cravings. Somehow I manage to get out of bed. I try to shake-off the nagging feelings of loss. The amount of sadness and despair almost makes me go down to the floor and die. I swallow a couple of downers and take a long hit off the bong which I keep to my rescue for generally unsettling conditions. I drag myself to the kitchen and whack-up some scrambled eggs. Then I wash it all down with a few shots of vodka before I force myself to hit the street.
I’m walking on snakes and diving through aliens but somehow make my way down to the studio. Mike is there and it’s good to see him although I have to rush to the toilet and vomit before I can even say hello. He stays silent when he sees the state I’m in.
We load up a track entitled ‘Prime Harvest’ which we’ve been chopping away on for the past couple of days. He’s done bits and pieces since yesterday and plays it to me and I pretend to be listening – but Amanda’s smiles sharply keep slicing my brain. Her smell. Her skin. Her passion.
The track has ended and I haven’t even realised. I sincerely apologise to Mike who looks at me with his huge, red-rimmed child’s eyes. As usual, his pupils are already at this time of the day stretched-out across the entire iris. Black eyes worriedly staring at me.
“I’m really, really sorry, man. I’m completely fucking wasted. Most intense experience I’ve ever had”, I mumble. “Just carry on, sounds all cool to me”. Feebly I totter my way out of the studio.
He doesn’t answer.
“See you tomorrow.”

On the street again. It’s about lunchtime. People are heading for food stalls, hungry stomachs wanting to be filled. I drift into the next available bar and order a quadruple Jack Daniel’s. Oozing into it. Drowning myself in self-pity. I check my phone. Yes, I do have her number. It wasn’t all just a dream. Everything’s cool, Tom. You just need to keep it nicely together up there. Keep it tight. I wave for another couple of rounds.

Back in front of my door I have trouble putting the key through the hole. It’s become quite late – midnight? I plunge into the flat as the door finally opens. Kick-shut it. Then crawl all the way to the mini-bar. Glug glug glug – I fill a whole cognac-ball with vodka and down you go. Zoning out. Waking up semi-naked on the floor. The withdrawal symtoms are still there, haven’t ceased a bit, really. Nagging. Itching. Craving. Perhaps even more so than ever before. Also a headache has mingled-in in the meantime. For fuck’s sake. I’m dragging myself to the bathroom to fetch some more downers. In the mirror I’m shocked about how awful I look. Both my eyes are dark holes. Blood vessels stain the white bits like ravaging cobwebs. I’m falling apart. I faint. Clinging to the sink, I slide down to the tiles. It’s pretty obvious that I can’t live-on like this. I’m done. Finished. She’s completely got me. Enraptured, hahaha. I lie there for I’ve no idea how long.

But it’s fine. I’ve found my master. I’m ‘in love’ for the very first time. Lying here naked, on the freezing floor of my bathroom, I’m drooling and drunk and fighting-off the most unbearable withdrawal symptoms I’ve ever had in my entire life. But whenever I think of her, Amanda, the most stunningly beautiful girl-slash-vampire – I’m rising. I’m suddenly awake. All those ideas turn up in my head. Tracks, already perfectly written. All I want is to surrender, be with her again.
And as feelings turn into ideas, ideas form into decisions. I’m slowly becoming myself again. I’m even starting to smile. The withdrawal symptoms are miraculously fading. Even the headache is almost gone, leaving behind only a distant memory of how miserable my whole life has actually been.

A few hours later I’m leaving the elevator to step on the hallway leading-up to her door. My legs are shaking as I knock. She’s naked underneath her scarlet-red silk robe and peels-off my clothes like the skin of an overripe apricot. Then I’m inside her and she groans and I’m zoning out again in bliss. The familiar electric waves of pleasure. Everything is sticky and wet. Blood, sweat, saliva, cunt-juice – I don’t know, I can’t care. This is going to be my life from now on. I’m completely, utterly hooked.
And as we look at each other, giggling and smiling and shivering with bliss, I know that she’s going to take my life away from me, bit by bit devour it. And I tell you what – it doesn’t matter. Not now and not anytime in the future. It’s all cool, baby, love of my life. I’ve arrived where I belong to. I’m here with you.
I’m the happiest man in the world.

¶

¶

london, august 2007 – march 2009
© 2007 – 2009, all rights reserved

¶

CAST:

GUY : a distinctive male character whose appearance and performance change quite significantly for each of the three Acts – although a certain core-personality remains consistent throughout. He represents a Male Archetype, progressing through three different stages of Human Endeavour.

¶¶

¶

Act 1

CAVE

¶

SETTING:

Prehistoric times. We look into the interior of a cave. Through the entrance in the background we can see volcanoes, reptilian birds and other out-worldly, strange animals. It is dawn. The sky has an eerie orange-violet tint. GUY is sitting in the centre of the cave, holding a raw stone-chalice in his hand. His feet are resting high on a table-like rock in front of him. He’s filthy, grumpy and hairy, only wearing a shabby fur loincloth.Clearly, he’s one of our early human ancestors.
AT RISE:

GUY sips on his drink which we can spot has a deep purply colour and a caustic consistency. It might as well be blood he’s drinking, we are thinking. Between each sip he vacantly stares into the air in front of him. Throughout the whole Act, his parts are mainly mumbled four-letter words which only after a while we recognise as actually being English.

GUY

Mmmhh. (He makes swallowing and gurgling noises.)
Nice, Nice. (Pause. He scratches his balls.) 
Good – Drink – (Gulp, gulp) – Aahhhh. Mmmhh – Good – Strong – Juice. Aaaahh.

(He takes another big gulp but this time spills the drink. As the red liquid pours all-over his face and body we are certain that it is blood he’s been drinking.)

GUY

(Screaming.) Aaaaaaahhhh!!!! Shit – Fuck – Fuck – Cunt.
Prick – Shit – Blood – Cunt. Blood – Fuck – Hell.
(Totally upset he whirls around as if to perform a weird dance.)

(OUTSIDE the sky has blackened and rolling thunder approaches. The beginnings of a grand lightning flashes into the cave. GUY all of a sudden seems frightened and sinks down on his knees. His face is ecstatic, blood smeared all over. Erratic flashes light-up its chiselled and hairy features.)

GUY

God. (He whimpers, followed by a long pause. Thunder is rumbling through the cave.)
God. (Another pause.)
Death. Pain. (His voice trembles. Another series of lightning and almost immediately roaring thunders. Their base comes out so low through the speakers that it reverberates through the intestines of the audience.)
Death – … – . Death – Hell – Pain. (He utters into moments of silence.)

(GUY nervously crawls on his knees while the thunder and lightning continue. After a while he stumbles across SOMETHING crumpled away in a corner. His attention and mood shift as he’s inspecting the strange find. It is an INFLATABLE SEX DOLL.)

GUY

Hrrrnnnpff. (Becoming excited and agitated.)
Hump – Pussy – Fuck – Cunt.

(He tears the doll out of its corner and further inspects it. Straight after finding its mouthpiece he enthusiastically starts to blow on it. Every now and again, as he pauses for breath, he breaks into uncontrollable laughter and mumbles some of his four-letter words.)

GUY

Hohohoho – Nice – Pussy – Nice – … – Mmmhh.
Hump, Hump – Ooohhh – Aaaahh – Oooohhh.
(The more the doll takes-on its fully inflated state the more he gets carried away by it all.)
Nice – Pussy – Nice. Hohohoho – …

(While he continues to blow he fumbles on his penis underneath the loincloth so that as soon as the doll is fully erect it is also ready for action. He mounts the doll and starts thrusting away.)

GUY

Ooooaahh – Niiice – Pussy – Pussy – Aaaahh – Niiiice.

(He rides ‘her’ passionately, immersed in the act of copulation. The fear and misery from earlier-on are completely gone now. OUTSIDE the night has turned into peaceful, moonlit darkness with background-noises from various busy night animals. Some odd ones are roaring away to accompany the gasping, sticky sounds from the cave. Somewhere in perhaps another chamber of the cave, we hear water dripping down into what sounds like a puddle, echoing hollowly.)

GUY

Hrrmmppf.
(Squeezing and fingering the doll while his thrusts intensify.) 
Hump, Hump, Pussy, Pussy – Hrrnnnf, Hrrnnnf.
Ohhhh – Aaahhh – Ooooaaahhhhh. (Brief pause, though his thrusts continue.)
Looove. (He finally utters.)
Looove – Hrrnnnppf – Oooaaaaahh.
(With climaxing passion, earlier words slip back into his vocabulary.)
God – Life – Pussy.
Love – God – Life. Pussy – Love – Lust. (Pause.)
Fuck – Drink – Hunger.
Thirst. Lust. God. Hunger. Love.

(The doll makes strangely moist noises as his penis slides in and out of the artificial vagina. It shakes awkwardly under his thrusts as if there was indeed life in it and his fingers produce disturbing screeching sounds as they rub over the sticky plastic. He’s just about to kiss the hole-shaped mouthpiece, as the doll all of a sudden – without any warning – explodes with a loud PANG! He is instantly, utterly devastated, left in a state of complete shock.)

GUY

NOOOOOO! God – Death – Pain – Love.
Pussy, Pussy – Noooooooo! (He holds the doll in his arms like a dead bride gunned-down on their wedding day.)
God – God – Hell – Pain.
Hate.
Death – Fuck – Fear – Life.
Love – … – Life.
AAAAAAARGHH!
(He breaks down, sobbing helplessly.)

(GUY raises his fists against the ceiling, blaming forces beyond his control for what has just happened. Flashes of lightning and thunder turn-up again, as if to respond to his curses. The sky opens its floodgates to release dark, heavy rain. Above the almost mute sobbing of GUY, the stormy weather is the only thing we hear for a while.)

GUY

Aaaaaaahhhh! – … – Aaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhh!
(He raises his fists against the sky, then breaks down again, breathing slowly and heavily.)

(Absentmindedly, his fingers wander across the limp doll until they discover a label sticking out from its side. He gathers his full attention to read what it says.)

GUY

(Not quite capable of reading, but trying hard.)
God … In – cor – … – po – … – ra – ted.
(Silence, only heavy rain and remote thunder OUTSIDE.)
Rea – li – ty – … – You – can – … – Trust.
(Silence again. He looks into nothingness. The implications of what he just read slowly dawn on him.)
God. In – corpo – … – rated.

(He unconsciously squeezes the dead doll between his fists, stands up and keeps looking into the black space in front of him. He’s getting very angry and really about to lose it.)

GUY

Fuck. Ass. (Pause. Then he’s throwing the limp doll in a remote corner of the cave.)
Death – Joke – Life – Love – Ass – Fuck – Loss.
(Rain is coming down heavily, patches of lightning pop-up with increasing intensity. He screams the last words well-over the top of the noise of the weather.)
Fuck – Ass – … – Grief.
Life. Hate. God. Joke. Death. Loss. (Pause.)
Asshole!

Curtain – end of Act 1

¶

¶

Act 2

CITY

¶

SETTING:

A very busy inner-city junction. Shops in the background, street-noises. GUY is standing there, well-groomed, wearing an immaculate business-suit with suitcase and tie, attempting to cross the street in front of him. But a never-ending stream of cars does not allow him to. A traffic-light seems to be consistently showing red. There are no other people on the street except him – despite the heavy noise he’s completely alone.
AT RISE:

GUY tries to step on the street once again but fails. It is simply impossible. He seems exhausted, yet composed. He puts down his suitcase and sighs.

GUY

I’m stuck. Here and now, as I’m facing yet another ludicrous obstacle to my miserable life. I finally realise that I don’t want to go home anymore. (Pause, a little pacing up and down.) What is my home anyway? I’m lost.
I’m trapped in a dark, hideous prison.
I’ve been turned into a complete slave.

(He laughs dryly, picks up his suitcase only to slam it against the traffic-light post.)

GUY

Goddamnit. There must be a way out. There must be a way to escape this bullet-proof shit-hole called Reality …

(More cars pass, also bigger ones – vans, lorries. We can clearly hear their Doppler effects whooshing through the theatre as they approach, pass, and fade away in the distance. GUY puts down his suitcase again, this time a lot angrier. He starts to undo his tie and collar.)

GUY

Is anybody there? Hello … can anybody hear me? See me? Do something?
(He turns round to look into all directions. No-one there. Utter loneliness in the midst of a buzzing city.)
Am I really THAT alone?

(He kicks his suitcase. Stacks of paper with numbers and pie-charts fall out, flutter into the audience over the noise of traffic.)

GUY

What can possibly be the point of all of this?
The exponential accumulation of pointless papers?
How could I ever fall into this trap?
Why am I born into such hypocrite fallacy?

(He pauses, pacing around in circles while the cars keep zipping past. The traffic-light is still showing red. A romantic violin tune slowly forms, clearly a piss-take to cheesy hollywood lovethemes. He bends down to sit on the pavement, with one hand carefully supporting himself like an old man. As the overall volume of the soundtrack fades, his voice becomes calmer too.)

GUY

Loss. (Pause.)
Losing your straight-laced, neat and sweet girlfriend one day – or wife even – after she’s always kept telling you with utmost sincerity how much she loves you, to another guy turning her overnight into a cocksucking, more-screaming whore. (Pause.)
Losing your best friend one day – or even brother – as he turns round with utmost sincerity to say “sorry”, before letting you down in exchange for the millions he’s just made through some outrageously daft business transaction.
All gone forever. Love does not exist.
You only played boyfriend and girlfriend, you only acted loving and caring – purely upon infantile programmes installed by your Mommy and Daddy or whoever else was put in charge to mentally, emotionally and sexually abuse you. In the end, what’s left is only the sad and bald football buddy starting to piss himself as he gets older – silently fading away.

(He picks up some of the strewn papers which contain sensitive company data and customer profiles. ‘Soap & Cream Media’ it says in a cute logo at the bottom right-hand corner on each leave. He crumbles them into paper balls and idly throws them into the audience. The music changes into something much darker while the car noises almost completely fade.)

GUY

I still fail to grasp that everything I’ve ever believed in was purely based on institutionalised, brainwashed lies.
Like everyone else I’ve been ruthlessly moulded into a thoroughly empty zombie. An ugly and cynical asshole. A killer monkey, trying to get out of his shit-hole at the expense of everyone else around him – whilst at the same time sucking-up to all the monkeys above.
It’s not even that the monkeys above have any power. They’re just successful at claiming it. The key to the world. The answers.
The ridiculous concepts of status and money. Ahahahahah. (He laughs drily.)

(Longer pause. He stops throwing paper balls and becomes more withdrawn instead. The music changes into something between funk and minimal.)

GUY

And then the whole ‘God’ thing. Yeah – religion. The spineless sell-out of consciousness and responsibility.
Even philosophy.All those little ideas about how reality is supposedly fabricated.What’s the fucking point to
subscribe to such bullshit if you can’t even see the reality right in front of you?
Look yourself in the mirror?
Face YOUR SELF.
(Pause. He addresses the audience on a different note.)
We eradicate each other, eat each other, devour the code of the scapegoated, so-called ‘enemy’.
All we do, day-in and day-out, is just add some more fuel to our constantly growing portfolio of mayhem. (Pause.)
And who knows, perhaps that’s really what we’re here for, live for, die for? Conquer or surrender.
Whether we surrender to Love or to Power – most ridiculously – doesn’t seem to matter at all.
Deep down we all probably want to be eaten.
We’re like black widows, striving to hand-over our self-indulgent genetic cargo to the all-powerful female (or male?) through the ritual of a Fuck and a subsequent Kill …

(GUY stands up and paces around nervously. He’s completely withdrawn in his own world now. The level of car-noises increases again. He takes off his shirt and unbuttons his trousers as if to go for a swim. His voice regains the momentum from the beginning of the Act, to rise above the level of street-noises.)

GUY

Whatever – I’m ready. I know where to go now.
I now know where my home is. (Completely naked he spreads his arms as if to fly. He closes his eyes.)
Whoever or whatever there is – take me to you.
(He steps off the pavement into the streams of passing cars. His eyes are still closed.)
I’m all Yours. Forever and Ever. Amen.

(He dives into his death. The spotlight which has illuminated him throughout the Act goes off and the sound changes into cars crashing. Horns toot, tires screech. Finally he’s getting noticed. The crash sounds go on for a while. There seem to be quite a few cars involved. Subtly, the ticking beeps of a heart-machine fade in, until they are clearly audible on top of everything else. As the heart beeps turn into the static bleep of death, the curtains fall and the theatre fades into silence and darkness.)

Curtain – end of Act 2

¶

¶

Act 3

HEAVEN

¶

SETTING:

The giant waiting lounge of an airport. We hear the sounds of planes landing and taking-off all the time. It says HEAVEN above one of the departure gates leading away from where GUY sits, alone. He appears to be extremely relaxed, wearing a white toga and sandals – like an angel, slouching comfortably, his arms spread across a long row of waiting-lounge seats. He looks sweet, sharp and gorgeous. The whole Act ambivalently fluctuates between existential drama and stand-up comedy.
AT RISE:

GUY changes his position into something even more comfortable and expresses his peace-of-mindedness with accompanying long sighs. Each sigh and word is followed by puffy clouds coming out of his mouth.Though his loose outfit and open body language would not suggest, it seems to be freezing cold in the hall.

GUY

Aaaaah – finally free. So unbelievably beautiful.
(Pause, steam comes out of his mouth with each breath.)
My ‘Paradise’ – shall I call the place where I’m going? (Two, three breaths again. Pause.) Or better where the essence of my cranium, the ghost in the shell, the teenyweeny particles of my yellow-grey brain pulp are going. The spirit, the energy. Me. My ‘soul’. Hahahaha. (He emphasises the exclamation marks of the word ‘soul’ with a tongue-in-cheek smile.)

(Another series of airplanes is starting and landing and flying by. It seems to be a really busy airport. GUY leans back deeper into his plushy waiting-lounge seat.)

GUY

I can’t tell you how glad I am that it’s all over. So good to be here now, hahaha. The life I’ve lived, the world I’ve seen. A complete disaster. An utterly pointless rat-race. My genetic code wants to survive. My ‘genes’. Whoa. Big deal.
And then what? Does sheer genetic survival really make me a happier and better man? (Pause.)
If I’m not busy fighting for food or for shelter, I’m otherwise trying to pass on those ‘genes’, find someone to fuck – and then what?
Feed any resulting offspring with my heinously patronising bullshit? Have them take-over family business, swallow my stubborn beliefs and agendas? And then what? The company will one day collapse. The kids will one day be fucked-up the arse.
And in the end, what’s left? Nothing.
The annals of recorded history? In a book, in a magazine, on a hard-drive, on a server?
Hahahaha. (He cracks-off laughing for a while.)

(GUY changes his sitting position into something more closed, arms and feet crossed.)

GUY

There really seems to be no fulfilment in our lives. Consummation takes place only at the time of our death. (Another series of planes.)
Death is what we’re ultimately here for – the Sun will eventually die. (Long pause.)
AND YET – perhaps Eternal Life IS the ultimate and achievable answer to our utterly insane Human Predicament.
Perhaps the Fear of Death only exists to compel us into such an ultimately required State of Being?
Would it be possible? By what means? At what cost? In which way? Together with whom? For what Ultimate Purpose? Or Reason?

(He changes his sitting position, opening up again. There is now almost complete silence at the airport.)

GUY

In a way, it would make sense, though. Molecules finding each other, forming something stable and yet flexible – PLOP! – and thus Life, DNA, is born.Well done, DNA. A double-helixed staircase to Heaven.

(Pause.)

But if it can assemble something so intricate and enormous, the Universe itself is actually already ‘life’ – in a way?
So when I die, ALL my particles, micro and macro, the ones not corroding or burning, will have to pop-back to where they originally came from, continue their flow in the Eternal Stream. Which means that even though I’m ‘dead’, I’m still, actually,‘alive’ – in a way.
I do certainly look different and my double-helixed spine has sadly expired. But it is still ‘me’ in the end, all part of what I originally was – before I was even born in my mother’s womb.
Is there also a Soul then? Maybe. But if there was, would it really make Death more comforting?

(Pause.)

It would still mean complete and utter surrender to whatever’s in charge of our day-to-day, tangible Existence. Surrender to what we can not ever remotely hope to grasp from where we look at in any way whatsoever. No one who’s ever been there, to the unfathomable mysteries of the thereafter, has ever come back, have they?
Except Jesus apparently, hahahaha.

(Pause.)

On the other hand, is such a belief in Eternal Life not just another trick our mind plays on us – cheeky bugger – to ease the most horrendously painful prospect of complete Annihilation? Like the hallucinations of torture-victims as they can not possibly cope with any further defilement of their infinitesimally frail nervous systems?

(Pause.)

But let’s also consider this:
Maybe all that remains from whatever we’ve attained in our lives are only the Imprints we’ve left in the Minds and Hearts of other People? And that’s it, end of the Story. There’s no such thing at all like an Afterlife – or any other Meaning. (Pause.)
On the other hand, what if there IS something like Retribution – not just in Heaven but actually spread-out across several Lives? (Pause.)
What about that?

(He gets up and starts to address the audience as if he was already in Heaven and they still trapped on Earth.) 

GUY

Lots of questions. Lots of answers.
What to believe? What not to believe?
I haven’t left any children and I haven’t left any other historical imprints either. I’m a complete nobody, having achieved nothing.
And yet, I’ve made the decision to come here, in the most purified, dignified way. I’ve worked it through, my dear brothers and sisters, dug my way out of the shit-hole. (Pause.)
I feel beautiful.
I’m a solemn and indigenous Human Being.

(He paces up and down, all-the-while excitedly smiling .)

GUY

All the suffering, all the pain. They do finally make sense.
I’ve really done it. I can accept myself, love myself – BE myself.
I’ve become One and Unified. I’m completely CONTENT. (Pause.)
I’ve actually become Immortal.

(He turns to the exit-gate that says HEAVEN.)

GUY

So then I leave you all to it, my dear brothers and sisters. To bravely tackle your futile struggle. I know in my heart, you can also achieve it one day – the ultimate, final surrender. And when you’re there, laid bare, vulnerably and wonderfully, my Eternal Essence – or whatever remains once my body is gone – will be blissfully swirling and swooshing around you.
HEALING – my dear brothers and sisters.
From the deepest depths of my soul, I promise:
I’ll do whatever I can that by the time you die you’ll be ready and beautiful too.

(Before he enters the gate he turns around with a smile of elevated bliss. He looks completely at ease. Humble, strong and beautiful.)

GUY

Byeeee. (He waves his hand and enters the gate.)

(Soon after he’s gone, we hear another airplane rise-up into the sky. It slowly disappears with a deep SHOOOM! sound above the steady noise of the airport – reverberating in the theatre for a while – until everything fades with the curtain.)

Curtain – end of Act 3

¶

¶

THE END

(Thanks go to Mr Hans Küng’s ‘Eternal Life?’ and Mr Li Hongzhi’s ‘Turning the Law Wheel’ to instil in me some of the spiritual insights for HEAVEN)

¶

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second draft

london, july 2007 – april 2009
© 2007 – 2009, all rights reserved

I – THE ARTIST

¶

LEONARDO AND THE MIRAMAX MEDICI BROTHERS

I have often wondered what LEONARDO DA VINCI would’ve done, had he lived today, let’s say in a place like London, simply just getting on with ‘his thing’. Would he be penning the new Wonderbraad, or a worldwide Coca-Colare-branding strategy? Perhaps he’d choose the art route and make it with Campbell- tagged, factory-tinned artist shit, followed by pink-yellow portraits of the President of the United States of America (sporting his trademark ‘mysterious’ Mona Lisa style smile)? He could also be more ‘radical’ (as he apparently was with his anatomy obsession and his spiritual and political views) and while unveiling photorealistic wax sculptures of naked, prepubescent girls, he is inviting the gathered audience to give it a go. Broadcast live to the world on MTV, they can try some of the new spearmint-spiced energy drink – Girl Power – directly from various-size pricks sticking out from their bodies like ferocious cases of acne vulgaris. But then again, he might simply do movies, with the Miramax guys to serve as the prestigious court to support him. Or what if his other obsession, science, in the end had completely taken him over and he ended up multiple Nobel Prize winner whose highly disputed work to treat cancer at root DNA level meant that we got finally rid of one of the most stupefying threats to our precocious mortality?

Could he have done all of those things – at once?

Then again. He might as well just be some scruffy and lonely computer nerd, who in a ghostly council estate, with sweaty palms clutching his wireless infrared mouse, day-in and dayout keeps surfing the net, in the hope to find some sort of ‘contact’ with other like-minded people on the planet. Perhaps with the business model of a Secondlife slash Google metacommunity-portal, he amasses a fortune in only two years and then either goes on to take over the world or buys a remote island on Ebay on which he and his mates found a newschool, Hippie-style commune where true unconditional love and politically unbiased child-care have become a reality for everybody involved – whilst astutely keeping it all secret from any media goons whatsoever?

But let’s leave this all up to everyone’s own imagination. What is important for us here is to ponder what ART or CULTURE really mean to us, at the beginning of the 21st century, in the midst of a ‘consumer driven’ capitalist society, like for instance again London, where during the day the world blatantly turns around the two ‘competing’ free dailies London Lite and the new London Paper and around Lost and Big Brother as soon as we crash on the couch after work.

¶

CHARLES SAATCHI’S FORMALDEHYDED SHEEP

On one hand we have so-called ‘established art’, art that is being curated and gallery-pimped between London and New York (aka ‘Nylon’, every  city hopper’s apparent paradise) and then the rest of the world’s most fanciful cities. Whilst some of it is surely crazy and cool, a lot of it comes across as selfindulgently shallow. There can be no doubt, established art – Fine Art – is a lot about money. For ‘money-people’ it is a quite sexy and safe investment – its main attractiveness (tax issues aside) being the potential to make extortionate margins in a relatively short period of time if you’ve got either a good nose for new talent or the balls to play it all cool when spending a million on a complete pile of rubbish.

In order to be allowed into the arena of Tate, MoMA or whichever temple of worship has presently won the battle for cultural supremacy, the artistic discourse needs to be molded to successfully wet the taste-buds of the current intellectual elite. You got to be flying-off to conceptual brain-wrecking exercises in an attempt to present your individual matters and answers to our universal dilemmas: death, hate, greed, war, racism, abuse. But no matter how hard you try to push those humanitarian boundaries, for art to be ‘established’, the bottom line will always be that if it doesn’t look good in an open-space Central Park loft or a renaissance Andrea Palladio mansion (next to the post-modern Scandinavian designer tables or the 5th century BC Chinese flower pots) you’re not going to be making it as an artist. You’ll probably get laid at the opening night of your first solo-show somewhere in Nylon, but you better get lucrative contracts while you’re on top of the game, private and business, if you don’t want to end up as a sad junkie art-tutor wasting away in front of his Sony vintage black-andwhite telly, in a shabby, vomit-stenched studio in downtown LA. The bottom line of ‘art’ in the context of ‘art market’ is that it definitely helps if you want to ‘become an artist’, if you know how to please people in power – and that doesn’t necessarily mean with your art alone.

At the other end, we have of course ‘underground’. Counterculture. Fuck-all, grass-root, unadulterated and raw self-expression. Emotionally deranged graphic-novel artists, pot-smoking crash-punk poets, neo-existentialist, mushroomchewing Internet illustrators, below-the-belt-hitting, razorsharp cartoonists, god-like-scripture-compiling computer programmers slash animators. If we look around on the net for a bit, we’ll find a sheer endless stream of creativity with sometimes astounding talent. The World Wide Web offers a never-seen-before diversity of styles, approaches and flavors, created and published instantaneously – without a budget or the need for any authority approval – on countless community portals and personal blogs. With the click of a button, we can share our stuff with other people in the world who appreciate what we’re doing. We can leave comments, critique, appraisals. We can do whatever we want, show each other whatever we’ve got and together rise, play, love, moan and laugh. We’re out and about, hunting and gathering, feeding and being fed, while we respectfully, mutually grow as human beings.

¶

ETERNALLY BLESSED MUSICIANS

In the midst of all this, we have – most omnipresently – MUSIC. Music, in many ways, appears to be one of the most urgent forces behind any cultural (r)evolution. I’m sure they whacked sticks on some tree trunks before painting elaborate hunting scenes into their caves – perhaps using the beats of those drums as the background tracks for their visual inspirations? With music you can virtually go anywhere, you can get everything you want in life, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll – and of course celebrity status and the vacuous promise of a ‘freedom of speech’. Your career can range from being laughed at on stage (PRINCE) to doing whatever the fuck you want with whoever the fuck you want to do it with, as one of the most influential figures in the whole scene (PRINCE). We all consume music everywhere. iPods have become nearly as important as mobile phones (or are happily merging with them as we speak). You can listen to tracks while you fuck or at work – or while you sit in a tank and shoot at Iraqis. Musicians are blessed amongst artists as they’re creating their stuff for a market which not only is simply enormous but very very REAL indeed. Music runs through the veins of our public domain. The vivid discussions about online copyright issues (1) only give us a glimpse into the death-threatening changes major labels are facing as they attempt to keep a tight reign on this incredible economic cheesecake.

¶

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN BEDDING KATE MOSS ON THE BRINK OF DEAFNESS

In order to shed even more light into our question of “what is art and culture”, here is another fantasy exercise: what would LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN do, had he written his music in 2007? Would he have set up a MySpace page and you could add him as a ‘friend’ like you do with BANKSY, ALAN PARTRIDGE or WOODY ALLEN? Would you check out his tracks and then leave a comment, “great stuff, man. keep it up”, or something? Would he be in a band, JOHN LENNON style, to press for more love, peace and freedom in the midst of a ‘free market’ madness? Would he still be able to ‘break through’ eventually and later on in his career lead a court case against shitloads of faceless suits who on behalf ofSony or Universal publicly try to cut off his balls and make him a whore they can squeeze, suck and pimp? (2)

After perhaps a turbulent life during which he DJ’s and travels the world with his special Max MSP spiked piano, he could go out with KATE MOSS or ANGELINA JOLIE and as soon as his pending deafness comes to the fore, Hello! and Rolling Stone magazine’s sales figures overnight triple as they’re running glossy exclusives purporting an angle between hypocritical pity and something which in German is poignantly referred to asSchadenfreude. For the labels, the loss of one artist doesn’t matter at all. Besides, they’ve just signed JOHANNES BRAHMS and his style is so much more urban and cool. It far better hits the nerve of the ‘now’ and thus crack-opens fresh, titillatingly virginal revenue streams – yeah, man.

And what about a guy like WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART? People loved and still love his stuff. Not for the first time has he been compared to artists like MICHAEL JACKSON and one can clearly see the point in this. There are quite a few similarities, not just the ambitious, violent father story and the incredible talent. Since the later stages of both artists’ lives come across as somewhat tragic and deeply disturbing, another intriguing question arises: could talent be doomed to failure and ultimate self-destruction in the human reality we’ve created for ourselves?

¶

THE FIGHTING VERSUS COCKSUCKING ARENA

But back to ART and CULTURE. What does ‘culture’ actually mean to us in the first place? Is it about wearing the latest designer outfits and showing them off in London’s ueber-cool Hoxton and Shoreditch? Is it embedded in novels about postwar immigration and broken family ties in Anglo-Saxon, urban society? Is it to be discovered through fastidiously crafted biscuit adverts where above-the-floor-floating people are shown with the expression of an orgasm on their stylishly made-up faces?

It is obviously very difficult to define or to judge. Renaissance style battles like the famous one between MICHELANGELO and LEONARDO about who’s the better draftsman have now turned into pseudo-intellectual discourses between one of the best draftsmen today (DAVID HOCKNEY), juxtaposed against someone who can’t draw at all (TRACEY EMIN). Who is the ‘better’ artist, JEFF KOONS or ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG? CHRISTO or NAM JUNE PAIK? A genuine, distinctive and confident Eastern European or African art student or a lecherous, world-famous, semi-senile and pretentious conceptual artist? Where and how do we draw the line(s)? The problem, if you will, with ART at this day and age, is that it could be ANYTHING, really. Give someone the luring self-righteousness of money and a somewhat Warholean ego-aloofness and they’ll seem perfectly appropriate to be one of the top 25 artists to look out for in the next issue of Art Review magazine or to open a ‘critically acclaimed’ solo show in London’s White Cube 2 gallery.

Perhaps, then, art and culture have just become another substitute for religion? At times where nothing is sacred except maybe a trademarked company logo, artists and celebrity status attract almost godlike attention. We readily worship our stars, due to weird psycho-dynamics called ‘projection’ and ‘transference’, and we happily and unquestioningly pay for their more-often-than-not lavishly expensive lifestyles.

But what does it actually mean to be ‘making it’ in the first place, what really ‘makes’ you a star? In a free-market battle for headspace and time it is the amount of LOVE and ATTENTION that you’ll get from other people, however force-fed and faked, which let you enter the mighty gates of stardom-heaven.

It’s a funny thing, though, FAME. Why is this ‘state’ so desirable? Why do most of us feel that we’d be so much ‘happier’ if we ever broke through to public acclaim? Is it not all just a silly dream for us mortals to raise our existence from the normality of everyday life into ultimately also just brainwashed ideas of importance? Should we not just get on with our pathetic little lives, down some more pints, snort some more lines, or simply pop a few more of those god-sent Serotonin pills, in order to miraculously dissolve any gnawing attacks of either hubris or self-deprecation?

¶

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II – MAKING IT

¶

GREASED AND TORCHED SLEDGES

Ever since JOSEPH BEUYS greased his torch-equipped sledges, it has become clear that everyone is creative and because of this everyone is also an artist. Living our life, this is the shamanic message, is essentially creating the ultimate piece of art. It is therefore always amusing that many ‘trained’ artists still today feel strangely uplifted or otherwise ‘ better’ than the rest of us lot who’re subserviently swiping their deep-frozen lasagnes at the localTesco or Sainsburys tills. The truth is, and they’ll also eventually be told, that we all just want to do our thing. It is part of human nature. We want to live and let live, grow and expand and if our thing – whatever it is – finally works, then great! Well-done. If not, well, we really just got to try harder. Nobody’s ever said it’s gonna be easy, have they?

Doing our thing as such has become easier than ever before, though. There really is no excuse anymore for why we aren’t the next QUENTIN TARANTINO or CHRIS CUNNINGHAM, since eleven-year-olds can already chop up their mobile phone footage on iMacs and straight away put it on YouTube, make a name for themselves. By the time they hit puberty they’d already do their first Snickers or Honda commercial or get to directSpiderman 7 – yeah, right. For even the most talented person, to become really good at what they’re doing, it takes YEARS of most diligent efforts to get across what they’re trying to say, in a way which equally works for other people. It’s not just to master the technicalities of your art. You have to also add love and suffering, thought and depth, the right amount of pleasing and teasing, darkness and tenderness – all ingredients which don’t just appear out of nowhere by pressing a couple of fake 3-D buttons. You have to LIVE and do that quite extensively and also make sure that you allow enough time to reflect back on it. Doing something from 9 to 5 and then hitting the couch for your daily Sky-sponsored brain operation will not be likely to make you an artist. Neither will the ability to sign your ten-bedroom bastard-house mortgage contract with a 24k solid-gold fountain pen while your Gucci-clad ex-model fiancé snorts all your coke in the cherry-red Porsche outside.

Only working away day and night, on perhaps even stolen equipment, from your filthy bedroom, in order to chuck out a kick-ass, refreshingly new hip-hop record (THE STREETS), or writing-up a very-well-told children’s fantasy story in the warming coffee shop downstairs (J K ROWLING) will eventually make all the difference. It is, as beautifully immortalized by bands like THE BEATLES, perhaps the only ‘way out’, out of the painful constraints we’re bound to endure in our tragic existence, as supposed to the apparent fun and freedom awaiting, should we ever manage to make things work out for us. Makes sense. But is it really?

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THE TRUE AGE OF AQUARIUS

Anyway, for those of us who feel absolutely determined to live our lives the way we want to, the time has finally arrived to do this. It’s called Web 2.0. Even if it will not quite work out in this version, in a couple of years, with Web 3.0, we’ll have certainly come a long way. The big corporations have essentially lost their power to the worldwide community at large. There’s not much they can do to prevent this. We are in the final stages of a revolution which utterly frees the individual and allows us to be connected 24/7 with everyone else on the planet, regardless of sex, age, ethnicity, religious belief, social status or else. This finally IS the Age of Aquarius. We humans are in this together.

In this ‘new world order’, money will primarily be made on the Internet. Catch-phrase ‘attention based economy’. If we manage to get the hits, we will get also the appropriate amount of money. The big corporations, of course, understand this new game already quite well, so they’d buy the fattest cows like MySpace, Flickr and YouTube in an attempt to pester their visitors with sometimes more, sometimes less slutty advertising. Squeezing out the juice. For us, though, it doesn’t matter whether our online experience is being spoilt by corporate bullshit, since above all, it’s about becoming visible in the first place. It is to use and to be used and it is all for free, so not too many questions asked, not too many issues unearthed. Just shove your stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, YouTubeor whichever portal tickles your current fancy. Create a profile, smile or be weird and you’ll soon be making new friends. Stick around, spread the word and expand your horizon and reach. Web 2.0 is about community portals and cultural hubs inviting you to meet people you’ve never met before. You’d create a worldwide patchwork of contacts and affiliates which organically grows according to the time you spend nurturing it.

In the end, if you want to be very serious about your work, you’d set up your own blog-space or website. It is the core where every thread that you leave on the net will come neatly together. We all can, without specialist knowledge, publish our work like this – visible, downloadable and re-usable – and if 10,000 people really like it and give us a pound every year, say, we’ll essentially pay our rent. What more could we want from secular life, really?

Another good thing is that everybody who’s doing their thing bloody well knows what it actually takes to do it – 100% commitment to the cause. This appreciation of others’ endeavours is usually bolstered by full, unconditional respect and therefore jealousy will in the future not be an issue anymore. Although, deep down we’re all somewhat competitive. Most of us do improve and grow, even as kids, by playful, innocent sparring. And here again – nowhere can this be more clearly seen in the arts than with MUSIC.

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THE UNDERGROUND RADIO WARS

Guys like those around London’s PushFM and RinseFM underground radio stations (at least at the time of writing) attempt to raise the envelope of “just good music”, as they themselves call it. What they’re referring to are basically computer-crafted audio tracks which can be equally played to hard-core music aficionados as well as to dancing, drug-popping party people. For any aspirational artist-producer, it is certainly one of the highest challenges to create something so wonderful and hypnotic that no-one can stop listening to.

In the arena of cutting-edge production, therefore, each ‘contestant’ tries to counter a track which has managed to hit them severely with something hitting back even more beautifully and severely. Eventually, truly outstanding pieces of work ‘naturally’ emerge. It is quite fascinating to follow such ground-breaking tracks into the stage of a substantial fan base, where all the effort someone has put into creating something that strong is all of a sudden starting to pay off – although not necessarily in terms of money. But it is certainly nice to get the recognition you deserve by peers and fans alike who not just sheepishly subscribe to ready-made superstars but instead acknowledge your sincerity and efforts with their heartfelt love and support.

The whole kick of life as an artist and the challenge of making a difference is that whether any money will ever arrive, you can never be sure (if you need to be, go and work for a bank). But you might be able to increase your chances if you as an ARTIST are prepared to surrender your talents to forces beyond your control, who in turn try and squeeze out the dosh ‘for you’, from whomever and wherever they can: the SUITS.

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SUIT WEARING RAPE MONKEYS 

Perhaps in order to become rich, suit power and its categoric imperative of HARD SELL are the only way to go. This is a tough call, but I shall end this discussion by at least putting this serious question on the map. 

How can it ever work for everyone?

Are we ‘civilised monkeys’ perhaps ‘meant’ to fuck each other over? Bomb the shit out of a country in order to revive fucked-up internal economy and secure perilous oil supplies at strategic positions? Is this the way how it works in this life, this world, in our sociobiological REALITY?

Or is capitalism not perhaps a bit too idealistic – or naive even – in terms of freedom of the individual? Since we’ve all been emotionally damaged by just the way in which our human condition works, we do eventually need to create some political framework, like perhaps an Emotional Capitalism(if that’s not a contradiction in itself :) where money is not the only bottom line at the end of the day, but where it is equally important whether the emotional integrity of the people you’re making it with is left untouched by any cynical cycle-of-abuse-induced lies?

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PAYING THE RENT

With a new breed of economy, where it is mainly about hits, some new and distinctive laws seem to emerge:

The first people who’d buy into something or somebody NEW will always get everything for FREE. It is perhaps a ‘natural’ reward, if you will, or an ‘evolutionary incentive’ in terms of micro-evolutional progress, for having the courage and spine to invest our most precious resources like headspace and time on something that we deep down feel has potential and can give us something that we need. By recognising someone or something as they’re just about to emerge, we demonstrate the ability to SEE behind a sometimes scruffy, unpolished surface – or sport at least the open-mindedness to sense that there is something great behind it – and therefore we don’t have to pay because we’re in fact the ones who’re helping it rise into the ‘sky’ (whether the one above or the media giant remains to be seen :).

On the other hand, the further away we are from something which later turns out to be IT, the more expensive it’ll be to still be a ‘part of’. By recognising something only after it has reached a more apparently visible stage of unfoldment, we really are not needed anymore for its continuing success. The breakthrough has already happened and the tables of this extremely translucent deal between ‘seller’ and ‘buyer’ have henceforth forever turned. In other words, our failure to jump on the bandwagon while it was parked in front of our door, perhaps while even all our friends always kept going on about it, results in increasingly costly procedures to still grab a place by the time it’s gone past our noses.

There is this funny saying in Vienna, that people who have no idea how the system works ought to pay so called Moron Tax (Deppensteuer) in order to compensate for their adamant refusal to look the truth in its face. I feel this is quite a sweet analogy for what seems to be emerging as a kind of self-regulating dynamic in a grown-up economy of the 21st century. Perhaps it turns out, after all, that ignorance is not actually bliss anymore, but does in fact cost quite a lot of money.

Whereas awareness, thinking and creativity not only pay off, but are possibly the only way to go.

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London, May 2007
© 2007, all rights reserved

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(1) Interesting paper about the problems of online music rights written by Apple’s grand father himself, STEVEN JOBS —> www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

(2) Hysterical article about the way how major labels hunt down new artists and then fuck them over —> www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic.html

anyway, i feel very excited about these. hope you guys like them as well :)

© 2007, all rights reserved

“we astrologers feel that there is a ‘meaningful logic’ behind the movement of the PLANETS in our solar system which deeply affects us as human beings. by somehow ‘relating’ to our endocrine and nervous systems, the planetary CYCLES thereby establish a framework which we have come to refer to as FATE. behind FATE, we feel, lies a certain programme, and the goal of this programme – the game plan, or MEANING of it, if you will – is to reach a genuine state of HAPPINESS – brought upon through a healthy and mature dedication to the individual and collective GROWTH of HUMAN POTENTIAL.

on one hand we are asked to grow INSIDE ourselves [MOON] where we find out who we really are as a person. by digging down deep into the core genetic TRUTH [PLUTO], we carefully learn to accept the fact that we are evolutionarily trapped into a state of ANIMAL NATURE. as soon as we have come to terms with being this lonely, vulnerable creature who desires to merge with other such vulnerable creatures we can eventually become CONTENT as human individuals. we can then emotionally and spiritually open up to other content people without fear of being rejected or otherwise hurt.

but at the same time we all continuously grow OUTSIDE as well [SUN]. we expand our reach into the world around us and with an ever increasing lightness and confidence express our true inner SELVES like worry-free, innocent CHILDREN. we want to unleash our dormant potential, so that we can all be STARS in the end, in our own individual drama called LIFE. the SKILLS to achieve this, as western, PSYCHOLOGICAL ASTROLOGY sees it, are represented by the PLANETS in our CHARTS.

and all the way through this spectacular concept of LIVING we humans also experience another somewhat sad and strange concept: TIME PASSING slash AGEING [SATURN]. we feel we are caught up in a REALITY we have to submit to, a PRISON, ruled by JEALOUSY and DECAY, which we cannot seem to escape. we astrologers believe that only through the existence of PAIN are we humans compelled to get ‘our act’ together and eventually PLAY a more confident, active and fun part in our own individual SLICE OF REALITY.”

reinhard schleining
london, 17th april 2007

© 2007, all rights reserved

to find out more go to –> www.systemicastrology.com

I – WHAT ON EARTH IS HAPPENING

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AS WE VIGOUROUSLY slither towards yet another year’s end – 2007 – we once again wonder: What the hell is it? What is still wrong with this world? Why are we still killing, abusing, torturing, spoiling, if all we really want in life – from life – is just to be HAPPY? Are we again not going to get anywhere near, also not this year, towards perhaps at least marginally  altering the glooming crash course of our poor planet? Climate change, poverty, famine, terrorism, environmental mayhem. The terrifying prospect of nuclear wars. Corrupt and cynically antiliberal governments. Intensified media-spin of pivotal public information. Further intrusion into our ever so sensitive privacy. And, on a more personal level, the soaring deterioration into depression and resignation, intertwined with the weird sensation of being increasingly alienated from people around us – friends, families, partners, colleagues, lovers. What has been unfolding thus far is really just another year of eerily empty consume slavery in a dull, almost surreal treadmill, devilishly staged against the emotionally unsettling backdrop of failed intimate bonding – if we do actually have any love life at all, in our sad, single-cell city-cave households. What is the point, we sometimes wonder, to carry on living like this – merely existing? Why don’t we end it just here, push the buttons, pull the plugs, and that’s that, end of the story, we finally manage to escape this tragically man-made prison? It wouldn’t really matter, would it? Life still goes on, the planets steadfastly keep moving, nature will always survive. It’s just US HUMANS who’d be gone – so what?

There must be some deep-down life-force, or a (genetically?) embedded core belief in humanity, if you will, to keep on fighting abuse and havoc and to bravely pull-up our sleeves in order to work towards a somewhat better, more humane reality. We seem to carry inside a vision where life has to work for every single one of us, regardless of passport or bank account, sex, religion, culture or views. And yet – however persistently we hear the call for more human unity – HUMANITY – we first need to get our own individual act together. We can’t even recycle our beer-cans properly, so how can we possibly contribute to an increase of LOVE and RESPECT in this world, however inisgnificant and meagre?

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II – THE PARADIGM SHIFT OF POWER

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ONE OF THE problems seems to be that by subscribing to, however much recycled, still essentially ‘Paulinean’ value and belief systems (irritatingly oftentimes referred to as ‘Christian’), our western civilisation has built its cornerstones on pretty muddy grounds. Its core structures – and consequently most of its branches – are essentially a lie. The whole intrinsic battle between the sexes as well as our genetic animal nature have never been properly addressed, not even remotely acknowledged. And yet, the same set of views was determined enough to go nuclear by the end of the last millennium, with the threat of complete human extinction cold-bloodedly asserting the right of calling the shots in this world. In 2007, this essentially means that we’re all being patronised by patriarch, rigidly corporate power structures. MONEY has replaced all other certificates for ‘alpha’ male- or femaleness like heritage, intellectual ability, cultural achievements or otherwise claimed, however preposterous, ‘genetic superiority’. Those who have the money now, at the beginning of the 21st century, have also made sure that not only will they (and their families) keep their tight reign on it for any foreseeable future but that they can effectively generate MORE almost effortlessly, at the whim of any however dimwit board-room decision and – most alarmingly – also war-room decisions, as we’ve sadly seen most recently. We’re now operating within a paradigm where money is EVERYTHING and the inescapable truth is that those of us who haven’t got it, here and now, at the beginning of the 21st century, haven’t really got much chance to ever get anywhere in life – apart from maybe scoring a girlfriend if they perfume their armpits with the right brand of deodorant-spray – or more foresightfully disguise their ruthless ambitions with the ability to bend over, right time, right place, in the rat-race for the sparse company hot-seats where apparently fat bonuses are impatiently only awaiting to be unplugged.

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III – LOOKING BENEATH THE SURFACE

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IN THE FACE of such darkness, it is admittedly sometimes just easier to subscribe to Hello! magazine or other Hollywood / Bollywood celebrity bullshit which PR companies and media giants cynically vomit into our cultural void. Within the everyday challenge of what we refer to as ‘our life’, with its permanent, subliminal struggle for power, we pretty much function like tiny, fragile gears within a giant, global clockwork. Gears which have sadly been screwed throughout our politically charged and emotionally and / or physically abusive upbringings. What Systemic Psychology is able to teach us is that we’re in a way not really meant to be ‘loved’ in this world (at least not on a surface level) and to a certain extent not even liked or appreciated. Within the limping clockwork of our everyday reality we’re much rather being usurped by each other and through the assertion of power and the seduction of sex more or less helplessly controlled and manipulated. As long as we’re blaming other people or situations for our ugly experience of life, we do not have the slightest chance to ever change anything at all. The clockwork will only keep spinning, awkwardly and grindingly, and we, the gear, will only further deteriorate into the painful sensation of ageing, betrayal and despair. The simple, bleak truth is that thereisno one to blame, no god, country, religion, parent, partner, fate, president. This is it, us humans, and what we participate in, with every single breath, every single heartbeat, is our very own, custom-made Slice of Reality. What we therefore desperately need is careful repair work to our poor, damaged gears – the painful and deeprooted procedure of EMOTIONAL HEALING.

It is indeed very unfortunate that the framework we’re stuck in, with our almost hysterically machinesque 9-to-5-job structure, doesn’t ever give us a fair chance to find out who we truly are. We’ve established a system which makes it almost impossible for us to ever ‘be ourselves’, let alone ‘love ourselves’ which is of course intrinsically required to ultimately ‘being loved’ also by others. There is no real awareness about the importance of EMOTIONAL HEALTH embedded into our western society. At the end of the day, what we ultimately long for are friendships and relationships built on warmth, depth and understanding, instead of insecurities, superficialities and power-games. We’re way off-target, psychologically speaking. And it is in the systemic interest of people (gears) in power that we’re being kept in this state, where we haven’t got a clue about the way how it really works in this world.

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IV – VICTIM AND PERPETRATOR MECHANICS

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LOOKING AT IT from the outside it is almost ironic. All we want is to be surrounded by people who can open up to us as honestly as we wish to find ourselves capable of opening up to them. And yet, all we’re achieving are uncomfortable and energy-draining entanglements with Others, trying to gain some advantage through us – sexually, financially, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually or whatever else they feel they desperately need us for. They seem compelled to socially climb through their fake affiliations with us and would skilfully camouflage these bonds as friendship, or – most disillusioningly – love even. It doesn’t matter whether they’re being conscious or unconscious about the dependency strings being created. They are in any case people who cannot actually see us and consequently cannot possibly care about us, no matter how much they openly claim that they do. Once the relationships or friendships are over and we’ve had enough time to unwind and move away from them, we’re suddenly strangely unable to understand how we could’ve ever been attracted to them in the first place. 

On the other hand, we find ourselves continuously a victim of people who’ve got some sort of power OVER us (or on an even darker level, who we hand over this power due to some devastating early-childhood programming). These people are ‘getting off’ on establishing all sorts of sick dependency strings in order to submit us to their pathetic attempts to escape their painful experience of utter, inescapable loneliness. And yet – from whichever side we look at it, victim or perpetrator – we’re all victims and perpetrators, stuck in our HUMAN CONDITION, the dark clockwork / framework also referred to as the CYCLE OF ABUSE. We’re not free in any way whatsoever, held hostage by nasty life-scripts in an ugly prison of attachments and needs. We can not possibly find HAPPINESS and PEACE in this world. We’re basically doomed to failure – unless we CAN eventually take charge of our lives and accordingly ACT upon ourselves via the powerful magic of CHANGE.

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V – RECLAIMING OUR PRECIOUS HEADSPACE

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THIS IS THE only one way out of the prison. Stepping out of the abusive cycle through healing. We have to deal with the fact that we’re all alone in this world, lonely gears spinning away as time passes (even if we sometimes manage to crawl back into the substitute womb of a family). And then take responsibility for exactly how and how much TIME we spend with ourselves and in turn with each other. Buying into brands, boyfriends, girlfriends, celebrities, mobile phones, mortgages, websites, countries, TV programmes or whatever / whoever else want to get into our fragile minds (and eventually trousers and pockets – psychologically, it’s a boundaries thing) will only hand over to other people our ever so precious HEADSPACE. Since we’re essentially a brain, mysteriously jacked-in to the experience of living, our headspace is the only true asset we’ve got to offer to other people and thus to the whole world at large. It is literally our REAL ESTATE and – why not – 2008 could finally be the time to reclaim it from everyone who’d be inhabiting it without our kind and sincere permission. We have to learn to say NO and self-assertively press the unsubscribe button in order to cut ties with dangerous power trippers and needy emotional vampires. Giving people we DO NOT LOVE our headspace is what only further empowers them and in turn buries us deeper into the framework of being their slaves. Whereas in turn, supporting those people, ideas and products that we truly love and care about will make all the difference and eventually FREE us. In other words – kiss by kiss and hug by hug we can, with a clear, healthy spirit and mind, change this dark, unsettling world forever.

Let’s therefore see whether 2007 is yet another passing, insignificant snapshot of human history or whether we can stir the titanic ship of humanity into a more beautiful, meaningful direction. Perhaps another wake-up call might alert us to do something about our condition, not only wait, endure and follow? Perhaps we need to be reminded, over and over again, in the midst of day-to-day dullness and slave entertainment, that it only takes one single desperate hand to push a red button or to pull a nylon string on a vest, for us all to go down, blown apart into pieces – essentially fractalised back into the random, amoebean splinter code as how we apparently once popped-up on this planet which we sometimes later lovingly called THE EARTH.

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London, November 2007
© 2007, all rights reserved