Shiva the deconstructor

In the traditional image of the Dance of Shiva, note that the angles of the legs form two intersecting planes orthogonal to the body's frontal plane. This implies Shiva is simultaneously dancing through many dimensions at once. He inhabits a multidimensional reality, and when we speak of Shiva as destroyer, the larger picture is that Shiva is the Great Deconstructor of realities in the matrix of mutually embedded N-dimensional quantum cosmological systems.

Certainly destruction, as by fire, is one way to purify ignorance. Another is by dismantling or deconstructing it, piece by piece. (I get the feeling that this is what Patrick Fitzgerald is doing.) It is interesting to regard the Shivaic force in this light because it is something we can participate in, not so much in the spirit of the rationalist French deconstructive literary theorists, whose purpose is to use relativistic philosophical strategies to give them power over the tyranny of textual misconstructions, but more as computer programmers debugging code with the purpose perhaps ultimately coming out with a new version. Let's put it this way: if God were Bill Gates, you wouldn't expect World 1.0 to be any good. You wouldn't even begin to take it seriously until World 3.0. I don't know about you but I'm expecting a new release of this buggy world any day now.

The lost art of acid rapping

I submit that there was a moment in time—the Sixties—when a confluence of a certain mode of questing consciousness together with chemical enhancement produced an ecstatic state of elocution called the acid rap, which in its most advanced form yielded miracles of verbiage the likes of which have not been seen in these benighted realms before or since. (Apparently there is a latter-day phenomenon called acid rap, which is an underground subgenre of rap music devoted to evoking the horrific; please, let us not confuse that with the original term.)

There seem to be few recorded examples of the classical acid rap, even those fabled rants of Neil Cassady at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, although here's an annotated one (you need the annotations, like when he says "I got the penguin right here in my pocket," he's referring to the Penguin edition of Kerouac's On the Road). We can only rue that there was usually no one around functionally capable of recording many such events when they occurred throughout freakdom in that epoch; although surely the most famous example of one that was recorded was The End by The Doors, improvised during the recording session by a subjectively altered Jim Morrison. (How prescient was his "The killer awoke before dawn/He put his boots on/He took a face from the ancient gallery and/He walked on down the hall..." For we are now in the throes of an administration presided over by just such an Oedipal lunatic.)

Some of the most inspired examples of this genre, however, were evidently uttered by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose reputation as a conversationalist at the time (early 19th century) exceeded his considerable fame as a poet. So one can only imagine what kind of magnificent albatross-fixated, Khan-crazed, mariner-opiated torrents of words must have exploded from his bardic lips in those palpitating midnight hours of shared communion with the animating soul of the universe.

See eye, eh?

I am perhaps taking a foolish risk by revealing this information, but I work undercover for the C.I.A. It seems unnecessary to keep this to myself anymore, as my cover will probably be blown soon anyway by the current administration.

Yes, I was recruited to work for the Cosmic Intelligence Agency sometime between my last life and this one; I cannot recall the loka where this happened, but I surely must have been a little under the influence of some divine elixir when I signed on the dotted line, as I now have reason to seriously question the purpose of being here at all. There is precious little intelligence to make note of. The idea, you see, was that I would write up whatever I heard anybody say anything, or saw anybody do anything, that reflected some degree of intelligence here in this realm, which has the code name "The Pit." By this point I have lost the address where I was to send my reports, which I have never had the heart to fabricate anyway. Now it is true that no one has ever contacted me about these missing reports...yet! But it is always possible that I shall be called to account. And then what?

I realize that most people will consign this memo to the category of insane ravings. But if you should happen to know what I am talking about, if it resonates, as they say, then perhaps you too are an agent. Maybe you were recruited, as was I, and have forgotten all about it until now. If you suspect this to be the case, let me know. Maybe together we can figure out what it is we are supposed to do next, in the obvious dearth of data that presents itself. Perhaps we are living in the eye of the hurricane, where everything is happening except where we are. There may yet be hope that intelligent life exists somewhere on this planet outside the circumscribed area of our perception. The prospects for this, however, do not seem encouraging, I must say.