Oh Holy Fog

The raga swirls about her bare white room creating eddies of sound that fill the corners and cover the ceiling with paprika and saffron hues.

A nebula forms around her head, orbits about and congeals into a pulsating gray nimbus.  She walks down the hall to her father’s room.

Her father is in a trance, and upon opening his eyes, he says: “What you do does not matter.  You are nothing but decaying organic components.  You mean nothing.  This, what we do, is nothing.  What you wait for in the future is nothing.  So stop.”

The floor disappears below and she falls through the void looking up just in time to see the world above go dark.  Her father above peers down behind an iris shutter closing. She falls through the black.  Arms stretch out of the darkness but can not arrest her fall.

She falls through an apocalyptic face in flames  — mouth agape — floating in space.  She intuits that the meaning of life is being revealed in this scene —  all is despair.

A blinding flash of white reveals that she’s now flying over anonymous cities and countryside.  She stutters mid-air and falls again.  She falls with great speed and gravity.  She can do nothing to arrest the fall.  She plunges to earth and hits the ground — and in this manner she wakes up gasping for air.

She’s encrusted in a film of the calamine lotion that was slathered on her in the emergency room last night.  She speaks automatically to the nurse in a torrent of words that waited a thousand years to be heard:

“You have to teach me to take the wind load.  I need a prayer room and chaplet next to me at all times, so I’ll rarely move.  I’m incubated and intubated.  My seizures are mine alone and I’d like you to respect that, under starry skies, and below level ground.  Try adapting, submarine-like, living in an abrupt sloped space.  I need my pillars back!  What is it that truly bothers you?  Do you flinch at roaches flying your way?  Does it concern you that youth culture will swallow you in the end?  Repent and stay quiet.  I fed the cat.  I was overtaken by the vapors when I opened the can of cat food:  Red Snapper Vesper Bits, it read.  God bless hair balls!  The cat walked out of the kitchen uninterested.  The fumes filled the kitchen and my revelation came to fruition.

I became a rice weevil.

And I kept exhorting: ‘oh holy fog,’ as the fog rose up and obscured the kitchen.  Laxity.  A  laxity of mind for which the fog was a metaphor.  A purple miasma seeped in like a cloud and nothing was self evident anymore.  There was a din, a blinding light and then complete darkness.”

“Writing gave me something to do every day.”

— William Burroughs