Persian Mysteries and the Immortality Rites of Zoroaster

Tower of Silence (Dakhma), Mumbai by Cornelius Brown

“…never age and never die, never decay and never rot, ever living and increasing, being master of its own wish: when the dead will rise, life and immortality come, and the world be restored to its wish.” 

Yasht 19.2.11. James Darmesteter, The Zend-Avesta, Part II, The Sirozahs,Yashts and Nyayis; Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XXIII (Oxford, 1883), p.290

__________

It is 12^th century Persia, the continental-temporal mirror image of 21^st century Canada. After a lesson on the estate, I a youth of educable age, begin to row across a placid lake with my father. The day is warm, with cool breezes flushing our skin in a mixed haze of natural praise and remorse for the end days of summering. My father, a muscular, bearded intimidation of manhood, speaks with the grazing lurch of intense commanding. As we row, in separate crafts, the waters turn rapid. In that moment, he begins testing me on my learned material. 

The oral literature of the day is mind-bending and terse in its memorable strings of morality, geography and spirituality. I’m able to recall various characters and events, and as I extrapolate, the waters toss and turn unexpectedly. At my wavering voice, my father’s eyes brim with the frosted fire of dark Persian mirth. Yet, as soon as I veer into future’s allusions, spouting the literary names and waves of later centuries unheard, a fire burns in his eyes of serious intent to quiet my youth’s wandering. As he reaches out to grab me into his craft and row back ashore to the consistent presence of historic symmetry, we are both swallowed by the apparition of a waterfall along the other shore, pouring us downward with the turbulent waters in a vein of undone chronology and placeless imagination. 

World According to Avesta by Orijentolog

I call out the names of literary history upwards along the upended future. Until the 21^st century’s own dawning, my mind, feckless among the archaic forms of Iranianization, is unceasing in its deliberations on the foreshadowed youth of humanity. I turn and writhe with ancestral might into the sheer unknowable mists. My father has since disappeared, and in that silence I begin to know my name.  

_________

Driving out demons with Masonic symbology
         Over the infinite sands of civilization,
         breathed and created out of time
In the sun’s ravishing corner of a universe,
         un-tempted and forever at a loss
                Between the child’s two eyes
                closing
On death and the holocaust of our forsaken government
         Laughing at the trees’ roots


When stretched to the bottom of India’s or Africa’s wells
         Ousting up the belief in life as a drunken tragedy
                              Yet, be not humourless
                              nor without comic sophistry


In the dance and song
         Come alive by the sexual majesty
                              In theatre’s delicate ways,


To present the creative being
as one with truth’s bold and upheld music
         Reflecting back in the caged mirror
                              A creator anew

- excerpt from "From Behaved Freedom to Absolute Nonsense"

The Voice of Nothingness is Not Silent

Keep listening. Repetition is the rhythm of a harmonious narrative.

________

Grandma paces across the massive floor space. Such a humungous house is a crime to live in alone. This is the end, after more than half a lifetime, and he’s gone. The family remembers him well. He used to sit, unmoving, for immeasurable hours in that chair by the fireplace. 

My dad, begrudging this unseemly fact of life, is bent on taking out all the young folk (now almost in their thirties) to the grocery store, “to get whatever you want!” As we board the car, I can’t think of anything more to want than for us all to be together again, though I suppose even the Lutheran God would deem that otherwise. 

When we’ve all gone through the supermarket aisles, I’m left alone, at a loss to find exactly what I’m looking for, I trudge hell-bent through the fruits and vegetables. Everything’s rotten. 

Again, my vegetarianism is marginalized in the family, I can’t choose between swollen cantaloupe and mangled lettuce any more than I can between two cuts of meat, it all seems inedible to me. Everyone leaves the store without me. 

I walk the highways indefinitely, then, finally after a swathe of nights changing traces overhead with sunrays, I am bled of fictitious impersonality before the might of the great city ahead. The parks are filthy, and an ongoing fair only cements the fact. 

At a chess table I find my old friend from Sudan. He is indifferent, though welcoming. We move here and there amid the goings-on, attaining food and drink in our path, as we sight our circumstances and in the usual mode of conversation, dastardly criticize the milieu and technological demonry of our host society, brandishing bitter tongues of aging cynicism and spite. 

I again leave the scene, suddenly struck with a sense of purpose, to see my own Love, first-hand. 

________

In the reared tragedy of common history
Gone from the Irish shores that reach into the heart of a small mayflower
Lore teaching the youth and middle-aged men of their rights
                    And losing fate in the unreasonable song


To play out our entrenched groove that rides into spherical motion,
A dreamless awe maintaining the earthy power to cool enraged throats
                    And impress a soft layer of peace on the back
          An all-escaping flesh
                              Of our siblings who praise the sun
                                         And its ever-flowing majesty

- excerpt from "Along My Own Shore"

No Country Mother West, Birth of Father Sun East

"...it was like we was both back in the older times, and I was a horseback going through the mountains in the night, going through this pass in the mountains, it was cold and there was snow on the ground, he rode past me and kept on going, never said nothing going by just rode on past, he had his blanket wrapped around him with his head down, when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it about the color of the moon. In the dream I knew that he was going on ahead and he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark, in all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he’d be there..." from No Country for Old Men by The Coen Brothers

_______

The road from the American Southwest opens in a lightning flash northward. A literal streak of beaming spectral intensity whitens the sand-whipped pavement unto the Canadian border beyond. This is my road, from Mother’s home of her dreams, to the creative migrant’s expatriate sway. A great triangle figures over the backdrop of North American flight. A sweet host of ethereal musing enlightens our unforeseen paths with adamantine wisdom. More southerly, the Peruvian fleet screams in my head with a need to lie beneath a doctor’s analyses, feet pointed horizontally, outstretched and fixed on the meridian point of loosened stress. Though, I am always late.

Waking up, exhausted and bedraggled, I find a representative from Amazon Watch at a doctor’s office, telling me I’ll be seen on the morrow. He’s an astute Englishman, proud and busy. I head back to Mom’s. A car pulls up in our driveway as we serve dinner. A human rights organization representative accompanies my old friend from Sudan.

My heart flies to cerulean heights under the darkening late feast of sky. His African build glows through a rejuvenated skin. His head, bald as usual, is unblemished and perfectly globular, fitting for such an astounding brilliant balanced mind. He greets us and I immediately have my mother fix him a decadent plate of meat. After dinner, he and his organizational representatives stay for conversation. My parents have retired upstairs.

“You have been a father and a friend,” my eyes tear with conviction at understanding our separate paths, crossed by pure benediction in our shape-shifting inglorious world. “Thank you for visiting me in person.” I am ever relieved to see him healthy, glowing and taking on his dream of working for his people, forced migrants of Egypt, in the comfort of a socially and technologically developed country as we enjoy in the West. His road is unlighted. With pronounced intent, their vehicle sets off into the unforgiving American night.

_______

West
To dream of going west represents fulfillment, opportunities, and growth. Alternatively, west symbolizes death, old age or an ending of something. (Source)

_______

western civility estranged
captivity in genital awareness
a rough and tumble, hide
and seek gathering
pushing into skin
draped exotic
law, broken by
caress and
gentle magic,
winning over
the ravaged tragedy
of attraction:
a sounding
for the war
on sex

- excerpt from "monosexuality"

  

Lucid Remedies Affects Waking Consciousness

Lucid Dream Tea from Algonquin Tea Company is a wild-crafted sweet gale / bog myrtle. Drink 1 cup, well-steeped before bed.

The tea has the effect of extraordinary stimulation, wherein the mind is active with constancy, which is why the normal state of consciousness carries over beyond the threshold of sleep. Beware, sleep on the tea is not as restful as without.

- testimony of a personal friend

__________ 

In Monterrey, Mexico, I am living in my old place with parents. I was the same age as now, though living with them. It’s funny because my Dad is dead. My brother was around but did not talk, he was just a presence. We had to pick up someone from my old elementary school. As we drove by, with my grandparents in the truck, we saw a big new door on the school. There is a park across from us. As we drove by in the park, we saw lots of birds. They were having a feast of food from the street vendors. There was an owl, crow, peacocks, turkeys and other strange birds. As we passed by the door, a girl shared a corn on the cob with a huge black turkey taller than her. The turkey would bite a few grains and the girl would bite from the outside. She was waiting to be picked up. We went around the corner and parked behind a tricycle. I got out of the car. I walked in the park and chased the birds. There were people there waiting for the kids. The birds got angry and the people ran away. Now the school is empty, all the kids have been picked up. I crossed the street and went in the school. A big patio is caked with mud. A few kids were playing soccer there. Since I was there to walk through the school, I searched for my old classroom without success, the school changed a lot. They had new buildings with big glass windows.

With my cousin, we received some coupons from the newspaper. Mine said “Monterrey” in big, red letters, handwritten as by a child. My cousin had a different piece of paper. I looked at his.

On another night under influence of the tea, I am with a group of people in an isolated cabin in the mountain wilderness. We are besieged by a ravenous pack of wolves. The cabin is invaded completely. All we have to fight back are pillows and straw brooms. 

_________

There is slight chance that the Dream Tea may affect daily waking consciousness, i.e. in the form of recurrent deja-vu as “dream characters” and “dream figments” however in life. In these cases the recurrent manifestations which trigger a dream-life liminal state are in the form of plants and certain characteristic features of people. The following stories are two examples.

In Michoacán, hiking through mountain range. I traveled much these days, walked a lot. On the corner of a road, tall up to the torso of a medium sized person standing with small, orange flowers in the shape of trumpets. Seeing the plant became a catalyst for dream recollection, it was as if the plant had existed purely in dream, though was interestingly present in my waking consciousness.    

If you’re in Mexico, this kind of person sticks out. He was 14, but looked 8. He looked like the main character from the film “The Blue Lagoon”. He was very blonde with curly hair, a strawberry or crystal blond. He liked to dress with a loin cloth and perform fire juggling. I arrived in Palenque and was hanging out with street drummers. Among them there was this kid, playing drums with a girl. I thought she was his mother. Later on, we stayed in the same place close to the ruins in Palenque. He asked me if I could buy gas for him for his fire show. He looked to young. That girl I saw with him wasn’t his mom. I helped him. He started his show on a street crossing. I collected the money. We got money at least to pay the hostel camp site and to get burgers. It was already dark and we were heading back to our place, some cabins near to the pyramids. He told me a bit of his story. He said he was 14, and fled home to look for his brother. His brother was a drum player and hitchhiker. He started telling me incredible stories like traveling to India and practicing mantras. We were hanging around a hippie commune with Hare Krishnas so I wouldn’t believe him. He sung mantras like, “Hare Hare Hare Hare Sham Bo”. I wondered how such a young kid traveled alone. He had his own tent, all by himself. I think he would have liked to travel with me, but I didn’t offer and he didn’t ask. This is a recurring situation with many of my blonde male friends and even my Dad (who was also blonde).

_______

“A struggle to exist.
In any form, taken
whether through ideology or bread
the resonance of the painful universal cry
into an imperfect echo that was never us.”

“In the process we have transformed
and become unrecognizable to ourselves
as the mirror casting our own reflection dirties with our pathetic work
for the sick sighs that last only in the mind after the inescapable is approached
finally
with complete resolve
in the last gasp
before the drop into…”

- excerpt from "Haunted by the lack of breath."

Seizure of the Father from the Western Family

Fighting Forms by Franz Marc

Taking place on the property of my Father’s house, there is great tension in the air as the house is stormed by government police, I hide somewhere near the trailer with my sister as I exit in similar fashion to the end of the movie “The Professional” I am caught, however, by officials after a standoff where my sentencing is escalated by the moment due to my non-cooperative actions as they assault me with shotguns and take me into custody, some of my family members there seem to have been killed as there was an incident involving drugs or an unclear criminal derivative of that sort. I am in the back of a police car, and exclaiming, “I am someone” in multifarious expressions as my life sentencing is foreseen by the accompanying police officer and in my mind, life takes a turn for the exceptionally terminal. Call it a nightmare, if you will.

September 11, 2011