Illuminated Psychosis: UFO, GOETIA, AND SEX OFFENSE BY cori hart
SEVEN STORY HOTEL ***LEAKED***
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SEVEN STORY HOTEL ***LEAKED*** 〰️
I
Motherfucker was beeping at me. Pulling out my earbuds I turned to find him in the young adult section. He was perched on a stool with books on UFOs strewn about his scabbed feet. He cracked me a devious smile. “Beep Beep,” he said. I laid the books I was shelving on the floor and took a step toward him. I’ve kicked out enough lunies this week to consider myself a seasoned vet. “Everything alright?” I asked. And with that he launched into an incoherent soliloquy, gesticulating with his hands like a German-expressionist stage act. Not one word discernible. It was a language that sounded both alien and familiar—something ancient. It was similar to the mad tongues I heard spoken during church camp as an adolescent, albeit slightly lobotomized. At first, I thought he was retarded, or maybe horribly medicated, but it quickly dawned on me that this old bastard was more lucid than me. He was caught in a flowing torrent of facial gestures and oscillating emotions, not controlled or forced, but present. It was akin to Charles Manson’s performance when the square reporter asked, “Who are you?”—as if such reductions of self could possibly apply to someone who's spent considerable time outside of Einstein’s “squared” space-time universe.
He drew me over with a finger and whipped out a little green book, straight from the ether and deft as a magician. In his hand was The Lesser Key of Solomon, the ancient magical grimoire of Goetian (that’s to say demonic) deities and invocations, inspired by the great biblical wizard King Solomon himself. I told him I was familiar with it and that seemed to get him excited. He drew a hexagram in the air with his finger, and then mimed as if he were shooting a ray of light up from the book and into the sky. He made a large orbital motion with his hands. “Huuuuuuge!” he said with an intonation you would expect to hear from some long-extinct hominid. He opened the book and poked at an invocation, urging me to read it aloud:
I invoke Thee, the Terrible and Invisible God: Who dwellest in the Void Place of the Spirit. Arogogorobrao: Sothou: Modorio: Phalarthao: Doo: Ape, The Bornless One: Hear Me: etc.
I shook my head and said, “I don’t want to say it.” I was familiar with the text and had promised myself to stay away from it—those with no experience in occult work can’t begin to appreciate the power of an utterance. He laughed heartily and then proceeded to tell me a story. Though it was completely in-discernible, from his exuberant signaling and garbled vocalizations, I could decipher the gist.
He was a soldier, and one night driving through (California?) a huge saucer built of light materialized over his car. He emphasized the concepts “huge” and “bright.” He was sucked up into the light—whether his physical body or simply his consciousness, I could not say. It was at that moment he made contact with ... something, and that something forced an object (material, etheric?) into his head. He then tapped at his lips with an air of pride, as if to impress on me that I had just been blessed with the origin story of his autistic speech.
I was amazed to tell you the truth. Not so much by the story but by his eyes. His steady pupils were gentle, but large and full like micro-wormholes sucking in all the subtle light of this world and the next. I didn’t want to kick him out, but there was no way I could explain this shit to my boss if she stumbled upon us. I simply asked him if I could snap a photo, which he appreciated, and took the elevator up to continue shelving. He put his nose down in the book and got back to work of his own.
This is not a fiction
II
Time is returning ... shapes regaining their definition. I had been standing in front of the Eastern Press wall, lost in an optic reverie—all those great classics bound in hard leather, alphabetized to perfection. I often err towards chaos, but there is an eroticism latent in a nicely organized bookshelf. The spell broke when I noticed a copy of Plato’s Republic fallen on the floor. Reaching for it, I was again reminded of the man downstairs...
The detail people seem to forget about the cave-allegory Socrates demonstrates in book 7 of the Republic is this: once the illuminated man descends back into the cave to impart his knowledge on his ignorant, shadow-watching cave brethren, he stumbles like a fool, having had his pupils dilated by the light of the external world. If there had been cave police, he’d had been apprehended on the spot for his strange and erratic behavior.
But what if he hadn’t crawled from the cave, slowly making his way to the light, allowing his eyes to adjust bit by bit as he inched closer to the caves mouth, but was rather plucked from the cave and dropped off outside by some audacious, brain-probing creature? Would his pathetic eyes not be instantly and irrevocably blinded by the light? Surely he would still have caught glimpses? Perhaps not grasping the noumenal thing-in-itself, as Kant would put it, but at least glimpses of the phenomenological: iridescent refractions of light flowing through three-dimensional space. He would still hold SOME secret knowledge of the world above. I thought to go down, hand the old man a pen and paper, and make him reveal to me his secrets.
A few minutes later I trotted back down to our bookshop’s cafe to pour an iced-coffee, half hoping to find him down there. “Did you see that crazy old man in the young adult section?” my coworker behind the bar asked. I told him I did and he demanded that if I see him again, call the police. “Why?” I asked. “He’s insane! He was just walking down the sidewalk in his underwear, talking nonsense to an elderly lady.”
I imagined him abducted by the cops and thrown into a cell. I could picture his sunburned knees, tattered underwear with his firm yellow-stained bulge protruding, his knuckles wrapped placidly around black steel with his soft Jodorowsky-esque eyes peering out beyond the jailhouse, through the walls, racing out towards the deep celestial horizon and beyond the bend of time and space. (Sorry Einstein.)
Is it as the Hindus say? That the ignorant and profane will regard the most divine emanations of God as the lowliest of men? Maybe. But was he really any different than those drug-addled cretins who sneak off to the biography reading room to wet their rod and spread their mana all over books on Trotsky? Should I revere them too as divine? I don’t have the answers. And because of these innumerable cultural implants, I likely never will. No matter how hard I try to “deprogram://dehex”, I can’t seem to hack this self-automated sorting system. It’s built a filing cabinet and labeled it “mentally ill” and when I'm trying to make my paycheck, for better or worse, that’s where the abnormals are getting filed. It’s a mechanism which was constructed by a billion-and-one intelligences of whom I’ll never meet. I haven’t read much Foucault, but I’m reminded of a popular line from Madness and Civilization when Foucault writes:
Modern man no longer communicates with the madman . . . There is no common language, or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange, between madness and reason, was carried out.
Well I’ve kicked it with the whores and derelicts in Brooklyn parks after dusk. I’ve entertained the opium enthusiast who drank from my garden faucet in the hot Florida summer. I’ve listened to my schizophrenic aunt let fly her delusions—having all day to talk to her dead mother and no time to scrub out the cat piss. But I’m tired. I want to build a cabin and be left alone to grow vegetables or make bombs. Perhaps if I were truly a “Transgressive Spiritualist”, I would admire them all as Shiva, but I’m getting old. I’m losing patience.