I recall the fractals, neon red, snaking amongst the gravel dust, the dark brown gravel dust stirred up, static yet shaking like some cloud of locusts, a plague, from the balding tires on my silver Pontiac grand am. I called her Starla, the car, and the particles of dust were, as much as I could then figure, stardust. Yes, that much was certain. The fractals though, effervesced and in a didactic spectrum from red to green, fizzing like some fourth of July sparklers on mute, those were a bit more unconquerable. You kind of had to chew on them, and I was busy fighting off each and every placid, Iowan ditch, so they didn’t exactly have my undivided attention. Still, they reminded me of mandalas, or I thought that they did. Maybe I hadn’t heard of them yet, mandalas. The road was gravel, the sky, beyond my pigpen aura, azure splotched with wispy tufts of God’s beard. I could see the blood coursing through the thin layers of skin taught around my phalanges, the fingers which were themselves tight around the black grey, hard plastic steering column. It might’ve been the acid. Either I did know of mandalas, and was uncertain because of intoxication, I hadn’t known of them beforehand, but had been granted instant knowledge of them because my mind, under the effects of such a holy substance, was on the same vibrational wavelength as the spirits which bestow knowledge and understanding, or I later hit google looking for a way to express my experience, came upon mandalas, and forgot the linear sequence of events because LSD don’t piss time with that shit. Actually, I probably accessed that part of myself, the part we all have, which stands beyond the finish line, existing outside of time, the direct sum of everything we will know and do, as he recalled what I would later google search. I saw what future, google searching Lot saw: mandalas.
They’re 2d representations of the cosmos composed of tight combinations of concentric shapes, circles and squares and stuff. It’s some real hippie shit, not to be confused with Mandela, which was the last name of a certain Nelson who was known for being a non-conformist and is perceived, most often by those who don’t know what month it is, as single-handedly overthrowing historically evil institutions in some third world place, possibly Kenya, by being a real nice guy. Nelson Mandela was also on some real hippie shit. And these fractals gyrating across my windshield like hyperactive lasers were on some real, real hippie shit. It was straight up ludicrous; a cat that looks like Hitler, a Facebook page for God, snuggies, etc. Starla was a spaceship! A Keith Richards intro guitar riff oozed through the speakers like puss from a slow push syringe, and the dimension of time kept contracting and expanding, changing the tune up on me. The clouds on the horizon darted like jackrabbits. Richard’s vibratos wobbled slow as a catfish caked in wet sand, beached upon the Mississippi delta, and my nose kept running. I was most assuredly on the wrong side of the moon, hurdling through an asteroid belt, and those asteroids looked like mandalas.
Well, not entirely. They looked like mandalas in the same way in which I was alive; they occasionally looked like mandalas. It was a game of cosmic yo-yo. The vibrant, organic fractal lines would skitter down playing the part of chaos, putty-like blobs glowing at their ends as if some sort of phosphorescent alien goo. Their production was social commentary, mimicking, downright taunting, the brainless brown background musk which was egged on by Starla’s spinning rubbers. With some speculated flip of the astral hand the blobs would encircle each other, a sublime trick from which, for but an instant, mandalas came to be. It was chaos to order and then back again, the process mirrored in the fluctuations of hues from red to green.
Meanwhile, driving north, it was the Eastern to the Western ditch, one and then the other and back again, which threatened my very life. Gimme Shelter played on the radio, and I would later read that Jungian psychoanalyst Marie Louise von Franz, who has, perhaps, the most gorgeous name, thought of the significance of the mandala to the psyche of the individual,
“It serves…to restore a previously existing order. But it also serves the creative purpose of giving expression and form to something that does not yet exist…” The mandala was a sign from the subconscious of new, ordered beginnings in the life of the artist. Whether aware or not, the artist was preparing to bring about some life change which would attempt to restore a previously existing order. Lacan, a Freudian psychologist, would probably intervene upon hearing this to point out that ever since the moment an infant learns that it is no longer connected to its mother, that there is an actual distinction between the two, and the concept of the “I” begins to form within the infant’s mind, every desire we have arises as a plan of action to restore this previous order, to undo the “I”. For him, the mandala would serve as a warning that another doomed course of action is about to be carried out. Is it really fair to measure such plans of action in such absolute terms as a success or a failure, though? The pixelated blips of Starla’s turn signals certainly didn’t think so. Conceptually, there is no way for the I to rejoin with the mother within this life, for Lacan. This doesn’t necessarily mean that every desire we chase will yield similar results. For instance, chasing that lack of continuity by jogging until you get a runner’s high is probably going to lead to more overall pleasure, in a central range of cases, than by chasing that lack through the over-consumption of alcohol. Pleasure aside, the jogger’s high is probably closer to the real deal, seeing as it tends to make someone feel like jelly, as if they are leaking out of their pores, ceasing to be an I, whereas the alcohol high makes one feel as if a hot air balloon has expanded within their bowels, stretching them into one big ol’ bad wolf of a self. Once someone becomes a mother themselves, or has the horrors of witnessing such an atrocity, it’s pretty apparent that the mother displaces the target of their former lack onto the thing which has just ruptured from them. And this is where the fractals come in. This is where my car becomes a spaceship, and I hop into that carship loaded on acid, trying to escape the overly attached hoodoo voodoo, bush burning, pyramid lovin’ mother in the sky. 2013 is a strange time. Some things are coming, man. The mother is one of them, and she’s coming for us. My story, my reintroduction, it’s simply a prototype, a plan of action never considered for mass replication. It was near those corn fields at the two day music fest which the mother plucked me out of the campsite and nearly suffocated me against her breast. Ayahuasca, molly, mushrooms, DMT, LSD, LSD, LSD, and as I lay docile, inciting death, she recounted to me the previous year’s dreams, insinuating that my subconscious is only mine in the sense that I’ve laid claim to the crops of wild grass which needed no tending.
Edited by lot_justice (12/27/13 09:43 PM)
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