Car Crash Communion ∴ Haunt Manual
Existential Hauntomancy dread and the art it birthed...
After the Moon Revel tour last October, I found myself in the post-travel wallows of a hard reset within the Seattle reality tunnel. The trip (and ramshackle musickal tour) solidified a number of things for me, and all of them revolved around the all-to-familiar aura of displacement and dissatisfaction with my then-current stasis. I again tasted dynamism and rugged resolve only afforded to the road weary. I now saunter within the memories of hot-flash creative bursts of performance and the daydreamy gust of social hyper-normality that preceded them. And yet, there I was, back in the unkempt universe that remained still and beating no matter my presence.
While traversing the southwestern desert we listened to Mark Lanegan’s gutpunch prose. Sing Backwards And Weep, read through is hard-lived rasp, so the idea of Seattle wasn’t too far from our minds. But it was a different Seattle than the one I was battling internally with. This spectre, this ghost of Seattle, specifically, is as ubiquitous as it is hushed. A trans-dimensional Seattle that existed behind and below the burgeoning 90’s hype—the one filled with underbelly bosses and Capitol Hill drug malaise—a Preta (Hungry Ghost) dimension that exists, still, in every place, albeit without the heavy charged zeitgeist of the 90’s boon Seattle readily ensconced in the amber of misery tourism and “Remember when…” regales.
I knew this dimension, I knew it in Portland, in Oakland, in Phoenix; the dimension is borderless and big-belly-full, bled behind every American edifice. Seattle just seems to have a corporatized tit-for-tat-milk-it-scheme with the super-8 dimension, especially. My time in Seattle had manifested after my own internal schism as a fellow unhoused and drugged Preta, and now, I too, can only vicariously live through the remembrance yarn of the archetypal and rugged sage-like-ex-addict of Sing Backwards And Weep. Oh the halcyon days of aluminum & pen-less Bic’s! All this to say, the ghost of Seattle, the Emerald Empire and daydream mecca of my youth would only ever exist in stories not my own, and yet, become every story I’ve ever known.
After the rough and tumble of my twenties, namely through self-medication and hard-learned survival tactics to weather late onset brain disfluencies, I would arrive to Seattle changed and delivered into a different caste-of-self. After dipping into the Preta realm for so long, it stays with you, and you can never unsee it. It is everywhere, and it follows. It makes every American city the same, essentially, barring the weather. And even though I now exist in a place that I charged through art and story, as a kid, I am left with an ethereal ghost-of-a-place pierced with the unremarkable usual. Just like Oakland, just like Portland…
It was this tour through a makeshift-slow- migration from the southwestern deserts to the northwestern Cascades that I traveled the bullet-point parallel to my own history. That hyper-sojourn of self-spectres and living graveyards surely allowed for some heavy inner spelunking, the kind of mind-cave diving that you belay with enough rope. And when I returned to Seattle, sans the Spectre of Seattle, weary of my own Preta-conscious ouroboros, I realized I didn’t have enough rope.
Through Hauntomancy I’ve been afforded footing to consort and consult my personal history, to strengthen the thread that tags every self forward, and to reignite the deeply tied animus of what memory is. I have found memory is both a lie and the objective truth, that it is always subjective and always true, and it, itself, is a language model, one that builds, adapts, learns through survival conditions. It is a tool, the bullet of creativity through the experiential gun of life, and also a poison. It is a pharmakon—both poison and antidote—and left untethered or insufficiently taut, it is a brutal whip. It bleeds, it sleeps, and it eats. It is an Other. It is a Source. Though, how long is this rope? And how often have I discovered this only to relearn it?
I felt inoperably broken, to a degree, that one tough-sourced tether could belay all the way back to 17. A 20 year loop. Arrested. My initiatory process of adulthood stagnated and stuttered, a weak link, a circular pully system. Hauntomancy helped me realize this, but now what? What other city will I need to destroy with experiential revelation, what new album do I need to create, book I need to write, to satisfy the loop? To release me? Does it matter to worry about such things after so long? Am I now just this way forever since it has been most of my life tethered to 17?
Mary and I capped our anniversary/Halloween season of 2023 with viewing of Blatty and Friedkin’s The Exorcist at our local arthouse theater, The Beacon, on November 1st. A film I have often felt a strong tethering to, as it had many a familial connection. Filmed in Georgetown, my grandfather Keats’ alma-mater, my mother would take my sister and I to Maryland and Virginia every so often to haunt the cradle of America. We often would visit the infamous stairs where Father Karras met his martyrdom in the film’s climax, and my 11 year old spectre still recalls the eerie ambience of the site. I was enamored, hooked into the heretical fiction and comfortably itchy around Catholic eschatological lore since I could formulate an idea. My mother was raised Roman Catholic, and for a time, we were too, and it scared the hell out of me. The film tickled that discomfort immeasurably, and with sick wit I sought it.
Now, after assessing a childhood split between a Jewish household and a sometime Catholic upbringing, I have been afforded the experiential degree of religiosity, of the Abrahamic spectrum anyway, and with that, the understanding of religion’s bastardization both in-house and applied. Although I’m still deeply entrenched in the lore of organized religion through an anthropological lens, I continue to find myself despondent, disjected and largely disregarding of its necessity. But something hit me on that viewing of The Exorcist that hadn’t the hundreds of times I had seen it before: Why did I revere the character of Father Karras so deeply? What has made me see myself in him?
As we walked out of the theater I bored Mary with these newfound realizations of Karras’ archetypal analogy to my own bouts between faith and science. I revered his sullied resolve of service no matter of passion or trust. That his deep ontological struggles would resolve with a magnificent and hurried act of martyrdom no matter how much he struggled with belief. That all his life he waited to be “delivered” as a man of the cloth, only for his entire life to culminate into a single moment. All he had to do was to arrive, and he would be delivered. Albeit, in a brutal and violent fashion. But delivered nonetheless.
I wrote “Damien Karras” quickly. Putting my travis-picked acoustic and voice onto tape with quit penned lyrics discussing these recent revelations. But the Post-tour depression haunted on… and this resolve only widened the gyre. Would all my insatiable hunger to create finally culminate into a deliverance, or is it all just a distraction on my way to arrive? Have I already arrived?
November 5th, freshly reinstalled into the Seattle stasis, I found myself on another aimless walk through the Seattle city spires and Preta dimensional rifts, wrestling out-loud and in-side with the aforementioned circular tether, with the Spectre of 17, psychically exhausted and spent. I specifically recalled Seattle landmarks in Lanegan’s book as I shuffled past them, namely the site of a long-defunct Seattle nightclub under the Monorail downtown.
For a moment, a lived within his ghost-of-memory through my temporal rift and studied the building, allowing the autumnal sun to hit my face in a whisper of resolve. I studied the Spaced Needle to my northwest, an obelisk to the Spectre of Seattle’s memory, still consistently misery toured and photographed. And for a moment I felt like everything was already dead, in a sweet finality, in an ever-revolve of birth/breath/decay even after physical death. And this voracious appetite to nurture the spectres-of-self through Hauntomancy was a humorous and illuminating experiment, if not just a plume of regard in the smoke-aura of particle rash…a for a fun read or listen for those misery tourists…if anything at all. And none of it mattered, anyway, so why allow such existential fodder to hollow-out whatever this era of life is? I know how to void the heavy ponder-wanders. I’ve done it in Phoenix, Oakland, Portland…and if things are too much, I could always do it here, too. If memory is really a shackle I know exactly what key to use to escape, if only for a few bucks at a time! But this regard, this resolve is not a wallow or an escape, and I assuredly don’t want admittance for a full-ride Preta-run again. So pucker up, buttercup, things are lookin’ up.
The moment faded quickly, as they often do, but stays with me still. It was made all the heavier when I discovered a news article the next day brandishing a startling photograph and headline: 1 dead, 12 injured after crash sends Metro bus into Seattle building
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/05/us/seattle-bus-crash-into-building/index.html
The exact corner I had my lick of heavenly resolve was struck by a bus not an hour after I left. That corner, still echoing with my heavy psychical machinations was met with a literal bus crash, killing an individual and harming a gaggle of others. I’m not so selfish to think I had anything to do with it; perhaps if I had kept daydreaming a little longer my life would have ended there, too. And then what? A freak accident would have birthed my existential turmoil into a forever echo languishing on a corner corralled with a sea of other stories? Left static and wandering the bardo behind the Preta? Or would I have died with that heavenly, if fleeting, resolve that everything is alright because everything is already dead, and I’ll just die again anyway? Did I die on a different plane, a different timeline? How many times have I died before? Is this circular tether and 20 year loop a bardo, a psychic panopticon? Maybe I should speak to a priest, an Imam, a Rabbi—anyone afforded the effervescent ability to saunter through these tussles?
After discovering the bus accident and the ominous synchronicity of the moment, I did what I could to reach the Other. I ignited a Dim Session, not unlike the audiomantic and ritualized set & setting I had long authored, but this time I would converse. Or at least, attempt to. I managed to record the session on my 4-track, half expecting to dive into probable EVPs or aminals that would only be audible upon review.
Through my meditative sonics, however, I found myself riddled with these haunting yelps and howls—all the post-tour ephemera that raddled began to spill out through my voice. By drawing in the sonic improvisation of chant-like expressions, I began to channel lyrics through a vocal delivery unencumbered by thought or aesthetic. A childlike drawl that found rhyme and meter otherwise foreign to my current voice. It was almost as if the spectre of 17 was barking through me. And for the first time, I improvised a (mostly) audible and consistent song of lyrics that were completely improvised:
"Heaven Again"
I forgot the words
to another song I wrote
Thinkin it was gonna be the one
to keep me afloat
And yes, I'm here again
Waiting on the train
Just 30 again
Begin again
I was supposed to meet you
At some nondescript coffee bar
Minimalist décor with nothing comfortable to sit on
It's like they want you to keep standing, to keep running
to get tired again
Then you buy that comfort futon
So I keep runnin’ again
Maybe I'm destined to keep runnin’ again
And I'll namedrop some pithy poet
Maybe some unknown religious scholar
to celebrate the divine comedy
that is a midlife crisis in a backwards economy
But I'm here just making a few tracks
in my bedroom like I'm 17 again
Now little flights in the choir
Need splendatory(?) sentimentalities
We've carved out a niche in front of
Brick and mortar scholars
But I'm just humming again
it's much easier to be warmed by the fires of anger
If finding empathy is idolatry
I'm just waiting for the right description
of the divine to acknowledge me
I wake up every morning wanting a
priest, a rabbi or imam
A confliction to change
I need answers, dammit, I deserve them
You know me
To me its as if we're just shards of memory
like thunder-crashed glass on beaches free
in a thousand percent history
and a thousand percent future spree
All in a continental atmosphere
A combustion of chaos
Choronzon, you know us
I've been here before
And just like I've been here before I'll be again
Just like a ragged man waiting on a bend
with 26 dollars in my hand
Well if it's fentanyl you got
Well it's heaven again
I've been there, and by hell or high water
I will be in heaven again
Because no matter how hard this
mid-life, mid-level, mid-suburban conscious affliction
will come at me I know
heaven's just a 26 dollar abode
I'm part of this revelry again
and if I'm ever alone
I can just skyrocket to heaven again
Don't worry, it's not in my plan
I don't feel maneuvers
and I don't feel delivers
I just wanted you to know that
it's making me feel inconsiderate
An apathy of reasonable consequence
and reasonable confliction is
quite relieving
Though I may be rugged and back on the stand
Feeling my 2 feet saunter between 17 and me again
All I gotta do is busk for 26 dollars
And hit that fentanyl heaven again
Because if heaven is all you know when you die
Like an infinite escapade into the fry
Of memory charades
Then I'm gonna be blissed out
In heaven again
These guttural synapses of linear poetry perfectly encapsulate that moment in the autumnal sun, basking in the death of everything right before a bus burrowed into that corner. As if I was suspended on a Prospectre tether, one taut forward rather than backward, and the spider web rang back, allowing a hushed and hurried resolve, if only for a moment, before destruction collided.
The 4track demo for “Damien Karras”, grew into a drumming session I recorded utilizing in-room effects, mic’ing the drums as well as running mics through FX pedals through amps and live capturing the groove that would become the bones for the fully produced “Father Karras” SongSigil and it’s mutated and instrumental Lynchian dub-noir “Delivered.” It dawned on me that the SongSigil project was always meant to mimic a sort of sigilized max-single akin to the 90’s discs I grew up with, and that with this channeled Dim Session, “Heaven Again,” became a sigilized song score for an “unrealized” short film that I simply titled “Karras.” Which, I suppose, is more of a HAUNTSIGIL anyway…
The SongSigil is constituted within the whole, as all four of the tracks were birthed from this post-tour bout with “deliverance” as I’ve come to rectify it. Not unlike a songcycle of sorts, the fully produced “Father Karras” songsigil was born from the 4-track demo, morphed into the instrumental “Delivered” and deconstructed and disillusioned into the guttural and earnest “Heaven Again.” They make Karras, altogether really, one song, both technically and figuratively, sharing both theoretical and metaphorical compositional components. Rather just a single such as the first SongSigil, “Many Named,” this became a sort of living lore film score form that synchronous era—burned and birthed into the haunting reminder that the ghost of a fleeting revelation, or of a cyclical struggle, or of a city haunts on with or without you.
The Aspectre haunts on too, namely through its experimental recording and the accompanying videomancy. I tracked down a special edition copy of the Exorcist on VHS, an analog “Dirty Video Mixer” that crudely mixes analog video signals, and spent time tinkering and toying with recording my Dimming Room altar on Hi-8 90’s camcorders, both superbly broken and surprisingly operable considering their decay. Naturally, from the 4track, to the VHS and camcorders, to the Dimming Room tinkering, everything became hauntological for my own youthful resonance in media and techniques I employed well into my youth.
The 4track demo of "Damien" also featured, along with a rant recorded around the same time, on the "Dimming Room Tapes" episode of Pragmagick. This first-ever fully composed and constructed analog PRAGMAGICK episode would become the harbinger for the new SOMATICK era of We The Hallowed and Pragmagick, and the true first episode of my new HAUNTOMANCY based, fully tape/cassette "podckast", HAUNTOMANCER. I will be restructuring the HAUNT MANUAL substack to feature only HAUNTOMANCER digitized episodes, trailers, or more HAUNTOMANCY specific audio ephemera.
To join our new SOMATICK initiative of WE THE HALLOWED PRESS, you can sign up at the restructured WETHEHALLOWED.ORG or subscribe to a specific analog media/small press tier of your choosing at PATREON.COM/PRAGMAGICK. The first HAUNTOMANCER / HEXKASSETTE KLUB tapes and print newsletter will be shipped before Halloween. Making the HEXKASSETTE a truly prophetic and talismanic entity on the anniversary of KARRAS' conception:
Keep your hearts crossed and eyes peeled these next few weeks for more PRAGMAGICK episodes, SongSigils from both REVEL ROSZ & DIMtZUM, HAUNT MANUAL chapters, and more…oh…and…
HAUNT ON!
Revl∴ Rosz
10/02/2024
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