Sine Wave Serpents ∴ Haunt Manual
The Fifth Ghost ∴ The Five Year Eclipse ∴ The Dim
This chapter of the Haunt Manual, Sine Wave Serpents, will be released in literary form in III separate divisions. The third division will conclude with the audiocast. This is due to the length, structure and last minute somatic changes concerning a major relocation and absence from my Dimming Room (Production Studio, Magickal Space).
Haunt Manual Artwork By Eric J. Millar of NO GODS BUT MY OWN
DIVISION I ∴
The Fifth Ghost ∴ The Five Year Eclipse
“The Fifth Ghost”
∴ Meditation Journal, August 21st, 2017
I Am The Uncanny Valley.
Sitting in a porcelain tub, knees to my chin; the temperature, needles and pins, hard-flush shower water punches my skin. I slither on the tub floor, I recalibrate. I finally seem to have my crooked spine aligned with gush, and not drowning in the osmosis - the deluge seems to spawn water fingers to plug my facial sockets when my placement is askew. A not so gentle reminder that a dipped hip can mean a watery nap. This element cares not. And that's exactly why I chose it.1
Finally, a courtesy of stiffened equilibrium is awarded. A concert of bone and liquid: the boned membrane’d of pellet-like pitter-patter water that sirens a compress of blood to patchwork rush. Allowing me a coagulated exoskeleton. As above temperature, so below skin.
My eyelids are orange hued spectacles of which my bad bat-vision can parse spasms of the coveted purple tetrahedrons that conjure after Tesla coil spurts. I focus, I transfix on the terraform’d orange and allow the purple schisms to collate in the periphery. This relaxes me, as jonesing for the coils will not allow me to dance in the psychic dirt.
I remember I am not comfortable, naked with porcelain scuffed bones. I find a distraction in the purple animations, and my care of comfort is hushed quickly and snuffed out. This isn't about comfort, for everything is tithing now.
I see myself taxidermy’d, stymied and static, allowing the loudness of this shower head above to loom like a snake coughing the river. I am still.
In this plastered crouch I feel the blood beneath my thin skin start to break, as if every cell was a levy holding back heartache. I remain in pain. I am constant.
The purple tetrahedrons begin to echo. The prisms seem to react to my lidded pupils; I am still not hushed, I am still somatic as I give a faint brush of an eye shake to see if we are in sync. I can now flash prisms of where I am at, the barrage of elements abound, the loud, loud sound, and I see them start to drip below the ‘hedrons as if they are Photoshop layers. I am reminded to be without purpose, to allow the wash of discomfort and somatic awkwardness to dissolve. I am reminded to not mind at all. I am finally here, or there. Neither either or.2
From my toes to forehead, I separate the membrane of skin and feel the de-location of self within. With my left hand I begin to peel back my right arm’s flesh. I am a faint ghost underneath, and am not shocked by the grey ghost of self as I continue to unzip my flesh. I do this for every ligament, placing the skin into a folded pile beside me. I remove my face as if it were a Halloween mask, and take a deep breath, I feel as light as a whispering thought. I feel as light as the voice behind the eyes.
I can see the schematics of the purple tetrahedrons build and bone an orb around me. The ‘hedron is my craft across these murky modes. This is the ship needed to trans-dimensionally rift through the planes. I now see the sheen of solid purple turn into a faint pink, as if it became a translucent, fleshy window. And it encases me as if it were an embryonic sack holding my spectral fetus in a ghostly womb. I begin to drive the bubble with intention. I begin to float.
This pink sack of gelatin fuss lifts me through the bathroom ceiling, through the upstairs neighbors’ living room. I see them circled around the floor, laughing, passing around a tequila bottle among the rhythmic bumps of some haughty Spotify playlist. I smirk because even in this translucent lift I still judge.
I keep raising, through their attic, the amount of boxes with parents handwriting surprises me as I float up through the ceiling and into the cobalt evening atmosphere above. I look down, there is my street, there is my car, like a neon satellite picture of ghostly movements on a static city block. My toes start to tremble. I am afraid. I recall my newly found fear of heights as I reach a height where only the curvature of the earth is viewed in a sun-kissed hue.
I breathe and channel a purple snake forward, slithering from my stratospheric embryonic bubble into the setting sun in front, infinite and forever forward. I turn my head behind me, to the east, I stare an electric sine wave backwards, infinite, forever backwards. This is my axis of time.
I raise my left hand and reach outwards, forever, warping into the space beyond the hues, into the unknown. I raise my right hand and reach outwards, forever, warping into a forever distant white dot far beyond the earth below. This is my axis of self. These coordinates of sine wave snakes, forever punching out into each sector of the abyss, gyrate my bubble, as my grey ghost finds footing. I recall this was the key to unlock the hatch above.
As I turn my head upwards, I see a luminous Bloodwood tree, with its radiant red blood beginning to fill my sphere, gushing around my floating specter. I am not scared. I recall that this transmutation of blood is the only way through. I focus on the tree and Its array of lush hyacinths and marigolds, like beacons of a flight path, and they begin to beat between light and dark in a heart rhythm. As the Bloodwood blood reaches my chin, my body submerged in a blood balloon, suspended yet anchored by sine wave serpents reaching out in every direction far above the earth, I submerge and take a deep breath. I plunge upward.
My hand can find footing in the exposed web of roots. As I come up for air I see my hand is but a shadow, a silhouette of negative space. I pull myself up onto a green terrain as I hear the infinite sounds of fluttering bugs and distant bird caws. To call it night here, would be irrelevant, for this place is beyond the sun. I lay at the bottom of the tree and look up, the Bloodwood drips orange and purple pedals in an endless autumnal swing.
Everything is both lush and devoid here. As I look back where I pulled myself out of, I see a large fluttering blue eye with a dark ring around the electric iris. Its pupil seems to be an endless drain of the blue, rushing water that makes the iris. I then see a golden tear where I was birthed out of. Both a rip and a drop. This is my left eye. And my entrance was the golden mark that I have had since birth. As if my birthmark were my window into this subconscious spelunking.
Artistic Photo of the Author’s Birthmark’d Eye
As I stand, I look to my feet, still, I am a shadow, but there are fluttering lights in my forearms, as if my silhouette was encased with distant galaxies and beady stars. I look over my left shoulder, and see the echo of my shadow 3 times over in distinct ghosts. They repeat my movements, delayed, in a syncopated fashion, like a cave echo, and the bright burning nebulas in the chests of each ghost grow dimmer and dimmer down the line, except for the fifth. The fifth ghost is still, its shadowed head now turned to me, and its solar plexus filled with a solar system, bright, burning and reverberating as if it were calling to me.
I know who this is. This is 2017. This is the echoed self of the past, five years ago, still resonating deep and heavy. I inspect the other three shadow silhouettes and see those burning nebulas grow fainter and fainter in each. The ghost next to me, exponentially dim, and crumbling in static. My ghost is not as dim. I feel hope. I stare at the static ghost to my left, and begin to crumble. I feel regret. I feel loss. I reach out to his hand with the knowledge of his impending death. He crumbles into a whisper and in a wind gust wash its detritus into me. I do this in sequence with the next two.
2017 remains still, beating a brighter light with each sacrificial ghost. I feel brighter, but I also feel an ethereal bittersweet, an emotion that is not unlike every memory and every wish and every regret into a primordial emotion. I look up to the Bloodwood tree, its careening branches and endless pedals, with pockets of light emanating from 9 spheres in a hierarchy of harrowing branches. I have been through before, never to the top, but through most. I wish to return. But the ghost of 2017 knows I know the shortcuts to reach into the 9 universes, and knows I circumvent the ones that scare me.3
The sphere of permanent growth, a loud breathing forest that engulfs in mountains of insects and ivy. The bright place, a white desert with a solitary man forever shooting out light from his screaming mouth. The warm place, the skull mother house, the apathy of nothingness. He is dismayed at my impatience. I feel ashamed. He places his hand on my chest, syncopating our twin galaxies, and in a hush he dissipates into television static and blinks into a flash of black nothing. I have absorbed him. I am tired, and I now share his hesitation to move forward. I have been here before and I will be back again. I return to the iris pool of birthmark’d eye.
I am sitting in the shower, drowned in its watery sound. I begin to cry but the tears are interlocked with the trails of water. 2017. What was different about 2017, and why do I feel a longing for a friend I’ll never see again?
Is this what a baptism feels like?
DIM SESSION Live Audiomancy Score for this Haunt Manual Chapter:
“The Five Year Eclipse”
∴ The Hauntology of The Self Liminal Preparation
2017, the year of my public magickal birth. The year that burned brightly through hip-shooting and bandit-like expression, experimentation and abandon. Five years ago, this meditation helped me realize the specter of self I have since forgotten. Though it forever reverberated, brightly, in the prism of self, I had not given it reverence. I must create a seance for the self of then, and commune with the ghost of what had been. I must practice a necromancy of self and help incur the motivations and wonderment that has set me on this path. And this is how I am doing it. And it hurts…
Memory is a defense mechanism, burned and birthed by the ramshackle need to absolve guilt, remorse, regret. It is a creative fiction at times, one that paints the pareidolia of making meaning out of past patterns and actions. That said, it is not always negative. The negativity comes with the broad erasure of responsibility, of mistakes. Not unlike an algorithmic AI, it tends to snuff out human error. I believe I must not heed such whims and fancies always, and the human error element is usually what spurns a self into the path we ride.
2017’s sine wave serpents, the ones molded and knob’d by the memory synthesizer are forever mutable. Instead of reopening the synth patches of what I constitute as the objective of that year, it is necessary to regale the clipping, shorting and blinding feedback that accrued to such an epilogue.
I have painted quite the narrative, though true in its documentation, it is also untrue in its absence of follies. Yes, this was the year I fell in love with my partner, acquired my Hecate’s companion in Dzarro my dog, created the Pragmagick podcast, fervently ordained salons of our collective We The Hallowed and began work on a mighty hypersigil, Cactus Crown, as Dakota Slim. All valiant beginnings worth celebrating. But in my meditations I have also recalled the numerous street fights with my partner’s ex, the reckless alcohol and medication abandon, the loss of relationships of multiple friends and collaborators, and the beginning of the end of my home and metaphysical dimming room I had fought so fervently to reside in for many years prior. These are the missives worth tithing, as without the warring extremes, without meditation upon the misgivings, my ghost is a fiction.
So how am I to commune with an echo? How do I strengthen the tether, the pathways back to a barking specter?
Meditation was always a primer; a boot-up into further investigation for me. The communion and deep-dive concerning this self-spelunking is illustrated by the practitioner themselves. Writing, albeit somewhat conventionally linear, is a pathway towards such introspection. But for me, I have found a somewhat multifaceted approach in dimming the contraction to the other. The language I speak, far from the confines of simple gestures, is one that envelops all fiddly digits, both physically and ghostly.
Sound, its generations, and my physical interaction with an intentional dominion of disparate talismen has always been the basis of my audiomancy practice. However, I would perform these rites with an objective to help inspire or create, never a direct objective to visit a same-skin-past-self (a haunt). Sound, no, music makes sense as an audiomantic working for this hauntology; the language of music is perhaps the easiest vessel to man the neither/neither!
Second only to smell, sound, especially as a composer, is rife with the esoteric intonations of history, echoed and sauntering through and charging idle movements of rugged synapses and neural highways to spark memory. A mutation of my fervent sound sorcery praxis can commune with something a bit more haunting than a/n unmoved mover, the ghost of me from a certain time!
Scrooge be damned, if a ghost of himself flew through that window he woulda croaked from sheer terror and there would be no Christmas. I digress; from meditation, to communion to inspiration, the next objective is to transpose the notes of ritual into a syncopated practice of self-travel through, well, through literal echo and through literal delay… to dim the contraction of here and there, and to sing with the third mind of both!
Next week…
Division II ∴
THE DIMMING ROOM ∴ ECTOGASMIC TALISMEN
“Music gives shape to the way we perceive and process our actual life experiences” Ezra Szandzer-Bell, Audiomancy
My nostalgiamancy-centric audiomancy session (I refer to as Dims, or Dim/Dimming Sessions) concerning this 2017 serpent was quite simple. The parameters set would distill down to three: Prism, Tether and Talismen…
I want to give a big thanks to Eric J. Millar and Michelle Embree for their input concerning this piece. And of course, all the amazing patrons that have stayed with me as I swayed these past couple of months. Thank you Brittany Brown, Bibi, CW Chanter, Jonicide, Jilly Beans, Michelle Embree, Corrie Anne, Spooky, Derek Hunter, Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, Carl Abrahammson, Tony Davis, Vanessa Kindell and Arnemancy for your ongoing support.
I have almost weekly patreon livestreams that act as sort of a magickal and mental health be-in for friends and patrons, as well as unreleased music, documenting my Taos plans with cohort Logan Ford, Haunt Manual drafts, watch parties, the WtH discord and plenty of musings. I am far more prolific there, and you can join for just one bone at patreon.com/pragmagick
This is a customized version of a Sefirot meditation learned from Oracle Elizabeth Kennemer who was a Pragmagick guest on episode 13: https://wethehallowed.org/podcast/pragmagick-13-oracle/
A tether to the previous Haunt Manual chapter:
https://wethehallowed.org/haunt-manual-neither-either-or/
2017 is the quadrant of which the continuing praxis of this Haunt Manual chapter will reveal. Further reading on 2017’s magnanimous birth:
https://wethehallowed.org/audiomancy-the-night-thief/