Hell - Part Two

This hell question.  I just don’t know.  I do know it isn’t in the places you might imagine.  I looked in a fair few of those.  I tried finding it in people too but each and every one, no matter how hard and tough and mean they looked on the outside, just turned nice on me.  Angels and demons eh?  Honestly, life is mirroring art – or is it the other way around? 

I suspect hell is hidden out of sight really, not down the dark alleys or in the mudflats, or in street-wise kids with sneers or big men with tattoos on their faces.  Hell is probably a flat, the warm yeasty smell of posset mingling with stale fat; and a baby that won’t stop screaming. Or a gleaming penthouse in which two beautiful people sit either end of a white leather sofa, staring into their perfect space.  Or maybe Hell is simply being trapped inside a mind where the synapses are misfiring. 

The closest I came to it on my London trip was sitting in an Internet café in Islington.  The computer was old, the keyboard sticky. The place smelled of stale cigarette smoke, Bombay mix and sweat.  I was swiftly catching up on emails, knowing I’d be offline for 24 hours (hmm, maybe Hell is being out of touch? Or is that Heaven? Do we know the difference anymore?). 

‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’  The chair behind me scraped along the scuffed vinyl floor. I kept typing – as you do.

‘No! This cannot be happening.’  Keys being crashed.  The air crackled.  A phone rang.

‘No. You don’t understand.’  Pause.  Scrape of chair.

‘No. You’re not listening.’  Pause.
‘But I’ve lost everything. Everything.’  Pause.  A strangled sob turning into anger.

‘WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO ME?’

Roses for Hecate by Solange Noir

She threw back her chair and stumbled out of the café, leaving her coat behind.  I went to pick it up and run after her but realised she had stopped outside, on the pavement. Even in the middle of meltdown, she was being polite.  Sheesh, us humans and our social mores.  I watched her through the glass front.  She looked stricken. 

What had she lost?  And who wouldn’t listen? 

What is worse, the losing or the not being heard?

Some music?  Wyrdly, I left my iPod behind when I was in London...but these have been playing non-stop since I returned.

Hell - Part One

So you wanna know about hell?  You wanna know about demons? Honestly, you lot…  As you may know, I’m writing a series of YA novels about a girl who falls in love with someone who is…what?  Demon? Angel? Something inbetween?  Anyhow, without giving too much away, when Book Two opens my main character is in metaphorical hell while her ex is sojourning in the actual destination: Hell with a capital H.  So, I had figured I’d go to the capital L (tell me you got that?) to get in the mood, so to speak.  And to meet a few demons.

Where do you find demons in London?  At a gathering of Chaos magicians in a backstreet occult bookshop surely?  It looked promising as I arrived.  There was a lot of black leather; plenty of facial hardware; tattoos and piercings; white faces and bloodshot eyes.  I wandered in and sniffed.  Sulphur?  Hmm, more like mandarin and floor polish really.  I browsed the bookshelves.  Necronomicon and Nocturnicon. Technomages and Pacts with the Devil. Low Magick and high risks. Getting closer.

A small woman with gimlet-bright eyes peered up at me and started to dance.  ‘Do you dance?’ she said.

‘Of course,’ I replied with a smile, following her in a bit of a cumbia. 

‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘One should always dance.’  Quite so.  She danced me down the stairs to where two tall men with long black hair were serving wine and proffering hummus and carrot sticks. 

The lecture, I have to say, was a huge disappointment.  The speaker was a PhD student who had perfected the art of obfuscation, made even more unintelligible by muttering in a transatlantic drawl.  I caught the odd word: exoskeleton, sigil, lobotomy, shame, subjugation, DNA, chimera, pack, pact, anomalous.  I started drawing sigils in my notebook and sketching faces.  I had kinda hoped to talk to people afterwards but they melted into the night…apart from an elderly woman with a face the colour and texture of a prune who thrust a small glass jar into my hand as I left. 

HEKATE of the cross-roads, keeper of the keys of the universe.  Storax, frankincense, myrrh, willow, aconite.
Hmm. 
Add 3 drops of blood to portion used in ritual, thus aligning self with intent.
Hmm

She smiled, shrugged and vanished.  In a puff of smoke?  Oh, how I wish…  But honesty impels me:  it was more like a fading away to grey... 

To be continued…in the meantime, some music...

http://youtu.be/e97isb0e5nQ

And a rather beautiful little film

http://youtu.be/2ePWK0qfisE

London calling

I arrived at Tiverton station and felt a lurch in my heart as I spotted the small figure charging over the bridge.  My boy hurtled down the platform towards me, paused and then just threw out his arms and sank into me, in our usual embrace.  How lovely that he feels he can still do that, at the grand old age of twelve.  I wonder how much longer he will fit so I can (just, with a bit of a stretch) rest my chin on the top of his tousled head?  Not that long now before our positions will switch and I will rest my head on his chest. 

Adrian ambled behind, looking surprisingly chipper given he’d spent the  weekend with the King of Extreme Alcohol Intake (aka Big Chief Sitting Birch) and we commenced the handover.  A briefing on what was going on on the home front; what was needed; what might occur.  There was I back from London, not even home, and he was going straight off to Moscow.  Modern parenting, eh? 

James hates it.  Can’t bear the way we’re always flitting off here, there and everywhere.  But, really, what can you do? 
‘Dad said we won’t eat while he’s away,’ James said, as soon as we got in the car.  
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘We’ll eat just fine.’

And, when we got back to the Bonkers House, I opened the fridge door and, lo and behold, two vast bars of chocolate and a huge box of chocolates – a present from Switzerland from BCSB, who works over there.  ‘See,’ I said to James, brandishing a bar the size of my arm. ‘We’re sorted.’
'I rest my case,’ said James.

‘Oh, that reminds me,’ I said cheerily. ‘Apparently lawyers are a dying breed, as well as journalists.  You can get a divorce online now, or so Jane says.  And there’s going to be no more Legal Aid.  You’re going to have to rethink your career choices.’
He shrugged. ‘They’ll always need private corporate lawyers.’  Ye gods.  Oh well, maybe it doesn’t matter that my pension is fecked.  My darling son can pay for my retirement grape peelers. 

But anyway.  London was fabulous.  I got massaged within an inch of passing out with pleasure. I met men with prosthetic boils on their heads and bolts through every part of their anatomy.  I walked into my past time and time again.  I had lunch with my lovely agent and I met an angel (no really, I did) in the British Museum.  I ate Japanese, and Lebanese and Greek and French.  I scribbled like a madwoman and bought more books.  I fell in love with a memory mattress.  Oh and I read Bradley Wind’s fabulous novel Bulb on my Kindle. 
‘You know what?’ I said to my agent, Judy, as we hugged goodbye on Hampstead High Street.  ‘I could just handle a pied-a-terre in London, then we could do this every week.  How about a stonking deal for the Samael series?’
She grinned.  ‘Now there’s a plan.’ 
Maybe, just maybe (if the angel was right) James won’t need to sell his soul to keep me in old age luxury…

PS – there’s still time to enter the Ila competition on the last post….just leave a comment here.  I’ll close it on Thursday. 

Bones of the Moon

I’m not sure how I came to miss Jonathan Carroll as a writer before now. He was recommended to me a few months back partly because I had written a book called Walkerabout shamanism in which a central character is a wolf spirit guide. The main character in Carroll’s book Sleeping in Flameis called Walker Easterling while a giant wolf features strongly in the first book of his novel cycle,Bones of the Moon. Then, of course, the shaman Venasque dances through all the novels. Venasque can teach people what they most need to know (be it swimming or playing a musical instrument or flying).
“I can teach you to fly. That’s the first step....It’s not such a hard thing to do.”
He can juggle time and space and death. Ah, truly a magician. But you have to learn for yourself; he won’t do it for you.

I stalled though. I didn’t like the cover of Bones of the Moon; I didn’t like the blurb. It sounded like silly fantasy. But then I laid aside my prejudices, started reading and was beyond captivated. I am now in the process of inhaling everything else Carroll has written. People label his books "horror" or "fantasy" - I suppose the nearest tag would be "magic realism" – but I’d rather not pigeon-hole them.  I hate the way books have to be crammed into little boxes.  One thing that is for sure and certain - they are magic, pure magic. I am reading them with my notebook and pen at hand, scribbling down quotes, nodding furiously; shaking my head quizzically. Smiling often; often feeling sad.  Then again punching the air and going 'YESSS!' the way you do when someone is saying in black and white what you have always thought in shades of grey.

“You’ve got to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.” You have, haven’t you? Yet the darkness is also beautiful in its own way, no?

“Life has a very bad case of acne which it has no desire to lose, because that would mean it couldn’t look in the mirror fifty times a day and feel sorry for itself.” Hmm. There’s something in that, let’s be honest. We all like to feel sorry for ourselves; we can all revel in 'poor me' syndrome. Many of us clutch tight onto our pain and sickness for the strangest of reasons.

“How far was a dream allowed to trespass into real life, before it was caught and sent back to its proper place?” Ah, but what is dreaming and what is ‘real life’?

“It’s hard convincing yourself that where you are at the moment is your home, and it’s not always where your heart is.” Where is home? When is home? What is home?

Carroll is made for quoting but also loves quoting other people. His blog posts are often just long quotes, like this one from Osho.
“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.”

Is that true? I absolutely agree with the first part.  One cannot be with another until one is unafraid of loneliness.  But to be happy at loss?  It is logical and my mind balances the equation but still my heart baulks.

On a lighter note he also says, quoting purely himself:
“Dogs are minor angels, and I don't mean that facetiously. They love unconditionally, forgive immediately, are the truest of friends, willing to do anything that makes us happy, etcetera. If we attributed some of those qualities to a person we would say they are special. If they had ALL of them, we would call them angelic. But because it's "only" a dog, we dismiss them as sweet or funny but little more.”

Ah, and you know how I feel about that. :-)

The path up through the woods

We are all on journeys. I had paused on mine and made camp for around twenty years or so. Then, about five months ago, everything shifted. It was time to pick up my knapsack again and start up the narrow track once again. I’ll write about it properly one day; from the very beginning. Not right now though.

When you’re ready (or maybe when you’re really not ready) the path will shine. People, animals, things appear like beautiful gifts. I was blessed. I am blessed. Then, sometimes, these angels and gifts vanish – unexpectedly, blindsidingly – and it’s as if you’ve been abandoned in the desert, without a map, without food or water.

But then. Just as you feel you can’t go on. That you really are alone. That there are no messages; no miracles; no magic. That the sweet companions of the road have abandoned you. That really there is only oblivion. Then. Then. Then.

Something happens. And you pick up your knapsack again. Sad but resolved.

She emailed me. ‘I knew you’d post,’ She said. ‘This is the next stage of the journey and this time, you should share it.’ And She reminded me that I’d signed the Pact. So I’ll try. I’ll try, try, try again.

And last night I dreamed that I knew the way. That there was a path and it was narrow and it was steep and it went up through the woods. But it was signposted, clear as day, and people were meandering up towards it. But I knew, suddenly, that it was easy, so easy. I knew I could do it and I started to run, laughing, knowing I could run the whole way up at an easy lope. Run up that hill and not lose breath, not once.

And then, this morning, a friend messaged me and said. ‘I dreamed about you last night and it was the strangest thing – a light hovering above me, all around me, and it changed from blue to orange and it smiled and it was you.’ But of course it did. Of course it was.

I’m not entirely sure where the path will lead along its way but it’s going to be interesting. And, if you’d like to come along, you are very very welcome. I can’t tell you about the Pact. Not yet. You have to wait – and trust – just like me.