Walking the Story: A Game

Humankind is a species who walks.

In our deepest core, the word JOURNEY can be found, carved in primeval psychic whispers.

And every Journey is Story, too. Unavoidably. Story is a self-organizing, automatic entity. She is Journey’s parasite, her third invisible passenger.

When a shaman “goes out”, he speaks of his experience in the language of Journey and Story. But one need not ingest strange plants, fast, or lose oneself in the beating of drums in order to Walk the Story.

No, one can also choose the simplest, the earliest technique of all. In an attitude of total poetic receptivity—put one foot in front of the other—choose a direction—and depart…

In the game which follows, we have decided to deviate from the usual surrealist choice of Walking Story in completely unknown terrains. Instead, we have decided to imbue a trail which is very familiar to us with new and lasting mythic residue. The game will not end there. Over the coming months and years, as we walk and re-walk on this trail, we will study how this new myth which we’ve encoded onto the landscape changes and affects us. Our hope is that these walks will be deepened and transformed by our new myth, that Story will grow, multiply, and bear fruit within these trails.

And so, a tape recorder in one hand, and a camera in the other, we began. We let our minds become open and receptive, we let our automatic muse take full possession of our words, and then set off down that path. And we made Story.

THE MYTH

Newly dead, we materialize. In the land west of the west wind, in the land east of the east wind. It is a well-known place never spoken of, it’s an in-betweener, a purgatory. Always shifting, always just outside the boundaries on every human map. We take our first baby step, and are immediately shaken by bizarre spectacle. Thirteen wild boars crawl up from deep holes in the ground before us, splitting surface like an army of overweight moles. Elsewhere, the ghosts of murdered deer stand guard, whispering to each other as we pass, trading their secrets. From the sky above a colony of red ants parachute down, falling in our ears, biting and beholding sacrament. We quicken our pace.

We soon come across the frigid bodies of two lovers on the ground, cursed by some evil sorcerer no doubt, forever entwined. Last holdout against a soggy soil of exile? Unperturbed, the god of electricity descends before us, trading in his desires for a short erotic dalliance with a nearby stillborn trashcan. We take the path on the right, wishing to pay our respects at that Last Temple at the End of History. Beware—it sometimes functions as a portal for chthonic gods, too—as an ontological “open wound”. The hole before us speaks in a high pitched, whiny voice, telling us that “at night the trees all move, the trees change places, and dance.” And also: “all are sisters lovers brothers witches here.” And the hole even quotes Heraclitus, the hole says “and you can’t never step in the same forest twice!” But enough, we’ve had enough. He makes us dizzy, this one. We walk on.

We read a sign which suggests to us that there are seven bridges which one must first pass, in order to leave behind this purgatory. “From all passers once was, it demands decisive sacrifice.” So reads the sign. It appears that a piece of one’s Self must first be left on the bridge, in order to successfully cross it. If one refuses, these stubborn little bridges will merely stretch themselves out towards infinity, postponing your crossing forever, or until proper obedience has been received. As one crosses these bridges, the seconds turn into mosquitoes, and these mosquitoes will bite hard. And that sweeping song of cicadas which you hear? In actual fact? Just the pathetic laments of all the frightened souls too cowardly to ever attempt a crossing. So says the sign. But can one really ever trust a sign, though? Can one really?

But we cross it, brave and true, and a fairy king comes a greeting us when we reach the other side. He tells us of a legendary battle once fought on this here very spot, a war between the Treekind and their ancient enemies, the Clouds. Fairy King points over towards a patch of moss, and says: “And this marks the spot where the blood of the great forest spirit fell—his noble last stand! Many times has forest been felled in these great struggles, and yet, always is she reborn. And every fallen tree in this place, it’s a shadow pair of some dead or dying god, too—but there are always a few, always a rare witty few, who have the ability to right themselves after the fact, to rewire and rebuild…” We nod politely and continue on, embarrassed by Fairy King’s unending awkward monologues. We gaze upwards, our eyes almost blinded by the bright collapse and reformation of the epileptic sun-god who hovered above our path. Yes, and we are becoming more and more delirious…

On some strange inner urging we decide suddenly to leave the comfort of the path. We soon find a strange rusty mailbox hidden behind a pile of old bones, and wonder aloud at its purpose. Hearing our questioning, Mailbox opens his metal mouth, and he speaks. He tells us that he is both path pouch and pad for all communiques to and from a parallel universe which inhabits this selfsame spot. We crumble up a child’s drawing of an ostrich, and drop it in the slot. A small grey notebook pops out in response, listing several unintelligible dates, times, and coordinates. Some are circled, some are crossed out, a few are underlined. We chew up the notepad with our teeth, and then swallow it, glowing briefly. Curiosity satisfied, we return to the path.

As we gaze at the intricate patterns written on the bark-bones of these beautiful, termite-caressed corpses, a flash of information is abruptly downloaded into all our minds. We understand suddenly, and with an understanding beyond all words, that these bark patterns speak a very ancient code. Barely understood warnings, lost cultural epics, all these call out to us, begging our unseeing eyes to truly comprehend. So many voices shouting at us, yet we cannot understand but a tiny inconsequential fraction. One among our party manages to decipher a strange message claiming that “every sprouting mushroom here is a surrealist Egregore on holiday.” We shake our heads in delight, we shake in purest confusion. We shake, and shake, and shake. Our heads become extremely spooked at all this shaking, and soon scatter deep into the woods, leaving us irreversibly, painfully bald. A tragic mistake.

We turn a corner, and are confronted by the fossilized drama of the Twelve Primordial Paladins. Standing ever at attention, their bodies eternal and unmoving—except of course for that wilting, collapsing thirteenth. That bad brother, that evil twin. Forest’s senile first deserter. In actuality, he has probably never stood. Or so claim the proud and gallant Twelve…

We pass another bridge, and then another. Under one such bridge, an unseen troll informs us that “in this purgatorial land, the flying insects are all miniature mermaids, are all itsy-bitsy seahorses no joke, because here, down deep in the loins of the great universe, we are actually WALKING UNDERWATER.” We shrug him off, unconvinced. Instead, we turn our attention towards Alligator Mothergod, watching as her monstrous claws slice ever so gently across the thin and transparent skin of the laughing Old River. Old River is her created thing, he is the wetness formed by the flesh of her flesh, by the dismembering of her All. And he loves her too, he loves her. A heartwarming scene to be sure. But the beating of the machine beneath our feet gives form to a new uneasy feeling in our hearts. We instinctively understand it—the mindless twilight roar of machines building machines—of incestuous omens of a future false birth. And it’s coming from the under-upper realm, too, from the place we’d so recently departed. Great turbines they were and are, spinning at us, hinting at us. And now, it seems, they have followed us. They are bleeding through into this new land of ours, infecting it with stillness. With no tail in sight, the cyclops witnesses all…

We shudder together, and quicken our pace. Above, on the right hand side of the path, we see the body of Serpent Lord, coiled around a tree. Many ages past, old Serpent Lord had found himself caught within the grip of a murderous black hole. He’d managed to extricate himself, yet, having expelled all his inward astrals to pull himself up from that vast cosmic prison, he had immediately fallen asleep here, and calcified. We give his solidified form a little friendly pat of encouragement. You’ll slither again some day, you Old Serpent, we’re sure of it…

Across from that living statue of the Serpent Lord, there stands a Great Mother Tree. Great Mother Tree, so shameless and so dead, is shaking boldly at us with her thousand wayward nipples. She urges all to suck, to take a deep sip from milky warm web, and inside that web, to be transfigured. A myriad of shrieking young crawl upon her carapace, lost forever in the promise of her alabaster dreams. She whispers a promise of pure, undiluted whiteness to her children, a promise of true void. A Rewombification, unending. No creature is too good for her, it seems, for we spy a human up above, and we spy possum, we spy earthworm and sea crab. For a moment we all hesitate. But then, in unison, we mutter “Not today, no no. At the very least not today…” Everyone in agreement on the subject, we walk on.

Above the treetops there swims a squadron of Great Invisibles. Their yawn is so loud here, so unfiltered and so raw, that it threatens to suck up the entire universe. So we tie ourselves to a prickly pear cactus now, our red lips vibrating in harmony. Using inverse sign language, I send several frantic messages towards them, begging wildly that they please oh please just go just depart. They seem to get the message, flying higher, heading for the space behind the sun. Danger now passed, we untie all our bonds, and head on towards that bright orifice who waits up ahead, at the end of the very last bridge.

We soon come upon it, upon the humid mouth of hell. Guarded by a wayward planet on its right, by a Nothingness on its left. We are trapped and beguiled, drawn in by the pleasures of the inferno. We see a fallen comrade, and then a second, and we step over them both. We known that the opening to hell is a prehistoric escalator, birthed by dead whale. And so we enter deeper into this diabolic amnion; in order that we might more fully incubate.

On the other side of Mouth, we find ourselves to be drifting along in a fresh cage of crystal. In a neighboring lake a platypus cries, building his spoons. Time truly has no meaning here; the mesozoic always bleeds through. Here, we can grow fangs, scales, tails. Here, we can devour. I climb my sticky offal, and I smile. The brown blood of the swamp here is eternally renewing, is eternally shed. A bright death mark is soon passed, a record of a forgotten crime. It is a tale written in white blood—angel blood. Angel had battled it out with Devil here, and both had been cast away. Both had been dialectically cancelled out, and then evaporated. Old Otter, far off on his distant mountain, had observed this all within his spectral binocular, yet he had been frozen to the spot, unable to choose either side. It is because of this inaction on Otter’s part that all opposites here have been irreversibly eclipsed. It is because of this inaction that our existence is made buoyant and renewed.

We reach the opposing shore, and meet immediately with a fresh cast of unknown and unsavory characters. A disembodied hand spirit points the way to blind torment, to the joys of laceration and disease. Like it or not, to this path we all are now committed. There is, or so it is said, still one wormhole leading out of this place. But it is a doorway which only opens itself to those small enough to have been born through it. We pass a foul-smelling, crumpled old egg demon on our right, a veteran spirit so obviously well past his prime. One among our party is heard, whispering to herself in sing-song voice, crying “O, he was a good egg, he was a good egg no doubt—but now, oh now, this good old egg is cracked…” Feeling touched, we spontaneously remove our hats, and pass his shattered body in the most respectful of silence.

More doorways are found, but we are ever doubtful of escape. It seems every door here is already full, and likely, every door leads merely to another open door. Hell is a helix, that’s what my momma once said, a helix with no end no beginning. And I believed her. We pass several forks and knives entombed behind glass walls, and become doubtful of any dinner, too. Are we hungry? Are we not hungry? We can no longer even tell. Where is our stomach now, anyway? Where is our mouth? An obscene tree bursts onto the scene, wagging its anus at us. Stopping us all in our tracks. Phil yells “Ha ha! Even the trees here are sodomites!” We can’t help but agree with him, bold fellow. And we are every one of us quite pleased.

We continue on, swimming from obscenity to obscenity, giggling stupidly all the while. Enjoying ourselves, here in the kooky circus sideshow that is Hell. But just as we start growing complacent, the scenery changes. Time moves in reverse, the old gods are reborn, our saliva ices over. A potent circular structure descends, dropping down on forest floor beneath us. A sacrificial chamber? A vulva, a uvula? None in our party can even begin to agree on what exactly this strange new circular is, and a great clamor of disagreement is unleashed. Yet our screaming is abruptly silenced when eyes witness a sudden magnificent cascade of blood rushing out from the empty air above the “Grand Circular”. Blood menstrual, blood Aztec. Blood of the All, of the Everywhere, of the Anytime. We know our truth now, we can finally agree. This structure standing before us is our birthing chamber. And it is time to be reborn.

Towards the Grand Disintegration? Sure, why not? Will we be wolf, gecko, sponge? We don’t know, but we feel ready. We have already tread this path a billion times, and we will tread it a billion times more. And this path, what is this path? This is the path made by walkers. And there is no Beyond for us here, there is no Sublime Outer. Merely this; an eternal laughing snake, a perfect circle. Our world is a carnival world, you see, a world made trickster. Our world is a marvelous, life-giving prank. But those senile old alchemists, well, they got it all wrong back then, oh yes they did. Because within the ceaseless spinning of the manic whirligig ouroboros towering now before us, we are able to see, I mean to really, to truly, to finally see—that the old snake of legend doesn’t eat his own tail. He is born from it.

Wills in agreement, we hold hands, we count to ten, we hold our breath and jump into the flow. We pass through it and under it, pass over-between. We are flattened like paper and deposited on this new, final trail. It is a trail which erases our memories as it winds itself through us. As we wind ourselves through it. Yes, it is truly a walk of remembering. The kind of remembering you forget.

We see broken mirrors at our feet, we see twisted window panes. Parts of Selfhood, shedding. On this trail, we are no longer what we once were. That much is certain. Bright orbs surround us, tickle us, call us onward. Our thousand absent others, our silent companions in flight. Self-dismantling souls are we, speeding on toward a strange rebirth. There are a few benches here, too, benches for the vacillating. Yes, some entities will try and remain stationary here. Some try and avoid the unavoidable absolute divergence which awaits. But that’s not us, that’s not us. Our party has been possessed by an unstoppable forward momentum. We barely can even think anymore. We can only feel, intuit. We exist like computer scripts now, like salmon. Amor fati! Around us, soft, bleak cries can be heard. An infant no doubt—but an infant of what?

But the exit is above us, the exit! We are caught briefly in the hypnotic green gaze of the Five Watchers of the Threshold. But we break away, we make it though, we lightburst and we reverse. Internalizing all exoskeletons, becoming invisible, imperceptible, microscopic. BECOMING GONE.