Free World
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll 2
*
Beauty, truth, art and love are the simple demands of a pervasive libertine mantra which sweeps through each new generation like a rampaging bushfire. Eternally youthful ideals of evolutionary revolution resonate through the disordered ranks of the avant guard - True Believers emerging from shadowy subterranean scholastic corridors to blink and wink at the dazzling possibilities of a brand new aeon.
The Swinging Sixties are an unprecedentedly bright beacon which is already fading into the morass of memory. Yet fresh notions are always coalescing in the open minds of the fortunate few youngsters who manage to escape the pleasantly appointed toxicity or impoverished ignorance of suburban caverns, searching for a truer, more satisfying reality.
The juggernaut of time rolls across the chaotic landscape of another, more decadent decade, and the blazing guns of warships aimed at the gates of
At the height of a wild goose chase towards frigidly vengeful victory in a cold old war, gabbling lies, improper overtures, endemic corruption and deliberated confusion reigns supreme. The mediated media is constantly massaged by invested interests and inexorably absorbed by a handful of megalomaniac moguls. When accidentally allowed to emerge at all, rare nuggets of truth are confined to middle pages and the serendipitous coverage of rare live crosses.
Whole populations are inculcated with the belief that everything they hold dear can be ripped away in a single unexpected instant of blazing fury. Armageddon has been a noxious dream pursued by aging madmen and fanatics for millennia - one which now appears well in reach, if not quite within the grasp of the latest crop of necrotic tyrants and sadistic generals.
The hidden hands of dispassionate antisocial surgeons have successfully lobotomised most of the once untameably wild and free human species, excising and taxing important portions of their bodies and minds through aeons of feudal obedience training. Rebellious spirits were beheaded, tortured, burnt at the stake or hung, drawn and quartered for untold millennia; abject culled lessons in the value of obedience to their enslaved and purblind peers. Throughout patriarchal history, the most submissive and undemanding females were bedded more often and bred into a state of increased fecundity, easily outnumbering their wilful sisters in an unending expansion of dire mediocrity.
Down through the long dark ages, inhumane puppeteers pulled the strings of ruthless primate pack leaders and their brainless bodyguard of so-called ‘alpha males’. The secretive string-pullers now possess legions of football-playing gorillas dressed up in colourfully clashing uniforms. Their regimented pet primates sport totemic heraldries of stars, moons and stripy colours, and are armed to the canines with lethal weapons of mass indoctrination.
Yet even in the most structured and restrictive insectile societies, rebels will ever arise. As the tribe of Centraxis reassembles its members amid the ruins of yesterday’s dreams, the millstone of war rolls on unperturbed and the hypnotised wage serfs continue to slave for unseen masters. In the heady pre-millennial days following the end of the Sixties, wide-eyed students are still taught a load of demi-medieval codswallop and unexamined hearsay masquerading as tried and tested sciences and supposedly universal moralities. Students negotiate insane pits and snares designed to entrap any young person who lets their mind run free, to circumscribe and re(s)train any unreined soul who’s released unto liberating self-reign.
The domesticated primates walk a minefield of linguistic and social booby traps designed to separate winners from losers and rich from poor, a black and white fantasy which constrains everyone within the same straightjacket of jingoistic lies and poorly conceived truisms. Fresh young minds must continually slough off all kinds of accreted nonsense about superior and inferior races competing on a planet of infinitely renewable resources, given unto the sole dominion of its ‘natural leaders’ - the clotted inbred corporate cream of purblind Humankind.
Children are subtly taught that might makes right, and that the colonialist rulers of planet Earth obviously deserve their technologically-derived wealth – and, just as obviously, are the fittest to survive and rule by virtue of their wise technology and immeasurable wealth. They have the right to hold onto their treasures and fight all comers to the death – or, more likely, into further enslavement. Politics is the ancient code duello writ large in cultures trained to worship competition and illusory dichotomies. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.
The domesticated people are thoroughly entrained to trust the pronouncements of any jumped-up authority figure accredited by their local regime. Even as the new age is dawning, wide-eyed populations are told that DDT, nuclear radiation, x-rays, amphetamines and cigarettes with asbestos filters are completely safe. They’re perpetually soothed and reassured by well-paid head shrinking authorities, who smilingly tell their ignorant charges that scores of thousands of untested new chemical compounds which permeate their air, water and food can’t possibly be bad for them.
In many ways it’s a simple time; paper bags and wooden boxes, glass containers, brick veneer houses, bakelite-clad, valve powered electrical equipment and arcane slide rules are the apparently enduring artefacts of the day. Sticky paper flycatcher strips are hung from most every ceiling to trap the ubiquitous flies drawn to the slowly decaying bodies of self-consuming societies. Scientists are viewed as saints or demigods and their pronouncements oft mistaken for infallible writ.
The smallest computer is beyond the reach of all but the filthy rich and takes up an entire climate-controlled room. Telephones have dials that take time and patience to turn. Shops and offices record transactions in thick bound ledgers, using mechanical adding machines and cash registers with complex mechanical innards and tinkling metal bells. People write letters on paper with ink-dip nibs, fountain pens, newfangled biros or clunky unpowered typewriters. There’s not the vaguest possibility of anything akin to the internet, photocopiers are in their infancy and the few independent publishers of the day crank out pamphlets, magazines, newspapers and treatises on hand-wound printing presses that still use molten lead for reusable typefaces.
Microwave ovens are a physicist’s sick science fiction fantasy. There are no mobile phones, home video recorders, truly pain-free dentists, responsive paramedics or safe x-ray machines. Horse-drawn carts still deliver bread and milk to many front doors, and credit cards are a recently invented and rarely seen luxury item.
Cinemas show five year old movies imported from overseas soft power merchants, their scenes summarily hacked and slashed in artless acts of senseless censorship. Nudity is prohibited and many artworks and statues are stashed, desecrated or destroyed. Religiosity is almost mandatory, and official schismatic paedophile priests and other followers of the Prince of Peace are always at loggerheads and often embroiled in violent physical confrontation.
All banks and businesses tally their escalating numbers by mind and hand and most currencies are backed by real metal bullion. Almost everyone smokes cigarettes, cigars or pipes; spittoons still exist in bars and restaurants, and large sandbox ashtrays stand in the corners of most public spaces. Tranquillisers are commonly prescribed for any dissatisfied woman or man. Contraception is chancy and abortions are illegal and difficult to safely obtain. No-fault divorce is impossible. Equal pay for equal work is seen as a hopeless ideal and most feminists are aged suffragettes.
Women are still basically chattels of the heads of their patriarchal families. They aren’t allowed in most ‘public’ bars, have little control over their own bodies or destinies, earn ridiculously smaller amounts than men for the very same work and are restricted to a small handful of glass-ceilinged career paths. Girls are usually pregnant by the age of eighteen and most marry soon after. They’re expected to hand their jobs over to another Miss or to a male breadwinner when they tie the knot, and become happy homebody housewives subsiding into greying lives in near-universal hive-houses - tied by inextricable binds into identical domesticated nuclear mirages.
These ‘modern’ humans are easily convinced that the profitable chemical-fuelled Green Revolution will forever end the problem of starvation. They believed that food shortages and overpopulation will be solved by as yet unseen but inevitable miracles of science.
Many see the hand of god in the works of industrialised civilization, believing that industry will never need to scrub its filthy pollution from the air and waters because Jesus or the Hidden Imam will be coming back one day soon; all corpses will rise reanimated from their coffins and the lucky chosen few will be taken up to heaven to party and wait out the Apocalypse. The age of the world is five thousand years and the planet won’t be needed for much longer anyway – the old odd-bod god sky fairy will return at last, to give the worthy a brand new Heaven and a shiny new Earth. As far as most of the faithful are concerned, the rest can go to hell.
Entire populations suffer a plethora of unbelievable delusions, professed at them by co-opted educationalist flunkies and inept petit-tyrant teachers. Children are taught that the world was an utterly stable place, bereft of all the decimating cataclysms that had cyclically destroyed all previous human civilizations. They’re subtly entrained with racist beliefs, shown concocted interconnections of primate evolution, laden with filigreed doctrines of racist supremacy which traduce Darwinism for malign imperialistic purposes. They’re told that the human brain had swelled to its current size in an easily defined upward progression from slobbering apeman through tribal indigene to triumphal Caucasian, ignoring all the abundant evidences to the contrary.
As far as they know, the planets have rolled along in their unvarying tracks for billions of years in an unbroken system of Newtonian clockwork and no asteroid or comet remains unswept from Earth’s orbit by the massive gas giants that patrol our solar system’s perimeter (The cognoscenti now know that a myriad of rocks and a handful of stellar mountains can strike unexpectedly at any time and that the Sun surfs through a monumental galactic battlefield, but in those days the histories of Wars in Heaven were still cloaked in superstitious mumbo jumbo and religious disinquisition).
Venus is widely viewed as a foetid primeval planet of swamp-dwelling dinosaurs, a relatively pleasant place we might like to colonise one day - rather than a brimstone-brewed literal hellball of molten metals, a burning pit of crushing pressurised flame – as the largely forgotten and thoroughly vilified seer Immanuel Velikovsky had predicted two decades earlier.
Many still talk of the slowly desiccating canals of Mars, and simultaneously believe in the literal and infallible truth of the Bible or Koran or Torah or Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Civilized people dream in black and white and spend their lives propping up the temporary edifices of divergent hierarchical ideologies, all promising permanent material security, ultimate global triumph or more subtle and insidious forms of self-delusion.
Meanwhile, flying disks, glowing cigars, undulant serpentine forms, shining spheres, delta-winged aeriform mystery craft and unidentified aerial objects of all kinds are seen and contacted throughout the world; the most important news of all times is twisted by well-oiled misinformation machines into a laughably implausible joke. The inconvenient fact that feudal, feuding humanity is not alone in the cosmos - or even on planet Earth - is swept from view, so that somnolent peons can remain free to avidly consume poisonous offal, guzzle mind-numbing alcohol and absorb the messages of brutal meathead games.
Few suspect that their warlike societies are building a base in a much larger ball game, and those who do are customarily ridiculed, exiled or ignored by the mainstream.
Information is tightly controlled and thoroughly massaged; there’s no independent media and no cable television. People fill their leisure time with a narrow range of opinions, comedies and dreary soaps on flickering low-definition screens. No-one eats sprouts or soy products or rapeseed ‘canola’ oil or drinks imported water or beer. The only organic food is incidentally produced or home-grown, vegetarianism is viewed as a very rare disease or a dangerous ideology like Communism, and homosexuality is illegal and punishable by jail sentences and/or regular beatings in public places.
In many ways, little has changed between then and now.
In this jobs-for-the-boys meat market masquerading as an advanced civilization, all police forces are equally corrupt. Politicians are usually worse – they have to choose between the money and the gun offered by unseen overseers. As Churchill observed, a parliamentarian may face their opposition, but their enemy is at their back.
If you don’t know the correct handshake, wink or nod your future is still circumscribed by your allotted stature in the nepotistic Old World Order. Despots and petit tyrants with falsified pedigrees and family trees – purporting to point back toward Jesus or Moses or Mohammed, Charlemagne or the Divine Julius - vie for control of the industrial hives of wage serfs, all indentured to their tawdry homes and disposable lifestyles.
Rabid, flag-waving, jingoistic patriotism is still the norm everywhere. But back in the dawn-time of global consciousness, barefoot long-haired hippies lead anticonsumerist rallies and antiwar moratoriums through the streets of concreted cities and establish alternative nations in rural enclaves, all burgeoning with idealistic New Age enthusiasm.
In the ex-imperial provinces of Commonwealth countries like Oz, if you don’t stand up for ‘God Save the Queen’ when the anthem is played in theatres or cinemas you’re unceremoniously ejected from the venue; likely spat upon, vilified and manhandled at the very least. Similar and worse fates await those in countries flying other flags and singing different supremacist lyrics.
In every place that’s easy to see, people have been entrained for generations to jerk and genuflect before ancient tribal trappings, wrappings, traditions and symbols. Their true illuminating meanings have long been forgotten and supplanted in the minds of most, hidden from the uncomprehending laity by tyrants jealously guarding their hoarded troves of stolen wisdom.
While the Iron Curtain still separates East from West the world is a thinly whitewashed bloodstained arena of feuding fiefdoms, whose various populations delude themselves into believing that their particular idiosyncrasies are superior and fit to be imposed on all others. Protestant and Catholic feud like Sunni and Shiite, Hindu and Moslem, Communist and Capitalist, and they all share the same handy and long-suffering scapegoat – the Jews. If no Jews are left alive in the area, black-skinned people or the ‘yellow peril’ will make a handy substitute.
All a country has to do to qualify as a democracy under the United Nations definition is to give the vote to all its adult citizens for a single generation – and even in the latter days of the Cold War only Norway, Sweden and Britain qualify for that lofty title; even the good old USA only ‘gave’ the vote to southern Negroes in the mid-1960s, and fails to measure up to even the slim requirements of a democracy demanded by the U.N. The feuding nations are islands of prejudice, unused to the nascent realpolitik of the post-colonial, post-nuclear future racing to engulf and deconstruct their globalised village.
The domesticated primates of more ‘privileged’ nations pay their taxes, obediently work nine to five or seven or nine, and train their children to do the very same thing, time without end. They borrow against a future they suspect – and half-hope – will never arrive, and see the bounty of the entire world as their personal property, their domain by right of the higher moral (and technological) ground they already possess. They’re all damaged peoples, still bearing the livid scars of the Great Depression and World Wars One and Two. They keep their heads down and their bellies full.
Most of their children inevitably become clonal colonial duplicates of their parents - voting, thinking, talking, acting out and believing the same supposed eternal verities as their forebears. Most people are half-awake half-drunk shells of their childhood selves and live in a dim dream world, self-hypnotised and easily enthralled by bright lights, loud noises and new transient plastic flavours and colours.
American or Russian, Briton or Swede, Australian or Japanese - all over the half-raped ‘developed’ world, paranoid populaces are told to dig holes in their back yards and stock up with guns to shoot their less prepared neighbours – in case a fifty megaton bomb should happen to explode over their heads. The MAD tenet of Mutually Assured Destruction is widely promoted as a good idea, and warfare is viewed by the makers of money as a constructive path to ‘development’. The constant threat of nuclear hell is excused as a promising route to world peace – by the blood-soaked weapon making power mongers and their strutting political puppets.
Almost every crooked cranny in the scarred living world is inhabited by a dominating species of raving paranoid schizophrenics, slowly waking from an aeon-spanning nightmare of sadomasochistic brutality, superstition, sexism, ignorance and anger. Humankind is sleepwalking in amnesia, slowly recovering from repeated and unrecalled blows to its collective braincase. Those too old to free themselves can’t wake from the ongoing nightmare even as their children sense that the tide of immanent destruction is losing momentum and that new possibilities are arising, glowing and beckoning over unknown horizons.
Disregarding all the misunderstood prophesies and prognosticators of doom, a wise young generation can see that the withered old emperors and empresses have no clothes and that the wheel of fortune is still in spin. Optimistic dreams of utopian peace may still win out over the parochial head-butting phantasms of yesteryear. A sanity of slow digressions may yet prevail over the fantasies of eternally growing cancerous economies trapped in limited territorial dominions.
A lucky and curious few always manage to escape the vapid, polluted gene pool of their submissively coopted ancestries. Artful dodgers can always slide through loopholes and rents in the tattered nets of the rapacious fishers of men and women. The alluring calls of beauty, truth, art and love are burning beacons to the few guttersnipe children of the revolution who can’t keep their eyes off the stars.
In abandoned warehouses, farms and factories, in post-agricultural ghost towns and empty city blocks awaiting delayed demolition (as ‘urban renewal developments’ are countermanded in the OPEC-triggered world recession), in remote tribal enclaves and urban concrete jungles, cells of radicals and cohorts of free loving free thinkers sprout, grow and entwine. They form new spectral threads in a mighty unbreakable cable, inexorably woven by eager visionaries into the unprecedented pattern of a genuinely new future tapestry. Though vilified as freaks, hippies and Luddite degenerates by the hypnotised mass around them, their untidy ranks continue to grow with infusions of runaway kids and disaffected young adults, all seeking a new something – anything, except more of the same mindlessly violent paradigm.
In the evolving era of long hair and moustaches, Day-Glo and disco, thick lacquer hairspray, padded prosthetic body parts, eight cylinder steel behemoths and dune buggies on the Moon, anything at all is entirely probable. The dream-seeds of the mind-expanding psychedelic era are nourished and cherished into life by an invisible anarchic army of loosely connected change agents, and within a generation most of their beliefs, nostrums, certainties and lifestyles have entered the mainstream houses of screen-watching domesticated hominids.
Turning back the rising tide of free love, open relationships, sexual experimentation and evolutionary Tantra is a priority for the counter-revolutionary forces of conservatism, privilege and uniform conformity. The tender art of making love is seen as an unmentionable necessity and a necessary evil in the uptight post-Victorian world. Sudden epidemics of war-borne clap and herpes appear and disappear and a toxic, carcinogenic tarnish rapidly forms on the bright early promise of the contraceptive pill, causing many to question the innocent wisdom of keeping hearts and thighs freely open.
If the wage serfs can’t be induced to form couples, reproduce and work endlessly to feed and house their families while filling up all their precious time and space with meaningless crap, the lopsided economy will surely collapse; the eternal battle to confine and control the domesticated primates in conveniently isolated and fenced-off little boxes - which they religiously and fearfully seal themselves inside every single night, as self-locking cellmates in a prison planet - will likely be lost. If the slaves don’t watch the hypnotic boxy screens they may even look up and dream of the stars and imagine proscribed and uncontrolled destinies.
A final solution has to be found to all the wanton experimentation and dangerous freedom spreading through the carefully concealed underbelly of society. A very different form of foreign aid is just coming off the retroviral drawing board and about to be inculcated in the bloodstreams of destitute nations, spread by supposedly philanthropic benefactors who hope to protect the world from diseases like smallpox; they succeed in spreading new lab-bred horrors with their inadequately supplies of filthy shared needles and contaminated vaccines instead.
The curious secret is to be kept well hidden; AIDS doesn’t spread vaginally and is no real threat to the blossoming flower of the sexual revolution, but people will fall for the Big Lie when they’re told it does. Even as the flower children cavort and disport in the newly regained planetary garden of free love, billions are about to be easily frightened into monogamous submission with a well-timed dose of ruthlessly skilful manipulation. #
In the first few years after the global youth revolution has been subsumed in a contrived tide of disillusioned consumerism, many of the original psychedelic pioneers have been imprisoned, killed or coopted. Their mind-expanding Philosopher’s Stones are being supplanted by deadly pharmaceutical speed, smack and barbs as contraband supplies of consciousness opening substances begins to dry up. The criminalisation of LSD and the lethal explosion of heroin addiction (powdery crystalline karmic fallout from the war in distant
Most people have tried marijuana and many smoke it regularly; most believe that the insane prohibition of a fantastically useful and harmless substance must end and that pot will be legalised next year, or maybe the year after. They don’t realise that the sources of alcohol and pharmaceutical chemicals are far easier to control and own by those who already believe they own all of Humanity’s dreams. Besides, cannabis helps people think beyond the box, makes them dream and understand that their world is controlled by obsessive-compulsive neurotic nutters, and that anything is possible to an open mind; so the herb superb remains crazily illegal while brain-numbing poisons are sanctioned and taxed by The Man.
The debilitating competitive entertainments of the uber-rich - ongoing imperialist or capitalist or communist invasions of poor little nations, nuclear tests and arms races, sanctimonious Old World Order belligerence and half-cocked New World Order domination, the pardoning of demon-worshipping presidential potentates and the silencing of assassins, nuclear weapons in space, poisonous water and glow-in-the-dark irradiated breast milk - are all slowly undermined by the shining spectral gloss of a new idea, a swelling notion that sweeps through the shell-shocked nations of the world;
We’re young and free and we don’t have to do this any more! We can create whatever world or lives we like! The future is in our hands and time is on our side… and a new millennium of peace is almost at hand!
“Centraxis is a tribe,” Fifi L’Amour the Lady Ringell is saying as Lip Po returns to the hall with his twelve-string guitar. “Oh yes, please!” she entreats him. “Some harp-like music from our elfin minstrel!” The long-haired Asian youth settles onto a large pile of cushions and begins to tune the tightly strung twists of steel wire.
“You were saying?” Charmayne asks, pulling long strands of brown hair behind narrow lobeless ears. “A tribe?” The Cold Wanderer passes the peace pipe in her direction and she shakes her head while a truck rumbles past the terraced squats.
“Thanks, Wanderer.” Fifi intercepts the pipeful of Afghani hashish and takes the box of matches from the Canadian’s hand. “Indeed,” she continues, “We’re a modern pre-twenty-first century medieval nation, with vast tracts of land and many bases and dwellings under our charge. This,” she gestures around the party-tousled, graffiti-blasted longhall, “is merely one of our far-flung holdings; it should suffice for another year or three.” The kettle boils, steaming and screaming in the kitchen. “Be a dear and get that, would you?” She hands her empty cup to an immobile Wanderer. “Mine’s golden seal – it’s on the bench. What are you having, Shar?”
“Mint would be nice.” Wanderer stands to take their cups. “Honey?” he asks. “Thanks, sweet buns,” the Lady Ringell replies with a dimpled smile and a snide aside to Charmayne; “He’s a pussycat, really – a classic Leo.” The Empress relights the hash, holding the match to the small lumpy brown granules until they’re smouldering with ruddy heat; then she inhales slowly and deeply.
“No sweetener for me,” says Charmayne. Wanderer affects one of his trademark clench-toothed leers and stalks off toward the shrieking kettle. “And you all share everything together? Everything?” Fifi nods through the smoke. “How daring,” the young woman sighs. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” She crosses her lanky blue-jeaned legs on the floor. Li Po strums a chord to test the tuning and begins playing the first ringing notes of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’.
Fifi places a hand on Charmayne’s knee. “You don’t have to be initiated into the tribe to live here, you know. We have a vacant room right now, if you’re interested. We need more women here, to keep the numbers balanced.”
“I don’t know if I can afford to move…”
Lady Fifi laughs. “We don’t charge rent, sister – we just share the power and gas bills.”
“You mean you all live here for free?”
“Of course! ’Tis free world…” Before the Centraxian noblewoman can complete her reply another tribesman enters the hall and Lip Po’s introductory chords clang to a sudden halt. “Ah!” The newcomer beams a winning smile, all gleaming white teeth and sensual lips ’neath high tanned cheekbones. His ice-blue eyes are framed by a gloss of long blonde hair.
“Just who I was looking for.” His voice trills in a musical Welsh accent, a beguiling tone that wins most everyone over when they first hearken to its charming lilt. “Here,” he says, leaning down to deposit an offering into a sparsely filled enamelled bowl on the bare scuffed floorboards. “Put that in yer pipe and smoke it!” He guffaws at his little jape and swaggers around the room, scanning the most recent signs and sigils inscribed on the graffito-smothered walls.
“Charmayne,” Fifi chants, “this is Nathan the Marcon. Nathan, meet Charmayne.” Nathan cocks his head and smiles. “Pleased to meet you. How do you do?” He speaks a little too loudly, clicking the heels of his sandshoes together with an incongruously Prussian precision. “I do very well, thanks,” Charmayne replies. “ ‘Shar’ will do, if you prefer.”
“If I prefer? If it’s up to me, I think I’ll call you Chaz. Has a nice ring to it. Chaz.” He rolls the word around in his mouth as Li Po tentatively resumes strumming his guitar. Nathan smiles as he watches Charmayne squirm slightly between the bulging arms of her overstuffed lounge chair. “Are you a Centraxian, too?” she asks.
“Me? A Centraxian?” He sits on a couch to strike the classic Rodin’s Thinker pose and pretends to consider the matter deeply. “Not yet,” Fifi answers in his stead, her hand still perched upon Charmayne’s knee. “But ye were talking about the possibility of thy initiation last night, at the party.”
“Maybe so and maybe not,” the Welshman sings, “but that’s not what I’m here to talk to yer about. Is Ram here, by the way?” Fifi’s eyes wander skyward. Nathan pronounces the name ‘ram’, as if talking about a male sheep or goat, and pointedly stares at an ovine skull with huge twisting horns ensconced above the fireplace’s mantle. “Oh, there he is. At least his room isn’t all painted black any more.”
“I think he’s upstairs,” Lip Po cuts in without pausing in his fingerwork, dreamy brown eyes darting to the older hippy. Nathan shakes his head with a disapproving pout. “Still in bed, eh? And it’s a beautiful day outside. His legs’ll atrophy an’ he’ll waste away, that’s what I keep telling ’im.” Fifi grins and barely suppresses a giggle as she watches the athletic Welshman work his captive audience. He brushes wavy blonde wisps from a handsomely scarred face; his rugged features barely betray the fact that the resilient hippy had come off second best in a near-fatal encounter with a speeding locomotive a few years earlier.
A shrieking yell bursts into the room - a deafeningly audible female voice screaming out, somewhere nearby in the convoluted conjoined houses of the squat; “Fuck me!” Li Po abruptly stops playing and all eyes in the room roll toward the ceiling. Silence fills the longhall and Charmayne shifts position on the floor while the Lady Ringell refills the wooden pipe.
“Why don’t yer play something upbeat,” Nathan demands of the silent musician. “D’yer know any Moody Blues, like In Search of a Lost Chord? Or Donovan? Season of the Witch?” Li Po knows the unassuming Welsh wizard well enough to understand that he’s merely playing a harmless mind game; that this foolish blustering banter is a sham designed to put them all off guard and probe past their defences. The graceful young man flicks glossy black hair from his eyes and begins strumming the chords to Buffy Saint-Marie’s ‘Universal Soldier’.
“Ah,” Nathan sighs, “Donovan! That’s more like it. Well, Madame Fifi, what’s this I hear about Centraxis takin’ in people when they’re still under the age of eighteen?” He waves an imaginary conductor’s baton as Li Po picks out the melody and prepares to sing the first verse.
“Lady Fifi, if thee please – or better still, the Lady Ringell. And not that I’m aware of,” she replies with sudden - if momentary - seriousness. “But if so,” the Empress says through a barely suppressed gaggle of returning giggles, “what of it?” She opens the brown paper tube Nathan had thrown into the bowl and pours out a peck of dried green flower heads. “I notice ye hang out with lots of people under eighteen… and sometimes ye let it all hang out, thyself, so what of it?”
“I’d be careful of that if I was ye,” Nathan says with a frown. “That’s tripping grass, that is.” Charmayne leans forward to inspect his offering more closely. “No seeds,” she muses dubiously.
“That doesn’t mean anything, Chaza!” He rounds on Fifi. “What of it? What of it? I’ll tell yer what.” He puffs up his chest and bristles at Fifi, who is also an initiate of a burgeoning local magic circle popularly known as ‘the Group’. “But first, tell me this – does the Dawn of Ra take kids under eighteen, too?”
“Take them? What dost…” Fifi’s reply is interrupted by the Cold Wanderer who returns with a tray of cups and jugs, geometrically arranged around a ceramic Chinese teapot. “Serve yerselves,” he announces. “Honey’s in the bowl,” he mutters gruffly as he deposits the tray on the floor. “I gotta take a leak.” He turns on his heel and strides to the foot of the stairwell, pausing for a few moments while he looks up the stairwell with his head cocked to one side, as if listening to someone or something upstairs. Lip
“Do one fer me while yer there,” Nathan laughs. The Cold Wanderer dispenses a sour grimace and disappears up the stairs. “Well?” the Marcon asks. “Do they? Do ye?”
“Do we what?” The Lady Ringell hands him the pipe and prepares to light a match. “Do ye initiate kids into yer magic school or not?”
“Well,” Fifi says as she depresses a dimpling crescent on her cheek with a scarlet fingernail, “we haven’t so far, but there’s no prohibition on it in the Group – or in Centraxis, for that matter. It just hasn’t come up yet.” Nathan lights the thimbleful of heads. “So ye would?” He draws deeply on the hand-carved implement, sucking the smoke all the way into his lungs. A plug of embers shoots through the pipestem and into his mouth, causing the Welshman to gag and spit.
“Well,” Fifi ruminates, “there are a couple of kids doing some lower order work; psychic training and odds and ends that one such as thee might deem ‘pagan’ in nature – but they’re the children of Initiates and Adepts, and what people teach their children in the privacy of…” As if striking a gavel, Nathan bangs the pipe down loudly on a brass ashtray to empty the bowl - and to regain the initiative. “That’s not good enough,” he announces. “It’s against the lore.”
“I don’t believe it’s illegal to…” the Empress begins to protest while Charmayne pours a round of tea, whose fragrance and colour indicate Wanderer has ignored their requests and provided a pot of chamomile.
“Not the law, the lore… L – O – R – E, lore.”
“Whose lore, then? Thine?”
Nathan glares at the Lady Ringell. “The ancient lore! No coven or magical order is allowed to initiate kids – and in this day and age, that means inducting them before the age of eighteen. Do yer really mean to say ye don’t know?”
“The Group is hardly a coven – nor is the Court of the Centrax. Perhaps,” Fifi diplomatically suggests, “it depends on what you mean by initiation…”
“You’re all a bunch of witches, whether you admit it or not,” Nathan assures her. Li Po chooses that moment to begin singing the first verse of Buffy’s masterpiece and his clear strong voice carries away the fractious conversation on vibe-lifting wings.
*
‘He’s five foot two and he’s six foot four, he fights with missiles and with spears
He’s only thirty-one and he’s all of seventeen, been a soldier for a thousand years
He’s a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain, a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
And he knows he shouldn’t kill and he knows he always will, killing for me my friend and me for you.
And he’s fighting for Canada, he’s fighting for France, he’s fighting for the U.S.A.
And he’s fighting for the Russians and he’s fighting for
And he’s fighting for Democracy, he’s fighting for the Reds, he says it’s for the peace of all,
He’s the one that must decide who’s to live and who’s to die and he never sees the writing on the wall.
But without him how would Hitler have condemned them at Le Baal, without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war and without him all this killing can’t go on.
He’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame, his orders come from far away no more
They come from here and there and you and me and brothers, can’t you see
This is not the way we put an end to war?’
*
A True Story
- R.A.
# See AIDS – The Real Story
* Lyrics to Universal Soldier by Buffy Saint-Marie
Images – author’s
Further true tales of the Prince of Centraxis -
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 3 -Stretching the Envelope
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 4 - Home to Roost
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 5 - Could It Be Any Body?
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 6 - Free Lovers
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 7 - Wild Widow's Son
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 8 - Womanimals
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 9 - Incautious Wishes
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 10 - Freedom of Choice
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 11 – Smuggled Desires
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 12 – Love the One
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 13 - Open Secrets
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 14 – Between Initiations
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 15 – Promethean Preparations
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 16 – Through the Looking Glass
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 17 – Second Arcanum
Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 1 - Doves and Serpents
The Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater
Psychedelic Water Part 1 – Fractal Rainbow
And for further enlightenment see
Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images
The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
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The Prince of Centraxis – http://centraxis.blogspot.com
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Please add your perspective to the collective mind NOW! - Prince Ram'yana