Reorientation
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Psychedelic Water 18
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“We’re each creating the entire universe, moment by moment, an instant before the language-based perceptions of the monkey mind can apprehend what’s occurring. Our thoughts are always one step behind reality, blindly marching after our real intentions. We conceal our truest sacred selves within an endless reel of commentary or critique and forget that we are divine, creating material reality from the whole cloth of mindstuff…”
- The Shaman
Footfalls sound close at hand in the dancing shadows as, one by one, the Star Earth crew begins to emerge from the all-encompassing starlit gloom. They straggle in from the livid vacuum of the fading night to collect around fire, coffee, smoke, mandarines, mangoes, ice cream beans and savoury jaffles, and the rollicking conversation swells with a welcome injection of fresh new ideas and addictive old emotions.
The shaman watches bodies jostle within the eternal pheromonal haze of humankind’s semiconscious interaction, while a loose chain of introductions winds around the rapidly gathering circle of hippies, Goths, ferals and semi-straight ‘tree changer’ visitors. Amara and Phico are swiftly engaged in rambling conversations with trippers, eccie heads and stoners as the trancing music wanes lower. The drumming has ceased after a resounding crescendo, and ambient electronica twitters and barks in mechanical semblance of the nocturnal marsupial world’s wide waking animal languages.
Omry and Paul laugh alongside a bevy of partly clad yuppie princesses, who are happily slumming their weekend away in the subtropical bushland before returning to their favoured strip of boxy upmarket concrete, not far to the urbanised north. The young teenage couple (coupling on the edge of the small firelit clearing) grow bored with the hippies’ endless discussions and roll into the bushes in a fleshy tangle, slipping away from the glittering stares of a lonely trio of Kiwi tourists.
A ragged convoy of vehicles staggers down the steep hill as early morning revellers straggle into the secluded campsite, returning from the plethora of parties that straddle the wider rural valley. The latecomers resonate with doof, trance, reggae, ragamuffin, rock, techno and house music, returning from miniature festive indoor and outdoor carnivals in far-flung, psychedelically lit and flavoursome settings – fitting backdrops for wild celebrations of life, love, sex, drugs, and unending dancing in a long weekend quest for continual blissed-out fun.
Hallucinatory images and telempathic feelings blur and meld as the acid trip finally unravels, conjoining the warped weft of the bearded shaman’s contemplation with the ambient hum of humanity. Soon all that remains of the LSD’s absorbing benison is a heightening of all Ram’s senses. He sinks into a single eternal ongoing moment, becoming a silent sentinel in the midst of the tumultuous circle of diehard partygoers.
A cacophony of thoughts ring inside his brainiac cranium like a random orchestra of resounding gongs; he witnesses waves of gay exaltation, lonely depression, wrung-out exhaustion, earthy contemplation, inspiring aspiration, fateful attraction and needful turpitude, all writhing through the body-minds of his fellow revellers - impassioned addictions and adhesions lurking behind the carefully contrived masks of their surface identities. Everyone flirts and jostles, staring into other versions of themselves refracted inside each others’ mutually mesmerised eyes.
As he views their interactions from an ever-increasing distance of difference the shaman feels the mutable nature of humankind mirrored inside his being. He reconnects with the wellsprings of life each time a pair of eyes connects with his – each time another primate peeks behind the veil of his hirsute appearance in a moment of curious recognition. I remember what older people looked like when I was their age, he assures himself each time they glance away. We hardly saw them at all…
Ram’yana reflects that he’s slowly disappearing behind ghostly memorialised barricades of once-vibrant decades, becoming gradually less visible to younger souls around the warmth of the communal fire; they only have eyes for their own brand of highly sprung vitality. Just as adult dolts customarily ignore the impassioned play and incessant meaningful ramblings of children, he muses, literally talking over their heads…
He hovers around his heartbeat, inhabiting his niche within the fireside bubble of warmth, suffused by a subtly intensifying aura of immanence as the microscopic dose of psychedelic water is absorbed into the deepening well of his experience. Almost half a century of psychedelic explorations have accreted in Ram’s plasm, long displacing all commonplace sense of normalcy; boredom is a nearly forgotten state that’s become impossible to entertain. After living so many years in a hermetically sealed life in an isolated forest, even the painful pangs of loneliness have almost been relegated to the time-wise realms of memory.
He lies back on cushioning hummocks of grass-clothed volcanic soil and flings his arms wide to inhale vaporous airs of riverside trees, drinking deep the savoury draught of the welcoming world. A young couple describe constellations to their fellow space travellers, holding hands and pointing into the misty sky while the wheel of stars spins around the centre of Ram’s being. Venus is rising in promissory invitation to the coming dawn, lofting above the rainforest crags of the scarp while a lambent moon declines and reclines beneath the westering hills.
Each different night and unique day can seem the same in every way... The rhyming words conjugate within his idling cogitations, lyrics to an unpenned song whose music thrums in his sinews and sings through his veins; To eyes and ears half closed to truth the sky is a confining roof… The dome of heaven expands as he drifts on the paradisaical shore of endless infinity and the silly ditty resolves into a brief quatrain; Even ants can feel the dance that draws them free from chores entranced; like people, plants and happenstance, each instant is a new romance…
After a timeless time bathing in the smiling crescent of Aphrodite’s bright iris the shaman prince experiences a swelling thirst, and is filled with a sudden pressing need for an infusion of fluid. Ram’yana rises from half lotus to kneel closer to the hearth of the dwindling fire and notices a box of fruit he deposited beneath a Bezier-covered card table many hours earlier; he smiles with the relieved sigh of a sojourning traveller who has spotted a long-lost friend in a foreign crowd. He passes the wrinkle-skinned fruit around the circle of trippers, dancers, smokers and musicians - who are all coming down from something or other through the seemingly eternal hours of the psychedelically enhanced morning – and sups on mandarines from the generous fruit trees of his distant forest home.
Laughter subsides and a momentary peaceable lull washes over all who sit, stand or lounge around the fireplace as the hubbub falls silent – an example of the sacred common stillness that occasionally claims the hearts and minds of everyone at once, even in the midst of the most fractious setting or ecstatic gathering. After an eternal instant of silence a mopoke calls from atop the towering basalt cliff and a local Rainbow Region poet jumps to his feet. He fills the burgeoning space with an enthusiastic shout that erupts across the flames, then waves his arms to the heavens and declaims a familiar refrain from an earlier century; “No matter what,” he cries, “you must stand for;
*
Freedom
Beauty
Truth
And above all
LOVE!
*
“Come what may – you can’t fool the children of the revolution!” A scattering of laughter and sporadic applause follows his heartfelt declaration. “Great movie, dude!” a relaxing drummer yells to the bedraggled poet, whose dripping soaked dreadlocks attest to a recent dip in the burbling creek at the foot of the slope. “Now sing it!” A ragged chorus of cheers flies up from the fireside as a fresh brace of logs is flung into the coals. Amara’s melodious voice unexpectedly rises in place of the poet’s, lifting in surprisingly sweet song; “Whatever happened to the revolution? We all got stoned and it drifted away…
“Whatever happened to the revolution? I think it died just yesterday.” A few ragged voices from the Old Guard of original hippies join the refrain as she continues singing a superbly well-recollected version of the old Skyhooks anthem *; “Well I remember nineteen seventy, the army wanted you and the army wanted me. There was a war goin’ on we were out in the streets, wearin’ our badges and stamping our feet…”
Ram’s lips move in time with the words and his voicebox begins to vibrate in a resonance of confirming reminiscence; “There’s a hundred thousand people all on my side, we didn’t care if we lived or died…” Knowing looks pass between the eyes of the elders, who straggle around Amara’s bold recollections while most of the youngsters listen to the old lyrics for the first time. “Hundred thousand people going to make it come, hundred thousand people had the Man on the run…”
Most of the fireside circle joins in the repetitive one-line chorus as Amara displays the full voluminous extent of her talent. “Whatever happened to the revolution?” rings out over and again, rising in pitch and volume as a dreadlocked mandolin player frantically strums a staircase of shifting chords. Ram’yana is pleasantly amazed and amused; everyone falls silent when the darkly visaged woman demonstrates her recollection of the last verses, throwing her hat to her feet and releasing her long black locks. She sings with full-throated zeal to impromptu accompaniment of mandolin, guitar and bongos; “Everybody thought we could win with a vote so the band went home without playin’ a note; We forgot about that war but it still went on, I’m alright Jack see ya round, so long…”
Amara’s eyes meet the shaman’s as she repeats the line before singing the last verse. “And now today everyone’s a bit older, we’re getting’ richer but we’re getting’ colder, we’re lookin’ for somethin’ that just ain’t there and it don’t mean nothin’ to have long hair…” The bongo player becomes lost in a solo fugue of percussive adventure as her eyes shift around the momentarily rapt circle. “So when you’re ready to make a stand, open your mouth and raise your hand – when you’re sick of your parties and sick of your sweets get off your arses - and I’ll see you out in the streets!”
The cheers and applause are heartfelt as the small crowd screams its fulsome praise, before settling back into clusters of conversation; musicians continue jamming in the lightshow of flickering shadows as the thicker logs catch light. Everyone is soon leaning away from a blazing conflagration, basking in a mortal plasma image of the eternal flame - presaging the approach of the unseen yet immortal Deity of the Day as the solar orb edges upward ’neath the Pacific horizon, beyond the massing black basalt cliffs that loom above the sheltered homeland of the Star Earth Tribe.
Freedom, beauty, truth and love… Idealistic ideas roll around the interior of Ram’s mindscape, ethereal mnemonic roller skaters circling the ovaloid rink of his braincase - and an image of Amber’s blazing eyes and feline smile swells to fill the glowing auditorium of his inward horizon. He vibrates on the brink of arousal as a lusty scene is projected against the half-closed screens of his inner eyelids, and he barely manages to divert his imaginative ruminations before they transform into full-blown sexual fantasias.
That’s a reality I’d best not pre-program, he reminds himself; even if it did have a chance of coming true. The shaman is all too familiar with the twin follies of projection and hypnosis. How can a magician be sure of any lover’s true feelings and intent, if he blinds himself with expectancies that bind him to the limiting fantasies of his self-mesmerising mind? How can he be assured of true love if he hypnotises his mate in an act of magical or commonplace seduction, or even merely wills her abed, as most prime mate alpha male players are wont to? How can he ever know the beloved if he muddies the waters of her will and the reality of her being with addictive expectations?
The ethics inherent in the blessed albatross of his Hermetically trained and distilled awareness constrain the slowly aging mage to refrain from acting – to simply await a bright moment of approach from a longed-for beloved, and to do little more to bring on that approach than keep his emerald eyes and smouldering heart as open and receptive as can be, despite the undiminished tide of his evanescent libido.
He recalls all too well the off-putting effect that wrinkly stigmata of time’s passage had ignited in him, when he was a younger aversion of himself - before life’s experiences began to weave a tapestry of faint cicatrixes across the landscape of his face, before his teeth had shattered into a sharp forest of ivory shards that had been dug out of his flesh and replaced with an unreasonable facsimile of his own smile: before his face and body had been lightly scarred by bites of sharp metal and the sharper, deeper gouges of toxic carnivore fags; before he’d known the diminishment of involute heartbreak and painful evolvement in the wake of sundered and sacrificed true love.
Before self-sought experience had burned brands in his flesh and bleached his long dark hair a russet light brown streaked with blonde strands and grey, the younger Prince Ram’yana had held older people at arm’s length and concentrated most of his attention upon his youthful contemporaries and slightly more mature mentors. In those bygone days the term ‘generation gap’ held a timeless meaning, just as it does in this day and age. A cold war had existed between adventurous frolicsome youngsters and the conservative old guard, who delighted in sending their kids off to slaughter in foreign wars, to feed the profitably rapacious war-making business of territorial disputes between multinational conglomerates.
The more things change… The older shaman stares into the flames as they twine and twist like the strands of his long-lost best beloved’s blazing mane. The face of Ram’s bygone paramour glides into his awareness like a scalpel gently sliding between the overclocked lobes of his brain. A livid montage of fond and lurid recollections arises from the ever-present pit of the past and his revolving mind pauses in the face of this taunting self-flagellation. His eyelids creak open and incipient images of lusty copulation dissolve into hazy blazing firelight. He smiles at his folly as his head tilts backwards and sight swims into focus on the limitless stars; How could I xpect to make love again so soon, after last night, after so many years alone with the trees - and with such a gorgeous exotic princess? Beauty and the Beast, in deed…
Despite the nobility of his intent, another vagrant memory emerges from Ram’s brainstem and he’s momentarily lost in ineradicable memories that swarm through his blown-open being. A vision of Sino-Japanese feminine glory arises from his populous interior wellspring of (re)collected souls, swimming forth from the plethora of people he’s known and loved most intimately in this particular extraordinary life. Zsuzsi…
Her name uncorks a font of blithely lived daily incidents flowing into a deeply imprinted array of impassioned instants. He relives the livid shared intensities he experienced with his beautiful, talented, very personal goddess, whom he loved and lived with through several vibrantly exciting, excessively debauched, endlessly entertaining, blissfully sex-slaked and hellishly heavenly years.
Zsuzsi had been the most sheerly sexual and feline female who’d ever melded her life with the lusty long haired prince. She’d dwelt in a continual highly strung state of heated arousal throughout every single night and day, all the way through the adventurous or domestic 24/7 times they shared in the ’70s and ’80s of the latter millennium. Zsuzsi was as horny as the continually coupling Siamese cats that were her constant companions, and Ram’yana oft had to virtually or actually beat suitors away from the gorgeous young Asian beauty – the unwanted ones, at least; she sampled the chosen few while Ram’yana turned aside to pursue trysts and other interests of his own.
The disrespectful yet accurate words of one of Ram’s erstwhile rivals return to him as his flesh and blood sings with the memory of Zsuzsi’s embrace; “Skin slick as a seal,” Fast Eddie had remarked; “Smoother than a baby’s bum,” another suitor had said, in a vain attempt to arouse a passionate schism of destructive jealousy in the soul of the younger prince. Most of the males attracted to Zsuzsi’s extraordinary sleek beauty surveyed her alluringly displayed golden skin with a particular stare; one that Ram’yana swiftly came to recognise. It was an all too common lusty look, oft bestowed on the oriental girl by awed Western males who were drawn to the exotic differences and silken symmetries exemplified by many Asian women - and by Zsuzsi in particular.
Zsuzsi Creemcheeze had been an utterly addictive xperience. Her incredibly inspiring responsiveness and endless propensity for multiple orgasms were continual blessings to her fortunate live-in lover, whose stamina and incessant attentive zeal perfectly matched the girl’s indomitable lustiness. The young couple were husband and wife in all ways that mattered for more than a handspan of years. They exchanged golden eternity rings of intertwined red, yellow and white gold while pledging their troth to each other in a sunny summer’s day handfasting ceremony, on a hillside overlooking the place where Oz had been proclaimed an independent nation eighty years earlier.
They lived in an ongoing honeymoon in the
The overpowered Beast LZD-665 (the Number of the Plate) had sped the lovers through flatlands, mountains and beachside idylls whenever they toured with bands or travelled to distant festivals, and ferried their partying souls through many sojourns across the varying landscapes of the anciently dreaming southern continent. Lizzy was a comforting campervan for the twining pair of adventurous lovers, who took advantage of the privacy afforded by black-tinted windows when they camped on the edges of towns - or on long empty beaches, cow pastures or forested clearings in more clement climes and times. Everywhere the long haired hippy and comely golden-skinned girl went, some innocent wag or mindless racist would yell the same refrain; “Hey, look – here comes John and Yoko!”
Zsuzsi always enjoyed the unavoidable attention she attracted on dancefloor, stage or barstool, or on any random street or highway. Ram’yana swiftly became used to the antics of his attractive bride and her would-be suitors, eyeing their monkey-minded seductions in the periphery of his vision while he painted audience and performers with washes of psychedelically shifting light, carefully keying the mind-pounding hues to the beating pulse of the music.
By the end of each gig in the wee small hours, Zsuzsi was often utterly sozzled after endless offers of cocktails amidst spirited attempts to entice her away and abed; but she almost always accompanied her lover home in the Illuminatimobile, to make love until dawn and beyond - after he’d carried a ton and a half of electrical equipment into the spare room of their faux-Californian brick bungalow, with the help of one or another trusted (and well-paid) offsider.
The freewheeling couple’s rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and open-minded night owl dispositions ensured they were always surrounded by a partying crowd, and always beset by sundry wild entertainments. Many in their circle were used to the charismatic feedback loop of public adulation, veritably glowing with a self-absorbed awareness of their desirable status and enviable reputations. Zsuzsi and Ram’yana dwelt within the colourful periphery of a demi-monde mirror-maze, where many semi-famous names and faces - and infamously attractive bodies – vied for their personal attentions.
Asiatic faces were less commonly seen in the streets of Oz in those bygone days and the attraction of Zsuzsi’s exotic origins was the icing on the cake for many drawn to her smoothly youthful beauty; “Like paedophiles to a cherub,” as the Cold Wanderer had remarked from behind the huge follow spot, during a long drunken night at one particularly rowdy gig. The pair of Centraxian Illuminati were deeply camouflaged, standing in shadows within the cognoscenti-haunted, coke-riddled, flock-walled cavern of darkness that was the notorious Manzil Room in the bowels of Kings Cross.
“Like bees to honey,”
“I don’t know whether to envy you or not,”
Each time she disappeared Zsuzsi would return in a frazzled or weepy state after a night or two, aching to make amends, riven by guilt-riddled hangovers which were swiftly cured by sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Ram’yana soon grew accustomed to her wanton flurries of breakaway independence, inevitably followed in turn by teary confessions and bouts of frantic lovemaking.
He swelled with the pressure of repressed disappointment and occasional anger when she bedded his closest friends – barely able to bring himself to forgive his male companions for succumbing to her inestimable charms, barely able to admit any responsibility on Zsuzsi’s part - and bit back his masculine sense of cuckolded pride with flushes of guilty awareness. I don’t own her, he’d remind himself again and again, trying not to envision his friends having her, licking her, fucking her, filling her with their seed – yet whenever Zsuzsi returned to Ram’s arms she invariably succeeded in fucking his possessiveness all the way to the blissful heights of oblivion.
After a couple of years things changed, after a fashion. Even as Zsuzsi continued to screw her way up the ladder of local rock culture she gradually came to forbid her lover the same state of abandonment with other females, flying into unquenchable rages when he so much as spoke to another woman. The injustice of their situation grew ever more galling for the insatiable young mage, and Zsuzsi’s behaviour swiftly became utterly erratic and unpredictable as a tidal wave of cocaine rolled across the musical landscape.
Yet the lovers remained wrapped together in symbiotic embrace for seven eventful years, passionately entwined throughout thousands of florid morning glories - heaving and panting in gymnastic abandon or floating together in Tantric bliss well into the middle regions of many a horny lovemaking afternoon. Their nights followed a similar pattern, interlaced between gigs, parties, jams and feasts.
They paid no rent and bills were few; they were free as two lovebirds, only working when they chose, in fields suited to their talents and fascinating enough to hold their wandering interests. Zsuzsi developed her skilful watercolour renderings into a paying proposition and Ram pursued his occult, artistic and musical proclivities across dales of dreams and down alluring rabbit holes, often becoming lost for hours or days in mesmerising magical mazes of meditation, yoga and tantra.
Ram’yana became totally besotted with his wondrous fey bride. She was a natural Daikini, always ready to fill eras of hours with rapturous lovemaking or frenzied fucking at the drop of a hat; or of skirt, dress, bikini or hotpants. Her skin was far more delectably smooth than Fast Eddie’s crudely racist description had implied. Even in later years, Zsuzsi’s taut musculature remained sheathed in a gloriously silky, utterly unmarked hairless elasticity, wondrously smoother than the rubber suit of any latex fetishist’s most ardent fantasies, and silky as the finest glass.
Ram’yana had heard various World War Two, Korean War or
Ram’yana sometimes wondered if Zsuzsi’s extraordinary allure was largely rooted in the commonly unexamined male desire for immature female lovers, an unspoken fact the Cold Wanderer had allured to in his ersatz jest at the Manzil Room.
Despite all odds, when the lovers finally parted they did so as friends. When the shaman had last bedded Zsuzsi she’d grown no less horny, but had become far more confident and certain of her centre, less liable to wild flights of emotion. After decades of suspicious wonderings about repressed family secrets, her investigations yielded paydirt; the headstrong beauty finally discovered her true origins, and the truth had set her free.
It transpired that the girl who’d been told she was the daughter of poor Chinese refugees was also the illegitimate granddaughter of a martial nobleman – the fearsome Baron who’d signed the documents of Japan’s surrender at the close of World War Two, aboard the battleship Missouri. The revelation of her illegitimate semi-nobility had resulted in a complete transformation of Zsuzsi’s life. Various offers of employment and succour suddenly arrived from various Japanese sources in the
As he stares into the flames, Ram’yana recalls a festival the lovers had worked on together, living in a vast campsite situated on the very next hill, just upstream from the Star Earth land where the bonfire smoulders and the party gradually slows toward recumbent standstill. Zsuszi and Ram had travelled to Nimbin in the lluminatimobile, to help prepare a celebration of ten years of alternative lifestyles and communal living in the hippy paradise of
After they eventually went their separate ways – parting as friends and occasional lovers until Zsuzsi finally moved far away, to live with a succession of northerly land barons (beginning with an old friend of Ram’s) - it had taken years for the shaman to reaccustom himself to the textures of Western women’s bodies. It wasn’t simply the undeniable fact of his lasting love and desire for his mate after years of shared connubial ecstasies. The truth of the matter was just as the veterans of Asian wars had claimed; after having made endless love with Zsuzsi Creemcheeze, most of the women of Ram’s own extended tribe felt positively masculine by comparison, regardless of their youth or beauty.
He’d worked long and hard at the task of retraining himself to white (and brown and black) women’s bodies, until he finally succeeded in reorienting himself to occidental tastes; the shaman prince no longer thought of Zsuzsi when he made love with other women or girls, and genuinely revelled in all manner of beauteous female forms and textures.
But Amber… At the thought of her name, the enigmatic woman’s features swim through licking tongues of flame and her blazing uptilted eyes sear a promissory hope into Ram’s psychedelic cytoplasm and inflame his hopeful heart. Dawn is coming…
A true story
- R.A.
Images – author’s
* Whatever Happened to the Revolution from Living In The Seventies by Skyhooks
*
Further true tales from the Prince of Centraxis -
See Psychedelic Water Part 1 - Fractal Rainbow
Psychedelic Water Part 2 - What Thou Wilt
Psychedelic Water Part 3 - Trancefixed
Psychedelic Water Part 4 - Feral Dolphin
Psychedelic Water Part 5 - Angelic Tantra
Psychedelic Water Part 6 - Dreads Unlocked
Psychedelic Water Part 7 - Fresh Flesh, Old Bones
Psychedelic Water 8 - Predawn of Awareness
Psychedelic Water 9 - Merry Moot
Psychedelic Water 10 -Wandering Orgone Wand
Psychedelic Water 11 - Water Power
The Red Pill - Psychedelic Water 12
Mothership Crew - Psychedelic Water 13
Amber Flames - Psychedelic Water 14
Wills Writ on Waves - Psychedelic Water 15
Alternative Universe - Psychedelic Water 16
Fractal Free Will - Psychedelic Water 17
Reorientation - Psychedelic Water 18
Viva La Difference - Psychedelic Water 19
Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 1 - Doves and Serpents
The Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 1
And see
Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images
The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
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Please add your perspective to the collective mind NOW! - Prince Ram'yana