Wherefore Art
Shaman of Centraxis 17
*
The resurrected teenage shaman finds it hard to believe that these inordinately intense sexual encounters and unusual experiences have all occurred in less than a single week. The ongoing round of extraordinary situations almost convinces Ram’yana that he must, after all, be living out a fantasy in a self-created dream world.
He flounders amidst futile attempts to find a more palatable explanation, appalled by the possibility he’s died and is trapped in the involutionary cycle of some afterlife Bardo realm that’s enfolded his consciousness after a premature death. Or am I somehow magnetising all these experiences to myself - after being removed from the universe and returning again? Have I opened a gate that was damming up the wellsprings of magic and improbability in my life, after viewing the cosmos from someplace outside? He sits with his back to the tram driver and salt-sprayed windscreen, facing back toward the bay shore from whence he’s come.
The enervating sulphurous light of
Fonder imageries and feelings beckon beyond that first repugnant recollection, engraved far more deeply within his recollection of the love-long night. He can scarcely forget the blessedly orgasmic look on the girl’s beautiful face, or the succulent sensation of Natasha’s hitherto untried loins and luscious lips wrapping and folding all the way round his proudly rearing sensitive flesh. He concentrates on those far more pleasantly compelling memories as the tram trundles through somnolent suburbs, blindly fixed on a narrow metallic course betwixt steel tracks below and sparking electrified wire webbing overhead.
As he watches the surreally lit urban agglomeration blur into a tunnelling vision of hive-like sameness, Ram’yana decides to mention neither Natasha nor her truculent brother to his old friend Leo. He covers his rehardening flesh with his trusty shoulder bag and the nocturnal world dissolves while he relives the inspiring sight and blissful feel - the wondrous girl of his dreams gripping his throbbing flesh with an unforgettably sultry embrace while her wide eyes blessed his naked soul.
The memory triggers a resurgence of protective concern and the teenage hippy considers the scant store of knowledge he possesses regarding his newly reunited girlfriend; he’s soon ruminating over the ample supply of suspicions gnawing at his confident post-coital ease. The rollicking tram rattles along its tidy rails and bright sparks fly from the highly charged mesh of overhead cables as the shaman considers equally imponderable probabilities.
He drifts along, still half immersed in the kinaesthetic bliss of their uncompleted union. Ram’s heart well nigh bursts with empathic concern and longing for the wonderful girl, whose first impassioned experience of full blown real sex had been so rudely interrupted by her older brother – a charismatic youth whom the mage regards as dangerously thoughtless and worrisomely possessive, despite Nasher’s teary reassurances. Allowing Natasha to push his insistent young erection from her inward embrace, withdrawing from her glorious heat – and not immediately ramming his full length back inside her - was one of the hardest challenges Ram’s willpower had ever endured.
Despite Nasher’s urgings he finds it hard to adopt Yakov’s doubtlessly understandable brotherly point of view, and the teenage mage burns with a smouldering forge of loathing when he thinks of the other boy – a barely suppressed rage that he recognises as the cursed clammy impetus of indignant and undignified jealousy. Ram’s outrage had threatened to turn to white-hot fury while cold water sluiced from his body – but Natasha had gentled him back into her trembling sodden embrace even as she’d twisted her hips aside from the sticky length of his unsated hardness and rearranged her rainbow bikini around her twice-whetted loins. Her caresses soothed his fractious male ego and her kisses assured him of her love; when she was sure that Jake had left them alone she’d unexpectedly fellated her lover to a rapid climax, and he’d fallen into the mossy damp pile of her pink duvet with a hearty and satisfied groan while she licked her lips and caressed his wet body.
At Nasher’s insistence he’d attempted to put himself in her brother’s unenviable position while they sat together on the edge of her soaked childhood bed. “He’s responsible for me while our parents’re away,” the drunken teen had explained on Yakov/Jacob’s behalf - after she’d nestled her breasts back into her bikini and replaced her long dildo in its stash beneath the mattress. “They’ll blame him for anything that happens - and y’know he’s always been a little overprotective.”
The shaman had eyed the beautiful sozzled girl dubiously while she wiped sticky juices from her face and breasts, his softening shaft and their sopping thighs with a fluffy white towel; she handed him his clothes with a wistful smile as she dabbed at eyes and lips with an unsullied corner of towelling. He stood naked beside the little bed while she stared at his body and swept crackling tangles from her long dark hair with a wooden boar-bristle brush. He’d wondered at the girl’s thoughts and motives as electricity sparked from the tips of her flowing strands in tiny tendrils of lashing lightning. He quickly threw his clothes over his water cooled blood-hot body when she turned on the lights and blew out the candle, instantly transforming the dim romantic caravanserai of their impassioned tryst into the stark pink fluffy suburban bedroom of a modern teenage schoolgirl.
He loitered in her bedroom in a funk of suspicious jealousy, pondering the nature of her relationship with Yakov - until Natasha kissed him with an open-eyed and love drenched intensity that dissolved his thoughtless ponderings in a saliva-slicked moment of tongue sucking glory. “Don’ worry,” the inebriated girl had sniffed through a resurgence of welling tears. “He prob’ly won’ tell ’em…”
The shaman prince tries not to entertain his suspicion that Jacob’s interest in his beautiful little sister extends beyond mere brotherly protectiveness. As he’d shivered in the wake of Jake’s crude interruption, Ram’yana had considered the way Natasha called her brother’s name while she’d lain beneath him in a delirium of drunken orgasmic rapture; now the memory returns as a deep disturbance in the peaceable pool of his sex-slaked being. He’d almost voiced his concern that the older boy’s intentions obtruded across the border of filial concern into outright proprietary ownership, but had kept wisely silent while Natasha suckled on his rampant shaft; neither could he bring himself to raise the more disturbing suspicions that had nagged at his curious mind.
“Please, love…” Nasher had begged through tear-swollen eyes. “Come back t’morrow; we c’n go out together, to a party or a movie, or maybe somewhere alone… and we c’n…” A salty font had drowned her slurred words as she fell into Ram’s arms and sobbed against his chest. “Please come back… I promise…”
Her long-haired hippy lover had assured the bedraggled suburban princess that he’d surely find somewhere else to stay for the night, and had left as she began to clean up the soggy mess her brother had made of her bed. Ram’yana decided not to hang around and risk encountering Jacob again on his way out of the manse. He’d kissed Natasha goodbye with a lingering cuddle before climbing over the bedroom’s balcony rail, precariously clutching his boots in one hand as his shoulder bag dangled from his neck. He’d clambered down the trellis like a latter-day Romeo while his semi-naked Juliet wept to the stars above.
Well, the Centraxian shaman tells himself as he rides the steel rails, you wanted a romantic life full of love and adventure. Ram’yana watches a pair of middle-aged lovers strolling arm and arm along a concreted strip of suburban reality, walking behind a leashed pack of skeletal muzzled greyhounds. And that’s what you’ve found.
The world appears two dimensional and flat beyond the fingerprint-streaked glass of the tram’s dirty window and it’s not a great stretch of the imagination to believe that he’s passing though a detailed yet subtly flawed illusion. It’s all too much like a well planned script or game… Obstacles become stepping stones and every problem contains its solution… completing one stage of the game opens access to another…
But what’s the point of playing a rigged game? The mage is familiar with the widespread New Age aphorism which blithely maintains that he always creates his own reality, but the synchronicities and timely encounters that have dogged his southern sojourn have been a little too glaringly pointed and instantaneous to be easily believed. There seems to be a subtle feedback between my will and events, he concludes. He doubts the veracity of his senses – and is rapidly coming to doubt the apparent reality of the unchangingly solid material world itself.
Everything fits the descriptions of the Bardo realms a little too well... He considers the implications of inhabiting a world whose reality can never be logically proven. How can I know that any of this is real – and not a dream within a dream? There’s no point pinching his arm; he knows that pleasure and pain are merely two of myriad sensory illusions that his mind is quite capable of manufacturing from nothing at all. And if - as the young shaman still partly suspects - he’s really dead and his body is quietly mouldering away within a damp cool patch of soil, then what could he possibly awaken to? Or is all reality an endless dream of Brahma after all? What happens when the sleeper awakens?
Yet another possibility beckons from the fringes of Ram’s inebriated and aroused mind; What if I’m alive after all, and my near-death experience has catapulted me into a totally intensified new destiny – where the abilities that have lain dormant through my childhood are suddenly awakening? The idea is so novel – and personally redeeming in an absurd sort of way – that he considers its ramifications for the rest of the tram trip. Was my death a standard rite of passage all true magicians are destined to undergo on the road to enlightenment? Am I affecting the world more directly with a refocused vision and desperately surviving will?
The image of Nasher’s semi-nude suppleness spread out asplay like a beggar’s repast on the altar of her childhood bed surges to the surface of his inner eye, appearing to slowly fill the wooden window frame with a masterpiece of erotic perfection. Ram’s circuitous mind reverberates with meaningless doggerel while he reinhabits the intimacies of their union; Legs asplay… as play… asp lay… She’s so beautiful… irresistible… The chaotic expressions that had swarmed across her symmetrical feminine features when she came, screaming and shuddering with the impact of her climax, are entirely unforgettable.
Once more the teenage shaman squirms at the recollection of cold water dousing their lovemaking, to leave him fuming in an unrequitedly high and dry plateau of tension. A less edifying notion sidles into his thoughts to soil the brave face of his unflagging egotistical enthusiasm: Maybe the only girls who’ll let me make love with them have already been torn open by something or someone… Damaged and twisted apart by ungentle hands… An even more troublesome idea jostles to the steamy surface of his innocent and inexperienced young brain; Mayhap they’re the only ones who actually fuck at all… He shakes his head, unwilling to countenance the distressing thought as visions of various girls and women he’s intimately known parade behind his eyelids. They can’t all be damaged goods. No way…
As the near-empty trolley car continues along its tracks and sparks fly from the small wheel that traverses the highly charged wires above Ram’s head, the sensations rushing through his electrified body impel his besotted mind to return to a far more urgent question - one that’s been nagging at him since he left the beautiful girl of his wet dreams in her damp pink boudoir; Will she really let me come inside her? She was smashed when she said it - still in shock and crying, dripping with cold water… and I didn’t think she was on the pill…
The unforgettable sensations of Natasha’s feminine musculature writhing around and beneath him are still engraved in Ram’s flesh (and his half-tumescent erection), and the lingering fragrance of her floral girly scent combines with memories of their lusty loving to fill him with an evanescent rush of happiness. He beams into the passing nightscape with a satyr’s bold grin while the transparent world flows past his purblind purview.
Ram’s mind becomes filled with sensation-ridden visions of sex crazed acrobatic coupling - images from near-nightly theatrical adolescent fantasies which have starred a starkly naked and frankly seductive young version of his long-lost Natasha, for much of the two long years since last they met. He knows – or fervently hopes - they’ll both be losing and finding themselves within an utterly intimate embrace on the morrow - if Jacob leaves them alone as planned.
He can’t wait to come with the beautiful girl, at the same mind-blowing instant; simultaneous orgasm with a climaxing partner is something the teenage mage has only ever experienced thrice before; twice in the single most amazingly engaging sexual encounter of his horny young life. Now that he knows Nasher is demonstrably able to scream and cream in the life-throes of unbridled orgasm, he can hardly wait to feel that selfsame molten explosive volcanic intensity again, with the limber freckle-faced girl he’s lusted after for so long. I want to feel her come in spasms of frothing frenzy, hear her scream with uncontrollable pleasure while I’m right up inside her tight little belly, jetting jism all the way inside her womb while she opens her self completely… to feel us both disappear into white screaming heat when she comes along with me…
The young hippy knows that he probably won’t hesitate to come inside the girl the next time she milks his cock with her astoundingly dextrous inward muscles. As soon as he has the chance, he’ll ram his shaft all the way up inside Natasha’s tight furry seam and fill her with as much of his cock as the smaller girl can take – and if she encourages him in any way whatsoever he’ll happily shoot his white-hot cream into her virginal womb, no matter how out of it or sober they both may be. Is that a promise she can keep - and should I expect her to? Will she expect me to hold her to it? He can hardly wait to find out.
As the tram rattles and sparks its way through the populous night, the shrouding veils of darker notions obtrude into the sunny glow of his expectancy.
While he’d climbed down from his girlfriend’s gilded balcony and negotiated a weaving path past her family’s large swimming pool, Ram’yana had remembered that a house is not a home, no matter how comfortable or impressive it may appear. A home is a refuge - a sanctuary and a place of reliably relaxing safety - whereas bricks and mortar make for suitably protected tombs just as easily as protective family living rooms.
He glances at his transparent reflection, superimposed over the blurred terrace houses and bright streaming headlights of
Would I have done the same as Yakov - if I was Nasher’s brother? The young hippy can scarcely imagine the reversal of roles that Natasha had suggested he consider, while they’d sat together upon the edge of her sodden bed and warm droplets of her tears had mixed with the cold water soaking his naked shoulder. Would I have thrown a bucket of water over anyone I found in bed with my sister?
He’s never had a female relative anywhere near his own age - never known what it might be like to have a precocious sister or kissing cousin; nor even a steady girlfriend. Most of his lovers have been older women in their twenties, who were looking for a one night stand with an appreciative and virile younger male. He still knows virtually nothing of the ways of women, and teenage girls represent a near-total mystery. Would I have reacted any differently if I’d found someone screwing my little sister?
Yet the teenage shaman retains a stubborn conviction that Jacob covets his sister in more ways than one – that he’s at very least attempted some kind of untoward dalliance with the splendid young girl. He recalls the jubilant teen crying out her older brother’s name as she’d come in a screaming, panting heap beneath the pleasuring thrusts of her flying broomstick. “Jake!” she’d cried aloud, and she’d screamed her brother’s pet name more than once while she approached more complete union with her utterly inspired lover.
The Lady Teal’s words ring in Ram’s ears as nascent suspicions burn at his innards. The older psychic had been the first to break the news of the incestuous realities of many peoples’ nightly lives to the naïve young prince. He wonders whether an uncle, a cousin - or even Natasha’s immaculately dressed father (whom he once briefly met) - has already initiated her into some version of sex, back when she was an even younger girl; his brow furrows as he considers the possibility that more than one of Natasha’s family members may have already partaken of her nubile young body and sullied her bright young mind and emotions with their adulterating desires. Had she… did she already know what she was doing when we were together at camp? How old was she when – if - she and Jacob first…
An image of the siblings locked in passion slithers into Ram’s forebrain, and he’s shocked by the intensity of mingled lust, envy, disappointment and rage that take hold of his equanimity and shake it like a dog harassing a rabbit. The thought of Natasha’s brother impels the confused young man to once again ponder his actions in Yakov’s place; but in an entirely less edifying vein. If she was my sister…
He imagines sharing a well-to-do privileged childhood with a younger version of Natasha - watching her slender freckly body filling out as she approaches womanhood; swimming and skylarking in the backyard pool and spa with the beautiful young girl, while unnerving hormones fire his blood with a relentless tide of horniness. As he considers the possibilities, a worrisome cavalcade of culturally taboo images fills Ram’s mind and he experiences a disturbing thrill that induces a rush of heated blood – a vital pressure which reminds him of the imperatives of his own insatiate teenage lust. Mayhap I’d be the same… do the same…
But if Nasher actually was my sister I’d surely keep my hands to myself... wouldn’t I? While he attempts to convince himself that he’d behave differently toward the beautiful elfin girl if she were truly his younger sibling, the shaman is beset by images of Nasher’s enticing (and still not fully seen – not without her bikini, at least) nude body - and the memory of her gorgeous orgasmic face crying out beneath him as she screamed herself into oblivion gladdens Ram’s heart and hardens his loins.
I don’t know that she and Jacob have actually done anything together, he reminds himself – but the thought fails to convince him that Natasha was dreaming or thinking of anyone other than her brother, when she’d cried out her pet name for Yakov in the throes of her drunken climax. And she said she’d had ‘practice sex’ with someone else, before… The idea of Ram’s reunited girlfriend screaming in ecstasy and crying her brother’s name - while ‘Jake’ pounded away inside her loins with her long white phallic love toy, if not his own firm young fleshy staff – fills the hippy with nameless dread, and infuses him with a hot blinding flash of jealous anger. Oh, Natasha!
Ram’yana doesn’t know what to think, or how to react to the unfamiliar situation. His challenging conversation with the Lady Teal flows through his distracted mind as sparks fly from the trolley car’s webbing of spidery wires. Thousands of well-dressed
The older Wiccan woman had told the teenage mage that many incest survivors were fundamentally damaged by their experiences, regardless of surface appearances. “Most have trouble coming forever after,” she’d told him. If her terse summation of the nature and results of this surprisingly common form of child abuse were correct, there’d be little chance of lasting happiness with the girl who’d haunted Ram’s nocturnal fantasies for so long; and of all the women he knew, the Lady Teal should surely have a good measure of their chances - if his suspicions were correct.
But I know she can come, he reminds himself, and his heart lightens at the bright memory of the glorious outpouring of Nasher’s passions as the inebriated girl exploded into luscious lusty orgasm beneath him. I’m sure it was real… I didn’t imagine it… he decides with an ironic inward smile. So mayhap I’m wrong about Jacob after all… Another likely possibility occurs to him, but he dispels the notion as soon as it appears: She was too out of it to be faking… he reassures himself. We still have a chance… With this decisive assessment his resolve is confirmed and his thoughts range wider afield.
Ram’yana reviews a mental parade of young skittish girls and older women he’s known or met, filtering a selection of damaged personalities out of the vast range of females he’s encountered in one way or another in his brief varied life. He examines their differences and similarities in a virtual line-up of memorised faces, emotions and situations. As he spies the steady gaze of reflected hazel eyes in the thick green public-proofed glass, he views the strangely fearful or internally wounded looks behind many plain or painted female faces in a new and revealing light. He wonders how many of the bright flower children and dishevelled street waifs he knows have left home to avoid overly amorous fathers, uncles, family friends… or brothers. And how many boys? he wonders, unwilling to pursue the sickening track of his thoughts any further.
A glance around the tram informs him he’s still a few minutes from his destination and his eyes fix upon a plump old matron; she wears a heavy overcoat in the summery night, and a matching hat is pulled down to conceal her face as she hunches over a landslide of shopping bags. Her defensive posture reminds the young shaman that some wounds might never completely heal, yet remain obvious in their concealment for an entire lifetime.
“Come on in.” Leo’s face hasn’t changed at all in the last two years, while his body has surged upward and outward in an ongoing growth spurt. The darkly tanned teen caricatures Groucho Marx, twiddling an imaginary cigar until he gapes at the comparatively transmogrified face and persona of his erstwhile pubescent friend; openly marvelling at the sight of the long haired Centraxian shaman. “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any,” he drawls in a convincing
“Aye,” Ram’yana confirms, “visiting out of the blue and barely expected, just as you requested.” Leo ushers him through the door and into an immaculately kept lounge room, sparsely decorated with highly polished hand carved wooden furniture; dark whirling grains of solid teak and walnut glow in a vibrant sheen, matching the original wooden fittings and features of the modest suburban bungalow. “If I’d known you were coming I’d have baked a watermelon,” Groucho’s shade rambles. The shaman notices a miniature bronze scroll, mounted diagonally on the frame of the entryway; his eyes automatically scan the other doorposts leading from the chamber until he spies another mezuzah.
“You’re looking well,” Leo says with a smile before preceding him into a hallway. “Like the cat that swallowed the canary, in fact. Or maybe a goldfish, now that I look a little closer; actually, you look like the bastard lovechild of John and Yoko…” His laugh is a familiar sly cackle as he opens a lovingly waxed panelled door. “Don’t mind my mother,” he says to his visitor after they enter a shadowy sanctum. “Just watch – she’ll turn up in a few minutes with a tray of gefiltefish.” He closes the bedroom door and sets a chair before the shaman, covering the bare wooden seat with a satin cushion. “She’ll be going to sleep soon.”
Ram’yana sits down and scans his old friend’s bedroom while Leo tidies up and removes sundry items of wrinkled clothing draped over various antique furnishings. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you a place to stay – but you see how things are…” Like the rest of the well maintained house, the large square room boasts a high ceiling decorated with detailed art deco plasterwork designs. The bedchamber is outfitted with original bevelled architraves, picture rails and skirting boards and the plaster walls are painted in a blue-tinted hue of pale grey; a handful of small landscapes decorate their storm-coloured surfaces.
The room is otherwise unadorned, except for a small two-tone poster of Che Guevara - staring impassively into an unseen horizon from above the doorway - and a larger smiling image of Jimi Hendrix holding a smouldering joint beneath a floppy, flower-bedecked straw hat, stuck to the wall above Leo’s loosely made bed. A pile of textbooks teeters on a stolid cubic desk, otherwise covered with opened notebooks and writing implements; an antique black metal typewriter holds pride of place in the centre of the clutter.
“How’s school?” Ram inquires. “Don’t ask,” Leo says as he turns away to remake the messy unmade single bed into a messily half-made state. “I’m really sorry there’s nowhere to crash…” The solid square hardwood desk, a mirrored dressing table and ornate walnut highboy almost fill the rest of the room. The remaining space is occupied by a glossy black upright piano, and Ram’s eyes alight on the instrument with instantly hungry anticipation. He barely stops himself from lifting the keyboard cover and tinkling the ivories, and sits on the proffered chair instead. “No worries,” he says. “I’ll be fine.” Leo sits on the bed facing him. “You’re sure?”
“Sure.” Ram flops his shoulder bag across one knee and opens the broad leather flap; the tanned surface is covered with hand-tooled Celtic knots circling a quasi-Islamic design of interlocking six-pointed stars, arranged around a rampant unicorn in a forest glade. “Here,” he says as he reaches into the bag. “A present.” He hands a matchbox to Leo, who holds the box in cupped hands and regards the unassuming gift as if it contains a hoard of diamonds. “Just what I needed,” he tells the mage as he stares at the female silhouette, printed in profile on the pinewood cover. “A beautiful red-haired girl.” His grin lights the room as he slides the box open. “I’d have settled for a blonde. Wow,” he says, bringing the contents to his aquiline nose. “And it’s fresh!”
“Genuine Mullumbimby Madness,” the shaman avers. “But it isn’t the best – no seeds, see?” Leo’s tanned face nods vigorously as he rummages through the dried green leaves and crumbly sins buds. Most of the hippies of Oz are just entering the flower power era of home-grown bush heads, and have scant knowledge of the subtleties of cannabis cultivation or the multifarious biological and horticultural causes of the herb superb’s variable flavours, textures and potency. Leo closes the box and his large brown eyes flicker from side to side. “Thanks – but we’ll have to wait ’til later,” he says. “After my parents are asleep.”
The friends have never shared a joint before; when he last saw Leo the young shaman had only recently tried ‘pot’ for the first time and still lived at his parents’ home; he’d had no access to regular suppliers. Leo had never raised the matter directly, when they’d met for a few weeks each year at summer camps in the southerly rural fastnesses and wildernesses - although he’d alluded once or thrice to having smoked the magic weed. “So what have you been doing with yourself?” the older teen asks. “Mark told me he’d seen you at a couple of demos. He said you’d left school and run away from home.”
Ram’yana recalls their mutual friend from the socialist summer camps, and remembers his prematurely bearded face shouting in the street on the day the White Lamb had been sacrificed on the altar of national insecurity – the Day of Remembrance, when a bloodless coup had shredded the tenuous democratic veil of a young nation’s innocence. “That’s right,” he replied. “I split a couple of months after I last saw you – almost two years ago.” He pulls out a packet of oversized rollies and pulls a long sheet of rice paper from the cardboard packet. “And Mark joined the Friends of the Earth after Whitlam was ousted by Kerr’s cur.”
“Maintain the rage!” Leo cries.
“Maintain the Age, more likely.”
“Hell, man – the idiots kicked the messiah out when they had the chance to re-elect him – and by then the Pine Gap treaty had already been renewed... No,” Leo says, shaking his head, “No more politics!” He opens the matchbox and sniffs the contents again. “Well – helping F.O.E.’s a whole lot better than joining the
“I usually don’t,” Ram’yana confides, “but I’m on the road.”
“Just like Neal Cassidy, huh? Or are you playing the role of Jack Kerouac? Are you here on magical mystery tour – or an electric cool-aid acid trip? You tripping, man?” Leo laughs as he reaches for a packet of Indian incense. The mention of the word ‘role’ reminds Ram’yana of his stature within the Court of the Centrax and he straightens his posture accordingly. “Not lately,” the younger teenager replies with a knowing smile; Leo blinks. “You mean you’ve actually taken acid? Real acid?” The shaman nods and his grin widens at his friend’s gratifyingly astounded expression. “Clearlight and microdots,” he assures the other boy. “Genuine Sandoz quality, man.”
“Wow!” Leo springs from the bed and spins onto the piano stool, twirling around to face his guest as he snaps his long fingers. “I knew it must still exist – even after they shut the big labs down! No-one I know can get any. I don’t suppose you have any with you? You sort of look like…”
“’Fraid not.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say you look as bad as a frayed knot – but that’s too bad.” The inveterate punster rolls his eyes at his old joke, mimicking the Marx brother which he most closely resembles. “Nudge, nudge, wink, wink,” he says, “say no more,” instantly shifting into a parody of Monty Python. “So what’s it like; tripping, I mean?” The young hippie faces him with eyes closed as he struggles to find words to describe the tiniest fraction or merest semblance of his experiences on LSD. He hesitates to mention his last trip, and decides to start with generalities. “Well,” he says, “you know how they say it’s ‘mind expanding’?” Leo nods. “They’re right. All your thoughts boom like riveting thunderclaps in a huge spacey cavern, and everything’s filled with layers of meaning you never suspected existed - that are always here, right in front of our eyes...”
“So do you see colours – twisting shapes and forms, like in all the psychedelic posters?”
“Just like the psychedelic posters, or a really good lightshow – all over the walls, covering peoples’ faces, inside the earth and filling all of space… it’s a little hard to describe. You sort of have to be there – be here, now; that’s what it’s all about, really...” He sprinkles some leaves into a bed of rice paper while Leo’s eyes dart toward the door to the ‘normal’ world. “It’s all right,” Ram’yana reassures him, “this is for later. Like I said, it’s a little hard to describe…” Leo stands up to reach for his desk drawer and slides it open while the shaman rambles on. “I can describe a couple of things, but they won’t tell you much…”
“Try me,” Leo insists as he pulls a book from the drawer.
*
A true story
- R.A.
Images – author’s
Further true tales of The Prince of Centraxis -
Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater
Shaman of Centraxis Part 2 - Surfing the Cosm
Shaman of Centraxis ३ - Turning Tides, Breaking Waves
Shaman of Centraxis Part 4 - To Infinity and Beyond
Shaman of Centraxis Part 5 - Land of the Living
Shaman of Centraxis Part 6 - All the Way
Shaman of Centraxis Part 7 - South of Eden
Shaman of Centraxis Part 8 - The Whole is Greater
Shaman of Centraxis Part 9 - Crossing Boarders
Shaman of Centraxis Part 10 - Believer
Shaman of Centraxis Part 11 - Behind the Veil
Shaman of Centraxis Part 12 - Peace, Love & War Games
Shaman of Centraxis Part 13 - Pole Dancer
Shaman of Centraxis Part 14 – Waking Wet Dream
Shaman of Centraxis Part 15 – Rending the Veil
Shaman of Centraxis Part 16 – Interrupted Dreams
Shaman of Centraxis Part 17 - Wherefore Art
Shaman of Centraxis Part 18 - Stranger in a Strange Land
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 1
Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra Part 1
Latest – http://centraxis.blogspot.com
And see
Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images
The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
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From The Prince of Centraxis - http://centraxis.blogspot.com
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