Safely At Port

Trip Guide(s): The Invisible Rosicrucian Brotherhood

We arrived sometime rough around 4:20 in the afternoon in Portland. I was dead exhausted and half drunk by the time we pulled in. The acid had kept me up all night on pins and needles, enduring the thousands of externalized psychological projections under a starry night sky. Jean's husband Richard let us in and Amy left to go find a liquor store. She brought herself back a cheap fifth of something and a fifth of Jim Bean for myself. I quickly fell asleep on the sofa after a few nice sized belts, and didn't wake up until after the hitchhikers had returned from a long walkabout and Jean had come home from work. She was gracious enough to allow our guests to sleep on the floor in her living room, while Amy and myself opted for the guest room which was basically a cluttered storage room with all sorts of junk squirreled away in it.

That night, the kids slept on Jean's living room floor while Amy and I slept on the floor of what was later to become my room. Most of the night was tense and awkward for me, mostly because I hadn't yet come to terms with the fact that I was enamored with her. She slept with the blanket completely wrapped around her, and I would have had to move closer and possibly wrap my arms around her to manage a bit of blanket for myself. Would she have been comfortable with it if I did? Amy was on a sort of self imposed celibacy thing for her own reasons, and I didn't want to make her feel uncomfortable for any reason.

So, characteristically, I turned over on my side away from her and let her have the blanket. Later on in the night, I guess in my sleep I must have subconsciously pulled it away from her to wrap myself in. "You're killing me," she mumbled, and flipping me around, pulled me towards her, grabbing my arm and hoisting it around her waist. She held my hand tight, and I got the first decent night's sleep I had experienced in weeks.

That night, I dreamt of a human marketplace, trafficking in fetishist material and narcotics and weapons, and everyone communicating through the language of need, which was silent telepathy. When there were noises, they were the noises of insects- long forgotten, primal tongues. Not language in any intelligible sense. Most of the women in the market place were veiled, but there were dancing, dirty street urchins covered in a thick layer of grime and glistening with the sweat from their wild gyrations. It seemed to me to be raining spit, and there were sandstorms kicking up round everything. Long, sleek dark bodies brushed through the crowds that winded their way through the streets like a serpent. We were somewhere in the desert, but the scenery of the locale kept shifting. I couldn't get a feel for the streets and how they were laid out, because they were all the time rearranging themselves.

Next thing I knew, I was being led up a ladder by a masked psychopomp towards a glowing hypercube hovering above. As I approached the top, the cube unfolded into a cavalry cross of 6 equilateral squares. The abstract geometrical aspect of the shape fluttered and flickered out, morphing somehow into a rose cross as I was led up to the thirteenth rung of the ladder and nailed to the cross. The whole of the process could have taken several minutes, or hours, or aeons, or a single instant before death in which the brain becomes fully aware of its own existence and spits out a long and incomprehensible dialogue to itself that finally crashes the nervous system.

I looked out over the desert, but it seemed then that all was desolate and silent but for the wind: there were no more flies or insects of the market places, buzzing around chattering in their long forgotten dead insect language. There was silence, and dust storms. I looked across the wasteland and saw broken down interstates and bridges, and half decayed concrete walls. Graffiti on one of the collapsing concrete structures read "MARK 10: 34-45", something I didn't recognize or know at the time. Nailed in securely, my head still gave me about 180 degrees to work with, and I surveyed the landscape. Everything was dead.

And my blood fell like that, for hours or seconds or aeons, into the sand which was dry, and the desert absorbed absorbed my blood like rain.

"Where would the world be without the love that binds together this and that? It gives itself so that it can experience the supreme self. It offers itself up, it dies, but that death is rapture in its union with the whole. The only thing that can die is the ego. There is also that which remains."

Foliage, slowly but surely sprouted from the sand, while the birds pecked at my carcass and my bones whitened in the sun. Gradually, the elements wore the bones away, and the garden grew thicker and greener still. A sort of a divine chaos, a paradise garden began to bloom all around the desert clearing and that clearing became an oasis, full of many beautiful living creatures.

The angels of a great abyss bore the dust molecules of my lifeless body up and over the winds, scattered to the furthest most points of the four directions. There was no life left in them.

It struck me: A month or so back, Amy and some of the kids in Ocean Side had taken a trip with me to a 13 sided Rosicrucian vault on a wilderness reserve that was opened to the public. I took pictures of it that I still have around here, somewhere. Each side of the vault probably represented the 12 astrological signs and the sun, I had imagined.

"That's where they meet, and send out positive energy through the world. They are Christian mystics. Luminaries. I'd imagine that most of them are ascetic," Amy had said to me.

I looked up the unfamiliar biblical verse turned up the following:

"and they will mock Him, and scourge Him, and spit on Him, and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.”

The next morning we awoke and decided to go and busk through the section of town with the head shops and health food stores. We met up with my friend and collaborator Yewsten sometime during the afternoon. It was good to finally meet him, as we had been working together from a distance for some time.

It felt nice to be alone, for once in my life. Self-reliant. To know what it is to not need much of anyone else around, I felt myself regaining independent strength. Amy and Yewsten and myself went a ways ahead of the kids from California, while Amy sang "Jerusalem" by Dan Bern and I harmonized with her. She always had a way of looking me in the eyes when she sang that song, and it made me feel kind of honored when she did.

We walked around for a bit and Amy played for a man who offered us three or four takeout boxes of Sushi rolls that were delicious. We sat by the car on top of the parking deck and smoked a bowl before we left and dropped off Yewsten in Beaverton.

I enjoyed seeing him. We decided to meet again sometime soon. Amy stayed at his apartment that night because of allergy problems over here. The next day, she took off right as I was waking up. She came to give me a hug, and ended up straddling me full on and we locked eyes with our arms around each other.

I kissed her softly, and our lips touched for a few seconds. She squeezed me one last time and turned to leave.

I smiled.

"I'll miss you, you know."

"You just be joyful for next time," she said and winked.

And I was. I was somehow joyful about the prospect that all that my life was had now died, that I was now free to do whatever I wanted to do because I had lost everything that ever meant anything, and that somehow, that was okay.

Like a phoenix, rising from the ashes.