Welcome to Nowhere-Land

In France They Kiss On Main Street

Today, January 6, is Epiphany in the old European calendar of Christian feast days. In the Eastern church, which stays a little truer to ancient timelines, it's Christmas. Oh, goodie. I get to do it all again.

People talk these days about having "epiphanies" all the time. "I had an epiphany at work today. My boss is a cross-dresser." Etc., etc. It's another word that's been stripped of its magic, like alchemy. Like "mystery."

But there are genuine little epiphanies, falling a few degrees short of the revealing of the Son of God to the Magi, that come our way, usually when we find ourselves in altered circumstances, as happens when we're traveling in foreign lands. I spent the holidays in what's at once the most foreign and familiar of places: France. Specifically, in Paris (though I did get out to the hinterlands a bit). Paris is familiar because, well, you know, it's "every man's second home." It's foreign because they eat snails and because the Reformation never took hold there. There isn't a drop of Protestant baptismal water in the Seine. Even a non-practicing Catholic is still a Catholic, and Catholics get to be bad and good at the same time. In Paris, you get to have your cake and eat it, knowing you can purge it with holy fire.

I was felt up by a beautiful woman in a Paris bookstore. In all my years in America, living and working in crowded cities, taking crowded subways and buses, boogying on crowded dance floors, I have never once been unabashedly groped. But there I was, on the Left Bank just opposite the Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame, standing at the bookshelf in the venerable Shakespeare & Co. bookstore (first publishers of James Joyce's ULYSSES) with a Michel Houellebecq novel in my hands (it seemed like the right thing to pull off the shelf, but I now realize it presented something of an invitation), when I experienced the unmistakeable sensation of fingers passing over the left cheek of my ass, dropping lightly into the crack, and lingering on the right cheek before departing. I finished the paragraph and then looked to my right with some trepidation because, of course, I figured it was probably a guy and that I would have to give him the universal I'm not gay sign and that would hurt his feelings and embarrass me. Gay men sometimes think I'm one of them because I'm small, keep my hair cropped short, wear an earring, use words like "sublime," hate professional sports, and do things like standing in Left Bank bookshops reading Michel Houellebecq novels. To my great surprise and delight, I found myself eye to eye across six feet of otherwise empty plank floor with a beautiful, petite blond woman in a red coat, more German or Danish-looking than typically Gallic, the faintest flush in her cheeks, the loveliest of smiles on her lips. She stood in place for a beat or two, awaiting my response, and only after I dropped my gaze did she turn and disappear into the crowded back room of Shakespeare & Co. I'd let her go. Had to. I was traveling with my wife, whom I insist on adoring in spite of it all, and was in the company of our nine year-old son, who had just come to my side to beg for the latest installment of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. But for that moment, everything had been possible, and that was enough. In a counterfactual world, we'd started with Sancerre and oysters, talked about the sterility of Houellebecq's fashionable nihilism and Catherine Breillat's feminist pornography and how there is still room for romance in the world if only you can see the angels on the willow branch, and then gone back to her one-room flat in Odeon and fucked crazily against the wrought iron bedstead before finishing with a kiss and strong coffee.

A little epiphany. God wrapped in red wool and draped with blond curls. ibn Arabi would know just what I'm talking about--he had the same vision while circumambulating the Ka'ba. So would Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote Oh, Russet Witch after a similar bookstore encounter. These things happen rarely and only in places like Paris, but they are the water of life and, along with mountain mornings and the laughter of children, maybe the only reason to put up with its crap. I lit a candle for her in Notre Dame. Not for the dead, but for the ever-living.

While my son and I were in the cathedral, we passed an illuminated wood carving of Jesus appearing to his disciples after the resurrection. "What's going on there?" Nathanael asked, and I told him the story as I knew it. "Could that have really happened?" he asked. "Could he really come back from the dead?" I answered, "If you're a Christian, you believe it happened...and that there's another world after--or maybe right alongside--this one." Now, Nathanael has never been baptised and has set foot in a church only three or four times in his young life. No Sunday School, no prayers before bedtime. And yet, at that instant, he spontaneously dropped to his knees in front of the wood carving in Notre Dame Cathedral, with crowds milling all around him. There was nothing showy, or stagy, or ironic about it. Just a kid being wowed by the power of the numinous, as I had been only thirty minutes earlier when that gentle hand had grazed my derriere. Take. Eat. This is my body.

September 29

If you've gotten a kick out of the Raszer series, subscribe to FORTEAN TIMES or STRANGE ATTRACTOR, or just plain have a yen for the fantastical, check out this site: http:/​/​www.phantasmaphile.com/​ It's run by Pam from Brooklyn, the new home of indie rock and Bohemian (in the original sense) culture.

Some news: Counterpoint Press will reissue a new and updated version of the second Raszer book, THE LAST DAYS OF MADAME REY, in winter of 2010. It's my personal favorite of the three books, mostly because of APRIL BLESSING, the woman who steals Raszer's heart and maybe his soul, too.

As ambivalent as I am about the whole POLANSKI affair, I have to say that this is one of those cases where law and art are in irreconcilable conflict, and we ought to come down on the side of art. Polanski did his penance with thirty-two years of creative output. Artists, like the shamans of tribal culture, are IN society but not OF it, and if we value their trips to Hell on our behalf, we must sometimes grant them a pass back to the land of the living. That doesn't mean forgiving the act, but forgiving the actor, So, SET ROMAN FREE. Besides, the whole thing went down at Jack Nicholson's house, so Polanski can honestly say that the Devil made him do it.

August 1

If you ponder the question: "Why does woman love a mystery?" for long enough and in a suitably altered state...you may experience a kind of satori. Or if you prefer, gnosis. Try it.

I learned this past week that Johnny Depp is reading my TESLA screenplay, and it feels like fate. Now, no one knows better than me how ephemeral the promises of Hollywood are, and I no longer bate my breath when this sort of thing happens. But I swear, this is the role he was born to play. Thank you, Ryan.

July 11

ROCKIN' IN THE NEW AGE

Gary Lachman, a founding member of one of my fave 80's bands, BLONDIE, has written a very cool book called POLITICS AND THE OCCULT (Quest Books ISBN 978-0-8356-0857-2), available at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, where I'll be signing my own flaps this Thursday evening. Just goes to show the ever-present connection between rock 'n roll and magick. It's said that no less a personage than Elvis kept a copy of Manly P. Hall's THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF ALL AGES on a bookstand in the main parlor at Graceland. A king is a king, after all. No accident that "Mystery Train" came out of those pipes.

June 26

HOW I MET THE GODDESS

The pretty girl came to me on the playground with a folded note in hand. She was 13, I was 13, so we were equals in age if not in experience. Girls are always older, no matter the age. "Don't open it yet," she whispered, with more than a hint of mystery. Mystery in the ancient sense of an unfathomable thing. She was gone with a swish of skirt around bare legs. She was the new girl in school, having come from Paris, where her father had been the rep for Carnation Milk. For whatever reason, she'd singled me out: the shy boy who kept to himself.

It's probably fair to say that my course as a future writer of speculative fiction was set that day, as I haven't since stopped asking myself, "What if?"

The note burned in my pocket through fourth period, and passing to fifth, I ducked into the Boys room and opened it. "Will you go to the woods with me?" was all it said. The fifth period bell rang. I stared at those eight words with no less awe than if I'd been considering a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. My skin knew what they meant. The flush in my cheeks spelled it out. But my brain wasn't quite ready for the message. It scared me to the marrow, and I knew from that moment I'd been stung and would remain stung forever. I see the words in front of me every time I sit down to write, and every time I write, I write to right the wrong I committed that day. Because I didn't go to the woods with her. I went home with a fever and tossed and turned and puked all night.

My youthful lack of intestinal fortitude has had its upside. Practitioners of tantra know all about the rewards of sexual sublimation. The serpent power Kundalini rises through the chakras, ultimately exploding through the crown of the head in a mushroom cloud of ecstasy. You "make the Ganges River flow backward," which is to say, you invert the orgasm, dam up the flow of semen. Cool things happen. Creation happens. If I'd gone to the woods with her, there's always the chance that things would've gone badly and I wouldn't still be thinking about those eight words today. At least that's what I tell myself to chase away regret. Of course, goddamnit, I should have gone. When a girl invites you into the woods, you go, even if there's a chance you'll never come back.

The pretty girl from Paris stayed only for a semester and never spoke to me again, but as I grew older and finally lost my fear of sex, my mental image of her matured and morphed along with me in fantastical ways. She lived in the woods. She grew out of the forest floor, part of the foliage, but more exotically blossomed than any of the local flora. Her fair complexion darkened, her cheekbones rose, her breasts ripened, and she acquired a scent that was part wild honey and part damp fruit cellar. I went back to the woods again and again to find her, and each time, her message was the same: "You let me down once, baby. Do me right this time. Worship me." Then she'd raise her sword and say, "Kneel, motherfucker, and let me knight your sorry ass."

Thus did I come into Her Majesty's Secret Service. She demands a lot, but when she gives back, she gives.

I believe there's a bedrock vision at the trailhead of every fantasy writer's career. For some, it's a safe place, a spired and shimmering refuge from whatever shit surrounds them at home or at school. For others, it might be a cliff's edge and the twin urge to step back and fall forward. Or a bejeweled cavern diminishing to a point that is both end and beginning. For me, it's the woods, and the presence there of that dark, sly sylph/​sprite/​nymph with the soil between her toes, vines in her hair, and a strawberry patch where thigh meets belly meets thigh.

I write about spiritual bungee-jumpers. People who want to get lost in order to find--to be taken to the edge of themselves. And I write about the guy who brings them back from that edge because he knows it so well. They sell me as a mystery writer, but it's only mystery in that very ancient sense of the note being passed to me on the playground before I was old enough to understand what it asked of me. I write stories that are equally fact and the most extravagant fantasy, because what lies in the middle ground--what they call "fiction"--doesn't interest me very much. You see, when it's all over, I want to go to the places I write about. When it's all over, I want to go to the woods with her. I hope to Christ she'll still be there, and I'm still sorry I didn't go the first time.

June 23

The whole world thinks it knows Los Angeles, but almost nobody does. It is at once the most exposed and most hidden of cities. People who say they hate L.A. wear their disdain like a merit badge, and even those who say they love it feel they need to add a note of distance. "I love L.A., in spite of...well, you know," and we're all supposed to know. This isn't about the traffic, or the smog (long since surpassed in places like Denver), or even the presumed superficiality and duplicity of the people, particularly those living west of La Cienega. It's about the fact that Los Angeles is home to a peculiarly American form of native religion, a creed rejected by right- thinking rationalists everywhere: the belief that we can transform ourselves from the inside out. "We are what we are!" cry the realists. "We are what we can imagine ourselves to be!" protest the ladies of the canyon and the countless script and song and headshot and prophecy-carrying waitresses, bank tellers, bag boys, and messengers. Now, granted, a belief in the vulgar truth of this leads to all sorts of human silliness, from boob jobs, vaginal rejuvenation, and penile enhancement to Scientology and A Course In Miracles. But singling out this stuff as evidence that the whole thing is a sham is like citing the Christian Coalition as evidence that Jesus was a blowhard. I can testify as one born-again in the hidden laurel groves of L.A. that it's all true. At certain times of day, the air shimmers with the potential for transformation the way Star Trek's teleporters did in the midst of beaming up Kirk and Spock. The unsolid earth heaves and moans with the ancticipation of our germination as something closer to the sprouts we were meant to be. Out here, said Jim Morrison, we is stoned, immaculate. Out here, we get to be who we thought we were before somebody told us different. That's why I keep coming. Never the same river twice, and never the same face in the mirror. Lord, make me over.

Mystery. From the Greek Mysterion. Dictionary definition 1. a religious truth that one can know only by revelation and cannot fully understand. Dictionary definition 2. something not understood or beyond understanding

I'm not sure I'll allow my work to be marketed as straight mystery again. I think the word has lost its meaning and is now code for "procedural." I think I write fantasy, or myth or Yankee magical realism. Or something. Just not mystery...even though I love the word and hate to give it up. Mystery readers like plot. They expect to be led on an evidentiary trail to gradual suspension of disbelief, whereas fantasy and horror readers know that behind every armoire or broom closet is a secret passage to the shadow side of oneself, and are ready to crawl in with the slightest inducement. Mystery readers need the blood evidence. They could never accept "If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit," which I thought was pure artistry. Mystery readers need to be seduced over a long and arduous night of dry martinis and drier wit, and I've never had the patience for seduction. I prefer the smoldering look across the crowded dance floor that says instantly, "We were made for each other--at least for tonight." I have a theory that fantasy people are Scott Fitzgerald people and mystery people are Hemingway people. Romantic that I am, I never should have tried to Trojan Horse my way into their hard-boiled world. Mystery people like "L.A. Confidential" and sci-fi/​fantasy people like "Mulholland Drive." I think David Lynch is a fucking genius, and that Philip K. Dick is Jesus, and that hearts are best worn on sleeves. And so, right here on this blog, I hereby announce that I am officially bidding a fond farewell to the mystery genre and declaring myself a...a.... Oh, hell, you decide what I am.

There's a great story that legendary film producer Robert Evans tells about the first distribution of Robert Towne's "Chinatown" screenplay. The movie, as everyone knows, is an enormously complicated tale of corruption of body, soul, and spirit in 1930's Los Angeles. Long before the cameras rolled, the script went out for a weekend read by studio executives, agents, financiers, and other people critical to the project's approval. According to Evans, half the readers loved the script and half hated it, but the comments betrayed the fact that not a single one of them had understood it. In both cases, opinion flowed from a desire not to be perceived as unhip. Those who said they loved the script saw virtue in its obscurity and wanted to be "in the know,", while those who hated it felt shut out of the clubhouse and wanted to punish Towne for making them feel stupid.

Nobody wants to feel stupid, least of all book reviewers. A critic's authority rests on the perception that he or she is, if not superior, then at least intellectually equal to the work being reviewed. This makes writing about all things obscure, occult, and arcane an extremely hazardous occupation. There are two common ways of presenting such material, and both risk the critic's most pointed barbs. You can do it in the breathless, gee whiz! style of a Dan Brown, in which case the reviewers dismiss you as simple-minded, or you can handle the esoteric from an insider's perspective, in which case they're likely to get good and pissed off.

I write about hidden things. Hidden things have always fascinated me. Locked rooms, diaries, double lives, cabals and conspiracies. I write about small, highly secretive groups of people who hold privileged information with potentially world-altering implications. It's taken me three books to figure out that if you're going to write about secret societies, you are obliged to let the reader in on the password. This goes double for reviewers. They have to be invited to the party, or they're not going to have anything nice to say about the hors d'oeuvres.

Because the whole point of my books is to share secrets without spoiling their mystery, this is something of a tightrope walk for me. If you shine too much light on numinous things, they have a tendency to evaporate. But in the new Stephan Raszer book, NOWHERE-LAND, I've struggled to find a balance. No doubt the critics will let me know to what degree I've succeeded.

November 18 (from NOWHERE~LAND, A Stephan Raszer Investigation):

The laptop’s screen came up with a file icon flashing against the Moorish desktop pattern. He opened it to a hypertext version of Revelation 14, with underlined passages linking him to pages of exegesis by scholars and theologians from the 5th century on. The passage Monica had highlighted in red was from Verses 1-4:

"AND I looked, and lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads."

"And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the Elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth."

"These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins."

He clicked on the hyperlinked word, virgins, and was taken to a display of related passages from Revelations, as well as a quote attributed to Jesus in Matthew 19:12:

Hearing his pronouncement against divorce, the Pharisees had protested to Jesus—in so many words—“if we’re not free to dump our wives, maybe it’s not such a
great idea to get married in the first place,” to which Jesus replied in cryptic agreement:

“All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. There are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heavens’ sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

Raszer read the passage repeatedly and with increasing speed, until its archaic syntax morphed into a kind of non-verbal vernacular, a direct feed from page to brain. It was a technique for reading sacred texts he’d been introduced to when first undertaking his study, and now he did it automatically. The fact was that unless you read the original Greek or Hebrew, Sanskrit or Arabic, everything was bastardized by the translator’s biases, and even in the maiden tongue, most scripture and sutra was secondhand news and at least twice-removed from meaning. The real meaning was esoteric. As Jesus had said time and again in the Gnostic Gospels: “He who has ears, let him hear.” If this was not the case in the matter of eunuchs, it was surely true of an even stranger quote Monica had pulled in from the Gospel of Saint Thomas:

“When you make the male and the female be one and the same, so that the male might not be male nor the female be female—then you will enter the Kingdom.”

In just two degrees, Raszer’s separate queries about the identity of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ “Little Flock” of 144,000 and the history of sacramental castration had been drawn together in a way that put a new spin on Aquino’s virgin sex ring theory. Suppose virginity—of one sort or another—was a factor, but suppose it wasn’t about the lust of middle-aged men for young girls. Suppose it was about devotion. Or control.

He left the thought there, reminding himself only of what he’d already learned on so many previous cases: that given half a chance, the predators would always use the tools of religion to augment their power over the prey. It was the same story with every clique that deserved the pejorative of “cult,” whether it was Manson’s Family or Jim Jones’s Temple or L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology. There was always an agenda, and if it wasn’t about personal power it was about power on a broader scale.

The castration material was more extensive and more eye-opening than he’d expected, and there would be a few nights’ work in digesting it. Several items, however, jumped out of Monica’s hastily assembled list of bullet points:

• The earliest evidence of ritual castration was found in Sumerian texts from the temple of goddess INANNA at Uruk in present-day Iraq. A sample quote from high priestess Enheduanna, dated to 2300 BC: “Inanna turns a man into a woman and a woman into a man.”
• The priests of the cult of Phrygian mother goddess Cybele, instituted around the time of King Midas (725-675 BC) and fashionable in Rome of AD 295-390, were known as the Gallae, and castrated themselves in imitation of her divine son/​lover Attis, who had done so in penance for his betrayal. According to myth, the birthday of Attis was December 25. Unlike other pre-Christian Mother-Son cults, the cult of Cybele and Attis was a cult of abstinence.
• Origen, the great scholar and theologian of the early Christian church, also “made a eunuch of himself” for the kingdom of heavens’ sake.
• In the mid-18th century, an ecstatic Christian sect known as the Skoptzy or Skoptji arose in the Oryel region of Russia, with ritual self-castration as its badge of membership. The sect attracted military officers, merchants and the nobles of St. Petersburg, and by 1874, counted 5,444 members (incl. 1,465 women) and tens of thousands of sympathizers. The Skoptzy claimed that they were following Christ in Matthew 19:12, but that their mission would not be complete until their numbers had reached the 144,000 of Revelation 14:3-4.
• Just as castratis had guarded the harems of the caliphate, the Holy Ka’ba of Islam and its black meteorite are to this day secured by an elite guard of eunuchs.

Raszer poured himself another glass of wine and lit a cigarette. The business about the gelded priests of Cybele he’d vaguely recalled, and it had been on his mind since seeing the morgue photo of a neutered Henry Lee laid beside the black “baitylos” rock on Aquino’s desk. But Raszer hadn’t been able to make the connection to Iraq until seeing that the Sumerian Inanna had also demanded the family jewels. And the gospel passages with their bizarre echo in the Russian sect seemed to suggest a trail of cognitive cookie crumbs that led right to the door of the Witnesses by way of their belief in the special status of the 144,000.

Could a cult of sexual negation born at the dawn of history have survived, like a viral spore, into the twenty-first Century? Monica’s accompanying weblinks seemed to hint that it could have, because there were sites—many related to the transgender community—with names like alt.eunuchs.com and Men Without Balls. He who has ears, let him hear. Sex and gender had always been big issues in religion.