Lighter Than Smoke

The tintinabulation of the spheres
Seems tickle-ing within my wicked ears
O surely it is but a dream
A green and gleaming mountain stream
Glissando crossing xylophonic stone
Silver demons in my eye alone
Send my salt and ashes to the sea
Saving only smoke and me 

- Soda Pop Fats, Minneapolis circa 1887



Away these last weeks, trying to break out of my head, I return to The Ol' Sync Hole to the ringing of a mighty sync and on the brink. 

Indras Net, in his sync-work, manages to mirror the events of my own life with striking accuracy.

On the eve of IN's recent post, I was holed up in a Super 8 motel room with my spirit guide, Azazel Fennrar.  We got drunk on rum, mushroom tea, and plenty of Drum Original Rollie Tobacco, which I like to call REDRUM.  We were in a town called Drumheller (Hell Murder), working on the design details of our Time Machine.

To chill, we took in two films which I am now delighted to recall concern the use of tobacco as a thematic meme: Ghost Rider and Dead Man.  

Later, in the cool morning, Zaz and I shared a Holy Moment in a place called Horseshoe Canyon and I flashed on Waking Life. Zaz's drawings for our Time Machine look alot like the folded paper divining toy from WL's opening sequence.

On the road, we listened to Alan Watts and the first random lecture was A Happy Death. 

Zaz dropped me off at about 11:30 am, and I went straight to bed with the TV on Encore Avenue (a kind of Canadian TCM).  Time After Time, with Malcolm MacDowell and David Warner.  I feel politely dazzled on my post mushroom-hangover buzz, and fall asleep.  Feeling and falling, I dream quite vividly I am being eaten alive by worms. 

I must also note that when Zaz and I meet, we call it Shining, after our groundbreaking work unraveling the Kubrick masterpiece, an opus with conspicuous use of tobacco and Amer-Indo imagery.

Now, a biograph: your pal Artislav Mel is a chain-smoker.  One hand rolled unfiltered after another, and each down to the nubbin.  In the morning, when I brush my fangs, I also pumice the golden patina of weed from my fingers - a stain which many find more offensive than the fireplace perfume of my dud's that follows me like Pigpen's cloud.  It is my custom to go to bed at the precise moment I no longer wish to smoke.

As a smoker, yer old AM is right up there with Nabokov or Kubrick or Bette Davis.  I ain't just name dropping, because I think that smoking is, in some sense, a function of what I like to call sink-think.  Sink-think has more than a few famous names.  Properly it is called synesthesia, which is the hallmark of Vlad's lyricism.  The Sub-Geniuses call it excremeditation.  Bach explains it in Edifying Thoughts. In alchemy it may be called Azoth. In Valis, PKD (a smoker) describes the process somewhat in reverse, as golden droplets of light descending to illumine a miasma of total emptiness and to my mind, Poe explains it likewise in Descent Into The Maelstrom.  I choose Sink-Think for its punitive value, and because of its relevance to my spectral mentor Stanley Kubrick, who is essentially a bathroom Joker and midnight Black Bram's Toker.

Smoking serves as the ritual of sink-think, exactly because of its famously relaxative benefits. Just as earlier Zen turns the third eye toward the sex, the Sink-Thinker descends past the sexual quagmire of the Sixth Sepulchur and into the Seventh Heaven of Anal Bliss.  Sex and the Genetic de-Genesis is a conundrum with no solution - a conundrum devised to insinuate the infernal cycle of nature as a superior to the total self.  To surpass this threshold we must open the crown with our assholes intact. The irony of this model is at a fine edge in the neo-buddhistics of Chopra, Oprah and most wonderfully Eckhart Tolle.  Tolle espouses illumination by the celebrated contemplation of the flower. The flower (ewige Blumenkraft) is the supreme image of sexual beauty and the murderous sick-sickle cyclic nature.  In the flower, which grows forth from the freshly killed living sexual sacrifice, the Buddha sees only despair.

And so it is for the sink-thinker and the smoker.  The physio-logic and hyper-doxical product of smoking is ASH (Latin creme; excrement - out of ash), which is the complete mortification of the material essence.  When the body is burned away, and burned again, it is akin to the crushing of all life at the bottom of a pestle.  Ergo, the insufflation of tobacco is the supreme spiritual and alchemical working.  The remaining product is not manure but salted ash, from which only the purest spirit can ascend beyond the logos and be one without form.

Down to Earth and the writing is on the wall.  We appear to be on the brink of eschaton, but remain too afraid to cross the abyss just yet.  Porn and juveneille sexuality are a giveaway.  The mainstream porn industry is ugly and evil.  And I am told that the teen-age goodnight kiss has been usurped by oral sex.  The source of this degradation is anal tension.  The divine mind has been barred passage beyond the sexual and into the anal - a process fundamental to the proper development of adult conciousness.  Basic cable provides anatomically explicit porn and yet treats normal anal function with a distant artistry on the level of a Shakespearian sonnet.  Adam Lambert's harmless queer kiss on the AMA's takes America to the red line.  The American hold-outs just aren't ready to accept the Sphere of Total Self Love into the light of day, and they aren't the only ones.  All government, religion and capital commererce depend upon the attenuation of arrested anal development, which is analog to enforced mortality with the supreme self as its subject.

And so it's 9/11 all over again, in the privy council courtroom.  Illegal imprisonment and torture. NIMBY.  The persecution of the aged, infirm, poor and the mentally ill (who, not too coincidentally, love tobacco).

Folks everywhere are ready to tear out their assholes.  It seems as if the shit is gonna get heavy, good people.  But don't worry, when it's time to burn... nothing is lighter than smoke.