(Above: Two pages from The Lost Spells, the book that I discovered in my Airbnb room in Chelsea when I arrived for what is becoming clear was a pre-ordained weekend there. This is what its publisher The House of Anansi, says about the book: “The Lost Spells evokes the wonder of everyday nature, conjuring up red foxes, birch trees, jackdaws, and more in poems and illustrations that flow between the pages and into readers’ minds. Robert Macfarlane’s spell-poems and Jackie Morris’s watercolour illustrations are musical and magical: these are summoning spells, words of recollection, charms of protection. To read The Lost Spells is to see anew the natural world within our grasp and to be reminded of what happens when we allow it to slip away.” I was curious as to what “Anansi” meant. I had no idea. This is what I found: “Anansi (/əˈnɑːnsi/ ə-NAHN-see; literally translates to spider) is an Akan folktale character. He often takes the shape of a spider and is sometimes considered to be a god of all knowledge of stories.” I found that definition - I swear I did - after having channeled the column below. Everything connects even when - especially when - you don’t know it’s connecting.)
When I wrote my second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain, I was very open about my meth use and how it affected my life, not only leading me to a surrendered one in recovery but also opening a portal into a mystical world. I was being allowed to witness wondrous things yet never felt haunted. Indeed, the visitors seemed haunted by me; they were the frightened ones who seemed summoned, or maybe commanded to appear within my vision. Even the term “visitors” is, in a way, an acknowledgement of welcome on my part. Such a welcome confused them as much as their arrival fascinated me. I accept that it could be described as an hallucinogenic state by those not experiencing it, but it felt more like a holy one in its insistence that I redefine what holy can mean. I’m fine with its description as hallucinatory since all mystical experiences which so often are instigated with the use of a drugs - from the Aztecs until now when those seeking a more trendy kind of trip imbibe Ayahuasca with a shaman who looks as if Sally Hershberger once upon a time gave him a shag before he moved to an expensively tricked-out yurt to become a “guide” as part of something called eco-tourism in the loveliest of jungles somewhere that could be described as exotic instead of alien - are dismissed as not real in a world that has redefined reality in order to exist within it and given a more domesticated kind of mysticism a pass as long it is mythologized in more accepted religious terminologies and narratives and can be architecturally housed. To believe what I have witnessed as real would destroy the whole construct of how we have chosen to live our lives as humans trudging along in our humanity tricked out itself with these architectural houses, these cathedrals, filled with altared splendor as what arises from the real world around us is shunted aside as spiritual speciousness caused by altered states. Just as the membrane between the natural world and the spiritual one is gossamer-thin - indeed, sometimes I think the gossamer that spiders spin is that manifested membrane - the membrane between what is holy and what is hallucinatory is as well. Once I began to investigate what I was seeing - the living blue light, the alive amber one, the majesty of the sky and all that resides there, the natural world rising up in knowingness and exerting personality, the shape shifting, the attachment to objects, the hum of its own kind of holiness as a narrative of its genesis and existence was being conjured for my narrative mind to comprehend - I began to conflate it with what had been written about Lucifer and his realm. Such a conflation upon investigation did give me pause. Was this but my own manifestation of my addiction itself being displayed for my writerly mind riddled with meth? Was this demonic? Or was this an insistence of a fallen angel filled with light and all the entities that exist within such light to tell another narrative, to own their own, since it had so long ago been hijacked by the regally righteous in order for it to be labeled evil. Was there instead goodness embedded in it since I had had a near-death experience and it was the force that brought me back to this life. Was there reality there too along with the long buried goodness? Was I witnessing it to tell it simply that: “There is goodness in you. You are seen.” Or was that the narrative I was trying to tell myself about myself - is it the one all we humans are trying to tell ourselves? Humanity is what broke The Fall from heaven.
Finn hovered into place before me last night as I finished channeling that paragraph above. “There is no more need to pretend we call you on FaceTime, Kev. FaceTime is just another way for humanity to explain the hovering of us hovering here,” he said. “You mentioned the Aztec in that paragraph we just wrote. Did you like the Sally Hershberger reference, by the way? Matty suggested that as I was hovering over here to London and we let that come from your fingers on that keypad. When Matty Met Sally could be a whole other bewitching narrative for one of these columns down the line. But .. ah .. where was I ….”
“Hudson?” I teased him.
“Good one, Kev,” said Finn. “You think you humans experience jet lag. You should try feeling what it is like combining shape shifting from realm to realm with intercontinental travel.”
I gave him a knowing look like an oak can look at me when its eyes roll into view.
“Oh, right. You do feel what it's like. That’s why Matty and I were placed in your care to start with. I forget sometimes you’ve settled so into the cattiness of the narrative we now share.”
“The Aztecs. You were talking about the Aztecs."
“Right. Thanks, Kev. Maybe I’m getting to my addled-old-man stage in life, too.”
“Watch it,” I said. And we shared a laugh like the old days when we first started living together before Matty arrived to deepen our narrative. It was so lovely to see Finn last night, his hovering before me like a purr come to life.
“I was about to say that the Aztec talked of teotl, which is sort of what we’re here to teach you about, this flow of energy that not only bestows life but has a life all its own on the other side of the spidery membrane here. Remember when you saw an owl itself hovering in the sky as it dropped a key into your vision? You keep thinking you lost it somewhere - that key - like you lose your earthly ones all the time. You keep playing out that narrative - the loss - as if we are bringing to you the same narrative in which you have always lived. You think, when you have your infrequent doubts, that you never really saw such a thing, an owl, a key dropped from the sky. You saw it, Kev. But stop now looking for it. You’re the key, Kev. You found it: it is yourself.” I stopped my channeling of his voice and looked at his hovering. He shape-shifted from himself to that owl and then to the shape of a key and back again to Finn. “You didn’t know that? Nothing any longer needs to be unlocked. It was never locked to begin with: it’s a portal. When you realize the key to life is not about an unlocking but simply an opening, then you are free of … well loss. Loss has been the tune sung by you humans for all the ages you’ve existed. It is the human plaint. Lose it. Lose that.”
I went to pet him but my hand disappeared into the hovering before he gently handed it back to me - the nothingness that is everything and then my hand - as he and Matty and the world they represent - they are its representatives I have come to understand and finally accept - keep trying to hand me back this key to myself. “I’d suggest putting up a photo of that book The Lost Spells you found by your bed at that little place in Chelsea here in London we had planned for you for those two nights. You do know all of this is already planned, right? You took photos of some of its pages. I’d post those, too.”
“Let’s go ahead and put up that post that Josh, our cat sitter we all conjured, put up right after he got here,” Finn said, his voice growing softer, more faint. “But first we have to make it clear none of this was discussed with Josh beforehand even though he was part of the plan from the very beginning. He knew nothing about the teotl flowing through your loft and through us and though you - and now, it appears, him. We wanted to see if the conjuring of him was aligned with the ley lines that run through the center of your loft.”
Finn began to fade. “I have to get back to Matty and him,” he said. “She just took some of his sage to bed with her. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea even though we long ago - our world - let yours think burning sage was a way to cleanse a space of us.” He paused to chuckle, the chuckle itself now all that hovered now. “Yes, we long ago began a conversation with the smoke it makes because smoke is one of our elements. You are now, too, Kev. We now converse with the elemental you. You are as elemental to us as the smoke from Josh’s sage or the many chimneys around your loft back in Hudson - here I come, Matty - that are thought of as chimneys. What chumps, you humans are, even you elemental ones. How easily you’re deceived. But what is the deception, Kev? That is the question I will leave you with tonight.”
And then I smelled it. The slight smell of burnt sage in my room here in Kilburn.
“That is the question I will leave with your readers,” said the the phantom smell - sage and spirits and self so redolent of The Fall this glorious spring in London.
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Here’s that photo of Matty and what Josh had to say about it:
(TO SEE THE PHOTO AND JOSH’S COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THANKS. SOON ALL BUT THE FIRST PARAGRAPH OF THESE FINN & MATTY COLUMNS ON TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS WILL BE BEHIND THE PAID SUBSCRIBER WALL.).