(Above: The coffee cafe on our Warren Street block in Hudson, New York.)
I charge my phone and computer at night while they sleep next to me. My MacBook Air even has a prompt that says “Sleep” as if to suggest that it is imbued with powers that are both more powerful than I presume it has and less than those for which I depend upon it. Is thinking that my computer is capable of sleep - a characteristic need for those of us who exist in a realm that requires it of us, humans and cats alike - a lessening of its powers or a heightening of its rather supernatural omniscience that we prescribe only to technology and man’s capacity to take great leaps forward in science in this same realm where rationality rules even as possibility reigns? Both my iPhone and my MacBook Air need electricity - another human leap that conjured a facsimile of light by failing to harness the heavens to do it - in order to recharge themselves to exist. We think we are dependent on them but they are dependent of us to feed them that which we have created that conjures a kind of light and a kind of power if not really light and power themselves. It is a symbiotic, circuitous relationship. Waking, sleeping, dreaming, light, power, the rational realm, the supernatural one.
I fall asleep here in London myself after clicking “sleep” on my computer and plugging it in to charge - to dream? - while I set off on my own dreams to recharge myself. When I get up to pee in the middle of the night, I switch the chargers on my one adapter plug here in London and then recharge my phone. Last night before falling back to sleep, my FaceTime on my phone began to purr in that silenced moaning mode that is more a demurring denouement of sound that comes from us this-realm dwellers, a mumble of a sigh that seeps from us as if our souls are taking a human breath. Before I left for London, Matty had begun to make that human sound when she was sleeping, a moan that means a soul is in there somewhere within her just as the sound of that iPhone at that hour meant that Matty was in it somewhere as well. I answered it. And there she was, her copper eyes finding my bleary ones and blending with them in that way we once found so confusing but now find comforting.
“Hello, dear boy. Finn and Josh are sleeping,” she whispered, the latter name the human cognomen for the cat sitter she has conjured for Finn and her. “I clicked on their own ‘sleep’ prompt. The light is charging them. It’s sweet how they think of it as dreaming in the darkness - just as you once did. You know better now though. You deeply know it, this different kind of better. In the morning, you will write a paragraph about all this to begin our Tuesday column together. So I’d like to add my theory - if you want to call it that to make yourself feel .. well … better about it all.
“God - all the names for Them, Their is Their preferred pronoun - in all Their narratives send Themselves down to earth in human form to understand you poor simple sods. All the great religious myths are finally about forms of empathy even if most of you humans aren’t forms of it yourselves finally. The Christian narrative alas just proves how cruel you humans are. You just killed Them on a crummy little cross and They had to come up with that resurrection stuff on the fly, so to speak, not a denouement that is demur at all. Talk about the Superego.
“Really, Matty .. all this at this hour .. come on ..” I said, groggy and grumpy and not in the mood to grapple with the concept of grace.
“Oh, be still. And listen,” she insisted. "That resurrection story is just a reconfigured narrative that nature wrote ourselves, the genesis of it all, by setting the seasons into a text that needed no words - or even, come to think of it, capitalization. That is the thing about my realm - ours now , dear boy - we don’t want to be worshipped. We just want to be acknowledged. We are already here. We exist in the seen world but if you are chosen, you see the seen world in unseen ways. We do not haunt you. We visit. Some of you welcome us. Some of you don’t. It is a symbiotic, circuitous relationship. Waking, sleeping, dreaming, light, power, the rational realm, the supernatural one. Use that in the paragraph you will write when you really wake.”
I began to drift off but Matty wasn’t finished. She refused to be a dream in the darkness. “My theory is that computers are the latest gambit by God in Their wisdom,” she continued, the light from the iPhone whispering in my ear along with her. “They - you know, God - couldn’t make the narrative work trying to understand you humans when They kept coming down in human form. So now they are giving you a God-like omniscience by allowing you to invent computers. Let’s see what humans do with being God-like instead of God arriving in human form. You’ll probably fuck that up too. I mean look at that guy who’s buying Twitter. Really? Him? Can’t even remember his awful name. You humans and your dependence on naming things. Speaking of which, such a diminutive name - Twitter. Such an insult to those who have the majesty of fuel-less flight. Musk, that’s the guy’s name. Bastet reminded Finn and Josh and me yesterday when we were reading about his purchase of Twitter that the name derives from the Sanskrit word muska which mean scrotum because of the similarity in shape of the sac on the abdomen of a male musk deer in which musk is produced. You can’t make this shit up.
“Humans are really good at one thing though: genocide. You have now turned genocidal toward the natural world. And that is why we are demanding to be seen in unseen ways before it’s too late to be seen at all. This story you about to tell - we are ready for you to tell it - is part of our seeking to survive you. All religious narratives have needed scribes to channel them. You have been chosen, dear boy, to tell just this small part of this one, this peek into the light that has been defined until now as darkness. Don’t blink now. Remain unblinking. Josh is seeing the unseen here. He is standing unblinking in the light. That last cat sitter felt haunted. Josh feels welcomed. We have conjured you as well as Josh. You both are just that: our offering to ourselves.
“I did a screenshot of Josh’s post from a week or so ago when he first moved in here and began to notice the energy all about him. And your bit of back and forth in the comments section. If I say this, your readers will think you made it up, though none of this is. It is channeling. There is a difference. But try explaining that to some people.
“Here are the screenshots of the post and your metaphysical tete-and-tete told with technology - oh, and the photo Josh posted above it all. Post the photo first:
“One man’s crazy is another man’s mysticism,” said Matty. “Did you not like this post Josh put up yesterday?” She then texted me this:
“I have to get back to my body lying there next to Josh. He’s so dear. We do miss you but you’re sort of here, too, simultaneously. You have begun to shape-shift yourself. That’s the thing about shape-shifting, the shifter doesn’t even know it really. Finn is stirring. His shape is shifting. He is waking. The shifting light that shapes us is. The dawn demands another day. Oh, look. Look at Finn. I love when he embodies both you and Josh and becomes more fully himself standing at the window. He’s so handsome when he conflates. Oh, FinnandJoshandKev … go on with your fine selves.
“Oh, yes, I almost forgot. Tell the mystical creatures over there - that ancient isle is full of them - we all said hello. But tell that Harry Potter crew to go fuck themselves, those costumed fakes. They have no idea what transitioning from realm to realm means. The only transition they understand is from stage to screen or some such entrepreneurial nonsense. No wonder transitioning in any way is a foreign concept to that awful woman who typed them up. My transgender and nonbinary Wiccan friends and dendrophiles across the river told me to send them all that message. Happy to do it. I do like a tall Druid though from time to time. Met any of those so far? Never mind. I can tell you’re about to drift off. Until Thursday when more will be revealed. Sweet dreams that are not dreams …"
(TO SEE THE PHOTOS OF FINN AND MATTY THAT JOSH TOOK THE LAST COUPLE OF DAYS, SUBSCRIBE FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. )