If I’d been a mid-90s Vertigo creator my book would’ve been a 33-issue finite series of the Fighting American, each issue corresponding thematically to its numerical equivalence in masonic degree and with a 0 issue for the weirdo knife & fork degree. But I could never ask others to pay for anything I’d do. Not because of imposter syndrome, but being homeless for years, days and days on end without eating, it’s hard to come away from that and *not* see all entertainment as luxury.
Sentience never fixes overflowing toilets. Was she riding the invisible jet, or was she riding the astral plane? What if UFOs are adventuring inventors going about their business in homemade fantasticar quinjets fighting mad scientists and mad gods and are just too busy to be celebrities while everyone we know is a loser. If the stigmatic Padre Pio could bilocate before he died, what happened to the other one?
I’d imagine if transcendental meditation encompasses a molecular control enabling such feats as levitation, it would not have to be as extreme as say, full-on intangibility with magicians passing through walls. What if it could ease molecules just enough to prevent tensions leading to aneurysms or heart attacks. Performing the old con of psychic surgeries, only for real, phasing tumors or lymphomas directly out of the body with no need for pain killers or blood transfusions.
The stories of monks becoming living statues, dead for decades without aging or decomposing, on some psychosomatic level they exist in a loop of reconstituting damaged and dying cells, very consciously maintaining their chosen molecular structures. What if it could be extroverted. There’s old, cross-cultural stories of shamans able to manifest a tulpa of themselves, a perfect doppelganger possessing the same memories, skills and talents and existing in the same time but in a different space. The will is able to disregard what is accepted as space. Muslim mystics had this whole concept of folding up the Earth to travel impossible distances, bending space without time and without reading science fiction stories of wormholes. The will is able to disregard what is accepted as time. Astral projection is one thing, but disrepairing and reconstructing the laws of physics at will and as extensions of ourselves, is something else. When common sense negates subjective experience, feeling good and looking good are made redundant but it never seems to bother the plant-life with actual roots.
What if the world is shitty because that is what each and every participating subconscious of the collective unconscious wants, all so fearful of being left alone with their thoughts, afraid they might discern the motivations of the godhead inventing itself from nothing.
I remember years ago when my professor of philosophy uncle was flying to Norway for his father in law’s funeral, I’d given him my copy of James O’Barr’s The Crow to read in the air. Which he did, telling me later that the more chaotic the world turns, the more primal its beliefs. Today, for all our evolution and collective learnedness, all the more do we await whichever god-king to make the bad things go away, like we can do justice in hindsight with guidance but are always conveniently too helpless and codependent to enact it in foresight ourselves. Leaving this tunnel’s vision of Punch and Judy shadow-puppetry for the thunder and lightning are you shitting me? It’s always a repeat but without repetition we’d have our own voids to fill and brothers and sisters our coffers run dry because inundation only suits dry fields. Buried back elsewhere in this site is an old attempt at seeing a commonality, between the permanent silhouettes burnt onto concrete in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Plato’s story of fire-lit puppets on the cave walls. I guess I just needed a few more years of despair to word it as needed.
Hell is what you make of it, because the customer is always right.