Go to Hell's Pass of the North?

"Go to Hell," she sells tells me. How much for how much, i think. (Did she mean “Hell’s Pass of the North”?)

Of all the things i coulda, would’va should-tilda do, should i do a no-comply? i don’t think i shouldn’t even if i could. i’d like to, kind-of feel obligated to but, but is that within my nature? Left foot, right foot & cozy now with skater shoes, suit & tie, i wonder if i'd end up going to her Hell or to Hell’s Pass of the North. What if i crap it all & go to Hell Paso, Texas? Would i then get an "A" for the effort?

And yet more "Go to Hell"-s. Well, they’re not verbatim but it adds up in the end. Like getting your car bent by careless neighbor-lane parkers or busted eggs post-grocery shopping or, or, or. Each one stretched out in time can easily be forgotten. But in a one-day, in a sequential series & Hell will have to pay for itself.

So, before i go somewhere, i must sit here on Rodin's rock:

We are told to go to Hell. Fine. And we have the ability to tell others to go to Hell. Amen. But what is this act of being told to go to Hell that others, like we, wish to endorse or come to predict?

Stripping down the vehicle, command or insult, it is eh… mostly on average… a naked return of injury, a sort of verbal justice. This Justice mostly affects a balance of the give & take and take & give. Like that blindfolded statue with the toga, sword & scales, Justice is for-the-most-part supposed to be a system of fairness. So for instance, when i tell you to go to Hell, we can assume my self had been insulted – Oh! My beautiful self, why are you so muddy? Mind how a jury will never wholly understand how the accused, the self-described judge was injured; the judge was outside the bounds of pure empathy... This injury felt was on a subjective plane & no articulated tangled mess of reason will fully convey that experience. ~ Weeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiii ~ Whether the judge knows this. or not. at the time of declaring his verdict is only a trivial happenstance. ~ Wheaaaaaaeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiii ~ In short, it is from hell - Did i just hear a violin?? – Anyway this is the main point here, so ignore that bit of the violin – It is from Hell, that one is told to go there. Otherwise, how will the discomfort of Hell be known and thus communicated to another?

Should we come to consider the Status of the almighty person desiring to communicate a mind & body to a place of infamous drudgery? Hell, take an example of a Holy priest who somehow let – allowed – permitted – tolerated - unchecked his/her emotions to get the best of him/her. Would the curse be stronger and uninterruptedly more effective coming out of his/her mouth, considering how his/her emotions went unguarded (somehow)? On the other hand, what if an unHoly priest told us to go to Hell, does his/her unique understanding of Hell have more sway over the state of our Wills? It seems as if this question of status would fluctuate with the Damned's current knowledge of what holy & unholy priests do.

In the unique realm of the Mind, a request to go to Hell & even the act of telling some dot to go to Hell could also be taken as a curse or form of incantation. Would it cause Hell to be told with enthusiasm to go to Hell? As a form of incantation, we can imagine a creative mind's capacity to fathom the depths of Hell, possibly sending it there. "What you see is what you get." "What you feel is what is real." "How does the wheat paste taste?" To rebel & put up a resistance would here indicate a fortified mind with sentries & a moat filled with crocodiles & sharks & zombies; the ease of resistance would show how solid shit that mind is. Got me?

Comparably, being told to go to hell is another way of being told to get bent, go fuck oneself, eat shit, etc. Again, it appears that the person saying this was first bent, fucked, ate shit, etc. But i regress. Of more importance, i wonder if it would cost us too much energy to reverse the flow of negativity by telling a villain that we love them heroically.

Does love cost us more energy than war? Would it be possible to return the insult by flipping the coin, by flipping the negativity, and saying "Welcome to Heaven"?

Her last "Go to hell," echoes away with every fresh remembrance. Ahh, the wind through my hair, looking up, at last i reply "Welcome to Heaven."

Fair Thee Well, Arms

Sometimes when i stretch my arms towards the sky, something i do naturally because the stretch feels good, i get scared that i'd set off my superhuman abilities & accidentally fly straight through the ceiling, crashing through the stories above me & up into the atmosphere. If i'm lucky, i'd be first classified as a U.F.O. then later denied & re-categorized as a human shaped helium-filled condom. If i get luckier, the U.S. Air Force will think i'm dangerous & try to shoot me down. But this is all unlikely. If anything my superhuman abilities will get bored going up, up & away, and i mostly fear that they'd shut off & let me free fall until i'm this close <------------> to becoming one, mind, body & spirit, with the ground.

Another related fear is due to the possibility that when i stretch, the stretch keeps stretching & my arms keep going, ripping on & off of my body. My arms have a mind of their own, and the trouble they'd get into worries me because my arms have fingerprints – a representation or summarization of who i am. Just as the police ask the police. Who knows the dirty, slimy, gritty things my arms & hands will touch once they're on their own.

Another fear i get when i stretch my arms is that i'll stay stuck in stretch. Then i'd have to comb my hair, drive, introduce myself & eat with my penis' hands. Yep, my penis is so big it has its own hands. i'd also have to stump my legs just to get through doors & into elevators. The police would think i'm admitting guilt by sticking my hands up without being told to do so, kind of like pulling over before a cop has had the chance to turn on his party lights & siren. Strangers would think i'm excited to see them, and freak when i don't hug back. Lecturers would get annoyed, rollercoaster rides would be denied and running would be an almost impossibility. At least my armpits wouldn't stink as much.

Doppelgänger for You

Once upon a time i was reading David Byrne's online journal – no need to clap; yeah, i'm awesome – & he was talking about Mayan history, when the word "doppelgänger" caught & salted my eyes. This is what he said:

"Many of the Gods, and many of the personal doppelgängers, are animal/human hybrids. Dog-faced or jaguar-faced humans. Parrot beaks on jaguar heads on a human body. And of course the serpent with feathers — now confirmed by dinosaur science to have actually existed in some form. Birds are indeed descended from dinosaurs, and flying feathered lizards did exist as (sic) one time — so this stuff is not all imaginary, it's not all the result of those peyote enemas.

"Part of the Mayan aesthetic mixed aspects of youth and age in these creatures — a creature with a child's body and the face of an old man was common. The Gods, being of many aspects and avatars, crossed what we see as the line between humans and animals. The Maya saw no such dividing line.

"What if, and this is a big if, not all of these chimeras were mythical? What if not all of them were figments of the Mayan imagination? What if the Maya had some kind of genetic science, lost of us now, which enabled a limited creation of these monsters? Don't laugh. Plenty of the world's knowledge has been lost, though much of it has been 'found' again — the science and astronomy of the Arabs was 'lost' to Europeans for centuries, then 'rediscovered', resulting in great leaps forward. Other skills and techniques of ancient cultures are still a mystery to us.

"So, given that we now know you can indeed mix a pig with a fish, maybe these people actually did it. Maybe the monsters on these walls and frescoes are not mythical, but are historical."

In another David Byrne's online journal entry, a journal continuation of the entry given above, he also says about Mayan history how: "The Maya believe that one has an alter ego, a spirit double, which is called a way (pronounced 'why'.) The word also means sleep. These dream creatures are often animal — or even a mixture of three animals. A feathered serpent with jaguar claws and spots, for example. They believe these doppelgängers can be contacted during sleep. They give advice, amongst other things."

Doppelgänger. The word itself stumbles across the tongue. The impact appears to strum a thick tune on the attention’s strings, and it wasn't for certain that it had seen before now. So, if i had looked-up the definition, it was forgotten, and if i hadn't, well, i was going to do it anyway: Doppelgänger (n.) = A ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshly counterpart.

Since the time of my birth, which has been a long time since & in the making, the idea of meeting my future-self was always welcome. Here's my logic: if a future me came up to me it was because time-travel was possible within my lifetime. In fact, i promised me to do this. The goal: to share information that'd enhance the future well-being of all humanity. Also, since i know myself, i'd tell myself things that i wouldn't have to learn later. It'd be like me teaching myself Kung-Fu now because i'd have to defend myself against people, machines &/or a crossbreed of both.

The viewpoint of a haunting double of a living me doesn't bother me too much, at least not now. The way i see it, after coming to terms with the possibility, if an evil me approaches me or if an evil you approaches you, there must be a reason for it. Kind of defeatist/deterministic, i know, but it would be like a looking glass into the darker part of the self, possibly a part of the self needing exorcism or guidance. Who said the evil self has to succumb to the good self? Why can't we just get along?

- And, what if i were haunted by a double of dead self?

At the clustering moments of becoming informed & building up an understanding of what a doppelganger is, the clustering of concept were linked into a series of stitches across my back, making me itchy & uncomfortable; especially when Wikipedia said that a Doppelgänger was: "generally regarded as harbingers of bad luck. In some traditions, a doppelgänger seen by a person's friends or relatives portends illness or danger, while seeing one's own doppelgänger is an omen of death. In Norse mythology, a vardøgr is a ghostly double who precedes a living person and is seen performing their actions in advance."

Also:

"The doppelgängers of folklore cast no shadow, and have no reflection in a mirror or in water. They are supposed to provide advice to the person they shadow, but this advice can be misleading or malicious. They can also, in rare instances, plant ideas in their victim's mind or appear before friends and relatives, causing confusion. In many cases once someone has viewed his own doppelgänger he is doomed to be haunted by images of his ghostly counterpart.

"Other folklore says that when a person's doppelgänger is seen, the person him/herself will die shortly. It is considered unwise to try to communicate with a doppelgänger."

Well there goes my desire to be altruistic; here i was reminding myself to visit myself when time travel becomes possible, when in actuality i was paving the way towards death. Sure, death is inevitability, ever present in everything i do, like enjoying a lollipop only to not enjoy the absence of it later… but here i was making a contract, an ultimatum to reach it.

- What if we see a doppelgänger in our dreams? Will our dreaming selves die?

…

What i liked best, maybe because it disturbed me so, were the two accounts given in the aforementioned Wikipedia entry: one by Percy Bysshe Shelley and the other on Abraham Lincoln. They have been captured in a specific moment in time to be here exhibited/pasted for your curious pleasure:

"On 8 July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley, English atheist and poet, drowned in the Bay of Spezia near Lerici. On 15 August, while staying at Pisa, Mary Shelley wrote a letter to Maria Gisborne in which she relayed Percy's claims to her that he had met his own doppelgänger. A week after Mary's nearly fatal miscarriage, in the early hours of 23 June, Percy had had a nightmare about the house collapsing in a flood, and

"... talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately — he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him — 'How long do you mean to be content' — No very terrific words & certainly not prophetic of what has occurred. But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs. W[illiams] saw him. Now Jane though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination & is not in the slightest degree nervous — neither in dreams or otherwise. She was standing one day, the day before I was taken ill, [15 June] at a window that looked on the Terrace with Trelawny — it was day — she saw as she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket — he passed again — now as he passed both times the same way — and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground) she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him no more she cried — 'Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall? Where can he be gone?' Shelley, said Trelawny — 'No Shelley has past — What do you mean?' Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this & it proved indeed that Shelley had never been on the terrace & was far off at the time she saw him."

Carl Sandburg's biography [on Abraham Lincoln] contains the following:

"A queer dream or illusion had haunted Lincoln at times through the winter. On the evening of his election he had thrown himself on one of the haircloth sofas at home, just after the first telegrams of November 6 had told him he was elected President, and looking into a bureau mirror across the room he saw himself full length, but with two faces.

"It bothered him; he got up; the illusion vanished; but when he lay down again there in the glass again were two faces, one paler than the other. He got up again, mixed in the election excitement, forgot about it; but it came back, and haunted him. He told his wife about it; she worried too.

"A few days later he tried it once more and the illusion of the two faces again registered to his eyes. But that was the last; the ghost since then wouldn't come back, he told his wife, who said it was a sign he would be elected to a second term, and the death pallor of one face meant he wouldn't live through his second term.

"This is adapted from Washington in Lincol's Time (1895) by Noah Brooks, who claimed that he had heard it from Lincoln himself on 9 November 1864, at the time of his re-election, and that he had printed an account "directly after." He also claimed that the story was confirmed by Mary Todd Lincoln, and partially confirmed by Private Secretary John Hay (who thought it dated from Lincoln's nomination, not his election). Brooks's version is as follows (in Lincoln's own words):

"'It was just after my election in 1860, when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day and there had been a great "hurrah, boys," so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau with a swinging glass upon it (and here he got up and placed furniture to illustrate the position), and looking in that glass I saw myself reflected nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again, I saw it a second time, plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler — say five shades — than the other. I got up, and the thing melted away, and I went off, and in the excitement of the hour forgot all about it — nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang as if something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home again that night I told my wife about it, and a few days afterward I made the experiment again, when (with a laugh), sure enough! the thing came back again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was somewhat worried about it. She thought it was a "sign" that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term.

'Lincoln was known to be superstitious, and old mirrors will occasionally produce double images; whether this Janus illusion can be counted as a doppelgänger is perhaps debatable, though probably no more than other such claims of doppelgängers.'"

To watch a re-enacted instance of Dopplegängers in action, go Away to experience “Dopple Ganger Is that your twin?”

Conforming to Nature

A milk-bottle shaped cow yesterday said, "You don't see me."

Convinced, i drank some freshly squeezed O.J.
The Wolves of Noon guarding the Orange Tree chased me into a corn maze.
Creeping on all fours, i pant & squish water from my dried eyes.

Drip drops splashy-splashed on the blue flowers i ignored.

Death?

More & more air i grasped while i kept my heart from jumping & running out.

Crows cawed, Flies buzzed & the Cornfields whispered lies.
For that they were cut down –

Stomp Clomp Smash those liar husks of corn down.

Nightfall grew a Strawberry out of my bellybutton, which seedily told me to do what you want.
After taking a sample of the Strawberry to latter clone, i sliced & placed it in a sugar bowl.

Morning sun thumbed up a jittery bird & spread the clouds like legs.

It felt Awake, meanwhile i ate corn-flakes with sugared strawberries

& drank glasses of wolfy orange juice.