Since I’m down with the flu, I figured I’d post one of the more popular pieces from pw’s past (originally posted Oct 2004). This is the kind of post that gets me better mentally prepared for resuming full-time blogging duty come March — the kind of post I’d like to do more of upon my return.
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De Somnis Vestimenta Horroris

     From the greatest horrors irony is seldom entirely absent, as if to remind us that there is in truth no such thing as motiveless or mindless malignity.  Thus, the crack in John Kerry’s mirror inspired him, subtly and indirectly, to begin to accomodate himself somewhat to the twenty-first century, but at the same time the hellish terrors of earlier centuries—Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Reagan weapons buildup in Europe, Vietnam, Vietnam—more insidiously gathered around him.  The crack was only moderately disquieting at first—although he could not look into it without imagining he saw, in the distorted image of himself created by the jagged glass, some depressing and menacing symbol of the dark side of the Vril force, made immediate in his too-easy embrace of crowd-pleasing populism, which had attacked him through the weak spot opened up by the susceptibility to the voluptuous yearnings aroused, perhaps deliberately, by the enigmatic Ms. Teresa and her brazenly casual allusions to the rhythm of the act of copulation and the red menace of desire.  He was haunted by an uncomfortable idea, although he tried to shake it off; it would be foolish certainly to accept it, on no better evidence than the coincidence of a bad dream, some dubious polls, and an earth tremor—yet the disturbing concept continued to grow in his mind:  he had perhaps encountered a real witch, and the political world he had so long studied was seemingly coming to life around him.

     The bedroom itself was now insidiously depressing to him, because of the cracked mirror and its eldritch bicameral images—John Kerry the war hero, John Kerry the anti-American firebrand—yet he was also subtly uncomfortable elsewhere about the huge old house:  something distasteful and disquieting, almost a sense of decay and morbidity, appeared to permeate the very air; something nameless and vague, a mere adumbration of new presences and possibilities, probably only his own overactive imagination, and yet something that seemed autochthonous, virtually antidiluvian, furtively suggestive of hideous secrets of forgotten times and deeds that were against Nature and against Scripture, like Ed Koch, or Vanilla Coke.  The invasion of even the furniture with this inchoate omnipresence was bewildering, if one was able to compare, in the light of the different atmosphere before the Dark Force (as he came to call it), the previous ubiquity throughout Kerry Manor of commonsense normalcy.

ACTION                                                      SOUND

EXTERIOR.  KERRY MANOR.  LONG SHOT.

The house almost lost in a panorama       Voodoo drums.

of dark trees and twilight shadows.

EXTERIOR.  KERRY MANOR.  MEDIUM SHOT.

The house, dark and looming.                  Voodoo drums.

The pennyfarthing bicycle in

front of the entrance.

     John Kerry embarked upon a campaign to banish the whole perishing business by refurbishing, not merely the cursed mirror, but the whole of Kerry Manor, and soon had the place swarming with tradespeople and illegal day laborers in a huge project of modernization, including even the installation of heavy Che Guevara busts in every room.  It required many months, but finally Kerry Manor had been fully adapted to the twenty-first century liberal worldview, which is to say, finally adapted to allow for luxurious agonizing over the perceived failures of the twentieth century, and more specifically, US culpability in all things vile, crafted from neutral phenomena and imprinted with the distinct and ubiquitous tendency toward liberal self-loathing.  The malign humor of the hideous forces unleashed against John Kerry meanwhile proceeded to produce, as this superficial adaptation to the present was feverishly afoot throughout the manor, a growing invasion of his inner life by the most hellish and dismal of ancient terrors:  conservatism.

     John Kerry continued to dream often of Cambodia and once he found himself in a huge dungeon beneath the Mekong delta, where crowds of sullen and pill-addled hippies argued and debated violently.  “We shall have gno wars!” shouted some. But others shouted back, “We shall have gnu Wars!” And weenie gothor thick haggard were poor.  “There are no countries, all is ideology, our fears are all a child’s fantasies,” muttered a liddel bho poop, yet venit verits, surd Alice war bear, flogging thor-talis behind them.  “The tree ovus, the size of us, the weight of us, “ sang an Erring Go BRA in groinblancorange, but a triune pentagonal octupus explained, posing as somadust.  “These are those who started on the Path without the Wand of Intuition.  They have arrived, but they do not know it.  They have I’s so they no can see.  Honey to them, pansy meals.  Does a BRA shith in the woods?”

     When John Kerry wrote this dream into his Magickal Liberal Diary, he added the comment:

For some reason I do not fully comprehend, I awoke with the conviction that Shakespeare was indeed an initiate of the Rose Croix.  I feel closer and closer to grasping what he meant in saying that we are ‘such stuff as dreams are made of.’ I also realized I kinda like tacos, but that, I believe, is incidental.

     A few nights later he allowed himself to be cajoled into a game of strip bridge at Senator Kennedy’s, although that was precisely the sort of idiot pastime he generally despised, his modest member, when publically unsheathed, tending toward the flaccid and the squat.  He barely endured the early part of the evening—there was much brandy and gin, many cigars, and altogether too much talk about bush-hunting, a sport he despised as crass and misogynistic.  It was with great effort that he refrained from quoting the infamous Wilde’s description of that indelicate recreation as “the undesireable pursued by drunk and flabby latent homosexuals”—a poor paraphrase of a quip that, upon reflection, he wasn’t so sure belonged to Wilde’s ouevre anyway.  Perhaps Truman Capote?  Rip Taylor?  He’d have to remember to look it up.  Nevertheless, around ten, a strange thing happened:  he suddenly remembered that the ordinary playing-card deck was derived from the Tarot.  The spades were the Wands of Intuition, the hearts the Cups of Sympathy, the clubs the Swords of Reason, the diamonds the Pentacles of Valor:  and the structure of the deck corresponded astrologically to fire signs, water signs, air signs and earth signs:  52 weeks in 4 seasons, 52 cards in 4 suits.  But if Cabalistic signs were everywhere, the divine essence was also everywhere—though not in the public square, or schools, or anything else demanding a stern secularist hand, don’t get him wrong—and he remembered again that there were no places or times where the visible and invisible worlds did not meet and mingle:  he saw Mary Jo Kopechne in everyone, again.  The rest of the evening he was so intensely conscious that he seemed to himself to have been half-asleep all his life by comparison (with the exception of his time in Vietnam; in Vietnam, he was awake, heroic, alert, virile); he won trump after trump.  The euphoria of not having to unleash his shrunken trouser snake before this panoply of tipsy statesmen, each with a cheap hooker or two adorning his fat lap, was with him for nearly a day and a half after, and then gave way to a vague anxiety again when he remembered that many forms of lunacy begin with such excited states of mentation in which every incident and event seems charged with more than human meaning.  Like, for instance, Vietnam.

     In DC two days later John Kerry met the bombastic US Senator Robert Byrd—perhaps by accident—at the Cracker Barrel restaurant.  Byrd was carrying an urban argot dictionary and a batch of notebooks labeled “What Negroes mean when they Talk” and was effusively cordial.  They amicably agreed to dine together—though as a rule both were institutionally averse to the type of Americana Cracker Barrel had to offer:  a menu filled with ‘deep-dish’ this and ‘homestyle’ that.  In fact, neither man knew what drew him there.

     “Your candidacy is progressing nicely, under Senator Kennedy’s influence, “ Byrd pronounced unctiously, over Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes.  “You’re coming out of that Yalie fog and beginning to couch your contempt for the everyman in empty promises designed to placate the horrid, mewling yahoos.” Kerry found this insight keen but troubling—for if someone so daft as the esteemed Senator from West Virginia could see through his political grooming, the yahoos themselves certainly couldn’t be counted on to stay gulled forever.  He quickly changed the subject.

     “Why are you so preoccupied with Negro speak?” he asked in his most diffident manner.

     “Negro speak,” Byrd pronounced, “will be as important to the twenty-first century as Greek was to the Renaissance.  These people reproduce like crackhead bunnies, and now that we’ve given them the vote, a dark wave is soon to sweep over the shores of Christian America.” And he went on for twenty minutes on that topic, before Kerry was able to interpolate a remark again.

     “Who was that woman saying her hellos in a variety of romance languages?” he asked, knowing that an evil impulse was driving him.

     Byrd looked up sharply.  “She says her name is Ms. Teresa and she comes from Mozambique,” he replied.  “But I doubt it.  Her French is worse than mine.”

     “She sounded like Kathleen Turner on ludes…” John Kerry said.

     “Exactly,” Byrd agreed.  “A lady one should not trust too much.  Filled with a self-image far beyond anything she’s actually earned.  Have you heard of Alistair Crowley?” he asked.

     Kerry remembered the name—one of the leaders of a renegade Golden Dawn faction said to have turned in the direction of Diabolism.  “Vaguely,” he said.

     “Well, whatever you’ve heard is probably unfavorable and you’re just being tactful in not mentioning it,” Byrd said with a piercing glance.  “Don’t get too interested in Ms. Teresa, if you want advice from me, John.  She is said to be, or to have been, one of Crowley’s countless mistresses.  Terrible things happen to people who get involved with Crowley, or his friends or mistresses.  Have you heard of Victor Neuberg?”

     “A poet…I’m afraid I haven’t read any of his work.”

     “Victor Neuberg got very involved with Teresa years ago,” Byrd said.  “He later died from a complete nervous and mental breakdown.”

     “A mental breakdown,” Kerry repeated.  “You mean…”

     “That’s what the doctors called it,” Byrd said somberly.  “Neuberg believed he was under siege by demons.”

     “Oh,” Kerry said, “how ghastly.”

     “Yes,” Byrd answered with a level stare.  “That’s the sort of thing that happens to people who get too close to Crowley and Ms Teresa and their circle.  Neuberg even claimed Teresa once turned him into a Mexican fruit picker.”

     “Into a Mexican?” Kerry exclaimed. 

     “Well,” Byrd said, “I suppose it would be more traditional to turn him into a toad, but Teresa by all accounts has a singularly eccentric sense of humor.  She’s a free spirit!  Delightfully candid, some say—but from where I stand, she’s an egomaniacal douchebag, if you’ll pardon my French.”

     “Do you believe Neuberg really did turn into a Mexican fruit picker?” John Kerry asked, wondering just what Byrd’s attitude toward all this really was.

     “Hellfire, no!” Byrd laughed scornfully.  “But I do believe that if you get mixed up with a gang like that, and really get into yoga and meditation and group sex and drugs and howling invocations at Sirius and the Earth Liberation Front, you’ll damned soon end up believing whatever the other lunatics in the group believe.”

     “Yeah.  But group sex, eh?  Doesn’t sound too terrible, all things considered.”

     On that note, the lunch ended and they parted.  John Kerry found himself wondering if he was ready, yet, to believe in the metamorphosis of a classically-trained poet into a Mexican fruit picker.  The idea seemed to belong not to the true tradition of mysticism as he had come to know it through the Golden Dawn, but to the realm of cautionary tale—of classist folklore, witchcraft and old-wives tales:  and yet the disquieting thought remained, trailing him about like an unpaid Jew, Something happened to poor Neuberg, something that the alienists are perhaps not ready yet to understand or heal. If we are such stuff as dreams are made of, these eldritch forces which MacBeth so evocatively calls ‘night’s black agents’ are as powerful as anything in the masquerade of social life with its timid decorums and deceptions; and thinking also, There is Cabalistic logic in it: the Mexican fruit picker corresponds to the Hebrew letter gimmel, which corresponds to the Masked Priestess in the Tarot, the guide across the Abyss of Hallucinations to the undivided light of Pure Illumination.

     It was only another accident, of course—only another coincidence—but John Kerry actually encountered Ms. Teresa on M street later that afternoon.  There was no mistaking that brown flange of hair, those strange eyes, that enticingly wealthy figure to unhood the cobra of desire. By the grace of God (who seldom appears in Washington, truth be told), she didn’t notice him and he passed by quickly, hardly thinking of her petticoats and garters and stock options and those things.

     That evening, however, he encountered her again, in a much more outre manner.  He was performing his fourth exercise in astral projection for the day, according to the instructions in the Golden Dawn manual, and, for the third time since he had begun the practice, he achieved a state of mind where he almost believed it was real.

     [“It seemed real,” he had told Kennedy after the first such experience, “but I cannot be sure.  I think I am perhaps just deceiving myself and it is imagination.”

     [“Oh, don’t let that bother you,” Kennedy had replied.  “Like a handjob from a Hooter’s waitress, it always begins as imagination…”]

     This time, Kerry, eyes tightly closed, was imagining his astral mind rising out of his body, looking down at the whole room—his physical body included, which he noticed for the first time looked quite like a greyhound stretched out in silk pajamas—from some eerie vantage point near the ceiling, and beginning, again, to almost believe his imagination.  Following instructions, he projected higher, above the earth, looking down at his townhouse from a great height, and then, projecting higher, looking down at Boston and parts of New England.  With a colossal effort, he projected higher and saw the blinding white light of the sun (behind the Earth at this hour) and the planets Mercury, Venus, and Mars (red being a favorite color of his).  It was going so well that he projected out of the solar system entirely and approached the realms of Yesod, the first astral plane.

     And there it was, just as described in the Cabalistic books of many centuries:  the two pillars of Night and Day, the masked Priestess seated on the throne:  Shekinah, the embodied Glory of Jehovah.

     “Who dares approach this realm?” She asked, Her voice strangely familiar.  (Or was he imagining all this?—a product of dubious shrimp cocktail eaten dangerously close to bedtime.  Was this practice just a trick to contact the unconscious by ‘dreaming’ while still partly conscious?)

     “I am one who seeks the Light, who aspires to the highest office of Man,” John Kerry answered, according to formula (and with slight embellishment, a tendency of his he never could quite contain).

     “You have turned your back on the Light,” She answered sharply, Her brown eyes seeming to shine or glow in an odd manner.  “You have rejected Me and banded together with the Black Brothers who hate and despise My creation.  Infernal nochts; rocks intangible; polished knobs; illiberal liberals.”

     “No, no,” Kerry said, frantically reminding himself of the First Teaching [”Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure”].  I have never rejected You.”

     “You have rejected the female, My representatives on Earth, and the act of joy and love which is My Sacrament.  You can never pass this Gate until you conquer your fear of Woman. Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure.”

     John Kerry recognized Her voice at last:  it was the voice of Ms Teresa.  Desperately, he plunged backward toward Earth, remembering to try to calm himself:  when one is blinded by panic, the teachings said, one might not be able to find one’s way back to the Earth-body (as happened to George Bush about midway through that first debate, the wags would later deadpan).  In total funk, he briefly found himself in one of the alchemical planes, where a White Eagle, a Red Lion, a Golden Unicorn, and a boatful of Swiftvets pursued him through a magickal river as the trees on the riverbanks chanted rhythmically, ‘Pangenitor, Panphage, Pangenitor, Panphage, Four, More, Years…” Ms Teresa’s voice sang in antichorus, “Io Bush!  Io Bush Bush!  Io Bush!  Io Bush Bush!” Then, somehow, he was whirling down, down, through endless darkness, to the White Light of the sun again, the spinning Earth-globe, New England, his own townhouse, and the bedroom in which he found himself seated, sweating, his heart beating wildly, his long face white as Bob Byrd’s dreams…

     He recited the great Mantra of protection: “New York Times above me, New York Times below me; the New York Times at my right side; the New York Times at my left side; New York Times before me, New York Times behind me; New York Times within me.” His back was cold from the sweat, and the astral heat burned his forehead; he was trembling, effete.  He repeated the Mantra three more times before he was able to feel safe again.

     “If anything particularly glorious or particularly frightening happens, write it down at once,” Kennedy had instructed him.  “That gets the linear, rational mind operating again—and the record will be useful to you, later.  Especially if some dumb broad tries to sue you for making a few completely innocuous remarks about her nearly perfect tits.”

     John Kerry performed a banishing ritual first, to be on the safe side, and then he wrote the vision carefully in his Magick Liberal Diary.  He added:

If this was just my own unconscious mind playing tricks, it is still most interesting.  The chorus and the antichorus invoking Pan and Bush seems to suggest that the unconscious can compose Greek poetry and parrot pedestrian sloganeering simultaneously—and much more rapidly than my conscious mind could.  And the ideational content of the chorus—Pangenitor, all-creator, Panphage, all-destroyer—clearly indicates the identity of Pan and the Hindu god, Shiva—counterposed with the Evangelical Bush—which is most curious, since I had never consciously understood that identity before the Vision.

     I can only conclude that the above attempt at reductionism is very forced and not really convincing.  Deep down I know that what happened was not merely unconscious tricks of my mind.  Because my heart is not pure, because I harbor powerlust and carnal desire, I missed the true gate of Yesod.  I did not encounter Shekinah, the female component of Jehovah, as would have happened if my heart were clean.  I encountered Ashtoreth, the female Devil, and true to Her nature, She attempted to psychically seduce me.  Many alchemists recorded similar meetings with the succubus, or female lust-demon.

     John Kerry repeated his banishing riutal, and gave up on astral projection for the night.  He allowed himself a rather stiff brandy, to relax, and another, even stiffer, brandy before trying to sleep.

     We do not escape our demons that easily.  Kerry dreamed of many things, all of them voluptuous and sensual.  He wandered through jeweled and many-colored harems where hippy protesters in honeysuits with camelly pants engaged in vile, nameless perversions, obscenities he had encountered before only in the evasive Latin euphemisms of Krafft-Ebing and Yalie argot.  He was wandering through the gardens of his mentor, Senator Kennedy, and a dark serpentine Sicilian named Giacomo Celine (who claimed to be related, distantly, to the Kennedys, and, hence, to Kerry himself—at least in spirit) was explaining earnestly something totally incomprehensible about Sex and Creation.  “The male is space and the female is time,” Celine said “but of course, the universe itself is bisexual.”

     “Blah blah blah,” Senator Kennedy said, waving his hand dismissively and pouring himself a scotch.  “All this philosophy is boring.  Me, I’ll do anything with a hole.  Now that’s egalitarian.”

     The clowns and acrobats sang “I Never Risk Inquiry,” but Kerry and Kennedy were now at Byrd’s Georgetown digs.  Kennedy whispered suggestively, “The culprit is Rove.  It’s always darkest before the storm.  And inside the West Baltimore slums—though you hardly need me to tell you that.” He was leading Kerry to another garden, past the hall of infinitely reflecting mirrors, and Hillary Clinton was waiting there for him, with a face much like a dour and aged Rebecca DeMornay.  She was sprawled totally naked, except for a blue garter with a Silver Star and 3 Purple Hearts pinned to it, on her left thigh.  Goldly nude on a crimson-jeweled Arabic purrpurplebed, her left hand lewdly moving in the grove of brown hair above that maddening garter, doing that horrid disgusting thing to herself, to gather per darker bane, a bolt like a brick sheet hose, her face flushed with the same unbearable and inhuman rapture as the famous statue of Saint Teresa in Rome, or Janeane Garofalo kneeling in a rented SoHo loft before the unfurled shaft of a suntanned Howard Dean.  “To the puer, all things are puella,” Kennedy mumbled.  “She feels your pain”—then he vanished with myriad reflections into infinite mirrors.

     John Kerry threw himself upon Hillary, kissing the garter rapturously, mad with hatred, love and desire, and she whispered, “All things are Clinton.  Evil to him who thinks evil of it.” And her thighs were wrapping around him, sucking him down, down, down into ecstasy so intense he cared not if it were divine or diabolical.

     “Little check on her?  Liddel chick honor?” The ghost of Vince Foster chanted.  “If god is dog spelled backward,” he hissed, lisping, “what does that mean?  Not the Almighty?  Flip-flop. Flip-flop.  Phillip Fop.” But John Kerry was fucking a fox-bitch in heat, groveling in the mire:  heart and mind and soul lost in the Night of Pan.  “Look, Phillip Fop,” Foster repeated.  Then, angrily, “Look!”—at which point Kerry lifted his head from Hillary’s shoulder and saw the face of Ms. Teresa, calculating, in a Bush-chimp smirk.  She rolled a fat tongue over her lips and said, almost as if to mock him, ”Viva la France, mon ami.”

     His heart beating wildly, Kerry shot up from sleep, moaning, the evidence of orgasm dark and dank on his pajama crotch.