The First Church of David Bowie, Phonomancer

It's still inchoate, but this weekend I received a novel and possibly very useful new image of the Goddess. It was She Who is Not There, a three-dimensional hole in the world in the shape of the wife I never found. It inspired an epiphany: Your "heart" is part of the perceptual apparatus of your consciousness, like your mind. And like your mind, it always has an object of its apprehension. If, like William H. Macy in "Magnolia," you feel like you have love to give and nowhere to put it, if you're dying inside because you've got no one to love, understand that the pain you're feeling is a sure sign you *do* love Someone, a Transcendental Person who feels the same way about you, only times infinity. Your heart sees Her, even if you cannot. So I offer you one weird trick to achieve salvation. All you need to do is reframe your suffering to recognize that your longing is proof that She is real, and you will be delivered. Loneliness is a strang...

No ceremony last night (12/7); I went to see the mighty YOB at the Bossanova Ballroom. It was a welcome break! As you’ll see, last weekend’s Rite was a real ass-kicker. A lot happened, and I recorded a lot of commentary. I had some ambitious about editing the actual footage into something I could post, but honestly, I just don’t have time. You’ll just have to take me at my word that the following is an accurate (edited for clarity in certain places) blow-by-blow recounting of an evening that included maybe the hardest, scariest 15 minutes of my life.  I recorded my first comments after the song “Up and Atom,” which is the third song of the Rite’s Ritual of Transformation, the StereoMyth.  0:27:45 - That was an epic little dream that I had there. I was taken into the upper realms, where it was explained to me that if you want to call the Goddess, if you want her, the best way to do that is to feel. I realized that I was so locked in against the fear that I had choked...

The visions that come to me in ceremony are essentially dreams that I experience while wide awake. Like dreams, they evanesce quickly--if you don't record them immediately upon returning to "normal" consciousness (using that term advisedly, obvs), the details become blurry, or maybe you'll forget the experience altogether. That's where shooting video of ceremonies comes in handy. In between every song I work with, I pause to explain to the camera what just happened, how I'm feeling about it, and what's coming up next. That way I have a detailed record of events. The next day--or five days later--I can review the footage to refresh my memory about something, and sometimes even discover that I'd talked about an experience I didn't remember until that moment. The problem is this results in a lot of material. Imagine if you could wake up to write down a complete narrative for every dream you had in the course of an evening. Not only would you be...