There's that sensation of walking through a spiderweb as it drapes itself over your face, across your lips; spit and spit but that doesn't get rid of it. And the sucking, a quick-sand box stood up on one end pulling me through a wormhole in a frame: wild and contained. It's a thick and porous spongey membrane that I can feel myself pulled-pushing through. I rub my palms on the soft pumice as it breaks apart for me. I a feel the tremor and velcro-tear across the sky of my blacked out world. As the membrane breaks down around me a dull piss yellow light pushes its fingers through the perforations, widening them, clawing and spreading the darkness apart. Yellow encompasses everything blindingly. Heavy voltage rolls up my limbs under the skin. One million freezing, giant, black ants crawling across the surface of my skin and dissolve and then waves of cool fog wash over my limbs rinsing away the pins and needles and loosens my eyelids a little. I cough on the fine powdered dust that forms whipping dragon tales that curl off the ground.
As my eyes adjust to the sallow twilight, a sour-sweet wind bullishly thunders in from all directions kicking the ashen desert dust up around my ankles and with it, cold - I shudder and grope for heat, but there is none to be found - a fierce cold; Winter containing a strange inner warmth, a sunny yoke encased in white bitterness. Riding in on this pale wind comes a roiling cloud of black ash petals like the murmuration of starlings. Thick and thin it undulates across the sky toward me spreading out and coming together, it forms a helix and then a tight band and a thin rod until, as if hitting an invisible barrier, it goes nova, shattering black glass, sprinkling its shards in circular bands that fan out through the ether. The bands contract into a solid writhing mass and comes at me quickly. It settles building up as the congregation of petals comes together. The bottom of it billowing just feet in front of me and slightly above. It takes the form of an undulating sinister shape. Stark against the pallid sky, a half formed skeleton, an image of Death incarnate gazes down at me condescendingly. A tumorous humorous, ulna and radius perched on a fogged pelvis, where it all ends in ashen vapour. Desperate, I tried to scramble back, to cower at least, even my throat eschewed a shriek. It was a lucid dream where you are desperate for speed, but can only move in slow motion. Anxiety, and fear build inside me rapidly, while my body continues to move far too slowly. It felt worse than trying to run under water, it was like trying to run under clear crude oil. I tried to rub my eyes clear of the nightmare, and found the reason for my paralysis: I'm completely bodiless. Just a blip of incandescent light waving tentacled ribbons of brown and white smoke. Reeling and flailing, each part of what should be and still feels like me, I fold in on myself and float through myself twisting and contorting in pure panic. The thing before me sidled toward me slowly like a seahorse until I was eclipsed in its umbra. As the shadow crept over me bathing me in its darkness a calm sensation laps up like the tide returning, I felt a cemetery stillness spread through me. A low rumbling building up to a heavy drum beat, heavy bass that sucks the air from your lungs, and then a resounding voice reverberated through my mind sending ripples through the ribbons of smokey energy, pulsing the light that formed my body.
"The surgery was a success."
"Surgery? What do you mean, what the hell happened to me... where am I?"
It's face squeezed in on itself and grew a little darker with concentration as it seemed to consider what to say and how to say it,
"The manipulation of your dying flesh; shaved was the excess and opened was the rest, your body and the sky."
"Huh, I suppose it would be nice if you could perform surgery on the sky, like that. I mean grab any old scalpel and make incisions into the aether, to see beneath the airy flesh at the inner workings of the universe." I pondered for a moment and losing myself to thought, dismissing the majesty of what was literally happening all around me. The floating skeleton intervened quick, "you can, we have. Human and Celestial bodies, spheres and oblong, just shapes that make up the cosmos. Mind you, not just with any old scalpel but with a special knife. What is known and has been known for millennia as an athame blade - a sort of ritual knife, a paint brush with many potentials - you can make a large enough incision, cut a swath. Fold it open and walk through like a tent flap. Words work like that. They can be as sharp as any surgical steel. Ever say something truly regretful, mean? Cause someone to cry? To crumble?" It asks, its words shake the air but seem only to be inside me.
"Of course I have. Not a great feeling though, not really something I'd like to dwell on." I responded, trying to be polite but this conversation was one of the strangest I've ever had. Not to mention the sound of his voice, the feeling of it throbbing inside of me was giving me a massive headache.
"Those words cut the emotional ligaments connecting you people. The soft, tenuous, fragile flesh that permeates the air between you. Words slice it and slip deep between the ribs, the cage that's meant to keep you safe - it isn't quite so formidable - to where all that energy is stored. That is why there are chambers in the heart. It is a dark cave system where emotional energy is pulled gravitationally like an underground spring into that natural cistern. It's a delicate ecosystem that is easily exploited. Therefore the right word can cut a swath for you to walk right out of this existence and into any other. Or conjure the dead from their residence, demons, and in times of need other celestial forms to keep you calm, keep your peace of mind. Another can transport you to any other cosmic island adjacent to this one or the Earth. Or, if this works better for you, think of the universe as a two storey home. Each room next to the other, with an attic and a basement. The Earth would be the living room on the main floor so to speak. For example, the Sitra Achra, where you are now, when you died you managed to step through Earth's door and into the Achra. The living room to the kitchen. All the doors remain locked of course, but for those with the keys. The right words and gestures, and the blade work like keys."
I was becoming confused. Universe houses, living rooms and kitchens. Unless I was in an ancient house with horrible wall paper, who the fuck gives a shit! What does any of it have to do with me? I turned on the spot to get a look at my surroundings, but found myself bound in some kind of force beam, magnetism or something that pulled me back into the conversation.
"Birth and Death are like skeleton keys, through them you can go anywhere you please. Although, at birth, during the reformation there isn't much choice. All human faculties are reset to their default settings and the only door that is open is to a natural birth on Earth. Death is a different story. There are options. Because you have experience and an informed imagination; there is of course, "the light" in the distance is an optical illusion, a mirage formed by the blank landscape or the "canvass," what we call the door jam between one existence and the next. Be weary of that light. Think of it as the angler fish light. People choose to head toward the light out of comfort only to get the cattle bolt. Others, either in shock, out of fear, or some lack of belief steer clear of the light. The more experienced the soul the more tainted the light appears."
"What do you mean tainted?"
"Have you ever noticed an immaculate swimming pool? You can see all the rays of light and their motes clear to the bottom and then all the patterns on the liner? Now, think about that pool with its cover on, having sat for years; all the falls, winters, and springs; all the dirt, silt, rotten leaves, animal shit, and disease sitting murky in the runoff and collected melt over the feint and sick colour the liner has turned. That dirty, stagnant West Nile water."
"I think I know what you mean." I tell the thing, but all I can think about is, where the hell is it coming up with this stuff? What does it know of houses and swimming pools? Its words cut through my thoughts as it continues its exposition.
"As you gain lives, and live them, gaining experience and knowledge and as your soul grows older and deeper, wise far beyond your mortal body and mind, the 'light' at the end of the tunnel begins to look more and more like that pool-cover, the 'canvass' becomes more faded and frayed; coloured, protecting the clarity beneath. Of course there are endless canvasses. All of them somewhere between blank and fully painted, not all of them tainted. It all just depends on what you seek, comfort and ease, or true enlightenment."