The Caterpillar: December 2012

Something’s happening in there, I know it. I just glimpsed a hand – well, I say hand, perhaps I should say an appendage. Yes, something definitely slunk, sort of withdrew, faded into the penumbra inside that gaunt and granite edifice that faced me across the time-bemoldered alleyway of ongoing experience.

The day could not have been more leaden and grey, a sobering blustering blast blew chill from Atlantic’s swirling swell, flecked with crawking gulls and slopping jellyfish blooms. A squall stole in, scattering showers, gusts and blasts across the gables, tiles and slates of the village-towne. I’d noticed signs of activity in the old warehouse recently, coeval with an increase in footsteps late at night, in owl-hours and beyond. Sesquipedalian scuttlings astir in archaic rhyme-rich dripping atmospheric glassy-eyed glaucous backstreets. I seen lights on in there at night and I heard hammering and a-yammering coming out of there and I know there’s something going on in there.

A slate-grey gloom slayed hopes of drowzy summer’s slumberous afternoons, chilled and thawed and frozen out as brittle bits and fractured fragments of brown-baked bracken blew down like brittle biscuits. Maybe it’s the Glagolitic Mass, echoing and emanating down tunnels of steel, bronze and bulkheads of obsidian basalt columnular conglomeration in catalytic conversation. That’s probably what did it, what set my mind to thinking and to realizing.

Blending into that tea-like darkness, that was a being alright, definitely a being of some sort. Swirls of fog notwithstanding, some denizen flittered and flitted in, in stealthy flight departing. Thirsting for experience’s flow, I followed and bat-like flitted silently inside.

An unearthly glow pulsed colourless drenching the ancient chamber in nacreous effulvous effulgence oscillating with slices of photoperiodic obscurity and a deep deep blackness. A calm warmth seemed seeping forth, encouraging my peregrination. A fresh impression like a French Impressionist painting, blurry and soft; muted, speckled; plates, greenish-white glow, spinning fingers, antennae, shifting plates of the carapace, a gliding motion of an archaic garment of clothing, a vast greatcoat surcoat, swaddling the figure of the being, the entity, the Caterpillar!

And now, as I look back, the encounter – if such it was – is indeed a little vague and sepia-faded at the edges, this being the inevitable concomitant of such episodes as these, featuring as they do, the meeting of mundane with supra-mundane Mind… I have a series of recollections, rather fragmentary, disjointed and indistinct. I have much more positively in my possession though the echo of the feeling, and this is the subtle gossamer whisp that is so discolos hard to convey through words. A sensation of being refined and rarified, as when metal is purified in great fire. This suttleification was bathed in a warm vibrant peace – whilst all this was going on, knowledge and informations were being poured into me from a source universally present. The presence of the central figure was one of great warmth and wisdom, a sunny benignity coupled with the dizzying mysterious drift of space itself. In fine, something that went beyond my limited grasp, yet left me uplifted, inspired with a hint of something vast and brilliant.

When I had fully returned to my normal condition, I was in possession of a casket of scrolls, tablets, cuniform phonograph rolls, wire-recordings, sketch-books, scribbled formulae and classical poetry, incantations, evocations and revalations. Rich food for the soul, for psyche’s flight, butterfly-like into the new bright night of day.

What follows in ‘The Caterpillar’ – A Visionary Ghetto Tabloid - & its remixed Dub Version is culled from the fertile trove of lore and learning bequeathed to me on the occasion of my most recent visitation of my mysterious carapaced friend, to whom ye humble blogspot and its accompanying journals are most respectfully dedicated.