Chapter 11:Hermetica

11

Indeed it was all, clearly in hindsight, a matter of time. The Inevitable modified by the Impossible. The way shit goes. Through the course of the actual events, somehow he passed into myth.

Norman and Imogen left the Indiana Academy on Valentine’s Day, Two-thousand-three, following an incident in which students were overheard in the cafeteria discussing having seen the two residence counselors buying a little metal pipe at the local Discount Den. An ex-hippy, born-again-Christian co-counselor interrogated the students (two distinctly unwilling boys from Norman’s floor) and convinced them to tell their story to the Director of Residential Life, an overly tactile, emotionally-immature mid-forties lesbian who had already been clashing with Norman over new Academy rules that disallowed gay students certain rights allowed to others such as holding hands and kissing in the dorm (the once liberal institution, caving in to the red surrounding it [Indiana], was on a slippery slope into fundamentalist folly). Norman was fired immediately. Imogen, insulted by the mere wrist-slapping she had received for the same crime, quit out of solidarity, as did Norman’s only-recently-ex-girlfriend Karen, who found out about his affair with Imogen soon thereafter through the grapevine. Norman never heard from Karen again (extremely sparse, semi-regretful emails throughout the following two years cut for pacing). The students held a day of protest in which many went to class with headphones on, but no ‘justice’ came of it, because Norman secretly felt like everything was falling into place.
His affair with Imogen was three months old at that point. The two had been sharing a small rented house in the nearby college ghetto for five months. Originally undertaken as a secret studio space where the two could find respite from their live-in job, it eventually turned into a secluded little love nest where they listened to records and passionately fucked and painted the walls in their off-hours throughout the winter. For the first month and a half after the firing, the two lived together in this house in a general state of lovers’ peace, getting high every day and entertaining the occasional student guests who were expressly disallowed to visit there and whom Norman took great pride in smoking up and finally getting to really educate without any concern for self-censorship.
It was in this tiny house that he finally decided to be who he knew he was. It was then that everything other than artist fell away.

Hermetica

No longer hindered by living where he worked, Norman began serious work at last on his first album, The World’s Original Man, an experimental trip-hop meditation on the relationship between his loves, self, art, purpose and general masturbatory egoism under his musical pseudonym, Box. He had been working on the music for some of the songs for years but had never quite had the confidence to write and record lyrics. But after Norman’s firing he went right out and bought an expensive microphone and The World’s Original Man quickly bloomed into a double album with eight-page lyrics inserts for each disc. Some of the songs were directly named after or referenced old romances of Norman’s (Amy3, Blue, Janine (the Origin), K is for Katherine), while others were named after half-remembered poems from high school or notes he had written on his wrist years before. Already, at that point, he had been creating electronic music on his computer for about four years, but it was the first time he really felt like a songwriter designing a full album as a single macroscopic work in the vein of the great rock albums he respected, as opposed to just arbitrarily grouping together atmospheric, twelve-minute drum-n-bass epics that didn’t relate to each other beyond all being saturated with Star Trek samples.
It was a time of paradigm shifts for Norman, a distinct phase transition, so powerfully so that it seemed to have come with some kind of cosmic significance attached like a note with flowers. The flowers were Norman’s new romance with a sexy, passionate fellow artist with whom he could paint on the bedroom walls and stop on the highway to draw on her shoulder and record her orgasms for use in his music, and also the sudden freedom of unemployment buoyed by temporary wealth. (Norman and each of his siblings had received ten thousand dollars from their father that previous Christmas [part of an inheritance from a great aunt], which was far more money than he had ever possessed at one time before, and thusly he felt comfortable enough to remain unemployed for six months and spend that time working on The World’s Original Man.) The note, however, to continue the metaphor, was still in an etheric, alien script.
All through the long, beautiful month of March, Norman would wake early every morning, smoke a bowl and then meditate. Sometimes his meditations would lead to dream-like visions which at first he saw merely as artistic inspiration; other times he would willfully astrally project, as he had at Lou’s apartment, to explore the nature of that experience. At Lee’s suggestion, he thought outwardly to the cosmos, while astral, that he was ready for a teacher to come to him. (Lee held the belief that such requests, a curious variant of prayer, truly worked. Norman was unsure, but followed her instructions for experimentation’s sake. It seemed to him that there could be no such thing as too much data, no useless experiment.) After his meditation he worked on The World’s Original Man in the corner of a mostly empty room of the house that was referred to as his bedroom for purposes of retaining a façade of non-romance, though Norman’s ‘bedroom’ contained only a tiny studio area in one corner with his computer on a desk, two microphone stands and a synthesizer, with a long, low green couch on the opposite wall. The lovers slept in Imogen’s room, where she had a fold-out couch permanently in bed form, as well as other bedroom staples such as a dresser and a mirror. Many nights, Norman would read Imogen to sleep from his old, disintegrating copy of 1,001 Nights.
Norman always recalls this brief period with a fondness as delicate as crème brulet.
For this initial month and a half, Norman’s family was left almost entirely in the dark except for Lee. He kept in close contact with Lee through this period, as he was astrally projecting frequently and calling Lee to discuss his thoughts/discoveries therefrom. But he had left Karen, his girlfriend of two and a half years, to whom the family had become accustomed after seeing her for two Thanksgivings in a row, and he had left the salaried job he had held without telling anyone the real reasons. He quite blissfully didn’t even have a phone. Norman’s email inbox received frequent concerned messages from his mother that he didn’t read until he moved to South Bend in April and got internet access again.
This also corresponded to the beginning of Norman and Lou’s life as regular weed-smokers, as around the same time that past fall they each had gotten together romantically with women who were able to procure it for them, indeed who smoked it regularly themselves. (The woman whom Lou had recently met was Eleanor, his future wife, but their relationship was young yet and he saw her only a few times a week and Norman still barely knew her.) Now that he didn’t live in a school, Norman smoked up every day, and continued to do so whenever he was able to (whenever it was available) pretty much from then on.
On the first of April of Two-thousand-three, Norman and Imogen moved together to South Bend, Indiana, three hours to the north. Their apartment was right downtown in a remodeled old high school, with two bedrooms lofted over a huge, three-leveled sunken living room that had once been the school’s pool, with a courtyard accessible only by them. It was by far the most awesome apartment Norman had ever seen, let alone lived in. And it was a mere fifteen minutes or so from the Enchanted Forest.
Norman finished The World’s Original Man in June and used his creative inertia to quickly produce a follow-up album, Illegible Signatures on the Texture of Time, which took him only about a month and was far less accessible an album, its lyrics being almost entirely stolen from ancient alchemical texts found online and then cut up and pieced back together seemingly at random (though in the randomness Norman felt intuitively that he had subconsciously hidden a code that he often stayed up late at night listening for).
While Norman stayed home at the Pool and worked on music comfortably nestled between his headphones, Imogen worked two jobs. During the day, she worked the register at the Salvation Army. In the evenings she worked at a local hipster coffeeshop called Lula’s Café with Sylvia, who was taking a year off from Notre Dame and living with her skinny, boyish new girlfriend while spending most of her free time at the Pool with Imogen and Norman. Lou was also over at the Pool most days after work, since he had been living alone for over a year in the Enchanted Forest and was only able to see his new girlfriend Eleanor on the weekends.
It began to seem as if all the events of the previous summer/winter cycle that had led up to Norman’s move had seemed to be some kind of mysterious serendipity intended to bring the two of them (Norman and Lou) together again, and they agreed that they ought to use their proximity to continue their collaboration both artistic and existential. Important things seemed to be happening. Norman’s world felt newly alive and vibrant in a way that made him recall the days of his youth when he had been certain it would end up that He was the Second Coming.


It was at the Pool, early one afternoon, that Norman first met in a dream what he would thereafter refer to as his ‘teacher entity.’ It appeared as an old man with short white hair and a white beard, wearing a white suit with a gray shirt and a black tie, who pulled Norman out of another dream and guided him toward a white room where, like a psionic martial arts teacher, he showed/explained to Norman how certain psychic abilities were actually done. Norman had only a few dreams with this entity. Though he could never remember many specifics when he would wake from them except that the teacher entity had taught him something awesome, he nevertheless always retained the wisdoms learned at an intuitive level.
The first time, he woke with the powerful awe of having just been taught how to defend himself from psychic attack by creating a shield of will, and he immediately had to call Lee to tell her about it.
“Lee, I had to immediately call you to tell you about this dream I had that I think I have just awoken from.”
“Okay. Hi, Norman. What was your dream?”
“Well, I’ve been asking for a teacher when I’m astral, right, like you suggested…”
“Good, good.”
“…and this morning when I woke…”
“It’s the afternoon, Norman.”
“…I had this distinct memory of meeting with this old man in a white suit with a gray shirt and a black tie, and him teaching me how to defend myself from psychic darts.”
“Oh my god, Norman, that’s exactly what Lizzie” (Norman and Lee’s sister, a year younger than Lee, currently living in Scotland with her British husband James) “was telling me about just yesterday. She went to her first shamanic healing class, with those shamans out in Scotland who she’s studying under, and she was telling me about how they were telling her about how there are people out there who can psychically attack you from a distance, and you need to be aware of this once you’re at that level, that you are now visible to them and somehow vulnerable to such things. I was actually going to call you this morning to tell you about it, because as soon as she mentioned that, I got worried about you.”
“Well it’s not a problem, I guess,” Norman said with a grin, moved by the enigmatic synchronicity of it all, “because now I know how to defend myself. He showed me how to basically create a shield of will around myself.”
“That’s exactly how they say to do it,” Lee replied excitedly. “The shamans, I mean.”
Two weeks later, Norman awoke with a clear understanding of how material objects could be imbued with powers through simple force of will. It was as if, by mere will (but, pure will), power could be given to anything. Imaginary things in his personal mindspace were the easiest to give powers to, such as his illusion-dispelling thought darts and his mnemonic faith disc. He simply built them by truly understanding them, and then they were available. Norman experimented for some time with the enchantment of actual items in the phenomenal world, beginning with his attempts to build a familiar and keep it in his bat ring (bought that past fall with Imogen at a head shop in Muncie not long before the firing). He theorized that zeitgeist entities such as his familiar (ideas, memes, or abstracts as Norman would later refer to them) could be created and imbued with powers like software through a similar process of will.
Every morning, during the familiar-building summer days of Two-thousand-three, Norman would wake late, a couple of hours after Imogen had kissed him goodbye for the day, then walk out to the courtyard and smoke a cigarette while meditating on the construction of his familiar. At first, the process was similar to building a foil ball, only using his own spiritual material instead of tinfoil. He would simply pull up the familiar in his mind and then slowly add to it with love and compassion and awesomeness and bits of remembered dreams, imbuing it with various minor powers such as sight (which he too was supposed to be able to see) and a sort of subconscious speech, though Norman never got any experimental proof or disproof that these abilities ever really worked. It began as a tiny glowing point in his mind and slowly expanded over the weeks into what appeared to Norman in his imagination as a small, glowing, golden man about one apple tall. When he was finished inflating the man each morning with his own spiritual vitas, a process that was always quite draining, the man would seem to look up at him expectantly, as if awaiting orders. Norman never gave him an order. Doing so felt weirdly like the Dark Side. All he did was create him each morning and then put him back in the bat ring.


This also was a time when Lou and Norman were looking for their next big collaborative project. The Turing Registry and Death and the Ladies, their intended first two films, were both now finished scripts, and they felt like they ought to wait until at least one film had been made before they worked on the script for their third (When the Levee Breaks). This time, with everything that had occurred between them over the past year, Norman and Lou wanted to go beyond simple art and make something, perhaps, actually supernatural in nature.
Imogen, a spiritually nebulous yet nevertheless highly attuned woman, had a deck of Tarot cards with which she semi-regularly gave readings for Norman or herself or their relationship. (It was from this, with the annotative aid of a book of Imogen’s, A Dictionary of Symbols, that Norman first began to connect himself with the symbol of the Magician.)
Inspired jointly by the Tarot and by their own narrative concepts developed through creative collaboration, Norman and Lou designed a unique system of divinatory cards based on narrative archetypes. Through the slurry of randomness it seemed insight could be divined with force of will and a focus of some kind. The Cards were such a focus for Norman and Lou. They were simple three-by-five index cards each separated into two sides of a single narrative archetype. Norman and Lou clipped abstract or symbolic images out of art and photography magazines (amounting this to pulling power from the zeitgeist, as all were images that would be looked at by thousands of people around the world – images with zeitgeist baggage [and they were all carefully chosen]) so that each card had two images each upside-down to each other on one face of the card, each image with its title above. Lou and Norman came up with the archetypes the first day, then spent five straight evenings, after Lou got off work, in Lou’s apartment on their hands and knees amidst a sea of magazine clippings, smoking weed and building the deck with scissors and glue sticks. The way Norman saw it, each card was a whole concept, with the two different positions describing flip sides of a full idea: The God/The Man; The King/The Fool; The Dream/The Nightmare; The Beast/The Spirit; The Legend/The Prophecy; The Forest/The Desert; The Magician/The Priest; The Voyage/The Return; The Battle/The Truce; The Lover/The Scorned; The Invincible/The Vulnerable; The Loyal/The Betrayer; The Mother/The Daughter; The Father/The Son; The Path/The Labyrinth; The Feast/The Famine; The Lock/The Key; The Painter/The Sculptor; The Family/The Stranger; The Teacher/The Pupil; Undying Love/Eternal Hate; The Twin/The Doppelganger; The Knight/The Scoundrel; The Costume/The Mask; The Overture/The Secret Sign; The Wanton/The Chaste; The Behind/The Beyond; The Fort/The Prison; The Home/The Tent; The Creation/The Apocalypse; The Hunter/The Prey; The Plain/The Sea; The Training/The Degradation; The World/The Underworld; The Faerie/The Elemental; The Dark Age/The Renaissance; The Cycle/The Pattern; The Slumbering/The Awakening; The Door/The Barrier; The Charge/The Feint; The Comrade/The Rival; The Skeleton/The Phoenix; The Cave/The Plaza; The Inquisitor/The Paladin; Eyes Unclouded/Smoke and Veils; The Wonder/The Act; The Ghost/The Corpse; The Birth/The Abortion; The Citadel/The Farmhouse; The Explorer/The Xenophobe; The Leap of Faith/The Calculated Risk; The Grail/The Artifact; The Sheriff/The Vigilante; The Hero/The Villain; The Intrusion/The Escape; The Posse/The Mob; The Charity/The Miser; The Tradition/The Trend; Fellowship/Against All Odds; The Conception/The Demise; The Plague/The Flood; War/Peace; The Expected Result/The Dramatic Reversal; The Angel/The Monster; The Golem/The Familiar; The Expanse/The Narrowness; The Oracle/The Sphinx; The Poem/The Book; The Mountain/The Pit; Wisdom/Insanity; The Labor/The Quest; The Steed/The Rider; The Local/The Alien; The Engineer/The Steersman; The Miracle/The Catastrophe; The Impossible/The Inevitable; Comedy/Farce; The Princess/The Siren; The Clue/The Red Herring; The River/The Bridge; The Fumble/Sleight of Hand; The Soldier/The Doctor; The Diplomat/The Spy; The Changeling/The Stoic; The Performance/The Charade; The Smith/The Farmer; The Light/The Darkness; The Storm/The Drought; The Treasure/The Plunder; The Deal/The Swindle; The Birthplace/The Grave; The Temple/The Grove; The Citizen/The Slave; The Stage/The Play-Within-A-Play; and two cards that were each a single concept, their orientation’s significance remaining intuitive and open to context: Deus Ex Machina and The Messiah.
Finally, when the deck was complete, they designed a layout based on the classic three-act narrative structure that untalented Hollywood screenwriters so treasure, where each act was separated into ten positions (The Hero, The Villain, The Milieu, The Nature of the Conflict, Three Supporting Players, The Inciting Incident, The Climax and the Denouement) each of which was represented by two cards, the whole meaning of each position being in the romance of the two ideas.
Since the cards were still delicately new, they shuffled them by spreading them in a circle on the floor with their blank sides facing up, then picked them up at random and put them in various piles which were then also mixed randomly, the whole time keeping in mind whatever the reading might be intended to be about so that this will, or this idea at least, might somehow subtly sabotage the randomness. For the first one they agreed that the reading ought to be about, in general, their particular Unimind.
“Alright,” Lou said excitedly as he placed the tall, sufficiently randomized deck in front of Norman, “the first act.”
“Right. Okay.” Norman picked up the first card on the deck. “The Hero,” he said, and turned the card over, placing it on the carpet in front of them.
“The Son,” Norman and Lou read in unison. “Modified by…” Norman pulled the second card and placed it next to The Son. “…The Messiah,” they said together, and looked at each other with huge grins.
It works, Norman knew instantly, and was overwhelmed with awe.
“Okay,” Lou said. “Interesting. This is the first act.”
“Or, the last phase. I sort of see it like – the first act could almost be seen as the past, like the last phase of your life, or whatever, if you can consider someone’s life to exist in distinct phases, distinct stories, almost. So the first act I see as, like, the last phase, the second act as the present phase, the one we’re in now, and the third act is the next phase. Or that’s one way it can be read.”
“Okay,” Lou agreed. “I can get behind that. I’m gonna load up Ahab.”
“Word; get to it. You’re the green bay packer, amigo.”
Lou laughed, stuffing the end of the pipe jutting from between Ahab’s big silly eyes with marijuana.
“Okay, so the Villain.” Norman pulled the next card. “The Fumble. Modified by … The Stage. Hmm.”
“This is fucking awesome,” Lou asserted.
“Agreed,” Norman agreed. “Should we try to interpret, or shall we continue?”
“Let’s see how the whole thing plays out, then interpret the whole thing as a story.”
“Okay. So, the Milieu.” Norman turned over the next card. “The Inevitable. Modified by … The Engineer.”
“It’s the Future,” Lou interpreted.
After taking bonghit from Ahab, Norman continued laying out the cards in their various positions: “The nature of the conflict is The Miracle modified by The Treasure; the three supporting players are The Familiar modified by The Demise, Peace modified by The Flood and The Monster modified by The Charade; the inciting incident is The Deal modified by The Citadel; the climax is The Birth modified by The Ghost; and the denouement is The Act modified by Smoke and Veils.
“Fucking word, man,” Norman said, shaking his head as his mind swirled with various interpretations of the cards displayed on the carpet in front of him. “We have created a magic item. Like, in D&D terms?” He looked up to the side, to Lou who was hovering right next to his shoulder.
“I know, dude,” Lou said, leaning down to take a bonghit.
“This is fucking amazing.”
“Serious,” coughing, grinning.
“So, The Son modified by The Messiah,” Norman said, lighting a cigarette. “I have to read that as my whole Christ-complex thing.”
“Well, I was reading it more in terms of the hero myth – the son, the messiah, the prodigal son who has to save the world by killing the father and taking his place, you know what I mean? Like, Campbell-wise? Can I have one of those, dude?”
“Sure.” Norman handed Lou a cigarette and lit it for him. “Hmm,” he thought.
“The Fumble-The Stage?” Lou wondered aloud.
“The Fumble-The Stage is totally about being a geek. Social awkwardness,” Norman said without moving his eye away from the cards.
“Or maybe it refers to all the crazy, surface-unfortunate events of the past several months,” Lou noted, nudging Norman’s shoulder. “If you see this as being a reading for the last phase. I would say we’re pretty clearly at the beginning of this new you-living-up-here phase and this must be the last phase, the you-getting-fired-from-the-Academy phase that this is a reading of.”
“Mmm, indeed,” Norman agreed. “The Inevitable-The Engineer I think maybe, then, could refer to me engineering events to get me here, with you, so we can do all this and I can finally work on my albums and everything, without realizing that that’s what the end result was going to be. You know what I mean?”
“Perhaps,” Lou said. “I instinctually read that as just being, like – it’s the Future – you know?”
“And The Miracle-The Treasure, what do you make of that?”
Norman sat motionless, frozen by an overwhelming sensation, like a subtle hand on his heart’s shoulder, that this was not a reading about the present but somehow one from the future. He sat alone in the intuition for a moment, then decided to voice it. “Dude, I am overwhelmed, sort of frozen here by this awe-invoking realization, somehow intuitively, that this is not a reading about us right now but somehow one from the future, about the future, and that it has to do with us, but somehow obliquely. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“I think I’m picking that up, too,” Lou said, nodding, looking at the cards.
“Let’s continue the reading,” Norman said eagerly. “Let’s see what the next two phases will be.”
“Okay,” Lou said, looking up at Norman and seeming to be startled by the glass eye. His glance flitted between Norman’s eyes, and Norman held eye contact with him while it did. Then Lou said, “Do it, dude.”
“Okay, the second act,” Norman said dramatically, holding the next card hovering just above the top of the deck. “The Hero.”
“The Hero,” Lou repeated, watching Norman’s face.
“The Changeling,” Norman said, laying the card upon the carpet. “Modified by … The Diplomat.”
“Hmm.”
“The Villain: The Doctor … modified by The Darkness.” Norman looked up at Lou and grinned. “Dr. Darkness. That’s a badass villain.”
“Fuckin’ a it is,” Lou agreed, grinning at the cards. “Keep going.”
“The milieu is The Alien modified by The Rider; the nature of the conflict is The Quest modified by The Book. Word. Three supporting players are Fellowship modified by The Tradition, The Priest modified by The Miser and The Posse modified by The Escape.”
“The Posse modified by The Escape? That’s dope. I naturally read The Posse as, like, the Crew.” The Crew is Norman and Lou’s word for the tightest part of their friend group.
“Yeah, me too. The inciting incident is The Inquisitor modified by The Cave; the climax is The Skeleton modified by The Rival; and the denouement is The Charge modified by The Door.”
“Kicking down the fucking door into the third act, the next phase, which is…”
“The hero … The Bridge modified by The Red Herring; the villain … The Siren modified by Comedy.” They both laughed at the sight of the Comedy card. “Awesome. The milieu … Insanity modified by The Pit. Damn. Fucking crazy. The nature of the conflict … The Oracle modified by The Narrowness.”
“Badass,” Lou laughed, and slapped his knee lightly, bouncing like a little boy in his crouched position beside Norman.
“Three supporting players …” Now Lou was again reading the cards aloud so that they were speaking in unison as Norman laid them out. “The Expected Result modified by The Villain, The Vigilante modified by The Artifact and The Leap of Faith modified by The Explorer. The inciting incident … The Slumbering modified by The Cycle. The climax … The Farmer modified by The God. The denouement … The Dark Age … modified by The Dream.”
They sat in silence for some time after the last card, The Dream, had been placed, both scanning the field of cards with proud, astounded grins.
“What do you think this is?” Lou asked.
“Something,” Norman mused, eyeing the reading closely with his eye unfocused just a bit, as if somehow he could see the greater spirit, or the greater meaning of the reading that way. “It definitely means something.”
“I mean, obviously it, like all things, is intrinsically meaningless,” Lou noted, “insomuch as it’s really just randomness. It’s whether we find meaning in it or not.”
“No, there is meaning here,” Norman declared, certain that he was right. It was as if he could see the reading glowing with some great secret locked away from sight. “This is definitely something. But it’s like we don’t have all the information we need to understand this yet. Like we got an item we’re too low level to use, you know what I mean?”
“Totally,” Lou laughed, enjoying Norman’s role-playing-game reference.
“I mean, I don’t think we’re too low level to use this – we built it for fuck’s sake, and it obviously works. But this specific reading. This is something big, and I don’t think we have all the information to decipher it yet.”
“Let’s turn it into permanent information.”
Lou took a series of pictures of the reading with his digital camera, and Norman studied the images for weeks following, on his computer while he listened to his new album Illegible Signatures on the Texture of Time. Something powerful and intuitive that, at the time, he attributed to the guidance of his teacher entity, led him to obsess over the reading for a long time.
He retains a photographic memory of the reading, as well as an actual photograph of it on the desktop of his computer labeled first card reading.jpg.

Inspired toward mystic knowledge by his recent astral explorations, Norman read all he could find on shamanism and alchemy and mystic religions throughout the millennia. He also studied the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, particularly his exegesis – notes about the writer’s own mystical experiences that inspired his novel Valis – and the old texts it referenced. Norman wrote as above/so below on his hand in sharpee and kept reapplying it for several weeks. Another tagline he wrote often, this one mostly in notebooks, was fortune favors the bold.
The days at the Pool that summer were of the stuff that blooms into myth, the kind of days that grow golden and glisten with age. Norman and Imogen were deeply in love, and the poison of her mysterious, ancient wound had not yet begun to sting again through the anesthetics of young romance. He and Imogen held court over frequent gatherings of adolescent pilgrims from the Indiana Academy, feeding memes of mind-expansion, self-liberation and artistic enlightenment to that supple demographic (a much needed public service in the Midwest).
Norman felt like a demigod.

In his dreams, in those days, he always had a unicorn’s horn.