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New York Unexpurgated, Part Two: The Guidebook

New York Unexpurgated is a highly inventive, excruciatingly funny guidebook credited to "Petronius." It's hard to imagine anyone using this as an actual guidebook, even when it was released in 1966. It seems to be more a work of wishful, absurdist psycho-geography. For example, if an adventurous traveler wishes to visit the mysterious Key Club of the 7 Rooms, she must first pass muster at a sketchy Chinatown candy store called The Jellybean Path. Once at the alleged club, she will find seven rooms "jam-packed with indescribable nonsense" lit only by a "trained ape of undefined sex" who moves a single light bulb from one nook to another every 15 minutes. How I wish that such a place existed, but I am doubtful of the book's claims of simian efficiency, to say the least.

I brought this guide with me to New York City, curious about its promise to lead me to the "under underground" and soon have me "going down in Gotham." As suspected, it was worse than useless for this. Any legitimate entries, if there are such, would be 44 years out of date and long buried beneath the changing urban palimpsest. But what the travel-guide lacked in practical advice, it more than made up in amusement value. It's almost impossible to turn to a random passage without succumbing to belly-laughs. I had the most fun inviting New York City residents to read aloud from it.

This tome seemed like a useful tool for a dérive ("...a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll" -Guy Debord). The playfulness of such an approach is irresistible to me and ideal for a walking city like New York. Combined with a list of pilgrimage points from the past (here is where CBGBs used to be, here is the former site of Peace Eye Books) and a few songs, the book was less useful than inspiring. It did lead me down the Jelly-Bean Path, though, and I did see a few sites that would have made great entries in an updated edition.

If you buy one spurious guidebook this year, it should be New York Unexpurgated. Its genius sadly under-appreciated, it's a cheap, tawdry read that might once have been valued by Dadaists.

Transmuting the Stone

I spent ten days in July and August in nearly unremitting agony. The disproportionate amount of pain sparked by a one centimeter kidney stone astonished me. In the 48 hours after visiting the ER, my consciousness was narrowed to a dismal pinpoint as nausea from Vicodin swirled with hot icepick stabs in the kidney. There was no comfortable way to lie, sit or stand. I slept when I passed out for a few hours, only to wake up drenched in sweat. I was given more medicine to combat the nausea so I could take the Vicodin, which was quickly diminishing in efficacy. I barely ate, just enough to buffer each fistful of assorted pills. I lost eight pounds in ten days and have yet to recover my appetite. I had no hunger, no desire, and only fever dreams. I was unable to enjoy sunlight lest I endure even more side effects of my medication.

It had already been a challenging shake-or-get-shaken-year. Everything was in flux. It felt like a period of mutation. I was not only reacting to a series of unusual ordeals, I had already decided to aggressively change several parts of my life and was succeeding beyond expectation. I had a new sense of equilibrium and freshness of life's possibilities. I was having more fun and felt creatively engaged. To celebrate and mark my passage, I planned a series of events, beginning with a Walpurgisnacht festival and culminating in an esoteric Moorish Feast & Jubilee. Strange and wonderful things were happening and events tend to facilitate the possibilities. I woke up one May morning, after an unexpectedly wonderful evening, with a head full of verse.

About the time that I was to begin preparation for the last event in the series, I was brought to my knees by pain. Family members, friends and my doctor urged me to cancel the Jubilee. It was an impossibly ambitious scheme and I was effectively out of commission for theforeseeable future. I could barely think straight and the only relief in sight was Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy; blasting the stone with infra-sound five days prior to the party. I had no idea how woozy and weak this would leave me.

I was sustained by two thoughts. The first, bolstered by the weight of experience, was that one's capacity to endure pain increases one's ability to experience pleasure and bliss. When in pain, endure and plan. When in bliss, gush. The second was that I could alleviate some of my stress and discomfort by bombarding myself with hours of gleefully buoyant music. I would stagger to the stereo for 70 minutes at a stretch, making party mixes heavy with Cab Calloway, string band music, cartoon jazz and frenzied trance rhythms from the Middle East. Then I would collapse in a hot bath with a stack of research material and check my audio work. It was exhausting and ill-advised but it felt right. It was my ritual of overcoming.

Had it not been for friends stepping up, the Moorish Qiyamat would have been greatly diminished. As for my own ordeal, the event occurred at almost the exact moment that I ceased being in pain. I had no idea that relief from suffering could be so ecstatic. I had the wonderful, cleansed feeling of having been chased out of myself for a while. All my senses were, and are, fresh and ticklish. Returning to life and work, I felt like some secret stranger with a heightened sense of absurdity. As Mustafa explained to guests at the Jubilee, Qiyamat, to the mystic, means "uncovering." For me, the price for this was having superfluous layers of thought and habit sand-blasted away by crazy amounts of pain. The patina was driven from my senses and I was able to celebrate this transition with beloved friends at just the right time. And many of them seemed to be celebrating rigorous or joyous transitions of their own, which lent the occasion a heady, intoxicating atmosphere.

Whatever else may mark the balance of this year, I feel better prepared than ever before. I'm hungry for fresh experience and mad to create. I feel renewed and re-invigorated, pleased to be part of a community of creative, inspired individuals. My stone has passed and my egg has hatched. Blinking in the sunlight of this new morning, I'm at peace with the world, walking in new shoes with new purpose and a fresh sense of Mystery. I have no regrets and a keen eye for interesting possibilities. If you pressed me, I'd have to say that things are about to get very interesting. It's wonderful to have friends with whom to strike sparks. Sooner or later something will catch.

"I've given up on my brain. I've torn the cloth to shreds and thrown it away. If you're not completely naked, wrap your beautiful robe of words around you, and sleep."

-Jilaladin Rumi

Evocation of Malak Taus

Malak Taus, Peacock Angel, Chief of the Heften,

Lord of feathers and scales, who, from fragments

Of the Primal Pearl, repaired Creation, we honor thee!

By fire refined, crafted from God’s radiance,

First of the seven Archangels.

We honor thy tearful brilliance!

Undone by your love of the Almighty,

You refused to bow before Adam and were cast down.

Repair this fractured sphere, we beseech you.

Torn from grace for the sake of Love, you fell.

Your tears poured for 7,000 years,

Filled the seven vessels with grief,

And these were poured out

Upon the fires of Hell, to quench them.

Serpent of Wisdom, Angel of Love,

There is no share of wickedness in you.

From white light, you draw out colors.

It is you who confers troubles and blessings.

Agent of Allah in time/ space,

We seek knowledge of the sublime.

Vouchsafe our way, for we are but slaves of dew.

Quotes on Love and Art

"...the Imagination (or love, or sympathy, or any other sentiment) induces knowledge, and knowledge of an 'object' which is proper to it..."

-Henry Corbin

* * * *

If what she says is true
And she feels for me
The obsessive desire
That I feel for her,

Then, in the sweltering heat of noon,
In her tent, in secret,
We will meet
To fulfill the promise completely...

We will reveal the passion
We feel one for the other
As well as the harshness of the trial
And the pains of ecstasy.

-Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi

* * * * *

"Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild."

-Dante Alighieri

* * * *

"A full and powerful soul can not only cope with painful, even terrible losses, privations, dispossessions and disdain: from such hells it emerges fuller and more powerful and – the crucial thing – with a new growth in the blissfulness of love. I believe that the man who has sensed something of the deepest conditions of every growth in love will understand Dante when he wrote over the gates of his Inferno: ‘I too was created by eternal love.'"

-Friedrich Nietzsche

A Brief Overview of the Eulessynian Hot Tub Mystery Religion

In 1991, the Eulessynian Hot Tub Mystery Religion bubbled up from a unique confluence of circumstances in Euless, Texas, a stone’s throw from the Great Trinity Forest and the river bottoms. Until it left Euless in 1995, the group’s rites were celebrated in the spa area of two apartment complexes, The Vaucluse and The Village, both on Silent Oak Drive. In a sanctum sanctorum luridly lit by pink neon, the cult not only conducted secret rites and social experiments, but also planned pranks, hikes, underground publications and public celebrations of the Mysteries. Original members included artists, musicians, rocket scientists, a cyberneticist, a repentant ex-COINTELPRO agent who infiltrated the Yippies in the late ‘60s, a LINUX pioneer, and half-a-dozen men who would become Master Masons before the decade rattled to a close. The core group met through involvement with a lowbrow ‘zine, The Sophisticate, and a sub rosa Bacchanalian festival held annually in Dallas, Disturbathon.

The resultant synergy yielded another odd type of event, the Gymnasium, gymnosophy appealing to the heads and hearts of these spa-loving freaks. When Alexander the Macedonian reached the Indian sub-continent in the 4^th century, he encountered the naked sages or “gymnosophists,” and dispatched the Greek philosopher Onesicritus to try to fathom their ways. The gymnosophists also knocked the socks off of Pyrrho, the founder of the Sceptics, who incorporated nudism into his philosophy. The Gymniasium of our Mysterians will be discussed at greater length at the appropriate time.

As a Mystery Religion, the HTMR embraced the ideas of individual and group gnosis over blind faith, free association over indoctrination and egalitarian discovery over hierarchical intercessory politics. The hot tub or hot spring is seen as the balance of the classical elements: earth hosting fire heating water generating air bubbles, all under the quintessential governance of spirit. Experiments were as popular as rituals. Hospitality enjoyed special emphasis, with the cult hosting traveling students, musicians and special guests. When Mysterians weren’t soaking in a rolling Jacuzzi overlooking a gentle valley, they frequently gathered at Forbidden Books in Dallas for anti-poetry, Masonic study, guest lectures, secret film festivals and hot coffee.

In 1995, the Hot Tub Mystery Religion was recognized as a fellow body by Thom Metzger of the Moorish Orthodox Church of America and editor of the Moorish Science Monitor. Once again, networks of fellowship emerging through ‘zine culture proved catalytic for the young Mystery Religion, which had its own clandestinely Xeroxed house organ by this time.

In 1997, CESNUR, the Center for Study of New Religions, welcomed two apologists from the HTMR to present at their annual conference in Amsterdam. Opposed to the idea of some mundane academic presentation, the pair opted instead for performance art inspired by the Marx Brothers film Horse Feathers. With a set of tangentially related overhead transparencies, the Mysterians riffed on Philip K. Dick’s mystical experiences, the Moorish Dr. Jabir’s idea that a network of “pleasure domes” was needed for the furtherance of mankind, and the Saturnalian social inversion offered by the European Feast of Fools. This proved to be a great favorite among students and more jovial academics while granting the HTMR’s agents unprecedented occult networking.

At this time, the Khalwat-i-Khidr (“Hermitage of the Green Prophet”) had been formally established as the Dallas branch of the Moorish Orthodox Church of America. Its launch coincided with the lack of a suitable hot tub in which to celebrate the Mysteries, so the HTMR was occluded as an Adept Chamber of the Khalwat, a flyer quoting Rosicrucian propaganda: “There are some baths in which one does not get wet.”

In 2003, a profile of the Hot Tub Mystery Religion appeared in Reason magazine, offering tidbits like:

One of the group's early inspirations was Alexander Scriabin, a Russian composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who dreamed of creating a work of art that would occupy every sense, driving the audience into a transcendental state. (The piece, called "The Mysterium," was to be performed in a specially built cathedral in India. It required, among other elements, "an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation" -- not to mention bells suspended from zeppelins.) The Hot Tub group's installations combined music, visual art, food, and sometimes mind-altering chemicals, along with symbols from Sufism, the Cabala, and other sources. [Yehoodi] participated in an annual Halloween event called the Disturbathon, which existed somewhere in the hazy territory between performance art and a haunted house. "It involved nudism in a maze-like environment," he recalls, "and there was inevitably some kind of pit."

Hot Tub Mystery Religion Dispatch #3

“Do not disturb my circles!” –last words attributed to Archimedes

“I believe I will dip my pink-and-white body in yon Roman tub. I feel a bit gritty after the affairs of the day.” -W. C. Fields

Of the secrets of the Tub, none may be more important than buoyancy. Archimedes of Syracuse, perhaps the greatest scientist and mathematician of classical antiquity, discovered the principle roughly 23 centuries ago. According to the Roman writer Vitruvius, when King Hiero II of Syracuse was presented with a golden votive crown, he suspected that the cunning goldsmith had adulterated his gift by mixing silver into it. Vexed by the possibility, he summoned his relative Archimedes and posed the problem to him.

Archimedes was baffled by the proposition that he accomplish this task without damaging the crown, which precluded melting it for further measurement. After much pondering, he sought relaxation in a hot tub. Upon observing the displacement of water as he reclined into his warm bath, he was struck by a flash of inspiration: the amount of water displaced is equal to the volume of the object displacing it. In the test case, the density of the votive crown would be less if cheaper metal lacking gold’s density had been added. So great was his delight, that Archimedes leapt naked from his hot tub and ran through the streets of Syracuse howling, “Eureka! Eureka!” (“I found it!”).

While it is perhaps most useful to regard buoyancy as the upward acting force generated by fluid pressure, we would be remiss not to consider the buoyancy of mood and spirit that Archimedes enjoyed as he relaxed in his hot bath. This less tangible buoyancy triggered the thinker’s observation and subsequent nude romp. So it may be said that one kind of buoyancy engenders a more subtle form, irrepressible good spirits and the ability to respond to increasing pressure by floating above it.

For the Epopts and Orgonauts of the Hot Tub Mystery Religion, the tub or hot spring represents the equilibrium of the four elements of the classical world: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. To this we add the quintessence, that fifth element engendered by deep relaxation and somatic bliss in a hot tub: buoyancy. One may note the discord present when one of the elements is missing from this experience, as with the cynical philosopher Diogenes, who dwelt in a dry tub, when not wandering in broad daylight with a lamp seeking an honest man. “Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you've got an audience.” Diogenes complained. To this we can only add that it’s easier to gather an audience when freshly bathed in hot water, shimmy notwithstanding.