Word From Elsewhere

March 4, 2026 

The Memory Boutique

3

It is not out of self-pity, or some futile play for sympathy, but simply the reporting of a fact that I say I am in the latter chapters of my personal saga. It is the natural progression of life, our universal fate, one might even say the privileged perspective of seeing the business through. And I certainly have no grounds to complain, having reached this point with few if any regrets. My experience has been broad—I was tempted in youth by the literary arts, but chose a career in medicine—my loves many, and even the most dour of my contemporaries must admit we have lived in interesting times.

So what is amiss? Not the shadow of imminent mortality—I have no fear of the escape clause that comes with every life, and even feel a surge of anticipation at the thought. Could it be a nagging sense that a life so fulfilled leaves no burden to be relieved of? No chance for the cleansing grace of liberation and redemption which some might say is the very point of life. The wish, surely, of an ingrate—but there it is.

We are led to expect, as the ratio of was to will be tips overwhelmingly to was, the succor of our memories. But we find mostly that our appeal to those phantoms results less in basking than in disappointment at how inaccessible they are. There’s no bringing anything back. I spend most of my time these days wandering around as though looking, in the most unpromising places, for something lost, thinking, yes the past was great but what the hell is this? When I pass the little shop on the corner of Rousel and Ninth with its blue and white striped awning and windows like blank eyes, it is always with a twinge. I think the place scares me, but I don’t know why.

2

“You’re quite sure?” the voice asked.

The voice—the pervasive voice!—that had infiltrated my mind like a smell. The smug and sly voice adamant that the procedure was irreversible.

“Yes,” I said. “Would I be here in this chair with chicken wire all around my head if I weren’t?”

“It’s saying a lot to say one is sure.”

With its little laugh—which I ignored.

I was surer than anyone needs to be of how shame and regret grow into life companions which not only strengthen with the years but ripen into the self-loathing and merciless dreams that at last become the numbness of an exhausted soul. Like the depressive who can barely find the energy to reach for the pill bottle that is his only relief, submitting to this most faddish of procedures feels like the last exertion one can manage. And sparing the world those boxes filled with the excretions of a quilldriver.

So it is when it’s either the wolves behind, or the leap.

“You can take solace,” the voice said, “knowing you’re in the hands—so to speak—of the best unrememberers in the business. Rewriting every individual, rewriting the world.”

And that sank with me into the dirty foam as my last memory.

1

One almost felt the Fresh Fields Memory Boutique had been there forever, with its tauntingly opaque windows and striped awning on the corner of Rousel and Ninth, but someone must have started it at some point—secured the permits, installed the equipment—but who remembers? Life, and all that implies—the way it bunches up on you and becomes too much to carry—had driven me there. As I stepped into the quiet lobby, I was expecting at least some people. But there were none.

A soft blue light, so exactly my favorite hue it could have served as my name, appeared above one of the doors spaced evenly along a concave wall. “This way, Noel,” a soothing voice said. I approached the door hesitantly—it slid open just as I reached it. The room within was bathed in the same blue glow, and there was an armchair, nothing more. “Please have a seat.”

I sat. The voice—I’m not sure “soothing” quite describes it, I would almost say “hypnotic”—said, “Welcome, Noel. Please relax. I know why you’re here.”

“I wish I did.”

“Probably not,” the voice replied—maybe returning my weak attempt at levity, maybe something more ominous, and perhaps I detected a razor under the velvet of those artificial words, but I was beyond caring—then continued: “What you know, which is exactly nothing, at least in comparison to what you think you know, you might say is the point—because it drives this dubious experience you’ve come to regard as your self. We take that down to the ground and renovate.”

“So I hear.”

“The first thing to understand is that there are no primal memories. What “really happened” is not only inaccessible, but like your “self” literally doesn’t exist. You’ve probably noticed there is no past, only Now. The past is just the work of your little brain sprites, like a crew of Egyptian embalmers, who never cease peeling your mental fingers away from reality, whatever that is, just following orders from that unclothed—could we even say artificial?—Emperor, You, which needs the illusion of the past, though it doesn’t exist and never has, to validate its own importance. It feeds off the story of itself.

“And, as you know, and the reason you’re here, it’s not all delusions of grandeur—in fact, it’s hardly those at all: only mentally damaged people—narcissists, sociopaths, the morbidly deluded—feel good about themselves. The story of one’s self feeds far more on the deficiencies, the failures, the regrets, all the enshrined highlights of your right to loathe yourself. So bravo for you.”

“You’re just talking.”

“Indeed. The point is, you create your reality by creating your past. It’s never been a matter of what’s real or accurate or true: that’s untranslatable, unreachable, like God or the laws of physics. The effect on you is all. Which brings me to my second point, which involves the power of what you forget. The truth lurks in the black holes where you keep what you strategically forget. It is our business to be experts in knowing what to save, what to keep repressed, what to replace and with what. So consider carefully what you want to have been.”

“I don’t care where you put the truth, I just want peace.”

“Of course. Memory is an evil construction. A burden. In your case, especially heavy in light of your hyperphantasic nature. The endless enactments that in making no distinction between what has been and what will be become what is. Your self is only a game. It is all in how you play it. You can finalize the arrangements out front.”

Where there was still not a soul.

Not even my own.

February 15, 2026 

Shiva

Shiva, covered in ashes to remind us of the transience of material existence, has opened his third eye upon the world. It is the time of Shiva the Destroyer.

It’s a free-for-all out there. The familiar world is unraveling, and the gods are laughing at mankind’s presumption of the permanence of laws, institutions, traditions, ideas. It’s the Age of Trump, baby—get it while you can. The Seven Deadly Sins aren’t deadly, you can cheat, lie, steal, betray your friends, torture children, bite the heads off ducks. Don’t miss out, go ahead and indulge yourself in real human nature—the gods aren’t looking.

They know that what drives all this delicious mayhem is a deep fear of change, and they laugh at that too. They know that change is the inevitable force, and it works through useful idiots as well as saints. From their vantage point they’ve watched the same show immemorially—this saga of ego-drunk bipeds struggling with each other, with chaos, dark, cold, and with the knowledge of the brevity of their flicker of life on this pitiless globe. And, equally, the gods have admired the battles with chaos the bipeds have won, and the fragile urge in a few to rise like bound angels from the muck of human nature into some other, suspected destiny.

It is for the love of all, but especially those few, that Shiva destroys. Or phrased another way, creates. That in his aloofness lies fertility; in his wrath, benevolence. The serpent around his neck reflects mastery over fear. The fear that inspires the drive to maintain the old is what makes Vishnu step aside for Shiva. The old is death.

The destruction of Shiva is opportunity. Opportunity to restore the balance of masculine and feminine—not rigidly man and woman, but the two aspects of human nature, shared by all. Shiva’s union with Shakti: that bond of the divine masculine with the divine feminine, the source of life itself.

The destruction of Shiva is not an invitation to swing back to something that has already been. What has been is what necessitated the destruction. It is not the doomed attempt of yin to defeat its yang. Yin and yang are complementary. If you want to banish the part of the population that is not like you, where exactly do you expect them to go? And who really wants to live in a neighborhood of Stephen Millers? Or the shrill self-righteous? The destruction of Shiva makes way for the creation of something new. A recombination of what survives the fire—when we have disinfected the desecrated halls of power, and scraped off their glittering cave art.

In our world of militant wokeness and Nick Fuentes, the masculine and feminine fear each other. Each tries to impose its moral code on the other—subjugate the other. An unstable state, which cries for a restoration of balance. That is, an ascendancy of love over fear. Masculine being harmonizing with the feminine drive to become.

Destruction has its thrills—it is self-indulgent and easy. The real work is what follows, and is difficult. It is there, and not on the tabloid shenanigans of our unhealthy world, that we should direct our focus.

E pluribus unum.

February 4, 2026 

The Wind Returneth

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9 KJV

“But the chief point is: why does the rabbit do this knowing all the time exactly what the end will be?” P. D. Ouspensky, Strange Life of Ivan Osokin

I discovered Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, and P. D. Ouspensky, simultaneously in a book shop in England during my much younger years. I read the curious tale with great interest at that time, and re-read it only recently, as the drift of my thoughts nudged it out of my memory. Shades of Pierre Menard, the two readings, the callow and the chastened, were of two different books. Or, phrased another way, two different readers.

The novel was first published in Russian in 1915, and first published in English translation in 1947.

It is the story of a young Russian man who botches his life with a few key bad decisions, then via “the Magician” has the chance to re-live the offending years, and change those decisions—even as the Magician assures him it won’t make any difference. At the end, which of course isn’t, as he has predictably watched himself repeat his mistakes, knowing in some hypnotic way that he has seen all this before, he comes back to the meeting with the Magician, who this time offers some cryptic way out of the cycle. The reader expecting some decisive last puzzle piece to the human dilemma is left with the full responsibility of decoding the Magician’s non-explanation. There are two hints: the suggestion that the escape from the wheel of karma lies in a transformative change in self-awareness that embraces the burden; and the Magician’s emphasis on sacrifice.

A seeker, driven back to Russia from an inconclusive sojourn in India by the outbreak of the First World War, Ouspensky met the Graeco-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff in politically turbulent Moscow in 1915, and immediately felt he had encountered a mind energized with the esoteric knowledge of a system of human awakening that he had been seeking. To Gurdjieff, the problem was the mechanical living (“waking sleep”) that modern man, his natural inclination to the rote magnified in a highly mechanized society, had fallen into; and the solution, the “Fourth Way”—a shock-driven integration of the three traditional approaches to self-renovation—body, emotions, and mind—into a whole of “self-remembering.” Or perhaps, as I think of it, a re-location of the fulcrum balancing internal and external in the jungle of complexity we call the “self.” Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, starting as student and mentor, would work together over the next four years, as the Revolution of 1917 drove them from Russia, up until 1924 when the split over what the mathematician Ouspensky seems to have perceived as Gurdjieff’s straying from an empirical to a more emotional and excessive approach to his system took place. However, Ouspensky would document the fruitfulness of their years together in the posthumously published (1949) account In Search of the Miraculous.

Ouspensky and Gurdjieff died two years apart (1947/49), and in spite of their split, Ouspensky continued teaching the Fourth Way until his death. He had a significant impact on a great many students, but never really found personal happiness or peace—which, to me, doesn’t discredit the woo-wooness of the system so much as express a universal truth about systems: the point lies in the effort of building them, and the inevitable letting them go. Everything but human striving itself eventually goes out of date.

The “self” is a tenuous concept darting about in the vast complexity of human existence: our origins in the inert elements of the universe, our long evolutionary history of life/replication/death, our inheritance of the mystery of consciousness, the surface waves of a bottomless ocean formed by, composed of, we know not what—and our struggle is to discover what, if anything, we can do to steer this mad machine. Teachers either of madness, or transcendental insight, have long claimed there is a state of mind superior to the dumb mechanics of life on autopilot, that the key is where we position our focus in that groping to know what power we may have in a predicament that we seem to have no power over at all—and the discovery that pain lies in clinging to what we seem, or want, to be, to the narrative that accretes itself around us like a mollusk shell, in losing in the labyrinth of our now technology-melded minds the touchstone of “now.”

Some people read Ivan Osokin as a fable of eternal recurrence—which originally for Nietzsche was basically a thought experiment of self-acceptance: If you knew you would repeat your life exactly, eternally, would you willingly embrace those terms? Amor fati—the love of one’s fate. A ploy, perhaps, to nullify what threatens the self by recognizing its ineluctable role in the structure of the self. You can’t change what you are, only how you orient your self in the maze of what you are. This isn’t the same as “having a good attitude”—but an assumption of responsibility so complete it is the work of an “übermensch.” Eternal recurrence in this sense isn’t exactly the tireless interchange of the old and the new that is the subject of Ecclesiastes. Personally, I think of it more in terms of memory: we live our lives on endless repeat in our minds—or the failure of what most people expect from “eternal life”: same selves, same parameters of earthly life, without seeing such a context as capable of hosting only replays. What could such an “eternal life” be but the life it is derived from? What is this old feeling of familiarity? Of everything being the same? This certainty that the longed-for thing won’t happen? That “I” will never rise into something more than myself, and even if I do, I will still just be myself? I can’t squeeze anything more than “me” out of a self. 

As for the living of the same life over and over, I’ll pass. Pretty sure that any transcendence of self will cost the self.

❦

There’s nothing new under the sun about wishing you could go back and live your life again and do things differently. I read somewhere that Ivan Osokin played some role in inspiring Harold Ramis’ 1993 film Groundhog Day. But a couple of other resonances seem more interesting.

Ouspensky himself cited Robert Louis Stevenson’s fairy tale “The Song of the Morrow” (in Fables, 1896) as a story sharing the spirit of his novel. It is the story of a beautiful king’s daughter in a kingdom between two seas who trades reality (“living like simple men”) for dream—a cautionary tale of how we lose life by shifting our focus within instead of on what’s in front of us. And a story of recurrence as the princess’s old, wasted self meets her young, radiant self in the end, ready to do it all again. The campaign to make your dream vision your reality is doomed to fail. Best to perk up when “the wind blows widdershins.”

And then, the intriguing story “Jones’s Karma” (in The Intercessor and Other Stories, 1931) by May Sinclair, an English writer and feminist well regarded in her own time (1863-1946), rather neglected today. The story is a sort of meditation on free will vs. determinism told by “the Mahatma” to his English friends to illustrate the compatibility of karma and free choice (“free to do the same things”) in the case of “Jones,” who, like Ivan Osokin, came to a point where he could repeat the years where he had made his mistakes. Unfortunately, in undoing his three targeted misdeeds, he set in motion whole new unfoldings of karma that drew him back to the same fate. If only he could have willed to undo his nature instead. Which, apparently, is possible only by not caring. That is, renunciation of self.

“Notwithstanding,” the Mahatma concludes, “there is a path of perfect freedom. When it is indifferent to a man whether he is himself or not himself, whether he lives or dies, whether he catches the cholera or does not catch the cholera. Thus he escapes from desiring and undesiring, from the pairs of opposites, and from the chain of happening and the round of births.”

You find life by losing it.

January 24, 2026

The Sin Eater

Even though the first sentence of the book was “When you finish reading this book, you will die,” Emilio couldn’t put it down. The book was titled The Sin Eater, and told the story of Fagan Bancroft, the wealthy scion of the Bancroft dynasty, and his dissolute life. And of course he was “wealthy,” because only the wealthy could afford a sin eater. The rates charged by the company were exorbitant—but, as the filthy rich regularly demonstrated, commensurate with the service they provided: the transference of your sin liability to a sacrificial lamb. In a word, salvation.

That in itself is a pretty good story, but not enough to risk your life for. The danger was, Emilio found himself attracted to Fagan’s sin eater, Dario—such a vivid and resourceful character with whom, if truth be told, Emilio secretly identified. There was no chance he could squelch his urge to follow his fate to the end. Even if he couldn’t help wondering about an author who would kill you for reading his book.

Still, as Emilio read, he entertained various subterfuges with himself: “I’m just skimming through the book, I’m not really reading it”—“I’ll skip an occasional page so I couldn’t be said to have read the book”—“I’ll read up to the last page, then stop (Liber interruptus).” Whether any of those ploys would really work, he didn’t know—but he did know he was not skimming or skipping at all, and like the story he was reading, he didn’t know where that Adamic attempt to hide from God would lead. Or exactly what sort of jurist God would prove to be, should the matter come to trial.

And how could he not equate the anonymous author of The Sin Eater with God? How like that noted clergyman to disappear into his creation only to pipe up at odd moments to say don’t do something or you will die.

“Sin eater” was less a profession than a caste. “Profession” suggests something freely chosen, while “caste” denotes something inflicted by birth. And who could possibly be so desperate as to choose the fate of a sin eater? Yes, they lived in rarefied and insulated luxury, but that was only to keep them in the ripened state necessary for effective sin eating. Who would lose their soul to gain the world? Everyone knows only too well the fate of a soul saturated in sin—whether your own or someone’s you’ve taken on—sin is sin. In a word, damnation.

Such stakes—salvation and damnation! But what do those words actually mean? Emilio couldn’t help but note Fagan Bancroft’s understanding of them: salvation, a continuation of one’s consciousness in a jump to the platinum level of the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. And damnation: the continuation of one’s consciousness under the floor joists of many mansions in a state of bankable misery and torment. Consciousness—such a sad fate for something so hard-won in the journey of humankind. And while on the surface that might seem unjust, a moment’s reflection would amply demonstrate the consistency with the laws of physics, economics, and common sense. Energy and matter are complementary, there are no free lunches, and you get what you pay for.

A sin eater eats the sins of his master during the master’s life—with a final feast of any surplus at the Viewing. In Fagan Bancroft’s case there was sure to be a fat surplus at the end. Emilio read with relish the rich account of the man’s profligacy: he gorged on the world’s most savory foods, prepared by his personal staff of bitchy but brilliant, constantly feuding, chefs; he kept a harem of sex slaves, many of them on the younger side; he drove fast cars, flew fast airplanes; killed big animals; flitted from one paradisiacal locale to another; and spent extravagant sums on the world’s slickest, most talented sophists to justify it all; and, as we’ve seen, had a highly effective sin eater in the hole.

What made Dario so effective?

His ethic of applying his utmost to every task he undertook, including the sin he ate so thoroughly and with such gusto. A boon for the lecherous Fagan, but also for himself. For in that surrogate delight he, clever lad, had had an epiphany concerning the nature of the reciprocal energy flow between master and slave.

Was that the source of the book’s suspense?

Of course—the resourcefulness of the hero in the face of overwhelming odds.

The fact was, Dario was gifted with the species of imagination that didn’t see the conventional demarcations and boundaries of consensus reality, and the resulting discreteness of things, events, and ideas—but something more permeable. In short, he had decoded the interconvertibility of his ostensibly one-way relationship with Fagan, a move which kept him thinking, and Emilio reading. In time, he devised a plan—a plan to reverse the direction of the energy vectors of that unholy bond based on nothing more than a belief in himself, and the recognition that justice does not predate the situation where it applies, but must be won situation by situation. And that’s when his inability to see the conventional lines between things came in handy. He nullified the proposition that he was Dario and Fagan was Fagan. Who eats whose sin is a two-way street.

Yes! Emilio would read to the end. He would not put it down, author be damned—with the same faith as his daring hero, Dario. Where goes he, there go I. Because didn’t it always come down to risking damnation to bet on yourself?

Knowing you have to finish the book to find out if it works?

Such is the power of art.

January 10, 2025

Nyla at Fifty

Nyla had company during the night.

But in the pre-dawn as she awoke with a jolt, she discovered that she was physically alone. It must have been a dream, this presence trying so earnestly, so diffidently to reach her. And now Nyla was left with only the feeling, no different from what is left when any person moves from on to off-stage. The lingering impression of a personality, in this case with a plea for attention.

Nyla tarried in bed, brooding, until dawn began to sneak around the edges of the window shades, then reluctantly rose, but the dream, unlike most which vaporize in the daylight, went with her.

So she didn’t immediately notice as she crossed in front of the bedroom dressing mirror that there was only nothing where her reflection should have been. She paused, knowing that couldn’t be right, and only then did her hazy self grudgingly materialize in the glass, and she felt the razor thin difference between one’s something and one’s nothing.

All of these uneasy thoughts followed her into the waking world.

Along with the whispers of her newfound companion.

As she drove to work, she was slower than the tide of commuters, trying to hold her own in the slow lane as everyone passed her, but without anger or any emotion, as though the space she occupied didn’t include her. She tried to remember the last time she had made eye contact with anyone, with a glance toward the passenger seat.

She stopped by the coffee shop where everyone looked straight through her. She used her phone to order, as ordinary working people swirled around her, not pushy, not rude, not anything. Several orders appeared on the counter, and she timorously looked to see if one might be hers. “Is one of these mine?” she attempted to ask out loud, but the barista might as well have been a mile away. Arms swooped around her to claim the waiting cups, leaving one when the flurry was done. She looked around at the other faces, trying to summon the nerve to claim it. She looked aside, as though for permission, then reached for it. No one contested her bold move. No one noticed it.

When she was safely back in her car, her phone rang, and she said “Hello,” but there was only silence on the other end. Either someone being no one—or no one being someone. With silence and a sheepish look at the passenger seat, she killed the call.

She made it through a day of work at her desk without engagement with anyone. Her protests stayed in her mind, as all the while the air beside her seemed to be straining to become not merely the place where something could be, but was.

At 4:30 she went home.

#

Yes, she was fifty, a heavy sounding number, and as she remembered it, she had in a receding earlier life interacted with people, known friendships, fallen in love, once, pursued goals, had added, in short, her bit of heat to the fever of humanity, but now these memories seemed to be burning away like morning mist as the sun rises, to the extent she could not be sure they had happened at all.

Leaving what?

Yes, the question.

Once back in her apartment she re-closed all the shades, leery of the tired and sterile scenes, like little billboards, that lay beyond the windows. She had very little appetite, and brewed some tea out of habit. As she sat in her familiar chair, sipping her tea, a feeling that might have been peace flooded her like an ocean swell and she fell into a pleasing trance, where she felt the other presence as one would another person in a small, dark room.

She felt it pushing, probing, and either in her real or her mind’s eye she saw a rubbery veil with something pressing against it like a restless fetus. At one point the crude features of a face pushed into it—then shoulders, knees, fingers, hands. Then suddenly two hands and forearms—small, feminine—broke through the veil like birth and floated in the air, fingers hungrily clenching and unclenching, and she felt a mix of uncertain emotion—compassion one moment, dread the next.

What did this entity want? The question didn’t really seem so different from what did Nyla want? To overtake and replace the other? To complement her as a long-missing half? Or was this simply her own self making a long-overdue house call?

Nyla knew a door had opened. She just didn’t know who was saying “Come in."