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July
16
2021

The Magician Awakes
Jon Rappoport

—for Mike Mahoney and Bonnie Lange—and FOR LAURA—

“Aye, harpoons…stuck in him like so many corkscrews. Aye, his spout is big, like Nantucket wheat. Aye, by death and devils, the white whale is Moby-Dick, if Moby-Dick you see! It was Moby-Dick that dismantled me, that reaped off my leg like a mower, a blade of grass and left me with this dead stump I stand on…The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer.” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick)

Scattered among my files, there are notes for a work called The Magician Awakes. Some notes I’ve already included in articles. Here is one passage I’ve never published. It’s narrated by a character who is wandering through a labyrinth:

“I’ve read everything, and I remember what I’ve read. I’m one of those people who eats books and authors. I’ve read philosophy and mysticism, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry, mathematics, literature, poetry, history, and so on. And this was all by age 30.”

“After that, I found myself reading only one book, Moby Dick. Now I read it over and over, and the ideas and feelings swell up ever larger.”

“The whale, Ahab, Ishmael, the sea, the minor characters, they keep rising and swelling and increasing. Last year, they were at Saturn and Jupiter size; next year they’ll be consuming a quadrant of the Milky Way; then the whole galaxy; and finally, they’ll be out in indefinable space.”

“I had a dream about God. He, too, was reading Moby Dick over and over, and when I arrived in Heaven, he brought me to his table for a meal, and we sat down. He said, ‘I keep discovering new scenes I’d forgotten. Most people can’t understand I’m always exploring. After all, if I’m infinite, how could I be a finished product? I gave up reading the philosophers a long time ago. You need the sense of the poetic to GO FARTHER. No one seems to realize I didn’t make humans limited creatures. I gave them all doorways into the infinite, without me knowing the whole or even half of what that was’.”

“Where is Melville now?”

“’I gave him a cottage down the road, but he’s been gone from there for some time’.”

“You made the whales. You should know a great deal about them.”

“’I didn’t make Melville’s white whale. That’s his domain, and even he didn’t understand everything about it. How could he? You don’t explore with full knowledge of the map. By the way…look at the Earth. When the intrepid explorers die and rise above the planet, do you think they want to go back and incarnate again? Unlikely in most cases. Because the people in charge down there are obsessed with organizing and controlling the scene in all aspects. THAT means, little by little, Earth is drained of the most adventurous types. Do you see? An unintended consequence. A serious one’.”

“When you say ‘intrepid explorers’, you’re talking about imagination?” 

“’How else are you going to navigate the uncreated spaces? In Moby Dick, it seems at first no one has it, but as you read the book over and over, it leaks out to you. Melville is the one with imagination. The course of the whale and Ahab and even Ishmael is set, but something else is there. An X factor. It’s the book above the book. It’s as if Melville wrote TWO. He wanted to. He wanted the inevitable tragedy. But something else in him couldn’t abide only that. It was his poetic sense. It shines through’.”

“Remember this Melville observation? ‘There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces’.”

“’That eagle-soul. Did I make it that way? Yes and no. I gave it an abundance of courage, but the soul decided he could range and roam in those extreme places. It’s freedom. Without it I would have created nothing more than a puppet show. People start out believing in a closed system. They think everything they want they can find inside that system. They can make magic from the inside. But they can’t. They never have. They have to get OUTSIDE, and then they have the ability. Sometimes what starts out as freedom turns into a system. Because they want to organize the parts. They’re rabid finishers and polishers. So then they’re INSIDE again. I’ve been writing a poem for some time. It’s about 100,000 pages now. I’m just getting warmed up. If you, the soul, were a physical form, which you’re not, MAGIC would live in the muscles and ligaments and arteries and nerves and heart and spleen and brain and liver and fingers and toes and ears and of course the eyes—it can’t be contained. It’s everything that exists outside systems. If my image is put inside a system, drop it off at the side of the road. It’s lost any value it might once have had. Infinite means INFINITE. I’m not messing around. The obsession with the little stuff is an affectation. That doesn’t mean you go with vague dead-leaf generalities. You throw every single thing you can think of into the mix. Cars, old tires, trinkets, gold shoes, bullets, road signs, rivers…I like to assume every person is writing an endless poem, whether he knows it or not, and there are plenty of bad ones, believe me. That’s because people are hypnotized by empty ideas. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll catch on sooner or later. Because again, INFINITE is REAL. There, two birds on every branch. The first one is a piece of the white picket fence and the white clouds and the horse and buggy moving along on the familiar street in the middle of town, but that bird is also one thing and creature in the mix of an endless poem that has lines as long as you want to make them…old Walt Whitman knew that. Read one of his eruptions. There are some truly terrible lines in there I would have edited out, but they have to be there, because he’s working up a head of steam, he’s moving toward a few immortal and unpredictable and unfathomable words strung together, and when you read them you’re stunned in your tracks, you can’t move for a few moments. I see you’ve been wandering in a labyrinth for a long time. You’re trying to figure out how to escape. This is a joke. There is no escape, which means there is no exit. That place where you came in? It’s closed now. You’re in a system, lad. Don’t fret. Just keep writing the poem. Look around you. What’s there? Throw it all into the mix. The old socks and the kitchen sink. And pretty soon you’ll be outside. Not by finding the exit. By magic. Come back around in a year or so and see me. I do readings now and then. We sit around and tell stories. There’s music. A few pals of mine, Ravi, Bird, Bud, Sonny, Igor. Bust the system, kiddo. That’s what it’s all about. The system in the mind. Just go the other way. The long shot turns out to be the favorite every time. It’s magic…’”

 

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

 

 

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