"In a curtained room, in a secret bowerSeek the sacred rose, find the holy flower
She’s on display, and ready to play
And none can resist her, once they have kissed her ...
To rescue Moon’s daughter ... Pass the trial by water.”
Friday, August 27, 2004
Terri at Mercer
"In a curtained room, in a secret bowerSeek the sacred rose, find the holy flower
She’s on display, and ready to play
And none can resist her, once they have kissed her ...
Iron Lotus on Mercer
“Learn to look and you’ll see.”
On the other side of the street there was a design in the black iron columns of an old warehouse… I crossed to look more closely. It was a flower like a lotus, repeated on several of the columns, a flower of black iron. I counted.
“There are 11, Terri.”
Canal Street
Opposite me rose the off-white First National City Bank of New York building, build in Egyptian Revival style in 1927, now housing a shoe store ...
... The GPS signal returned with an accuracy of 40 feet and I headed west.
Vesica Piscis
I walked back to Broadway. The GPS signal returned as I reached the R and the W subway station, the gated grounds of City Hall itself to my right, closed to the public for security reasons. The Quad now said 0.91 miles. Something about the subway station entrance railings leaped out at me. A form like a fish was welded into the design. Green metal.
The Malice Box
I tried pressing lightly on the various geometric patterns traced in its sides. Nothing... It gleamed a reddish bronze in my hand. The concentric raised rings on its top seemed to flip from convex to concave and back. Then they seemed to turn in a slow spiral … I stared into it. Lost myself. It was like a tiny black hole.
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Ground Zero, lower Manhattan
If I look within myself at this place, I return to a memory so painful it still causes me to twist my head away as though ducking a blow. It is the image of a street covered in thick black dust, under thunderclouds, and at the end of the street the still-standing remains of a section of the World Trade Center towers, twisted and blackened and looking like the very mouth of hell, those Gothic arches backlit in the afternoon gloom from the arc lights of the searchers, the damp dust like cinders under my feet and the sheer hatred of the attack reverberating weeks after the towers fell. It caught me by surprise even though I knew it was there, as Katherine and I walked in the rain and held each other, walking in downtown Manhattan to spend some money to support the local vendors, the only time I could bring myself to go.
There was beauty still: the arches persisted, they were not all thrown down, something defiant remained in their shattered suggestion of a cathedral entrance, of praying hands, of a portal that said: through these arches lies a womb, beyond this defilement there is rebirth, even here there will be love.But the overriding pulse in that place was of such anger and hatred that I could not look at it for more than a second or two, I had to walk away, east, toward the Seaport. It will never leave my mind's eye.We have been locked in a labyrinth since that day. How do we react, how does anyone react, to an act of such wickedness and still remain ourselves? You cannot be good unless you survive. But there is a monster within us who out of sheer fear says: do anything, hurt anyone, I don't care: to anyone beyond the bounds of my tribe, anything may be done.
Today I thought I would die. I was so scared that for a moment I wanted anything, anything at all to happen to prevent it. Then suddenly I wasn’t afraid. We were right underneath Ground Zero. I stared into the face of death, and I fought for my life. I saw something in myself I had not seen before, and I came out on the other side. It was the ability, the desire, to kill.
It was dangerous, inchoate, raw energy that poured through me. Blood energy. I know now, with complete confidence, that I can draw on it again, whenever I need it.
Many years ago, someone within my family wrote to me with seven lines of wisdom. The first line was this: To live well, know death.
I think I understand: these were the first energies I had to tap into on the quest I have embarked upon. Raw, powerful, potentially murderous. If I can’t yoke them, I won’t have the strength to survive. But how to harness them?
At Ground Zero the towers fell and St. Paul’s was left intact, not a window broken. A friend of mine, a masseuse, volunteered there for weeks, working on cops and firemen and construction workers, offering real physical compassion as others put together the Chapel's ministry of meals and water, a place to sleep, a place to find some solace for the heart. Yet this was all for "our" people, for those like us who had suffered, those with whom we identified. For "identity" comes from "idem", the same. It is easy to pray for our friends. How many of us can truly pray for our enemies, for those who actively seek our death?
There was beauty still: the arches persisted, they were not all thrown down, something defiant remained in their shattered suggestion of a cathedral entrance, of praying hands, of a portal that said: through these arches lies a womb, beyond this defilement there is rebirth, even here there will be love.But the overriding pulse in that place was of such anger and hatred that I could not look at it for more than a second or two, I had to walk away, east, toward the Seaport. It will never leave my mind's eye.We have been locked in a labyrinth since that day. How do we react, how does anyone react, to an act of such wickedness and still remain ourselves? You cannot be good unless you survive. But there is a monster within us who out of sheer fear says: do anything, hurt anyone, I don't care: to anyone beyond the bounds of my tribe, anything may be done.
Today I thought I would die. I was so scared that for a moment I wanted anything, anything at all to happen to prevent it. Then suddenly I wasn’t afraid. We were right underneath Ground Zero. I stared into the face of death, and I fought for my life. I saw something in myself I had not seen before, and I came out on the other side. It was the ability, the desire, to kill.
It was dangerous, inchoate, raw energy that poured through me. Blood energy. I know now, with complete confidence, that I can draw on it again, whenever I need it.
Many years ago, someone within my family wrote to me with seven lines of wisdom. The first line was this: To live well, know death.
I think I understand: these were the first energies I had to tap into on the quest I have embarked upon. Raw, powerful, potentially murderous. If I can’t yoke them, I won’t have the strength to survive. But how to harness them?
At Ground Zero the towers fell and St. Paul’s was left intact, not a window broken. A friend of mine, a masseuse, volunteered there for weeks, working on cops and firemen and construction workers, offering real physical compassion as others put together the Chapel's ministry of meals and water, a place to sleep, a place to find some solace for the heart. Yet this was all for "our" people, for those like us who had suffered, those with whom we identified. For "identity" comes from "idem", the same. It is easy to pray for our friends. How many of us can truly pray for our enemies, for those who actively seek our death?
At the Tick Tock
Trinity Seal
In the center of the seal stood a figure like a man composed of spinning wheels, or whorls, or a garment of spirals.
Trinity Reflected at One Wall Street
"Robert."
"Where have you been, Terri?"
"Hell."
Glimpse of the Red Room
Cube
Legs
An Amiable Child
“No. A gravestone?”
“Yes. It reads as follows: Erected to the Memory/Of an Amiable Child/St. Claire Pollock/Died 15 July 1797/In the Fifth Year of his Age. It’s up by Riverside Church. A child. Caged off in perpetuity from everything that goes on around it. Hold that image in your mind. You’ll need it later. Trust me. It’s going to look like a game, but it’s not."
Terri, again
Terri
Name: Terri, 22/F
Location: Between Hades and Earth. Eliot likes me "throbbing between two lives”
Gender: Female
Marital Status: Open. To myself, to the divine
Hobbies & Interests: Vaticination. Seduction. Speaking the language of the birds, the green language
Favourite Gadgets: Myself; my eyes :)
Occupation: Seer, guide, lover.
Personal Quote: Two snakes I spy, entwined in the act of love
One I scotch, the female, and am myself made woman
For seven years
Till the same snakes I spy again, again lost in love's act
The male I scotch, and am myself made male again.
So the seasons turn ...
What The First Cache Said To Me
Terri
I don't know how you want me to do this. Connect the cached items and the site, you say. The inner world and the outer.
So: I am getting lots of death, naturally. You sent me to two graveyards, venerated places, one to crack a code about death, one to dig in the grounds of one of the oldest buildings in Manhattan, you sent me back to the beginnings of this city among flowers and stones and grass to gaze upon the great gaping hole at Ground Zero ... the church that was somehow spared when the spars and beams of the twin towers came hurtling down toward the ground.
You had me gaze upon the place that fills me with anger at the primitive emotions it arouses in me, and you had me root around like someone not entirely sane or presentable among the gravestones till I found your cache, and in it, a bullet cartridge. So yes, death. Death and survival, and the willingness to lash out and hurt in order to survive. Primal things. Are you going to send me all across the city sinking my fingers into graves? Is this enough? Help me. I don't understand.
George Washington had his own pew at St. Paul's, you can still see it. He prayed there after being sworn in down the street at Federal Hall as the nation's first President. Birth of a nation, from war. Now another war. Destruction, survival. Is this where you want me to go?
I had a friend who was downtown when the towers fell, in fact I sent her there, she said those clouds of dust you see on the videos of that morning were full of flying fragments of metal. I drank with her at this bar.
9/11 was an act designed to provoke a tribal response. We are all reasonable, civilized people until someone touches our tribal core. Then we change, or maybe we remember. We will kill and more for our tribe. We are all potential torturers. Some things are impossible to forgive.
Terri, what more do you want of me?
I don't know how you want me to do this. Connect the cached items and the site, you say. The inner world and the outer.
So: I am getting lots of death, naturally. You sent me to two graveyards, venerated places, one to crack a code about death, one to dig in the grounds of one of the oldest buildings in Manhattan, you sent me back to the beginnings of this city among flowers and stones and grass to gaze upon the great gaping hole at Ground Zero ... the church that was somehow spared when the spars and beams of the twin towers came hurtling down toward the ground.
You had me gaze upon the place that fills me with anger at the primitive emotions it arouses in me, and you had me root around like someone not entirely sane or presentable among the gravestones till I found your cache, and in it, a bullet cartridge. So yes, death. Death and survival, and the willingness to lash out and hurt in order to survive. Primal things. Are you going to send me all across the city sinking my fingers into graves? Is this enough? Help me. I don't understand.
George Washington had his own pew at St. Paul's, you can still see it. He prayed there after being sworn in down the street at Federal Hall as the nation's first President. Birth of a nation, from war. Now another war. Destruction, survival. Is this where you want me to go?
I had a friend who was downtown when the towers fell, in fact I sent her there, she said those clouds of dust you see on the videos of that morning were full of flying fragments of metal. I drank with her at this bar.
9/11 was an act designed to provoke a tribal response. We are all reasonable, civilized people until someone touches our tribal core. Then we change, or maybe we remember. We will kill and more for our tribe. We are all potential torturers. Some things are impossible to forgive.
Terri, what more do you want of me?
Les Halles
Looking into the restaurant away from the street, the light was almost amber. Yellow-gold lighting fixtures played off black-brown wooden backgrounds...
...Looking toward the street, a UPS truck had drawn up outside, painted in brown and yellow, outside the plate glass window on which "Les Halles Brasserie-Rotisserie" was written backwards, as though in Cyrillic or Chinese script...
Ground Zero
