Dethcack. - ritualaid: // October 2011

ritualaid:

// October 2011 - Ashley Valley Wilderness, Utah
I arrived at the Salt Lake City airport in late August, wandering around with a dead phone, waiting for someone from the rehab, MHYR, to pick me up and drive me through the mountains to Vernal, where I was to be given a physical and the yellow uniform you saw in the previous photograph. I got into a big white truck with J and his brother, and his brother pointed into the cab, where a heavy oak coffin was bumping against the sides as we rounded sunsplit, shimmering lakes and they cracked jokes about football which went over my head as I watched the new, western landscape in quiet awe. Halfway to Vernal the truck stopped and J, his brother, and myself unloaded the coffin, which I found to be empty, into a hearse parked alongside the road. It turned out J’s brother had bought a Subway sandwich instead of gas, and stranded himself on his way to their funeral home. J told me thanks for the help, I told him “I’m looking forward to the dreams I’ll have tonight.” “I think I like you.” J and I pissed off the side of the road, got back into the car, and his brother headed off in the opposite direction, ashamed about his mistake, myself, laughing at the strange, wondering about death and rebirth. I arrived in Vernal at the rehab’s office, got fitted for boots, camo pants and a handful of yellow shirts and sweatpants, got in a truck with a hard, flat-voiced Mormon with a dry sense of humor and a manic military veteran. When they asked what I liked to do, I jokingly said “Fuckin nothin,” the Mormon replied “Whew,” turned to me in the back seat and gave me a look that said, “Buddy, you’re in for it.” They asked me about my drug abuse, the usual questions, and then we were quiet, as I saw for the first time, the entirety of a storm on the horizon, the coarse black clouds, the rain a grey, fuzzy, slow-shifting screen, and the lightning which split the looming. The sky in Utah, day and night, gave a distance to my mind I hadn’t experienced years 3 feet from a computer screen and wandering the streets. I’d been wondering about looking into the past and future simultaneously, the need for stars, the extension of thought not to distant people but to distance alone, and I found it first on a bumpy ride to a moving mountain camp, 50 miles from civilization in the Ashley Valley Wilderness. I arrived in the night, most of the campers were already zipped up in their sleeping bags, and only one, J Mello, was allowed to talk to me, although everyone bounced their questions through him, as the rules had me on a 24-hour blackout period where only my mentor was allowed to talk to me. The strange power of my eyes became apparent to me in these first days, as I wandered off from people making cordage from sage bark and carving fire making tools with spoons to chant Hu into the forest. —-
A month later and I’d sat eye contact in the style I learned from both Bernard in I ♥ Huckabees and also the recent experiments of Marina Abramovic in New York. The initial experiments with DS (not pictured) were waves of convoluted language which after 6 or 7 minutes resolved into a cognizance of our shame and pain as heroin users, the language in my mind went from I and You to We, “We have wronged” “We have hurt them” “We are forgiven” “We will heal” . Since we did this during the designated “silent spiritual time” we were unable to discuss the happenings as they occurred, although the movement of our faces and the occasional blinks and drops of our eye contact to the heart let me know a sliver of the nature of our experiment. Later, sitting with DS, we would smile, near crying, and sometimes one of us would fart, which would send us into laughing fits breaking the spell of soul transmission. One night, laying in the tent, we made eye contact in the dark, and he said he saw a demon, that I was a shape-shifter, and many described this experience with me, of my face turning old and my beard growing all around me. (I wish there had been an artist capable of rendering what they saw, although I know that if I went to the mirror it might show itself to me. I am not ready.) With each new camper, I offered the challenge of sitting and making eye contact with me, and with each camper I knew a different part of their history before we began. DC, who came in with a rage problem as well as being lied to about where he was going, moved between compassion and teeth-gritting threats towards me and DS, and each time I would tell him the reason you’re doing this to us is because we’re the ones you know won’t retaliate. Eventually I sat with him as well, and after 5 or 6 minutes, the words “Forgive her” transferred between us, a desire to forgive our mothers for the fear and shame they brought us connected us and he began to cry. Later that week, still frustrated with my inability to make fires, I whipped myself with a switch and smashed the woodpile over and over, expending the energy I could’ve used to build my fires and move on to the next step. I laid on the ground, looking up through a bush, stroking the leaves and twirling the branches in the slow agony of giving up. DC came to me and told me it was time for me to get my fires, he and the others sat with me and I made them all, and then the joy of accomplishment returned to me. That week, a camper, WM, arrived, with a history of drug abuse and arson, as well as a penchant for exaggeration due to the one-upmanship that sometimes travels in the talk of criminal circles. He would become angry, climbing trees, throwing rocks and breaking branches, and each time he sat with me, in lotus position, matching chin mudras, I would sink deep into the left side of my heart, with a blank look on my face, we would begin to synchronize our breathing, and his fury would ease, his pain drawn into my heart. After 2 sessions of 15 minutes that week, WM began to see my face change and also squares move in the same style of Bernard and Albert’s interaction in Huckabees. I would keep an empty mind after the initial tests which seemed like a sort of combative exchange. Another camper arrived a week later, JW, a psychonaut like myself who heard my story about my dissolution due to acid and understood, without judgment, that what happened to me was possible. We sat a week later and after 10 minutes in a similar posture, his face began to move off of his body, and the thought “We have died, we have died, we have died!” rang triumphantly in my mind. We both smiled and our bodies started to fill with energy, the pain in my back and shoulders dissipated, but John said he was tired and drained in the same spots where I’d encountered relief. Pictured here is GG, a kenpo black belt from TN who’d allegedly been busting down doors and impersonating officers. I sat with him when all I knew was his name, made eye contact right eye to right eye, and felt resonance with him more than anyone else, his love of precision and power, his arrogance, something I tempered in my time on the mountain, and his desire to fight and win. Eventually one of the campers who came, CO, was black, and growing up in West Virginia I had no experience with black people and an innate fearful ‘nigger’ would sometimes ring in my mind when he did something I didn’t like. Though I knew this was no different than thinking ‘loser’, it was stronger and more frightening to experience, and when we finally made eye contact that was the first word that entered my mind, “nigger.” After a few seconds, the fear, the word, melted away, and I began to connect with his soul, we smiled and talked openly the rest of the day about our hopes and dreams. Since I’d made eye contact, held in my heart, with each of the campers, they knew they could call me out on my bullshit, if I complained about the snowstorm instead of building a shelter, or talked down on someone’s behavior instead of confronting them, and I was able to call them out, organizing the camp, keeping things moving, tempers even, comradery maintained. One day, hiking to a new campsite, I held eye contact with the ninja fighter Seth as he walked backwards up a hill, sun in my face, 80 pound pack at first holding me at a crawl, but the energy we exchanged kept me going all the way up the hill, breath even, feet steady. Since I’ve returned to society, eye contact, the locus of awareness during eye contact (brow, left or right heart, gut, genitals), as well as the implications of eye positions (right/right, centered, left/left) have been a major part of my experimentation. If anyone has any writings on this topic, or lives in LA and is interested in helping me with this project, please contact me. I’ll be writing further about my experiences as an addict, in the streets with violent rednecks, in psych wards with schizophrenics, in rehabs with gnarled, gossipping sugar fiends, and waking up in hospitals, wondering if I was lucky enough to have died.

// October 2011 - Ashley Valley Wilderness, Utah

I arrived at the Salt Lake City airport in late August, wandering around with a dead phone, waiting for someone from the rehab, MHYR, to pick me up and drive me through the mountains to Vernal, where I was to be given a physical and the yellow uniform you saw in the previous photograph. I got into a big white truck with J and his brother, and his brother pointed into the cab, where a heavy oak coffin was bumping against the sides as we rounded sunsplit, shimmering lakes and they cracked jokes about football which went over my head as I watched the new, western landscape in quiet awe. Halfway to Vernal the truck stopped and J, his brother, and myself unloaded the coffin, which I found to be empty, into a hearse parked alongside the road. It turned out J’s brother had bought a Subway sandwich instead of gas, and stranded himself on his way to their funeral home. J told me thanks for the help, I told him “I’m looking forward to the dreams I’ll have tonight.” “I think I like you.” J and I pissed off the side of the road, got back into the car, and his brother headed off in the opposite direction, ashamed about his mistake, myself, laughing at the strange, wondering about death and rebirth. I arrived in Vernal at the rehab’s office, got fitted for boots, camo pants and a handful of yellow shirts and sweatpants, got in a truck with a hard, flat-voiced Mormon with a dry sense of humor and a manic military veteran. When they asked what I liked to do, I jokingly said “Fuckin nothin,” the Mormon replied “Whew,” turned to me in the back seat and gave me a look that said, “Buddy, you’re in for it.” They asked me about my drug abuse, the usual questions, and then we were quiet, as I saw for the first time, the entirety of a storm on the horizon, the coarse black clouds, the rain a grey, fuzzy, slow-shifting screen, and the lightning which split the looming. The sky in Utah, day and night, gave a distance to my mind I hadn’t experienced years 3 feet from a computer screen and wandering the streets. I’d been wondering about looking into the past and future simultaneously, the need for stars, the extension of thought not to distant people but to distance alone, and I found it first on a bumpy ride to a moving mountain camp, 50 miles from civilization in the Ashley Valley Wilderness. I arrived in the night, most of the campers were already zipped up in their sleeping bags, and only one, J Mello, was allowed to talk to me, although everyone bounced their questions through him, as the rules had me on a 24-hour blackout period where only my mentor was allowed to talk to me. The strange power of my eyes became apparent to me in these first days, as I wandered off from people making cordage from sage bark and carving fire making tools with spoons to chant Hu into the forest. —-

A month later and I’d sat eye contact in the style I learned from both Bernard in I ♥ Huckabees and also the recent experiments of Marina Abramovic in New York. The initial experiments with DS (not pictured) were waves of convoluted language which after 6 or 7 minutes resolved into a cognizance of our shame and pain as heroin users, the language in my mind went from I and You to We, “We have wronged” “We have hurt them” “We are forgiven” “We will heal” . Since we did this during the designated “silent spiritual time” we were unable to discuss the happenings as they occurred, although the movement of our faces and the occasional blinks and drops of our eye contact to the heart let me know a sliver of the nature of our experiment. Later, sitting with DS, we would smile, near crying, and sometimes one of us would fart, which would send us into laughing fits breaking the spell of soul transmission. One night, laying in the tent, we made eye contact in the dark, and he said he saw a demon, that I was a shape-shifter, and many described this experience with me, of my face turning old and my beard growing all around me. (I wish there had been an artist capable of rendering what they saw, although I know that if I went to the mirror it might show itself to me. I am not ready.) With each new camper, I offered the challenge of sitting and making eye contact with me, and with each camper I knew a different part of their history before we began. DC, who came in with a rage problem as well as being lied to about where he was going, moved between compassion and teeth-gritting threats towards me and DS, and each time I would tell him the reason you’re doing this to us is because we’re the ones you know won’t retaliate. Eventually I sat with him as well, and after 5 or 6 minutes, the words “Forgive her” transferred between us, a desire to forgive our mothers for the fear and shame they brought us connected us and he began to cry. Later that week, still frustrated with my inability to make fires, I whipped myself with a switch and smashed the woodpile over and over, expending the energy I could’ve used to build my fires and move on to the next step. I laid on the ground, looking up through a bush, stroking the leaves and twirling the branches in the slow agony of giving up. DC came to me and told me it was time for me to get my fires, he and the others sat with me and I made them all, and then the joy of accomplishment returned to me. That week, a camper, WM, arrived, with a history of drug abuse and arson, as well as a penchant for exaggeration due to the one-upmanship that sometimes travels in the talk of criminal circles. He would become angry, climbing trees, throwing rocks and breaking branches, and each time he sat with me, in lotus position, matching chin mudras, I would sink deep into the left side of my heart, with a blank look on my face, we would begin to synchronize our breathing, and his fury would ease, his pain drawn into my heart. After 2 sessions of 15 minutes that week, WM began to see my face change and also squares move in the same style of Bernard and Albert’s interaction in Huckabees. I would keep an empty mind after the initial tests which seemed like a sort of combative exchange. Another camper arrived a week later, JW, a psychonaut like myself who heard my story about my dissolution due to acid and understood, without judgment, that what happened to me was possible. We sat a week later and after 10 minutes in a similar posture, his face began to move off of his body, and the thought “We have died, we have died, we have died!” rang triumphantly in my mind. We both smiled and our bodies started to fill with energy, the pain in my back and shoulders dissipated, but John said he was tired and drained in the same spots where I’d encountered relief. Pictured here is GG, a kenpo black belt from TN who’d allegedly been busting down doors and impersonating officers. I sat with him when all I knew was his name, made eye contact right eye to right eye, and felt resonance with him more than anyone else, his love of precision and power, his arrogance, something I tempered in my time on the mountain, and his desire to fight and win. Eventually one of the campers who came, CO, was black, and growing up in West Virginia I had no experience with black people and an innate fearful ‘nigger’ would sometimes ring in my mind when he did something I didn’t like. Though I knew this was no different than thinking ‘loser’, it was stronger and more frightening to experience, and when we finally made eye contact that was the first word that entered my mind, “nigger.” After a few seconds, the fear, the word, melted away, and I began to connect with his soul, we smiled and talked openly the rest of the day about our hopes and dreams. Since I’d made eye contact, held in my heart, with each of the campers, they knew they could call me out on my bullshit, if I complained about the snowstorm instead of building a shelter, or talked down on someone’s behavior instead of confronting them, and I was able to call them out, organizing the camp, keeping things moving, tempers even, comradery maintained. One day, hiking to a new campsite, I held eye contact with the ninja fighter Seth as he walked backwards up a hill, sun in my face, 80 pound pack at first holding me at a crawl, but the energy we exchanged kept me going all the way up the hill, breath even, feet steady. Since I’ve returned to society, eye contact, the locus of awareness during eye contact (brow, left or right heart, gut, genitals), as well as the implications of eye positions (right/right, centered, left/left) have been a major part of my experimentation. If anyone has any writings on this topic, or lives in LA and is interested in helping me with this project, please contact me. I’ll be writing further about my experiences as an addict, in the streets with violent rednecks, in psych wards with schizophrenics, in rehabs with gnarled, gossipping sugar fiends, and waking up in hospitals, wondering if I was lucky enough to have died.