Unsolicited Spiritual Advice: God Crack

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

“…the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.” -Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

I’ll tell you what: Right now my brain is starting a headache looking at this quote while my consciousness is in Aldous Huxley’s pants. Such a spiritual hottie. Great big juicy brain. Big glasses. All the vision. Sexy. Delicious.

A friend asked me if, spiritually, there was a “ghost in the machine” and I think there is some big philosophical principle there, but I took it as: Is there a ghost in this human flesh machine that’s running the show? And my answer is, of course! Who else would be running the show but a ghost? Dead humans are the geneses of ghosts, are we not, so surely we each have to be full up with at least one ghost to begin with. In there, pulling the levers. The consciousness operating on the brain.

There are psychiatrists out there who say they can reproduce the god feeling artificially with some sort of electronic doodad plugged into your brain. They take this to mean that the god feeling is a product of brain function and not at all inspired by something outside, like an actual god. But then, how do they think a god operates except by affecting the physical brain through the consciousness? The god-consciousness goes conscious and pulls on the god-conscious-feeling brain levers because it says, “Hey flesh machine! You have GOT to feel this!” So yes, nasty psychiatrists. The god feeling can be reproduced in the brain, but the gods do it by one little lift of a divine eyebrow where it takes you a room full of overpriced equipment and millions in grant money.

But let me not come out of my hair about it…

My hottie Aldous used peyote to try to get there. High, he got the god feeling by looking at a painting of a chair, looking at flowers in a vase, counting the pleats in has pants. (Him and those pleats, man. He goes on and on. But he was high at the time, so we forgive him, and his sheets of pleats.) He was a visionary, but on his trip, he didn’t see visions. He saw life pulsating in everything, which is to say the divine radiating out of everything, which is to say the omnipresent face of the divine. Can we say he saw gods everywhere? Each pleat having its own divine ghost the way each human has its own divine ghost?

I think we can. I think we can see it too.

Unsolicited Spiritual Advice:

If you have millions of dollars in grant money and a stash of peyote to get you to the god feeling, by all means use it (and invite me), but if you don’t, the door is not closed to you. Pray. Meditate. Commune. Dare I say, make a habit of it? The gods are vast, but the the vastness of their feeling can slip in through even the tiniest conscious crack.

-M. Ashley

Fantasy. Union. (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

“From fantasy comes union” that feels like
Ecstatic gratitude. Electricity comes to mind
But seems trite although there was literal
Lightning in my gratitude ecstasy. I danced
With my windows open in a storm drunk
On an almost full bottle of table wine

I couldn’t have fantasized it better this stormy union

It wasn’t what I expected. How silly to expect
Union to feel like freedom when really
It is the ultimate binding—the ultimate us
Together. We
Eternally.

I flopped down in my unmade bed
Left the last of the wine in a red plastic cup
Gathering rain and the reflection of lightning on
The dusty windowsill—dust made mud by the
Gods’ rain. I wanted IT so much. I was naked.
I wanted IT so much but
The Lover said I was just a little too
Drunk to have IT much
Just now.

The Lover is a gentleman.
I didn’t know that.

-M.
….sometimes, from fantasy comes union.” -Rumi

Blindy Bull Heaven (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

I am sorta blind. Legally blind.

My totally blind friend can tell you what chord car honks are on different cars. Frankly, I think he’s full of shit, but what would I know? I was barely aware, (I’m saying “barely” because I want to appear smart and not admit that I was “totally” unaware), car honks were more than one note. So he might not be full of shit, but I’d never know it. I have to take his word for it, or not. Either choice is uninformed.

Man, you can tell sighted people all kinds of stuff that isn’t true about being blind and they would never know it.

I was in an optometrist’s office once, talking to a guy about blindy benefits. We were on Zoom. The optometrists were flanking me on either side. The benefits guy was totally blind and a talker. I didn’t mind. We were swapping blindy war stories and, as a writer, I find swapping stories with anyone just heaven.

We talked about how I needed to get on the disabled door-to-door bus, but I was worried about it because the guy at state blind services, (also a blindy and, like me, albino), told me the bus people were jerks and that I should beware. The blind benefits guy agreed and said, “Make sure to act more inept than you are.” I love it. A benefits guy who’s about the blindy hustle when life and limb depend on it, (as they definitely would trying to take the regular bus as a blindy in my neighborhood), is my kind of guy.

I am about to enter graduate school. He talked about how I needed to get with student disability because that way, as a cripple, I can register first. He said that, when he was in school, he felt a little bad about it because being blind really didn’t hinder his ability to register with the plebs, but he’d take the advantage when offered. “Social capital,” I said. We, as blindies, are all about the social capital.

My fully sighted best friend, with whom I went to college at the same time, also thought that was a little unfair, just like parking placards for the blind, because it’s not like walking across a parking lot is going to make me blinder. But then, she said, maybe it would be ok for her to let me have the parking placard and early registration if the choice were between that and having her eyes poked out. “Good choice,” I said and hopped up onto the curb that I had to feel with my toe not to miss. Luckily, the curb was only about a foot from the car door.

Back to the Zoom call with the blindy benefits guy:

When we started the call, he asked me my name three times, asking me if I preferred Ms. Ashley to Michelle. “You can call me Michelle,” I said and repeated it. Toward the end of the call, he called me Shirley, also three times. Every time he did, I looked over one shoulder at the optometrists and openly snickered. That’s a thing a sighty can do when talking with a blindy. That’s sighty privilege. That’s part of, and only one little part of, the car honk horn level bullshit we sighties pull, because what does the blindy know anyway? That’s what he gets for his parking placards and getting to register first. That’s what he gets for being able to hear the music in car honks.

There was a German exchange student at Vanderbilt with me who was totally blind. In character, she stopped me one day to swap blindy stories, (Michelle heaven), but, also in character, the theme was overwhelmingly how much better Germany is at everything and how much better they treat blind people specifically. Something about bus fare being free, because I guess paying bus fare makes you blinder.

The conversation got quickly tiresome, standing there in the impressive doorway of one of the impressive buildings, student traffic having to respectfully divert around us two blindies standing in the way of everything, (she had a cane so fuck all you sighted people, walk around). But even that blindy privilege didn’t make the conversation less tiresome so, at about the six hundredth time she told me Germany was blindy heaven, I politely told her I had another class to go to and we said goodbye. I let her walk ahead of me.I had no class to go to of course, but my dorm was on exactly the same path she was taking to wherever she was going to annoy someone else about German blindy heaven. I walked about ten feet behind her the whole way, keeping my heels soft, being sure not to crunch on leaves. I walked behind her for a full fifteen minutes. She was none the wiser.

Sometimes, straddling the line between blindy and sighty heaven is a kind bullshit that’s awfully sweet.

-M. Ashley

Soul Filling (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Crack open my soul and tell me
what’s in there, would you?
I am thinking of a decadent Easter
egg with filling too bright and
sweet to look at or taste. A Cadbury
egg gone berserk spilling out gooey
gold light.

Is this my soul or is it gooey
gold godly Ichor?

What’s the difference
anyhow?

-M. Ashley

The Wisdom of Lavish Desire (creative nonfiction)

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“There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.”
-Lao-tzu

I get this out of a devotional book for a twelve step program. Well there you have it, I’m in a twelve step program. But the thing is that I disagree with the devotional quotes about half the time. All these old men, very rarely women, who thought they were so wise. This devotional is like an assemblage of ancient and medieval Twitter. Humans have been thinking, wrongly, they are so wise since the first human threw a bone in the air to impress the mysterious monolith. Or maybe that was a movie.

But now that I’ve complained about people who think they are so wise and we who desire so much to find people to be wise to us in our faces to give us direction when our wisdom fails us, let me tell you how much wiser than this guy I am.

Lavish desires is the IT! That’s the magic! It’s the juice, it’s the jazz, it’s the… I can’t think of another “j” word. It’s where it’s at. The gods tell me all the time to “ask ask ask.” There is no limit, not even the sky. The more we ask and surrender to the knowing our ask will be answered, the more they get to answer and the richer we all feel.

I’ve been trying to focus in my writing lately on concrete, physical details, because that’s the jazzy juice of writing. But how do I explain sensually what I mean about this lavish desire and bold asking that is the very opposite of calamity? What are some antonyms for calamity? Alexa says one of them is “blessing.” That’s exactly whatI’m talking about, I mean, right on the nose, but “blessing’ seems so benign. It’s more like BAM! BLESSING! Nothing banally benign about that.

But you don’t get the BAM BLESSING unless you ask ridiculously and desire lavishly.

Even the wording…

Every week in my white and gold planner that is the white and golden apple of my eye, in the section on the left side of the two page week spread—the section marked priorities that, frankly, I don’t actually know whatI’m supposed to write there—in that section, under priorities, the first thing I write every week is, “My gods love me lavishly at every single moment and in every tiny detail.” So you see this Lao-tzu guy stole my very word to say a very wrong thing.

The heavens drop golden plums—plums not apples now—in my lap almost constantly. More and more and more and more, better and better and better, and why? Because I lavishly desire golden plums constantly and greedily ask for them and BAM the BLESSING and, sensually, golden plum juice is sweeter than your best French kiss, and wetter. And why? Because I dared to desire lavishly.

So here’s the wisdom—my wisdom—that in this one and only case may be actually wise. Desire lavishly. Ask greedily. Receive the juicy plum. Celebrate with jazzy gratitude.

It would have been a better finish if “gratitude” had started with a “j.” Hey gods, give me a “j” word for gratitude.

“Joy.”

Yes. Joy.

-M. Ashley

Theos: Boxed (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Roll up your sleeves
my golden god
these clavicles ache
for the cracking.

Your bare knuckles scrape
but are not scraped.

My blood spatters.
You stay freshly washed.

Dear god,
my kidneys have grass stains

and

I need an oracle
to locate my spleen.

-M. Ashley

Lie (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

One fourteen-year-old lies in another’s lap
face-up
squeezing the pimples on her
I’ll-die-for-you-sweetheart’s scabby
sunburned face.

I lie with you
naked back to the earth
dug deep
moist and recently turned
picking the teeth of a death trap.

-M. Ashley

God’s Skeleton on the Sunset Strip (poetry)

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Legally drunk on The Strip I slide
anonymous past the break-dancing boys
who sell CDs and their phone numbers
on the liminal bridge between
The Lion and The City.

Blurred, a bronzy man walks in front of me
gray skinny suit filled out to six feet, six inches at least
almost big enough to be the ancient god’s skeleton
found by archaeologists in an unmarked grave
somewhere in the backwoods of Greece.

On this night,
Caesar’s is the best he can do.

Its plastic emperors, audio-animatronic mythology,
and the gray-water fountain Evel Knievel jumped
wait to praise him

just north of the newest destructions—
about ten blocks shy of the lonely Stratosphere.

-M. Ashley

The House on Doheny (poetry)

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I saw you bought that house I loved
on the hill, off Doheny, hard to get to

during rush hour or when the veins of LA
burst and bleed all over West Hollywood

up Sunset
and gush through the Bel Air gates.

The skin of my inner wrists
with her oxygen-blue undertones

(soft contemporary design)
is up for sale too.

Ten million or best offer
(like the house on Doheny)

plus, realistically, another million
to meet your execting standards.

How deep, my Darling,
are your lightless pockets?

-M. Ashley

Learning to Be Alone (creative nonfiction)

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Not the first time I was alone, but the time I learned to love being alone. Art school. Summer arts school between my junior and senior years of high school. I went for writing. I had two writer roommates. They put the writers together because they said we had a tendency to keep odd hours and they didn’t want us keeping the dancers or singers awake all night because they had to wake up early and actually work for their muse. Lazy cusses that we were, our first class wasn’t until nine and we only had two classes and one group activity a day. The rest of the time we were supposed to be typing away at our keyboards making Shakespeare or whatever. We were supposed to be getting inspired. We were supposed to be collaborating. We were supposed to be bouncing off the walls with creative energy.

Mostly I remember wandering through the halls exploring myself.

That sounds unnecessarily sexual. If I were to say exploring myself from the inside, that doesn’t make it any better. Feeling myself from the inside? No.

Understanding my own soul better. There we go. Expanding. Spreading my arms into the empty space.

The halls were white painted brick and white tile, fluorescent lights. Someone in my class, more brilliant than I in that moment, said the halls looked like Communism. I just about fell out of my tree laughing at that at the time. I’ve used that joke several times since. I’ve probably used it more than the person who cracked it in the first place. I wonder if they even remember. I wonder if their own humor followed them the way it did me.

The halls of the funky math and science building at Vanderbilt looked like Communism. The mental hospital I was in on a hold that one time—that looked like Communism too. Math and mental health and art school. There should be a connection there. Art led to math led to the nuthouse. Maybe the more talented writer who cracked the joke in the first place could do more with that than I can in this moment. Don’t expect much of me. I was great in art school, I did marginally at math, and I was not one of the popular kids at the nuthouse. It was hard to be alone there. I made myself lonely in math when I didn’t need to be and at art school I was alone, but damn I was never lonely. Damn I loved being with myself then.

There was a smell in those halls. It was the smell of freedom. I had been to summer camp before—lifetimes of summer camp—but here I had all this time to do with as I pleased, to be plying my art, and no one was up my butt to be cheery or play Red Rover. Our meal times were even flexible.

I was planning a good roam one afternoon and went to the cafeteria first to get a sandwich. I was in the middle of a bad attempt to wrap it in a yellow napkin that was too small for the job, when a handsome man who worked there, I’m sure one of the regular students, so maybe all of 20 years old, came over to me and offered to wrap it up for me. That was the kindest thing.

I thought I was being so sly. I wasn’t even sure we were allowed to take food out. I was being on the down low and he busted me—busted me, then helped me out and in such a sweet tone. I wonder if he was a writer too or if he had found his personal space there—had explored his own self from the inside wandering down those halls, so he understood the lure and understood the need to have portable sandwiches for the journey.

-M. Ashley