Busy last week. Went to get my eyes examined so I can relace the glasses I scratched with sand in Grand Turk. (That's my retina.) I’m getting glass lenses this time around, sick of replacing plastic.

I had computer problems. Learned something. If you have a pivoting Viewsonic monitor, don’t use the free image-rotating Pivot software that comes with it, use your graphic card’s built in ability to rotate the image. Much better image now.

Saw some friends in Santa Cruz, including Michael Beeson and Jon Pearce.

A flock, school, herd — what’s the word? — of seals off the dock, mothers and children.

We walked past a somewhat scurvy motel that had a dead rat floating in the pool.

I ended up getting a BMW, it kicks ass.

Getting to work on (long) chapter two (of four) for Postsingular. Metalovelist Thuy’s point of view. I want to have a scene were Thuy walks into a “Rebel Angel Church on Valencia St.” And they chant and Rebel Angel Azaroth from the Mirrorbrane appears.

Initially I was thinking of lifting the Kamikaze chant from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

“Hi wa Ri ni katazu,

Ri wa Ho ni katazu,

Ho wa Ken ni katazu,

Ken wa Ten ni katazu,

Ten wa Hi ni katazu,

Hi wa Ri ni katazu,

Ri wa Ho ni katazu…”

“On and on, around and around. Searching in the orphidnet, Thuy found referents and meanings for the Japanese words, but the meanings didn’t matter, the meanings were bullshit, only the sounds mattered, like divine Aum vibrations bringing the Rebel Angel Azaroth into the room…”

But that seemed too derivative. So I looked up some riddles or lallagunut in Gaddang, a language of the Luzon Island Philippines.

Here are some good ones:

Riddle: Gongonan nu usin y amam; maggirawa pay sila y inam. (If you pull your daddy's penis; your mommy's vagina also screams). Answer: Campana (a bell).

Riddle: Itannu si canayun; udde ammem maita-ita. (You stare at it often, yet you never have seen it.) Answer: Sinag (the sun).

Riddle: Innacun cunna, gampamade nattoli. (If he says he goes, he means he comes.) Answer: Laddao (a shrimp). [For plot purposes, I think I’ll cheat and say the answer is “cuttlefish” or “squid.” (“Squid” is “pusit” in Tagalog and some other Filipino languages, although I’m not sure what it is in Gaddang.)]

Riddle: Ana tata tolay, accananna bagguina. (A person eating up his own body.) Answer: Candela (a candle).

How about using the candle/cuttlefish/sun lines for a chant, like

“Ana tata tolay, accananna bagguina;

Innacun cunna, gampamade nattoli;

Itannu si canayun; udde ammem maita-ita.”

He’s eating his own body;

When he turns away, he’s coming to you;

You stare at him, but you never see him;

I think it works better to just use cuttlefish/sun. I went by an actual storefront church on Valencia St. yesterday for atmosphere, here’s a current draft of the opener for the scene:

Thuy was digging the scene, eating her popcorn, and then Luis paused and stared right at her, drawing info from the orphidnet. He was a kiqqie, with beezies bedecking him like shelf-mushrooms on a forest-floor log. “Welcome, sister Thuy in back,” he called in his weirdly accented tenor. “Azaroth be with you. Chant with us, ay, I’m calling out the Rebel Angel Azaroth, ay, despised by the high lamas of the Mirrorbrane, guiding us to revolt against the dicky-ducks, a sword against the Pharisees, ay, our savior from the ravening Big Pig. Show us your face, Azaroth, caress us with your energies, ay, warm our hearts to heal this wounded world. Lead us in the invocation, Sister Kayla!”

[Note, we were in SF yesterday and saw the Calder show at MOMA.]

Kayla was the woman running the popcorn machine. Smiling and pressing the hands of her fellow worshippers, she curvetted up the aisle, taking a second microphone from Luis and beginning a chant.

Innacun cunna gampamade nattoli.

Itannu si canayun udde ammem maita-ita.

On and on, Kayla and congregation repeated those same two lines, drawing out the sounds. Searching in the orphidnet, Thuy found the phrases to be couched not in Spanish, but in the Gaddang language of the Philippine island of Luzon, not all that far from good old Vietnam. Thuy’s grandparents had landed there when they’d fled Vietnam in a leaky boat. The two lines turned out to be folk riddles, meaning something like:

When he turns away he’s coming to you.

You stare at him but you never see him.

The answer to the second riddle was “the sun;” the answer to the first was “a cuttlefish.” The chanted words overlapped, divine Aum vibrations calling another order of being into the room. Everything was becoming so very deeply intertwingled.

Warm air eddied across Thuy’s neck, making the hairs stand up. Luis kicked aside the silk Persian rug to reveal an pattern inscribed on the floor, an octagon with a square drawn on the inner side of each edge — a beezie agent told Thuy the pattern was a flattened hypercube — and here came Azaroth, or the upper part of him anyway, the lower half of his ethereal form sticking down through the floor.

[I saw the famous twins in Union Square, nice to see them still out there shopping, they were already a fixture 20 years ago.]

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