We only walk Piedmont Park at night. We advise you to do the same. Because the park of the day is not the same park, not at all. Because at night, a strange doppelganger takes its place entirely. The whole landscape becomes Someone Else. Dr. Jekyll? Meet Mr. Hyde. Every surface is infused with a kind of magickal static electricity. Go ahead then, try it. Touch any random bench. See? Ghosts nip at your fingertips. I once made a sticker that advised its viewers to “Shed a little shadow on the subject–some things are seen better in the dark.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in Piedmont Park after sundown.

We’ve been undergoing this ritual for quite some time now. It begins with a trip to The Independent, a local pub. A pitcher is downed, and then? We board our diving bell, sinking deep into that darkening field. By the time we reach the center, our city has died away. Becoming a distant mirage, a memory. Merely far off lights, as inaccessible to us as the stars in the sky. And so we wander.

Once, we followed a side path into the forest, and came upon a waterfall. Majestic and moonlit it was, a place for strange happenings. Our bladders were full, so we decided to enact one ourselves. My partner sat on a granite boulder and let their pee fall into the stream. I stood before it, unbuttoned my fly, and watched the golden elixir mix and transform and transcend inside of the crystalline pool. Bizarre alchemical marriage, enacted by surrealist drunkards. Presided over by Queen Moon. A few steps later we found a proper restroom waiting for us. But we wouldn’t have given up that waterfall experience for anything.

Another night, another mystery. We crossed paths with an imposing stairway, and we climbed it. At the top, we found a labyrinth formed of black chain link fencing, the edges of tennis and basketball courts to be exact, yet our imaginations inflated it with a sense of strangeness and potency. We navigated the dark tunnel with minds ablaze. An open door beckoned us to enter, and we did so, studying the cryptic geometric shapes on the ground before us. Circles, lines…was this a basketball court, or a page from Ars Goetia? We decided on the latter. We locked our hands together and spun around the circle, shouting automatic gibberish as we turned. Finally, dizzy and delirious, we joked (but only half) that we’d summoned a demon of unknown make and model, and that we’d better watch our step. We left the labyrinth then, descending another impressive staircase. At the foot of it, an enigmatic call broke the night’s silence. An owl we thought, and yet somehow otherworldly, too. Our unknown demon friend, come a-calling? The demon Stolas, perhaps? Nothing doing but to follow the sound, and find out. The call led us to a very tall, very old tree…and then this call stopped. So we abandoned our search, and sat on a nearby bench. Eerie blue cop lights sparkled in the distance, in beautiful predatory warning.

A common locus for our wanderings here seems to be the gazebo that hangs over the lake. Occasionally, it will emit an oddly menacing aura and is avoided. But usually, we sit down here, listening to the half-sleeping duck murmurs a few feet away. Sometimes flower petals cover the ground—trivial wedding leftovers, no doubt, but oddly poetic in the comfort of the night. And strange calls are heard near this lake, too, always strange calls. Avian cryptids, heard yet not seen.

We once sat at the center of the “Active Oval” section of the park, watching unnaturally fast, unnaturally short shadow figures running around the edge of the oval. Children, perhaps, but most likely phantoms. Or fae. It was somewhere around here too, wasn’t it, that one of the earliest film projectors was first displayed? In the fall of 1895, at an international exposition. The “Phantoscope.” What a perfect name. Perhaps we were merely seeing filmic echoes, Victorian ghosts…

An essential part of our nighttime ritual appears to be the aspect of the “pilgrimage.” The walk from our apartment is quite long, and for two days in a row we tried to cut it short, to cheat. To drop the car off right next to the park itself and “get right down to it.” Our moods illogically soured as soon as we got in the car. Both times we circled the park arguing, feeling confused, and failing to find parking. Both times we suddenly abandoned the attempt, and headed straight home. With tails between legs…Piedmont Park is a veiled lady. She must be wooed first, as must every experience of the marvelous. Short cut = magick-mood killer.

On our latest trip to the park, we drifted towards Legacy Fountain. Halfway there, we spied two grown adults laughing and playing in the dark and empty playground. Emboldened by the night, casting off for a moment the repressive shackles of maturity…I thought to stop and pee in a restroom further up, but heard eerie singing coming from within, and thought better of it. Finally, reaching the field near Legacy Fountain, we decided to lay down and look up at the stars. I wondered aloud if we should check the ground for dog shit first with our phone lights. My companion countered “to check for dog shit now would be a betrayal of the experience..!” So we put ourselves in fate’s hands and fell into it. Above us, the stars seemed soft and whispering. Ready to betray all their secrets. We noticed Orion first, and then the Pleiades. When finally we pulled ourselves up off the dark ground, we realized that a couple that had been walking this way had retreated when they’d noticed us. Perhaps to them, we’d looked like sinister shadow creatures, floating up from the depths of the underworld.

We floated on, stepping into a shadow line cast by a nearby light pole and walking its length across the field to where it ended, then stopping briefly to marvel at the strange geometric shadow patterns cast by a stairway. Inside a nearby restroom, an uncanny atmosphere proliferated. An ideal place to get murdered or abducted by aliens, I thought. But in a good way. My alien hypothesis was further strengthened by the appearance of bizarre asemic writing next to the toilet. Had a confused Pleiadian crash landed here and then recorded on this wall its last sad SOS? Or perhaps he’d been on a drunken joy-flight merely, and had written a few naughty extraterrestrial limericks for his pals? We left the bathroom, and heard noises of a man or beast approaching from the leftmost stairway. We quickly scuttled towards the one on the right, and made our exit.

Reaching the end of our exploration, we mused over the fact that we never seem to leave the park by the same way we came in. For some obscure magickal reason, it feels as though one must always leave it by a different route. Near the exit a couple sat on the grass, painting in the dark. As I walked by I peeked at the canvas. Abstract patterns, circles and lines mainly, and animals. Immediately my mind went to aboriginal art. A hint, perhaps, that we were passing now through Dreamtime? The last thing we glimpsed as we left the park grounds was a shadowy figure running in the distance—barely visible behind the trees, heavy with the sense of portent. Just a typical night in the park…

Surrounds Game
As you walk speak into a voice recorder, incorporating things around you, wherever you happen to be, into a freewheeling improvisational text. This suggests the interplay of objects broken free from their utilitarian functions and reveals the hidden life of our surroundings.

– JF, DS, HC, SC

I spend much of my time daydreaming, gazing up at the ceiling, thinking of nothing or almost-nothing. Sometimes these absences lead somewhere interesting. Sometimes they don’t. But today, as I vacantly stared at the ceiling, a hazy childhood memory floated in, breaking through the veil of pleasant nothingness. A very early memory. The kind of vague, dreamlike memory that you are never even quite sure was the memory of a real event, or merely a mislabeled dream.

It was a fairly simple one – a memory of an architectural space I had spent an hour or two in with my mother once, somewhere in Atlanta. But something about the way the interior was constructed had fascinated me then. It had a large open space in the middle, and at one end, it seemed as though there was a building inside another building. Hanging plants descended from the sides of this interior building, and there were odd little terraces. Something about it felt unreal to me then and now, like the architecture of dreams, or science fiction. I thought of space colonies, and of the internet “Backrooms” series, with its irrational remixing and reshuffling of architectural spaces.

I also thought of that bizarre Italian horror film The Visitor from 1979, which had struck me most at the time for its bizarre ice skating battle(?) scene. I had noticed then that it was filmed in the very same building as my ancient memory, and had fairly successfully captured the uncanny atmosphere of that early childhood experience. Up until that point, I had never really been sure that the memory had been a real one. From this detail, I began researching online, and I finally found the name of the building. It had been called The Omni Complex, then later The CNN Center, and finally, The Center. I realized I’d passed the entrance to my childhood marvel a hundred times in recent memory, on stickering walks, protests, and other excursions, and had never even realized.

Digging further, I uncovered a (to me) fresh kaleidoscopic gem of Atlanta history. Apparently, when the center opened in 1976, it was host to “The World of Sid and Marty Krofft,” an indoor amusement park based on the various children’s shows of the Kroffts, such as the wonderfully bizarre H.R. Pufnstuf. A prime example of popular surrealism, if ever there was one. In the Krofftian imagination, everything is sentient, everything is alive. Castles have faces, and so do flutes, and even hats. It is the animism of childhood…a kind of live-action Max Fleischer world. And this park in Atlanta took it one step further, too—because a person could travel up that absurdly long escalator, and find oneself arriving in this very material realm of Unreals. A person could become a part of the Krofft’s world in real time, the inner melting towards the outer. A Cartoon-World, infecting the skin of the Real. One could ride crystal carousels, become a pinball in a massive pinball machine, and much more besides. In this place, puppets lived and puppets breathed. Unfortunately, after six months the entire place closed down. It had been barely attended, and was a total financial catastrophe, like most everything else decent in this world.

Combination of the silhouette game + diagram game with a UFO focus.

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– JF, DS, SC, HC, AM, RC, E

Magic afoot.

We were told to take a walk through the city, and to hunt for these two things:

a mole
&
a rose

I wrote the words on my feet. “Mole” was repeated on the right. “Rose” was repeated on the left. A spell, an attractor. An irrational idea, that I knew somehow would work. The feet shall know with a certainty all occult secrets which the mind shall merely intuit. So I listened to the guidance of the toe, and was not deceived.

We discovered the mole’s burrow on North Avenue. It was cold, crystalline. Dripping water had created intense stalactites, some perhaps seven or eight feet tall. We walked deeper in, and deeper. Concrete archways grew at the center of the tunnel, wise and menacing. My friend was overtaken with a sense of the grave, with the idea of a graveyard underground. The empty spaces created by the arches were like gravestones, they said, and these invisible gravestones had a corresponding material gravestone elsewhere, too. Perhaps in Decatur Cemetery, where the werewolves rein. We thought of our own deaths too, here in the underground. Looking above at the stalactites, one thought of little else. What kind of unwholesome, sick beauty might our bodies display, impaled through by these translucent spears of ice? Cars rushed by, wrapping us in a soft cocoon of sound. Ahead, a strange and slow figure creeped. Hunched over, with head and body covered in thick brown winter clothes. A fairly short human, even by our standards. We watched as they made their way to the burrow’s open mouth. We tried to hang back and avoid them, but eventually we had to pass. The brown figure cried gibberish at our backs, half in song. Gibberish, or lost mole language? Meaning felt nearby, at the tip of our conscious minds. But not quite there, not quite. We never looked back. And as we left behind this burrow, we became convinced that the strange figure was the mole. A mole spirit, in human clothes.

A few hours passed.

To be honest? At this point in our walk, we’d forgotten the search for the rose. Too many aches and pains, too much hunger. We came across a small park, and, quite relieved, searched for the nearest bench. The first was broken, so we walked on to the second. And there she waited–the tiny rose. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Not a solitary rose, either. No, she waited for us on the top of a strange little offering, an assemblage. Beautiful in its irrationality. Something had sat here and slowly built this pyre. Had collected bits of twigs, bits of grass, bits of tree. And combined them in this very special way. For who? For us? For what reason? We tried to imagine the kind of entity which would do such a thing. A spirit perhaps, or a bower bird, or a child. We tried to imagine the state of mind that would cause this mound to come into being, and to make this state our own. For a long time we sat mutely in the stillness. Listening to the distant birdsong, letting the wind nuzzle kindly at our eardrums…

City trash men walked past us, breaking the spell. Asked us both “how y’all doing?”

Pretty well, sir. Pretty well.

Any sudden end of “business as usual” ushers in possibilities for everything that is neither business nor usual. Every interruption in the “normal functioning” of government and commerce reveals glimpses of a new society that is the very negation of such sorry afflictions. Momentarily freed of the stultifying routine of “making a living,” people find themselves confronted with a rare opportunity to live. – A River’s Revenge, Chicago Surrealist Group, 1992

We took a walk before dawn. The snow had already started falling. Falling from the moon itself, perhaps. The world was a quiet pocket of calm, emptied of all people. A soft apocalypse. In the mystery of early morning, everything felt like an extension of our dreams. We walked to the center of the crossroads, amusing ourselves by drawing a pentagram in the snow with our footprints. Summoning revolution, summoning the total reinvention of everyday life. No, it is not snow which flakes down from that silvery moon. It is the great goddess Poetry herself…

In Atlanta, a minor snow collapses everything. The cars retreat to their burrows. Businesses close down, and schools all shut their doors. It is as though capitalism itself freezes. Turning finally into an white empty mannequin, into a puppet unstrung. And these snow days happen so very rarely that they barely seem real. Distant memories of a half remembered dream.

The Great Blizzard of ‘93 arrived on the morning of my 6th birthday. I like to think that my childhood self dreamed it into existence in the night – as the absolute perfect gift. I like to think it, well perhaps I did. I ran through the snow in my puffy red jacket, and with my friends, brought several great white monsters into being. Ephemeral snow golems, marvelous beasts. Childhood’s most treasured tulpas. Eventually we all came back inside, to open presents and eat cake by the fire.

The Chicago Surrealist Group once wrote the following lines about the Great Flood of ‘92:

“The majesty and fertility of the river is as irrepressible as the desire for freedom. Dreamers of the world, dream like the flood!”

Dreamers of the world, let’s dream like a snowday, too.

–

CODA
by NIMOZ

what should i call you, night
besides night
whose feathers
thick, soft, black
have turned white?

what should i call you
at sunrise
when the night turns golden?

may i call you friend
when you hold me
in the heat
and the cold
and the rain?

i hope i will die
in your arms
with the stars
looking on

Initial Concept: Mountain Stairway as Words

Chosen Stairway: Amicalola Falls

Walk the path to the waterfall. Let each step in your journey become one word in an automatic story. Let the ceaseless rhythm of walking upwards deny any attempt at backtracking, pausing or rethinking. Mutter it under your breath as you climb, record or remember it. The automatic muse will walk alongside you, invisible yet potent…

Participant 1’s story:
In the darkness was a voice. And the voice spoke into the darkness. The voice spoke the darkness into something larger than it had been. The voice spoke the darkness into becoming a giant. The giant was very beautiful, and the giant was the world. From the giant’s mouth came time or light, and from the giant’s eyes came birth, and from the giant’s ears came death. From the giant’s navel came a great rushing waterfall. In the waters dwelled silver fish and rainbow fish and golden fish. From the waters arose a thick and roiling mist. Some of the mist became clouds. Within the mist was also dust, and over time, particles of dust clumped together and formed the dry lands. Some particles of dust crawled across the land on their bellies, some grew legs and walked, some grew wings and flew. Some particles of dust grew roots and stayed still and had leaves, some grew petals, and some crawled along the ground yet also had roots and leaves, and tendrils which clung.

Participant 2’s story:
Crystal clear object. This is a foot. A foot with toes, devoured by the Dog. Spit out one toe, little doggie. Wet and slimy now, they transform at our feet. Become a diamond necklace, marvelous. This diamond necklace does Everything, it does Nothing. Depending on one’s point, and one’s view. Necklace becomes a white bird, Necklace flies into earth’s greatest sandstorm. Below this sandstorm is the Great Pyramid of Giza, and a pharaoh. A banquet is set for him, a feast. A special duck is served. The Triangle Headed Duck. When devoured, each devourer’s head is remade as triangle, too. Is triangulated. And out from each of its three points, there seep Spirits. Spirits dark, and translucent. They become Faceless Walkers, fading into Horizon. As they walk, they are joined by one loyal friend and companion: sweet “Jacket”, black and warm. But at the turn of the earth, Jacket grows two raven wings, and departs. He follows the wind, he reaches the ocean storm. And flies into it. Alexander the Great sails in this storm, he rides it, and then, he fails. Once consumed by the waves, our earth stops spinning. And all humankind leaves at last, for darkest Jupiter. Settling deep on her beckoning clouds. Our sun weeps quite freely then, and repents.

The streets are filled with an abundance of tactile experience we seldom avail ourselves of. And the tactile-imaginary is the most underused inner organ of them all. Even in our dreams, touch often plays second fiddle to visuals, to narrative and emotion. In the following experiment, I decided to explore this tactile-imaginary. To stretch that underused muscle, and see what strange new worlds might open at my fingertips.

INITIAL CONCEPT: Petting Zoo

Our world is a petting zoo. If only we’d let it be. Stretch out thy skeletal fingers (tentacles?) and stroke firm at this, the ever-changing zoo. Be not afraid of the skin-staining dirt, fear not at the bite of the traveling germ. Embrace all possibilities. Swim in the dank, marvelous Unknown of your city street’s offal.

First, choose thy desired, desiring animals. Be they goat, be they donkey, or lamb?

For myself, on this first of finger excursions, I chose the four following creatures: Elephant, Salamander, Gila Monster, Slug.

I now set out to find these tactile entities. Hidden among the highway cast offs, masked behind a thousand layers of visual camouflage…

[…that trash bag is no trash bag, friend. It is a dung beetle!]

My framing in hand, I depart.

–

Zoo Trek

The Gila Monster
I touch one hidden animal after another, looking for my chosen. Yet nothing feels quite right when I interrogate it with my fingers. Instead, I am finding other half-guessed animals, shy little creatures which skitter away at the touch. Still, the experience is quite disorienting overall. An unseen universe is opening up for me, I am reading and interacting with the landscape in an entirely new way.

Finally, on the corner of Moreland and Ponce De Leon, I find my first animal. My Gila Monster! Cars speed by as I gaze lovingly at him. A hundred eyes watch transfixed, as I reach out my trembling hand. And then I pet him. I touch Gila, and am amazed. A total tactile confirmation; this could be nothing else. My gila monster reacts very little to this caress. Merely gazes up slyly, and returns to a very long sleep.

Elephant

I find a herd of elephants in Little 5 Points. No head, no legs, no tail, but I can feel the truth. Rough, wrinkled, old. Heading towards god knows where, in the slowest, most imperceptible of motions. Covered in stickers and graffiti, tricking all with their silence. Hiding in plain sight. I touch them, and they respond to my touch. A current passes between us, and we give each other a sort of inner wink. We’re in on the secret now–are you?

Salamander

Truly a salamander is the most common creature in Atlanta at this time, for I think I have cataloged at least 5 or 6 of these odd little creatures. Many are colored orange or yellow, and can be heard screaming out a warning of some kind, things like “CAUTION”, or “CALL BEFORE YOU DIG”. A defense mechanism, perhaps? Others are blankly white or transparent and have moister skin, yet are somehow more disturbing to me, despite their lack of any scream.

Slug
Signs of him are everywhere. One sloppy slug trail after another, crossing my path. Behind dumpsters, in driveways and across streets. All is lubricated. And yet? No slugboy in sight. No final boss. My first three chosen, they were found quite quick. And yet with this guy? It’s all just hints, all just whispers. Little microscopic teases. After about an hour of walking, I get the strong and unmistakable sense that he is close by. I rush behind an Italian restaurant, knowing I’ll catch him at last. Unfortunately? It seems I’ve been left in the lurch again, because it’s just another slug trail. A trail, leading up to a drain pipe. Leading up to a roof. Seeing no safe way to follow the villain to his final hideout, I decide to give up the chase. Not every surrealist hunter bags his game, I guess. Unfortunately.

I speed home now, ready to catalog my finds. And non-finds. I burst through the door, resisting the temptation to immediately wash potentially pestilential hands. Hands that have touched a hundred strange creatures of unknown pedigrees…

No, I let the holy germs seep deep inside the keyboard, impregnating all my wandering words…

ZOO TREK

Surrounds Game
As you walk speak into a voice recorder, incorporating things around you, wherever you happen to be, into a freewheeling improvisational text. This suggests the interplay of objects broken free from their utilitarian functions and reveals the hidden life of our surroundings.

The First Dream
An entity made of pure shadow is attempting to break in. It forces a sliding door open a few inches, and passes me a pizza box through the slit. The box is empty except for a small handwritten note. This note says “JOIN US.”

The Second Dream
I wake up in my bed. I am feeling uneasy, as if someone is trying to break in. I decide to walk into the living room and turn on some lights. I have great difficulty keeping awake, as if some supernatural force is trying to lull me back to sleep. My legs feel wibbly wobbly, and I can hardly stand at all. Somehow, I manage to half-walk, half-crawl my way to the living room and attempt to turn on the light, but it won’t come on. I go to the breaker box and realize it’s been torn out of the wall by someone. I push it back in and flip the switch. Suddenly, the record player comes on, playing an old 1930s song. I decide to check the front door and discover it’s unlocked. The door swings open then, and a shadow figure stands on the threshold. I fall backwards onto the floor and then wake up again, this time for “real.”

An Automatic Response
Dream of forbidden soup. Of a soup of 1 forbidden. Drink fast? Earthshake it. Red eyes, breeding catacomb. The face of the worm(s) gone delightfulish. Just like me. Ompregnation of Jesús, Jesús as a bellybleeding-full. Secret cathedral of the halfmoon and its watcher. If Shadow Man = tool? For mere weathering of the face? Then…the kindness of my imp shall never lie.

We sat in the belly or the shadows of our Atlantean gods. Their stories had been lost to time, yet we knew we could still uncover them. Using surrational methods we channeled their myths, we collected and synthesized them. What follows is the result of our search.

PEACHTREE CENTER STATION
Before the gods was a time of blackest void. And all was of the primal heart rock then, and all was of the gneiss. And an unborn alien cry broke out upon all this orbiting solidity, and a first cracking was at once observed, and thy wheel-incrusted dragon “M” cut far through it. Ever softening us on this, the coldest of all stones. Thus was the path opened for all little walkers, all riders. Ejaculated from this, from this very first dividing were we. And an upper ladder was soon ascended. And a vertigo soon traversed. Risen were we then, there at the beginning of all history, into a new Atlantean dawn.

THE WESTIN BUILDING
There was a time when this sky-child was carefree, wandering the high mountains and clouds at will. One day when the sky-child was at play, it tripped on a great ravine and fell lengthwise across a broad continent. Like a splinter cast from the sun, scream-laughing light molecules shot forth from her fiery mouth; a beginning of all brightness. With First Fall, that overwhelming heaviness called “gravity” was born into this world. So shocked was the sky-child by this first pain that soon it cried its first tear. And where this tear fell, there rose from the granite a great citadel, one which lifted the sky-child back to its feet. It provided support and guidance for the child, and other attendant spirits helped in her formations. By her, the black was soon separated from the white, she became a god of differentiations–of definitions. All 14 stars were said to have aligned to mark her birth.

TRUIST BUILDING
He is a giant ice worm breaking sky from sky. He is a portal to the 7th dimension, and a catalyst for all destruction. Yes, this is the very god in charge of deciding when to sink the land back into the waters. His name is Arthros. He acts as a mechanism for reversed becomings, squeezed in the blue that is not blue. Arthros is mere severance from time and time’s axis, he is Movement’s betrayals beneath a fog bank in the corridors of eternity. Penetrating the self with the self, in order to become as one Unknown. Arthros’ two beloved daughters dance at his feet, pleading with him to delay the destruction. Every day they plead, and every day Arthros waits.

BANK OF AMERICA BUILDING
Her name is Lanternos, and she is both beacon and lighthouse. She invites travelers from the stars to come down and pass through her grand gate. Her light is a scent of great beauty that she uses to attract fine and bright spirits, who move softly like fabric floating gently in water. Passing her gate, they soon impregnate her. For Lanternos is a vast metallic womb, also. Spinning and birthing millions of fleshy platonic solids. Each geometric cast from her is a seed which, when planted, grows some new skyscraper demigod. Yes, this is her treasured brood, her golden children. But there is a dark one nearby who devours in secret many of these floating seedsforms before they have the chance to reach the ground, to blossom…And it is to him we now turn…

TS BUILDING
Lanternos’ dark twin, her twin with the thousand eyes. He is called Actis, and he is an open mouth which devours, and he is hunger without end. Blue electricity arcs from him like arms, tending and sorting all the things that he touches. He makes all his decisions using mysterious rules and standards, known only to himself.

– HC & SC

A secret compound of Christian monks exists inside a high wall. Standing outside the doors of the main cathedral, a head priest speaks to two of his underlings. He shows them four jewels, each of a different color. There had been four head priests, each with his own jewel. However, this priest had had the other three murdered and had gathered each of their jewels. Now that he has them, he can reach his goal. The head priest and the underlings go into the cathedral, down a long hallway, and all the way to the back where the door of the holy of holies is. They enter and the head priest lays the jewels on a table and says that Jesus will awake now. Jesus is lying there on the floor, dead and dormant, all wrapped in old strips of white cloth like linen or gauze. Jesus stirs slowly at first and then sits up, emerging from his shroud. His skin is pale and diseased, bloodless. His limbs are shrunken, yet his belly distended and bloated. His face is bloated and ugly. He is hairless. He is a piteous creature and base. On his face is an expression of wickedness and disgust. He has been held here against his will. He carries a whip, curled with sharp angles into a rough spiral. He uses the whip to attack the head priest and one underling. I no longer notice them. Now the only two I notice are Jesus and one underling. This underling is different. This underling is transformed by the greatness of the emotion that now fills his breast. This man sees Jesus. Truly sees and understands him in all his vileness and cruelty. And he loves him all the more. Even more than he ever has. He backs toward the door saying all the while, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I love you. I didn’t know…” The underling leaves the room, but Jesus can’t or doesn’t follow through the door. The man, enthralled and inflamed by his great love, goes down the hall and outside the cathedral, to the stained glass windows in the back that look into the holy of holies. The windows are locked from the outside. The man unlocks a window, and Jesus flies out into the sky, a great pale beast. He is free.

– Dream by HC, drawings by HC & ADK

William Seabrook–a hard man to introduce. A cannibal and explorer, a drunkard and a fetishist. A dabbler in occultism, and in surrealism too, though always on the outskirts. Never quite “whole hog”. A kind of liminal figure, I suppose. His most significant claim to fame, at least to the broader world, is his introduction of the term “zombie” to English speakers through his 1929 book, “The Magic Island.” This paved the way for films like “White Zombie” and countless other portrayals in popular culture. He palled around with the surrealists is Paris too, collaborating on numerous bondage-themed photo series with May Ray and Lee Miller, and contributing to the magazines VVV and Documents. Perhaps most intriguing for us, as surrealists and Atlanteans, is that he once lived on a farm just minutes away from us in Atlanta. I’d learned this while reading Lawrence Sutin’s autobiography of Crowley, and was absolutely tickled that the Crowley-Atlanta connection was on the surface of it just so seemingly frivolous, and so odd, even for weird old Aleister. You see, it turns out Seabrook had once invited Crowley to spend a summer with him here, and in between bouts of drunkenness and sex magic, they’d also spent one very strange week playing a peculiar sort of experiment–a game of WOW. The details of this episode are reproduced in Seabrook’s words below:

One following summer — it was about 1920 — I invited A. C. to spend July and August with me on a farm near Atlanta. We got to talking one night about the Trappist monks, about their vows of silence, etc., and he suggested that we try an interesting variant. He proposed that for a week we limit all verbal communication and all conversation to one prearranged monosyllable. We experimented with several, tried various animal monosyllables, including urr, woof, moo, baa, and finally decided upon wow.

We stuck to this for the whole week. Katie was amused and tolerant, visitors wondered whether we’d gone crazy, while Shep and Vonie, our two Negro servants, were convinced we’d either joined or were founding a branch of some new religion. We learned in the first couple of days, or believed we did, a good deal about the manner in which animals communicate with one another. We were both surprised how much, by mere change in intonation, volume, etc., we could communicate. After we’d become pretty good, or thought we had, in “Pass the butter,” “I don’t care for any more,” “Would you like to take a walk?” “That’s a pretty girl!” “It’s a fine morning,” “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” “I like it,” “I don’t like it,” “The hell with it,” “Isn’t it wonderful? ” and elementary things of that sort — it chanced that one night Shep brought me a gallon of moonshine corn.

A. C. and I sat up that night, drank most of it, and held a long, deep, philosophic conversation, in terms of wow, until the small hours, when Katie finally made us shut up and go to bed. She still insists that we simply got drunk and sat and barked at each other all night, but A. C. and I felt the talk had been profound and illuminating.

Between this story and the surrealist connections, I found myself utterly caught in Seabrook’s web. I scoured the historical archives, looking for clues to the location of the house. I checked census records, old maps, and newspapers. I contacted Seabrook’s living son, and even his biographer. I managed to narrow down the road, and then, a possible location for the house. Though no smoking gun ever arrived, as far as the exact point. It had been along North Decatur Rd, of that much I was fully certain from the census records. Having reached the limits of rational research methods, I knew surrational research methods were now called for…

AT THE PUB

We sit in the Irish pub on the corner of Medlock and North Decatur Rd. Thinking of Crowley, thinking of Seabrook. We drink, and play surrealist folding games. Looking to goddess chance for clues.

THE FIRST HINT OF GODDESS CHANCE
red star like coal / the wind has swept the stairway / 17 snakes bear witness

THE SECOND HINT OF GODDESS CHANCE
a dome in the dark/ flesh sheep cast to dust / let it wilt. exhale!

I contemplate these strange truths while staring deeply into that bright glowing pint bubbling piss-yellow before me. I meditate upon the Holy WOW, and then, I sigilize…

WOW, MOM, WOW.
WHAT BIG BEAST YOU RIDE!

I cook up a batch of stickers with this symbol on it, planning vaguely to place them along the entire stretch of North Decatur Rd…

THE WALKING GAME

We decide finally to play a walking game in the area, to hunt for that Holy Wow along Seabrook’s North Decatur Rd. So we ask a non-corporeal friend for some key things to look out for. Our non-corporeal friend suggests the following clues:

Things to look out for:
– Dogs that sound weird.
– Red birds.
– Signs that make sentences.

Research Hints:
– Rose of fire
– Penguins

We consult our map, and decide to start the game at the corner of North Decatur and Clairmont. We leave our car at a shopping center there, and, worried about getting booted, we decide to drop in a store and give the illusion to any watching camera eyes that we park here for entirely wholesome, above-board reasons. Most stores are closed at this time of day, but there is one, a bird supply store, which is open. Its logo? A red cardinal–our first hit.

Having purchased a perfunctory owl-shaped seed and nut ball with apricot eyes, we start on our way. I place my very first WOW sticker on a silver pole at the intersection. And then, I place another. And another. Crows fly by and caw at us, heralding the start of our journey. A red fire truck howls past too, galloping down the hill wildly. Strange dogs, of a sort?

We come across a black glove, and I am immediately reminded of Man Ray’s bdsm-tinged photo collaborations with William Seabrook. A few paces from the glove, we also spy a dark object wrapped in a plastic, wearing that plastic over itself like a mask. Another hit–Seabrook’s photo famously reproduced in Bataille’s Documents magazine, a token of his African journeys which he’d sent to Michel Leiris, for his essay “Le caput mortuum ou la femme de l’alchimiste.”

Past this point we reach a bridge, next to which a bicycle has been placed. This bicycle has been painted white, and a red rose sticks out of it. A strangely poetic memorial, for an unlucky cyclist who died here. And then? A few houses later, and we see a large halloween tableau. Multiple skeletons (or should we say zombies?) digging themselves up from the ground. And for some unknown reason, donning swimsuits. Going swimming? In a sea, in a brook?

We arrive near the area I had marked out as the most likely position of the Seabrook Farm–the corner of Medlock and North Decatur. When last I’d scoped out this area, a psychic fortune teller had occupied a house here. Now it was entirely gone, seemingly disappeared into the ether. Had I imagined it? Perhaps. We spy a crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon can, and then turn left at an Irish pub. Signs of Seabrook’s alcoholism, leading our way. A red metal rooster sits at the corner too; more red birds to egg us both on. Getting closer now? Yes, I can certainly feel it. I spot a truck parked behind the pub, covered with a collection of horror-themed bumper stickers—references to Hammer horror films, various incarnations of zombies, and the Atlanta-based Silver Scream Spook Show. …clear echoes of Seabrook’s zombie legacy, right here at the (most likely) doorstep of his Atlanta farm. Soon, we turn down a neighborhood side-street where my best-guess location is for the lost Seabrook farmhouse. A feeling of discomfort washes over us. A dog approaches in the hazy distance, barking weirdly. We’ve arrived now, haven’t we? And now? Best we depart…

THE PARK

Our non-corporeal friend has offered one more intriguing suggestion: overlay the WOW sigil I created onto a map of the area. The points where the circles hit might reveal additional points of interest to Seabrook, they say. Three of the circles point to seemingly unremarkable neighborhoods, so I decide to pass over them, but the fourth is placed right in the middle of a certain “Ira B. Melton Park”. Bingo.

So we drive there, and we begin our walk. A somewhat slow beginning. We recite poems to the spiders, marvel at oversized mushrooms, and admire the rib-like trees lining a creek bed. We pass a massive bridge across a river surrounded by overgrown vegetation, and think of post-apocalyptic fiction.

As we pass through an unexpectedly magical stretch of undergrowth, everything suddenly shifts. The trees all seem caught in a strange, hazy glow. Our minds seem caught, too. Prompted perhaps by this new environment, Hazel recalls two dreams from the previous night. In the first, they were behind the wheel of a car, and they were having trouble pressing their foot on the brake pedal to stop and were afraid they would crash. They realized an old woman was in the car and she reminded Hazel of one of their friends and thought it must be his mother. Hazel awoke into another layer of dream and realized the car and old woman had been a dream. They met their friend, and he had his mother with him. It had been a premonition dream within a dream. In the next dream, there was an ambulance driver who had died, killed by something unnatural that came from nowhere and couldn’t be seen but had devastating effects on the body, even partially melting it. As Hazel reached the end of these accounts, and we were crossing over a stone walkway over a creek, I was struck by the eerie connections between these dreams and an event in William Seabrook’s life. In this incident, Seabrook had recounted his time as a WWI ambulance driver, describing a day when he was suddenly overwhelmed by an insistent premonition of his own death by shelling. He had penned a long, solemn letter to his wife, mailed it, and set off on what he believed would be his final ride. And then…nothing at all had happened. He had been quite struck by the firm, unwavering truthfulness that this premonition had announced itself for him, and wondered curiously at its complete non-fulfilment. Much as I wonder curiously at these connections, now. What does it all mean, if anything? The answer lies beyond logic, or at least, beyond human logic.

New marvels await us across the creek. We pass building after desolate building, each rotting and graffiti-covered, each a haunting beauty. The site of an old water treatment plant, it seems. Built in 1907, undoubtedly supplying water to Seabrook and Crowley. No doubt. A large, circular pool lies hidden in the forest here, its surface still and muckish. We walk around it, tracing the boundaries of the enchanted circle. As we explore, I notice something green peeking through the leaves on the ground. I brush them away with my feet, and–low and behold–two zombies! William Seabrook would be proud.

We finish our explorations and head back towards the entrance. On the way, a child’s doll hanging in a tree catches our eye. A Haitian vodou doll, perhaps, like in Seabrook’s “The Magic Island”? And then, right before the exit we stumble upon three fairy shrines. Tiny creatures, beckoning us to the invisible realm. We leave an offering of a small stone mushroom. Their call is seductive, and, like Seabrook and Crowley before us, we are sorely tempted to follow. Perhaps, one day we will…

– HC, SC, DS, JF, AM

Directions: Each player draws disembodied eyes, nose, and a mouth, and then puts them into separate piles. Mix up. Players then grab new parts randomly from the piles and assemble a face which they glue down, filling in additional detail as they see fit.

Players: AM, SC, HC, DS, JF, S

 

 

In this reversed version of our normal silhouette game, we collectively filled in the space outside of a randomly drawn outline.

Players: SC, HC, AM, ADK

1.

2.

3.

4.

Diagram Exquisite Corpse

Question/Answer Folding Game

The Game of Listening

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

Directions: As a group, choose an abstract concept one would like to make concrete. Each person will then secretly choose a recipe ingredient which they associate with this concept. Later, create a meal using these items, and eat it.

Players: HC, SC, AM, T

Concept chosen: “EVIL”

The Recipe
black liquorice
natty light beer
sweet pickles
zebra cakes

Report back: The dominant taste of Evil, perhaps surprisingly, is one of obscene sweetness. A rough, bitter undercurrent of the abyss follows closely at its tail however, and the general feeling is an unpleasant one. One can dimly intuit how one might develop a connoisseur’s taste for it, given enough time.