Hear Here: The Disappearing Right Hand Path

"Isn't this where we came in?"

An excerpt from an early, unpublished draft of The Hallows of Death, written sometime in 1995:

Late in the day, when school ended, Harry Potter decided to try the Hermetic transform once again, so that he would know the world around him.

     First he speeded up his internal biological clock so that his thoughts raced faster and faster.  He felt himself rushing down the tunnel of linear time until his rate of movement along the axis was enormous.  First, therefore, he saw vague floating colors and then he suddenly encountered the Watcher, which is to say the Boggart, who barred the way between the Lower and the Upper Realms.  The Boggart presented itself to him as a nude female torso that he could reach out and touch, so close was it.  Beyond this point he began to travel at the rate of the Upper Realm so that the Lower Realm ceased to be something but became, instead, a process;  it evolved in accretional layers at a rate of 31.5 million to one in terms of the Upper Realm's time scale.

     Thereupon he saw the Lower Realm-not as a place-but as transparent pictures permutating at immense velocity.  These pictures were the Forms outside of space being fed into the Lower Realm to become reality.  He was one step away, now, from the Hermetic transform.

     The final picture froze and time ceased for him.  With his eyes shut he could still see the room around him; the flight had ended; he had eluded that which pursued him.  That meant that his neural firing was perfect, and his pineal body registered the presence of light carried up its branch of the optic conduit.

     He sat for a little while, although "little while" no longer signified anything.  Then, by degrees, the transform took place.  He saw outside him the pattern, the print, of his own brain; he was within a world made up of his brain, with living information carried here and there like little rivers of shining red that were alive.  He could reach out, therefore, and touch his own thoughts.  The room was filled with their fire, and immense spaces stretched out, the volume of his own brain external to him.

     Meanwhile he introjected the outer world so that he contained it within him.  He now had the universe inside him and his own brain outside everywhere.  His brain extended into the vast spaces, far larger than the universe had been.  Therefore he knew the extent of all things that were himself, and, because he had incorporated the world, he knew it and controlled it.

     He soothed himself and relaxed, and then could see the outlines of the room, the coffee table, a chair, walls, pictures on the walls:  the ghost of the external universe lingering outside him.  Presently he picked up a book from the table and opened it.  Inside the book he found, written there, his own thoughts, now in a printed form.  The printed thoughts lay arranged along then time axis which had become spacial and the only axis along which motion was possible.  He could see, as in a hologram, the different ages of his thoughts, the most recent ones being closest to the surface, the older ones lower and deeper in many successive layers.

     He regarded the world outside him which now had become reduced to spare geometric shapes, squares mostly, and the Golden Rectangle as a doorway.  Nothing moved except the scene beyond the doorway, where his mother rushed happily among tangled old rosebushes and a farmland she had known as a child; she was smiling and her eyes were bright with joy.

     Now, Harry thought, I will change the universe that I have taken inside of me.  He regarded the geometric shapes and allowed them to fill up a little with matter.  Across from him the ratty blue couch that Ron Weasley prized began to warp away from plumb; its lines changed.  He had taken away the causality that guided it and it stopped being a ratty blue couch with Butter Beer stains on it and became instead a Hepplewhite cabinet, with fine bone china plates and cups and saucers behind its doors.

     He restored a certain measure of time--and saw Ron come and go about the room, enter and leave; he saw accretional layers laminated together in sequence along the linear time axis.  The Hepplewhite cupboard remained for a short series of layers; it held its passive or off or rest mode, and then it was whisked over into its active or on or motion mode and joined the permanent world of the phylogons, participating now in all those of its class that had come before.  In his projected world brain the Hepplewhite cabinet, and its bone china pieces, became incorporated into true reality forever.  It would now undergo no more changes, and no one would see it but he.   It was, to everyone else, in the past.

     He completed the transform with the formulary of Hermes Trismegistus:

     Verum est . . . quod superius est sicut quod inferius et quod inferius est sicut quod superius, ad

      perpetrando miracula rei unius.

     That is:

     The truth is that what is above is like what is below and what is below is like what is above, to

     accomplish the miracles of the one thing.

     This was the Emerald Tablet, presented to Maria Prophetissa, the sister of Moses, by Tehuti himself, who gave names to all created things in the beginning, before he was expelled from the Palm Tree Garden.

     That which was below, his own brain, the microcosm, had become the macrocosm, and inside him as microcosm now, he contained the macrocosm, which is to say, what is above.

     I now occupy the entire universe, Harry realized;  I am now everywhere equally.  Therefore I have become Adam Kadmon, the First Man.  Motion along the three spacial axes was impossible for him because he was already wherever he wished to go.  The only motion possible for him or for changing reality lay along the temporal axis; he sat contemplating the world of the phylogons, billions of them in the process, continually growing and completing themselves, driven by the dialectic that underlay all transformation.  It pleased him;  the sight of the interconnected network of phylogons was beautiful to behold.  This was the kosmos of Pythagoras, the harmonious fitting together of all things, each in its right way and each imperishable.

     I see now what Voldemort saw, he realized.  But more than that, I have rejoined the sundered realms within me;  I have restored the Shekhina to En Sof.  But only for a little while and only locally.  Only in microform.  It would return to what it had been as soon as he released it.

     "Just thinking," he said aloud.

     Hermione came into the room, saying as she came, "What are you doing, Harry?"

     Causality had been reversed;  he had done what Voldemort could do: make time run backward.  He laughed in delight.  And heard the sound of bells.

     "I saw Chinvat," Harry said. "The narrow bridge.  I could have crossed it."

     'You must not do that," Hermione said.

     Harry said,"What do the bells mean?  Bells ringing far off."

     "When you hear the distant bells it means that the Saoshyant is present."

     "The Chosen One," Harry said.  "Who is the Chosen One, Hermione?"

     "It must be yourself," Hermione said.

     "Sometimes I despair of remembering."

     He could still hear the bells, very far off, ringing slowly, blown, he knew, by the desert wind.  It was the desert itself speaking to him.  The desert, by means of the bells, was trying to remind him.  To Hermione he said, "Who am I?"

     "I can't say," Hermione said.

     "But you know."

      Hermione nodded.

     "You could make everything very simple," Harry said, "by saying."

     "You must say it yourself," Hermione said.  "When the time comes you will know and you will say it."

     "I am--" the Wizard said hesitantly.

     Hermione smiled.


I never fully understood Harry's relationship to Voldemort, or why Voldemort was threatened by a child until I read this.  It wasn't Harry's ability to resist the Dark Arts that threatened Voldemort; he would have been perfectly fine if Harry had ignored the Dark Arts altogether.  What most threatened Voldemort was Harry's ability to master the Dark Arts, his ability to control them, something Voldemort never could.  That's some pretty deep shit.

This Is Your Drugs on Brain

The above story is a fake.  The "early, unpublished draft of The Hallows of Death" is actually a mash up of Philip K. Dick's The Divine Invasion with Harry Potter.  Other than some of the names, J.K. Rowling had nothing to do with it.

Hardcore Harry Potter fans probably recognized the shenanigans right away and stopped reading before I even had the chance to confess.  Casual Potter fans probably sensed it was some kind of a fan-fiction stunt but stuck around long enough for the punchline.  To the observant Dick-heads?  We are a fractured bunch, so I have no idea.  And to the few of you that might have trusted me, I apologize.  If you feel deceived, deception was not my intention.  Let me try to explain.

Mash ups are everywhere.  In music, film, collage, video games, anything really.  The most complex field to utilize mash ups is probably quantum physics.  Finished in 2008, the Large Hadron Collider is a high-energy particle collider designed to test out and prove different theories about particle physics.  It mashes and smashes like a beast.  The most famous function of this nine-billion dollar machine was to find observable proof of that elusive particle known as the Higgs-Boson, which for decades existed only as a mathematical theory.  Amazingly, only five years after the completion of the LHC, those incredibly smart people working at CERN provided observable proof of it's existence, which means apparently one of two things.  Either millions now living will never die OR everyone living right now is already dead.  That's some pretty deep shit too.

I wonder what Marshall McLuhan would think about all of this?  I think he would laugh at first and then calmly explain to the perplexed that the Large Hadron Collider is also a fake, a ridiculous, expensive fake.  The real technology, the largest high-energy particle collider ever made, is that great gray lump in your head, and every second of everyday it is busy mashing and smashing every conceivable component of reality.  And this is just when we are awake!   When we go to sleep, or when we ingest certain plants, we really let the fucker rip.

So why build the LHC?  Why the fake?  And what does this have to do with Roger Waters?

"So ya, thought ya, might like to go the show….."  

R.W.