...The only real world was the world of mind.
...As a child, mind was where he retreated, where he found a reality to his liking. Therefore he was always in some form of retreat in order to contemplate his awareness, impressions and self-consciousness at a pace most suitable to his understanding. His fantasy world was filled with gentle creatures, thickets and forests. It was filled with adventure. Mighty men and women conquered in the end or performed great feats to the roar of an adoring crowd.
...Often his world was abstract: geometric patterns, not as some would imagine, as static triangles and squares interlocking at unusual angles, but flowing patterns, patterns that appeared for an instant in brightly colored hues and quickly melted, dissolving into the stream around it.
...As he grew older these forms were enhanced by manifestations in the outer world. He became an athlete, not as amazing as those in his world, yet the skill he did have gave him great delight and satisfaction. He learned to play the guitar. Alone in the evenings, he picked plaintive melodies superimposed over and interwoven with triads and more complex structures. Although he didn't realize it, these were the times he discovered his deepest and most profound feelings and emotions.
...Yet always there was the world of mind. People moved not in one direction or another; they flowed in colorful streams. The athlete didn't merely move in one way or another; he expressed a coordination of muscle and energy in a smooth, seemingly effortless motion in a boundless space until checked by another motion. His music was part of the flow. Notes and chords built delicate structures, first strengthening each other on the emphasized beats, then sounding separately or in syncopation- contrapuntal forces in an alternation of strength from melody to rhythm, from obvious to underlying, creating a tug of war of the mind, an ebb and flow of attention which at the same time was a singular expression of their underlying unity. Like a chess game the world moved in fathomless motions, ever coordinated and smooth as though there were some master plan. Yet he could never see that plan and from the conflict between his world and the world that infringed on his smooth motions came his confusion. Conflict between idealism and reality made him feel angry and betrayed, between self-centeredness and his relations with other people, lonely. Nothing in his experience filled the need deep inside him for substance, something he could touch and feel, something solid and strong, something that would fill the vacuum, fulfil the vortex ever crying out for meaning and solid ground.
...Gableplunk is the name of a journey, the journey of a mind. Gableplunk is the sound of a motion and Gableplunk is his name. Happily and momentarily suspended from his inner turmoil he sang a sing-song melody.

...He stopped. "What name can I use? mmmmm. How about no name? Let other people fill in their own names. More fun for them." He started again and strummed the chord a little louder when he left a blank in the lyrics.

My name is demented _____
And I walk with my _____ up my _____
I'm as jovial as can be
When I take my _____ to bed

My name is demented _____
I live as well as I can
All I need is food
And some _____ on the side

"Demented Blank"

...One day Gableplunk packed and left town. He followed the Old Mill Road, an ancient track along the road at the far end of town. He'd decided to follow it as far east as it would take him.
...He wound his way through the fields and over hillsides until all signs of the town were erased. Often he skirted the edges of a stream or great thickets of impenetrable berry bushes. It was a sunny day, clear, not too hot, not too cool. Clouds danced merrily, billowing in slow motion, making great masses of air almost visible.
...Gableplunk whistled and sometimes stopped to sit under a tree. He took a deep breath and played a tune on his harmonica.
...A wagon appeared in the distance. As it neared, Gableplunk saw two people sitting in the high seat. Soon the sounds of clip-clopping could be heard and a single horse drew the wagon into view. Gableplunk watched as it drew to a halt near an old fallen tree on the other side of the road.
..."Hello. We heard your harmonica past the last hill. Liked it. Nice tune you were playing." A woman's face peered from behind the man's chest. She looked across the road, smiled and leaned over to whisper to the driver. "Which way are you going?" the driver asked.
..."East," Gableplunk replied.
...The man looked at his horse, then asked, "Would you like a ride?" Gableplunk's eyes swept beyond the wagon to the distant hills. He inhaled deeply and held it for an instant.
..."Yes. I'd like that," he answered and smiled.
..."Drop your bag in the back. There's a step up on the other side. Gableplunk crossed the road, pulled himself up and the driver snapped his reins. "Gid up," he called and urged the horse to a slow pace with tchitching sounds.
...They drove for miles, talking about the countryside and the fine day. The woman's name was Ethyldreda and the driver's, Jann. They had a small farm a little farther east. Their children had grown and moved away. One lived in the city. Another had married and lived nearby.
...Jann and Ethydreda told Gableplunk he was welcome for dinner and could stay overnight in the loft in the barn. There were lights and running water and a hammock. The extra bedrooms in the house were small and cluttered with boxes containing the things they hadn't discarded after the children had gone. It was a warm evening and the barn would be cooler. The sun set slowly.
...An hour later they turned off the road. Gableplunk could see the roof of the house silhouetted against the moonlit sky. The lower part blended into the darkness and was lost to the eyes.
...They stopped in the yard and Gableplunk helped carry sacks of flour and grain to the barn. They walked to the house and opened the door. Eyes shined in the darkness. A shiver crossed Gableplunk's shoulders. Jann snapped his fingers and called into the interior; a growling dog appeared.
..."Don't be afraid," Jann said. "He won't harm you when we're here." A light flickered on. "Come in." Jann snapped his fingers, calling the dog behind them. He called, "Ethyl?" and she answered, "In here." Gableplunk followed into the kitchen.
..."Jann, show our guest the washroom. Supper'll be ready soon. He led Gableplunk through a darkened hallway.
...They had dinner in a quiet corner of the kitchen. Everyone was tired from the wagon ride. The sounds of food being chewed, "Pass the salt please," with a nodding of the head or a deep breath, a slight lifting of the chin or shifting in the chair were the only sounds sharing the stillness of the evening.
...After dinner they cleared the table and washed the dishes. Jann turned on a light in the next room. Returning to the kitchen he said, "We retire early. Come, I'll show you the loft."
...Surprised with the sudden contact break, Gableplunk suppressed his desire for conversation. He thanked Ethyldreda, said good night and followed Jann into the moonlit yard. The dog trotted beside them.
...They entered the barn, passed the horse's stall and climbed a ladder to the loft. Jann turned on a lamp and climbed back down to the floor below. They exchanged good nights and he closed the barn doors. Moonlight shined through a window. The sound of an owl and the faint rustling of hay from below harmonized with the strange nocturnal song of the wind and the crickets. The barn was inundated with silence.
...The roar of a truck passing beneath his window roused Gableplunk from his reverie. A transistor radio floated by, blaring.
...Disrupted, Gableplunk was annoyed. An uneasy feeling and vague childhood memories caused him to twitch. Jangled, he crossed the room to his guitar case and took out the wooden instrument. Trying to soothe himself, he found only a reiteration of his tension. He began to play in a minor key and sing almost inaudibly a low and sad melody.

"Reach Out"

...Gableplunk rarely used a clock. Nocturnal, he slept in the mornings after the incoherent ravings of the mad woman from the building down the block ceased. Each morning at seven she shuffled through the neighborhood crying out in her desolation. Was she lonely or frightened, half-crazed by grotesque or demonic dreams? Was she maddened by her inability to come to terms with the concrete, mechanical and spiritually debilitating world she lived in? Gableplunk wasn't able to find out. Whenever anyone approached her, she lashed out in fury and ran in the opposite direction.
...Gableplunk felt compassion for the crippled man whose job was hauling the trash from the basement of the next building. With hips twisted, the man grimaced each time he lifted a can to the step above. Gableplunk often bid him a cheerful good morning and the man smiled, remembering it was good to be alive. He soon renewed the battle with the cans and although Gableplunk sometimes helped to lighten his burden, he couldn't lighten his own heart. Gableplunk, too, was crippled. His deformity was inside and the crippled man was a mirror; Gableplunk saw his own reflected spirit.
...A shaggy black dog lived in the neighborhood. Shy, easily frightened, she rolled on her back in submission to anyone approaching. She'd had puppies a year before and her owners had turned her out into the streets. She lived as well as she could from scraps of food that people fed her but in the winter she grew gaunt; her usual liveliness and the playfulness in her eyes were extinguished. She refused to live with Gableplunk. Faithfully she slept in the cold wet shelter of her masters' doorway. Was she a ghost? The spirit of a dog's being killed with no recourse but to live out her fate? These were some of the inequities that led Gableplunk to cry out, "This is a filthy world I live in!"
...Yet sometimes he could feel the warm breeze of a new awareness. In his bitter moments he called it a draft, for he had no way of understanding, nothing in his experience to compare it with. The supra-consciousness born of futility and helplessness was a lightness that came and left in the blink of an eye at the oddest moments.
...He was often unaware of slipping into such a state. It was only in these times, these brief suspended moments, that he was happy. Sometimes he'd think:
......Why is there this lightness, this simple and empty knowledge surrounded by this sea of soulful suffering, this morass of twisted kelp that suffocates and spurs me to maniacal frenzies?
And the lightness would fade. He'd try to hold on to it but it would fade away, unconcerned.
...He couldn't understand. Was it a result of slipping over his limit of tolerance, a form of shock, a temporary suspension designed and carried out by his body? Did his nervous system relieve his burdens before he passed the point of no return, before he shattered into a million incoherent fragments and fell into a state of protective idiocy?
...He felt it was more. It was lightness with no concern for safety. There was nothing to hurt him, for he wasn't there to be hurt. After a time he learned that he could neither control it nor hold on to it. Trying to siphon pleasure from it, it faded; trying to examine it, to analyze it proved impossible; it dispersed as though the wind had swept it away; leaving it alone, letting thoughts and images come and go as they pleased, attaching no importance to one over another, it remained; no particular attention given, a superb attention was gained- an attention encompassing all that was possible at that moment. Free and at peace, Gableplunk radiated serenity. His smile and calm appearance made everyone who saw him smile and feel happier for the moment.
...One evening a cool breeze cleansed the malevolent spirits from the streets. It was quiet and a great many stars shined from an inky black sky. Not comprehending that which brought lightness and peace into his usually tumultuous inner life, he expressed a new awareness and his uncertainty in song. In a lively and clear voice he sang

"Jesus, There's Something Creeping"

...Gableplunk was crucified. Misery and suffering existed side by side with the potential to end them. How could he bring this potential into play? What forms would it take?
...Anguished beyond comprehension, Gableplunk sought answers. He'd been helpless yet comfortable too long. To allow apathy to exist for even one more day would be unendurable, like sticking a knife into his soul and twisting it, exchanging one unbearable wound for another. Although the agony of the knife would be understandable and less dangerous than facing the unknown, Gableplunk knew he could no longer cling to the safety of his all-too-familiar misery, despising his ineptness yet holding fast to his distress and twisting the knife minutely deeper with each passing day.
...Gableplunk searched his memory for a clue. Perhaps there was a predisposition that led him to experience the world as a never-ending series of opposing forces, an endless variety of joys and sorrows, of happiness only as a momentary escape from misery. Striving for release only made him more miserable; it emphasized his inadequacy, yet in his misery there was a strange pleasure- the pleasure of self-pity. In a fantasy, he imagined people standing near his coffin, mourning their loss.
...Allowing other images and emotions to flood to the surface, Gableplunk entered a dream. People were sources of energy, warm and full of life yet impossibly distant- electric sensations passing from one point to another. Emotions became indiscernible from images. Gableplunk seemed to be floating. Time seemed to drift. Currents of darkness swirled and couldn't be touched. Gableplunk slipped into the stream and whirled; he wasn't moving. Soft floating sensations bore him through the darkness. All the deep swirled around him. Then the whirl was within him! It gripped him and his dark nest sailed from beneath; he reached, failed and foundered in the emptiness; now Gableplunk revolved. Turning over and over, moon without a planet, the void engulfed him; he shattered into ten million pieces, each piece picked up by a non-existent current, transported in limitless directions until a part of him reached a star and became fiery orange; Gableplunk vanished into a billion places and he knew those places as he knew his own soul and each new Gableplunk transformed into a new color; a sun, a metallic planet, deep black for the traveler's journey through emptiness, silver for reflecting mirrors of the future, gold for wisdom and green for new life; fears dissipated; love swelled and was gone; ego became transparent; billions of Gableplunks reached and moved through transparency into selfless dimensions; fright beyond experience consumed him; his brain exploded fiery red, imploded blue-white and was gone; Gableplunk was gone. Time seemed to drift. Darkness swirled and transformed slowly into shades of blues and oranges; waves and pulsations took shape; colors and glitter were born; drawing from all came a form; an infinitesimal stream of new energy coursed, reaching its limits, calling for others of its kind; a light shined, blinked out, disappointment; shined again, elation!
...Gableplunk opened his eyes. He looked around. He was still alive! Memory returned. Bewildered yet pleased he felt buffered by the distance of time. His experience seemed more objective, less personal, bathed in blue sunlight. Not fully comprehending, he picked up his guitar and began to strum. From a basic blues form he improvised a discord. Peppering the basic structure with dissonant notes, he felt a grating in his brain. Although still unbalanced and in a daze, he sang

I wonder if that isn't
The knife?

"Comfort Is A Twisting Knife"

...The rhythmic notions of strumming sent a smooth flow of energy coursing through his body. He filled his lungs deeply, bringing the extra oxygen needed to clear his head. The coordination of voice and hands and the relaxation of his neck and throat muscles helped to calm him and effect a balance between body and mind.
......A man's life has no single reason for existing. I can't trace my presence backwards in time with any degree of certainty, for I've only my memory to guide me and my memory often has a way of its own, independent of the truth of Gableplunk. A series of events, a way of life- from these spring new ways seemingly causatively connected but, as memory is deceptive, so, too, is our conscious structuring of our past moments, thousands of moments perceived and interpreted and filed in our memories until patterns seem to appear; we erroneously decide that such and such event in our past is the cause of our behavior in the present; memory and structuring ability are interconnected, though in ways impossible to isolate or describe conclusively. Like a translucent crystal whose vertices are constantly changing, shifting the boundaries between the units, even eradicating them, changing hexagonal prisms into tetrahedrons sliding along each others edges and melting together to form a fluid unit one moment, a dispersion, like oil on water, the next, this interconnection of mind, memory and events paradoxically validates causal relationships between past and present; psychology becomes inseparable from metaphysics upon realizing the truth of scientific method: isolation and division for a purpose, not a description or pseudo-validation of a state of separateness. With the scientific evolution we learned to divide and separate. In our minds we forgot to put the pieces back together.
...Gableplunk's perception of his life as a dichotomy, endless divisions of happiness and sadness, day and night, rich and poor, life and death, often left him in tears or angry in frustration. This anger and helplessness were turned inwards, generating the energy and motivation for both self-hatred and preservation which he could only direct towards the uneasy process of understanding.
...Gableplunk discovered that division may be understood in many ways. Idly strumming, picking chords and extensions that led to modulations, he felt unusually open and free from his intense self-occupation. He began to drift into a more impersonal medium. A lofty feeling seemed to carry him out into the limitless evening sky. Millions of pulsating lives twinkled. The Milky Way swirled around him, enveloping him, caressing him, telling him he was welcome.
...His flat picking took on a rhythm and his fingers began to fly. Playing a major, a seventh, quickly forming the eleventh and back to the seventh, he burst into the Cosmic Division! Like the Whirlwind, he scattered all who stood before him with his song:

"Cloud Street"

...His new role became him. Like the Prince of Pleasure, he was elated! He stopped playing and plunged deeply into intense meditation.
......Where am I?
...Wave after wave of knowledge thundered against him; on the outside he was still. Dwarf-like fingers groped in the darkness, pulling Gableplunk behind. He could feel the molecules of his existence slipping, brushing against him; he plunged forward.
......Where am I?
...He found his body, settling quickly into the nerves, following the millions back to the junction that was his brain. Incredible denseness he encountered, myriad lights in the distance, messages carried in tiny chariots, dwarf-like fingers groping in the darkness, pulling Gableplunk behind. The question was pounding, ever pounding.
......Where am I?
...Something ruptured; the barriers burst! His brain parted! Carried on a wave of blood he burst into glory! Beyond towering cliffs were the universe and two stars, awesomely detached, giving forth all the energy of the universe and Gableplunk was those two stars. Possessed, in another world yet the same world, his fingers flew to the guitar fret-board; he played and sang of his certain vision:

There are two of us,
Different,
Yet the same
I am not yet one
But yet, not two

"Beyond Brain"