Cobwebs on my Soul

When the world kicked me in the throat I simply faded into obscurity, finding myself in a cut-price motel room that stank of jailhouse disinfectant, and where everything was Andy Warhol pink. Hearing footsteps upstairs, and the screeching and scratching of grey-haired wood, as well as the wheezing of ageless steam pipes in the walls. I could distinguish all these dejected, grief-stricken sounds, for that was the one distinct period of my life, the most bizarre moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was. I was elsewhere, haunted and exhausted from roaming. I looked at the dirty window just above my head and for about two mad minutes I wasn’t aware of who I was. I wasn’t afraid, I was just somebody else, an unknown person, and my whole life had the eerie vitality of a shadow against the wall.

This was when I got to know a struggling pile of tattered clothes and scraggy limbs, sluttish and filthy, cleaning what teeth she had left with charcoal. A lived-in look to her features, with plenty of creases, scars and other peculiarities as if her face has taken on the character of the situations that had deeply and most fiercely been part of her life. She once told me she graduated from college, but I don’t know, I just can’t picture it. By then she was too ancient and haggard for anything but honest labour. She couldn’t thieve and she was too old to be a prostitute, so now she was the lowest of the low, an honest wage-earner, who sold fruit and nuts from a cardboard box. Oh, the humiliation.

Cobwebs on her soul.

A hero is one who believes that all his mistresses are ladies, a villain is one who believes all ladies are potential whores, and they’ll willingly cross the line from being somewhat unique to unashamedly offbeat and wild. There was a lady, the niece of a Mahumetan, who was greatly in love with me, and I accepted her intimacies with other women, possibly only because of my own infidelities. It was an intense and fabulously flawed marriage. A princess and a hobo. When the stars hung low and fires flickered, I would drop handfuls of cedar, pine and cypress seeds into her footprints.

I wish I knew where you are now.

Most of what I understand to be good and true and lasting has come not from intellectuals but from minstrels and Gypsies. And once I realised this it dawned on me that, I want to sit around a Gypsy campfire with my little dogs beside me, eating freshly caught rabbit in the company of bare-knuckle fighters, and listen to stories about their campaigns. I want to sit with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table after they’ve defeated the barbarians in battle. I want to be there when Arthur pulls Excalibur from the stone, and I want to be surrounded by dragons, wizards and sorcerers. I want to drink with Caribbean buccaneers of the 17th century and listen to their tales of preying on shipping and Spanish settlements. I want to witness Celtic Berserkers fighting in the trancelike fury of ritual warfare. I want to spend time working on a scrap cruise, the very last cruise before the ship is due to be scrapped, so there’s no future in it, and it attracts all the mad faces of the Merchant Navy. Faces that are known in that industry, who couldn’t survive outside the life and who for the most part are quite dangerous and mad themselves. And I want to ride with highwaymen on ribbons of moonlight over the purple moor.   

Somewhere between the innocence of infancy and the recklessness of humanity lie those wild-eyed unsung heroes; the mad tramps and angels who I befriend.

So, I roamed around the world. I listened to flute players in Calcutta, drank brandy on a balcony in Mombasa, smoked cần sa in Ho Chi Minh City, slept rough in the polluted and putrid city of Peshawar, and, with ethereal spirits reassuring me, made it from Shanghai to the other side of nowhere.

Sometimes, I’d find myself in the back of beyond.

And sometimes, in the back of beyond, I’d find myself.

I eventually spent a few years in Aden, a port city in Yemen, until I settled in Al-Habash, in the House of Solomon, the ruling dynasty of the Abyssinian Empire, the members of whom can claim direct descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, who in Kenya was known as Oloye Bilikisu Sungbo, which is suspiciously close to the Arabic name for her, Bilqīs.

The Queen of Sheba, rumoured to be part Djinn, brought to Solomon the very same gifts which the Magi later brought to Christ - those gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh – although 1000 years earlier than the Magi.

The joining of humans and Djinni in marriage is still practiced in some parts of the world. Did you know that?

One tobacco-scented summer with kánnabis to smoke, a girl I knew went half-crazy following her inner moonlight. Half-crazed with a clear-skinned voice and smelling of Mexican sunlight, the Señora crossed her golden thighs behind my back and never went dancing below. It was only the insanity that kept her sane.

Your whole psyche vibrates when a storyteller - that carefree scamp – begins the oldest of tales. You can tell stories at that indigo time of night, when light tracking-snow is on the ground, and you hear elk feet shuffling in the hoarfrost. They can be about hobos with souls laminated in cobwebs, wagon trains coming from the east, caravans of forever children, stone arrowheads, monasteries that crumble into valleys, or winter chilling the lap of October. They can be about frozen rivers or summer meadows, rainy June afternoons, pine needle soup, or conversations between pensioners and the stars. They can be about silent maps of bones, blood dripping from a warrior’s lance, robber’s haunts and witch’s dens, or wolves wandering across the great white north. They can be about women with covered faces and Moorish eyes, about love soft as an easy chair, snowflakes falling in the wrong place, a blood-red African moon over the Algarve horizon, elephants drifting across a midnight desert, distant voices that echo from the past, or about the savage, magnificent animal that is you. They can be about woody notes, slurred gut-bucket riffs and heat sneaking up fast. About pink mountains of shrimp in the marketplace, or barrio fiestas where exotic Tehuana women with flowers in their hair dance with rhythm and dignity, while their long rabona skirts billow out around them.

After listening to the high-plains drums in New Mexico, I tried making a living out of drumming. I drummed beneath a harvest moon, drumming with a kind of mystic poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize …. and the world went by elsewhere.

But it wasn’t for me, so, with my little dogs beside me, I became a tattooed storyteller, weaving tales as the setting paprika sun shone right into the cave.

As a roaming raconteur I earned a crust spinning yarns whilst riding long-tailed boats through the back waters of Bangkok, and while watching for UFOs under a bamboo moon, and once in a homestead as sunlight walked across the back porch floor. My dogs and I lay in long grass at midnight and while my life soared by just beyond reach, like a root of timeless wisdom waiting to be unearthed, I listened to silences I’d previously been unaware of. Following that I told tales of emerald hills, sacred mysteries, wagons hitched to yesterday’s dreams and smiles hinting of secret delights. I can’t explain that, except that it kind of fogged up my brain, but I enjoy sometimes feeling this way.

I earned enough for food that tasted the way damp stones smell.

And as I travelled, told my stories and listened to other people, I came to realise that all our beliefs are obsolete. They’re fucking archaic! There is no fundamental bedrock to any of our beliefs. And the reason we hold false mental representations of the world is because our brains tend to favour faulty assumptions and social integration over what some would term gospel truth.

So, with the intention of discarding all my beliefs, the Gypsy in my wandering spirit went hopping freight trains, hitch-hiking, walking and talking my way across the globe with charisma that is not really wrapped too tight. I have holy curiosity and crazy wisdom, I know that, and I intended to simply go and discover what’s out there between light and shadow, and to delight in it all.

In the parched wilderness of the West the dust penetrated my bloodstream and trickled through to the depths of my soul. The West had a sinister splendour to it, an uncanny beauty, and at twilight I could hear ghostly harmonies and celestial refrains drifting across the desert like perfume. Wraithlike melodies bleeding into the night, and I wanted to live there forever. But only cowboys can survive the desert, and, I suppose, Bedouin tribesmen, but not a dreamer like me.

Over the course of our travels, in the whispering pastel shades of dreamtime, we heard Indians chanting in deep, compelling tones, and saw forgotten travellers in moonless, black robes. On one warm crimson morning, after the white sun had turned to big red, I witnessed dancing clan mothers telling fortunes in the sand. I’d met the caretakers of secrets, and felt as though I’d been on a Shamic journey to the other side of self. And Wizards, Elves and Angels protected me and the dogs. Yet I still retained my beliefs.

Well … after a fashion, for I’d sometimes exist in bizarre, haunted places where it felt to me as if I’d done this before, whatever it was – washing the dishes or buttering the same slice of toast – and at the same time it felt like I was doing it for the very first time ever, like I was programming myself to pick up someone else’s memory and etch it into my mind. 

But I did learn one thing – apart from the fact that every single tree carries a story – I learned that all doctrines, creeds, and articles of faith are nothing but somebody else’s dross. All of them. And that’s because they humiliate the Freethinkers. And that won’t do at all.

A warm kiss, a cold beer, hardened waitresses and explosive affairs while listening to jazz blowing faint across the river, a ratbag of a river, muddy, polluted, oily, smoky and rank. A river of easy virtue, if ever there was such a thing.

God continues to give life to womanhood and propels her out onto backstreets and alleyways, but every now and again, a lady walks up with flowing black hair, panther eyes and an ophidian smile, full bloom, just bursting out of her robe, a sex creature, a curse, a zenith, the end of it all.

Those fiercely independent women, with their sultry bedroom eyes and predatory smiles, women who take no shit from anybody, seem to trust me and listen to me when I philosophise.

However, we are all immortal children of the universe, and the truth is still the truth, no matter who tries to scare you into believing otherwise. We should view with the utmost suspicion any ideology that claims to own the monopoly on the Creator.

So, what about you? Enough about me, what about you? Your soul may well consist of vagabonds, visionaries, and venomous snake worshippers, for these are the outcasts who fairies and goblins recognise with that unruly part of perception that the soul holds dominion over. You have the free spirit of a court jester and the wild ghost of an animal inside, which I guess is why you can be a little bit unpredictable at times. Everything the establishment has said is faulty and defective with you, is what’s genuine and authentic about you, because you see things others don’t.

I don’t know if you’re hard-wired to change the world, at least the world around you, or not. But people like us certainly appreciate the profound and the enigmatic. We paint the town red with ideas! Our minds are uncontrollable, and the establishment is intimidated by this.

You see, we must create our own roadshow. But those who are stressing about being misgendered, or racial tension, or being offended at absolutely nothing, perhaps just a word, are already suppressed. They’ve already killed off all their darlings. And that is boneheaded thinking.

As for me? I’m probably 20% masterpiece and 80% mess all at the same time. Hero or villain, cowboy or dreamer, mad tramp or angel, cobwebs on my bloodshot soul or not, I believe in me. Flawed, frustrated, cracked and repaired with gold …. but still kickin’ ass.

If I were to look for a Tarot card to represent me, it would have to be ‘The Fool’, which displays me at the outset of my journey, although it should be made clear that ‘The Fool’ in the Tarot deck never represents a fool. ‘The Fool’ is never a fool; he just hasn’t planned things properly. I have my two little white dogs beside me, who’ll protect me on my journey, but will push me to learn life’s lessons. 

The most important thing for ‘The Fool’ is to just go out and enjoy the world. To discover what’s out there and to delight in all of it. ‘The Fool ‘represents crazy wisdom, for his journey may well be to discover advanced and contemporary ideas, and to tell stories about them. ‘The Fool’ has holy curiosity.

And my little white dogs will always watch over me.

It’s a striking epiphany when you finally get comfortable in the knowing that you’re kind of mismatched on this planet. I feel too much about too many things. And some people don’t feel enough. I prefer people with depth. People who’ll talk about sorcery, soul contracts, past lives, distant worlds, death, immortality, otherworldly beings, the lies they’ve told, what scares them, their fuck ups, and what cracks opened their truths. Small talk never fed my spirit. I prefer people with a slightly tainted mind.

So, keep up the vibe, for if we put aside the hatred, intolerance and bigotry this is a truly magical and enchanting world.

And the ferocious, untamed man, he laid the thunder down 

Copyright © Karl Wiggins