Lucas, a failing student, urgently seeks out his father Nick, psychedelic-era wreck and self-proclaimed channel for “Qabalistic knowledge”, now confined to a mental hospital alongside Wolfbane, a forgotten rock & roll icon. Pauline, ultra-rationalist mother and burnt-out teacher, dreads their encounter. Her nightmares seem realised when Nick escapes and Lucas disappears – to enter a parallel world, peopled by a rogues’ gallery of bohemian riff-raff and sacred harlots, whose operations – artistic, criminal or magickal – are scribed with hallucinatory intensity. He undergoes poetic – and erotic – initiation. It’s a story worm-holed with dark wit and satiric allusions. The manias of an imploding alternate world are only a modulation of our more familiar obsessions, here at the base levels of The Qabalistic Tree, amid the broken shells and debris – the Qliphoth – of our Creation.
The Qliphoth by Paul A. 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GreenRating: 0 out of 5 stars(0 ratings)Start your free 30 daysRead previewSaveDownloadShareShare titleAbout this ebookLucas, a failing student, urgently seeks out his father Nick, psychedelic-era wreck and self-proclaimed channel for "Qabalistic knowledge", now confined to a mental hospital alongside Wolfbane, a forgotten rock & roll icon. Pauline, ultra-rationalist mother and burnt-out teacher, dreads their encounter.Her nightmares seem realised when Nick escapes and Lucas disappears – to enter a parallel world, peopled by a rogues' gallery of bohemian riff-raff and sacred harlots, whose operations – artistic, criminal or magickal – are scribed with hallucinatory intensity. He undergoes poetic – and erotic – initiation.It's a story worm-holed with dark wit and satiric allusions. The manias of an imploding alternate world are only a modulation of our more familiar obsessions, here at the base levels of The Qabalistic Tree, amid the broken shells and debris – the Qliphoth – of our Creation.Read moreSkip carouselCarousel PreviousCarousel NextFantasyLanguageEnglishPublisherLibros Libertad PublishingRelease dateDec 12, 2011ISBN9781466103092Start your free 30 daysRead previewSave for laterDownload to appShareShare titleRelated categoriesSkip carouselCarousel PreviousCarousel NextScience Fiction & FantasyFantasyMagical RealismOccult & SupernaturalSuperheroesReviews for The QliphothRating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings0 ratings0 reviewsWhat did you think?Rate as 1 out of 5, 1 stars. Rate as 2 out of 5, 2 stars. Rate as 3 out of 5, 3 stars. Rate as 4 out of 5, 4 stars. Rate as 5 out of 5, 5 stars. Tap to rateWrite a reviewReview must be at least 10 wordsBook previewThe Qliphoth - Paul A. GreenThe Qliphoth Paul A. Green * * * SMASHWORDS EDITION * * * PUBLISHED BY: Paul A. Green on Smashwords Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Paul A. Green grew up in South London, studied at Oxford and the University of British Columbia. He has worked as a freelance writer/broadcaster in Canada, college lecturer in Devon, supply teacher in inner London, and used-book operative in Hay-on-Wye. He is currently Lecturer in Media at the Royal National College for the Blind, Hereford. His plays have appeared on BBC Radio 3, CBC Radio Canada, RTE Ireland, Capital Radio and Resonance FM London. His poetry has been disseminated in magazines, anthologies and, increasingly, in audio formats via alternative radio stations, podcasts and on-line journals like www.culturecourt.com. His Selected Poems are scheduled for publication in 2011 by Shearsman Books. The enigma of the paranormal has been a constant theme in his work, exemplified in plays like The Dream Laboratory, Ritual of the Stifling Air, The Voice Collection, and Babalon, his speculative drama about occult rocket scientist Jack Parsons. The Qliphoth probes still further into these eldritch realms … An End-Time fabulation in the lineage of Burroughs and Ballard: complex, fast-twitch language spasms, loud with interference and radio static. The voices of the new dead transmit warp knowledge. Straight-blade satire. Deadpan humours. A word quest launched from the edge-lands of arcane knowledge. ~ Iain Sinclair Lucas sets out to find affinity with his demented Dad, a drug casualty of the sixties - or visionary - in Oakhill, sunniest hotbed of sanity in Devon, where Dad, old Nick, is buried like a rusty drum of plutonium, irradiating the depths of the Qabala or the arcana of old Brit rock’n’roll. There is a mysterious black box with the Lore of the Brazen Head in it, opened in a stream of the funniest, most hip and haunting prose, where the DNA dialogue and descriptive powers of Ken Kesey, James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell and JD Salinger are fused into the tissue of the fiction. ~ George McWhirter From intense narration to first-person hallucination, it's a book that draws you in and leaves you gasping for air... each sentence drips with fantastic imagery. ~ Dan Whitehead It really is wonderful to read such focused, beautifully paced, freshly minted writing. ~ George Amabile THE QLIPHOTH is magnificent, both in range and depth of arcane snoopage. ~ J.Michael Yates For Cathy, Tristan, Titus & James 1. LUCAS / PAULINE: CRACKING THE SHELL 2. NICK: SPECIAL WITHDRAWAL UNIT 3. LUCAS: GRAND JUNCTION 4. PAULINE: ASTRIDE THE VOID 5. NICK: THE ORDER OF THE BRAZEN HEAD 6. LUCAS: IN TRANSIT 7. NICK:THE MUTANT GEOMETRIES 8. PAULINE: A RECONSTRUCTION 9. LUCAS: THE ENCLAVE 10. NICK: A PROJECT OF HORUS 11. LUCAS: LOVE UNDER WILL 12. LUCAS: LOVE UNDER WILL II 13. PAULINE – A TOTAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE 14. LUCAS: THE SCRIBES 15. NICK: FORCE FIELD 16. LUCAS: KELPHAVEN 17. NICK: ROAD MOVIES 18. PAULINE: RESEARCH AND DESTROY 19. AN EXCHANGE OF SOULS 20. THE DEEP MIX 21. OUR LADIES OF BABEL 22. THE CHAOSPHERE 23. YESOD TO MALKUTH LIVE AND DIRECT 24. AFTERMATH "Cosmic evil is called in the Qabalah The Qliphoth ; which literally means shells. The origin of this term is twofold: The first origin lies in the concept that the Universe is made like a series of nutshells... each sephiroth, each World encloses the one above, and is enshelled itself by the next and lower World... at the very last is the densest, most metallic shell of all... only a dim spark of divinity resides here. The other meaning of the term is that anything - event or being - can become Qliphothic... if its central axis or raison d'etre of consciousness is removed. If such a situation occurs, the demonic realms... can gain a hold and so use and feed off the undirected Force or Form. An example of this is seen in the mental disorder of manic depression..." (from A Qabalistic Universe by Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi) A feature common to recurrent dreams... is the narrative shell. A landscape forms a matrix in which are embedded locales, each with a specific ambience, a mood or flavour that determines the nature of the plot that unfolds within that locale. Each shell is an archetypal narrative. (from The Immaculate Perception by Christopher Dewdney) Whether or not the Qliphothic forces exist, the Universe behaves as if they do. (J.G Brodie-Innes, Hegemon of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) 1. LUCAS / PAULINE: CRACKING THE SHELL Fast-forward: images blitter non-stop across the tube - brown-bellied children scrabbling at a desert water-hole/a smart missile blitzing the wrong bunker/the famous blazing palm trees of LA - but these aren't the icons that Lucas is searching for. Pause. He wants his mother. Or, rather, his father, that notorious mysterioso old scumbag - or so everybody says. Lucas doesn't know, his father is virtually terra incognita . But he's certain his father is hidden somewhere, on one of these dusty VHS-180s that he's found stashed behind her bedside cabinet. The tapes must have been there for months, since the last time Pauline The Mother of Battles (why is he feeling so violent about her?) visited this dank so-called holiday home (how can a Marxist Mum have a holiday home?); and if she's been bringing down old tapes to record over (why does she tape every doomstruck documentary even in her holidays?) she's possibly erased this family showpiece. He's not even sure what the show was called. One of the words was definitely two syllables, like - The Blah Blah Show. That was his father's rhythmic mumble, whiskery husks of words in the ear, as minders hustled visitors out of the ward . Watch your mother on the Blah Blah Show - she told them the same old story... Lucas wishes he could forget the dribbly mouthing of that phrase, just let it go. But there must have been a show. Lucas was almost in it, if not in on it. It was at home but it wasn't a home movie. It wasn't a fun'n'games show, either. As far as he can remember. Nevertheless, thousands of people may have seen it - when he was too small to know better. That hurts, Mummy. What have you done with Daddy? Perhaps this is going to hurt, so fucking what, he wants the gut truths hanging out, there's nothing left to lose, nothing left. He ejects the unlabelled cassette, puts it to one side on the coffee-table, on top of his most recent disaster, supposedly receiving his earliest attention. The important documents are crumpled, wine-stained. Still shell-shocked, he blankly scans a paragraph: `If you have not achieved the prerequisite grades for any of the provisional places you have been offered, fill in the attached form immediately and send it to the University Admissions Service at ...' He carefully repositions the cassette to conceal his Results Slip, already three days old, with its catalogue of Advanced Level fiascos - everything E or worse, even Media Studies. I hope by the time I'm back you'll have finally decided on your next quantum leap... Mega-Pauline, ever the teacher, in control, had pursed her lips tartly as she strode to the door an hour ago, off on one of her motorised Great Treks into Social History - around Abbotsburton, of all places, with its folksy BMWs and healthfood stores... What is he doing in this post-modernist Devon village, under picture-postcard thatch? Why is he in this over-loaded world? He's stuck in the middle of August. Despite the haze and the ramparts of dark cloud massed above the high crooked turrets of the old Priory (now the Abbotsvale Personal Growth Centre) his clothes are bags of sweat. There's bio-electricity in the air. And he can't stop shaking. How can she expect pro-active educational self-management, all that crap? As if there was a miraculous future he could magically salvage, her order out of his chaos, that's what she wants. He decides to half-close the curtains, and crouches in the protective gloom. The screen glows. It's the past he's trying to sort out, the hidden order. Nine more cassettes are spread out on the rug in front of him, and somewhere in the ferric particles on one of them there are patterns that will tell him the secrets of how and why and when, in dancing pixels... That's the great distraction, only a trivial academic detail - Was your dad mad or bad or both? Give reasons for your choice and dates as required. He shuffles the cassettes around like dominoes or toy building blocks. Pauline hasn't taught him very much about his father's grey matter, this greyish subject area. She'd rather go out for some purposeful activity on the last day of her holiday. Says she needs to relax before going home to London W9 to psych up for the latest teaching job. At bloody Westway Community School, for God's sake. She says she wants to escape from his messes. But she'll be going back to the site of his criminal failure. It's insane. He selects another cassette, at random. Or maybe because it's more worn and chipped - but has obviously been relabelled. Pauline's neat ballpoint says `News Clips 10.' And indeed, the VCR trundles at slapstick speed through more prime-time fragments, all of them bad news. He mutes the volume. The images shiver, blur, skip, all over the place: a derailed train like a broken snake; a black beach of burning oil; white males in shell-suits compressed against chainlink fencing; helicopter gunships landing amid scattering kids; and, popping up like arcade-action targets, the relentless chattering heads, the anchormen and continuity-women, yammering away like his mother in their compulsive mission to explain, analyse, justify, rationalise, as if that could stop the mad planet. Except Pauline won't explain his dad's little bit of the action. Joining his mother down here for a cosy post-exam-results holiday has been a fatal error. Guys he knows are hitching round Hungary or driving down Route 66. Why on earth has he made this West Country retreat? The whole notion of being-in-time is deeply obscure. He's been going in circles, but his centre is nowhere. He tried to tell Katie this but she wouldn't listen and ditched him a month before the exams for a trainee accountant, which didn't help, he couldn't/can't focus on anything, but it's no excuse. This tape looks like another dud. Keep it rolling just a little bit longer. There goes an hairy old rock band; and something about a drug trial. He never knew his mother cared about such things, not these days. But there's layer after layer of items on the tape, the years keep cutting into each other - he can't place them all - and now some of them look like dubs of dubs, the picture breaking up as it goes down the generations. But here's a BBC2 logo, and rolling titles. Hang in there, bump up the volume: ...In tonight's edition of The Lifeskills Show we look at the problems of living with mental illness, taking a dark journey into the nightmare world of manic depression. We ask - what can it do to a marriage...? Oh shit. Holy holy shit. Long shot: an institutional garden, Victorian gothic buildings. Autumn oaks, drained greenish skies, brown bushes where someone loiters. The camera starts to zoom in, slowly but relentlessly. His scarecrow father, his actual grey-faced father Nicholas Oscar Beardsley, stands under the big tree. He is shuffling his feet through dead leaves. Then, perhaps dazed by the lens, the sudden attention, he waves a hand feebly, in a purely gestural shielding of his face, like a criminal celeb arriving at court. The shot slowly dissolves into a montage of still snapshots, underscored by sixties fuzz/wah-wah rock. Lucas can hardly believe this. There's his handsome aquiline daddy, no more than twenty-five with long curving locks, headband, beads, epaulettes, saffron shirt; and Pauline, hardly seventeen, has her auburn hair cut like a warrior's helmet. She's striking, almost pretty in her floating blue robe. His parents are apparently immortal, smiling as they silk-screen posters together in a white studio, ignoring naked flower people thronging the doorway. Perhaps this is a Love Happening. Which fades into wedding pics , everybody grinning in kaftans and flares outside the registry office. The voice-over intrudes - male, charged with synthetic urgency and portent: Nick and Pauline were filled with the heady optimism and vibrant energy of the sixties generation. After their marriage Pauline did her teacher training and plunged into the hurly burly of inner-city schooling, while Nick, with his art-school flair, entrepreneurial drive, and the help of a small legacy, started a life-style shop - The Great British Time Machine... A grainy monochrome archive snapshot: Nick, in tiny heptagonal smoked glasses, poses proudly under a giant pop art sign. Pauline, his smiling fellow-conspirator, is putting up a poster inside the sunlit shop window. Lucas suddenly feels wildly protective towards these funny silly people - and simultaneously enraged. All that rich energy. How did they blow it? What went wrong? Outside there's a distant rumble. The picture wobbles for an instant, as if there's a glitch in the power supply, the sudden gust of breeze smells oddly saline - Abbotsburton is miles from the coast - but Lucas mustn't lose anything, even the pontifications of the commentary. ...less than a decade later was permanently hospitalised. How did Pauline's nightmare begin? His mother's face fills the screen, against a background of bookshelves. She's backlit, face in shadow, but he can discern her sharp nose, firm lips, large anxious eyes. Her chin was more cleary defined then. And she's wearing one of those red t-shirts with a message. She's staring through the screen, waiting for the right words to form. Lucas can confirm now that he was, indeed, almost there himself, off-camera, in his little bedroom at the end of the corridor, Uncle Larry minding him, and special new cars and trains to play with. This has always been puzzle corner, this dazzling fragment of memory. How old was he? He'd blundered into the beginning of the shoot, had flinched from the heat of the lights, had walked right into the anxious squint of the cameraman, until women with smooth voices and clipboards had steered him back, promising sweeties, better than grown-ups' boring chat. No sweeties for him now. He pauses the tape for a second, kneels with his face only inches from the curve of the screen. He has to go through with this ritual, there's no going back... Playback. Yes, that's her voice, bright, edgy, slightly nasal, like a soprano sax, solo: It's hard to pin-point the beginning of the end...Nick had always been a little obsessive, a bit impulsive, his moods swung on a big pendulum, as it were. You had to anticipate the motion. Either I was a fairy princess or a hag fit to die in a garbage bin. In the first few years I was mostly the do-good fairy on the Christmas tree, as long as I stayed in the confines of that role it was fine... And believe it or not, I think I wanted to please... She's almost managing a bitter smile, as the take fades. This nuance matters to Lucas but the presenter, off-screen, brisk as a toothpaste advert, has left the rest of it on a cutting-room floor and sticks to the rhetoric of his script. Did Pauline recognise those all-important early warning signs of mental disorder? Pauline leans forward into the camera. It's confession time. In a way I blame myself. When you're in close proximity with someone who's innately unbalanced, you tend to see things from their warped perspective. I'd got used to him talking to himself all the time, smoking dope with his mat… truncated (22,974 more characters in archive)