GOA – Kali Moonshine

Goa, India. December 6, 1997. Any day now, the season's about to start....moon months of acid, Thanatos, Eros, drug-busts, pure ecstasy, synthetic blips, trance, smack and moonshine. Any day now…. "I shouldn't be telling you this," whispers an English DJ from Birmingham, close to Goa's hidden workings, "but we're in for roller coaster and there are no valleys, only peaks. We have to wait however, cause the local kids are taking exams and the authorities do not want a load of fucking drug casualties stumbling about, It'll put them off their schoolwork." …we would not want that would we? to disturb the growing economic nightmare, sorry, tiger, from its studious grazing…

The build up to that first party is hyper-tense…that first kick off land is awaited by all with trepid tremors. The beaches are so womanly beautifully smooth it’s a crime to look…hard to breathe, humidity so dense it could cut a knife…at last, release: "a moon party…Monday”….

”Vita Femina” , “Life is a woman”, as Nietzsche would say, maybe he was thinking of Kali the four armed skulls wearing blackness, the Indian Goddess of annihilation and destruction, hence, of creation and life affirmation. Shiva is never too far behind, waiting in Kali’ blood stained shadows…

…"It's bad for Indians to see such things" says a middle-aged Indian smoking Ganja in a chillum…talking about blackness… this is the finest blackness in the world mmmm…

"You westerners think it is so easy, so spiritual, come here and you can live well for just a few dollars. On what you would spend on just one meal in your own country you can live for months here, what any Indian would die for, you waste for. You do nothing but waste energy …ok, hook me up to the national grid, or whatever the Indian equivalent is, if they have one… he continues, among puffs of narcotic smoke…just breathing it is already inhaling the madness of the gods… "You take too many drugs it's a bad example to India. It's not a good thing for upcoming Indians to see this much liberation"…liberation, or is that waste…aren’t the two synonymous?...

…there's a cute Indian girl hanging and talking with the western party travellers. She has just finished an MA in software engineering…how fucking original is that!.....from Delhi University and is taking time out to trav­el up and down her Kali-immense country. She wearing tight Calvin Klein denims, a purple “I’m an innocent slut” T-shirt…or something to that effect, well that is the west for you…did I say marketing…another thing to try for India’s starving masses... and high-hell sandals…is that not a contradiction in terms, fashion is cruel, stupid and effective, they all want to belong…and carries designer Gucci label baggage. Most of the hippy party goers…no I’m not a hippy, kill all hippies, haven’t you heard of punk, Kali’s anarchy in the universe…the spiritual ones, annoy and irritate her, because they only want to see the old India, the ancient places, they don't have time or curtsey for India’s evolving computer…hey Bill, there is an Indian up your arse…..film Bollywood here I come… bank­ing, investment…ehh ehn oh a no comments…fine arts…hard to stifle a yawn, how boring…"I like the parties," "It’s fun, wild, good - but it’s weird also. It's somehow too easy down here, too wonderful a fool’s paradises were all that glitters is not gold…what if it was…ok…silver will do…

….however, for us, it’s the package-charters who piss us off, we contemptuously dismiss them as hedonistic pimps, 'two weeekers' without grace or excess. Two weekly-weepers of booked returns invade the land of sweetness and light…

…this coming party, like many others, is for the Goa’s aesthetes: those holy graces that stay for months, roaming from hole to hole, and don't have regular lives-jobs back home…

The kind of people who are prepared to die for a gram, a pill, a kiss, and yet, somehow, always make it to the end, no doubt because excess is a sacrificial duty here. The moon and white beaches of Goa don’t ask for less. You have to earn the respect of Kali and only excess will do: burn…burn...burn like the thundering flames wavering in the distance, where all night/day the Hindus burn their dead on crackling pyres, filling the night with the acrid smell of burned flesh…Kali is everywhere…

There are some other western travellers inhabiting the outskirts of Goa, like the so called “Rainbow tribe”: who take long-term medita­tion studies, learn Sanskrit or work for months on end as Mother-Theresa vol­unteers in Kali ridden Calcutta. Some of them don't have any respect for the Goa Technoids. "Those techno-trance people” spits out an Italian Rainbow girl, "they just bring their own fucking culture to India. This is a good place to explore something spiritually different from the material west, but as long as they have their techno drugs they don't seem to care…indeed…we dance on the synthetic void and crave for a whiter moon…

“…have you ever felt so free? "No" smiles the girl with the purple shades. "Welcome to Goa."…

“Ok space cadets... prepare to hurtle yourselves through the cos­mos, hyperspace yourselves in twelve dimensions….” blips the sampled trance track played across the moonlit darkness...

We dance to the side of Kali in unison with her cosmic dance - her relentless beat and rhythm in divine synchrony with the trance of our synthetic machines.

Avid seekers of an infinity beyond all dawns, we reach that bittersweet point of no return where life and death are no more - no more fear, no more angst, no more neurosis and civilised decorum…

We taste the quintessence of freedom on our synthetic-lysergic coated tongues, and want more…of course…the black goddess is ever present in the shadows of our dancing lights….awaiting for blood and overdose to come her way…who will be sacrificed? No one knows…or cares…

Death is the authentic seal of our excess, without it, it would be all a joke, another packaged life from weepy-two-weekers.com, and no spirit would be present…Kali accepts only spirit; there is no counterfeit that can pass her scrutinizing mad ruby eyes, they red glow in the moonlit darkness… shadowing by moonlight, Kali sees all, and forgivee nothing...

Mercy…Mercy…Mercy, Mandy K…

I remember in early nineties when I was squatting in London’s King’s Road (always squat within the land of the posh!!) I met the purest of girls in a luxury of style:

Invariably, her black eyes were heavily underscored as if it had been weeks since she had last succumbed to the weaving hands of Morphus. As the days went by, an always whiter and whiter skin, wider and wider eyes, as if there was never enough light, avid pupils hungry for more light. It is always the beginning of the habit that is the most beautiful, because of the strangely ethereal transparency the skin takes on in the early days of the pristine dawn…

As the life of the body dwindles, the soul tries to ascend the valley of the body. She was destined to lose, but oh boy! (her favourite expression) what a ride…She ascended and ascended… double, triple, quadruple, the white light…Light and more Light…a translucent angel flapping in a luminous void…

There is always a light, neither inner nor outer, to reach…and it is of course, never enough; a perpetual falling in a gravity of cotton, that is neither ecstasy nor the negative of ecstasy, but rather, the underside of ecstasy. It is almost ecstasy turned inside out. If ecstasy had a shadow, this would be its experience: it is not “take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you are still nowhere near it” but rather, a total subtraction, neither addition or multiplication. Take all the best orgasms you have ever had, subtract them to the power of a million, and you are still nowhere there: a collapsed ecstasy under the weight of its own gravity – the ecstasy of an infinite density.

“I was bored” she told me “I decided to experiment. For 3 months I’ll take, and then I’d stop. I wanted to experience this rush that people laid down everything for it, the experience of an extreme purity on the edge of chaos, and then I’ll stop”, yes, yesss of course, sweeter in hell than the heaven they give us…

Eventually, if you waited long enough, an afterglow of a halo emerged, an angel out of the gutter, and then back again…never saw her again, except her crying mother. Always running with the quicksilver flow of life, thinking one can be swifter than death, but I guess not… The shadows of death catch the good, the bad and the high in equal measure.

Mandy K, R.I.P…Somewhere, beyond or nowhere…
…if nothingness or the void could be experienced we would forget to die…

Eyes and Bodies – The Dark Side of the Moon

The dark side of the moon: in shades of cobalt-blue, towards an erotic darkness we fall…

Not happiness, we live for beauty…and yet, how we always ruin it. How deep the disease of matter eats into the human body. We want to posses and control; whether, it is “just” physical attraction, the lust of one night, the love of three months, the kindness between two passing strangers…no we can’t take it, we must buy, have and show power, we want to cash it all, always go to the bank of our needs and status, control freaks opening up the coffins of exchange. Fear, always fear to lose, or that we might be taken for a ride…despite the fact, that for a few hours, days or seconds we felt what beauty/life was all about: “the best things in life are free”, and how strange that we can never live up to that freedom, and yet, it is all “there”, in the flagrance eyes of passing strangers, the yearning never ends… If souls could speak they would not tell us…

Glimmering techno ladies that fill the night with their graces and empty it with their egos…

We are not what we seem to be, or think we are what we want to be. We are acted upon by the images projected by our imagination, optical illusions reflected off the opaque surfaces of existence…

After and before ecstasy, life is a sublime climax that never comes…

Half-glimpsed behind empty forces, we are lead towards a boundless circumference…

Half-glimpsed and half-tried, the expended night always leaves stereo traces of a bitter sweet melancholy…

Shimmering summer nights: her hands tied above, criss-crossing both hands over an arch of naked steel…her eyes reflected deep pools of light, almost whispering: “it’s the way, not the climax, just the flow…”

Extremes of desire burning in the night, spirited illusions of a viral infinity…

A sense of ease in the lightness of existence is the spirit of life…

Freedom can only come out of beauty…