The Magician Awakes

—for Mike Mahoney and Bonnie Lange—and FOR LAURA—

by Jon Rappoport

July 14, 2021

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“Aye, harpoons…stuck in him like so many corkscrews. Aye, his spout is big, like Nantucket wheat. Aye, by death and devils, the white whale is Moby-Dick, if Moby-Dick you see! It was Moby-Dick that dismantled me, that reaped off my leg like a mower, a blade of grass and left me with this dead stump I stand on…The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer.” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick)

Scattered among my files, there are notes for a work called The Magician Awakes. Some notes I’ve already included in articles. Here is one passage I’ve never published. It’s narrated by a character who is wandering through a labyrinth:

“I’ve read everything, and I remember what I’ve read. I’m one of those people who eats books and authors. I’ve read philosophy and mysticism, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry, mathematics, literature, poetry, history, and so on. And this was all by age 30.”

“After that, I found myself reading only one book, Moby Dick. Now I read it over and over, and the ideas and feelings swell up ever larger.”

“The whale, Ahab, Ishmael, the sea, the minor characters, they keep rising and swelling and increasing. Last year, they were at Saturn and Jupiter size; next year they’ll be consuming a quadrant of the Milky Way; then the whole galaxy; and finally, they’ll be out in indefinable space.”

“I had a dream about God. He, too, was reading Moby Dick over and over, and when I arrived in Heaven, he brought me to his table for a meal, and we sat down. He said, ‘I keep discovering new scenes I’d forgotten. Most people can’t understand I’m always exploring. After all, if I’m infinite, how could I be a finished product? I gave up reading the philosophers a long time ago. You need the sense of the poetic to GO FARTHER. No one seems to realize I didn’t make humans limited creatures. I gave them all doorways into the infinite, without me knowing the whole or even half of what that was’.”

“Where is Melville now?”

“’I gave him a cottage down the road, but he’s been gone from there for some time’.”

“You made the whales. You should know a great deal about them.”

“’I didn’t make Melville’s white whale. That’s his domain, and even he didn’t understand everything about it. How could he? You don’t explore with full knowledge of the map. By the way…look at the Earth. When the intrepid explorers die and rise above the planet, do you think they want to go back and incarnate again? Unlikely in most cases. Because the people in charge down there are obsessed with organizing and controlling the scene in all aspects. THAT means, little by little, Earth is drained of the most adventurous types. Do you see? An unintended consequence. A serious one’.”

“When you say ‘intrepid explorers’, you’re talking about imagination?”

“’How else are you going to navigate the uncreated spaces? In Moby Dick, it seems at first no one has it, but as you read the book over and over, it leaks out to you. Melville is the one with imagination. The course of the whale and Ahab and even Ishmael is set, but something else is there. An X factor. It’s the book above the book. It’s as if Melville wrote TWO. He wanted to. He wanted the inevitable tragedy. But something else in him couldn’t abide only that. It was his poetic sense. It shines through’.”

“Remember this Melville observation? ‘There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces’.”

“’That eagle-soul. Did I make it that way? Yes and no. I gave it an abundance of courage, but the soul decided he could range and roam in those extreme places. It’s freedom. Without it I would have created nothing more than a puppet show. People start out believing in a closed system. They think everything they want they can find inside that system. They can make magic from the inside. But they can’t. They never have. They have to get OUTSIDE, and then they have the ability. Sometimes what starts out as freedom turns into a system. Because they want to organize the parts. They’re rabid finishers and polishers. So then they’re INSIDE again. I’ve been writing a poem for some time. It’s about 100,000 pages now. I’m just getting warmed up. If you, the soul, were a physical form, which you’re not, MAGIC would live in the muscles and ligaments and arteries and nerves and heart and spleen and brain and liver and fingers and toes and ears and of course the eyes—it can’t be contained. It’s everything that exists outside systems. If my image is put inside a system, drop it off at the side of the road. It’s lost any value it might once have had. Infinite means INFINITE. I’m not messing around. The obsession with the little stuff is an affectation. That doesn’t mean you go with vague dead-leaf generalities. You throw every single thing you can think of into the mix. Cars, old tires, trinkets, gold shoes, bullets, road signs, rivers…I like to assume every person is writing an endless poem, whether he knows it or not, and there are plenty of bad ones, believe me. That’s because people are hypnotized by empty ideas. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll catch on sooner or later. Because again, INFINITE is REAL. There, two birds on every branch. The first one is a piece of the white picket fence and the white clouds and the horse and buggy moving along on the familiar street in the middle of town, but that bird is also one thing and creature in the mix of an endless poem that has lines as long as you want to make them…old Walt Whitman knew that. Read one of his eruptions. There are some truly terrible lines in there I would have edited out, but they have to be there, because he’s working up a head of steam, he’s moving toward a few immortal and unpredictable and unfathomable words strung together, and when you read them you’re stunned in your tracks, you can’t move for a few moments. I see you’ve been wandering in a labyrinth for a long time. You’re trying to figure out how to escape. This is a joke. There is no escape, which means there is no exit. That place where you came in? It’s closed now. You’re in a system, lad. Don’t fret. Just keep writing the poem. Look around you. What’s there? Throw it all into the mix. The old socks and the kitchen sink. And pretty soon you’ll be outside. Not by finding the exit. By magic. Come back around in a year or so and see me. I do readings now and then. We sit around and tell stories. There’s music. A few pals of mine, Ravi, Bird, Bud, Sonny, Igor. Bust the system, kiddo. That’s what it’s all about. The system in the mind. Just go the other way. The long shot turns out to be the favorite every time. It’s magic…’”


The Matrix Revealed

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.)


Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

10 comments on “The Magician Awakes

  1. Pam says:

    Beautiful!

  2. Paul says:

    WOW !!!

    I’ve gotta, gotta get out my dusty copy for a new-read. In my youth, I read it as merely an exciting ocean tussle betwixt man & beast. This new venture will prove most interesting.

    THANK YOU.
    Always

  3. Brad says:

    Nice…beneath any system is human empathy and caring for our fellow travelers. If we don’t have that we don’t have a humanity that is worth a plugged nickel. Some of our fellow travelers are dead but their words still travel with us in our physical and mental lives. Some of those words, poems about life, are well worth pondering as wheat from the chafe. Other words propel ideas that are poison and bring forth slavery of the soul and all else. Words like stakeholder capitalism and its derivatives, the 4IR, Human capital markets and the Internet of (blockchained)Bodies, social impact bonds, pay for success,the gameification of a virtual reality that encompasses everything from education [sic] to a transhuman world wherein the eventuality is the blending of all human carbon based life with a silicon version. The ultimate goal of turning off any carbon based life form and then simulating all life in a simulated reality. That is where the system is taking humanity and perhaps if we are to be a failed species this is for the better?

  4. Dr._W! says:

    Greetings to all. Thank you, Jon, for sharing the segment from “The Magician Awakes”. I very much relate to ‘devouring books’ mostly, in my own timeline, before age 30. Not being very familiar with seafaring terms, I read Moby Dick and did not entirely catch all of the nuances. Surely the story behind the story was philosophical, my middle school teachers told us that, yet I had moved on to other books. The notion of those in control (of earth), are determined to organize, organize, organize rings so many bells. Then eventually freedom is steamrolled so the truly adventurous ones lose interest and no longer wish to ‘return.’ I was talking with a sister, lamenting the encroaching globalist, socialist scenario, and then looked around to see trees, bushes, flowers, lawns and homes. As the past year and a half or so has unfolded I find myself often marveling in the embrace of nature. Perhaps we may be among those who no longer choose to return. I’m sharing these words this morning with a reminder to all genuine people similar to myself. If you are able, get outside, soak in the fullness and beauty of the natural world. Enjoy, Love, and Pray.

  5. Roundball Shaman says:

    “You need the sense of the poetic to GO FARTHER. No one seems to realize I didn’t make humans limited creatures. I gave them all doorways into the infinite, without me knowing the whole or even half of what that was’.”

    Most of us have seen a tug-of-war rope contest where lots of people on one side and lots of people on the other side are pulling like mad to win the battle and prevail over the opposing force.

    That is what is going on today. Humanity is caught in the middle of the tug-rope in a massive tug-of-war between those who want to snuff what it means to be human and those who desperately want to retain the divine and free nature that was bred into humanity from the beginning of Time.

    Poets and mystics and just every day regular people like freedom and living with the endless horizons surrounding us of what is possible in every direction if only we’d have to courage to venture out there.

    But there are powerful forces that want to crush the life out of poets and mystics and everyday people. They not only do not freedom for people, They don’t even want… people at all.

    To be a Poet today is not just to be creative and courageous and spontaneous and free. A Poet must be a Warrior who stands up to all the massive hurricane forces that are trying to level Him or Her and drive them into the dust. A Poet must be a fighter with the strength and tenacity to withstand the heaviest punches of all the Dark Forces that come at Him or Her with the intensity and lethal power of the most savage beasts.

    And what else must be erased besides the Poet? The whole notion of Imagination and Magic. You don’t need Imagination and Magic to be a soulless cog in a wheel serving agendas and Forces you don’t understand or know about as those with one horrid future vision are lusting for. The ideas of Imagination and Magic are in the middle of that tug-of-war rope bitter contest underway today as well.

    And the side that wins that Eternal Rope Struggle will determine and define Humanity for the ages. Pull that rope with all you’ve got. It may be the last chance you’ll ever get.

  6. Dr._W. says:

    […] Many of us posting messages here also would like to fully spell out such statements as: ‘That arrogant and snotty-nosed little twit Mark the Suckerturd is a F***ing piece of **it. The boy is probably an illegitimate B*****d, may God Da** that turd for eternity! … .’ (Three or four other spicy remarks deleted, you get the idea – I trust.) Everything you type here can and will* be used against this effort, and it could be used against you personally. * The asterick in the preceding sentence refers to this scenario: In the event you should somehow get the attention of the Jabs-Gestapo and end up being called to answer for your “Vaxx hesitancy” postings online, well … . Just think it through for yourself. To prevail in this War against Humankind, insults and threats need to be replaced with solid and specific information. Never do you want to lower yourself to their level. Demonstrate a much higher order of character by the things you do and say. Perhaps some people making posts here were tricked (propaganda s-advertisements,) forced (eg. company policy and so forth) coerced or whatever into doing so. Saucing down your comments here (with profanity) is definitely tempting. Instead, spend your effort and time collecting and sharing information with family, friends and others. Learn about the history of the Nuremberg Tribunals and memorize the Nuremberg Code. Learn about and memorize the history of the 1972 UN Geneva Convention along with specific key points from the final outcomes of the convention. Further, know that there is US Federal Law which totally prevents the Vaxx-Gestapo from forced ‘medical treatments.’ Learn about US Code(2) Title 42 The Public Health, Section 1983 – Civil action for Deprivation of Rights. Memorize the key points. Or, even better keep a note card with you. Just in case you need to put a stop to the above-mentioned Vx.-Gestapo. Most states have law(s) which refer to US law, making Federal law ‘superior.’ Within USCode (2), Title 42 there is another section which provides for remedies (counter-action -lawful and legal as in Lawsuits) in the event of “Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law.” It is thanks to Jon R. that I’ve learned many of these details. Find the information which applies best in your own situation – including Titles, Sections and subsections which apply to you in your own State. Alongside the doorway into your home you could keep a summary in case the V(exed) Gestapo shows up. (Please pardon me. The sarcasm keeps running through my mind and flowing down to my fingers which are doing the typing.) What we want to do is prevail. Then there will be endless work needed to attempt to clean up the messes that this nonsense Convid19{84} will have created. Notice: I am not an attorney and nothing in this post is to be construed as “legal” advice in any way, shape, or fashion. This is simply one olderish fellow’s effort to guide others to maintain their own health and well-being.

    Right now, most of us already know there is a team of doctors and lawyers preparing or already pursuing a U.S. Federal Lawsuit to put an end to the (vexxing) Jabs. Let them handle the heavy, heavy lifting. Of course courts move slowly and the outcome is unknown. Meanwhile, protect yourself and your family as best you can. OK, next time I plan to share some much more uplifting words. Please bear with the angst.

  7. Paul says:

    “And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this :—

    ‘Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

    ‘WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISMAEL.

    ‘BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.’

    ~ Moby Dick (p. 6)

  8. RegretLeft says:

    This looks to be the prose version of last week’s Wilde poetry prescription – just perfect for those of us for whom – for some odd, unfortunate reason – poetry just does not “work” – printing it out now to read tonight – thanks!

  9. Haniel Adhar says:

    You should finish this and publish it

  10. Sean Garrisson says:

    Alright

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