The Western Gate

The thin veil of Samhain (Halloween), what does it mean, that feint fabric betwixt Autumn’s final death rattle and the surety of death that is Winter?
And this period, between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, falls, somewhere between Oct’ 31st and Nov 5th, depending on the dates of the Equinox and Solstice. For this… even if we take it as symbology, it is indeed the fine mesh into which we, of the northern hemisphere, descend with Persephone into the depths of the cruel and unforgiving.
The Rites that I have long suffered, emulating nature in her dance, re-enacting mystery plays in lucid dreams, walking hand in hand with the images and deities. What here then transpires in 2024?

He sat opposite me, his eyes seemed to bulge outwards, his clothes dishevelled and dirty, he is of African descent and by his words, American.
” So you want to play the Blues?”, he said dismissively.
Indeed, this has been my preoccupation these last few weeks, though I can play my guitar and even the blues, somewhat, it’s a different style I seek, something altogether unwritten.
” I do,” I answered, ” and you are?”
Throughout this discourse, whenever I were to ask a question or seek clarification with him, to question or even to praise, the figure opposite would shuffle make some objectionable grunting noises as if he were to get up and walk away, I were here, in his company, and he were not here like some accused villain in the dock, to be questioned and patronised. As I relented and slouched back, relaxing, so too he feigned a nod and continued, ” I Am,” he did say,” Smiling Ike,” he laughed a little ,” Ike Le Gracious” he continued, “Ike le Gracious- the worker of instruments gifted by the trees.”
The glint in his eye hid both sarcasm and the riddles of his prose. He did not ask my name, nor cared for introductions, no handshakes or greetings, even though he answered my question, the reply was deliberate, mocking and also teasing…. “and I aint nobody’s servant”.
I returned an equal smile as I smirked at this…
“Ain’t no white boy,” he said at once, “gonna be teaching you the blues”, he said this awaiting my response, to see if I was about to object. I didn’t, though my recent guitar teacher isn’t white, he’s of colour but perhaps more middle eastern than African, inside I objected, this gatekeeping and and ‘dragon treasure hoarding’ over ‘who owns what’ is as bad as a nation drawing its frontiers, we do this, you do that, boys act like this and girls like that, white people, black people, communists, capitalists… I didn’t object as I knew he was going to expand on what he’d just said.
” You can’t play the blues holding the guitar the way he dang taught?” he became animated and scorned, “damn, clawing your hand over the bridge like you ’bout to stroke a cat” he laughed an infectious howl.
It were true, my guitar teacher had taught me to sit upright, my right hand raised above the strings as if I were gently about to stroke and pick at the strings, it was a classical guitarist posture. And I sat there plucking away methodically and disciplined , notes in a descending appregio to the sheet music before me, each in perfect time, exact.
“Written down dots n lines, wha’s s’matter wid you?” he laughed, he then reached over for perhaps the dirtiest and most neglected guitar I had ever seen and then he played. To a critic or analyst, it were a standard 12 bar blues, but it was altogether a different beast. Each note he plucked and each chord struck was emotion, every line repeating mocked the previous, jeered at the lyric and danced its way through a sad melody that were both entrancing and mournful.
” I’m on the dog ‘n’ bone” he sang looking and nodding at me, it were a song for me, dog and bone, a cockney rhyme- phone , “yeah, Im on that phone” he sang, “And the troubles that I dont have, are gonna land me by the ton.”
The turnaround of the song was cheeky, deliberate, at times he hit just one note discordantly as if he didn’t know where the turnaround should go, but he did, it were a poke in the eye, a stick in the wasp nest as he crescendoed to the verse again, ” This guitar wont letcha, treat it like a pussy cat. This damned guitar wont letcha, treat it like a pussy cat,…” and with a heavy pounding chord the guitar sang ” it wants to reach the song of heaven boy, sat’s’fied to the end”
I was not here to ask, how he plays it, how he structures his song, how he decided what lead line or turnaround he’d play, I was just here to witness, to be in the presence of, to be non-acting.
The next verse was almost a caterwaul, a celebration of ecstasy and then there was silence…
Ike looked at me and in front he had two tumblers of a golden brown liquid.
“If you accept this drink,” he said,” I will teach you the blues that will make you famous.” He leaned into me, to make sure I was aware of what he had just said and then his eyes fell upon the other glass, that looked exactly the same, ” and if you take this drink,” ……In the following silence I knew perhaps the ominous foreboding of this coming oblation.
“Then I will teach you the blues that only your soul will understand, but if you shine unto others with it,…. if you show the song off to a crowd for gain and profit, then, your soul is mine?”
Fame and fortune, or the hidden secret coveted for no-one else to uncover. The options, to be seen, or not be seen, and if the later and I break the rule and unleash myself upon the world, then I forfeit my own self, all that I am. The first option will give me the tools to be heard and famous, fortune! acclaim, the applause, the shower of gifts… the fucking loneliness that will come with that, the highs to be met by the lows….the rollercoaster ride that never stops and never rests and every one you meet, fingers pointing, obstructing. Loneliness.
Or the other option, to have the guitar sing to me, and only me, in my other aspect of loneliness there, but yet at one with the nature of song.

” And if I refuse both?”
“Then you go scratching in the woods …”

I tried to think, what would my Lucid dream poet, Rumi do, the philosopher of reason and rhyme? What would Jerome say, the logical, methodical and wary, tread with caution, way up the options.

“My soul would be yours?” I asked….

The darkness began to cover the scene, I was losing grip of the lucid dream, I would either fall into a non lucid environment, enter darkness and sleep. or awake.

I did not answer but as I slowly awoke I heard Ike play another song, a cheeky number that sounded like the guitar riff made famous by Elvis Presley’s- That’s Alright Momma (orig. Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup).

“He had lips n curls, and his collar unfurled…” he sang “The looks to get Helen o’ Troy, or any girl….”
I was awakening and before the clutch of my conscious mind engaged I caught the last wisp of a channelled and received chorus… ” He were like Prometheus of the Gods all, and that white boy stole the blues….”

I began to awake, I could still hear the blues, still pick out little bits of each piece, and the lyrics, I was beginning to lose them, I kept singing them in my head, the two songs, repeating, to remember.
How would I contact IKe again? Rumi, and Jerome and Thoth are constant in my Lucid dream wanders, how do I contact Ike?
It arose from ‘out of nowhere’ a sigil though more a Vodoun Veve and explained, “the five pointed star are my fingers, and the six pointed star be the strings on the guitar…..My left hand the Star David, the right hand the star of the apple……”

Would ever it be that I stray from the path, the path would always come back to me, as I stand on the crossroads between Autumn and Winter I am not here, I am not there, but fore’er inbetween.