This was recorded sometime around 2002/3
Your head will be severed. Kali Ma is the severing of one’s head. She is the dying and decrepit and the fresh and newly born. She is the death-mother with an unconditional love immune to conceptualization. She is a force where one’s own release is its only means of relation. Her text is a tooth-eating teeth.
About a year and half ago I had become, what I believed to be, very close to Kali Ma (if still with boundaries and slightly voyeuristic). It began on a trip to South Africa where it was summer. D’s mother was in a new house that had a niche around the side of it carved out for me to “meditate.” I have never been a good meditator, though this personalized niche’s novel presence did manage to get a little meditation out of me for a while. Maybe in an effort to do anything but meditate, I eventually began to sing in that niche. I would wake up early, morning, and singing notes is a very pleasant thing to do. Just a series of attempted a-tonal “ah”s for the quick morning arc of the sun. “Ah” is a wild West note. It is the /a/ in Allah and the /a/ in God. It is a note for singers. It is meaningless and ready for personal meaning-making. It is the first letter of (not all) international alphabets. It is therefore mudane and not universal. It comes highly recommended.
The impulse to sing of course came from a place less mystic and more commercial—somewhere seemingly un-earth-presence-merger. D- bought me a wonderful set of “learn how to chant/sing songs of India cassettes” by Chaitanya Kabir. I gave it a shot. It stuck. I still listen to these today and Chaitanya is a wonderful known to me man.
I had since returned from South Africa and the songs to Kali had made an imprint. You will have your head severed. You will have your head severed.
Maybe a year later?
One night at around dusk I was home alone singing a song to Kali Ma: Chaimundaye. Kali Ma, Kali Ma, Kali Ma, Kali Ma. Up to this point in the year, I had been having very strong experiences while singing this song around dusk. The changing from day to night is a special time. (It’s how a person might sing at the time of the sun setting and have little fear of actually worhsipping the sun. The spiritual orthopraxis lawmakers have underestimated us I say! The Qur’an mentions three times of prayer. Of those three, two are the most talked about: morning and night. I often wish the companions wouldv’e been able to simply handle what descended through the mouth of the Prophet instead of obsessing over details. They’re like those kids in your class who used to ask the teacher why s/he didn’t give us homework. But what do you mean pray? How does one do that? Only three times? That seems like so little. Ugh. Just keep cool and be quiet I say! Just figure it out and be peaceful to one another. Erg. Thankfully the Mother-force-contradiction of the head-huntress Kali can render these naught!)
I had an immediate relationship with the head-huntress. Immediate. I still do. The manifestation of the great contradiction and the severence of fear. Often I would hear the sound of two swords slicing together. shhhhink If I sang this song while walking around town I would hear these sounds behind me. shhhhink shhhhink To me, it was the sound incarnate of the irreducible conundrum of fear and pleasance. Kali Ma apparently does not discriminate. Kali Ma cuts off your head. The head is the ego discriminator. The fear discriminator. It discerns out of fear rather than love. This is the fear-head. This is in contrast to the love-head. The fear impulse is problematized and is removed(?). Despite recent Kali wannabes playing God and severeing the heads of humans, getting your fear-head cut off is a good thing. When reconciled, this state of constant death is turned into strength. (see Buddhist &/or Samurai meditation on death).
On this particular night, however, the air was pre-storm air. It was October? and worthy of a fire. Pre-storm and deep fall mile-high mountain air is special. It is somatic. It ruptures your sense of I’m-on-top-of-the-worldness. It is bigger than you. You are smaller than the entirety of it’s its. It was a fine time to acknowledge the archetypal fearless. Big stone walls. Big glass candles. Little dusk flicker lights. It went deep.
After about five minutes of singing, I became VERY scared. The ability to hear was very much crystallized. Exact. Sound felt almost solid. I began hearing very clearly the sound of metal blades sliding against one another. shhhhink Over and over, the sound of metal on metal. shhhhinkshhhhink It was very present in the room. Between the sounds of metal there was the type of silence that is experienced as a vacuum.
shhhhink . . . . . . . . . . shhhhink
Dust can be heard. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Spiders can be heard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The room itself was both silent and revealing its own minute utterances. The clinking of metal would return. It was unclear to me whether I should keep singing or just stop and get out of there.
And then the dry heaving came—uncontrollable heaving and spit. It was as if something was trying to climb out of my insides. It felt like some sort of air-demon. I kept saying in between words of the song: Get out of me. I felt like I was having a physical manifestation of ego-exorcism. I had never experienced this before. A little fear maybe. But never such a bodily response. If in fact the ego and its close relative, fear, can manifest somatically, than I would say it did so on that evening (or so my few life references have me believe). This eventually passed, though by the time it was over my stomach felt as if someone had been punching me in it for an hour.
Days later, the large house flies began to be a bit more curious of me, or at the least I became more aware of their curiosity. Were they scavenging the skin of a dead person? It didn’t feel right to shoo them away. They felt a bit different. Almost like they knew something about me that I was only partially made aware of. D- did not like the flies. She hadn’t had the experience and like me previously simply didn’t want the flies around. I however, felt they were now part of my daily experience, like angels and caught left-over body essence, AKA ghosts or spirits. Unfortunately for me, my angels hung around feces all day and threw up every time they landed. Such is the irreducible…
