Alternate Perceptions Magazine, June 2024
Additional Reflections on Ancient Mysteries viewed through Modern Experiences
by: James Edward Carlos
In the final ten or so pages of my writing of 29 pages in the May 2024 issue, I must offer an addition based on a new extension for where that writing ended. I presume/hope this will be then a second Carlos connection issuance for June 2024.
I wrote about body markings occurring during close encounters based on my own history of such. In the interim of this ongoing history of close encounters I had late old age pangs of concern that perhaps my entire life had been one of insanity because of the many, and always dramatic, multi-leveled scenarios of encounters. In younger years I found appropriations as to these visionary, mystical, experiences, once I was introduced to the Judaic religions’ Pritzker edition of twelve translated Old Testament volumes from the Aramaic script and Hebrew language. (Translators: Daniel C. Matt, Nathan Wolski, and Joel Hecker). These are tellings (aggadah) about Ezekiel’s encounters with Light; I felt at home with those descriptions because they were comparative to my own encountering. Although I had accepted encounters for the information the hayyot (holy, living, beings)(angelic) offered, never requesting or asking beyond what had been continuously given. However, I asked just once about four years ago for some verification about my sanity (or not). Almost immediately the next week gave me verity in a phenomenological manner, as realistic encounter phenomenon exposures.
For the Tuesday afternoon of that next week we hired a young electrician for a small electrical fixture in a rental cottage next door to our home. When I went to pay the man, named Abe (to preserve his personal privacy), he anxiously regaled me with personal information. I listened attentively with real interest. Abe divulged his history of being gay that included trips an hour away for weekend indulgences in gay bars. On that Friday night I had a complex close encounter of some length that resulted in my having simultaneously two sets of differing skin “wound marks-holes” on my right upper thigh, immediately next to each other adjacent to my testicles. I photographed the marks the next morning.
The narrative of the complex encounter imagery of that Friday night began with my standing on the upstage of a Jean Genet drama, The Blacks, beneath a balcony where seated was a jury of black men and women, each wearing a white mask in accordance with the original drama. The judges on that jury observed the all black cast members below who were indulging in the preparatory activities for a black revolution. However, in this encounter I had two countenances simultaneously. In one countenance I was my white self only younger than my current age. In fact, both of the two countenances were based on a reincarnation experience. I was reincarnated as a white man from my memory of my youth, and hence I was both director of the drama in the encounter only and also the same as an actor on the stage. The other countenance was of my being a young muscular black slave during the early stages of the Civil War in the United States. Thereof I was a sex slave to nightly serve the white master in his plantation manor bedroom prior to his sleeping. I was to sleep on the floor, but once he slept soundly, I removed myself to journey outside to a swamp area where I was leading a voodoo ritual, a throwback to my earlier life in the African jungle and reflecting my own part in a revolution (akin to the Genet drama which had been a subject of my doctoral dissertation).
My white self and my black self oscillated in a continuous movement back and forth during the encounter, with the symbolic impact of “doubles” being a numerical structuring for several aspects of the encounter. Herein the encounter I represented (as soul material) these essential two roles.
Within this encounter, I was being criticized severely by one of the black women jury members seated above where I stood at one end of the balcony, and like her peers on the balcony she wore a white mask. She was castigating my white countenance standing beneath her on the main stage for not doing enough for the black race in this current lifetime. I was attempting my defense that she angrily resented. I felt though, even during the encounter, that she seemed overly familiar to me somehow. At one point I recognized that this black woman judge during my undergraduate college days had made me leave her home, being a white woman who had offered her bedroom for painting a week after my return (in real life) from a solo trip to Mexico City. That week in my real life (outside the encountering experiences) I painted three large oil paintings of the Suertas within a bullfight, and another large oil portrait study of four famous black musicians in New Orleans French Quartet open rehearsals. As an art major graduate I had sketched almost constantly when not driving, and this image derived from my joining the few artists who displayed their artworks in the Pere Antoine Alley beside the large St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. When this white woman in my younger life, whom I thought was my good friend, saw my artwork, she became incensed that they were all “evil” and ordered me to leave her home and not return, indicating that I, too, was evil therefore, a change from what she had thought of me as a young Newman Club Catholic man on campus. I was shocked that she was so prejudice about both blacks and brown skinned Mexicans (the bull fighter). I never saw her again in this lifetime. But here as a returning image-memory she was, ironically, a black judge in The Blacks. Such memories appear in encounters carrying symbolic implications as in this instance then.
On stage then in this encounter, as with the real drama by Genet that had been the topic of my doctoral dissertation (comparing the Roman Catholic liturgical Mass to the medieval depiction as a black mass), I was serving a “hidden” memory so to speak of the “rebellious” imagery I was expressing during my graduate study, herein the encounter “now” while I was facing the masked black woman. During my stance facing the balcony stage right behind me, also as in the real drama, two men of the black cast who both in the real drama and repeated herein this encounter, left downstage left side, to then as in the real drama. Returning to the stage drama activity one man was farcically dressed as a white Norwegian woman-maid with yellow yarn pigtails and bangs across “her” forehead. So another doubling was enacted in the encounter acknowledging patterns of life instances. Herein then a black male actor was imitating a white woman wearing a black and white striped dress with full skirt and puffy sleeves, under a white apron that matched a small maid’s decorative cap on her head. The other black actor returned as he was in the drama and with him the one disguised as a woman had sex behind a screen, the sexual activities only implied therefore for a real audience facing the front side of the screen.
I note here the frequency of doubles involved so far in the close encounter: 1). My being both a white director/actor, and as well my being a young black male sex slave to the master of the southern plantation. 2). Both a real drama and a fictional drama were occurring simultaneously. 3). The two black men on the stage left of me. 4). The black man disguised/dressed as a white woman (having yellow yarn hair as a maid) – i.e., two characterizations for one black male actor. 5). The implicit but occurring homosexual activity behind the stage screen, hence two man in a gay act. 6). Plus the frontal side of the screen facing the audience as the sexual enacting being understood and implied which left to their imaginations as in the real drama, repeated herein duplicating the directions for the drama.
To continue with doubles in this encounter: 7) and 8) together: The actions behind the screen in the real drama is repeated herein duplicating the directions for the drama presentation in the original presentation in the original written script, and the back side where the two men engaged in sexual activities. (from a personal history directing college productions, I acknowledge that this activity was akin to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” with an imitation called “The Mouse Trap” both being in a sense a play within a play. 9). and 10). also together as location and as action - The stage having downstage activities – the main drama, and an upper balcony separating the blacks into two sets of characters.
A slight deviation thematically in this part of the encountering, but still continuing on the doubles as structural elements: 11). and 12) as layered memories: The implied four oil paintings (one a set of three)(the other being one oil with four musicians depicted) being characterized with two races. Although, too, not directly indicated in the encounter, in my “real life” when painting on that same trip to New Mexico, another painting was of a religious nature: the cathedral in Mexico City. However it had been painted in New Mexico and not at the former white woman’s bedroom). Still though in terms of encounters, such adjacency is part of the symbolic encounter manifestations. 13). Implicit in the understanding of the creative effort was the fact of my real paintings being based on earlier sketches during my travels in real life). 14). I add, too, that as a young black man I had two lives in the civil war, a hidden degree in the encounter but in keeping with my awareness of the former life as herein a reincarnation (one of the major lessons of all of my encounters this lifetime): While being the nightly sex slave serving the master in his bedroom at bedtime, I was a slave man with a woman and three young children, corresponding to my white life this incarnation. 15). In the reincarnation as mentioned, I was involved with the voodoo religion with my slave peers. Therein, once free of my sexual responsibilities I was a zombie leader having rituals with my black peers in the swamps once my master was asleep.
14). To repeat that In the reincarnation, implicitly I was a slave revolutionary with the voodoo religion organized by me as “high priest” this being an action against my master and his racial over-lording. 15). And yet I had also inevitably came to address the master with respect plus I loved the master because of his sexual attention to my body during our sensual embraces. Psychically, I was emotional driven. At the same time in that earlier lifetime, I inevitably loved the woman-wife in my life and our children. 16). In the drama during the encounter my presence as a black man with sexual desires was a balancing factor to the two black men having sex behind the screen, but as if a black man and a white woman.
Such heavy, deep, complexity is a usual demeanor of the close encounter structuring and narration. Thereby a personal interpretation is intended (and actually required to be part of this encountering countenance). Encounters are ultimately long narrations of mixed imagery. Every facet is symbolic, however, valuable as an intellectual and emotional combination of the personal sense of being involved with the hayyot.
As to the close encounter as an ongoing visual enactment and narration then, I add that on that Saturday night’s reality in this lifetime, the young electrician - Abe, whom I had just met that Tuesday had gone to a gay bar. He met a black guy, and had sex with him. The black guy called him then on Sunday morning to inform him that he had had sex with yet another man who had confessed to having AIDs, so he in turn called Abe to warn him of venereal possibilities. Abe then called me to ask what he should do. I suggested he immediately get off the phone with me and go to a hospital to be tested, which he did. The young man learned then that although he had now a venereal disease obtained from his weekend dalliances, he was thankfully free of AIDS.
Later in that same week, on Monday afternoon, Abe called to see if we might get together to chat and drink some red wine, so I suggested we meet at my home the next morning, a week after we had first met. Once arrived, I informed him of my close encounters feeling that if we were to be friends, he should know that about these strange encounters in my personal history. I showed him the images taken on Saturday of the marks on my thighs. Abe immediately responded by saying “I have those same marks.” I was stunned because this was certainly not a usual part of my long history of close encounters to meet someone else so involved in my own encounter. So he dropped his trousers and I photographed his markings on his thigh that were identical to my own. I took another photo of Abe’s finger pointing to his own marks so we could tell the difference. ((As an aside, I note however, afterward I realized our skin coloring different; his was darker and suntanned from his athletic activities, whereas my skin was more pale and much whiter)).
As to truth of encountering being part of my ongoing sanity in this lifetime, I realized then that this experiencing informed me of the manner in which the encounter marks were all phenomenal, i.e., physical, for both of us. The markings done so identically to each other by a machine lowered from the aerial vehicle ceiling to mark each of our thighs. While we had been separately floated up to the table beneath the marking machine, so had other humans in the craft of whom I have no actual specific knowledge (at least in terms of this accounting). As to encounter amnesia, which is fairly, perhaps frequently usual in part, being lifted momentarily for my remembering on the basis of my question about the encountering being phenomenal, Abe and I were only two naked individuals on the craft in a line of several humans, equally naked and getting the same markings, each one in turn. I was aware of the activity although herein not remembering details beyond these stated.
This was physical, akin to my own being. I realized that this was proof of my sanity, that the encounters and markings were always real, and that the hayyot had responded almost immediately to my request for some sign of sanity regarding the many encounters during this lifetime. I add that my relationship with the young electrician did not resume outside of a short time thereafter.
