THE ORDER OF THE 4Bs (O.4B.)

The Order
a loosely organized band of rogue, intello-spirito-interlopers (aided by accidentally-conjured-yet-invisible like-minded souls) who harvest dreams from a sea of noospheric possibility
    of the
Bewildered
hopelessly confused by something complicated and involved
Befuddled
stupefaction, as if by inebriants
Betwixt
in an intermediate state, not altogether one nor altogether the other
    and
Between
in or through an interval of space, time, or degree that separates yet connects or relates to…

We talk but say nothing. We huddle in thought, thinking nothing. The Order of the Bewildered, Befuddled, Betwixt and Between, forever voyaging, passes a broken cup of ideas and feelings – daring to authenticate ourselves.

Spirit, ensouled within and about the fibrous membranes of the corpuscular, glows behind the eyes in a hue of pulsating magenta. Meditato potato-heads, we just can’t seem to consciously, conscientiously quell life’s baffling confusions. And words gush, vent, spew and hurl themselves; thoughts fall through image after image; the passio-embrace, the collectivization, the will that won’t – we meet, it’s done. Paradox fooled. Again! Absurdity, humor routing fear, banishing (so we think) the demon pain of distance!

The original O.4B. came out of disorganizational meetings that began around mid-2000 on a mighty upright whale-of-an-Artship-thing that used to be waiting-her-silent-wait, barely moving, moored and tethered, parked and awaiting repairs at her Oakland, CA port. This leviathan, man-made Earth-goddess might have been better christened the Mate Me, Nurse Me. Oh dunderheads were we, those founding, core-four Fathers. Aboard and awake as if in a lucid dream, we would circle our wagons in the cabin and chase word illusions ‘round the decks. We cast out ghosts, during breaks walking the slippery cliff face decks in pow-wow meets, out and about those ancient mariner digs. Who knows? Maybe Jack London knocked his skiff alongside, ferrying aboard other great old souls, like Plato, Nietzsche, Lord Byron, to the night’s immovable feast. Out on the decks an archetypal feminine wind would enfold us in its magic presence. Back in those days, during irregular meetings of maybe two or three times a month, the O.4B. mythos would appear, would resurrect, only to dissolve back into night’s ruddied speckle.

O.4B.ers allow ideas to parade about, letting imagination’s interlocking pneuma propound in loving cadence. Standing back, observing where we really go – it might seem as if each of us is in dying Bladerunner replicant Roy’s head; as if beholding a pan-hedron luminescence of the magnificent, doomed but experientially aware. Turns in O.4B. conversation might steer us into ever more remote isles of the Beautiful. It was here we first harvested dreams in a sea of noospheric possibility. In a building moon crescendo, communal tongues would quicken the night. Minds absorbed in meaningful chat would herald a shared, somehow more transcendent B-ing of imaginal selves.

Since then and now, the O.4B. has dispersed, each of us a self-orbiting moon. And everywhere, from the cavern dankness of the superstructure originally beneath our feet, outward into Nature, or within whatever walled-in refuge we have found for ourselves, time floods back in as memories into the space occupied during such voyages as these.