Today’s episode occurred many years before these men ever met!

The past and the present? Breasts that suck rather than secrete? Where is Butcher Billy when we need him? What is happening to Archibald the Professor of Arcane knowledge? Listen for the demon on the pogo stick as he chases after one of the young scholars.

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“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits… In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network’s mind there are no limits,” Lilly, J. C. (1974). The Human Biocomputer. London: Abacus.

John C. Lilly is known primarily for his research into the nature of consciousness. His principal tools in this regard were the isolation tank, dolphin communication, and psychedelic drugs, sometimes in combination. For example, in the early 1960s, Dr. Lilly and co-workers published several papers reporting that dolphins could mimic human speech patterns. Subsequent investigations of dolphin cognition have generally, however, found it difficult to replicate his results.

Besides his career as a researcher, Lilly has also written extensively on the psychedelic experience, and such things as for example, Solid State Intelligence or SSI, a malevolent entity, which is, according to Lilly, the network of computation-capable solid state systems (electronics) engineered by humans. He claims this network will eventually develop (or has already developed) into an autonomous life-form. Since the optimal survival conditions for this life-form (low-temperature vacuum) are drastically different from those needed by humans (room temperature aerial atmosphere and adequate water supply), Lilly predicted (or “prophesied”, based on his ketamine-induced visions) a dramatic conflict between the two forms of intelligence.

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Jameson & his pal The Swan

A D Jameson, quaint and childish, tired ex-wife of a rodeo angel, owner of an antique tortoise-shell comb, nice-mannered, respectable, having been seen crawling quickly across the dinette set, destined to someday become a vice president at the bank, and whom you long ago bought and sold, is the newest member of the Mutable artistic family. If you let him, he’ll fall fast asleep on the unread page in your lap, but be warned, he’s still wearing the camisole that you gave him, the one embroidered with his initials. He still has the cameo that you stuck in his Christmas stocking.

Among his many gifts as charlatan and provocateur, Mr. Jameson counts himself a storyteller of the comedic and bizarre. He is the author of the up and coming, Amazing Adult Fantasy, to be released by Mutable next Spring. To read more about him, go here.

And lo, his tongue birthed a forest of equally-sized tongues

Travel through the present and into the past, and not just in the usual ways of listening to old stories, but in the not so usual ways of actually being in the past, or rather a timeless place is neither the past or the present. Is Ursula also Satan? What really happened after she and Jack went through the Tongue Forest? It’s up to you to find out!

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(Below is an advice column we found by an obviously deranged individual. To see Sweathunter in action, go here. More of these may appear over the course of the coming months, if there is not so much hate mail.)

Dear Sweat hunter.
I am cannibal-curious. What does it say about a man if he eats his girlfriend’s menstrual flow? Is that cannibalism? There is a tiny human egg in it and I have eaten this egg. Is breast-feeding also cannibalism. I have done this as well, and NOT JUST WITH MY MOTHER.
- Listless.

Listless.
I have one word for you. Lick. It is a special word and honestly. Did you ever imagine that a cannibalist could lick his food? Frankly the idea of a meat popsicle brings to mind my childhood and what people used to say about me behind my back, then to my face, then shat on me while punching me in the face repeatedly. But enough about me. We were talking about how you still breast feed with WOMEN WHO ARE NOT YOUR MOTHER. You know I hate capital letters. Please do not write to me anymore. I know where you live.

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A creature from the beyond captured on film as it fondles its human lover

Perhaps you have become confused. In this episode Butcher Billy discovers the secret to hopping from hell to earth and back again, but it’s all blurring together regardless, hell and earth squishing into one slippery slab of sight, until there is no distinction between the fiery pit and the world above, and no escape!

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On the woman’s first day at work the poet helped her with her boxes, but as he was helping he was looking away.
      ”Do you know this is my seventieth sick day since I started here?” he asked.
      ”But you’re here,” she said.
      ”Yes, I know.” And he went to the bathroom and peed blood.
         -from, The Poet and the Philosopher as Roommates

We here at Mutable first heard of Sheila Heti some six or seven years ago, when she went on tour with the event she founded, Trampoline Hall, while promoting her first book, The Middle Stories, put out by McSweeney’s. We were taken by her stories, and she has continued to tickle and tug at our interest both in her own writing and in the projects she involves herself in.

Her prose is well-hewn stuff, elegant and terse. For example, “There are many machines in the world, so now we know something about machines.” The stories themselves, however, have an emotional potency that plays well against the simple lines used to draw its contours. They also often have a fairytale element, although the story that introduced us to her work, The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates, is more clinical and elusive. It opens with the line, “The poet went softly to the novelist’s bedroom, while the novelist lay asleep, sleep coming out heavy like a stink through his nose.”

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All she ever wanted to do was save her brother from his brain tumor

The hordes of hell are spreading across the land, and a strange creature made all of leather but for the cleavage and porcelain face has confronted Archibald the professor of arcane knowledge and Butcher Billy. The young scholars are frozen in time, and the narrator is winning because the narrator is satan.

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