~ diffrayer +

The Oscillating Oculus

Zeroing in on Hawaii . . . was what came to mind upon seeing this digital image above, rendered on DDG as a guest (just to test it out, instead of logging into my free account) using their default text prompt without any further enhancement, and these are the results.

I can't recall what the text prompt was, except I believe I c&p'd a segment from one of my poems. It occurred to me I should share this image with Al Attanasio, thinking he'd scry similar visions to mine, if not more outlandish ones, from it. It's just that I've become obsessed with that recent common meme going around the metaverse, promulgated by many fine authors of science fiction and fantasy, the one shewing the obverse side of our Earth, revealing what appears to be an all-ocean planet, at least on that side, and in the very center of it lies a landmass known as...Hawaii...the most remote location on our planet. So, yes, it's piqued my interest in visiting (read: getting stranded there...) even more (to a pre-feverish pitch) or at least enough to continue dreaming of living in one of those water-collecting plots that are for sale online.

Then I considered it would also work nicely with my imagined human interest monthly, The Oscillating Oculus, (or Journal of the Mind) named after my grandfather Rudy Elie's column The Roving Eye (in the Boston Herald), only mine dreams of being a technological variant at the very crux of being somewhere in between the dawning and setting of the technosingularity we are clearly in the midst of today. The nigh-equilibrium and subsequent descent from that exquisite alignment is the stuff our legend's being written about.

See, there's an interstitial crisscrossed pie wedge-shaped area of cubic space which represents the intersections of certain biological life forces in constant harmony with electromagnetic subharmonic frequencies in resonance with spectrums we can't even remotely imagine, let alone describe, that I'd like to make sure isn't overlooked, even while at the same time, they tend to distract the average reader's focus on the narrative. Lucky for us, the ability to infer the truth comes rarely to those adepts which have been made to require it, yet its fractured appearance seems to remain fixed, even while shuttling through so many alternating frequencies, that the resultant holographic overview becomes as intricate as the X-rayed shadow of a tesseract, outlined in the soft glow of radioactive isotopes; or to dare take the metaphors further, the algorithmic signature squiggle-wavelengths mirroring striations within the irises of the human eye, for example. Nevertheless, counterbalancing energies continue to exist in greater numbers and stronger properties than ever before, enough for us to readily make use of them in our counterrevolutionary defensive, of course.

It's nature's way to provide the keys for her subjects to maintain a modicum of continued survival opportunity, and another matter altogether for the personnel to successfully acquire the keys needed to maintain it. Such are the challenges of this life, and a direct explanation for the necessity of things like combat video games, and eye- hand-manipulation techniques inherent to the sociopathic state of things, which have long ago been integrated into our natural political and economic discourses to have built, from the invulnerable panic room/root cellar up, a foundation upon which variable pods of Elysium have already been built, and will continue to flourish so long as the Never Ending Colony of Empires Never Ending (NECENE, pronounced "neh-scene") continue with their cabal established 'Sacred Secret', that of the perpetual and industrious war machine complex, an iconic slogan paralleling a thousand and one tales and visions, from the double-lightning bolt staff of Zeus to the various logos of four-lettered heavy metal bands from the seventies on out.

This periodical aims to measure the worth of success through the eyes of those who dare pursue their passion for the amateur. It's a brand new modern cousin of the magazine, only perfect bound and reduced to the size of a six by nine. Roughly the size of Plasma Tales or Impressions, thin glossy chapbooks which contain a wide variety of original writings one might loosely file under human interest, because the one thing they have in common might be the direct electrical current they tap into, the fluid shocking grasp of the moment itself, reverberating with its own hypnotic rhythm and series of interpenetrating counterrhythms producing a subliminal harmonic that could awaken cells heretofore unbegun. If you would recall for a moment, in silent meditation, that long bygone era of ethical journalism was it called, back when men were men and they really reported the news with integrity by corroborating sources and making sure the everyman could sit and catch up with so called world events. Forget about that for one goddamn moment and find yourself refreshed by the invigorating articles in the Journal of the Mind. Because honestly we could care less for whatever the fuck happened in Butt-town, and we are not interested in facts, and the only integrity we have left remains with integers, as when a couple of them make two, and how on Earth could 1+1=3, because that's what life's all about, baby. Rest assured you will not be bothered by any such nonsense as would be accounted for in the most prestigious newspapers of history. Rubbish of the most baneful sort, even the fact they grew to charge a nickel per day (that's a dollar a month) belied the despicable garden of monstrous lies that would grow to mutate into a pogrom of genocidal proportions which are still rocking the human population to this day, with increasingly exorbitant numbers, digits, and scalpelized accessories reaching out to finger the truth, that coveted myth we the vampires of imagination crave so much. Do not touch or read into this too much. You get the general idea.

These articles will be written by some of the finest minds to have flourished online and in print for quite some time. Each slim and trim issue will be chock full of micro fictions and flash faction and dubious essays concerning an array of of approaches designed to provoke the reader and automatically guide them toward learning how to think for themselves. A sort of ink stained literary lubricant, if you will; but I prefer the more evocative description of likening these truncated reports as being synonymous with popping IQ booster pills. That's because the contributors to Journal of the Mind each have an exceptional intelligence and uncanny ability to pierce between the atoms of the veil, and seize the heart of the moment, that pulsating and vibrant essence running through the cosmos we think of as the current moment in time because we're in the process of being electrocuted which may be likened with possession. To be possessed by the spirit of life itself is what it means to be human, among a wide variety of other living things coexisting apart from one another mostly yet feeding on the left over remnants of each other's dried up dreams and carcasses.

This will become a collection of writings to provoke readers to follow their imaginations wherever their minds can be taken. It's not necessary to know what happened downtown last Saturday night. Pay attention to the sound passing through the finest hairs in your ear canals. Notice the syncopation with the wind. The rustling of thousands of leaves in the darkness of night under a pale moon light. How the silent stars slowly slide en masse to the left.

Our columnists and correspondents only wish for you the reader to be able and willing then to relish each successive feature, review or editorial which we are able to assemble from the various wizards at our disposal. Some of the editors getting involved are thinking of eliminating known bylines, and replacing them with pseudonyms, or whatever the case may be, in order to remove any potential association or connection to any given persona, should it turn out to be at all necessary, so that the reader may then focus on the words themselves, without having a yardstick by which to measure any personal bias, or even find they need to calibrate their opinion of what they've read to what they've heard about any given author, etc. Anything goes for this periodical.

Journal of the Mind will strive to pave a new pathway for integrity of word and phrasing and language and metaphor. The editors understand that well known names deserve to be heard by an even wider readership. Any true names or bylines will be allowed.

Since it will necessarily be made available in print by means of POD tech and self publishing, the cost will be as minimal as possible with enough for the contributors of each issue to split their share of the chump change with the dot com platform providing their service. Since a book this size may cost around 5 dollars wholesale, the cover price will be determined as one dollar times the amount of contributors, so for example if the editor and two contributors produce an issue, that edition will sell for $8 + the usual four dollar shipping fee which brings total cost to $12.

Journal of the Mind is not about the money as much as it's about a fun exercise for all involved including the reader. The editors believe it's important that every contributing writer to Journal of the Mind receive one dollar per issue sold, and if this publication comes out as a monthly (and it will) then just do the math by factoring in five different levels of potential success. If ten copies sell, each contributor makes ten dollars. The idea being, if each successive issue manages to hold the reader's interest, within the expansive community of creative writers alone it could go viral enough to become a new meme.

Stay tuned for the first issue of Journal of the Mind.

Coming soon from Plasma Press.

Journal of the Mind will be as if issuing from a cut-out hole in a newspaper containing only the human interest section, and blowing it up into its own world. Journal of the Mind's code of ethics will dictate that the application of fantastical prose be done so with enough sagacity and ethos which qualify its articles in a manner akin to the outmoded ethic of the best journalists of old. Journal of the Mind will be not unlike wandering through a mine field of explosive speculative fiction which unlock areas of the reader's psyche few even stop to consider on a daily basis. Journal of the Mind seeks to keep above a certain waterline while not limiting contributor's scope of creativity, but rather enhancing it.

Journal of the Mind is only now beginning to take shape in the eye within the mind of its creator. A ragtag, literary pirate ship or a vessel of subcultural satire and opinion. A schooner for scholarly screeds and a cutter for controversial, cutting edge articles concerning any variety of a wide scope of subject matter, enough to fill a universe with. The closer we come to dissemination point, the more urgency develops in sealing a certain criteria to abide by, in terms of what may be necessary to qualify for publication.

The only criteria which flashes into the peripherals of our chief editor's mind remains a quicksilver impression carrying with it the after-image of necessarily being written in the present tense, a signifier which may seal the deal after all by keeping our contributor's minds bound and focused on the very here and now of this, our eternal situation we're somehow all once again upon a time enmired and enmeshed within, as we each awaken within our mortalized shells of flesh and blood to continue flourishing on our own personal pathways of evolution together. But that's just an after-thought in and of itself, since the most paramount criteria to meet in order to have an article published in Journal of the Mind will be its inherent readability. The only rules we know of are meant to be bent or tossed out the window.

The Rise of Troy

by Shaun Lawton

Sending for salvation

on a wing and a prayer

Sometimes a donation

shimmers right out of the air

mindset, belief, lack thereof

Experience has proven

only when push dares to shove

What each one has woven

It's occurred to me caught in

a bauble we've been trapped

Because each of us bought in

forcing us to adapt

every line of this verse

Rings truer dreaming hard

Sometimes I think that life

awaits us in the back yard

Or that's one way of stating

to believe in yourself

You are the spirit which shines

within you after all

Defining silence

by Shaun Lawton

First, define sound. Sound may be defined as vibrations that travel through the air (or another medium) and can be heard when they reach a person's ear. Silence could then be defined as a lack of such vibrations that are picked up by anything remotely equipped with ears.

Vision may be defined as the state or faculty of being able to see, therefore seeing should be defined as the state by which visions are observed in real time, but not necessarily recorded. This distinction leads to the question about the difference between a machine's recording of vibrations that may be played back to reproduce the original sounds, and a human being's ultimately having to rely on the mysterious process known as memory.

Here in this thin crack where the palest and virtually unnoticeable light drifts like so many infinitesimal specks of pollen dust revealing their eerie echo location music-of-the-spheres to ring and harmonize in correspondence with the full eternity-inducing mobius spectrum of the spectacle we're recording in digital bits and bytes with our Oracular Payload, the James Webb telescope, we're led to realization by a clue. Whereas full on digital recordings of both sound & vision began rolling live many years ago and continues piling on today with the advent of our technological social media revolution, we can be reminded that the difference between our own self-defined "conscientious consciousness" and sentience from that which our machinery of artificially intelligent software development fails to experience altogether, goes hand in hand with the notion of "experience" itself (an experiential phenomenon, which necessarily shares covalent bonds with the sidereal experience of phenomenological and biological split-mind objectification sensory stimuli processing) and the flat, lifeless reaction of having captured vibrations divorced of their context for analytical purposes which have more in common with the alien than what our own spirits have demonstrated and taught us over many generations. Here, within this easily forgotten sliver of compressed information, a detail which, remember that most of us caught up in the eddies and currents of today's onrushing technological singularity all-too-soon forget about completely, yet it remains flashing amid our periphery of neon stimuli like some lone corporate logo of a salamander which hums quietly with an alluring resonance calling out visually, a fresh new hieroglyph sending out its undercurrent of meaning we can only pick up on subliminally. It's the out-on-the-plain-field-everyday-right-before-us reality that unlike this and last year's crop of animated artificial robotic apps and doodads, reflects our own plugged-in sensory overload of natural stimuli which just can't be stored on a disc or magnetic tape by its very nature, as if in possession of a random access memory capacity generated from all the background radiation, or something.

It's very nature being that which currently exists here and now within our own spacetime continuum. We may call it what we like, there remains a host of words and synonymous terms all helping us to define the indefinable. Assisting us to glimpse that which cannot ever be seen. Giving us just enough of a push to make the intuitive leap of faith that the subject of our life and death legacy of murder and birth remains more than we could ever know because there's only so much room in our memory that we can each handle.

Now, the collective memory of the human race all told and humming like a livewire even now as we listen to and read these words scrolling by from the effort my mind kept sending to my fingertips, nonetheless remains fully imprisoned within the sealed skull of each individual human being doing the recollecting. Don't forget, most of us are too busy keeping up with our lives trying to survive in this economy while the world gives off the thermal impression that it's burning under a constantly rotating and evolving wildfire.

Here we've introduced the secondary wafer-thin slice of our ever expanding branes, likened to the spermaceti trapped in abundance within a great whale's head, which is to reflect on the echoing trait of membranes expanding like so many skins sealing up the albumens of their collective sunrises and sunsets. How all of the history of the plant and animal kingdom compresses down to the one eye of a singular elephant, and how this mirrors back the similar reflection of one individual human being's eye staring back in stark recognition after a tidal wave of memory floods into the soul.

The entire dynamic as illustrated before with the two fragile footnotes reveals to the keen observer and to the ones who can keep all their notes in order to not be distracted and forget this sharp, bright solitary idea (so much like that boring old philosophical stuff we were forced to learn in school) that the so-called answer to the repeatedly asked burning question whose signifier triggered this essay to be randomly composed out of nowhere on a Wednesday afternoon while I'm sick with a cold home from work lies outspread before us and beyond us as it always has, a simple notion that may be picked up and examined as easily as a sea shell on the beach during low tide.

And here comes the first wave of that which becomes naturally poised to overtake and ultimately conceal this small glinting bit of realization, which becomes the eventually taken for granted notion that the priceless secret of the universe turns out to not be so precious after all, at least not really for the majority of us caught up in the ceaseless rat wars played out by the human race. But where were we? Oh, yes. Defining silence.

Silence must be a relative thing, and at the very least, sometimes so down low on the register of our scrutiny as to reveal nothing, with no vibrations to pick up on. Silence may be defined as a simple reminder that nothing may totally exist, and if it weren't for its unfathomably mysterious nature, everything that we've known and will come to know about our existence would not have somehow been brought about for us to question in the first place. Silence is that space located for a split fraction-of-a-second in between each startling rattle from a Diamondback's sudden warning of attack. Silence resides in between the concussive blows to a soldier's ears from the incoming shockwave of an improvised explosive device. Silence may reign supreme in the courtyards of the dead. Silence remains a blessing in which healing can take place in your head. Silence has been denied to the human race. Silence now is just a sign that signifies a memory of how it was before we were born. Silence becomes heightened by the song of a bird. Silence is but a name given to one of life's missing parts. Silence is actually nothing but a word.

~ dedicated to Jason Bronson

and everyone else listening

to the silence in between the words

Breaking Update from the Nanohorde

detail of a photo by Shasta Lawton

The FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction has been streaming new waves of speculative fiction in daily installments as well as publishing singular stories in their entirety since the summer of 2009. That was when I, prospective editor in chief, found my central nervous system infected by an invading stream of nanobots sent from the future to possess me to put this free webzine out on a semi regular basis. Since then we've published over twenty authors and featured over sixty stories.

So far, there are seven years archived on the official FREEZINE blog site. Nineteen serials have been published during that interim.

2009

Sky Pirates, by John Shirley
Plastic Children, by Nigel Strange
The House in the Port, by J.R. Torina
armed to the teeth with Lipstick, by Blag Dahlia
The Fold, by G. Alden Davis

2010

The Fallen Guardian's Mandate, by David Agranoff
Waiting For The End, by Vincent Daemon
Elimination of a Picture and It's Subject--Called the Feller's Master Stroke, by Richard Dadd
(The Trickster in the Spines, by Yves Columbar)

2011

Cyrano & the Two Plumes, by John Shirley
Space is a Deadly Sister, by Gil James Bavel
(The Opener of Conceits, by Yves Columbar)
(Old Scratch Came to Bean Town, by Yves Columbar)

2012

(The Alabaster Chalice, by Yves Columbar)
Elder Cruiser, by John Shirley
I Am the Sun, by Sean Manseau

2014

The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers
Of Cadence and Weathered Statues, by Vincent Daemon

2015

Swimming in the Ghost River, by A. A. Attanasio

Due to an exceptional turn of events, four of our serials remain missing from the registry: the enigmatic Yves Columbar's uncanny WJ Tales. Few remaining subscribers today are even left to remember these disturbing serializations. It appears that many who had subscribed to our webzine back then no longer remain to be found anywhere on or offline. What's odder yet, is that the very blog archives in which these abstruse serials were stored, have vanished. It is almost as if they were experienced in a dream. We have done our best to search far and wide for Monsieur Columbar, but nary a word from this mysterious scribe has even turned up beneath a rock. So despite the fact that nineteen novellas have been serialized on the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction, (A. A. Attanasio's Swimming in the Ghost River having the distinction of being the nineteenth), our latest novelette now remains the fifteenth entry to be serialized in our august archives. In addition, the FREEZINE now presents forty-nine stand alone stories published in the archives, all adding up to a grand total of sixty-eight tales.

Out of nowhere the nanohorde have suddenly requested that our triannual observe a short period of radio silence. This is the first time I've received such a peculiar request from the bloodhost. I have reason to believe this period will be very short indeed, so please relax and find something to do while we wait for our mysterious benefactors from the future to give us the green-light to proceed with our "Pentaquark" issue for the month of August, in the year 2015.

+ Expect the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction to return at virtually any moment with a new story by John Shirley called Where The Market's Hottest ~

Waiting For The End

Go ahead and read, free of charge but maybe not charges, the ultraviolent splatterpunk postapocalyptic science fiction terror tale WAITING FOR THE END, by Vincent Daemon. Google it, but be warned, a record of your having Googled it will be filed away permanently, not that anyone really cares so go for it, I dare you to read Mr. Daemon's uncompromising outtlook of a future so brutal as to render your own worst nightmares possibly more comfortable places to be condemned. Read this violent science fantasy right now.