Like Moses, Bob was charged with shepparding millions of starving, oppressed followers. There were differences, of course. Water was one of them. They both were leading their people from Babylon to the Promised Land, however, Moses with tablets of stone and high expectations, and Bob with rhythm and music. Both methods prove to be sucessful, one being no better than the other. Moses led the Israelites through the desert in order to get them away from Pharaohs; Bob led the Rastafarians through a violently oppressive era, giving them strength and a place to find peace of mind, like Ghandi, but with a different style. It takes all kinds, though; and all kinds lead to the same place. When a chard is shattered, various crystalline factions retain varying resonations. Thus it becomes necessary for prophets of different eras to use varying methods to awaken their people, to move them a closer to learning light, hence nearer to that which is God. Prophets change the way people think, move them from one frequency to another, inspiring them, evolving them towards the ultimate future. That's what prophets, myths and legends are for. It's what the do best. It's what they live for. And I found this young minstrel prophet swimming in the azure waters of the Caribbean, aged perfectly Pi in Paradise. Already, he swam like a dolphin. He was amazing. Sitting on the edge between beach and jungle, I watched him chasing the parrotfish and yellowtails in the slightly swaying sea. The scene was serene, idyllic. I waited until his mother called him out of the water, then began walking across the beach. I removed a penny. Yet another penny. Pennies, my little, copper pods brimming with eternal life, singing truth unto the minds of men, sowing avatars like apple seeds, sewing back together the torn fabric of civilization, once whole. As I said, healing is what we avatars live for since that little misunderstanding of tounges at the Tower of Babel. You know how rumors spread and distort? Same thing. There was a disagreement that escalated into a brawl, which ended up with the shattering of the tower, thus ruining it for everybody for thousands of years to come. Wasn't that nice of your human ancestors? The truth didn't change one bit, not one iota. the perception, the relationship to it was what changed. Once the tower was destroyed, humans were left with naught but bits and pieces held together with sheer speculation, speculation and predilection, which lead to nothing but war, of course. And now, here at the turn of the millenia, humans stand at the crossroads between healing the shattered chard, or vaporizing it altogether. I knew this potentiality, knew the choice was their own, but would do what I could to stop it. That's what I live for. So as I approached the young lad I garnered all the serenity, all the peace and love and tranquility from the Omega Point, condensed it into that little copper pellet and flicked it in his direction. He caught it, became serene as the omniscience flowed through him like a cool babbling brook, like a soft-spoken torrent. We spoke without speaking, as usual. "Speak the words prophet, and he will come. Jah. This name, the oldest of names, This becomes your mantra. You will rise from the ghettos or Trenchtown and lead the people to the Promised Land, and much of the world will follow for generations to come. Like Jesus, you will work hard and come Home early but you'll be blessed with a less violent death. You and Leary. Brothers of the Brain. Born from the fires of violence to later sail the seas of tranquility, that's you, Bob Marley, Prophet Minstrel of the Poor. Become this Child of Light now and give it to the people with music, sweet music, and with rhythm. Riddim beating from your heart, roaring like the Lion of Cameroon, music played sweetly, simply, honestly, and given to the people. From the People, of the People, for the People in order that they might rise up, exodus and find their way Home. Tell them that the mighty god is the living man. Show them that all humans can avatar, that it's the most natural thing in the world. Bring them here this moment of bliss between us. Show them how it feels. You open the door and pipe them into the light with simple melodies, Marley, Man of Jahweh, the oldest human name for that which is God. Sing your songs that speak the truth. "Shoot the sheriff, but not the deputy. "Come,we go chant down Babylon with music! That's you, Buffalo Soldier, Man of Peace born from the fires of the terrorized, polarize the people! Show them that the oppressors ultimately have no power. Show them how singing out a song, how a melody so strong removes the power from the grasp of small minded, mediocre men surviving soley on the Power of the People. "If the People take away the powers duly bestowed, these men have nothing. "Nothing. And the people have nothing to lose and everything to gain. "This is an Exodus, this is a movement of the People. "Bring them to that estatic point of extasy in exodus, laughing, dancing, singing to the heavens, and toppling the Jerichoesque walls of tryanny, banishing the Byzantine evil surrounding humanity, consumming it in the fires of it's own fashioning, as it should be, as it should have been those thousands of years ago at the shattering of the Tower of Babel. Things have just not been quite right since then, but we're trying. Sing to them that perfect harmony divine with the original voice of the tower, the One Voice, the One Tone, the Perfect Resonation of that which is God. You know the One. It rings within you now and forever. "Prophet Marley lovingly leading the Living towards learning Light, show them how easy it is to become an unwaivering band of light, lightness of being rising from the Love and Wisdom of seeing the Promised Land in singing and dancing. Music is not an instrumment of the devil, music is the Voice of God. Give thanks and praises to Jahweh, so that they come to know the essence of that which is God. "Show them that the pathway to redemption comes comely from cool runnings. Teach them that to create the world around them, solely from their intention. Vision through the seas of oppression for them, Merry Marley, Dread Prophet, teach them the One Loving Glow and free them with music. "See your people, speak the truth and set them free, " I said, vaporizing before the stunned little boy in a lightning flash, laughing from the belly. He was smiling a toothy grin, I remember, which always made me happy. And happiness is a good thing. Afterall, the world can always use more smiles. _ _ _ After this, the tenth of my avatars, I removed myself from the world-at-large and found my new home at El Mitadore', the place where I now write this slice-of-Pi vignette. It had been a long century, and it was only half over. I had done what I could for humanity, and now the choices were their own. I would leave my new home but a handful of times over the course of the next fifty years. These last few moments are all that remain of my story, this particular life of Pi, which is ultimately bounded and infinite, just like the universe. So there it is, then. There and then, I moved into the tallest temple, smack in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle and took a much-needed vacation. I was tired, frustrated. I almost felt human. Frustration remains a highly-underrated, highly-mocked state-of-being. Frustration, in actuality, is a driving force behind ninety-nine percent of civilization's progress, of human call to action, and the driving force of the expansion of a universe. Frustration is an expansive build-up and subsequent release of whopping loads of energy. Men make war, brawl, drink, cheat, lie to their friends, steal from others, and so on, all out of frustration, and the irrational fear of death. Which is, of course, frustrating to that which is God. It's a karma thing. To sow the seeds, to wait hundreds of thousands of years for the seeds to grow, then to watch them fester and rot just a few years away from flowering, well, that's enough to frustrate anybody. Even that which is God. In the post atomic America, this rotting and festering was beginning to take root, albeit bandaged over with the image of 'post-war' prosperity, otherwise known as denial and repression. You don't just vaporize another country and walk away from it. Karma exists beyond the individual level. Just look at Europe, look at the Middle East. They disfigure themselves through eons of warring. Karmically, they're up a creek. A nation is an entity of the species, a purely human creation, despite it's lack of physicality. Ideas are every bit as real as flesh. From an immortalist perspective, in fact, ideas are superior to the flesh, because they're energy, not mass. Matter en masse is the lowest form of energy, encorporated into various forms of organization, some more organized, more cohesively than others, but largely undifferentiated. Humans happen to be one of the more organized, matterwise, to the point of having the potential to choose new forms at will. One of those forms, potentially, is that unwaivering band of light. Humans have the latent ability to change their resonation, have the ability to change frequency whenever they desire, whatever their intention. It's always been that way, always will be. That's what makes humans special. The opposable thumbs and nimble digits, the hairlessness, the fully-erect spine, those are things meant to push humanity towards a less physical and more cerebral way of life. Humans constitute lousy animals, hence should make haste at learning to live without their bodies. This is otherwise known as evolution. It's just that simple. Ever evolving towards perfection, towards that which is God. This concept has been repeated since the dawn of of Man's ascension ten-thousand years prior, chanted like a mantra amoung countless shaman, scribed in stone by the blind prophetic visionaries who wrote the Torah at blistering speeds, all the while encoding the entire History of Man. These were the days when humans were more in touch with the wealth of other dimensions surrounding them. They were connected, simultaneously to that which is God and the Earth. This ideology lasted from the Dawn of Nations to the Age of Industry, although it began it's decline in the Age of Reason. This is ironic, because the Age of Reason was supposed to bring about the ascension of humanity. The age wound up, by-and-large, a utter farce, a total wash, falling far short of the goal. It was laughably predictable, however, because the people in charge of creating this blend of 'Reason' were small-minded, power-minded, mediocre men with nothing but personal gain in mind, nothing in mind but oppression and tyranny and conquest, which remain the most vulgar expressions of this superior human potential, and consequently bring about the fall of every dominant Age of Civilization. Hence, The Age of Reason failed miserably. Again, it was a karma thing. The real challenge, the real dhrama, begins when humans learn light and leave their bodies once and for all, collectively. As I said, this is the mantra, the key to the door, largely ignored by the mainstream. Check your prophetic refrences from all over the world throughout the histories of various civilizations -- the Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Aztecs, Druids -- all different tribes, all different parts of the world, yet the same apocalyptic visions of the End of Time. Disputed, disreputed, but seemingly far beyond coincidental, don't you think? And why? Because that's what's going to happen, of course. Western Science, being the 'idiot light' of civilization, prefers to wait until after the apocalypse before drawing any 'hard' conclusions about the Destiny of Man, prefers to wait until the problem becomes critical before trying to solve it. This ideology, of course, will leave humanity a day late and a dollar short, as the saying goes, when the apocalypse finally arrives. And the sad and sardonic thing about it is they will have had the power to change it all the while. So it goes. Hence, I remained on my perch there at the temple, mulling this quandry over for a almost a decade, then decided to go for a stroll. I needed to walk. I felt frustrated. Making my way across the Gulf of Mexico, I decided to walk across the state of Texas. It was either there or Alaska, but Texas was simply made for walking, so I went, began walking, thinking about humanity. Very frustrating, indeed. I walked quickly through town after town of primrose white picket fences and pink plastic lawn ornaments. It made me physically ill, something I'd never experienced before. Never in the History of Civilization had humans sank so deeply into such an elaborate and vulgar state of denial. Never before, not the Crusades, not the Inquisition, not the witch burnings of Salem, not since Christ was crucified had society crawled this far into itself, pretending not to notice the ring of fire they set to burning, the unleashing of a hellfire so intense as to vaporize the world. And yet in the same breathe proclaim that there's only one reality, this reality, this lamb-like subsistance of blissful ignorance. To which I say this: Phooey. I walked quickly, running it through my mind as I walked. I felt the urge to martyr myself for a moment, something I'd never even considered. And I would have, too, if I thought it would help. But it doesn't help. Humanity simply lives to tear martyrs limb from limb, at least to this point in their evolution. They offer no quarter, hence none taken. The mediocre think that political and economic power make men the masters of the universe. This is foolish, of course. This is a lower form of evolution. And the sadly ironic thing about their misguided thoughts is this: In the end, they fail miserably, dying like dogs in the great Heat Death of Entropy, wondering what the hell they did wrong, which is this: They failed to wake up and smell the smoke, and leave the house before it burned to the ground, as it were. Walking along there in the springtime night of 1957, walking down a largely deserted strecth of Texas highway, I strolled through Lubbock, Texas, pondering these plasticene precursors to destruction, feeling more frustrated with humanity than ever I'd felt prior. I was beside myself carrying the burden of their weight. I walked along, shaking my hands, waving my arms in the air, mumbling to the winds, my hair and beard both long and white, my haik the same, I yammered incessantly about these idiotic myths of civilization, perpetuated by the minds of the mediocre. People who saw me coming moved quickly to the other side of the street, pretending not to notice my extreme duress. That's the American way. Down the highway, on the outskirts, walking down a deserted highway I chanced past a roadhouse bar, where I saw a young man standing beneath the soft glow cast from an incandescant bulb hung at the top of a telephone pole outside the bar. He was looking into the night, gazing at the sky, sniffing deep the air, his back straight and strong and proud, his chin lifted to the heavens. It was young Jack Keroauc, out on a stroll about the terra, just like me. He was fully awake, of course, fully aware of freewill and luminance. He looked fantastic leaning up against the telephone pole, savoring the night air, and I spoke as I passed him summoning up all that frustration, condensing it into the smallest demnominator and let my thoughts fly, airing my feelings to a open ear, to the open air, I said this: "Go moan for man!" And I walked right on by, never so much as breaking pace. He never said a word, but I saw in his eyes that he knew of that which I spoke. We both smiled our secret smiles and went on, in our own ways, to evolve Mankind on to a higher consciousness. As I said, it's what we avatars live for. And the wonderful thing about this chance meeting in the night, was that it made me feel so much better. Like the weight of Atlas lifted, if only for a moment. It's the little things that make you most happy, that make your molecules purr. It requires nothing more than an open ear to an open mind to hear the secrets of the universe. At that point I felt so elated, so light, that I became light and returned to El Mitadore', feeling refreshed and rejuvinated. I had almost thirty years to kill before my next avatar, and now the weight felt lighter. I could relax. Take a little time off. I was performing my function to the utmost, Keroauc, he was doing his part, which was all we could do. We strove for perfection. As with existence, there is no such state as semi-perfect. Either something is perfect or it's not. And that state of Perfection, that line between finite and infinite, therein lies the nanolaser thin line of light between mortality and immortality. Perfection, or bust. That should be the motto of Humanity. Because once attained, Perfection exists forever. It's just that simple. _ _ _
In the shadowed alleyways of creativity, where the echoes of typewriter keys mingle with the distant hum of synthesizers, Kevin M. Cowan weaves his narrative web. His words, like smoke curling in a dimly lit jazz club, linger in the mind, haunting and elusive. As a writer, he crafts stories that dance on the edge of reality, inviting readers to lose themselves in the chiaroscuro of his imagination. As a musician, his compositions are the soundtrack to a world where the past and future collide, each note a ghostly whisper of forgotten dreams. And as a technologist, he stands at the crossroads of innovation and nostalgia, a digital alchemist transforming the ephemeral into the eternal. In the noir-zine of
Kevin M. Cowan is a writer, technologist, and artist whose work spans novels, AI development, drumming, and filmmaking. From his fiction roots in Nebraska to experimental media projects and cutting-edge AI, Kevin blends storytelling, sound, and code into one creative continuum. Explore his world — one story, rhythm, and idea at a time.
Music. Video. Visuals arts. All composed or curated by Kevin.
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