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The voice of the wilderness (23) – minerval

Martijn Benders — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:17:30 +0000

Beatrix and I greeted each other and stepped into the car. She was a Leo woman around her thirties, with wavy blond hair and very shiny eyes. As we drove towards allala oasis there was some considarable electricity between us. What was known as allala oasis was in fact a pretty normal house in in very small village next to the moesel. That is, from the outside the inside was completely painted up with occult symbols, such as the OTO lamen, the tree of life and so on. We walked into the house and I met with Beatrix husband, Wolfgang. She told him ‘it was hot in the car’ as to give him a hint she liked me. Wolfgang seemed slightly upset and just nodded. He was an intellectual looking fellow with dark hair and glasses. As I had arrived early we decided to go for a beer. Soon it became sort of evident to me that Wolfgang and I didn’t get along too well. I talked about casteneda and he made some rather arrogant remarks about it that also seemed to upset Beatrix. He also talked about unter and ubermenschen which I find an annoying simplification if anything. Anyway we drank a beer and went back to see the other candidates for initiation arriving. Mostly a colored bunch but nice people. One of them was a dokter, a very intelligent guy. We started to play chess. I was out of shape since I play chess sporadically but I must have played about 20 games with this guy and not even a single second I had the slightest feeling I could stand a chance. That is pretty remarkable given that I used to be the chess champion of south holland. The guy’s play simply was almost infinitely superior to mine. Fascinating!

I was sort of nervous about this initiation thing since I had no idea what to expect. I had very unrealistic ideas about everything anyway. I thought I would go to some giant castle with thousands of people, think Kubrick here. I remember asking them why on earth initiations were always in the weekends and being quite surprised hearing they had jobs. That idea didn’t cross my mind for a second.

An initiation is a drama play they put you through in order to achieve certain effects. My minerval initiation was sort of funny. There was some point in it where I was telepatically communicating with the female officer on the throne before me, which was Beatrix. She answered some of my questions. We seemed quite involved with each other and must have stood like that for at least a minute. Her husband, who was the other officer in the ritual, disrupted our communication by shouting some silly dogmas through the room. That pissed me off so I told him mentally where he could stick it with his crap. He was silent after that and I continued with Bea.

After that they did a Gnostic Mass but that ritual is way too religious for me even though it did have some effects. I don’t like the religious setup and the bad poetry of Crowley. After all was done we went downstairs and Beatrix came ask me if I wanted to come with her, but I had promised the doktor we’d go for a walk and besides I felt it would be sort of rude to sleep with her since her husband obviously had some issues with it and I felt that was sort of a strange start for an entry into any kind of org. She was very dissapointed when I told her I’d go walking and I felt sorry I did, actually. I walked a few hours through the moesel area which is beautiful with the doktor guy having some interesting conversations. Then a few hours later I hitchhiked back home without having slept at all.

The voice of the wilderness (22) – a prophetic dream

Martijn Benders — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:29:21 +0000

After I broke up with E. things were somehow seriously going downhill in terms of being isolated. I just didn’t find anyone there interesting, they were all moralistic, political sort of people whom I felt little connection to. The only exception was Paultje. He was a thin, weird looking fellow who was also into Castaneda. One time he ate about 50 mushrooms when he was depressed and he had been having these ‘after flashes’ ever since. Sometimes I would walk with him through the city and he would suddenly stop and just stare confused at his own reflection in a shopping window. Otherwise he was a pretty decent guy though and he got me into On-U-sound music of which he was a fervent collector. I remember one time we went on holiday to Schiermonnikoog together. We stayed at some farm and most of the time we were busy practicing the right way of walking, meditation, etc. He freaked out one time because he got attacked by an owl while he was practicing. There was also another guy there who was into magick he was all the time talking about dream manipulation. Decent fellow, but at night I scared him by moving my sexual energy around the room and in some way I was able to make the girls in the room moan. I was pretty deep into the mind at that time. I remember I could make people say stuff, for example. I would sit at a table and I noticed that one could simply ‘steer’ a conversation by planting thoughts into someone else’s head. That might sound far fetched to some people, but in fact its a rather common phenomenon if anything. People do that sort of stuff all the time. The big error is that they assume that anything they ‘hear’ in their own heads are their own thoughts. The reality is pretty different. Its more like we live in this thought field that interconnects and thoughts are being exchanged all the time. As such ‘clairvoyance’ in the sense of thought reading is a very common phenomenon, all it actually requires is the talent of differentiating between your own thoughts and those of others and some concentration ability to listen well. The majority of fortune tellers consist of people who will simply tell you what you want to hear. Then there are some who have actually developed this differentiation ability and can actually repond to stuff from your head, but it doesn’t mean much that they can do so. Real oracling abilities requires much more than this and those sort of people are quite rare.

Two weeks after I returned from Arnhem some guy walked into my room. He was a croatian guy and Paul told him I had Crowley books. He told me he was a member of OTO and if I was interested in joining it. I said I didn’t know. He did a Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram in my room to show me how its done. It was pretty impressive. It felt like he was controlling invisible winds that were blowing through my room. I was kind of baffled by the whole phenomenon of this guy appearing like this and I never considered the option of ritualistic magick. He asked me to perform a LBRP too but I declined, it felt too weird to do anything like that with him watching. Two weeks later he send me a Liber Al vel Legis in the post, a Croatian-English version. I read it but I didn’t like that book very much. Parts of it were interesting, parts of it irritating. I had the biggest problem with part 2. Chunks of it sounded like social Darwinism and I seriously dislike that sort of philosophies. I was wrong interpreting them that way, but at that time, being 19, I was young and I had some naive hopes for my fellow humans.

Everything now posed a big dilemma: would I join an organization I knew little about? I felt things were connected, the appearance of the Castaneda guy from Aachen, the appearance of the OTO guy in my room. On the other hand I never liked organizations much and I didn’t particularly like that book he had send me. So there was a serious dilemma. Two dreams I had made the situation even worse. In the first dream my future self came to meet me. He had a copy of Liber Al vel legis in his hand and he told me the book was ‘okay’. That’s exactly what the message was. When I woke up I thought about it and thought this must mean I should join. So I got in touch and arranged for a meeting in Germany. At that time there was no Dutch branch, if I am correct I was the first Dutch person to join it.

However, there followed a second dream. In that dream I was in an underground cave complex. There was a room in the middle of the complex where an alien lived, in a room full of manuscripts and books. Whenever I would enter that room he would turn at me an look at me with his completely black eyes. Every time he did that I would feel a boost of terrible fright, since the intelligence that radiated from him was so otherworldlish, so hostile, so alien that it scared the creeps out of me. I ran away every time only to find that I got back to that same underground room.

After some loops I managed to find a way out. I was in a mountain landscape. A voice from the air told me I had to push this giant rock into the abyss. Below the mountain my friends were standing. I did what the voice asked and killed all of them with the rock. Then hundreds of ladders came out of the sky and I started to climb one of them. After climbing for a while I came unto a room in the sky. The room was filled with a blue light. There were entities inside that greeted me and it felt like finally I was coming home. I felt a great peace being there. Then, all of a sudden, the thought came to my mind: I had forgotten to close the door! I saw in a flash that the creature from the cave had followed me up the ladder. That thought was so scary I woke up, bathing in my own sweat. That dream was the most strong and real feeling dream I ever had. It was a prophetic dream, which are quite rare. I was completely at loss as to how to interpret it. What the fuck did this mean? I had no fucking clue. It undid the certainty I gained from the future self dream but I decided to go on with the initiation thing anyway in the hope for some answers. I got an invitation for Minerval initiation from Allala Oasis, they were located next to the Muzel between Koblenz and Triest. I went there by train. A woman named Beatrix told me by letter that she would pick me up from the railway station. The station was rather empty, they lived in this miniature town, but somehow Beatrix managed to miss me and I sneaked up on her when she was about to get into her car disappointed that I didn’t show up. We got into the car and drove to their house.

The voice of the wilderness (21) – an encounter with the spirit

Martijn Benders — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:34:37 +0000

After the winter cleared it was phenomenal to experience spring. That’s another defect of living in an artificial climate: you do not experience the differences between the seasons much. An old friend from school moved in downstairs together with an ex girlfriend of mine, J. I haven’t written about J. because I didn’t think the relation was very interesting. We went to Turkey together with my parents when I was 16 but the entire holiday she’d just sit on her ass and complain which annoyed the living daylight out of me. Anyway, the strings weren’t any tighter when they started living downstairs. They were too petty and moralistic to my taste, I remember them telling me I couldn’t listen to fats domino for example because he was a ‘capitalist’. They thought I was way weird. One time there was some guy in my room and he had brought acid. I decided to take some but that was a serious mistake. Some time after taking it I began wonder who the hell that guy was. I didn’t know him at all, he was just there by incident. I started having stomach cramps and started to panic. I walked downstairs and I was quickly losing my grip. They managed to put me in bed but I was paralyzed. I felt like I couldn’t move at all. Time was moving at an incredibly slow pace. It was like torture. I must have managed to tell them they should call E. who at that point was still my girlfriend. Her father drove her all the way from Dommelen to Eindhoven to check what was going on with me. All that time, and to me it seemed like weeks, I lay paralyzed on the bed. I saw skeletons riding on horses outside of the window. I wasn’t scared it was beautiful to watch. At some point E. came into the room and she had this incredibly high forehead. She started talking and as soon as she did we were cracking up together, giggling like little kids. She thought I was okay so she left again after 15 minutes. I felt better and got out of bed to ride out the next of the trip.

The next day I was sort of a wrack. For some reason, however, I felt like hitchhiking to E., not because I wanted to see her but because I wanted to break up. I am not sure why, it could have been related to the high forehead thing. I remember thinking I couldn’t possibly have a relationship with someone who looked like that when seen on LSD.

I went to some outskirt road to hitchhike to Arnhem. E. had recently moved there because she was starting at the art academy there. I was looking seriously weird – I had a shaven head, ragged clothes and I was wearing this giant rosary with wooden beads around my neck.

After standing there for 10 minutes a small red car passed me. But after it passed me its driver stepped full on the breaks, put the car in reverse and drove back at me. A dangerous move since it was a busy road. The driver opened the passenger door, looked at me with piercing eyes and asked me if I had lepra or something. I said ‘no’. He asked me if I was a Buddhist or something. ‘No’ I said again. ‘Okay’ he said, ‘come on in!’.

I stepped into the car. The guys energy was incredible. We immediately started talking about Casteneda. He had read all books too and after he went to Mexico to search for don juan. He stayed there for years, did all kinds of peyote sessions, and recently returned. He now lived in Aachen he said where he build his own house and started a healer practice.

The guy was amazing. He had the most supernatural sort of energy. Every time he laughed he throw his head to the back and made this hyena like sound. All the way to Arnhem he hardly looked at the road at all. He kept telling me all sorts of things about the warriors way. He even got a sign about me because his car radio refused to work. After we arrived in Arnhem he put me off somewhere and I turned around, grabbed his hand and made the spirit thank him. That took him by surprise. I did so because I felt that it was a great gift to meet such a person. I had been calling out with my will to meet someone ever since I read the casteneda books and this was the manifestation of the spirit.

I went to see E. and told her I wanted to break up. We laughed and made love. I went back home this time using the train. My encounter with a sorcerer would get a tail, soon.

The voice of the wilderness (19) – Riots and Love

Martijn Benders — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:36:30 +0000

I have left out I. – I. was a punk girl I met in eindhoven. She was a very independent person, a Scorpio, and used to walk around in a leather jacket with the Russian word for freedom, svoboda, painted over its back. I used to have these great philosophical conversations with her. She actually followed me around everywhere but I was too stupid to notice she was in love with me. I remember two moments of significance. The first was the blockade of Shell in Amsterdam at the end of the eighties. I was still in school and would have an exam that day so I asked the principle if I could redo that test later on. He said no and I would get a zero if I went to that protest. I didn’t care and went anyway. I. was there too and we were together most of the day. The blockade went pretty nasty. There was lots of military police and somehow I ended up sitting in the front row of the street sit down. It was obvious they were going to charge soon and I was alert. When the charge started I was somehow able to avoid any beatings. Chaos in the street. A lot of hardcore autonomes had shown up with bivaks and catapults and baseball bats. It was like a war but it was exciting. The cops were actually pretty scared of this shadow army. I saw some cops stop charging and run away when they ran into one of these anarchist baseball squats. Of course soon the teargas was used. Both me and I. got hit by a fair amount of it and that stuff sucks pretty hard. However, crying together caused by teargas with a girl you are in love with in a warlike setting was somehow seriously romantic. Highlight of the day was when the ropes came out. We tied ropes to a police bus and hung on it with 20 guys trying to pull it over. It was great fun. Eventually the bus escaped.

One thing about this event struck me as typical. The cops actually had 2 buses full of cops dressed as autonoms. They copied everything even the Mohawks and slogans on the jackets. I think the idea was actually to let these guys incite a riot. Events like these are great opportunities for police to get more budget when things run out of hand. However these riots were already there, which is why I think these punk cops simply were not used and waiting in a van instead. They were seriously embarrassed by being discovered and drove away at light speed afterwards.

The second event I remember about I. is that I made a date with her. I was still living with my parents. I was thinking I should finally tell her how much I was in love with her. That thought made me so nervous I had to sit down on the ground twice during my bicycle ride to eindhoven on the way to this date. Finally I actually bicycled into a ditch with water! I couldn’t believe I was so nervous and excited about this. I. And me sat in front of altstad and played a game of chess. I told her I was in love with her. She looked at me with this funny, ironic sort of look and said she was in love with me before too but now it was over. That kinda sucked! Later on she told me she was thinking about taking me for a screw on this occasion but instead we just played a few games of chess and parted.

I think at that time I was more political than I. was. I remember some talks we had in de bunker. She told me that the squatters there were just as conservative as the people outside. I was seriously shocked she felt that way because at that time I seriously believed in anarchism and all that. But of course she was right. I. Was a big neubauten fan and got me into more alternative forms of music instead of just punk rock. She lived next door to me in the school after the other guys left but she was hardly there. I remember I one time peeked in her diary and found what she wrote about me. She wrote that she had never met someone with such an all-devouring, destructive oversight and vision as me. That touched me, that she would feel that way. In hindsight I think it was my idealism that sort of blocked a possible relation with her. Be it as it may, she was one of the persons I really loved at that time.

The voice of the wilderness (18) – a room within a forest

Martijn Benders — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:48:57 +0000

As I’ve written before my interest in the occult started when I was about 14 and my prime interests was science fiction, fantasy, advanced physics and the occult. Summarized: anything that was filled with the promise of the fantastic. I read a few hundred science fiction and fantasy books, a few dozen occult and physics works. Not of the more speculative kind like ‘godel escher bach’ but genuine works of Einstein, Bohr and others. I think part of my motivation for that was to irritate my dad, because he was a physics teacher but his knowledge was limited to simple newton mechanics. I was proud I knew more than him about the subject at the age of 13 and kept bothering him with discussions he didn’t give a shit about.

At the age of 16 I bought some Crowley books, the first book I bought of him was ‘The book of Lies’ which is a collection of cryptical, kabbalistic writings ordered by numbers. The book starts with the observation that all thoughts, even this one, are lies because they are pictures of reality, subtracts rather than the real thing. That book rather fascinated me. It is not exactly an easy work but on the whole probably one of Crowley’s better attempts. What’s interesting about it is that he attempts to express truths as compact and abstract as possible without any rational makeup.

At 17 I began reading Carlos Casteneda. His works had an even deeper effect on me. Crowley was sort of interesting but I always felt he was somehow seriously lacking direction and oversight, partly because he had to build a system from scratch and partly because he had this rather irritating Libra personality which tends to wander off in any direction without much spine to see something through. Its beyond me how the guy could write such insane volumes of mediocre poetry without even once questioning his sources, methodologies or even the intent to ‘become the greatest poet in the world’ – I have noticed this allergy to criticism in many Libra people: they are in fact severely upset by even the most minute sort of critique. I find that mode of existence mindbogglingly dull but maybe its some sort of natural phase in natures grand cycle.

The yaqui system seemed far more subtle and advanced to me and I was completely fascinated by these works. I read all the casteneda books, 7 of them in that time, in a few months. Here I saw a vision of a reality completely different than the one we are brought up to believe in and it was a reality with a working system and sound philosophies behind it. I started to practice some of the techniques described in the books. The first one was the ‘right way of walking’.

By that time I had moved to a squatted school. I had a classroom as a room. It was a giant room and at first I was at loss as to what I should do with it. The previous guy had build a little room inside the classroom with foam bricks. I decided to make a forest in the room with that little room as some sort of oasis in the back. I carried shit loads of yellow sand upstairs in buckets and covered the whole floor with it. Then, it was just after Christmas time, I started collecting the Christmas trees people had put as garbage next to the street. At the end there it was: I had a forest of Christmas trees in my room and an shiny oasis in the back! It was magnificent. It was great to live in a room in the middle of the forest. Some people also thought it was way cool and some others thought I was seriously bonkers. The school was right in front of the Evoluon so when I looked outside of the window there was this giant UFO in front of it. My parents came to visit for the 2nd time since I had moved out but the forest was way to weird for them they thought I was even more nuts than they did already and moved in and out like they’d have seen the devil in person. Well I didn’t care. I had a great time in my forest. E. and me used to walk naked through it and she looked like an elf already. The room also had the only access to the roof and we used to sleep there in summer under the stars.

The school consisted of two buildings. Ours was the home of the group that came from the willemstraat squat. By now we were sort of a family, living together for 15 months and we were more creative sort of folks. The folks in the other building were more political. They used to have these board meetings that bore the shit out of me so I never went. At some point later a building came free in the tonglresestraat and 3 people would be able to move there. It was a real cool place and they offered me a room but at this time I was tired of moving and I told paul he could have my room so all the guys moved leaving me behind alone. This was the starting signal of a somewhat more darker time for me.

The voice of the wilderness (17) – Ramadan and beer

Martijn Benders — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:20:12 +0000

I lived about a half year on the willemstraat squat. It was the old majors house of eindhoven, right in front of the mosque. I shared the attic with Paul Beekhuis, a photographer and allover cool guy whom I still have contact with sometimes. Paul was one of the few dutch people that came to my wedding here in Istanbul. Anyway, the house had been empty 3 years before we occupied it and the place was a dump. The toilets didn’t work, there was no heating no water. We had to fill a jerry can with water everyday a mile away at some other squatters house. It was getting winter and the winter was pretty cold. It was freezing and we just had this small gas heater we would gather around with 10 people. It was an exciting time. There is something wild and exciting about living in such ghostly places with people you don’t know very well yet. Its a strange experience because these people become like your new family.

I remember two events that sort of stuck out in the months we lived there, besides the barricading frenzy I mentioned earlier. One time I came home late at night with arno and we saw a shopping car full of beer bottles which had been drunk by our squat by the guys. We decided to make some surreal artwork with beer bottles in the garden and stuck all of them heads down in the sand so at the end there was this giant field of beer bottles as our back garden. It looked surreal and cool and we went to sleep. Next morning paul came wake me up in great consternation. A large group of Muslims had gathered at our house, apparently today was the start of Ramadan and they thought that garden, which was right in front of the mosque, had been made specifically to insult them. We apologized and told them that wasn’t the case and quickly cleared all bottles from the garden.They weren’t aggressive or anything, in fact their logic was perfectly comprehensible, but of course our action had had nothing to do with the mosque.

Another event: an old sewage pipe broke in Patricks room downstairs and we had been using the toilets upstairs, and shit was literally spouting into his room. He had to go in and try stop it. A heroic effort if I ever saw one. He was covered from head to toe in feces but managed to stop the flood. He was like this sensitive sort of cancer fellow but no one wanted to volunteer to go in there, we were like ‘yeah dude, its your room man, you stop it’…

We also found this insane bastard dog in the street we adopted. We named him ‘zeiksnor’ because he had a drooling mustache and he would all the time chase his own tail and shit everywhere in the house. The first time my dad actually came to see where I lived I was already living there for 2 months. He came into the house and immediately stepped into dog turd. As he was already highly opinionated about squats you can imagine that didn’t improve his opinion and he was in and out of the house in two minutes. Oh well.

We used cooking turns so everyone had to cook like one day of the week. The only guy that wouldn’t cook was Jeroen. Jeroen was a strange fellow. He used to get up in the morning, take a beer from the fridge, sit down and sit in the same chair all day saying nothing at all. The only times he would get up was to get another beer. I think he was seriously depressed but at the same time I think he sort of felt it was really cool to be like that. We lived with him for 2 years and in this 2 years we could, one time, after applying an enormous amount of group pressure, get him to cook for us. ‘Ok ok I will cook’ he said. He went to the supermarket, got a can of beans, heated it up and that was our meal. When we moved to the school later on we put Jeroen in the weird basement of the school since there were no rooms left. We figured he didn’t actually need any daylight and he was perfectly content living in that half flooded cellar too, which sort of added to his ‘coolest beer drinking punk in the world’ image. Last time I heard from him he was actually talking to me and telling me he got some teenage girl pregnant.

The voice of the wilderness (16) – the devil cake

Martijn Benders — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:35:29 +0000

When I turned 18 I stopped smoking marijuana altogether. I never liked that stuff too much. I smoked it intensively for two years and it was enough it just didn’t add anything to my creativity. The spirit that lives in marijuana is female and highly seductive: she makes you feel like you are being very creative but when fact you are doing fuck shit. I had some pleasant times with her but found out that she was increasingly feeding all sorts of paranoia in my mind. Most notorious of these were the countless times I was lying in bed and started to notice my breath and got confused about how fast I should breathe. That is pretty flippant, trust me, I was sometimes really panicking about the breath thing.

The last time I used marijuana was also the worst experience I had with it. Some guys from another squat were growing weed in their garden and they put about a kilo of weed into a single cake. The damn thing was entirely green! Some guys ate a piece and they had to call a doctor because some of them were flipping out. The next day one of them brought the devil cake to our squat, telling us to be careful because the thing was quite strong.

That sounded like fun so I ate a slice and went to my room and started painting. I was painting flames for about 20 minutes but it was harder and harder to hold the brush. At some point I crawled to my bed and lied down hoping to pass out. When I did so suddenly an enormous wind started blowing through my room and I was holding on to my bed for life. That wind was so strong it would completely blow me away and I was scared to death and screaming for help on my bed. Some guys came but they didn’t know what to do, they tried to comfort me which helped somewhat. I rode it out but swore never to take that stuff again. I don’t know what would have happened if I would have let go of my bed instead of holding unto it but it seemed like a quite dangerous situation to me. That just goes to show that even mild drugs in very high doses can be quite threatening! I have used various hallucinogenics but I never experienced anything this threatening with any of those.

When I got my high school diploma I took some lsd. After a half hour or so everything started to be inexplicably funny. After an hour or so this changed into calm bewilderment and I found out that my new hobby was to climb and walk roofs. I was in this serial housing squat and they had a great rooftop where you could climb for hours on end and that’s what I did. Some people might think it dangerous but it wasn’t I knew exactly what I was doing and was very happy being there. I remember Dennis/denvis once telling me he took lsd in Australia and sat at the edge of a cliff for hours. Its great to experience such total lack of fear or boundaries. I always liked roofs and I was always climbing and sitting in trees as a kid too. I guess I am some sort of roofman.

The voice of the wilderness (15) – Indian romance

Martijn Benders — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:24:03 +0000

After my relationship with M. ended I met E. in a bar. I was dancing and she was sitting there, looking absolutely stunning. Her father was Indonesian and her mother was dutch, she had a ravishing exotic beauty and a keen, intelligent mind. She was into fashion and clothes design. I don’t exactly remember how we got together, but I regard it as the first real relationship in my life. She looked like a splendid squawk and we used to put feathers in each others hair and run through the city barefoot pretending to be Indians. It was incredible fun and free. I remember i used to run over stratumseind barefooted and always my feet were full of glass and bleeding but for some reason that seemed cool. We made love everywhere even in the park when people were walking by. She had this incredible Indian looking coat she’d put on the grass and I’d screw the hell out of her. One time we were make love on the rooftop and the entire philips department was watching us from the office next to it but we simply didn’t give a shit.We were caught up in this sweeping sexual romance thing…

And we felt like the most free people in the world. E. wasn’t very experienced she just had one boyfriend before me and he was sort of an eunuch so all this sexuality stuff was pretty new to her. She somehow transformed from a neat girl into the most horny thing in the world. Two years ago I had an American-dutch poet friend to visit here and I asked him if he remembered E. and he said ‘oh yeah that incredibly horny girl’ – well, that was her and we were together about a half year. It was pretty intensive. I think we loved each other a lot. I remember she used to kick me a lot whenever I poked fun at her, but I love girls that kick me so I just kept poking.

By that time I was living in a squatted school. More on that later on. I remember she used to get really pissed at me for wanting to sleep alone. I would leave her at the roof and get into my own bed and in the morning she’d throw stuff at me like my shoes. She would yell too and throw stuff at me for leaving her alone there.

We went on a holiday to Berlin, Prague and Budapest but it went wrong there. I had promised my friend we would go and she insisted on coming even if she was damn ill. My friend arno didn’t think it necessary to bring a tent so we had only 1 small tent for 3 people. After a day of tiresome hitchhiking we arrived in Berlin and had no idea where to go. It was raining like shit. I said let’s just put the tent in the bushes and get it over with. We did that, and we hardly fitted in but somehow I managed to still make love to E. while arno pretended to sleep.Around 6 in the morning we found out the tent was about 2 meters from the tramway. Hell! We visited Berlin, Prague and Budapest but this 3 person thing was a big mistake and E. and me were fighting all the time. She was still ill and blaming all sorts of things on me. When we arrived in Hungary, after sleeping on the floor of the border police office, her parents were there and she’ continue the trip with them. Arno was tired of it all and wanted to go home. So I said okay I will go on alone then. I looked at the map and the were some mountains northeast of Budapest that looked interesting. I hiked there and arrived on my birthday. I bought a bottle of vodka and walked as far into the forest as I could. I put the tent up and drank the entire bottle to celebrate my birthday. I felt like shit, actually, and went to sleep. The next morning I was awoken by an insane noise. There was a helicopter circling above my tent shouting stuff in hungerian at me. I quickly packed my stuff and moved on.

Once back in Holland I met E. On stratumseind and I remember exactly what she said. She didn’t even say hello. She said: ‘you have aids!’ Somehow in my absence he mind had gone on some trip about me having aids and she was completely freaked out about it. There was some reason behind it – a year before that I had become ‘blood brothers’ with a girl sitting next to me on the dance floor. I have no idea why, she was a gorgeous girl sitting next to me and I suddenly got the idea to become blood brothers and she agreed, so we cut our pulses with some glass and did it. It felt very romantic but later on she came tell me there was a chance her boyfriend had aids. So that’s were E. got it from – but she was way too trippy about it. I tried to talk sense into her but she kept repeating the same line ‘you have aids’ like she was a record that got stuck. I looked at her and I knew I had to hit her. I slapped her in her face and she came out of it and laughed and we had a good time after it. I got an aids test to calm her mind and all was well.

She moved to Arnhem to study fashion. I visited her a few times, the last time planning to break up. I told her I wanna break up she said yeah me too. Then we screwed one last time and it was over. It was a very nice way of saying goodbye.

She kept writing me letters though for a long time I was getting these long handwritten letters in which she’d tell me all her sexual escapades. I really liked reading them. I think I really loved that girl. I think she loved me too because when i visited her in Arnhem, after we already broke up, she gave me a painting she made of me. It was this weird surreal painting with me on it and a penis. I kept that painting a long time but it got lost somewhere between all my movings.

After that I only saw her one more time, on the Amsterdam kunstvlaai. It was a moment of amazement since the same spirit was still there. Sometimes I still miss her.

The voice of the wilderness (14) – Speaking Out

Martijn Benders — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:29:39 +0000

Another event that happened to me between the age of 16 and 17 years old that had great impact on me: two public speeches I held at school. At Dutch schools, at least at that time, everyone was obliged to hold at least one speech in front of the class about a self chosen subject. Usually these speeches were 10 minutes long and a lot of students were sort of nervous about doing that.

My teachers name was Hans van Es and he was a soft, friendly and sympathetic sort of character. His subject was Dutch language. He had given me good grades and compliments about my writing abilities before so we generally seemed to like each other. Since I could chose my own subject I somehow got the idea into my head to try change everyones world view in my speaking time. I was somehow expecting that was possible. I got in front of class and spoke for 45 minutes about quantum physics, universe, shoestring theory, all sorts of other stuff relating to how weird a place the universe really is. I was totally emerged in the job and wasn’t even using any material as far as I can recall. The knowledge I had stowed within through years of reading and thinking simply poured out of me like I was exploding. After 45 minutes, which I had hardly noticed had passed, students literally rushed out of class. The teacher was rather impressed, though, and gave me an A but all I cared about was the effect my lesson had had on my fellow students. To my great disappointment none of them had even understood a single thing I had been saying. I questioned a good sample and most of them were simply unable to even tell me what I had been talking about that hour. I was severely disappointed by that awkward laziness and inability to understand the simplest things. I felt really pissed off.

So, one year later I had to do another one of those speeches and I thought like: fuck it, no concessions this time. I have to try something different. I asked Hans van Es if I could again take the whole hour and this time have a classroom I could prepare for the occasion. Hans gave his permission.

I asked some guys from the squat I was living in to come be surreal figurants. They were wearing weird masks and robes. I emptied the classroom so everyone had to sit on the floor. I darkened the windows with garbage bags. I had weird music playing and two tv’s with strange art videos a friend had made. I put one of the guys in masque in front of the door and burned heavy incense. I had a bunch of texts printed out from Crowleys Book of Lies. The class came in, bewildered, and all sat down on the floor. The only thing I remember about the 45 minutes that followed is that I went completely bonkers. I screamed, I danced, I read texts, I raved like a lunatic. All my energy was coming out. It was incredibly trippy. The entire hour is some sort of black hole in my mind. After I felt finished I sat myself down in front of the class and said ‘game over’. Right at that moment an alarm clock went off I had set before, really loud, and the students and teacher who were already freaked out jumped up.

It was one of the best things I did in those years. It gave me great mental independance. It was a performance I did for myself rather than for them, and that absence of concessions was superb. However, one blind guy who was in my class was completely fascinated by the whole thing and he thanked me repeatedly. Some girl who was there and was from our squat told me that a lot of the people the entire hour had been staring obsessively at the television in front of them. Fear of the unknown, it is an interesting thing to defeat.

Some years later I one time returned to that school and saw Hans. I asked him if he remembered that performance. He said he was still having nightmares about it. What really blasted my mind however was that someone had painted a portrait of Crowley and hung it close to the classroom i had done that performance in. I pointed it out to Hans and he gave a real troublesome look.

The voice of the wilderness (13) – bar to bar with a bucket

Martijn Benders — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:09:22 +0000

Before I moved into a squat we had some great times with a group of friends that had sort of spontaneously formed. There was me, there was Arno, the son of the town milkman. He was the brother of the guy that once threatened to cut my throat if I didn’t stop flirting with his girl. His dad was this ultra funny, ultraconservative elemental type. When his eldest son became punk he threw him out of the house. When his second oldest son became punk he threw him out too. Arno was the third in line and whenever that milkman used to spot me he’d go berserk.

There was Peter, who owns a pub in Eindhoven now. There was Hein the weird art student who continuously talked about Laibach and other weird things. There was Michie and Edwin, two fucked up dudes that worked in the local slaughterhouse. Last but not least, there was Henry.

Henry was unbelievable. He was like Mowgli, or one of those children raised by wolves. When we met him somewhere on the street with carnival he seemed the most funny character we had seen in a long time. He couldn’t even ride a bicycle and he never went to a bar. There was like tuns of things the guy had no clue of and when I saw his folks I understood why. Imagine my amazement when I rang the doorbell and the door was opened by this small cave troll in human form. She didn’t even speak she’d grunt. Henry pretty much raised himself and had hardly went to school. When we took him to the local youth centre he was out of his mind from sheer joy. He’d dance like a raving lunatic and the guy didn’t even for a single moment in the entire time I knew him worry what anyone else would think of him. He was the purest manifestation of the idiot savant I have ever met.

We taught him to smoke weed and he would buy insane amounts of weed all the time and half the bar would be stoned from his weed, except.. Henry. He just sat there, bewildered about the fact that everyone got high except him. After a few weeks we found out he wasn’t actually inhaling the smoke. He was that sort of guy, nothing was obvious to him and you had to explain the simplest things.

One time I took my sisters block flute to the bar and we would roll eight joints and stick one in every hole. That would flatten half of the pub! I returned the flute after that to my sisters drawer but it smelt like tobacco and pot like nothing else. Sometimes I heard her play after that and it always made me gniffle.

We had another trick with a bottle and a bucket of water. Henry used to carry a bucket with him when he went out solely for that reason. Imagine that, a guy going from bar to bar carrying a bucket and asking everywhere if he can fill it up with water. Henry was in fact really intelligent sometimes I had these philosophical conversations with him and he would be genuinely interested and perplexed at the mechanisms of the universe we discussed. He also was seriously reckless, though. He also worked at the local slaughterhouse, because they offered good money, and his job was to cut the cow’s heads off. Henry one time decided to try LSD at work, because he was bored there. Now, seriously, the last thing I would EVER do is use LSD in a slaughterhouse. He of course went ape-shit after 15 minutes and thought he was in hell. Well, in fact he was in hell and LSD just showed him the reality he was in. It took him considerable time to recover from that trip, even though he must have maximumly stayed there for a half hour or so before he ran outside.

By that time we had progressed our nightlife to ‘de Bunker’ which was this military bunker squatted by some old school punks which was simply the coolest place in Eindhoven at the time. Years later it became nationwide news when the major of Eindhoven used tuns of military police to evacuate it and was met just by a few squatters with water pistols. That major looked like a complete ass on national tv wasting resources like that and he called it the biggest mistake in his career.

Anyway, we used to explore really extreme methods of getting stoned. We used chilms, waterpipes, tulips, flutes, wc-rolls. One day Henry got the idea to roll the longest joint ever made. We bought 10 packs of van Nelle shag and 30 grams of weed and 30 packs of rolling papers. After about 4 hours of work Henry rolled a joint that was exactly 1 meter and 20 centimeter long. It was thicker than my arm.
We tried to light it up but the damn thing just wouldn’t burn. There was simply too much oxygen coming through the paper and it was impossible to suck it hard enough. So we chopped up the joint in 4 pieces and smoked those. It was like smoking two entire packs of shag in one time. I was sick for 4 days!

I mentioned De Bunker as our cool hideout but in fact we had an ever cooler hideout for a while. The was this old hooker party boat lying at the old harbor-head in Eindhoven and Peter had managed to change the locks on it. We would go there every weekend with large amounts of cheap booze and get really pissed. The ship had burned down which was why it was abandoned, but below deck there were perfectly intact mirror-cladded 70′s style sofa’s and a dance floor and a bar. We got pissed there for many nights in a row and it was simply the coolest place one could imagine for this sort of thing. I must have been 16 at that time because I remember bringing my girlfriend S. to the place who was frightened to death because she saw ‘ghosts’ everywhere. Sometimes the owner would come and change the lock again but we would just cut it off and replace it with a lock of our own. As i think back that must have been sort of risky since the sort of people that own giant hooker boats usually ain’t really softies but the thought didn’t occur to us at the time.

The voice of the wilderness (12) – the barricading episode

Martijn Benders — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:08:23 +0000

When I was 17 I moved into a squat. I had been attending meetings where political activists and punks talked about squatting the former majors house of Eindhoven on the willemstraat. These meetings were quite ridiculous. I remember hourlong ethical discussions. Someone discovered a junkie was living in the house. Did we have the right to throw him out? After about 6 hours of discussion the general consensus was that, somehow, we did have the right to throw him out. Sunday morning around 6 o clock we moved in. Unfortunately, part a of the group were some jackass hardcore punks from Oss. These guys felt we had to barricade all windows with grids and spirals from beds. They had all kinds of wild stories about cops and hitmen, and the next 3 months these jerkoffs were constantly busy just barricading that house. Well, not me. I had a great time reading books on top of the roof. I couldn’t even for a moment imagine why anyone would like to waste time with something as idiotic as barricading based on some fairytale stories. I felt free and had the time of my life on that roof. Opposite of our building was a philips office and I was greatly enjoying seeing them slave away their lives while I was the king of the roof.

After 3 months of barricading the house looked like Fort Knox. Getting in was really complicated, one needed to climb a ladder to the roof and follow all kinds of procedures. Meanwhile, winter was setting in and we had neither water nor heating and just one electric line we borrowed from the neighbours. It was getting really cold, started to seriously freeze and we had one little gas heating we would sit around with about 10 people. I liked it because it was seriously romantic. I was in love with this punk girl who also lived in the house but unfortunately she had a friend and it was sort of painful seeing them together. With the exception of the Oss wankers we had a nice group going. The first months me and my friend Arno were the black sheep of the group since the Oss guys would convince everyone we weren’t real punks because we refused to barricade. However, as these guys regularily smashed up the living room piss drunk, cool as they were, the other people soon grow tired of their hardcore lifestyle and we were suddenly the good guys again.

I was hardly going to school that year, but in the winter I would go sometimes just to get warm. I remember sitting next to a blind guy in class. He really liked me, we used to have all sorts of philosophical conversations. He was, maybe because of his blindness, much more curious about his environment than most people who always take the environment for granted. However since we lived without water or shower it was quite challenging to sit next to me for him, I imagine, since blind people usually have a sharp nose.

I had picked up a girl in the bakkerij, M., whom I had a relation with for a few months. She was a gorgeous hippy girl and she lived in Waalre. I remember my pickup line I walked up to her and asked her if she wanted to have a pillowfight and she laughed and said yeah. She invited me to her house and we had sex. She told me her dad was a freemason and he had this huge collection of occult books I would sift through. One time I had to come eat dinner and she asked me not to say I lived in a squat and pretend I was a normal student. I came in, probably looking quite ragged as I was in those days, and her father sat there and looked like he wanted to shoot me. He had this eye disfunctionality where one eye always looks the other way so you can never tell what they are looking at. I found him a silly person. He would sometimes dress up in his mason regalia and get really pissed if I saw him walking around in it. I didn’t continue long with M. since there seemed to miss some essential energy in the relation, maybe because we are both cancer. She was a weird girl, I remember she had a room filled with beercans. Thousands of beercans from all over the world. She really loved drinking beer too. My friend Markje, the guy who drank a bottle of scotch a day, at some point just took over the relation and I didn’t mind since I wasn’t feeling I had any type of essential connection with her.

The voice of the wilderness (11) – chess player Willy Wokka

Martijn Benders — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:29:55 +0000

Once the famous Mierlo chess player Willy Wokka, who came from a family of chess players, invited loads of eindhoven punks to his birthday party. The guys showed up and it was sort of boring there, an awkward silence penetrating the air. Everybody sort of started to wonder why the hell they came there. All of a sudden Willy apparantly got enough of it too because he got up and started shouting and throwing things at the guests saying they should all piss off from his party. It dawned on me that Willy had the right sort of spirit: its pointless to waste ones time on anything so spiritless. I learned a sufi saying later on that one should never spend more than a few minutes in the company of a person one doesn’t like. That rule has become a golden rule in my life: if I don’t like someone I simply minimize the time I spend with this person.In a lot of cases that sort of requires one to cut off formalities and fake connections but it feels great to cut that bullshit off anyway.One should live ones life with maximized potential and that potential requires one to simply not waste time with dull idiots. When one can cut out such people from ones life ones energy levels are substantially raised.

Of course I was young at the time and I didn’t master the art of saying ‘no’ yet. There are many occasions where one should simply say ‘no’ as some sort of directors cut in the film of life. One should certainly never hand over the directors seat to anyone, even if this is the person you loved most in this world. Without the ability to direct the film of your life you have nothing: no love, no soul, not even a real movie. The object is more or less to figure out what sort of movie you want to create, and to carefully observe your environment to look for plot lines. Just ask yourself if that person that bothers you deserves a place in your film, would you mention him or her in the subtitles, can you give the annoying presence an interesting twist or is this a mere figurant?

In the last period before I’d move into a squat my folks went on a holiday and left me home alone. I organized a series of parties to celebrate the occasion. After 4 nights of partying I was extremely tired and told my mates that the next night we would just watch some videos. To my dismay, however, the doorbell rang and a bunch of punks I knew only from their abysmal reputation was standing at the door saying they heard about the party. Now, these were hardcore guys, not the political variant but the ‘kick your face in mohawk destruction fuckup’ variant.They came in, sat down and all started snorting speed. I didn’t know what to do. I was too tired for this sort of thing and I was pretty sure they’d tear the house apart if I went to sleep so I decided to give speed a try. I snorted a big line and my tiredness simply evaporated. I felt like a million bucks! I put on some punk music and spend the rest of the night frantically drumming along with it. At some point the badass punks left and at 5 I tried to go to sleep. Forget about it! There’s no way one can sleep on speed. I got up again and decided to bicycle to eindhoven just for the hell of it. So I bicycled 12 kilometred and it felt great. However, once I was in Eindhoven the shit started to wear off. All of a sudden the most dreadful tiredness I have ever felt came over me. One moment I felt like I could run a marathon, the next I felt like someone should pick me from the floor. Never ever have I experienced a more tiresome journey as those 12 kilometers I had to ride back. Speed is a weird drug: it somehow manages to use reserve clusters of energy one has stored in the body. I don’t think its a very pleasant drug. I knew some addicts and they hardly ever slept. From all drugs probably speed wears you down the most rapidly. I’ve tried it 3 times but its simply not a very interesting drug, besides feeling like superman there is little the drug actually does than speed up ones metabolism.