This is EL14.

And so I stood on the boundaries of life, on the peripheries of existence, and peered outwards unto death and
unto every True Thing, every thing that I would feel from then on until eternity, and it was a very Dark Ocean
- a very deep, and very empty universe.
Robert Voor.
THE GHOST
1. The Haunting Presence
2. Blackest Bile
3. Grave Filled With Books
4. Empty Churches
5. Im Going To Do It
6. Spectral Bride
7. No One Is Ever Going To Want Me
8. A Sleeping Heart
9. Buried Above Ground
0. Introduction
THE LIE
Village of 100 Witches 1.
Indians Shooting Stars 2.
Come Over, Come Over 3.
Sleep Tapes 4.
The Dark Ocean Society 5.
The Spectral Gaol 6.
What Does It All Mean If We All Die Anyway 7.
Wells of Despair 8.
Ole Worm 9.
Giles Corey 10.
Seance 0.
Afterword 11.
INTRODUCTION
Sometime in the Spring of 2009 I tried to kill myself.
Six months before that, I used a Voors Head Device for
the first time.
I sat in front of a piano, and slid the hood over my face.
Immediately, I felt the room contract. After that, only
flashes. Half-memories.
The tape recorder on the table clicked to a stop an hour
later. I was on the floor, the hood next to me, crumpled
into a heap. Featureless. I couldnt remember how Id
come to be there.
It was several days before I could bring myself to listen
to the recording. When I did, I noticed things - footsteps
while I played. The sound of glasses clinking together.
Knocks on the wooden body of the piano. And myself:
wailing, screaming, crying. For an hour, until the end of
the tape brought it to a sudden stop. No explanation.
Several months later, I found myself in the kitchen, a
knife to my chest. Wailing, screaming, and crying. I
didnt remember how I came to be there, how I came to
be standing where I was standing, holding what I was
holding. It was like a veil had been lowered, and then
lifted. I threw the knife and it stuck, quivering, in the
wall. There it stayed until I had the courage to touch it
again, weeks later.
The months in between the two events had been lost,
utterly lost, to a wave of depression that nearly
destroyed me. Week upon week buried in books, hidden
in texts. I had already decided that my life was not worth
living, and so the depression manifested itself as a
question:
If I did not wish to be alive, did I wish to be dead?
I read anything, and everything, I could find - on
the afterlife, on suicide, on physical evidences of
ghostly existence.
I am searching, I told myself. Searching for
reasons to live. Searching for ways to defend my
continued existence. Searching for a reason.
But I was lying, even then. I had already decided.
Rehearsing. Retreating.
The search for death brought me to many strange
places. I learned many strange things. This book is
a record of those things. These songs are a record
of those things.
My life is a record of those things.
THE HAUNTING PRESENCE
Giles Corey, bloody, gory,
we will redress your wrongs
bloody, battered,
nothing matters,
somehow, just makes it worse
and I dont care if I live or die,
because I aint ever going to no other side,
there aint no heaven and there aint no hell,
but I am a sinner so its just as well
theres a devil on my back
theres a devil on my legs,
theres a devil on my chest
theres a devil on my neck
and of a wicked physick came
all the heavy stones
to fall with crushing weight upon
all of those who cant become a ghost
Ive been wailing like a child at the bottom of a
well
Ive been pacing like a man in a prison cell
I am buried above the ground
and no one knows anything
is this real
VILLAGE OF 100 WITCHES
I want to talk about the Voor's Head Device, but to
talk about the Voor's Head Device, I need to talk
about Robert Voor. And to talk about Robert Voor, I
need to talk about Dogtown. I need to start at the
beginning.
There were two Dogtowns - one in Massachusetts,
in the 1700's, and one in New York, in the late
1990's. They are very different. They are also the
same.
The first Dogtown was a small settlement on the
coast, right in the middle of what is Worcester
today, but wasn't much of anything then. It was
little more than a small circling of houses and a
church. Dogtown sat on the towns edges. It was
where the undesirables went. This mostly meant
unmarried women, the elderly, and some Blacks.
People went to Dogtown because the land on the
rocky outcropping didnt produce anything. No one
wanted it, and thus no one complained when one
more shack went up. All their homes were old
before they were even built, little more than cellars
carved into the soil. Holes in the ground.
That's similarity number one.
Voor's connection to all this is up for debate, but it's
a connection he believed in, and so for our
purposes we can pretend it is fact, even if we really
think otherwise.
He believed that Judy Rhine was his great-great-
grandmother, or, as he put it, "as many greats as it
takes." She was a prostitute, a gatherer of herbs,
owned nothing and bothered no one. She had a
reputation, as did many of those who lived in
Dogtown, which was known as "The Village of 100
Witches." It's doubtful there was ever 100 people
living there, but Witches? Possibly.
There is a story about how Dogtown got its name,
and its a story that has stayed with me. The story
says: These women kept dogs, lots of them, and
when one of the women would die the dogs would
starve, and would come streaming down the hill
into town, looking for food. Every time you saw a
pack of dogs in the street, you knew someone had
died. Like mockingbirds going silent at your
window.
Judy lived with a black man, which was probably
enough to have her hanged even without her
witchcraft. They said she performed hexes for
money. More likely, she traded bodily fluids,
which, after all, is the sum total of most human
relationships. She controlled life itself, in its
rawest, most honest form. That is as much
witchcraft as anything can be.
The man was creatively named Black Neil. Black
Neil was a hog slaughterer, a job for the
untouchable caste America isnt supposed to have.
He came home to Judy every day covered in blood;
he washed it off in the stream behind their house.
He would sleep in the cellar. I like to imagine that
he never slept with her;

that theyd both just had enough. Why make more,
theyd say, when theres too damn many of them
already.
But Voor points to this house, with the killer in the
basement, and the witch in the bed, as his
birthplace. "Inside these four walls," he writes,
"from these empty places did I come, born as a true
soul, born as a true man, the idea of myself
becoming something, when it was nothing, but
could become something."
In any case, it's impossible to know, because
neither left anything behind. Neither were the kind
to erect monuments. No mementos. No diaries.
They were better than that. They lived their lives
and then had the decency to disappear forever. Not
like Voor. He built monuments out of other people.
Made them into memories and never had his own.
In the winter of some year or other, Judy Rhine
died. Some say she hanged herself. Voor said she
was raped. People hate what they create, almost as
much as they hate what they are, he said. Thats
true.
They found Black Neil in the cellar, cowering
under a potato sack; and this is one of the reasons I
believe that they were never lovers, not even really
friends, just beings who recognized in each other
an infinitely deep and yearning something. If they
slept within a few feet of each other, if they saw
each other and only each other, they could be sure
of never needing to explain. Theyd never ask you
if slaughtering hogs and casting hexes were
acceptable. No one
would come up to you and ask you why everything
was always so awful. No one would wonder why
you were always in bed and no one would ask you
to straighten the fuck up and get on with it. And
you never would.
Once, Judy Rhine wrote down a spell, her only
surviving artifact. Perform these deeds, it said,
and you shall knowe a great and powerful spirit.
It said -
Cut the door along its frame
Mar the flesh along its gates
a bloodied bath to loose the tongue
a heightened sense to sing the song
a knowledge pure of life and death
a love so great, a frozen breath
- and even
now
I think

of

it

BLACKEST BILE
all around me
in the air hangs a wreath
of blackest bile, and smoke,
that only I can see
I open up my heart
and let it all in
and it kills all my love
and hope for everyone
and it hasnt been easy on you,
I know that more than most.
I am born to be alone,
I am just some lonely ghost
all around us
hangs an air of darkest doom,
and it flows out my lungs
and slowly fills the room
I open up my heart
and stick my fingers in,
but you will never want
what I have to give
INDIANS SHOOTING STARS
I sometimes wonder about my childhood.
I remember almost none of it. Its all gone
somewhere else. It isnt part of me, anymore,
though I can still feel it if I feel very deeply. It is
the opposite of a wishing-well: if I send the bucket
down, it comes up with a reason why I am the way
I am. Why things are as they are. Why I cant be
happy. Why I have to die so young.
I remember one time:
There was a boy, larger than me. I was awkward, so
uncertain and ugly. They threw rocks at me, all of
them, but I think, now, that most of them did not
quite mean it. They couldnt commit. He could. He
threw with all his might; hit my face, my glasses.
Connected with my temple and spilled blood down
into my eyes. I couldnt see and I couldnt feel
anything. There is an empty place in me and that is
where it comes from.
They say we have, within us, cosmic forces,
primordial things that are older than we are, much
older. Basic. That those things are there either to
protect us, or to hurt us. At that time I didnt know
that, but now I see, in my self, in that moment,
something very old, something very angry. Angry
from the womb, sad and desperate always.
I moved so quickly, my limbs strong like theyd
never been strong. My legs like trees, rooted so
deep into

the ground. Unmoving. Yet running, flying. My
fists were like everything Id ever wanted to say,
carrying so much weight. All those words
forgotten, or stumbled over. All those days, every
one.
I knocked him down. I couldnt stop. I got on top
of him; the others watched. I struck him, struck
him, struck him. I reached down. I grabbed the
rock. This is right. I felt it in my hands; I knew
every atom of its structure. I knew what made it so
hard. I knew how it felt. I knew what it was like to
be buried so deep. I knew what it was to be made
from earth, to be a lifeless stone. I brought it down.
I brought it down again. I raised it up. Like a torch.
I raised it up. Like a sword. I brought it down. His
eye closed. There was no such thing as depression.
I brought it down. A tooth spit onto the dirt. No
such thing as sadness. A pool of blood. No such
thing as acceptance. I raised it up. No such thing as
fear. A scepter. A bible. A crown. No such thing as
anything.
No such thing.
But they wouldnt let me finish. There were hands
around my throat. Hands on my shoulders. It was
back to the adult world, the modern world, a world
where the old things are not welcome. A world with
desks and books and parents and police. A world
with rules.
I remembered once:
On a candy wrapper. Signs and symbols. There was
a boy on a bike; there was a girl in a river. There
was a

grave in a mountain. And there was an Indian,
shooting stars. Bringing them down. Embedding
them in the earth. And I thought: that is what I want
to be.
My father took me home and I wished then what I
wish so often now: that the car we were in would
skid off the road, and that none of us would have to
be. That everything would be quiet. There would
be no rules, and there would only be lifeless earth
and stone forever.


GRAVE FILLED WITH BOOKS
I dont know what anything means.
I think Ive forgotten how to sleep,
and Im not the only one.
I will break my spine on the page,
like the books that will fill up my grave.
I am entombed in my bed
with those words that you said, that I kept:
that Im not the only one
that youve never loved.
boo, hoo.
COME OVER, COME OVER
What is an afterlife, Voor once asked; what
would satisfy you? He never answered, but I often
worried about it. I sat each day in my empty room,
perching myself on the edge of a very deep, and
very real, hole in the earth. Where did it go?
A place where everyone is evil, where everyone
understands the deepest workings of the world. As
if through some mystic ritual, they simply wish,
and it is. They are like gods, but hooked, and bent,
and crooked, and thus evil, and broken. A place
where everyone is like that. A place where
everyone is separate, and no one can ever belong to
anyone or anything.
That sounded like a place I knew, I thought. That
sounded so familiar.
Voors mother left him very early, and he grew up
with his father, who was overbearing but not
abusive, domineering but not nearly domineering
enough. In the end, he was just like most of us; he
wasnt happy, but he didnt die. Not right away.
Voor left school early. He never liked it. They said
he once convinced his entire 6th grade class to hold
a book burning; they burned every book in the
school. Random. Mindless. Administration took the
shelves out of the library and made it a teacher
break-room. I don't know if the story is true. There
are a lot of stories. But he had a way with people,
even then. He knew what to say to them. He knew
what they wanted to

hear him say and he said it. He felt those things in
his skin. I was never like that. I had no skin and felt
nothing. Or too much.
He joined a traveling show. He had an act - no one
knows when he invented it, or really what it was.
All we have for a source is Voor himself, and hes
untrustworthy; but then, so is everyone else.
The act was called the Witch Box. Voor recorded
his opening monologue in his autobiography, The
Spiritual Asphyxiate: The True Diary of a Spiritual
Rapist and Murderer.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he would begin, "have
you ever wondered what life is really made of
what these spaces around us, these seemingly
endless and empty stretches of nothingness, are
really composed of - because when you think about
it, if we are surrounded by nothing, then nothing
must be composed of somethingbut what could it
be? That is exactly what I mean for us to discover
tonight.
He would remove the black fabric draped over the
table, revealing a black cube. It was worn, dirty.
But sitting there, on the table, it seemed to be of
great importance.Voor would very carefully avoid
touching it, wouldn't allow himself to brush up
against it. The audiences noticed, even if they
didn't know they did. They always took in a deep
breath when they saw it.
"This, ladies and gentlemen, is The Witch-Box. Its
tale is a long one, and tragic, but it is true. You see,

my ancestors lived in a place called Dogtown, far
away from here. They lived there because they were
persecuted. Hunted down. Whips, lashes, and
hangings, that was their lot. And so they banded
together to crawl into the barest possible living.
They starved, and they were miserable, and they
lived there among the rocks and driving coastal
rains for years and years.
Those who did not understand called it Witchs
Village. They did not understand, and so they
hated. These Witches, however, were not bent over
old crones; they did not fly on broom sticks. No.
They were the guardians of sacred and ancient
knowledge, truths long forgotten by 'advanced'
societies the world over. They knew what
nothingness was. They had found the box in the
woods. Buried under branches and leaves, housed
among the pines and weeds.
They understood that Life was as much its opposite
as it was its self. That it was like a skin on top of
something much larger, and that if you made an
incision into that skin, the slightest incision, the
tiniest cut, that Death would leak out. Absence.
Think of it. You are alive. Alive right now. We can
sense the world around us - the tent, rustling just
so; a breeze moving slowly through us. There are
sounds outside; people talking, footsteps, cries
from the ferris wheel off in the distance. There are
smells, I can smellpopcorn? The dust. But also
sweat, the leather from someone's jacket. I know all
this right now without thinking - these things, these
beings and bodies and things, these are the things
that prove to me that I am alive.

But yet - the slightest twist of my foot, and I will
plummet down to the ground and snap my neck,
and I will lie still, and hear nothing. The slightest
rise in the chemical balance of my blood, just a few
micrograms more of some chemical or other, and
my heart will stop beating, and I will die. The
slightest change in temperature, just a fraction of a
fraction, really - locked in a motor-car, say, on a
day that is slightly hotter than average - and my
brain could stop functioning, and I will no longer
exist anywhere as I do at this moment.
There is more death than there is life. And it is
waiting just below the surface, and it is held back
by the thinnest of possible membranes.
And the Witch Box will show you this. Indirectly, of
course. May I have a volunteer?"
No one ever volunteered. He always had to pick
someone. Sometimes he would pick the men,
because he liked watching them tremble, and he
found them amusing. The women often seemed to
develop a connection to him. Every now and then,
one would wait for him after the show, and they
would retire to the small tent he slept in. He picked
people then the way he would pick people in the
future - based on their utility, what they could do
for him, and do to him. He had a system. It was all
a system then and it is all a system now.
The reaction was most important. The spectator
would insert their arm into the box - even this took
a great deal of courage. No one trusts Voor at the

outset. He earns it over time. Their arms would
disappear up to the elbow, and at first there would
be nothing but the silence of the tent and Voors
patient, close-lidded breathing. Then they would
feel some scraping on their arm, up and down the
length to their elbow and back down to their
fingertips. It wouldnt be pain, necessarily - but the
closeness of the crowd and the darkness and the
unsettling atmosphere would heighten their senses,
and they wouldve felt as if that scraping were the
most real of all possible realities - like things were
moving inwards and becoming smaller. Like things
were collapsing, and touching, things that had
never touched and should never touch.
And then their arm would emerge from the
opposite side of the stage. Not someones arm;
their arm, their hand, with their rings, their scars,
their trembles and the scrape marks up and down
the length of it. It would move slightly, they could
feel it move; it would gesture to them. It would curl
its fingers and motion-
come
over,
come
over
and Voor would lean in, close; he would breathe
onto their neck. He would whisper: But do you
see it? What does it want you to do? What do you
want you to do?
The entire crowd would erupt in nervous shrieks;

several times the volunteers would jerk their arm
from the box in a panic, all the tension of the
moment spilling out as their arms were scraped and
cut by the boxs unfinished edges. And Voor would
smile, and hold his arms out in front of him, as if to
say, But Ive only just shown you. Its only just
started.
Ive thought a lot about the Witch Box, and what
couldve been inside it. Voor never told. He had
everything to lose from being normal. But if you
eliminate the possibility that he had a unique
knowledge of life and death - and even after all this
time, I feel uncomfortable doing so - and take into
account all that was just about to happen - its
likely that the box contained a series of mirrors,
perhaps pointed at others concealed just off stage,
amidst the black curtains. Images would project
onto one another and things would emerge from
thin air. It was a common enough trick at the time.
The spiritualists used it to make their ectoplasms
emerge from nothingness and spill out onto the
clothes and hands of the unsuspecting.
The difference was Voor himself. He knew great
secrets, but perhaps not of the afterlife. He knew
great secrets of humanity: how afraid we are, how
uncertain about the things we pretend to be certain
about. He knew we were all just about to unbelieve
the very ground under our feet.
When Alice Rogers, just 11, put her hand into the
box, she slit her wrist ever so gently on a piece of
broken glass. She barely moved; she didnt say a
word.

Perhaps she was frightened of how her parents and
older brother sat so still, of the man in the suit.
Ladies and gentlemen," he began, and Alice felt
not so much pain, as a warmth in her arm, a
numbness. She must have closed her eyes, tried to
concentrate. Not to ruin everything -
Have you ever wondered what life is really made
of?What these spaces around us are really
composed of -
- and soon there wasnt even numbness. At least,
that is how I imagine it. Nothing at all - a nothing-
at-all that moves slowly up her arm, to her shoulder
and chest, and she leans ever-so-subtly against the
table, rests her forehead down on the box itself.
The audience barely notices -
- because when you think about it, if we are
surrounded by nothing, then nothing must be
composed of somethingbut what could it be?
That is exactly what I mean to demonstrate to you,
tonight."
- and he leans into her, he breathes on her neck, and
she is quite still. And her arm emerges from the
curtain, but it hangs, it does not beckon. It does not
gesture. Her arm is silent, and there are dark lines
down her skin where the blood has gone, pulled
downward by the earth, everything happening and
then unhappening, an impersonal movement of
atoms from one area of the universe to another area
of the universe, and the crowd only notices when
she falls forward onto the table and knocks the box
to the floor. The broken mirror eats into her; where
it once

had been held back, it now plunges downward, and
things are severed and atoms move to more and
different places. And the image hangs there; it
stays, though she does not. Suspended in the air.
Whose arm was that?
If the Witch-Box was meant as a seance - meant to
call spirits into the tent - then surely it was
successful. One more soul in the air, and one less
body on the earth. A spectral bride, wedded to the
world, a meaningless gesture.


EMPTY CHURCHES
maybe Im just feeling
crushed
SLEEP TAPES
The following is a transcript of Robert Voors
Sleep Tapes, originally printed in his book, The
Dark Ocean. Voor described it as a recorded
encounter with the afterlife. A detailed
examination follows. Please note: Voor maintained
that he was asleep during the entirety of this
recording.
VOOR: [incoherent]...on top of it once...I do.
VOICE: Robert. Robins.
VOOR: [tired, dull tone - droning voice, little
enunciation] I don't...who is it.
VOICE: Father. Fatherer.
VOOR: The...do I know you?
VOI CE: Yo u k n o w me . [ b a c k g r o u n d
noises...possibly a desk being pulled away from the
wall]
VOOR: [moaning] No....no...
VOICE: Father. You know me. You know me. You
[unintelligible, more moaning].
VOOR: Oh god, oh god. Oh, god.
VOICE: There isn't god. Not. Not god.
VOOR: Please, please help me. Daddy. Please.
VOICE: I can't. I am in here. I don't [unintelligible]

VOICE: I can't. I am in here. I don't [unintelligible]
any more than I did. Now. Not now.
VOOR: Somebody. [sound of movement, possibly
Voor himself moving across the room to an empty
corner.] Where am I. What is [unintelligible] to do.
What is this.
VOICE: There isn't anyone or anything. Help me.
You don' t . Cant . I am your fat her and
[unintelligible] forever. Not now.
VOOR: [moaning]
VOICE: This is the end.
[there is two minutes and 34 seconds of silence.]
VOOR: why, why. why, why.
VOICE: I can see through walls. I can destroy
them, but I can't. My hands won't move. My hands
cant [shuffling sounds, distortion on tape] reach.
VOOR: Can you see me?
VOICE: No. No.
VOOR: Where are you, I can't see you. I can't see
you, where are you?
VOICE: I am at Dogtown. I am in the well. There
isnt anything [untintelligible] where I am. It's
empty.
VOOR: Empty of what...what is empty?

VOOR: Empty of what...what is empty?
[There is 47 seconds of silence.]
VOICE: Nothing you do will matter unless you
know. You don't know [unintelligible] and I don't
have any way out.
VOOR: I want to help. [moaning]
VOICE: There is weakness everywhere.
VOOR: There is weakness everywhere.
VOICE: There is weakness everywhere. There is
weakness everywhere.
VOOR: I don't know what any of this means. I
miss you so much. I wish I was dead. I wish I was
dead. I wish I was dead. Help me. Please, please.
Help. Release me. Help me. I need the square. I
need to find the square. He told me of it once.
[There are 26 minutes of silence. The tape changes.
Voor stated that he did not remember changing the
tape, and may have changed it in his sleep. The
sound of quiet sobbing is heard for the next 15
minutes, at which point the second tape shuts off.]

Though Voor originally discussed his experiences
with EVP
1
in a pamphlet entitled Sleep Tapes, he
did not fully analyze the phenomenon until the
publication of The Dark Ocean, nearly four years
later. As such, his recollections in that work can be
considered suspect.
Still, the change between the two writings is
striking. In his earlier work, Voor is orderly,
academic, even meek; in Ocean he is ecstatic,
practically falling off the page. He rambles, every
page steeped in metaphor. Hes given up on
Western science, he says, in favor of the
approach of the Sufi mystic; for what in life is
graspable by the mind? Only the life of the mind,
and the world of the mind, and the death of the
body which is its vehicle. Life is wholly something
else.
The Dark Ocean is a deeply personal work, a
stream-of-consciousness attack on the Christian
afterlife and all that rests on its foundation. Though
it is difficult to find a clear thesis, Voor introduced
several concepts he would spend the next decade
writing about: the spectral gaol (the idea that spirits
are trapped on earth after death and that reality is
limited in ways we dont understand); the idea that
ghosts are present among us, can interact with us,
and that their presence can be verified with the
spiritual sciences: the use of EVP recordings,
spirit-photography, and what he called half-
deaths.
Voor considered Sleep Tapes to be the most
ground-breaking work in EVP to date. Others
would likely have shared his view, had Voor been
able to
1
Electronic Voice Phenomenon.

reproduce the actual recordings. As it was, all he
was able to show anyone were his transcripts.
There have been those who claimed that the tapes
never even existed, a charge which Voor violently
rejected, even on his deathbed.
Voors interpretations of his experiences also
differed wildly from those of the mainstream EVP
community. Most EVP enthusiasts believed
strongly in some variation of a Judaeo-Christian
afterlife; they tended to be spiritual but not
religious, people trying to make contact with
something larger than themselves. Voor, in contrast,
built his own unique cosmology around his
experience, one in which the afterlife was not a
reassuring element, but a physical manifestation of
the rejection of life.
In Voors world there was no joyous reuniting with
relatives, no pearly gates, no soothing light.
Instead, there was a prison: an aurora of ill-will that
trapped souls within the orbit of the Earth. Ghosts
spend their existence desperately trying to make
contact with the living world, able to see it, even
feel it, but unable to manipulate it in any way.
Ghosts are very often like the people they once
were, Voor wrote, but, without their bodies, they
suffer invisibly; they suffer without hands to touch
their own faces and without lungs to tell anyone
what has killed them, and murders them still.
I think that most EVP enthusiasts - the people who
stay up late into the night in abandoned houses,
recording static and flittering cellphone signals and
asking questions of the dead - want to capture
death. They want to hold it, to control it, and in the
process

distance themselves from it.
Voor doesnt allow anyone that option. His afterlife
is irrational. It is controlled by an all-powerful, all-
knowing force, but is completely godless. It gives
us a life after death, but one that is only a pale
shade of the life we lived before; all the pre-
destination of the Christian tradition, none of the
solace. None of the mercy.
When I first read Voor, I recognized that place.
When I first read Voor, I was open to nothing, and
closed to everything. So was Voor. We opened to
one another. He read what was in my heart and told
it back to me. A true communion. The first person
who understood.
And every time I read it, I felt worse
and worse
and
worse and
worse

and




IM GOING TO DO IT
there is no self to kill
a city of gardens
Im going to kill my self
to kill my self
to kill my self
Im going to kill my self
so there wont be nothing left
Im going to remove myself
remove myself
remove myself
Im going to remove myself
so there wont be nothing left
Because you are everyone you hate
when youre asleep or awake
all the choices youve made
you are everyone you hate
and it is ruining your life
THE DARK OCEAN SOCIETY
After the publication of Sleep Tapes, Voor quickly
found himself teaching others what he had learned,
running small workshops out of his home. People
who wanted to know what was on the other side of
death were pulled to him. He was so sure of
himself. Sure he knew what life, and death, were
all about. He knew when life lied to us, and when it
told the truth. He promised to only tell the truth.
They believed him. True belief is so rare. Even
those who say they do, dont. Not really.
At first, The Dark Ocean Society (named after one
of Voors most famous quotations from Sleep
Tapes) existed mainly to meet and discuss Voors
work. They were full-time seekers - attracted to the
next New Age thing, the next system or method
that promised to make life something other than
what it was. They had questions. They were just
like all of us, no different; no evidence that they
were depressed and lonely individuals, as has been
reported. No evidence they were anything but
normal, with all the pain and sadness that entails.
Voor introduced the Voors Head Device to the
group a year later. Once it became apparent what
he was suggesting, the group lost most of its
members; only the truly dedicated, or truly
desperate, stayed.
They would sit in a circle and wear the hoods; they
would sit silently, until one of them had a vision, or
a seizure; and then it would spread amongst the
group until they were sharing visions, rolling about
on

the floor, climbing the walls. The police would be
called. Religious Disturbance, reads one
complaint form. Thats as good a description as
any.
Initially, the Voors Head was only one part of the
meetings. Over time it came to be more and more
focal; eventually, they would put on the hoods and
not take them off until the meeting was over. It
became their purpose. Their Rite of Spring, of
Rebirth; they were seeing the other world, seeing
this world for what it was. Intoxicated.
The effects are very gradual. Slight oxygen
deprivation, over a long period of time. It is barely
noticeable, but it is there. Ive spoken to a few of
them recently. They are not the same; at least, I
assume not. Much slower to speak. Far less
curious. Far less present. Far less everything.
Every great discovery, one of them told me, has
unintended consequences.
It was after 5 years of this, 5 years of hallucination,
of increased closeness amongst the group, of
constant preaching and indoctrination by Voor -
that Mary Singer brought her son, Scott, to a
meeting. He was not the first child to be introduced
to the group. As fate would have it, he was to be
the last.
They would do various things, try different
methods of achieving something like death, of
breaking through the walls of the Spectral Gaol.
Its unclear what their end goal was; was it
knowledge, or did they actually want to travel, to
go to places they

could not reach? I doubt they knew. Voors ideas
were constantly developing. He published several
books during this period, using contributions from
the Society to fund short-runs of cheap newsprint
pamphlets.
One of his most successful innovations was
Decontextualization. Of all Voors spiritual
inventions, Decontextualization perhaps provides
us with the greatest understanding of his
underlying aims, as well as those of his followers,
and lets be honest, my self as well, I cant
keep writing in here as if Im not
talking about myself, we all know well and fucking
good exactly
whats happening and
I dont want to pretend anymore I dont
want to pretend
t h a t t h i s i s n t h a p p e n i n g t o
me right now and
every moment of every day and I dont know
how to
stop it
h o w c a n y o u j u s t

fucking
sit there?

Decontextualization was a requirement for Voors
followers, and was about as close as we can get to
understanding the the point of everything - the
ultimate goal of Voor, his writings, his work.
Voor believed our lives are made of context; that
context is all they are, their underlying nature, their
atomic structure. He believed the things that
happen to us, the events and the people that define
us, are random - or if not random, meaningless.
Events are simply occurrences that, were it not for
context, were it not for the human mind projecting
an illusion of meaning and connection, just
wouldnt exist. He believed that if he could strip,
completely, the context from a persons conception
of the universe, then that person as we know them
would simply cease to exist, and what would
remain would be something better; what would
remain would be a person that could not die, but
also a person who could not be, a person who had
escaped the shackles of meaning, of purpose, and
of context.
There were a few ways he would attempt this - one
involved diary-keeping. Writing, in general, and
diary-keeping in specific, is the most powerful
method with which we could give our lives context
- Voor would say we are keeping diaries all the
time, mental catalogues of everything that happens
to us, constantly placing boundaries on events - we
create time, for example, in order to say that an
event happened at a particular moment, to give a
beginning and end-point to something that has
neither. Time provides a context, but then we layer
more and more context on top of that - we create an
identity, a philosophy of

self, and say that certain events happened to certain
people, certain people that were there and were
aware of something that happened, and thats
another context - and then we create place, in order
to put boundaries in space - in physical space there
are no real boundaries, we simply view things as
being boundaries. There is no prevention of
movement on a subatomic level - and so there is no
such thing, physically, as a boundary in space - and
so on and on and on, context after context, we layer
these meanings onto ourselves, endlessly
segmenting reality, which is truly an unbounded,
uncomplicated whole. A solid wall.
But a diary - a diary is a completely personal
philosophy of these boundaries, a completely
personal context - it is a self-built narrative.
Psychology and neuroscience have shown that
Voor was correct in this - that the narratives we lay
out, our memories of what has happened to us and
the meanings and motives we apply to the things
and people in those memories - are almost entirely
fictional. Our conception of what is occurring is
very different from the reality of what is occurring,
if anything is occurring at all. Memory has been
shown, again and again, to be unreliable. People
create memories of things that never happened, edit
and reshape their memories of things that did. We
dont really know where we were at any given
moment - dont really know what we thought, or
how we felt. We only know the story we have told
ourselves.
A diary is a physical relic that provides a narrative
for the chaos around us, a map of the divisions and

boundaries weve built. It doesn't record reality, it
creates reality - through the process of narrating
and writing, and re-reading, we create the reality of
our past, assuring ourselves, repeating it - we
literally write ourselves into existence. We build
the universe up around us, tiny gods creating new
worlds in every moment.
At least, that is what Voor believed. He thought that
if he could decontextualize our reality, we could
see it for what it is: Nothing.
And so he required all his followers to keep diaries.
- minute, detailed diaries of everything that
happened to them, inside the society and out. They
all had them. One of the more revealing facts about
Voors followers is that these diaries should tell us
a great deal, yet not a single one exists today.
Not a single one.
After a year or two, or more, of keeping this diary,
of putting their truest selves onto its pages, Voor
would ask them to destroy it. He would ask them to
destroy it in a very specific way: they would take
certain passages, passages that showed a specific
emotion, or an important event, that told the
meaning of a person or place - and they would cut,
and cut, until they had only segments. No larger
narratives, simply a mass of disembodied words
and meanings. Items of reality, but not reality.
And then they would rearrange these pieces - into
other

narratives, reverse narratives, opposite realities,
ideal narratives - and then, finally, they would write
themselves out of the story altogether. What would
remain would be a record of their life without them
in it. And when that was all done, they would burn
it.
When I first read about this I was - reluctant. I have
always felt a compulsive need to record myself - to
keep a physical manifestation of myself outside of
my body, whether encoded in music, or writing. I
have desperately needed that all my life. To destroy
those things was a huge leap of faith. I lived more
in my narratives than I did in the world.
But by then I had resolved to end my life, and I
decided it simply didnt matter if there was
anything left over afterward. I started the process. I
read my diaries, and I cut, and cut. I eliminated. I
removed. I erased. I cut and cut, and cut and cut.


SPECTRAL BRIDE
Angles singing in a choir
oh, my lord, I am on fire
what am I to do
voices singing into space
read their verse in my lonely face
what am I to do
because I dont deserve you
not even for a moment
not even for a second will I ever be saved
my loves out to get me
and you know
you know
you know its going to succeed
and I hope I survive this fucking week
alone
and if I dont survive
Ill still be by your side
just clad in ghostly white
Ill be your spectral bride
THE SPECTRAL GAOL
There are ghosts. And then, there are ghosts. There
is accident, and then there is coincidence. And then
there are the ghosts of coincidence.
There are ghosts.
You can catch them in the flesh - material things,
patterns caught and frozen, a coming-together of
events. A re-creation. A specter.
All the world is haunted, because everything has
already happened. The world haunts itself. All
events are, in fact, ghosts. Copies. Phantoms.
Ghosts of accident are simply that - collisions of
probability, random chances. They are completely
inevitable, and thus meaningless, meaning
everything to everybody, and thus nothing to you.
Or I.
A man falls dead just outside your car door. Your
driver leaps out to rescue him. The car coasts to a
stop against the curb. You watch from the back
seat, the chest rises, the chest falls, the worried
neighbor paces the street with a cell phone to his
ear. The pieces move, and suddenly you are a year
younger, a year un-wiser, sitting, staring, watching
the paramedics pretend to try to save your dead
father, because, as you will later learn, the
paperwork required to find a dead body is far more
tedious than the paperwork required to lose a
patient en route. And so they load a corpse into an
ambulance, and ride with it to the hospital.

They talk about their day, about what theyll do
after work, watch the scenery as it moves slowly
by. No one is in any hurry. The situation is
understood by all except the people on the curb,
watching the ambulance pull out of the driveway.
And somewhere else it happens somehow else, to
someone else. And sometimes you watch from the
backseat and remember, but for most of those
times, you will never know. Those ghosts are
invisible.
It repeats. Random.
A Ghost of accident.
Ghosts of coincidence, on the other hand, mean
something. Are something.
We are a nation of seers. American spiritualists. We
see the dead everywhere we go, and for such a
young country, that is quite the feat. Snap a
photograph. Press record. Close your eyes for a
brief moment. All our dead friends and family are
with us, all of the time. Tied to the ground, like legs
stuck in cement. Standing frozen, like a forest. A
forest of ghosts, for everyone, all of the time.
Voor called it the Spectral Gaol. People who want
to die, he wrote, dont know what being dead is
like.
Voor never wrote openly about depression, but if
you read carefully, it is there. All your movements
take place within an invisible world - in everyone
elses world, the physical world, no movement can
take

place. Impossible. So you lie still, not daring to
breathe too hard. And inside, in the invisible world,
the unnatural world, every atom of your body is at
war with itself.
If we accept that we are surrounded by invisible
spirits at all times, that we move through them,
their arms are outstretched and touching our arms,
their hair frozen out in waves and touching our
faces - if we accept that, we can accept that we can
move under them; that they can be on top of us.
There can be spirits on our chests, right now,
invisible weights on us, preventing our chests from
expanding, stopping us from taking in enough air.
If we accept that, then we should accept that their
world can affect our world; that we move through
the forest, but are of the forest as well. And we
should accept that they do not want us to move;
they want stillness, because they are of stillness.
And we should accept that we are constantly being
pulled into their world and out of our own. And we
should hold despair, and depression, very close;
because all humans are held down by spirits, and
are pulled towards them, and sadness is their
boundary. Their territory.
The Ghosts of coincidence are not simply things
we remember, or flashes of memories. They are
things we cant remember; things we never did, and
will never do. They are shades of being that come
into our selves and turn us downward, make us face
the ground and dive into it, to meld with stone and
inviolate earth. They slow us. They let us fall
through air as if into sleep, as if nothing were
happening, they close our eyelids for us, they calm
our breath.

They say:
It is all right. I have been here before, and so have
you. I have felt all there is to feel. I have done
everything and know everyone. I know all there is
to know and have seen all there is to see. There is
nothing else for you anywhere. There is nothing
left. There has been a procession of all possible
experiences, and nothing you have seen has
brought you any peace, and nothing you have done
has brought you any contentment, and no one you
have known has brought you any love, and all that
is left is to simply lie down and sleep, and I will
help you do that.
Every living being has a ghost of coincidence that
follows them, and it has a voice that gets louder
and louder each passing year. Those that believe
The Lie are able to hear its voice. Soon it becomes
louder, and then louder still - until it is all you can
hear, and the physical world becomes silent. There
is the sound of the voice and there is silence, and
the two coexist, so that no sound can enter, only
emerge. All things become the one thing.
And the ground is so inviting. The ground is so
quiet.
The Spectral Gaol, he called it. Every one, trapped.
Every person who has ever died. No moving on, no
other life. No matter what they did. There are only
so many possible combinations, so many
permutations. It isnt possible to escape; it isnt
possible to end without regret. Everyone goes to
the same place, which is nowhere.

What does it mean, I would whisper, at night.
Unable to move. Unable to disbelieve. What does it
mean?

But it doesnt mean anything
just


a ghost

NOONE IS EVER GOING TO WANT ME
Im armed to the teeth
like a fucking animal
I ruin everything
I get my bony hands on
and here we go, now
over the bridge of sighs
we will get a cross like christ, crucified
its like a birth but it is in reverse
never gets better, always gets worse
Ill gnaw at anything
new england is mine, and
it owes me a living
step one
step two
step three
step four, we fall through the floor
fall through the floor
fall through the floor
I want to feel like I feel when Im asleep
WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF WE ALL DIE
ANYWAY
Some people feel that uncertainty is equal to pain.
The worst part, they say, is not knowing.
The Lie is not like that. The Lie is a plague of
absolutes. That is its very nature - absolute, eternal
certainty. All things are forever - they are known in
fullness. Those are the words that are whispered.
The mantra. The Lie has a true physical reality. It is
carved into tombstones all over the world, in every
country, on the walls of every house. It reads:
What is now, has been always
What has been, will always be
And so suicide is born, created, as if out of thin air.
It turns happiness into nothingness. It erases the
ledger, settles the debts. It is absolute certainty that
misery exists, not only in the present, but always,
and will always, stretching back and forth into all
possible times.
Eternal suffering is nothing new. It is the True
Banner of the Depressive. It projects outwards - no
reprieve, not in the future, not in the past, not even
in memory.
Voor wrote, not about it, but around it. Nothing
moves, nothing breathes, nothing lives. We are
now, and have always been, in the wickedest kind
of stasis. The Gaol, of course. We have been there.
We know.

In our ignorance we have created a simulacrum of
life, he wrote in a letter to Scott Singer, one of the
many he sent and were never read. The illusion of
movement. We believe in change and life and that
is enough to create a passing likeness of life,
enough to fool the ignorant, but it is all a shadow
that is clearly insubstantial upon any further
inquiry. We are trapped forever in the middle of a
universe we created, nothing more than our basest
urges and cowardices.
For Voor, ghosts were not seekers of redress; they
did not, and could not, right wrongs or seek peace.
Instead, they were echoes of our own illusions;
they were us, unmoving, standing still in the face
of truth, frozen solid by our own arrogance. When
you died, he said, you finally knew. Just knowing
was enough to root you to that spot forever.
To the depressive, his life is like what his death
will be - a Complete Knowledge...Or the belief in a
Complete Knowledge. That is the Lie. That is its
very center: a belief in a knowledge we cannot
have.
When Voor nearly killed himself, sometime after
the Sleep Tapes were published, he created the
Voors Head as a way to test his hypotheses. He
thought that what he would see would confirm his
deepest beliefs - that there was nothing, anywhere,
no existence, no possibility. Just endlessness
forever, black paint on black canvas.
That isnt what he saw, and he didnt kill himself.
But it didnt help me. And in the end it didnt help
him.

WELLS OF DESPAIR
There is an axis, and this axis explains human
consciousness. Or at least, a good deal of it.
The axis is a human invention; it doesnt exist in
the world outside ourselves. The Axis is a way of
thinking about the universe; or more specifically, of
thinking about what we think about it.
Imagine it this way: There is a square, and this
square is subdivided into four spaces. The spaces
correspond to what happens in the universe, and
our expectations of what will happen.
Thus, there are four possible combinations:
1. Things which exist in the universe, and are
accepted.
2. Things which exist in the universe, and are not
accepted.
3. Things which do not exist in the universe, but
are accepted.
4. Things which do not exist in the universe, and
are not accepted.
The further something falls off the axis - that is, the
more it does not occur or does not conform to our
expectations - the less we notice it.
We almost never think of all the things that might
confirm our beliefs, but do not occur. We will
notice almost any occurrence which confirms our
beliefs, however.


Unaccepted occurrences are within the realm of our
consciousness, but often pass unnoticed. Invisible.
Ghostly.
The axis affects everything we see and think; it
changes the world around us. The world creates the
axis, by supplying us with evidence, but once the
axis is in place, our ability to perceive conflicting
evidence is compromised. We create certainty
when it cannot be found externally. We build a
world in which it is possible to believe in truth, all
the while ignoring the mountains of evidence to the
contrary.
When applied to our beliefs on suicide, the axis is
quite revealing. I realized this very shortly after
attempting to end my own life. I began at one
point, one belief; I ended at another.
The process is as follows:
We begin with the stated belief on suicide. We can
call this the Social Construction of Self-Harm. It
states:
Sad people commit suicide. They have suffered
some trauma; a loved one leaves them, they lose a
job, or a loved one is killed; their children,
perhaps, run over in the street. Drug use is often
involved; drinking, for example, to numb the pain
before it overwhelms them. They turn to death for
relief. Suicide is thus caused by a defective mental
state, which is in turn related to outside forces and
events.

It seems innocuous. It is a fully-featured,
internally-logical theory of suicide.
When laid out on the axis, however, it begins to fall
apart.
The phenomena we notice tends to fall into the
categories we expect: people who kill themselves
and were depressed. People who dont kill
themselves and arent depressed.
And yet, any number of ghosts fall between these
divisions. For example, an extraordinarily large
number of people get depressed, but do not kill
themselves; in fact, most adults will experience
some form of depression within their lifetime. I am
now one of those, and will, no doubt, experience
depression again. It is as much a part of my self as
is the color of my eyes.
The vast majority of the depressed do not kill
themselves. These millions do not fall into the tidy
categories of the axis, and so we ignore them.
More frightening, perhaps, is the shockingly high
number of people who are not depressed, but kill
themselves anyway. These people give no outward
warnings; they do not give away their things, they
do not lay in bed for weeks, they do not stop seeing
friends and family. They do not withdraw. Up until
the very end, they are living; up until the very end,
they are engaged with life.
They are the most damned of all.

They are also the cases we do not notice, the ones
that slip between our fingers. They are the ones that
suggest that something else is happening; that
depression and suicide may be linked, but that
connection is not causation.
These are the cases that imply that there is no
causation.
Think of it: There is no causation for suicide. It
simply is. It walks between us like a ghost. It hides
between the tables of the axis; it eludes us. We
dont see it, but it is always with us. It is all of our
fathers, and all of our mothers, and everyone weve
ever loved. It is everywhere, but disconnected.
Loose of the moorings. No feet on the ground.
Floating over the earth.
What does it mean that there is no causation? That
there is nothing that causes, but simply phenomena,
things disembodied, no thought, no prime mover?
Verbs? Doings, stripped of personhood?
Voor knew. He claimed to know. You can look at
his entire career as a way of saying to the world,
Look at me: here I am, lonely; here I am,
confused; here I am, perched so close to death.
When I speak, when I can push into the world
something new and horrible and terrible, then I am
the causation; I am the causer, and the creator; and
that thing is given meaning, my meaning, and I can
imprint that meaning onto the universe, and I can
make it what it should be, and no longer what it is.
And he would try and try and try to do something
new in the realm of the spirit, he

would loose all the ghosts and people into one
giant, boiling cauldron; and what would follow
would be something caused, something deliberate.
Something his.
This is where we talk about Dogtown. This is
where I lay it out as best I know how.
There were two Dogtowns - one in Massachusetts,
in the 1700's, and one in New York, in the 1980's.
They were very different, but they had certain
similarities.
As the Dark Ocean Society grew to about 40
members, Voor decided that seclusion was a
necessary element of spiritual development. He
said it would be a movement towards True
Freedom, to a destruction of the wall between the
living and the dead, of the dissolving of sadness, of
the elimination of guilt.
True Freedom. It sounds nice to me, even now.
Even though I know what is going to happen.
Its always been interesting, to me, how cult leaders
(and by this point, if not much earlier, that is
clearly what Voor had become. Did he plan it that
way? Somehow I doubt it. He craved attention, he
wanted love and affection and he wanted to be
respected; he wanted to be reunited with dead
loved ones; he wanted to be free of pain. His crime
was that he believed he could do so. His crime was
that he believed, and he told others; if what
followed preyed on the worst parts of his
personality, well, Im sure it wouldve done the
same to me. Or to you) convince

people to leave their homes, their families. Just
pack up and leave. One day, youre there, happy,
living, with everyone, engaged. The next, youve
disappeared; no note, no goodbye, just gone, an un-
physical presence.
To disengage so fully from someone, everyone,
everything. To simply unattach. We ask why? on
the outside, but we secretly wish it for ourselves.
Ive thought about it. Ive thought
walk into her house. a party, maybe. everyone
there. things move in slow motion. I float through,
not really engaging, making eye contact, waving,
smiling, but not talking. make the rounds, only
once. make everyone see you, but dont make
anyone realize. make my way to the door. put my
phone on the table by the couch.
when they call it, worried, it will ring . theyll hear
it, someone will find it. but that wont happen until
later. before then, I get to my house. before then, I
open the door and go in. before that, I draw the
blinds. I lock the doors. cancel bills. name off the
mailbox. name off the door. sit in the dark.
they will come by. they knock but theres no answer.
no ones seen me. they wonder. peek in the
windows. but there isnt anything there. its an
empty house. its an empty house and so there cant
be anyone inside. and so Im not inside, I am
nowhere, seeing no one, no connections, not
tangled up, not caught. Not anywhere, not
anything.
Ive thought that. It cant be much different. It isnt
about fear of the world, it isnt about retreat from

about fear of the world, it isnt about retreat from
pain. Thats what people always say, people who
dont know. They dont think it through.
What it really is about is spite. Hate. Self-pity. A
wish to harm the outside world. Suicide is not self-
harm. It is world-harm. It is an attack on the
universe.
Whoever was willing moved to their new center of
operations, a 4 -building compound Voor named
Dogtown. It wasnt anything more than a couple of
shacks, really; the rooms were barely big enough to
sleep everyone, and the shelters they built to house
newcomers would frequently collapse. They
thought the physical world was composed mostly
of lies and illusion; they werent surprised when it
would fall in on them. They blamed the ghosts, not
their own work.
Dogtown was set deep into a wood, a forest that
bordered state land. No one ever went out there,
which, I am sure, is how they wanted it. Set apart
from other people, the group could dedicate itself
to its psychic research; they began to wear the
Voors Head Devices more and more frequently.
Gradually, the bags became the focal point of their
practice. They slept with them on. On quiet nights,
it sounded like the whole camp had a pillow
pressed over its mouth.
Later, when everything was falling apart and the
media got involved, one reporter said that upon
nearing the main clearing between the buildings he
was greeted by an entire group of black-hooded
figures. Women, children, old men; the black fabric

would move, slightly, with the in and out-take of
their breath. They reminded one of fish; like
everyone was underwater, like maybe the flood had
come, and wiped everything away, and this was it.
Did the hoods affect them? Some say yes, some no.
Personally, I dont think any of what was about to
happen wouldve happened without the Voors
Heads. I think things look very different when you
have your eyes closed. When youre having trouble
breathing.
If youve never worn one, the effect is hard to
describe. It isnt simply a bag over your head. It
represents a fundamental severing of your
connection with the outside world; it muffles your
hearing and blocks smell as well as sight. Your
breath quickly fills the bag, leaving just enough
oxygen to keep you conscious and moving. You
feel light-headed, lucid; instead of feeling cut-off,
you feel your senses have been heightened. You
trust everyone. You feel your skin so profoundly,
the lightest physical touch can result in great pain.
Or pleasure.
Mentally, you are prepared for whatever will
happen; but, even before putting on the hood,
youve made the decision to do it; youre
committed to the people around you, prepared to
trust them while you are vulnerable.
Most importantly, you are more concerned with
death than life.
Thats what this is all about, isnt it? Seeing the
dead.

Speaking to them. Knowing their smell again.
Hearing their voice again. Hearing them say your
name. Feeling it all come up in your chest, feeling
those emotions rush to your eyes. Being free of it
all. Finally knowing where they are.
Isnt that what its all about?
The fact that they were wearing them so often
suggests that their fragile connection to the outside
world was breaking down, if it hadnt already. The
living world wasnt there anymore. They were with
the dead.
By my own best estimate, based on letters written
to Voor much later, Scott Singer was probably 8
when he arrived at Dogtown.
Scott was an attractive, intelligent child. He had
blonde hair and blue eyes, and a charming
demeanor that made him a favorite among Voors
followers. All other children had left the fold, and
Scotts presence probably supplied a reminder of
the outside - of the continuing, living world - that
they sorely lacked, even if they didnt know it. He
played in the woods, slept well, and enjoyed being
the center of attention. He was the only child in a
world of adults. He was probably happy.
I often think about those woods. I played in the
woods as a child. Did Scott find old trees and hide
his toys in them? Did he outgrow those stories?
In the meantime, Linda Singer became more and

more integrated into Society life. Voor took a
special interest in her, and would often privately
tutor her on spiritual advancement. She became
adept at the use of the Voors Head, and reported
elaborate visions. Her later recountings show a
woman deeply moved:
At first, I feel I am in a long, dark cavern; as I
walk I can feel the dampness all around me, a
condensation on my skin that is cold and aches; but
then I am out, and have come out into a world that
is so bright, so densely packed with red and green
and deep, deep blue that my breath catches in my
chest; Then I see that I am looking at a river, and
the river is flowing backwards; I know it should not
be so, but it flows against itself, somehow, as if I
could see the river before some force changed it,
could see the past as clear as the present; and in
that river, standing waist deep, is my husband; and
he is so beautiful, I long for him so intensely; I can
feel every part of my body crying out, all that pain
and sadness, and it could be washed away in that
moment; I know just where he is standing, but cant
quite move there; I pick up my legs and they wont
obey me, they are so heavy, so clumsy, and I splash
through the water and it fills my mouth so I cant
yell out, and splashes up into my face and covers
my eyes, and when I come up again he is further
away, and I am taken down again, and up again to
see him receding, he doesnt know I am there, but I
know he is there, and the water takes my body with
it and we travel together and I am happy...
What you think of all this is up to you.
Maybe Voor saw some kind of spiritual power in

her. Maybe her visions impressed him. Maybe he
saw weakness.
He saw weakness everywhere.
Then again, maybe he didnt care one way or the
other. Maybe it was Scott, from the very beginning,
that he was interested in.
How you see what happened depends on your view
of Voor, and your view of the people who believed
in him. There is little definitive evidence. In the
absence of evidence, all we have is feeling.
Suspicions. I have felt that while writing this: that I
dont know enough. That I cant talk about it. That
I cant capture reality with these words. That I am
too weak. That it isnt enough.
All we know is:
On a day in September, Scott Singer was lowered
into a well. They called it the Well of Despair. It sat
back along the tree line. A tight-fitting covering
was placed over its mouth. Voor designed it; it
allowed food to be lowered through a small flap
without allowing light into the well. Scott Singer
stayed in that well for nearly two years, until he
was rescued by Police. He fought them. He said he
didnt want to come out.
By that time, Voor was in the hospital and Scotts
mother was dead. In two weeks, Voor would be
dead. A year after that, Scott would kill himself.
And two years after that, I would write these
words:

you have an idea
and you make it real
isnt that God does?


A SLEEPING HEART
if I die
and I will
oh please, please bury me
in the ground by the school
where I once worked
if Im killed
as I will
oh please, please raise a stone
and inscribe all of these here lonely words:
how do I wake your sleeping heart?
OLE WORM
A Portrait of my life without me in it:
everything about it is increasingly hostile
something it did
there are no possibilities
there are no possibilities
Itll never start over
not possible
worthless piece of shit
there are no other options
such incredible pressure
everyone is happy
why do we love anyone
lay its head on a black column
had awful dreams last night
it is pathetic to want it so badly
Its going to do it
make an excuse
leave the room
drop the phone on the table on the way out
drive home
close every shade
delete writings
never go out
never contact anyone
no one will know
quit the job
just stay inside forever
it will do this, It swears
nothing worth being conscious for
It made plans today
didnt work, big surprise

there are no good signs
the worst part is imagining
looking over sleepily, smiling
it is the worst thing it can imagine
easy to pretend
but it isnt
chest tightened
this is all so pointless you are such a piece of shit
has been miserable forever and is only just now
realizing it
It doesnt know what to write
this hurts so badly
It wont know what living like this could possibly
be like
FUCK
no one gives a shit about it
picture everyone with someone else
thinks being alone is better than being with it
this life is so fucking worthless
it has to believe this will work
once you know it wont, it cant
it is weak and empty
It couldnt stop
It was emptied out
this place is new but it doesnt feel like it
last night was horrible
back at work, please jesus let it be all right
we know we wont but we want to be
always sad around the edges
forgetting, maybe, or forgotten
all this hope bullshit is bullshit
what does it mean to be always sad
and to never feel life in your bones
never, everyone


BURIED ABOVE GROUND
theres a devil on my back
theres a devil on my legs
theres a devil on my chest
theres a devil on my neck
Ive been wailing like a child
at the bottom of a well
Ive been pacing like a man
in a prison cell
I get buried above the ground
GILES COREY
I know.
I know Giles Corey was crushed. He wouldnt
commit; wouldnt put in a plea, wouldnt say
Guilty, wouldnt say Not Guilty. Wouldnt
choose. Refused to take part.
I know.
I know he was crushed. Either he could be crushed,
or he could be hanged. Have rocks placed on his
body, all flat under a wooden board, almost natural,
like being caught in a storm. Or he could have had
the bottom drop out from under him, and dance in
the air with a rope around his neck, carefully tied.
To be clear-cut. To be humane.
I know Giles Corey refused to be humane. Refused
to pretend. Refused to say, Everything is all right;
this is all part of everything that happens; I accept
what happens to us, and I will take part in it. He
was not executed. He made them murder him. He
made it ugly. Made them see it for what it was.
Stripped them of their disguises. Made them real to
themselves. Let everyone see. Called everyone
around.
Stand in a circle
Push my tongue back in my mouth
watch it roll back out
Nothing more
Nothing less

A spell. Try saying it. Under your breath. Late at
night. Magic.
So often I feel this about life. Everything is so
heavy. No one seems to notice. They all seem to
know some secret; everyone seems to know.
It seems not to bother them, they seem not to be
consumed by so much doubt, so much hate for
everything that I am and have let myself become,
hate for who I am when I sit around and watch TV
and do not create or do and do not walk out in the
world and do not write letters and do not compose
music and do not start a business and do not make
up with old friends or call them or do the things my
father would have done. Everyone seems to live in
a world where those stones are not on their chests,
where those people are not shoving, with a long
stick, their tongues back inside their mouths, and I
feel as if I am the only one on the ground, and if so,
than that must mean that everyone else is standing
around me, and I am in the center, and they are on
the periphery, and the fear begins to set in that
I am suffering alone in the universe
and perhaps there was no one else, to begin with.
Perhaps I made it up.
That is their world. That world. That world is the
world in which Giles Corey was crushed, and he
lies there still. Crushed flat. Undone -

our patron saint

of sadness forever
- but on my better days, I say:
That is not my world.
I choose a different world.
I create a different world.
In my world, there are no stones. There is no circle.
There is no stick, and no tongue, and no gallows,
and no misery, and no death.
Their world is not This world.
In this world, the rocks tumble down onto me. In
this world, I can feel every ounce of their weight
on my back. On my legs. On my chest. On my
neck. I know every single inch of them, I know
every crack in their earthen shells. I feel every bit
of pain, I feel every moment of sadness, I feel
every night of loneliness, all in my bones, all in my
self, all of the time, every day, forever. Everything
is forever, in my world. Everything stretches out as
far as my eyes can see.
And in my world, I shrug my shoulders. In my
world, I turn my back. I spit. I curse them. I curse
every person. I do not care. Not for love, not for
anything. I do not care. I do not care for
dependence or need. I do not care for desire or
sexual contact. I do not care for comfort. I do not
care for peace.
I do not care.
And I move. I breathe. I crease my forehead. Grit
my teeth. Stretch my legs. Feel my arms. Feel my

I think of him. I think of his hoods. I think of his
specters and spirits. I think of his ghosts.I think of
his fears and his outrages, of the people he hurt and
the people he carried. I think of their faces, and I
think of mine. I think of his. I think of his hate. I
think of his worry.
I think of his Lie.
And I move. I breathe. I crease my forehead. Grit
my teeth. Stretch my legs. Feel my arms. Feel my
ribs. Feel my body. I hold my hands in front of me.
I turn one over; they are covered in grass; they are
smeared with dirt, and blood; I read the lines in my
palm. It is my self. It is my servant. It is not who I
am. I am who it is.
And I am crushed. Utterly crushed.

And then, I get up.



AFTERWORD
Giles Corey was recorded between 2008 and 2010,
in various bedrooms around Connecticut.
Mastering by James Plotkin. plotkinworks.com.
Some samples of EVP recordings on this record
have been taken from the PARC reissue of The
Ghost Orchid: An Introduction To EVP.
Many of the other EVP recordings on this record
were recorded live in Middlefield, CT.
Some of the photos are from the excellent collection
provided by the National Media Museum. More can
be found at:
www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmediamuseum
This record is a product of ENEMIES LIST HOME
RECORDINGS. For more information:
www.enemieslist.net
ELHR
8 Oxford Drive
Middlefield, CT
06455 USA
If you are thinking of committing suicide, dont.
Call 1-800-273-8255.
Giles Corey was written and performed by Dan Barrett.

Thanks.