UFOCCULTIC ACCOUNTING — Old Current

Eugenia Macer-Story was an occult investigator, poet, playwright, novelist, and painter. Her work was mostly self-published, through her press Magick Mirror Communications. She was based in Woodstock and New York City. She died in December 2013.

These four poems were pulled, by Colleen, from a selection of eleven that I myself pulled from several of Eugenia Macer-Story’s chapbooks. I find in Eugenia’s work a kind of willingness to read the world, and an accompanying adeptness, that, even in its often rough, plain, strange, confusing, or opaque way, is a joyous thing, like the reading of our mystics, prophets or saints.

I’m interested in continuing Eugenia’s work— well, maybe not always in my own poetry or writing, but at least in mentioning her, republishing her when I can. Her novels, her un-categorizable nonfictional works, her plays, her paintings and poems… I think they are necessary weirdnesses and beauties that the literary world hurts and pains for lack of. In the tradition of the occult Master and the seeking Student, I find myself carrying on her philosophy and work in daily, amateur, desperate, small ways. Two paintings hang above my bed, both hers.

Ben Roylance

“I could sleep under a stone...”

Colleen: Everything we do and are starts and ends and lives inside of everything else. A stone is a powerful representation of the solidity and stability of what we think is possible. As the poet is sleeping inside of a stone -- penetrating it -- they are opening up what reality might be made of. But it is not violent. It is quite gentle. Of course all this is interrupted by physical existence and the arena of this world.

Ben: Not hollowed out, but part of, sunk in. Stone-ness. So, to be in the stone, under as in setting under and into. Of the earth or of the earth’s mind. But explosions? That’s man. The intruders? Well…

Invocation to Hermes

Colleen: Everything here hinges on the run of the second line, wherein the poet pleads may I rather than declares I may -- by doing this everything that follows becomes a wish, and we are able to understand that although the tone is tongue-in-cheek, the references to the quotidien wallet and hot wine are in fact references to spiritual matters. That in fact the poet wants their daily existence delivered, transcribed, and affected by and to the highest planes of spiritual existence.

Ben: Hermes is the god of many things. Here, let’s see, Dionysus (Bacchus) sneaks in with the hot wine, hot with what? Information? Hermes is god of magic, of communication, those feel real here, relevant. And the peacock, with its many eyes (only one here mentioned)… A medusa. Or are we just letting go for a moment, letting our wallet go to Hermes, dancing with Bacchus? Money, remember, is a most common (read: lived) form of black (read: lefthand) magic.

The Empty Suitcase

Colleen: As if the body were “the fiduciary” -- and for a poet, in a poem, the body is made of language -- each word here is an empty suitcase. We have attached all of our own “additional zero”. Is meaning absolute or subjective? Are we actually carrying ourselves around in just this one version of reality?

Ben: “Something mistaken for nothing.” What’s she getting at here? And what is the suitcase anyway? In a Macer-Story poem, it’s always both exactly what she says and everything you think she might mean. The spirit. A zero? I’d say there’s a history to that idea. Is the naked lightning “fiduciary” (an additional adjective) or is that naked lightning beyond something else which is “the fiduciary”? Some invisible trustee. I guess it all depends on how we read that broken line.

“Inside the small world of the body...”

Colleen: The logic of this verse is as circular as the small world of the body and it creates infinite iterations of itself. If the fog is the perpetual wall preventing the poet from expanding, and if the poet is the fog, then the poet is both expanding and preventing themselves from expanding. And herein we are presented with the limits of our human perception, and we come dangerously close to realizing that what we see and feel is not the end of what is.

Ben: The walls that turn out to be made of our own flesh or mind (shifting? obscuring? a fog....) The claustrophobia of the body becomes elation as our trappedness becomes connectedness— we are stuck in here but we are also STUCK in HERE (all of it, all of it).

The booklet from which these poems are taken (and that booklet itself drawing from Macer-Story’s deep chapbook oeuvre) is 11 Poems of Eugenia Macer-Story. It is in an edition of 50 and can be purchased by contacting Ben Roylance. He sells them at or around cost + shipping. Eugenia Macer-Story was an occult investigator, poet, playwright, novelist, and painter. Her work was mostly self-published, through her press Magick Mirror Communications. She was based in Woodstock and New York City. She died in December 2013.

“I could sleep under a stone...”

I could sleep under a stone

In the stone

Happy in stone-ness

Except explosions wake me

& the intruders whisper my agenda

Invocation to Hermes

the day I meet the devil

in disguise, may I

already have left my wallet

inside the peacock’s eye

so that sight stays on top of my money

as I dance and drink hot wine

The Empty Suitcase

Once again I arrive with an empty suitcase

Undecided whether to pack or ditch the absent contents

Full garbage cans outside the doorway

Contain no room for my additional zero

Unless I am carrying something mistaken for nothing

Attached to the absent contents

Extra dimensions rattle in the vacuum

Like castanets held in invisible fingers

Beyond the fiduciary, naked lightning

“Inside the small world of the body...”

Inside the small world of the body

Fever-walled into the perpetual fog

Seeming everywhere

I am the diameter and axis

All plans return to the base of my breastbone

Imploding into shifting neural focus

As I am the fog I breathe

Expanding to include the stars’ edge

Touched against intergalactic silence

UFOCCULTIC ACCOUNTING is a journal dealing with/in the twin worlds of ufology and occultism, and the little odd realms between intersections. UFOCCULTIC ACCOUNTING is written by Ufoccultist, poet, student, teacher, and book collector, Ben Roylance.