January 10, 1965 - January 16, 1965
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Sunday, January 10th,1965
I had strange dreams last night. I was in a forest, in another time, in another place. I had taken a look at the thaumatological equations of temporal mana conversion before bed, and I think they somehow crept into my dreams. The leaves on the trees were gray and rubbery, the bark scaly like a lizard's scales. Walking on the dirt felt like walking on piles of hay. There was a haze lingering in the air, blue-gray in color, obscuring my vision. I came to a stone retaining wall built along the base of a steep hillside. There were etchings on the wall. I think they were etchings in the Tongue Man Was Not Meant to Know - the Mythos Tongue - but I only thought that because of a vague sense of dread that crept through my mind when I looked upon them. The characters had unsettling lines and horrific curves, telling a story of desolation and despair. I could not read them, but I could feel them in my mind. I turned away from the wall and saw streams of light in the haze, spiraling from a hole in the fabric of reality. Where is this place my mind took me last night? It felt so real, the horror, yet it recedes from me even now just as all dreams do.
I got off to a slow start this morning. I jogged out to a copse of trees a little ways down the hill from the compound. I practiced hard strikes against the trees, using the strikes of the iron monkey. I moved through the steps, still in a mental fog, and only emerged back into the moment when I felt my knuckles throbbing. I looked and saw that I had beaten my hands raw against the trees. It's not the first time I have pushed my limits striking wood. I'll be fine tomorrow.
I started in on another session reading The Book of The Gates with the "help" of Mrs. Salehi. The menu today was fesenjan - one of my favorites. The smells coming from the kitchen were glorious. I learned from the book that Sayed had figured out a way to summon forth his "spirit twin" from another dimension. This entity taught him strange mathematics, I believe it was something like what we now think of as differential geometry, maybe topology. It is clear to me that I will have to work on my math skills prior to being able to comprehend the diagrams I have encountered in the book. This is not going to be easy, but I'm sure Wei will be happy to learn that I'm taking math more seriously, "like all good girls from Guangzhou should do." Numerous pages of the text remain a mystery to me, magical in nature and otherworldly in scope. I will not be able to unlock the secrets in The Book of The Gates this way; I will need to study Classical Persian and mathematics more seriously before I am able to understand it. I will also clearly need to become more competent at gate magic to ever be able to make use of it.
On that note, I have formulated an idea. I looked over some of my notes from the sessions with Mr. Tophet again today, upon the conclusion of Holmes's cooking lesson with Mrs. Salehi. I do believe understanding the book is a matter of time, a lot of time, but time is something a master gate magician has in abundance. I have decided I will focus my efforts first on the temporal aspects of gate magic, to buy myself some extra time to work on the book. With enough effort I may be able to go visit Sayed himself! Who better to learn from?
I finished the day with another session of Da mo to relax my mind. I seem to be doing that a lot lately, but I think it's good for me.
Monday, January 11th,1965
I had another odd encounter with Mrs. Carter at lunch today, again about Tibet and Tibetans. Basically, she wants me to be some sort of liaison between the Promethean Foundation and their Tibetan contacts. I'm fine with that. I don't speak Tibetan and Tibetans don't generally speak Cantonese, so we'll be communicating in English just like anyone from the Promethean Foundation would, but I guess me being Asian and being adept with chopsticks is worth something in terms of our cultures not seeming so alien to each other. I agreed to assist Mrs. Carter in what ways I am able regarding the Tibetans. I am actually curious about Tibetan mystical traditions, because I believe they share the same origins as Chinese traditions. Somewhere along the way they diverged, and I wonder why.
Mrs. Carter also informed me that the foundation had purchased subscriptions to Sing Tao Daily and China Times, the two most significant Cantonese newspapers in America. Sing Tao Daily originated out of Hong Kong and made its way to America in recent years, and is probably the most widely distributed Cantonese newspaper in the world (definitely in America, from what I have learned). China Times is actually older, founded in San Francisco, but has a much smaller circulation. Mrs. Carter has asked me to read them over on a regular basis and look for anything out of the ordinary - in a way that would be of interest to the Foundation. I presume this means unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences, and possibly even accounts of the supernatural. I guess it can't hurt to stay informed!
Before lunch was over, I asked Mrs. Carter to schedule two more sessions for me with Mr. Tophet. My first foray into The Book of The Gates has left me with some questions, and I think I could use some extra practice with gate magic. It's obviously important that I learn as much from Mr. Tophet as I can if I am ever going to make use of the book in my lifetime.
After lunch, I went through half a dozen White Crane taolu. That wore me out. I arrived back to my cottage this evening to find that Quin had left me a ring, with a note about it penned in Cantonese! The ring will help me recover my energy faster - a useful device when I am out in the field making heavy of magic. Sometimes there just isn't time to sit and engage in Da mo to recuperate, so this will be nice to have.
Tuesday, January 12th,1965
After an early session of White Crane, I took the bus down to Chinatown this morning to visit Weng Du's tea shop. I ran out of oolong, and I don't think it's possible to get good oolong anywhere close to the Alden House. I was fortunate; he had a fresh supply of Bai Ji Guan, one of my favorites. Weng was well today, but he talked me into helping his cousin. Apparently his cousin, recently in from Shenzen, is in need of interpretation help at the immigration office later this week. He is trying to relocate from China to America and is going through the citizenship process. Of course I agreed.
I returned in time for the afternoon lesson I had scheduled with Mr. Tophet. I informed him of my particular interest in temporal metaphysics, so we started there. I feel that I have an aptitude for it, though it is exhausting to learn. I learned about how transdimensional and temporal travel intermingle, how they can often be mistaken for each other. For instance, even something as simple as timeporting back a year then forward a year can land the traveler in an alternate universe, though he will never be any the wiser to what has happened. There are a lot of theories as to why this is, but if it weren't that way, perhaps the multiverse would be unsustainable, and the metaphysics have simply evolved this way. Another theory holds that in the realm of all existence, there are infinite parallel worlds, each less separated by precisely 5.39106 x 10^-44 seconds: the Planck time. Mana can lift someone from one such world and place her in another, and even alter the history and future of each stream to account for the traveler. One theory holds that timeporting is just an exercise of moving between these parallel worlds. So, while teleporting moves through three spatial dimensions, timeporting moves through the other dimensions, however many they may be, yet preserves spatial coordinates relative to the point of departure. It's all very fascinating stuff!
I was both energized and exhausted by today's lessons. The possibilites that lie before me seem limitless, especially when I consider how I will be able to use what I learn today to unlock the potential of The Book of The Gates in the coming years. I finished the day with some wall pushups. I can't do many, yet, but I am getting better. I have heard tales of Five Ancestors masters doing one-handed wall pushups, without a wall!
Wednesday, January 13th,1965
All of this gate magic business is giving me the weirdest dreams. I was walking on the seafloor. It was cold and dark, though there was a peculiar purple light emanating from nowhere in particular. My hair was floating above my head, and while I could not breathe, I did not need to breathe. I was climbing a sandy rise; strange, tentacled sea creatures drifted in the dark waters around me. The sandy rise gave way to bare rock, that curved upward to a cliff face awash in purple light. I could see shadows dancing along the top of the cliff face. They swayed and undulated, as if cast by great sea oats swaying in the breeze, but the source remained out of my view. I tried to scale the cliff face, but I kept slipping back down. I could not swim up. I was bound to the floor by gravity. I heard a low rumble behind me. I turned and peered into the dimness of the formless, watery void. Terrible thoughts plagued my mind, driving me down to my knees. I sobbed, my own salty tears streaming into the endless ocean that now oppressed me, forcing me down to my hands. I struggled not to lose consciousness, and looked up into the nothingness. For a mere instant before I awoke, I saw a great fish eye peering back at me from the black waters, as a macabre hymn in a perplexing tongue arose from the depths.
I was unsettled for hours after waking. Much as with the previous dream. I played some records to drive the twisted hymn from my mind. In time it was washed out by the more palatable tones of Etta James. I decided against training this morning, as I was too shaken up by my dream, and the last time I trained in that state I ended up with bloody knuckles. Those scabs are gone now, but I don't need fresh ones.
After a light breakfast of rice and bok choy, I met with Mr. Tophet for our final session. We picked up where we left off last time, the rough syllables for temporal mana infusion. We then sent a scrap of paper a minute into the future as practice. It was my first success in temporal magic, and it left me wiped out. If I had the vastness of Kuranes's mind, perhaps I could do this more than once at a time, but for now, I cannot. It is too taxing. Mr. Tophet assures me that with practice it will all come easier. I have no reason to doubt him, as that is the way with all things. This is just harder than anything I have done yet.
After my session I called Weng and set up a time to meet his cousin, Mr. Tsui, at the immigration office in tomorrow morning. Afterwards, I spent a couple of hours familiarizing myself with Old Persian script. I have been paging through a text on the subject off and on over the last week, trying to decide how to approach familiarizing myself with it. I've picked up a few things, but this is obviously going to take a long time.
Thursday, January 14th,1965
Tsui must be Weng's older cousin. He looked about 65, with a long gray beard, and bushy gray eyebrows. I greeted him outside the immigration office. It turned out that he just needed me to go over his forms and to look over some documents he had to sign. This was no trouble. Tsui himself seemed very unfriendly. He did not speak to me except when necessary, and he tended to ignore me. He is accustomed to the traditional ways, and I must seem like something very strange to him - an independent Chinese woman who is unmarried and has no children, who wears the clothes of a westerner. While he was unkind, there was a certain charisma about him, hidden beneath a sense of urgency to his immigration. I feel like he is fleeing something, and while I did not think to check his aura amidst the bustle and seemingly endless forms of the immigration office, I got the impression that he is no mundane old man. He has seen things, done things, and knows things, and some of that might be catching up to him. When we parted ways he asked me for directions on how to get a bus to Chinatown. Before I could tell him goodbye, he turned and left abruptly.
I returned to the guesthouse to find that Mr. Tophet had left me a folder with a few extra notes in it. Homework, of a sort, and what seemed like an evaluation. He told me where I was weakest, where I needed the most work in my manipulation of mana through gesture and syllables. That is helpful. I practiced some of the phrases he suggested and, before I knew it, the hour had grown late. I took an evening stroll down Glendower Ave, down into some of the neighborhoods of Los Feliz. Fog had started rolling in in the afternoon, and now it was heavy in the air. I made my way back up the hill. I heard coyotes yelping out in the hills as I arrived back.
I enjoyed a cup of tea over a few passages of Middle Persian script with annotations and instructions on reading it, then practiced some Da mo to close out the day.
Friday, January 15th,1965
After a session of luohan this morning, I ran across Kuranes outside his guesthouse. He informed me he would be joining me for some breathing exercises in the magical library tomorrow and the next day, for extended sessions. I made the offer last week to teach people what I knew, so I agreed. Even though he didn't actually phrase it that way. He's an odd one.
I went to the library today to look at what the Promethean Foundation had available on advanced mathematics and differential geometry. It has been a long time since I cracked a math book, so I will admit that the texts I found seemed daunting. I don't know if they have enough for me to get started working toward understanding The Book of The Gates. Perhaps when we get another break I'll get started on that. I also found some rudimentary texts on Middle Persian. I put the math books back on the shelves and instead got back working on understanding the Middle Persian script. Middle Persian is actually runic in the way it looks, kind of like Thai. I wondered when I was reading it if the script itself had a magical origin. Of course, the same has been said about Chinese, that mages helped devise the brushstrokes in ancient times. I don't know if there is any truth to that.
Just thinking about the magic inherent in script gave me a flashback to the dream from several nights ago where I saw that terrible writing inscribed on the wall in that weird, gray forest. I remember it so clearly when I think about it, almost as though the experience were real. Somewhere in the multiverse, at sometime in its existence, someone had those memories and they somehow found their way to me. Maybe they were my own, from another dimension. Maybe they were someone else's. Whatever the case, it's something that both terrifies and intrigues me. Part of me wishes I could un-remember it, but part of me wants to know more.
Saturday, January 16th,1965
Kuranes and I began our Da mo sessions this morning, working primarily on posture and relaxation. I find that when the posture is sorted out first, the breathing comes easier. Many people focus on the mechanics of the breathing first, but, in some ways, when you achieve good posture, the breathing takes care of itself. The session went smoothly. Kuranes was distant, as always, with little to say. Perhaps he was in the moment but just did not show it. It's hard to say with him, as his mind is vast and he lives within it.
The session lasted all day. I had time for little else, though I did read through some Middle Persian manuscripts. Mostly poetry, though there was also a boring account of grain allowances under Yazdegerd II. It was useful for practicing numbers. I also read up briefly on Persian history during the Sassanid period. I remember thinking how strange I would seem to them, but it turns out that assumption was wrong. The Silk Road flourished under the Sassanid kings from the time of the Jin dynasty to the Tang dynasty in China. There was some cultural exchange, and even military cooperation against the common enemy of the barbaric peoples in central Asia. Persians traveled to the Chinese court, and Chinese traveled to the Persian court. It's funny to think that, when all of this is said and done, I would be better at communicating with the Persians of that time than the Chinese.