“Noovoodoo”
by JC Penny
the story behind the title track of Sage Against the Machine

“Energy is the potential to do work and it does not care what work it does (that is the job of design).  Its result ‘X’ is a variable and a variable can be anything, limited only by the amount of Energy applied to the design born of a dream or a nightmare.” 
         – Einstein (paraphrased)

The shirt you wore the day before is on a plane.  The plane is flying over an ocean, on its way to a forest on the other side of the world. 

Your apartment is ravished, shredded, blendered.  Tomorrow, you will awake on your bed with a hangover because the first thing you do after standing in your open door for minutes looking at your raped home with mouth, eyes, and stomach wishing for a dream instead, is look for the second best thing: wine.  You find them on the kitchen counter right where you left them, two bottles safe and sound, standing together like a scared elderly couple in a dangerous part of town.  Cereal, appliances, cutlery, spices, your culinary hobbies, the materials for your recent experiments in Thai cooking, the fridge magnets and notes, broken glass, detergents, juices and sauces – all smeared across your walls and floors.  “Maybe all my stuff is actually alive when I’m not home and there was a war or an orgy…”  Your mind is starting to fly.  It wants a dream immediately. Your eyes stop on a pickle with a postage stamp on it.  You think you smell urine.  You begin to hyper-ventilate.
The wine on the counter nearly makes you unravel.  You have very little bandwidth left.  Your mind is yelling “WHY?”, “WHO?”, “HOW?”, “FUCK!”, and “HELP!” all at once. You use wine to take the edge off your life.  It’s a personal comfort.  Your worries don’t breathe under wine. 
This wine is like a note from a monster.
You look away.  Your eyes fall on a pink folder with your bills and your yogurt in it.  You look away.  A chip of the familiar orange of your coffee cup is stuck in the mustard on the wall.  You turn away.  Across your living room that is covered with the stuffing of your sofa, you can see half your toilet resting on your bed.  You cover your eyes.  You laugh and moan at the same time.  You see yourself loosing it, rolling around in the goo and mess on the floor.  Your knees begin to bend but you catch yourself.  You hear a creak from your bedroom and you scream.  You grab the bottles and go to your neighbour’s immediately and drink them and babble until the shakes subside.

Across the ocean, there is a tribe of women that has been practicing their magic long before the west learned to use gunpowder. 
They are the Witches that Sing.
In their forest grove there are seventeen huts.  One is the Witch Mother’s, their chief.  Another is shared by the rest of the witches in the tribe, fourteen in all.  It is the largest but not by much.  It doesn’t need to be.  The witches are never there all at once.  The rest are for the children, one in each, but only nine are occupied now.  The witches sing to the children from birth to adulthood without interruption.  Never touching or conversing with them, they burn psychedelic herbs and a candle to carefully lullabye each one through the tricky years of sexual awakening.  None are given names, clothes or taught language, although some begin to sing in voices not comparable to anything.  They are human beings in a lifelong trance.
The Witches that Sing provide all that the children need to mature without too much disproportion.  They sit by their children and sing, always watching them.  Their songs carry glory, tension, solace, humour, and most importantly: stories.  The children’s eyes gaze steadily into their candles day and night.  Their unconscious faces plainly show the drama that is continually unfolding in the flame.  By the time these children are nineteen they are ready.
The plane carrying your shirt has dropped a crate over the witches’ forest.  It floats down under a white parachute.  It lands just outside the witches’ grove.  Your shirt along with 196 pounds of your personal possessions are in the crate, as well as a sheet of paper.

You sit on your father’s sofa.  He makes you tea and puts on old swing and ragtime music.  It works on you.  It must’ve been pretty hard being black in America in 1920.  Your problems deflate a little. 
You woke this morning in your apartment with only three seconds of mercy before you remembered everything, and then the hangover fairy put a cherry on top.  You walked the city with no direction all day until weak from hunger.  At 8pm you were at your father’s door.  It’s 8:45 when he brings you your tea, sits beside you, and you break down sobbing in his arms until you fall asleep.

Across the ocean, in the forest grove of the Witches that Sing, the huts are green with moss that spill onto the ground like carpet.  Some have stood for centuries and appear as if the ground has grown a hut.
The trees are old, 150 feet tall on average. Above the huts of the children (looking from below it is hard to see it) the trees have leaned away.  In the witches’ shady grove, the best available view of the skies are all above the children’s huts.  Beneath each hut lay the bones of each child that has stayed there, all under 20 years old when they are buried.
Beside one hut in particular, in which a girl has been sung to for nineteen years, a new hut is being prepared a few feet away. 
This tent is white with zippers and poles.  It’s surrounded by machines and wires, busily tended by men in modern clothing with pockets that bulge with tools.  Inside the tent is a round platform bounded by a steel ring.  Filled to the ring’s brim are 196 lbs of your possessions.  Photos, towels, figurines, spoons, books, all broken into one inch bits and neatly packed. To look down on it one would think of a throw rug woven from television noise. 
Sitting in the centre of the platform is an old tree stump from the surrounding forest.  On the stump burns a new candle with wires that are hidden. The wires trail under the platform and ground to the equipment outside. 
Nearby, a witch stands watch over the operations of the men arranging their boxes of silver and black.  When a child’s lifeforce is released and sent out to do work, areas of the ground and air that surround a child’s space cannot be polluted.  Also, there are rules of behavior.  Once a technician had been noticed by the monitor witch.  He was nonchalantly humming a few lines from a pop tune during his work inside a tent.  He exited the tent, plugged his laptop into the server, and then suddenly found himself standing in a pond a mile outside the forest.  He gave this gap in his memory only a few moments of attention.  The pond was home to an obscene number of mother crocodiles.  He managed half a minute of excruciating radio contact to his team back in the grove.
The men fear and respect the witches but the feeling is mutual. It is an uneasy alliance between soldiers under orders and an ancient tribe threatened with extinction. 
Their first meeting two years before had taken place at the edge of the witches’ forest.  Short greetings were exchanged and then a man pointed to a lush, rounded mountain in the distance.  In moments a beam from the clouds descended on the mountain.  As it moved across its face it left a black shiny strip as large as a river.  Behind it, the smoke billowed madly away from forest and rock under instant incineration, without a chance to produce even a single flame.  The smoke filled the sky.  The effect was not lost on the witches.  The man then proceeded to outline his proposal via pictures in the sand.  The witches’ put on their best smiles and led them into their forest – the first men that have ever been allowed to enter and leave their grove alive.
Since their first collaboration with the men two years before, the Witches that Sing have debated many aspects about the men.  For instance, why they do not use more intricate patterns instead of rectangles?  If one is determined to master “shape magic” – the term the witches have come to use about the men’s magic – would not circles have far more flexibility as conduits of will?  However, the witches have accepted that they do not understand the men’s magic at all.  The men had once opened their boxes for them.  The witches had insisted that they reveal what was inside before agreeing to collaborate.  They could imagine far worse fates from objects of evil concealed within a box that is allowed to rest in their grove than the men’s threat to burn them all by fire from the sky.  The men acquiesced.  Every last box that the men had brought was assembled before them. 
One by one, the men opened them and what the witches saw they still cannot agree upon after two years of debate.  Most now believe the boxes were once human.  They are to the men what the children in huts are to the witches, but instead of a final harvest of power through death, they are transformed to lesser beings – weaker magical batteries, equivalent to ground plants or insects.  This explains why they need so many of them to produce an effect and why the men connect them all together by smooth, coloured strings.  But when the men showed them that each box was a box within a box within a box, until the boxes and the strings were so tiny they disappeared under the eye they were at a loss to understand. 
A few older witches maintain that it was deception, a masterful hallucination engineered by an unseen shaman to baffle the witches, conceal the truth, and stamp out further questions.  The chief of the Witches that Sing – an inscrutable woman who wears a hundred plus plastic superhero rings she had once collected from a river whirlpool decades ago when the world was at war and a king had summoned her from far away to solicit her tribe’s services to hide his country from the ebb and tide of slaughter – had declined this theory.  No man is able to deceive the Witch Mother.  She affirms that the men had no deception in their hearts during the presentation.  In fact, she wishes that they did.  As their wisest, she harbors some shame at not having some sense of the men’s magic. 
Another mystery about the men that is more playfully debated concerns their long coats and how they manage to make the cloth whiter than bone.

You meet with the detective at your home. It’s been 48 hours since the break-in.  He explains that they were career burglars, probably a duo. They picked you at random.  It took them an hour to do the job.  “Why didn’t they just take the money items and run? Why would they risk getting caught?” you ask. “To annoy us -” says the detective smiling.  Two younger officers are methodically going through the scene for evidence.  You had been there half an hour already and they hadn’t moved much farther from the spot they were combing.  “- and to buy them time.  It’s going to take us another three days to finish up here, find out what they took, motives…” he says and smiles again.  He had done his ten thousand hours of looking for an eyelash in a crack house after a murder.  The smile is half nostalgia, half pecking at his junior officers crawling over ketchup and feathers, eyelash hunting in ridiculous headgear and one rubber glove.

Across the ocean, three witches sing to the girl now.  It is her time.  She is swaying as if in love.  Her eyes in her candle are blissful.  Her life she has dreamed in the songs of the witches since birth is wrapping up…  Her enemies, the cruel ones, the saints, the mild players, her friends and the heroes meet on a beach of pink by the ocean.  The giants come as well.  Behind them are the coloured kingdoms and some hang off the hands of clouds always shaped like napping monkeys while others stand on great, mile-high pillars and spin, sending inventions and animals far across the world. Her friends and enemies are companions now.  They grasp and hold each other with relief, some crying – the sins of an age wiped away by a handful of compassionate glances.  It is the most wonderful day in memory.  The sun sets beautifully.  The ocean sky is filled with old symbols of life and death that rain down the horizon…

Your meeting with the detective was too long.  You admonish yourself a little for spacing out at the end of his report.  “..rule out hate crime, prurient interest…ninety percent of the time…wouldn’t worry..” are the only echos left.  It was getting to you, seeing your life all ground up on the floor of your home.  Your imagination took over again.  The detective talking to you was turning into the narrator of a wildlife special and the junior officers had become the program’s subject: “ ..these diligent little fellas are a fascinating species of tool-savvy, scavenger field monkeys..”  You chuckle and decide perhaps that’s the most useful memory anyway.  It’s midday on Queen Street. Your stride slows and your shoulders relax a notch.  You suddenly realize your body has been ready for a surprise attack for the last two days.   In an internal punk rock moment, you declare that it’s all just stuff and that you’re glad it’s gone.  You can start over now.  Your eyes open on the street ahead of you.  It’s your neighborhood again.  There’s the café, the bookstore, the bakery.  You decide on take-out tea, a new pair of sunglasses and finding the best tree in the park to sip under. 

… the girl’s companions line-up on the beach to join in the rite of thanks. They disrobe comfortably except for an under garment which they begin to lift up and down for the sun, exposing their hearts, inviting god to burn one of them right then and there in thanks for their lives and good fortune.  She looks across to her friends’ faces.  She has seen legendary determination in each to defeat impossible odds.   Now she sees the opposite: acceptance of fate. Each contemplates death in their own way.  Vulpish, for example, has not ever used his eyelid in her memory outside of the rite of thanks.  A new feeling washes over her.   She began this adventure as a child.  She remembers a thousand times screaming “I am not a child!” to her elder compatriots.  Time passed and she proved herself.  She rose to great challenges.  The taunts and insults about her experience were gradually replaced by respect, and now as an elder, reverence. She wonders what’s next?  She knows it lays beyond the quick door of death, but what is it?  She smiles to herself.  “What silliness, there is no shame in an old woman warrior taking satisfaction in a world of peace that she has fought to build.  Away from me death!” She chuckles audibly and a few steal a glance at her.  Far off in the ocean, the sun has signaled that it has chosen a life to take. From its flame hovering over the ocean a boat drops onto the horizon.  The sun rarely chooses to burn a life in the rite of thanks but she has seen it.  It does not discriminate on age or beauty. It can be anyone gathered here.  It approaches and grows with the seconds.  A great green sail in the shape of a ‘T’ can be discerned now.  There is a tree of white and symbols on it arranged from left to right.  The boat is not as she remembers.  She glances at her companions but they remain resolute and proud.  It is growing immense and she is having trouble maintaining her gaze.  The sky and water do not seem to realize it exists.   Its size cannot possibly fit this world.   She begins to question the phenomena.  Perhaps it is a trick conjured by a new enemy.  Should she break the rite and call for arms?  Then she realizes: it has come for her.  The boat will not fade suddenly on the water as a companion is reduced to ash.  That is what her companions will see along with their friend, her, reduced to ash.  Green and white is all she can see now and beyond its veil, a rising volume of sound and fury of infinite proportions that will consume her, return her to the source of all.  Her last act is to scream with all her lifeforce at the veil so that god should prepare herself to swallow a warrior unlike any other that has passed before.

Your tea in hand, you wait for the walk signal at the corner of Queen and Prospect.  You take interest in a tabloid headline to pass the seconds.  You are reading the line “FATHER AND SON TEAM WIN!” when your heart suddenly doubles in speed.  You step back and raise your hand to your head.  A splitting headache drops on you.  Your breathing accelerates and you are scrambling inside your head “Am I having an embolism, a stroke? FUCK!”  You catch the tabloid box and fall to one knee. A passer-by stops to help.  You jump back in terror and tumble backwards into the street on your back.  People and cars stop.  A voice from somewhere manages to calm you as the light from the sky between the buildings fuzzes as if through Vaseline.  You see what looks like little strings tied into knots raining down from the sky.  Your breathing steadies and you manage some words through the hallucination.  It all vanishes as quickly as it arrived except for a bad shake in your right hand.  Someone helps you up. 
Across the street, a car covered in loud advertising is parked. Hidden across the advertising are 35 directional antennas all pointed at you.  They have captured terabytes of your body’s life-sign data in the last two minutes.  There is a man in the driver seat.  His fingers work fast on a laptop while he speaks into a headset: “Test subject showed contact from 14:45:03 to 14:45:50, no fatality. Sending data.”
Across the ocean in the witches’ forest, a soft sound like a kettle after boiling fades from the girl’s under-used vocal chords.  Under bright lights and the latest technology, she lies on the platform made from your particled possessions in her new tent dying.  Outside, a technician with a headset nods and three witches enter the tent and resume singing to her.  The last five minutes were the first time she has been without their song in her life. This song is farewell. Her right hand has broken its own under-used bones and only now settles its furious shaking.  Her face is beatific, her eyes still fixed on her new candle with wires that are hidden.  Her sweat has drenched your green “Island Time” t-shirt you got in Jamaica.

© 2009 Dirty Penny Partnership, Candy Mountain Records