The Poison Pie Publishing House presents:

April 1, 2020
Cole awoke in bed at some indeterminate point after midnight. The nightlight in the adjoining bathroom cast a faint but sufficient light for his eyes to take stock of his surroundings. He always slept on the same side of the bed and he found himself lying on his left side so that he faced his wife. Elaine, by chance, lay on her right side, so that he had a shadowed view of her face, resting peacefully about eighteen inches from his own. For reasons unknown to him, Cole lay this way for several minutes, gazing at the face before him. Several times he squeezed his eyes shut to clear them of sleep because it seemed he had difficulty focusing. The skin of his wife's face, over the bridge of the nose and the cheek bones and across the hollows of her cheek could not be resolved into a single, coherent image. Instead, it was as if there were several translucent images of the face anchored to some fixed point but allowed to erratically bob about a few millimeters in all directions. He rubbed his eyes with a sleepy hand and looked again but proved unable to dispel the optical illusion. The visual phenomenon did not particularly disturb Cole, nor did he think of it as a mystery. He simply closed his eyes and waited until he fell back to sleep, knowing in a few hours he had to rise for work.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke & Yoshio Kuge - unreleased live recording, tracks 1-3 (May 20, 2010, Jam, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 2, 2020
Cole entirely forgot about the weird vision of Elaine's face until it happened again at two a.m. on the following night. It appeared that she wore several overlapping masks, each no thicker than a layer of skin, which shifted laterally and without coordination over her skull and were able to penetrate through each other as they drifted across a range of perpendicular distances. No amount of rubbing his eyes was able to dispel this vision. Again, he had no recourse but to close his eyes and return to sleep.

In the morning, he mentioned to Elaine that he might have to go see an ophthalmologist. When she asked for details, he merely said that he had been having trouble focusing, omitting mention of the particular object of his scrutiny. The significance of Cole's admission to his wife should not be overlooked. Here was a man who had for many years utterly kept to himself recurring nocturnal visions. That he was able to speak of it without reservation now was strictly an indication that he had no idea what these initial visions portended.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke & Yoshio Kuge - unreleased live recording, track 4 (May 20, 2010, Jam, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 3, 2020
Cole lay on his side, facing his wife. His head rested on a pillow and the line of sight from his left eye was partially obscured by a fold of fabric. The lightbulb in the bathroom had a soft yellow tint to it but, as he examined the fluctuating surfaces of his wife's face, there was no denying that they possessed a pale blue luminosity. Cole could not explain the origin of that clear azure hue. The languid undulations of the skin of her face, though free of regular periodicity, hypnotized Cole. For the first time, he found himself unable to close his eyes and dispel the vision. He was compelled to further observe what by all reason was a hallucination. The azure light beckoned him to become lost in some fathomless dimension previously unimagined and accessible now only through this forced scrutiny. The light penetrated the lenses of his eyes and was concentrated upon the surface of the retina, where it was converted into neural impulses and transmitted along the optic nerve to be absorbed by his brain. The autonomic bioelectrical processes were no more able to repel the invasion than had been Cole's conscious will.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke & Yoshio Kuge - unreleased live recording, track 5 (May 20, 2010, Jam, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 4, 2020
It seems a minor thing. For a matter of only a few minutes out of twenty four hours in the day, Cole experienced a very specific hallucination centered on his wife's face. There was no cause for the remainder of his day to be impacted by a brief aberrant episode in the middle of the night, unless Cole allowed it to perturb his mental state and carried that vexation with him. Of course, we have already observed that Cole had experienced mixed success in his efforts to contain the impact of the nightly visits of the hovering squids and thus no one should have any confidence that he would be able to compartmentalize this latest nocturnal irregularity. When it became clear to him that this was not an issue of the eyes, he canceled the appointment with the ophthalmologist, which Elaine had made for him, implying that the problem seemed to have disappeared on its own.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Eiko Ishibashi - unreleased live recording, track 1 (May 30, 2010, Lady Jane, Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 5, 2020
In his waking hours, it did not appear to Cole that the recurring nocturnal hallucinations bore any commonality with his childhood nightmares of the hovering squids, other than the twin facts that they both transpired at night and were fabrications of his mind. Fear had once dominated his reaction to the squids. He experienced no terror when observing the transformation of his wife's face, although he could not deny a sense of apprehension that this uninvited phenomenon signaled a mental breakdown that would jeopardize the stability and harmony of his family. That was surely reason enough for any husband and father to fear. Cole did his best to minimize the impact of these unwelcome visions. The impossibility of this task was quickly laid bare. When Halley found him lost in thought at the kitchen table, he was forced to lie, telling her that he was thinking of a troubling bit of code at work, in order to hide from her the transmutation of her mother's face.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Eiko Ishibashi - unreleased live recording, track 2 (May 30, 2010, Lady Jane, Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 6, 2020
Like clockwork Cole woke in the still of each night. When he opened his eyes, some perverse force invariably had caused him and his wife to turn onto their sides so that they were facing each other, though she still slept. His head lay on the pillow as he examined the undulations of the skin of her face. The eerie azure glow, which illuminated the distinct layers, emanated not from within his wife's skull but rather from between the floating layers themselves. One night Cole discovered his hand raised, seeming of its own accord, and his arm out-stretched as if to caress Elaine's face. As soon as he was aware of the motion, he jerked the hand back. Should his hand pass through the phantasmal strata of skin, he might touch the physical flesh that lay beneath it. He dared not wake his wife, for he had no explanation prepared to describe what he was going through.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Masataka Fujikake, Munehiro Narita, Mitsuru Tabata & Yuro Ujiie - unreleased live recording, track 1 (August 6, 2010, UFO Club, Koenji, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 7, 2020
The layers of skin, which had originally been as smooth as sheets hung from a clothesline, billowing gently in a breeze, began to boil. Cole could not remember the details but he once had watched a television show in which volcanic activity was present beneath a landscape of riparian wetlands. The combination of heat beneath the surface layer of water had killed off any vegetation and left a featureless expanse of deep brown muddy stew. Brought to a slow boil as if in a cauldron, one large bubble formed at a time. It grew languidly beneath the arc of a spherical film until it passed a limit of stability and abruptly bulged outward, splattering droplets of mud as it burst. Upon his wife's face, Cole observed much the same phenomenon--an isolated pocket of fluid, half a centimeter in diameter, appeared trapped beneath a layer of skin. The pressure gradually built beneath it until it burst. After the eruption, the layer of skin quickly returned to its original state, showing no sign of puncture or deterioration.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Masataka Fujikake, Munehiro Narita, Mitsuru Tabata & Yuro Ujiie - unreleased live recording, track 9 (August 6, 2010, UFO Club, Koenji, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 8, 2020
Cole was fairly certain that the visual hallucinations, which played over his wife's face, were limited to the dead of night and that the intimations of the same phenomena, which occurred in the morning as he sat across from her at the kitchen table, were merely vestigial remembrances summoned by his ever growing anxiety. To be sure, Cole was anxious. He was trapped between two opposing fears: first that his delusions might be discovered and second that, if they were not revealed, his marriage would collapse. How could he continue to fulfill his functional roles as husband and father when he was consumed by the worry that he was either losing his mind or regaining the debilitating nightmares that had defined his childhood and adolescence? Noting a peculiar expression on her husband's face, Elaine asked with modest concern, "Are you feeling well?" Her husband nodded perfunctorily and she drew another sip of her heavily creamed and sweetened coffee.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Han Bennink - unreleased live recording, tracks 1-2 (September 8, 2010, Super Deluxe, Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 9, 2020
Nothing lay within Cole's power to calm the bubbles that emerged from his wife's simmering face. Cole was not a man of prayer so beseeching a supernatural power for divine intervention never occurred to him. He would have to make do with mortal means. He wondered whether there had been a change in his diet, which had upset the balance of biochemicals in his endocrine system, but he could identify no obvious trigger. Anonymously, he researched on the internet causes of nocturnal hallucinations. Of the various potential origins--narcolepsy, schizophrenia, etc.--none seemed remotely viable. The only subject, which arose in his investigations, that had any relevance to his lifestyle was daily alcohol use; it was considered only a catalyst and not a cause itself. Cole became more careful in maintaining a strict limit in this regard but dismissed the notion of abstinence. He continued to take what solace he could find in a drink or two when he arrived home from work.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Han Bennink - unreleased live recording, tracks 3-4 (September 8, 2010, Super Deluxe, Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 10, 2020
Soap bubbles take on a spherical shape because the interface formed by the soapy film is energetically unstable and the lowest surface to volume ratio is achieved in a sphere. Bubbles can be induced to temporarily take on rounded tubular shapes if a sufficient flow of air is present during their formation. Cole observed the bubbles forming on the translucent layers of his wife's skin. For several nights it appeared that the duration of individual bubbles was growing incrementally from one night to the next. As the length of time increased, the bubbles began to adopt distended shapes. It was as if the breath escaping from his wife blew the bubbles into flimsy tubes, with one end anchored to her face. These cylindrical features reached but a few centimeters and possessed a flexibility that allowed them to weave erratically back and forth like seaweed caught in the tide. They were not, however, indefinitely sustainable. Each elongated bubble burst after only a few seconds. That Cole had a conceptual notion of the physics governing the geometry of these peculiar attributes brought him no consolation whatsoever.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke & Oren Ambarchi - unreleased live recording, track 1 (January 6, 2011, Super Deluxe, Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 11, 2020
On Saturday, Halley had almost finished preparing an economic analysis to convince her parents to install solar photovoltaic panels on the roof of their house. She asked her father for help verifying a calculation, which would allow her to include the impact on power generation of the number of sunny days, based on historical meteorological data at their longitude and latitude. Cole had been sitting quietly out on the front porch, his cell phone face down in his lap. Periodically neighbors jogged or bicycled past as they took advantage of the clear skies and pleasant, spring weather. At her query, Cole looked up into his daughter's face. He found a magnificent visage of beauty for she was utterly unmarred by unsteady skin, undulating tubular growths or the hateful pale blue luminosity that penetrated his sleeping hours. "So did I do it right?" she asked. "You will have to tell me everything again," he replied. "I wasn't paying attention."

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke & Oren Ambarchi - unreleased live recording, track 2 (January 6, 2011, Super Deluxe, Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 12, 2020
Up to this point, the shifting layers of skin had floated over her face, but had conformed generally to the features beneath it, maintaining smooth expanses above the forehead and cheeks, a ridge oriented along the nose and pits at the eye sockets. The boiling and subsequent tubular growths had appeared over the flatter regions of the sheets of skin. However, Cole's hallucinations appeared to lose focus, because the luminous projection masking her face began to adopt distortions that deviated from any known human physiology. The ridge began to flatten and the pits to fill so that the more or less even patches of skin began to join with each other. The resulting vision, devoid of features save the continuous bubbling, appeared only peripherally human. As Cole lay on his side, facing the dissolution of his wife, he found it pertinent to remind himself that this woman before him was his anchor in life whom he loved above all others.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Akira Sakata - unreleased live recording, track 1 (February 13, 2011, Lady Jane, Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 13, 2020
What kept Cole, for the time being, from collapse was the fact that his nocturnal visions consumed but a few minutes, secreted away in the deep of each night. He slept soundly both before and after this brief intermission, so he remained able to function at a tolerable level at home and at work. While the duration of the hallucinations did not expand, the particular details continued to evolve. Once the mouth, nose and eyes were covered by the fluctuating layers of skin, the boiling behavior migrated into the newly available spaces. Cole gazed at a vaguely human-shaped face in which all readily identifiable sensory organs were masked behind several translucent and inter-penetrating layers of simmering flesh. That he should fall asleep so easily once the visions departed struck even Cole as unusual, but he accepted the fact gladly. His natural dreams, free of the contamination of his waking moments, provided a respite from the anxiety anyone would feel at the unmistakable evidence of the deterioration of their mind.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Akira Sakata - unreleased live recording, track 2 (February 13, 2011, Lady Jane, Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 14, 2020
It proved impossible for Cole to deceive his wife completely. Noting that he had withdrawn within himself to a greater extent than usual, she pressed him for an explanation. "What's bothering you?" she asked with undisguised tenderness. Surely, there are readers among us who would urge Cole to simply come clean and admit that, for the past two weeks, he had been subjected to strange visions. His wife would have undoubtedly offered sympathy and support. The solution seems so obvious and so immediately accessible. Yet, Cole did not perceive his problem in this light. He had always existed in a reality where he was responsible for managing his own affairs. That he had found a happy companion in Elaine he did not deny, but neither can it be dismissed that he regarded his reliance upon her as fortuitous. As a child he had outlasted the squids. With this precedent in mind, Cole was determined to persevere by his own devices yet again.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Peter Brötzmann - unreleased live recording, tracks 1-6 (April 10, 2011, Café OTO, London, England, digital files)

April 15, 2020
The density of the tubular growths, each of which sprouted from the center of a bubble on the boiling surface of her face, increased. As their number grew so too did the tubes spread out to cover those regions previously occupied by human sensory organs, which had up to that time remained free of the polyps. The result can best be described as a head-sized egg, oriented with the narrow point of the ellipsoid pointed down toward the neck. The front surface was entirely covered with a thick layer of appendages, each roughly an inch in length. The many layers of skin had coalesced into a single film, while the stability of the individual growths seemed to increase for their abrupt bursting became much less frequent and they were quickly replaced. Furthermore, the tubes now narrowed along the cylindrical axis; the diameter at the base spanned roughly a quarter of an inch while the diameter at the free end was half that. The source of pale blue light also seemed to shift so that it was concentrated in spheres located at the end of each appendage. As if possessed of some means of discretion, these growths grasped haphazardly and waved their bioluminescent beacons independently. Intimated in this nightmarish semaphore was the signal of Cole's demise.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & SUNN O))) - unreleased live recording, track 1 (April 15, 2011, Roadburn Festival, Tilburg, The Netherlands, digital file)

April 16, 2020
Cole recalled the mechanism by which he had escaped many years earlier from the nightly visits of the trio of squids. It was the finite nature of his energy reserves that had freed him. When he had poured his efforts into work and school, he suddenly discovered that the internal processes, which had been at work creating the illusory cephalopods, were deprived of the energy required to function. Consequently, the visits had abruptly ceased. Cole pondered whether a similar strategy could be consciously employed in his current situation. Certainly, he could bury himself in work, but his circumstances now were different. The hallucinations were focused on his wife. Should he push himself to the edge of exhaustion, would that mean that he must redirect the physical and mental energy used to maintain a relationship with her? Cole feared this to be true. As a result, he did not believe that he could banish the visions, in which his wife's face was deformed beyond all recognition, simply by laboring unto extreme fatigue without destroying his marriage. There had to be another way.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Altered States - unreleased live recording, track 1 (November 25, 2011, Pit Inn, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 17, 2020
Cole's mind returned to the days of his childhood and he recalled the epiphany that he had felt when he discovered the book containing the description of Teuthida Volantem, also known as the hovering squid. The knowledge that someone else shared his experiences had proved a powerful palliative. Nor had he forgotten the crushing despair when he had returned a few days later to the store only to find that the book had disappeared. So it was with guarded wariness that Cole set out to locate another individual to whom the same image of a particularly alien transformation of a loved one's face had also been revealed.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Altered States - unreleased live recording, track 2 (November 25, 2011, Pit Inn, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 18, 2020
Cole commenced his investigation on the internet. It was true on both counts that search engines took either words or images as input and that a clear picture was seared not only into his memory but also into his waking consciousness. However, Cole possessed no means to render the mental image into a physical form. Consequently, he was required to verbally describe the creature that he observed, for which he needed precise vocabulary. Perhaps because of his experience with squids, he began by researching marine invertebrates.

written while listening to:  Seijaku - unreleased live recording, tracks 1-8 (May 10, 2011, Koenji High, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 19, 2020
The phylum Cnidaria contains more than ten thousand species of creatures divided into two general categories: swimming medusae, such as jellyfish, and sessile polyps, such as corals. Also counted among the Cnidarians are sea anemones. The anatomy of a sea anemone is characterized at its base by a single, adhesive foot from which extends a generally cylindrical trunk. The musculature of the central column possesses a strong sphincter muscle, which when closed presents a smooth, rounded terminus to the trunk. When opened, the protective covering retracts, exposing a central slit-like mouth, surrounded by whorls of tentacles. Often the tentacles are sufficiently dense as to appear as a solid mass, hiding the mouth in their midst. In other instances, they form a concentric ring separated by a plateau from the central orifice. In response to being touched, the tentacles release a venom-laden harpoon into the flesh of the intruder. The neurotoxin temporarily paralyzes prey of a suitable size, which can then be grasped by the dexterous appendages and delivered into the mouth for digestion.

written while listening to:  Seijaku - unreleased live recording, tracks 9-18 (May 10, 2011, Koenji High, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 20, 2020
Cole found in his investigation a tremendous variety of sizes, shapes and colors among anemones. The smallest species, dwelling in cold northern waters, possessed trunks that rarely exceeded a quarter inch in height, while the largest tropical species reached a yard in diameter. Anemones displayed a palette of vibrant colors, including pale rose, buttery yellow, intense magenta, white and sea green. Most interesting to Cole were the nature of the tentacles, which also varied greatly in design. Some anemones possessed long, sinewy tentacles, with aspect ratios of a hundred or more. Many examples, however, more closely resembled the tentacles of his visions, in which the height was roughly five or six times the diameter of the base. The parallels did not end there, for he found multiples images in which the tentacles were attached to the central body by a thick circular base, which tapered to a finer appendage as it extended outward. He also viewed examples in which the tentacles displayed a sharply contrasting spherical patch of color at the end of each tentacle--for example, a ball of yellow glowing on the cap of a cylinder of fuchsia. So close did Cole find the similarities that he began to suspect that he must have seen images like these before and subconsciously incorporated their physiology into his private hallucinations.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke & Oren Ambarchi - unreleased live recording, tracks 1-3 (January 30, 2012, Super Deluxe, Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 21, 2020
At night Cole sank slowly to the bottom of a deep, tidal basin, where he came to rest comfortably on his side. The absence of air posed no problem for his breathing, so he knew that he had left the limits of reality and ventured into the realm of dreams. His wife lay before him, seemingly unconscious. Her neck appeared as a trunk, attached to her body much as the foot of a cnidarian adheres to a rock surface along a coral reef. The trunk spread in diameter to the size of her head. In the opening where Cole should have found her face resided instead a dense mass of pale blue, tapered tentacles, which ended in small, luminous spheres. The tentacles combined a common motion--as if swaying to a tide that all felt--with individual deviations from it. Although the flesh of the tentacles was translucent, so closely-packed were they that Cole proved unable to detect the maw that he knew must lie at their center.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke & Oren Ambarchi - unreleased live recording, tracks 4-5 (January 30, 2012, Super Deluxe, Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 22, 2020
Additional exploration of the animal, plant and fungal kingdoms brought Cole no closer to a representation of the organism, which he perceived each night, than the sea anemone. Once he accepted this conclusion, he felt equipped to proceed with an attempt to identify others who had experienced a similar vision. The logic of his thoughts was relatively easy to follow. His wife had taken on the aspect of a creature that was part human and part animal. Such organic amalgamations were commonplace in the field of mythology, where minotaurs, centaurs, mermaids and countless other examples were routinely encountered. Cole needed merely to find the name of the creature which combined the body of a woman and the face of a sea anemone. A superficial survey of the internet provided no immediate satisfaction. He submitted a variety of phrases because, despite his repeated exposure, he was not sure whether the portion of his wife that had been transformed into a sea anemone began at the base of her neck, to which the entire creature had been affixed or, rather, just her face, reaching back to her ears, had been replaced by the tentacle-covered oral disc of the organism. Such nuanced descriptions failed to uncover any additional information.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Steve Noble - unreleased live recording, tracks 1-3 (February 28, 2012, Café OTO, London, England, digital files)

April 23, 2020
Cole began to spend substantially more time at the computer investigating books about fantastical beasts. These catalogues of creatures went under the generic name of bestiaries. While it was true that illustrated bestiaries from the Middle Ages had been translated from Latin and remained in publication, there was also a plethora of contemporary monstrous encyclopedias created as informational resources for role-playing games. Some of these books were available via digital download but most required the purchase of a physical copy. When numerous packages began to abruptly appear on their porch, Cole was forced to provide an explanation to Elaine and Halley. "I am thinking about starting a blog about bestiaries." Mother and daughter found this statement somewhat surprising but ultimately harmless. In particular, Elaine's acceptable range of allowable behaviors by her husband was quite liberal and bounded only by outrageous acts or infidelity, such as those that had brought about the end of her previous marriage. A sudden interest in books she gladly accepted as a scholarly eccentricity.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Ryuichi Yoshida - unreleased live recording, track 1 (August 21, 2012, Knuttel House, Iriya, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 24, 2020
We shall not devote a significant number of words to the description of the various creatures that Cole discovered in bestiaries, new and old. Suffice it to say that his search covered several hundred such books. Because he had invented an excuse that he was going to create a blog about his investigation, he felt obliged to do so, lest his pretense be revealed.

The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House was able to recover much of the html code and associated text and images that composed this blog. It was titled "A Survey of One Hundred Bestiaries", although the number of volumes quickly escalated beyond one hundred. A significant portion of the blog has been reconstructed and posted on the site of the Poison Pie Publishing House.^* Additional entries are gradually being added as they are found. As of the time of writing, there are 291 bestiaries in the survey. The interested reader is directed to this external document.

Relevant to this work, two salient points should be noted. First, there is no indication anywhere in the blog of Cole's ulterior motive. Second, none of the featured entries from any of the bestiaries corresponds to the woman with the face of a sea anemone, which plagued Cole's nights.

^*A Survey of One Hundred Bestiaries, Poison Pie Publishing House, https://www.poisonpie.com/words/others/collect/bestiaries/text/onehundredbestiaries.html, accessed April 24, 2020.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Ryuichi Yoshida - unreleased live recording, track 2 (August 21, 2012, Knuttel House, Iriya, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 25, 2020
Cole found numerous examples of creatures with some element of tentacles on their faces. The Lovecraftian mythos presented as the paradigm of such beings the elder god, Cthulhu, and its spawn, who possessed faces in which the lower half was typically portrayed as a mass of writhing tentacles. Those appendages formed more or less a living beard covering, presumably, a mouth. He could not find any examples of a beast in which the entire face has been replaced by tentacles. Moreover, it struck Cole that the analogy to Cthulhu-like monsters was even more distant than it seemed based on physical appearance alone because the elder gods represented a belief that the universe was intrinsically inimical to the interests of man. Cole's nightly visitor left no such impression on him. While it was utterly alien, it did not appear menacing. Perhaps, his presumption of benevolence was a misunderstanding prompted by the fact that the creature always appeared juxtaposed within the body of his wife.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Tenniscoats - unreleased live recording, track 1 (September 2, 2012, Tsuki Miru Kimi Omou, Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 26, 2020
Cole accepted the possibility that no matter how many books of fictitious beasts he read, he might not find one that contained the woman with the face of a sea anemone. Still, that concession did not deter his efforts. He found some comfort in the activity and he could not entirely repress the disbelief that he could be the only person in the history of human imagination to have contemplated such a creature. He did not yet think of himself as dwelling so far outside the norm of human experiences.

In fact, it was not in a bestiary that Cole found an image that most closely resembled the creature in his visions. Rather, on an album cover by an avant-garde French pianist, Cole discovered a boy's face covered, from the hairline at the top of his forehead to this chin, completely in what appeared to be over-lapping human tongues. It was intended to be a classic portrait; the boy sat for the painting in a collared shirt and sweater, his hair well brushed. Via the internet, Cole traced down the artist responsible for this cover.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Tenniscoats - unreleased live recording, tracks 2-7 (September 2, 2012, Tsuki Miru Kimi Omou, Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 27, 2020
She was a Polish artist, whose name we do not reveal here for fear of associating her, unwillingly, with the disaster that was to come. A more complete examination of her work, as it appeared in various online galleries, revealed to Cole that she appeared to take inspiration from artists as diverse as René Magritte and Hieronymus Bosch. The boy with the face full of tongues was one example in a series of portraits in which the faces of young boys and girls were disfigured in grotesque ways. Typically, some portion of the face was flayed, the skin peeled pack to reveal either a gaping hole or, in some cases, pink, worm-like tentacles emerging from inside the skull. Clearly the paintings were intended to disturb the viewer. Such an intention gave Cole pause, because his goal was precisely the opposite. He desired to disturb no one, especially Elaine and Halley. Still, it could not be denied that this artist had been induced to commit to canvas figures for whom the expression of their identity had been entirely overtaken by tentacles. In his desperation, Cole decided to attempt to communicate with her.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Kazuhide Yamaji - unreleased live recording, track 1 (September 3, 2012, Three, Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 28, 2020
Even before Cole acted, he already accepted that contacting the artist was a terrible idea. There were at least three obvious indicators. First, he had seen several photographs of her on the web. She did not choose to present herself as a person with a well-balanced internal equilibrium. On the contrary, her expression fell somewhere between distrustful and haunted. There was little chance a query to such an inward-looking person would be favorably received.

Second, her photographs possessed a certain feminine attractiveness, an aspect which the photographer, perhaps encouraged by a gallery owner with a financial stake in the artwork, accentuated. Cole supposed that this artist received numerous queries of a variety of sorts, some unseemly, from many men scattered about the globe. He did not relish the role of internet stalker. It was only as a last resort that he had resolved to contact her.

Third, he had no idea what to say to the artist. How could he possibly be expected to reveal the truth to a stranger when he could not bring himself to mention so much as a hint of it to his loving wife of nineteen years?

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino & Kazuhide Yamaji - unreleased live recording, tracks 1-2 (September 3, 2012, Three, Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 29, 2020
Cole wrote drafts of the missive to the artist numerous times. He wanted the initial contact to be brief, as he thought no one would welcome a lengthy letter from a stranger. However, it proved difficult to adequately condense his thoughts. When he wrote, "I would like to know where the visions for your portraits of faces covered entirely in tentacles or tongues originated," it seemed that he was asking too general a question, as if he had an interest in the field of artistic inspiration, rather than in a small set of specific paintings. If he appended the query with an admission that he was visited nightly by somewhat similar images, it made him sound insane. Of course, there was no way to broach this subject without provoking the suspicion that he was mentally deranged, so he sent a message by email of which he was utterly embarrassed and ashamed. In the best light, Cole attributed his insistence on attempting this correspond to courage.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Jiro Shoda, Toru Matsuo, Isamu Hirano, Keigo Iwami, Gogh Ikeda & Hiko - unreleased live recording, track 1 (December 15, 2012, Earthdom, Shin-okubo, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)

April 30, 2020
Each day for a week, Cole looked with trepidation into his inbox, both hoping and fearing to find a reply. He never received one. The absence of a response could be attributed to a variety of innocuous factors, including the possibilities that his message was never delivered due to the unreliability of the internet, that his message was diverted into a spam folder, or that the artist was not fluent in English, a fact he had not been able to verify. There were also less palatable explanations, especially that she had received the email and deemed it in some manner offensive or simply unworthy of her time. Under any other circumstance, the judgment of a stranger would have meant nothing to Cole, but in this case he felt an irrational sensitivity. Regardless, he considered his duty done. He had made the attempt, however half-hearted. Apparently there was no one on Earth who had seen what he now saw. No help would he find in the waking world.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino, Jiro Shoda, Toru Matsuo, Isamu Hirano, Keigo Iwami, Gogh Ikeda & Hiko - unreleased live recording, track 2 (December 15, 2012, Earthdom, Shin-okubo, Tokyo, Japan, digital files)