Source: A Rainbow in Curved Air by Terry Riley
Lobe (Excerpt)
…circumstances of a post-consumer society will in time mimic the effects of Lobe on an individual pre-social transformation. Society itself becomes the embodiment of a Lobe-induced perspective. With this marriage of the internal and external, the mode of maintaining the impetus of social change is permanently incubated and transcends the necessity of all supplemental effects including that of Lobe itself.
… being an environment in which creativity is considered the norm, the fourth human age (the first being the pre-cultural, the second being the religious, and the third being the scientific), the age of art will have been successfully initiated.
Lobe Users Handbook
Lobe walks with us through the swarming urban mass and we glow with it as the city’s organs spin round us ever thicker, spinning thick the culture-sodden mass, with the clouds swilling greedily over the busy streets, the stinking swell of rush, the tornado of noise, traffic howling through the air and we on our night walk and the fall wind upon us.
The night walk and the grim wind whipping through the street-lined trees, which now near naked of their leaves rattle darkly… Grim wind and the trees whipped, rattle naked, the new moon through them dapple cut. ‘Twill be morning before we can breathe afresh, but the cold brings a winsome clarity: Pound the ground with hand and fist so that it might quake before us! Kick on its dry mass so we may rise again! There is nothing but the dust of history to blind us to ourselves!
But we are tired, bog-tired, gut-tired, the head hangs on, bobbing over, the sick stick of our insides holds us up, just about, a brown fade, sleepless-tired—stillness would be enough to settle the bag of self before its fall. To fall, tumble and twirl, down, down, a clown released from our casket, tumbleweed tumbling on.
On and on, Lobe spreads through the crooks and nooks of the city, awakening, unburdening, melting selves into selves, flinging minds over sleeping streets, every creeping and flying thing its vessel, bodies no longer but thoughts in the mesh, ideals and moods the roads and routes of its travels, more seeing and hearing and sweeping and swooping. Lobe resets the city into mood-melded zones through the gels of which flow its eager travelers—surfers of the night, cloaked in sin.
Source: Lobe – Paul R. Buckle Archive
