Lava Trip

There is a bust of Timothy Leary in the drawing room and you are trying to find your way inside the lava lamp. You have an intuition that this is a place one can visit. The voyage is within, yet, outwardly, it’s like molten lava cooling in a piece of sea. You can glance across at the glowing fish darting past all zig-zag in a coral reef. You feel a warm current. Now it changes to the cool up welling of an arctic flow. And then, if you are willing, imagine what it sounds like; a psychedelic sixties gig, a love-in, psychedelic music at a Victorian house where the bean bag seats are gathered round. Love beads are screaming in the afterglow of something that has happened before you entered the room, –you’re not sure what.

The smell of patchouli and incense drift like vagrant spirits in the air. Perhaps there are 60’s hippies, tie dye shirts and Beatle boots, then, more love beads. And like earlier tonight when you were at The Electric Marmalade gig, –from another room comes their smooth Vox organ playing a trance. Psychedelic rock. The thin grinding guitars are running backwards across the heads. You notice, but you choose to follow a girl’s voice to the next floor while The Electric Marmalade is jamming in the kitchen after a Sugar Shack gig. They have just returned in their Love Bus.

You climb a staircase in this gingerbread of a Victorian house. Anticipating your own arrival in an attic. And you have reached the height of the third storey from what seems like seven floors below. You can still hear the embryonic rise and fall of the organ melting into one giant paisley drop of sound. The jingle-jangle of the twelve-string Rickenbacker guitars chirping with the tambourines. It’s the sound of The Electric Marmalade, all electric and plugged-in at the breakfast nook –Beatle boots stomping the rhythm on the wood floor.

You go up a ladder staircase. At the hinged ceiling at the top you can see a soft red light through the cracks. You lift the wooden hatch to find an empty loft. At the window in the center of the gable, is a lacy curtain blowing in an open breeze and lifting parallel to the floor. But otherwise, all emptiness –except that here on a box, in the middle of the wooden floor, is a lava lamp glowing red. You can hear the sitar and tambura chanting in the strangest scale of melody.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, you look into the lamp and hear sweet dreams and moonbeams from the after-gig kitchen where The Electric Marmalade has gone into their raja rock set. But you are upstairs and now there is a face inside the lava lamp. It is the face of a young woman calling out silently, much like Auntie Em looking for Dorothy, all grainy like old film inside the crystal ball. Only this girl is smoothly fading-in. Fading-in so pretty in black and white. This is a beautiful girl whose lips are quietly murmuring, maybe for you.

As you knew, this is a voyage within. Gazing into the warm water of the lamp waxing rich as you look. You think she is closer now. You will never know what had happened in the room downstairs, where the bust of Timothy Leary had been painted by hand and the people in the room seemed muted by the impact of something he had said. But you are gone now, gazing at the glowing face of this beautiful girl.

Among dreams, you spin The Electric Marmalade disk and find a place where a clock will strike the Zero. But the motion of the warm lamp is drawing you inside. You feel closer to her now, the blonde girl. You are ready to follow her to places where the guitars play all night. After all, you can stand in the yellow sky together beneath the purple sun. And she will lead you into warm blood streams – just so close you can almost hear her now.

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