HYPNOTIC SPELL
I would like to tell you a story. It is about a lad who grew up in the sticks. He arrived in a huge machine called Nairobi. He arrived by bus. It was his first time in the magnet that pulls the merchants, villagers, students, the pious, the alchemists, ducks, and thieves of different breeds, sizes, and stages in life. It was an important journey. The kid had been seized by a strong spell from unseen forces of the universe. He was doomed into an irresistible urge, a sort of synchronization of his brain, his blood, his DNA, his gene clocks, his breathing, his body rhythm, his sleep patterns, and even his dreams. His very atoms were attuned to mysterious forces.
In the village, they said he was bewitched by a nude witch with a blubber mouth of a tilapia, hair like the spines of a porcupine, eyes of a cobra, and a nose quite like a hawk's beak.
His old folks suspected he was mad. Other talkers suspected he was bipolar. My good fellow, the lad is me. Aha! Far be it from me to bribe you with a feel good title. I just feel the need to explain myself, step by step, and peel off the series of individual episodes from the first time they occurred. No fanfares, no bling bling; just the truth. See if I will not.
The Night Ride
I think I remember the bus that brought me here. It was a battered diesel vessel with age related problems, like a gigantic homemade container. Its roof had started to cave in as if a giant had sat on it. The writings from its fading yellow paint read "Good Samaritan." Its engine roared like a flour mill; it chewed your ears. Its interior was inhabited by a film of dust. A flurry of dust choked your respiratory apparatus when it hit bumps and made turns. You coughed like air was being stolen from your lungs, so bad that a boiled egg eating woman seated next to me spilled a bubbling puke on my grinning shoes. My head took a safe refuge inside my signature oversize trench coat, which a hater of human progress once called a tent.
Hours rolled by, and the bus straddled across silhouetted hills, sighing in the deep sea of darkness. My head bobbed up when it hit bumps, and I would disappear into the coat. All night long it rocked us from side to side; sometimes I flew to the next seats. Another problem requiring acute attention: the bus had bugs. All night long I fought and scratched the vermin that had taken war and established a throne beneath my pants, while many others waited for their chance to serve in the front line. With curses loud and lethal, I cursed the vermin. By my grandfather’s beard, I cursed.
Napoleon Hill’s Interview with the Devil
The metallic cadaver stopped with a jerk and the engine let out a loud belch. The city was night dressed. Sorely spent, I wobbled down Tom Mboya Street, the cold biting, insured from nyctophobia by patches of creepy yellow light jumping in and out of the deserted street.
I passed yellow cabs parked in a line with drivers drooling inside, whoring cats about, and an occasional limping dog crossing the street. An eerie air hung low as I wandered down.
My ears caught Rhumba coming from a pub far down Tom Mboya. I walked stealthily down and got to the pub. It was St. Ayub. It was packed, dingy, dark, and smelling of no scant tobacco, the sour smell of pee, and a certain sin, and I had a feast of it. I took flights of stairs and found a lofty seat upstairs. I sat on a lofty chair at one of the seats against the counter, red and blue lights flashing on my face.
Then a stiff waitress appeared, balancing a tray of bottles in her right hand, and she grinned diabolically; she smelled of stale perfume. I ordered rabbit soup. Her grin faded, and her narrow jaws became a flute as she shrieked, "We don’t sell that!" I ordered two beers for 300 shillings. I gulped a generous sip; it was very good beer.
Perched there, I read the law of hypnotic rhythm from Napoleon Hill’s Outwitting the Devil. This hypnotic rhythm is a universal force that automates the rhythm of the universe by aligning its galaxies, stars, planets, their environments, and species, syncing their rhythm. It creates permanent harmony between time, speed, distance, atmosphere, and temperature, such that it is difficult to change its power once it aligns a man's brain with the universe.
It was here at St. Ayub that it occurred to me how powerless I had become to the whims of hypnotic rhythm, which had attuned my mind to impulsive reading and scribbling. To be honest, I have spent most of my weekends and nights doing either of the two, rarely drifting, and I remember the conditions under which the behavior was formed so that I was helpless to it.
My hypnosis occurred by subconscious thought. In Napoleon’s work, the Devil describes the term "drifting" and a "hypnotic rhythm." Drifting is the human habit of relinquishing control of the mind to another. A drifter is one who does little or no thinking for himself, allowing himself to be influenced and controlled by circumstances outside his mind.
The Devil here, according to Napoleon, is not a mythical guy with horns and a forked tail, but an entity composed of negative energy, the negative portion of an atom, and a dweller in the minds of those who fear him. Thus said, the Devil is the amount of dark matter in unused space in a man's mind, which equals a sum total of all his addictions, all other factors held constant.
Addictions of any kind, argues Hill, compromise the use of reason and lead to the neglect of the mind, allowing negative energy to occupy unused faculties. Mastery of hypnotic rhythm constitutes the ability to notice the exact moment you are getting addicted so that you are able to lessen consumption, break the habit, steer away, or quit forthwith.
Now, I promised to frankly confess to you a series of events that got me hypnotized to the extent that I could not drift from my permanent trance, and what came of it, such that solitary reading and writing became the basis of my identity and life purpose.
My Younger Version
My younger self growing up in the hills was shy. I had esteem issues. I felt like an evolutionary throwback. I stammered, and with difficulty I uttered phrases. I was clearly a child, but I was not immune to being an object of ridicule. The national radio used to broadcast kids' poetry programs on Sundays. The beautiful, intelligent voices silenced me. While my counterparts spoke with flair on the radio show, I whistled to squirrels.
Our home was isolated from the village, a huge edifice that sat on the hills like an extinct behemoth from the Middle Earth era. Down the valley, there was a cave called Kathiamundu—the Darkness Factory. I even imagined I had originated from its nethermost depths, in brotherhood with cave species. One day I annoyed my elder brother, and he called me Zinjathropus from Olduvai Gorge. Wow, I knew it then; I was not a pedigree like other kids.
Few of my childhood peers related to my interests. I loved chasing grasshoppers and dragonflies, and herding chickens. Nothing felt better in my ears than the meek bleat of lambs. My nose loved the evocative smell of red dust when goats pissed. I loved to tend to injured goats, feed orphaned hatchlings, and forgive the snakes that came to our house in search of water. I think my gentleness to sentient beings started here.
You need to know this: self esteem malnutrition as a kid drove me to books. I consumed a buffet of storybooks my mother bought me, and it left me with such starvation after every read. In the afternoon after school, I used to look after my father's flock. I would sit under the shade reading, and when not reading, I was miserably thinking. My mom further challenged me to read the Bible from cover to cover, and by grade five, I had read the Bible completely.
When dusk fell, I could never have enough of my parents' evening tales by the cracking embers, along with my siblings’ half stories and carefully construed little lies. They would torture me with suspense, or we would trade. I would work my tail off on their assigned chores while they sat leisurely, looking accomplished in life. I was tired of servitude. See, I went to school so that I could read stories on my own. The dark days of slavery ended when I started deciphering book stories by myself.
A Case of Vacant Mental Space
In school, I was bullied. I found refuge in books; you already know this. Reading became a religion. I will walk with you through how it happened.
One time, while walking in a dimly lit corridor, I bumped into Goliath Mwenge. When I saw his hexagon head, I faced the Church of Our Lady St. Paula and said the Grace. I had no escape route. His face changed color. Mwenge had thirsted to "teach me a lesson" just for the fun of it, and now the hour had come.
Without loss of time, Mwenge grabbed my ears—the oculars of St. Lucy—and tried to lift me, high fiving my face at an accelerated rate. However, I slipped from his grip before he could smash me against the wall, and I ran yelping.
Do you remember what Napoleon Hill says of unused mental space? A lot of the Devil had moved in when Mwenge neglected the use of his mind.
On a different day, as I was walking home from school, I reached a fork in the road. Something huge leapt from a thicket. With his horrid mandibles, he left my face with no small amount of scratches. I boasted small reddish bumps all over my face. When mother looked at me with all her soul in her eyes, I lied to her that a bat had urinated on me. Word floated among the society of boys, and I enjoyed derisive howls. I found refuge in reading, all the while hypnosis taking reign of my mind, thanks to habit.
Looking back, I hold no grudges against the bullies; they were drifters. It is the first time I have truly forgiven my bullies, for I recognize that a lot of negative energy had hypnotized their unused mentality.
Where It All Began
My ancestors began in Mbwaa, legends tell us. Mbwaa kept her peace while it lasted. Mbwaa flourished, circled by a large body of water. It was the time when the men of Ntangi were acclaimed warriors; a time when we lived at the very mouth of a large river that ran into a great sea. It was a time when justice was administered equally to all, both high and low. It was a time when we lived on an island we recall as Mbwaa.
I am in high school, in the Mbwaa dormitory, named after our cradle. The dormitory is a stone edifice with rows of beds and curious heads sticking out. The captain has left me at the mercy of sore boys who surround me. Some make me spit hard to pronounce vocabularies. I try, and I bite my tongue; my grandmother would lose her remaining tooth over it. They tip over like hornbills with laughter. Some run their mandibles on my face. Rivulets of blood ooze and race down my face. I taste my blood; it fills my mouth. They enjoy themselves to the utmost. They do not tire of it; they also want to confirm if I am circumcised. The consequences of not being circumcised were too chilling to contemplate, as I had hitherto heard.
Overshadowing the union of bullies is menacing Abdi, with a sick face and several missing teeth on the roof of his mouth. A prince of darkness himself, faithful to his idiotic calling, he rips off my trousers. I shriek from the pain of an unhealed wound. They scurry off. I am left curling, folding, twisting, stretching, breathing through my lips, and writhing from the pain of a hundred needles stabbing my magic tree at once.
To build a defense around myself, I started studying the Oxford Dictionary so I could build an arsenal of vocabulary and unleash missiles on those bullies should diplomacy fail. A senior student once told me to sing him a lullaby so that he could doze off; he was used to terrorizing me. That day, I summoned courage, looked at him unflinchingly, and told him, "I will discombobulate you." It worked. He slithered away!
Too Fragile to Resist
During the good old school holidays, I did most of my reading in my mountain town library. Fishing books from shelves, even if just breathing in their scent, was a little triumph. I loved hunting for new finds. I loved their scents with the same intensity that I loved reading. I relished burying my nostrils into the pages browned by age and breathing in lungfuls. Books so old carried an evocative scent with a mighty effect on my brain. I later discovered the scent was a result of lizard pee on the covers, as the library hosted long tailed lizards.
And so each day I went to the library and lived among a community of long dead authors, reading the classics. I often forgot myself until the librarian would awaken me from my trance when it was time to call it a day. The habit was subtly ingrained in my subconscious. Acting by hypnosis, I spent school holidays wriggling through the works of C.S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde, Katana Mkangi, Ken Saro Wiwa, Grace Ogot, and other great lovers of words.
Too Definite to Drift
Let me draw your memory back. You will remember that I checked in at St. Ayub the night I arrived in Nairobi. I woke up in that seedy den with the most terrible hangover ever. I had drunk too much the previous night. I drank too much of Charles Bukowski. Do you know his poem "Go All the Way"? It has had a mysterious effect on me; the words sank deep the first time I read it. It spoke to me. It reinforced the hypnotic rhythm.
Even now as I tell you this, I hear Bukowski whisper:
"If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way."
One Year in Purgatory
So, I descended into Rongai that day with 10,000 shillings in my pocket, looking for a place to rent. I rented a windowless bedsitter. It looked like a morgue. It smelled like hopelessness. Purgatory must be that hovel. It had no windows and was mostly dark inside. I often woke up at 1:00 p.m. thinking it was 5:00 a.m. because I had been composing lines all night.
In the shack, my soul became poetic. I composed animal poetry: odes to snakes, to bats, to porcupines, to hyenas, to elephants; to all animals, small and big. I have always been kind and gentle to animals, and to some people, as you already know.
Of my love for animals, I have already told you. Even now as I confess to you, it is the first time I have stared intuitively at Simon the cat. Simon, seated at the window next to me, is not aware of my stares. I think he might be an ex human serving purgatory here on Earth. It is why I am gentle to animals. Someone like Simon knows what he knows, and I think he thinks about it. Men and women of science tell us that a cat's brain structure and matrix is 90 percent similar to that of our species. See, the central cortex in us that controls thinking and decision making has up to 26 billion neurons, against a cat's 36 million neurons. Don’t we subconsciously bribe cats with milk and let them occupy the king's seat in our living rooms so that we can stay in their good books? Writer Eric Rugara says cats used to be worshipped as gods in ancient Egypt; they have not forgotten. Cats have 36 million neurons. It is why I advocate for animal voting rights. In the Alaskan town of Talkeetna, they once elected Stubbs, a cat, as the honorary feline mayor. We can elect animals among our ranks; they fare better in morals, if morals are what we are looking for in a leader.
Toiling day and night, littering pages with words and deleting a lot of them, I basked in the glory of some that found a home in underground magazines. I continued expressing myself in words. By December, I had finished my maiden book of poetry. I named it Enchanted Africa, and it was horrible—a cryptic puzzle. I tossed it into the dustbin and felt sorry for myself. By this time, I was head and shoulders drowning in poverty.
Cinnamon
I married young, at 22, to a perfect beauty: sweet to the eye, shapely, with the heart of a dove, and too pious to feel any pride. Cinnamon by name. She took hold of my heart. At 19, Cinnamon was pregnant with our baby. Zanetta, our daughter, was born. She inherited Cinnamon’s nose and wit.
Cinnamon and I were madly in love, such that many a man with eyes of hyenas sought to break our padlocks of love and eat her bread—my bread. Cinnamon sneered at them, and they went flying.
Time Bomb
Then something happened. Something that I must tell you because I know no one else to make a confidant of.
Good fellow, I was intent on following literary pursuits. My intense urge to write must have in part been reinforced by historical injustices, and even greater than that by the habit I had formed over the years since I was a kid. Hypnotic rhythm uses environmental factors to take hold of humans, argues the Devil in Napoleon's Outwitting the Devil.
The habit became erotic. Minutes of hypnosis rolled into hours, and nights fell. This went on until midnight. Once done composing, I would delete everything, quarrel with my tools, and my head would slump onto a hard surface.
I neglected Cinnamon. I failed to respect her night adventures and went slow on confidential duties while I succumbed to clandestine, obsessive writing. The hypnosis was crucial to the loss of balance.
And so, Cinnamon and I started drifting apart. While I got lost in fanaticism, she froze in the cold. Her mind wandered and drifted away, and away, and away. I grew insensibly thin, and Cinnamon was diagnosed with malignant ulcers in her stomach. My new disposition and hers were no longer congenial. She displayed certain traits of character that remained unchanged despite my numerous attempts to change mine. I guess by this time, her new principles had been permanently formed. This was the moment we lost the grip on our relationship.
Many times she came and sat on the bed, put her arm on my shoulder, and entreated me with her tender eyes to look for a job. I would hear none of it. I kept telling her, "Don't you fret, don't you fear, don’t grow thin, honey; I will ace it," and tears would flood her eyes. She would ask me, "Are you sure?" and I would tell her, "Of course." She might have heard "Of curse," because when I arrived one evening, I found she had left with the baby. Cinnamon was nowhere to be found. She had left! I found out later she had gone upcountry to stay with my mother.
By this time, rent arrears had mounted like COVID cases. Whenever I heard a knock on the door, I felt terror lest it be the shylocks coming for me.
Brotherhood of Suffering
In December, I was tossed out of the shack. I left pressing my jugular vein and whistling a circumcision song, my rugged shirt falling off my shoulders.
With failed dreams of being a writer, I crawled down the dusty Magadi Road feeling like an impostor. Would I give up? Once the rhythm starts, at some stage it gets too late to stop, and I had no reason to stop it.
I lodged in a cheap, seedy restaurant. It had uneven, cracked walls and was infested with vermin. The bed swarmed with them; they loved playing on the hairs of my legs. The room had a rusty nail where I hung my few clothes. The rusty nail scared me; it looked like a ghost with a sinister snarl was hiding behind the wall. I had to look under the bed to make sure there were no teeth in the darkness. I paid 400 shillings per night just to lay my head, fully dressed. Of course, I needed a bath sometimes when I could afford that luxury. When I did not have the 400 shillings for the night—and those nights were many—I befriended night guards. They accepted me, and I enjoyed some protection in the brotherhood of suffering as we ate stories to keep us warm.
One night, I strayed through a shortcut when I was ambushed by about ten miscreants. They stole my phone, stripped me nude, and took my shoes, which, as you might have guessed, grinned like crocodiles. I begged them not to hammer my skull with a mallet. Such merciful sons of darkness! I tiptoed in the darkness behind the building blocks like a witch, breathing through my lips.
I remembered one of the watchmen whom I had acquainted myself with some days earlier—a huge man with arms like logs and an equally big heart. He manned a gate across the street. I will not bore you with details. He gave me an old, green, oversize coat which also served the purpose of pants. I slept inside it on the pavement like abandoned, suspicious luggage, choking from tobacco and dust, listening to my stomach bite me and grunt like a quarrel of pigs with sadistic pleasure.
Despite the troubles I suffered, I remained rooted in self belief, hypnosis augmented by stoicism as strong as nails. I trace my stoicism here. Stoicism helped me cope with grace and patience, proving to be an antidote to whining and crying. Having hit rock bottom, knowing how rock bottom looks and feels, I raised my depression bar. This was the first time I developed the bone that gives firmness, resilience, and stature, devoid of cowardly caution. Within my hypnotic universe, I derived strength sufficient for my happiness.
The Delegation
By means of gossip, word reached my mother that I was dying in the city. The rumor chilled her old heart, and she called in a frail voice. Mother, desiring to see me, at once sent bus fare. Like a prodigal son, I arrived to her warm embrace. I noticed her face was unusually pale.
Father was not present. He died of liver failure; he died in installments. He was only 70. See, habit kills in installments. Father loved frothy brews since his teens. The hypnotic grip seized him with the first sip, the second, and the third, another day, and another, until he was helpless against the habit. As long as he kept supplying his primal instincts, he was totally subdued by hypnosis. He had drifted too far to return.
So, Father became a hypnotic patient, and only treatment could cure him, but by that time, the law of hypnosis was not widely understood.
Father grew older, and the hypnosis grew stronger. He drank good beer and drank from fountains of clever books congenial to his taste. He wrote a lot. His works, though never published, testify to his wisdom. Other than his alcohol hypnosis, he died a man of note. He left good deeds in the community and molded those who passed through his hands; Father was a teacher.
That night, I barely slept. I took adventures in old bookshelves. My thoughts were drawn to my father’s diaries, which were browning with age on a familiar shelf. I remembered when I was a little boy and my father found me reading aloud from his pinned diaries. I did not see him enter the room. He had stood behind me, listening to me read his diaries aloud. I turned and was frightened, but a small smile played on his lips, and his eyes glinted with brightness. He patted my back and said I would amount to something. Father had a hand in strengthening the hypnotic rhythm.
I do not know the exact point I fell asleep. What I know is that at 7:00 a.m., I awoke to a knock on my bedroom door. It was my mom. She invited me for breakfast.
My instinct was as accurate as yours could be; Mom had contrived an early meeting, and a delegation of greybeards was in the living room, rendering empty the mugs of tea. They had been commissioned to talk to me.
After the usual pleasantries and pretensions, the chairman cleared his throat and spoke: "What have you got yourself into, our son?"
Speaker after speaker of proverb spitting elders persuaded me to take up a "decent job." To be honest, I stopped paying attention from that point. I kept quiet in the corner of the box I was put into, and I let them flatter themselves. I did not know how to answer revered men who lacked a wit for fiction without sounding insane. Taking care not to trip over my words, I did not have goats to offer in the event they cursed me.
Anyway, vain was the effort to surrender my mind to the old men's control; vain was the attempt to extinguish this rising flame. The spirit of irritation took over the meeting. My mother recognized how futile the meeting was, and by and large, I was left to be.
It would be the first time in my life I had disobeyed my mother. Tears rolled down my eyes. I was supposed to be the golden boy of her family. I had now let her down, and her soul was sour. I was a bad son. Yet she insured me with a prayer:
"Bless his way that he may go treading on ants, and sliding on paths with honey, and give him the wisdom of Kaigituju (the hare)," mother prayed. I left for the city the next day.
And Cinnamon Burst
Having reached a bursting point, tired of sharing in my suffering, Cinnamon relaxed her inner powers to stick with me. She left. The girl hated me. She said it. She texted: "I hate you so much." I tasted hate. It sears your guts. Three days later, I woke up in the hospital. No, I had no malaria. I had fainted.
My mind was clouded with pictures for the months that followed—too damn vivid to be a dream.
One Friday in September, I rang her phone. "Hello," the phone was answered by a grumpy voice which I did not recognize. "Who are you, and why are you calling my wife?"
The final kick. I felt my knees unbuckle. I threw myself on the bed and wept with both eyes.
A couple of times I called her number, but the calls went unanswered. Days later, she sent a message through WhatsApp: "I’m happy, delete me from your mind."
I texted back: "Still the scent of you lingers. You are a cinnamon that lingers, still a temptress, a rain goddess, because right now I am soaked. Please come back to me."
I wrote this at St. Ayub pub over many bottles of Guinness. It was my first time drinking.
"I’m sorry, I moved on," she replied. "And don’t text me again."
I am unable to tell you how painfully it bit my inner heart.
Days rolled into weeks and months. The victim of my hypnosis did not return. Futile were my efforts to bring the love fugitive back. She turned away diplomats, including my one hundred year old grandmother. Young people nowadays have no respect for elders.
Cinnamon’s new disposition was a sharp contrast to her previous easygoing character. She was hypnotized, perhaps by hypnotic strokes from the other side. For the first time, it sank deep into me that ours was a lost cause. For the first time, I stopped persisting in bringing Cinnamon back. For the first time, it didn't feel right. By and large, we drifted apart. I was at peace knowing she found a place to plug in.
Too Hypnotized to Drift
When Cinnamon and I crumbled into ruins, I resurrected from the darkness and dank and betrothed solitude. Bukowski tells us solitude is a gift. I turned my soul's eyes into hypnotic expression. In it, I gained gratification. I wandered from town to town: sometimes hungry, sometimes ill, sometimes wearing a long face, sometimes happy, sometimes with beautiful weather, sometimes with birds singing, sometimes with pockets full—all through remaining faithful to the calling. Too hypnotized to drift.
People call me a monk. That must have been long ago. I am now one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, consummated in literary hypnosis. Thanks to the stoicism that augments my hypnosis, I am trying to drown the consciousness of memories we made through deliberate hypnosis, hoping to make a career out of it.
I believe you now see the series of causes and effects from the first time the environment around me became toxic. I became a lover of justice with an excessive desire for self expression. Hypnosis has brought me here. I could not be anything else in the universe since the first time I let it carry me off to the state where nothing else matters except to satisfy my primal instincts, written expression, and intrinsic attraction to victims of injustice in a brotherhood of suffering. I am a Socratic vessel flowing from its brim into empty vessels.
This is the first time I have felt fully aware of myself. The first time in years I have been able to talk about it. Some pains make you numb. I am a non drifter. I am synced with permanent hypnosis. I am definite.
You probably want to ask me if I forgave myself, seeing I was emotionally absent from Cinnamon. I did. I have forgiven myself. It is important that we forgive ourselves. When you forgive yourself, you avoid drifting, and you know drifting will make you unrecognizable. Unforgiveness is a malignant disease that produces a mutant version of yourself. Lack of self forgiveness blocks the hypnotic light and expands the space of dark matter in your mind. In turn, it makes you a creature of darkness. So I have learned to forgive myself, and I feel the light of hypnotic virtue seeping from me.
You see, in my thirty years on this earthly shore, many things I had imagined are becoming realities as a result of natural consequences in sync with the molecular configuration of my mind, the habit of non drifting, and the non vagueness of purpose. The new universe enveloping me is swallowing into its black hole everything which does not align with the rhythm. I have gained magnetism, attracting a swirl of all good things by the law of hypnotic rhythm. I feel boundless power. My nature is expanding.
You have stuck with me to this point; you are a non drifter. I think it is only fair to tell you another day if I attracted my soul match within my hypnotic orbits. If I do not tell you, let it be known to you that I died a happy soul and dissolved into the celestial hypnotic energy.
