Dream’s End Archive

Now has been released what will probably be considered the definitive article on Duncan and Blake. It’s by LA Weekly writer Karen Coe, who also has this blog, for which she’s paid by the post and which, you’ll notice, is far more likely to feature names like Lohan and Hilton than Lacan and Milton. As such, it is safe to say that there is a far greater depth to this story than you will find in her article, though what she does have certainly makes sense. “Theresa Duncan” was a fictional creation, played by Theresa Duncan. But we already knew that.

I think Coe’s description of Duncan’s blog probably is enough to explain her perspective:

In 2005, at the urging of close friend Blake Robin, who owns a small record label, she had launched her blog, The Wit of the Staircase, where she wrote witty observations about esoteric perfumes, hotel bars and arcane literary works.

That’s a bit like saying Herman Melville wrote about fishing expeditions. And I’m not sure that my comparison is too overblown. Duncan’s perfume descriptions alone, despite my complete lack of interest in the topic, completely enchanted me and proved to my satisfaction that she could write circles around me and Coe combined.

But that’s not all she wrote about. She wrote about film, and the occult, philosophy and psychology and, from the very beginning, provided all sorts of hints and glimpses into conspiracy lore. And she even began laying the groundwork for her own exit well before she took her life. Consider this passage:

Folie à deux, literally “a madness shared by two” is a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a symptom of psychosis, particularly a paranoid or delusional belief, is transmitted from one individual to another. Related to the issue of shared delusions, there have also been occasional claims of shared visual hallucinations that are near-to-exact duplicates. Even more mysterious than the illness itself are the unanswered questions as to what prompts such shared delusions.

The above was written in February of 2006. Over one year ago, she wrote the description that the world would apply to her relationship with Blake which ended in their deaths. Self awareness, perhaps, but as a literary device, it was a perfectly placed piece of foreshadowing.

But this post, which should be my final on the topic, contains some thoughts about my own process as I entered this strange labyrinth to which I was invited by Duncan’s blog. I wanted you to share in the process I went through that was headed toward either madness or revelation and why I chose, for now, to put it aside. In fact, I think that my journey of the last ten days or so may very well have mirrored Duncan’s in many ways. I certainly looked as deeply as I could into her own thoughts and fears.

It’s funny, really. By the time of the last post, those who know my work best, those more likely to accept what is derisively termed “conspiracy theory” had pretty much all decided that I’d gone a little nuts. Meanwhile, it was novelists and screenwriters and artists who were writing to me to say that they were captivated by this same story and my odd spin on it. Because despite the reality of the tragedy that underlies it, this story looks for all the world like a work of fiction, very carefully crafted. For example, she didn’t kill herself at some random point…she had come to the climax of her online story. Just a few days before she had promised a “political essay” on the “Devil and Dick Cheney.” She died, in a way that seemed rather mysterious, just as she was about to make the grand reveal. The timing, from a literary standpoint, was perfect. And that was the first detail that drew me in.

But I know things that those writers don’t, and maybe many of you don’t. I’m on intimate terms with the internet conspiracy lore concerning pedophilia, mind control and secret networks of powerful men of evil. And so beyond her more recent writings about being stalked by Scientologists and a rich politician from DesMoines, I was struck by the images she employed which echo the themes in those conspiracy circles. I’m not going to examine that internet lore closely here at all. The core ideas are based in fact. MKULTRA, as I’ve written, was a real program of mind control amply documented and even the subject of Congressional hearings, for example. The scandal in the Catholic Church proves that organized pedophilia can exist in “respectable institutions”. And if you don’t think Scientology is capable of doing what Duncan described, whether or not she, herself, was imagining those incidents (I checked with the Venice police and contrary to her blog, she had not filed “four or five” police reports concerning this harassment), you don’t know much about Scientology.

But there were so many allusions to this “mythos” ( as I’ll call it so that we can save sorting out the probable from the improbable another day) which permeated her blog, often uncommented by her and not even recognizable if you are unfamiliar with the territory. Dick Cheney, to pick one example, is a major “character” in these stories. And there was her emphasis on “twins” for example. She had several pictures of twins in her blog, and there was the odd coincidence, which I guess is what we are going to have to call it now, of the death of a sort of literary twin of Duncan named Sarah Hannah. What you may not know is that “twins” and allegations of a sort of mind control process called “twinning” in which two victims are said to be somehow linked, has become in recent years a theme in internet rumors concerning “Project Monarch” the alleged mind control project employing unspeakable means to program children for unspeakable ends. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there really is an actual Project Monarch, but I wish I could say I rule it out entirely.

The word “monarch” itself is another theme Duncan hit on a lot in her last days. Her next to last post had a picture of an emperor, she had obviously alluded to Project Monarch directly, and the poem excerpted under her post “Asleep in the Arms of the Great Lover” also has a reference to an emperor.

And there were others. Alice in Wonderland allusions were frequent, both in word or pictures. And Alice in Wonderland images have been closely linked to Monarch lore, allegedly employed by the programmers as visual cues to trigger certain behaviors. And we also know that Lewis Carrol was reputed to spend much of his time taking pictures of naked young girls, which ties back into her troubling allegations about sexual abuse and pedophile networks.

And there are masks galore. Women in masks and young girls in masks. It is a prominent recurring visual motif. Not just any masks, but “Venetian masks,” more elaborate versions of which feature in Stanley Kubrick’s last and completely misunderstood film Eyes Wide Shut about an elite secret society revolving around occult ritual and sexual practices. Or maybe it’s only about a dream of such an occult underworld; Kubrick leaves it to us to decide. But Duncan was very familiar with Kubrick and referenced him often.

In other words, as a fine artist would, not only did she directly tell us about her worries and fears and (we are to understand) delusions, but she continually reinforced these themes by her choice of images. This process began at the very start of her blog…the themes were carefully built and nurtured throughout, though in a sort of non-linear and associative way. They build to a crescendo in the final weeks before she died.

And so it drew me in. But I was not so ignorant of art as some seemed to think that the very presence of visual images and their interplay with text was somehow proof of some massive online ARG. Though like a good artist, she does use these images and words to invite us to look more closely at what she had to say.
No, what convinced me that there was some involvement of others beyond her own blog was that the primary people around which her delusions were based were participating in and reinforcing these ideas. Duncan felt that artist Anna Gaskell, who briefly had dated Blake a 13 years or so ago, was in a family controlled by just such a “Monarch”. Gaskell and her siblings were given to Jim Cownie in guardianship after their mother died, following some years after the mysterious death of their father. Duncan implied, but did not state outright…that Gaskell was a victim of Monarch style abuse by Cownie. For some reason, Coe’s article doesn’t touch on that. It seemed significant to me.

I don’t know Cownie or Gaskell, so I don’t mean to suggest I think these charges are true. What I do know is that Gaskell’s artwork is built on these very same themes. Her photographs are typically of girls about 12 years in age in ominous and foreboding settings. The theme for one set of images, called “hide”, is directly taken from a a fairy tale in which a girl dons an animal skin to avoid the advances of her father. Another prominent set of images are composed entirely of girls assuming the role of Alice in Wonderland. In fact, many of the images feature TWIN Alices.

Anna Gaskell may have had nothing whatsoever to do with Duncan, and yet she reinforced the themes Duncan was offering us in a way that made them seem far more like collaborators than enemies. And these themes also reinforced the Monarch idea, though not in a way people unfamiliar with the topic would even notice.

But that’s not all.

Gaskell’s brother Jon was directly responsible for adding to and reinforcing the Monarch mythos. He was editor at a DesMoines weekly called “Pointblank” when it printed this article drawing together the abduction of an Iowa boy, a national pedophile network, snuff films and even Hunter S. Thompson. Later, at least according to an alleged copy of an email from Jon Gaskell, he admitted the article had been a hoax. Read this:

From: Jon Gaskell [mailto:jon@pointblank-dm.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 6:34 PM
To: Boatwright, Gary – GPM
Subject: Re: Pointblank Web Contact re: Boy Soldiers Not in the least, no. We do an April Fool’s edition each year. The Gosch
story was done — kind of — by the DSM Register the same day. The story
itself is wild which is why we decided to tell a story about the story. Does
that make sense?

Contact me any time. -Jon Gaskell

Again, while I’m not suggesting that all of the internet lore around Monarch is factual (though, for example, Johnny Gosch most certainly was abducted), Jon Gaskell intentionally created a media hoax on these very themes by which Duncan was so haunted. And immediately after that article was printed, that newsweekly ceased to publish, having been bought out by its rival. Rather than face scorn at the new paper for this questionable April Fool’s Day joke, Jon was given an editorship there.

How, I wondered, is it possible to explain this without assuming that somehow, these people were collaborating to create a web of mutually reinforcing but seemingly independent sources emphasizing this legend? And hence I hit upon the idea of something ARG-like going on, or, to use a term I discovered later, the creation of a “hypersigil” as explained in previous posts. If they weren’t actually “collaborating” somehow, what else could explain it?

There were other such outside links into this “project” if such is what it was. The death of the poet Sarah Hannah seems really to have happened. Duncan linked to an article about Hannah without comment but the woman was the same age, in the same basic profession and looked very much like Duncan herself that if you wrote it in a screenplay it might get rejected due to implausibility. Twins.

I think all of the above is compelling and I sought to find more pieces of this (primarily) internet based puzzle. In fact, the very way the story developed was part of the mystery. There are, I imagine, more than a few reporters in NYC permanently assigned to the police beat. And yet the story of Duncan’s death was not released until 10 days later, even AFTER Blake had disappeared. And the story was broken first not by the New York Times, but by a couple of blogs.

What was going on? Were the police in on it? That seemed too grandiose, so it occurred to me that perhaps it had never even happened…that the blog and all the mysterious hints and the idea of this rivalry with Gaskell who nevertheless plays a role in confirming Duncan’s beliefs…were part of a setup that was ARG-like though with perhaps much higher stakes. And I wrote about that, and introduced you to groups and individuals known to have created almost…ALMOST…equally elaborate hoaxes. But then, when I found evidence to my satisfaction that Duncan had, indeed, existed, I wrote about that as well. In fact, I even suggested that given her fascination in playing with ideas about identity and reality, she’d likely be flattered by my own confusion about her existence. We saw, for example, some media hoaxes involving people who did not actually exist which were gleefully celebrated by Duncan. Here’s another passage from Duncan about two authors, one who existed but made up things about his life and another (we’ve already mentioned him before) who never existed in the first place:

Aren’t then, those so outraged and betrayed by James Frey and JT Leroy the fantasists, the fanatics, the ones who want so to believe in Santa Claus? Deliberate disceptions (sic) by scientists and journalists are ethical lapses, but novels and autobiographies are always openly presented as subjective accounts.

That the arguments and mea culpas and media interest regarding life and stories and truth and literature are continuing into mid-February proves that the perpetrators of these minor hoaxes seem to be on to something important regarding the mysteries of how language organizes the self. These liars are not far-out specimens, they are the exception that proves the rule of how elastic an autobiography can (should?) be.

So, I think it was not that strange to wonder if some elaborate hoax were being staged here. Even if Theresa Duncan existed, she may simply have been playing a character who happened to have the same name as herself…authors do this all the time.

But then there were the bodies. It is unlikely that her dedication to this non-linear storytelling project would go so far as to include suicide. And yet, I refused to except the imposed dichotomy that either she was just a troubled and depressed woman or else she was murdered for her secret knowledge about mind control and secret pedophile networks. I now that some elements of these stories are true but have come to see that there are just the sort of “hoax magicians” as I called them who are taking elements of this mythos and finding new ways to keep the story going while adding elements along the way. And, perversely, they feel rather free to draw in innocent but mentally unstable people by convincing them that they, too, are part of the plot. I’ve seen such people at work on various internet forums. It is not pretty. And, I wondered, if maybe that was happening to Duncan. Perhaps she was only being used to provide an entryway in some scheme of yet again repackaging the mind control theme into another ARG like El Centro (and remember El Centro didn’t really have a clear gamelike structure…and never even really identified itself as an ARG. You’ll need to see my previous posts on Duncan if you want to learn more.).

I think that all of the above was perfectly rationale. But a funny thing happened on the way down the rabbit hole. As I pursued this further and further, looking for confirmation and clues and hidden pieces of the puzzle throughout the internet, the very people who had taught me about ARGS and malicious internet mindfuckery, began to hint and then state outright that I was losing control…I was making irrational leaps and taking the idea too far. In fact, they began to back off the idea of their being much that was that mysterious at the heart of the story. And other people who normally embrace or at least are open to various sorts of “conspiracy theory” thought I was losing it, too.

So I’d like to indulge your patience a bit longer and show a bit of my thinking as I was starting to get so tangled in the web that I lost my ability to objectively decide whether a trail was really there or not. It’s a tricky place to be because assuming for the sake of argument that these trails WERE there, they would naturally be nonlinear and not easily explicated in a few paragraphs on a blog. Nevertheless, I decided to pull the plug…even removing my last post after having it up only for a brief time. There was the chance I was heading more toward psychosis than revelation and while when younger and single I might even have welcomed that state (temporarily!) now, perhaps, is not the time.

So here are the sorts of things I kept stumbling on that kept me obsessed with this mystery. Some of them really do have importance and some may very well be a result of my not maintaining a solid enough relationship with the left portion of my brain.

I spent one entire post on a series of blogs all belonging to one person. You can reread that entire thing here. And while I assure you that I am most certainly NOT an ARG entryway, click around so that at least you will see that the place is built like a riddle. Some of the pictures in the headers, when clicked, change to another picture for no reason, for example. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d put in some sort of web-based mystery, though if clues there were…they were indecipherable to me.

And, in fact, the multi-monikkered owner of these blogs came upon this site and wrote a response on his page. Written in a style that does suggest difficulty with rational thought, nevertheless I took it as confirmation that I was onto something. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s my contention that a bunch of us were profiled and taken down in various ways before we could make too big a stink, back in the day. For a lot of reasons I’ve kept enough of my selves intact to hit back, feebly as may be, from here, relatively comfortably, from this chair, this computer, this moment – thus informant38. And affirm my reverence for the aesthetic and transcendent, thus dirty b.
Your facile – “but dude, if you AREN’T part of some kind of ARG, I would urge you maybe to get a little professional help. No offense” is pretty much the only thing in what I read – I read most of it – in your coverage of Duncan and Blake that was objectionable to me personally.

—————————————skipping a portion———————————-

I could easily believe given some consistent evidence that Theresa Duncan was a fictive avatar, an Idoru, but I could pretty easily believe the whole of earthly existence is a metaphysical ruse, as well.
If life is indeed composed of real things I’m pretty sure Duncan was one of them, and her concerns well-founded, at least originating in something she couldn’t quite express directly enough to get it all the way up and out. Something dark and important. Something rigorous intuition gets close to a lot, in between the flashing UFO lights and the crop circle chaff.

So here he is, someone whose other blog is among the 10 or so links provided by Duncan, suggesting that he is a mind control victim himself and also suggesting that the idea of Duncan as “Idoru” (a word I learned from this post) seemed possible to him. The rest of the post suggests that his bizarre writing style, rather than being a product of mental illness is simply the only way he can communicate the dangerous truths he knows. It looks crazy to you…and now, to me, it looks crazy too. But Duncan linked to it…she felt it was important. So I had to think there was a reason. Looking for reasons, however, may have been a bad idea.

There were other internet trails that seemed signficant to me but to others were evidence that I was slipping. For example, Duncan listed four bloggers as her favorites including “badfeminist”. So I decided to check out badfeminist. Oddly, all of the links to the archived articles kept coming back to the same page. So I did the google thing and found that sometime after May 30 all the pages had been pulled save that one. (I can’t even get that page now…that’s a google cache link.) But I was struck by a comment on the page because the commenter was “stair witch” which sounded too much to me like “Wit of the Staircase” to be a coincidence. Clicking on her name I got her about page, showing she was a mother of three living in New Haven. Dead end. But then, I looked at her list of favorite movies and there were only two listed. One was “The Double Life of Veronique” about two women, exactly identical, who lay eyes on each other only once but are somehow then linked, thematically if nothing else. The other movie was “Jeremiah Jones” which I find no reference to at all.

Was that a trail? Would you have thought so? I have no idea now.

Or I also considered the site of Lauren Cerand, a PR person who specializes in generating media buzz in creative ways. For one thing, looking at the entries and links back and forth, it occurred to me that Duncan’s obsession with Kate Moss and Peter Doherty might simply have been part of a job for Cerand, who seems to me like she’d look for ways like that to promote a client. But I had found the site via one of my google quests…I think on “Duncan” and “Masks”. And I found three different images on Cerand’s site all submitted by Duncan for Cerand’s quirky “Dress like a cat till you get what you want” themed..umm…something or other. Anyway, all three images were of young girls in cat masks. All three appear on this page which take forever to load. Here’s one of them.

It seems so tenuous now. Cerand seemed close to Duncan. In fact, on the page above she talks about visiting Duncan and Blake. Yet Cerand does not seem to have mentioned Duncan’s death at all. I began to suspect that Cerand, too was somehow in on the joke. I think that’s a good example of finding “confirmation” that was…well, not so solid.

And the associative thinking just kept growing. Blake Robin, who performs as “Baron von Luxxury” had written a tribute to Duncan. In it he said, “Theresa is really Sable Starr, now you know.” I didn’t know what this meant and I began searching and was introduced into the whole, sordid world of early seventies, underage teen groupies who were used for sex by many of the big rock stars visiting L.A.. Sable Starr was one. The LA Weekly article mentioned how a friend (meaning Blake/Luxxury) with a small record company had prompted her to start the blog. I clicked on the link and saw that record company was called “Nolita.” I clicked on the about page, and came to a picture of Sable Starr and another famous underage groupie called Lori Lightning. They are provocatively dressed and at most 15 years old. So we had Theresa Duncan and her themes of pedophilia, being paid homage to by being compared with a girl celebrated in myth for having sex with musicians when she was only 14.

I saw “Nolita” as being a play on “Lolita” but people reminded me that “Nolita” is actually a place in Manhattan…NOrth of LIttle iTAly. They reminded me that Sable Starr could be seen as a symbol of the glam-rock seventies, the fashions and designs of which have been adopted, it seems, by some part of the rave/dj culture. But I kept searching. I found references to Starr on a website for “Star Magazine” which put out only five issues in 1973. It was a teen magazine promoting the groupie life, with a provocative picture of an underage girl on each cover (though the content was not pornographic at all). I noticed that the people on that site, sharing their memories of the magazine and how it positively influenced them said they bought copies on ebay…and yet I could find no evidence of the magazine on ebay at all. I became convinced that maybe the magazine didn’t even exist…that this was some kind of front. I even noticed on the website where they’d announced they were going to also have a myspace account that they regretted the fact that myspace had become a “playground for pedophiles.” I even noticed that the name of the website, using the initials for “Star Groupie Magazine” was SGM. One of the aliases of the blogger who wrote me the message on his internet38 was “MSG.”

My style in the last paragraph was intentional. I was frenzied and rushed and on this wild string of associations that seemed highly significant to me at the time. All of the above was on my last post, but the reaction I got from my online friends was that I seemed to be losing my shit. I pulled the post. Maybe they were right…and maybe I was in danger of roping others in as well.

In the sort of minor synchronicity that has followed me throughout this series, as I was writing these words, Baron von Luxxury himself just wrote me. It was a polite note and not hostile in tone. Here’s what he said abut the above:

The significance of my calling my company (Nolita) is simply that I love the
neighborhood when I lived in NYC. When I moved to SF I longed to bring a bit
of the neighborhood’s feeling to it. (And yes, it’s also where Theresa and
Jeremy lived for many years). I named a song after a bar in the area. Etc
etc. It’s just a personal thing, as is Sable Starr (sorry but it would take
me hours to explain – indeed, my album – the one with cover art by Jeremy
and liner notes by Theresa – is an effort to do just that, and it took me 12
songs to flesh it out!)

I don’t exactly know what I thought all of the those “Star” and “Starr” references proved. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t thinking the Baron was the leader of a pedophilia ring, but whatever I was thinking, I apologize for speculating about it publicly in that way. It’s possible, in fact, that I was kinda losing my mind. And by the way, if you have a copy of Star Magazine, there are people out there who will pay over a hundred bucks for one.

In fact, it brings us to the last portion of my trip into the rabbit hole. Because as seemed to happen over and over, items I would later find significant were brought up by others first, in emails or comments on the blog. The Sable Starr stuff was one of those. I had been warned in advance from a veteran of real ARG games and also of massive online flame wars instigated by such internet tricksters (in his case, some of whom openly identified as military intelligence) that once the article came out, IF…and we really did use “IF” the entire time…there was some ARG nature to it, then we’d have people leaving comments and emailing me with further “clues”. That’s the way a real ARG works. In one of the first, Majestic, you might even receive phone calls. And the trick is to keep you on the trail without giving too much away but keep you away from concerning yourself with who was actually BEHIND the game.

So if my rationality did slip…I had just a little help, both from people clearly playing games and also from some synchronicity. I had lost the ability, I think, to tell the difference.

The first such “message” was a comment on the first part from someone going by the name slomo.

“…But I am invented too for your entertainment and amusement! And you poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?”

– Frayn in Zardoz

Turned out that this quote was from a sci-fi film called “Zardoz.” Please don’t google it, as you may be forced to see a picture of Sean Connery in a what looks like a Borat swimsuit. Consider yourself warned.

The name “Zardoz” is actually “Wizard of Oz” with letters removed…and that’s another big theme in the Project Monarch lore, so that got my attention. Then I found the full quote:

Here is a fuller quote:

In this tale I am a fake god by occupation, and a magician by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented too for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in showbusiness too?

When I asked, slomo said he was just a sci-fi geek as I had speculated and thought the quote appropriate. But in true ARG fashion, he didn’t actually post the relevant part of the quote…the use of the term “puppet master” for example, is, as we’ve seen, what a person running an ARG is called.

And then I received an email. It was from a “Lamont Cranston” and had the subject line “Lead?”. In it was a link to a video which had no connection to Duncan that I could discern, though it was very experimental in nature. I wrote back and asked what the video meant to him. But instead of a reply from him, I got a reply from the maker of the video. he was freaked out, he said, because although that Cranston email address was his, he had not been the one to write me that note pointing to the video. Well, I looked into it and the IP addressed on the two emails were the same, which would seem to mean they both came from the same computer. In addition, there’s no way to connect that video to Duncan without knowing already that it was a tribute to her. I wrote him back to tell him all this and he replied that he was totally freaked out and was going to delete both the video and his account at Rigorous Intuition. I don’t know if he cancelled his RI email, but the video is still there, if you’d like to see it. For all I know, he was simply hoping to get more people to look at his work.

But he had called the work a “sigil.” In fact, he’d ended the work with a sigil constructed in the way chaos magicians do…by writing a message “Please protect her” and then removing all the vowels and repeating consonants. He was the second person to point out the idea of “sigil” as I explained on a previous post, and that whole notion got me knee deep in well known practioners of chaos magick..as discussed before.

Meanwhile, I finally figured out the meaning of the title of the video: “The Black Page.” That, in fact, is a reference to a blacked out page in original copies of the novel “Tristram Shandy” known for it’s innovative structure. I know this, because Duncan’s post with the quote above about hoaxing novelists and authors had a picture of it.

Surely, I thought, this was a clue from the tricksters themselves. After all, news of her death was not released until Aug. 21st…that’s a very short time to make a video. But if he is well read, or if he read Duncan’s blog regularly, he would have been quite familiar with the reference. I assumed he’d passed it onto me, with the cryptic identity games, to draw me to that entry on her blog.

Most of the above was not entirely irrational, though it wasn’t entirely rational either, I suppose.

And with dozens of hours of writing and research, chasing leads and chasing my tail, I’m not sure I have too much to show for it. I’m prett sure I understand Duncan now, better maybe than her good friend Coe. My primary thesis, that Duncan had constructed a reality for herself on that blog seems to be correct. The only question is whether the “Theresa Duncan” she created had significance beyond just serving as a foothold into sanity by someone whose “true” identity seemed to be fracturing. Was she simply delusional or trying to inflate her sense of importance in world affairs? Or was there greater significance to the cryptic messages she left behind?

And somehow, it is appropriate, that for a short time, I accompanied Theresa Duncan on her trip into what we are now labeling madness. I followed her down the rabbit hole. Only in this case…

I came back out.