The Verses

“Chase the Laughter”

In the founder’s account of the years after the eight days, a man from his Ibiza circle, asked by a mutual friend what had happened between them, offered no explanation; he answered with a poem, which he called “Chase the Laughter,” and read it aloud at a village gathering. The book quotes the lines that circle the account’s central impossibility:

“Mule, what he bore he never knew, and what he lost he could never see, and what he has left is up to me.”

The reading is preserved in an independently produced documentary, publicly released, in which the poem is read in its author’s own voice: “Ra Uru Hu’s Encounter with the Voice - The Origins of the Human Design System.” The author is a private individual and, as in the book, is left unnamed here.

The excerpt above is what the book quotes, and it is the extent of what this archive reproduces. The poem entire survives where it was preserved, in the reading itself, at the two links above.

The founder’s music

There are two albums. Going Ashore: 10 Years Sailing Neutrino Seas, thirteen songs for voice and guitar, was recorded in Taos in 1997. The Dog Queen’s Penta, ten tracks recorded at Son de Mar on Ibiza and released through Ibizarre Records in 2005, carries the credit “Music & Lyrics, Vocals, and Producer: Ra Uru Hu,” with J. P. Pasquier arranging. One song, “Package Tour to Eden,” appears on both, dated 1987 on the earlier record.

The liner notes of The Dog Queen’s Penta carry the founder’s own account of where the music came from: “Music has been writing me since I was a little boy,” and, of the morning after the encounter, that he “woke aching to make music,” found “a red cowboy guitar lying on the ground with five working strings,” and, taking it in his hands, “it wrote ‘Package Tour to Eden.’” The account is his; the book carries it in the his-account register.

Of the lyrics themselves the book quotes only fragments, and so does this page. From “Raving on the K-Line,” the opening track of the 2005 album: “I can read the signs in space and time,” and the closing turn, “I’m raving and you think it’s true… in the end, the joke’s a you-know-who.”

The recordings, lyrics, and liner notes are the property of the estate, and no full lyric is reproduced here. Both albums sit in the Jovian Archive media library, and the estate’s own account of them is at the pages linked above.

Mary Ann Winiger’s poems

Three months into her experiment with the system, by her own account, Mary Ann Winiger drove from Sedona to Flagstaff and “an inner dam of energy burst. Words were tumbling out of me onto paper.” The poems she collected from napkins, receipts, and newspaper edges circulated through her site and her articles; a musician friend later set one, “The Mystery of Waiting,” to music. From “One More Time,” her poem of the waiting itself:

“Then I waited . . . as dreams burned through the night
I waited . . . as longing turned bitter in my mouth
I waited . . . doing nothing to change anything . . . I waited”

The poems are hers. This page excerpts three lines with credit and points to her own sites, where she published them and where they remain.

Elsewhere in the archive

Winiger’s testimony about the founder is in her witness dossier; the albums sit in the timeline among the dated works; and the documentary that preserves the poem is also a source for the founder’s own account of the encounter, treated in The Voice on Ibiza.