What is it about long drives? Another one up north this last week, and another of what I come to expect and hope: a peak into another dimension of reality, or so it seems. Is it the isolation, the hum of engine? Or is it the music?
Perhaps it's all, and it starts like this: I am somewhere north of Juneau on State Highway 26, on the last few hours of the long trip home. Playing with the buttons, an old favorite, or a new favorite comes on, and then memories are touched, their reality almost as real as the present. One leads to another, and then from many comes one theme, one whole that ties my entire life together in a theme, and that theme is directed, not arbitrary, but not pushed either. It is rather pulled, pulled towards an ecstatic completion that I have known all along and am in great compliance with, even though I didn't realize it. The pull appears to get stronger as the memories add up to the whole, as if time and age bring me closer to the source of the pull, its presence like a silent, brilliant vacuum cleaner, its pull an implied, and then perceived great light. And then closer still, until the actual ecstasy starts, a rush of heat energy and joy that flashes brilliant and then trails off like the dying embers of a giant firework.
In its place is not a recess, not a silence, but another world, a new sight. I can almost switch it off completely at will, enough to compare the difference: this new world vs the standard personal and social world, this new world, the standard world. It is not hallucination or dissociation, or if dissociation, one that can be commandeered, and the difference is of the finest subtlety. Everything looks the same - what has changed is meaning. In the new world, there is depth, meaning beyond comprehension, fullness, completeness; in the common social, there are discrete entities, one not attached to another, no continuity accept that as accepted: a house is a house, a car a car, the definitions known. The new thrills; the old is commonplace. I do not want to return, but then there is always something. Yesterday it was man on a riding mower, cigarette burning, doing his job of cutting the lawn. So everyday that the greater view is overridden, my social conditioning back to full gear. The greater vision then seems an anomaly, and as any social scientist would, I must ask: is there brain damage here? Is it merely the consequence of boredom, of the hum, of the intrusion of the music in an opened mind - a fabrication?
But the reality was so much more complete. The mystics call their visions "more real than real," and these are such when experienced, but not when gone. Instead is followed the question: What the ---- was that? Is it what is says it is in its wordless way? Or is it a mirage? Which is right - almost all of humanity, or the singular vision?
As I near the finish of the novel, "Clowns of God," by Morris West, I am reminded of this question and embarrassed. In the plot, the Catholic Pope of a fictional near future has a sudden revelation, complete, of the 'parousia' or End Times, first of apocalypse and the Antichrist, and then - I do not yet know, but it is a compelling and complete vision. He is urged to warn the world by a god who is not described. He tells the cardinals in the Vatican and they force him to abdicate. The reasons are two-fold: on the one hand, he could very well be a madman; on the other, this would put a kink in the whole business, the whole structure of Mother Church. Their social reality and all they value would dissolve.
Of course we eventually side with the deposed pope. And here is the embarrassment: my vision has no great significance beyond the personal. It may be the reflection of a genetic glitch or a chemical imbalance. I am most certainly not anything like a pope, either a good one or a bad one, or one of the chosen few. But what of it? Perhaps I am not as alone in this as I think; and what's more, we have the title to the book: "The Clowns of God." I, we, have been named. Still, if I am only a mere toy of God, it is a blessing to be played with once and a while. To be a clown of God is still to be in touch with God. And the man on the mower smoking his cigarette - for what he represents to me, whatever his actual thoughts are - is so much less than the vision, however dumbed-down it is, than that of the old toy.
Perhaps it's all, and it starts like this: I am somewhere north of Juneau on State Highway 26, on the last few hours of the long trip home. Playing with the buttons, an old favorite, or a new favorite comes on, and then memories are touched, their reality almost as real as the present. One leads to another, and then from many comes one theme, one whole that ties my entire life together in a theme, and that theme is directed, not arbitrary, but not pushed either. It is rather pulled, pulled towards an ecstatic completion that I have known all along and am in great compliance with, even though I didn't realize it. The pull appears to get stronger as the memories add up to the whole, as if time and age bring me closer to the source of the pull, its presence like a silent, brilliant vacuum cleaner, its pull an implied, and then perceived great light. And then closer still, until the actual ecstasy starts, a rush of heat energy and joy that flashes brilliant and then trails off like the dying embers of a giant firework.
In its place is not a recess, not a silence, but another world, a new sight. I can almost switch it off completely at will, enough to compare the difference: this new world vs the standard personal and social world, this new world, the standard world. It is not hallucination or dissociation, or if dissociation, one that can be commandeered, and the difference is of the finest subtlety. Everything looks the same - what has changed is meaning. In the new world, there is depth, meaning beyond comprehension, fullness, completeness; in the common social, there are discrete entities, one not attached to another, no continuity accept that as accepted: a house is a house, a car a car, the definitions known. The new thrills; the old is commonplace. I do not want to return, but then there is always something. Yesterday it was man on a riding mower, cigarette burning, doing his job of cutting the lawn. So everyday that the greater view is overridden, my social conditioning back to full gear. The greater vision then seems an anomaly, and as any social scientist would, I must ask: is there brain damage here? Is it merely the consequence of boredom, of the hum, of the intrusion of the music in an opened mind - a fabrication?
But the reality was so much more complete. The mystics call their visions "more real than real," and these are such when experienced, but not when gone. Instead is followed the question: What the ---- was that? Is it what is says it is in its wordless way? Or is it a mirage? Which is right - almost all of humanity, or the singular vision?
As I near the finish of the novel, "Clowns of God," by Morris West, I am reminded of this question and embarrassed. In the plot, the Catholic Pope of a fictional near future has a sudden revelation, complete, of the 'parousia' or End Times, first of apocalypse and the Antichrist, and then - I do not yet know, but it is a compelling and complete vision. He is urged to warn the world by a god who is not described. He tells the cardinals in the Vatican and they force him to abdicate. The reasons are two-fold: on the one hand, he could very well be a madman; on the other, this would put a kink in the whole business, the whole structure of Mother Church. Their social reality and all they value would dissolve.
Of course we eventually side with the deposed pope. And here is the embarrassment: my vision has no great significance beyond the personal. It may be the reflection of a genetic glitch or a chemical imbalance. I am most certainly not anything like a pope, either a good one or a bad one, or one of the chosen few. But what of it? Perhaps I am not as alone in this as I think; and what's more, we have the title to the book: "The Clowns of God." I, we, have been named. Still, if I am only a mere toy of God, it is a blessing to be played with once and a while. To be a clown of God is still to be in touch with God. And the man on the mower smoking his cigarette - for what he represents to me, whatever his actual thoughts are - is so much less than the vision, however dumbed-down it is, than that of the old toy.
RSS Feed