It is another one of those trips from my teen years that comes back to haunt me, usually in dreams. I am standing before the 200 foot cliff of the trap rock quarry, already a hundred feet up from the road, far into illegal company property. You are not supposed to go there, even when they aren’t working, because they use explosives and there are loose rocks and heavy equipment and maybe a stray blasting cap lying around to take off the arms of high school ferrets like ourselves, but we are there anyway. We are tripping on what the dealer called mescaline, but whatever it is, it is working, and there are the cliffs. Up up they go, seams of quartz or sandstone or what -have -you sending brightness from the otherwise dark-purple heftiness of the brittle-hard trap rock that the quarry masters crush for highways and driveways. The cliff speaks, almost human but never either, never human, but still almost in a voice that can be heard: “I am old, old, old. I have seen the dinosaurs come and go. You are small, small, looking at me, sensing age that I cannot sense.” It feels what we feel, we feel what it feels, and it is us in eternity, blown away, sent out there – out to be scared and amazed.
I wake from such dreams just like that, a little scared and a bit more amazed as the feeling runs through me like the seams in the rock, and then I recall the real trip, so way, way back in time. It was different then. I stood with my friends beneath that cliff with the fool’s laughter gone as it got too real, too seriously real. One of them, a tall jock popular with the ladies and always cool, pulls out a piece of paper with a cartoon on it. It is of a goofy man wearing striped shorts who has his prickly-haired scrotum hanging out below one cuff, and his penis hanging below the other. Beneath the picture it reads, “Why I don’t wear Bermuda shorts,” and it would have been funny just an hour ago, but it is not now. Still, it is funny in not being funny, and others of us laugh at the stupidity of thinking that it is funny, unable to stop even as the popular jock is humiliated in a way that he never is. He tries to hand someone else the cartoon, saying “here, I don’t want it, you can have it,” his lie, his attempt to save face, now a tortured truth, too much to take, too much to not laugh at. It is horribly uncomfortable but hilarious, too, because we can sense what is happening. We are losing our common humanity. We hear the rock speak, telling us of its age, letting us feel eternity as it never could by itself. Our laughter dries up. All else is pretense. Life is intense. This is not an interlude, a juvenile rebellion with drugs, not anymore. It is real, and it is heavy, heavy as this towering cliff of incomprehensible age.
There is a movie with William Hurt – “Altered States” - about a scientist who takes peyote and then lies in a deprivation chamber, one of those iron coffins filled with water where you feel, see, or hear nothing. In doing this, he begins to travel back in evolutionary time, so much so that he actually changes his DNA for a while to become primitive man. But it does not stop there; the progression continues, until he is drawn down to single cell life, then into the primordial soup, then into exploding matter, and finally into the singularity of the Big Bang itself. He is losing his mind, until his estranged wife shows him care, concern – love. We find that this is what was missing from the whole equation, and what is essential for our sanity. Could this be Hollywood’s admittance of a loving God behind creation, or is it a call only to love while alive, for ‘ye shall all perish into nothing in the end’?
The question remains, held dangling as the two come together, and I am brought to remember the cliff again. The rock knew no love; time knew no love. Rather, it was all awe, all fearsome, terrifying, the stuff of warriors and the mystical way. The joke was only funny in that it was stupid, and then even that thought was stupid, squalid human flotsam that has no more to do with reality than a strand of straw in an immense prairie.
But this is not the answer either – we are not to be somber Pharisees standing above fools and infidels. Jesus drank wine at the wedding of Cana and perhaps, no certainly, he danced or sang or both. The Buddha plays tricks, the Master laughs at our struggles, and things happen in life that are miracles but useless, mere coincidences or strokes of luck that make us laugh or puzzle. Is it love that does this? Or is it that the universe is also us, thinking through us, feeling as we do, for it cannot feel for itself? Is it that our fear can change to laughter, and in that light the dark horror of infinite space? Is it that the terror of the seas might also be our playground, a nest for children and lovers? Is it also that God, what we sense in the eternal, could be both horrible and loving, both hard flint and gentle parent?
Certainly yes, I think, for in my mind the cliff still rises cold and terrible, speaking of ancient things steeped in mystery; but the comic, the little scrap of paper with crudely drawn genitals, is no longer just a joke on the jock. It is just itself, a stupid joke, and now, sometimes, I can feel the cliff and hear the joke, stupid but funny in its stupidity, and humanity returns. Not just “why not,” I think, but of course; of course we are stupid, snarling and sniping and angling for this or that, but that does not take away our eternity. We are dying fools but immortal too, and it is not only the fool who laughs, but the wise man as well. We measure what is given us and then give back, and it is never enough. We laugh because we know this, and in this knowing we learn more about what we fear, which is what we do not know. It is through us that even the rocks cry out, surprised as we are that they exist, and there we meet. So strange, so wonderful, so mind-blowing that even a god might dance, and even we might laugh. FK
I wake from such dreams just like that, a little scared and a bit more amazed as the feeling runs through me like the seams in the rock, and then I recall the real trip, so way, way back in time. It was different then. I stood with my friends beneath that cliff with the fool’s laughter gone as it got too real, too seriously real. One of them, a tall jock popular with the ladies and always cool, pulls out a piece of paper with a cartoon on it. It is of a goofy man wearing striped shorts who has his prickly-haired scrotum hanging out below one cuff, and his penis hanging below the other. Beneath the picture it reads, “Why I don’t wear Bermuda shorts,” and it would have been funny just an hour ago, but it is not now. Still, it is funny in not being funny, and others of us laugh at the stupidity of thinking that it is funny, unable to stop even as the popular jock is humiliated in a way that he never is. He tries to hand someone else the cartoon, saying “here, I don’t want it, you can have it,” his lie, his attempt to save face, now a tortured truth, too much to take, too much to not laugh at. It is horribly uncomfortable but hilarious, too, because we can sense what is happening. We are losing our common humanity. We hear the rock speak, telling us of its age, letting us feel eternity as it never could by itself. Our laughter dries up. All else is pretense. Life is intense. This is not an interlude, a juvenile rebellion with drugs, not anymore. It is real, and it is heavy, heavy as this towering cliff of incomprehensible age.
There is a movie with William Hurt – “Altered States” - about a scientist who takes peyote and then lies in a deprivation chamber, one of those iron coffins filled with water where you feel, see, or hear nothing. In doing this, he begins to travel back in evolutionary time, so much so that he actually changes his DNA for a while to become primitive man. But it does not stop there; the progression continues, until he is drawn down to single cell life, then into the primordial soup, then into exploding matter, and finally into the singularity of the Big Bang itself. He is losing his mind, until his estranged wife shows him care, concern – love. We find that this is what was missing from the whole equation, and what is essential for our sanity. Could this be Hollywood’s admittance of a loving God behind creation, or is it a call only to love while alive, for ‘ye shall all perish into nothing in the end’?
The question remains, held dangling as the two come together, and I am brought to remember the cliff again. The rock knew no love; time knew no love. Rather, it was all awe, all fearsome, terrifying, the stuff of warriors and the mystical way. The joke was only funny in that it was stupid, and then even that thought was stupid, squalid human flotsam that has no more to do with reality than a strand of straw in an immense prairie.
But this is not the answer either – we are not to be somber Pharisees standing above fools and infidels. Jesus drank wine at the wedding of Cana and perhaps, no certainly, he danced or sang or both. The Buddha plays tricks, the Master laughs at our struggles, and things happen in life that are miracles but useless, mere coincidences or strokes of luck that make us laugh or puzzle. Is it love that does this? Or is it that the universe is also us, thinking through us, feeling as we do, for it cannot feel for itself? Is it that our fear can change to laughter, and in that light the dark horror of infinite space? Is it that the terror of the seas might also be our playground, a nest for children and lovers? Is it also that God, what we sense in the eternal, could be both horrible and loving, both hard flint and gentle parent?
Certainly yes, I think, for in my mind the cliff still rises cold and terrible, speaking of ancient things steeped in mystery; but the comic, the little scrap of paper with crudely drawn genitals, is no longer just a joke on the jock. It is just itself, a stupid joke, and now, sometimes, I can feel the cliff and hear the joke, stupid but funny in its stupidity, and humanity returns. Not just “why not,” I think, but of course; of course we are stupid, snarling and sniping and angling for this or that, but that does not take away our eternity. We are dying fools but immortal too, and it is not only the fool who laughs, but the wise man as well. We measure what is given us and then give back, and it is never enough. We laugh because we know this, and in this knowing we learn more about what we fear, which is what we do not know. It is through us that even the rocks cry out, surprised as we are that they exist, and there we meet. So strange, so wonderful, so mind-blowing that even a god might dance, and even we might laugh. FK
RSS Feed