Where Seas and Fables Meet (12 page)

Backstory:

Max Brod (1884-1968) was Franz Kafka's closest friend and literary executor. When Kafka was dying of TB, he asked his friend to burn his manuscripts. Brod disobeyed his friend's commands. Instead, after Kafka's death, he edited and organized the manuscripts, presenting them to publishers and then to the world. Brod himself was the author of many novels and histories. Kafka's works became central to modernity. Meanwhile Brod's works faded into insignificance.

Max Brod dies in Israel and awakens in heaven.

He's greeted at the gates of heaven by the composer, Antonio Salieri. In the company of Salieri he finds the critics and exegetes who have written about the greatness of others. They're the annotators of originality. And they are there to welcome Brod and to introduce him to paradise.

“A special place has been set aside for you,” Salieri says. Eagerly Brod follows the annotators and exegetes who documented or promoted or elided or recognized the vastness in a figure. He walks with them, expecting to see God from a privileged place.

He finds himself with the others at a small observatory. The observatory is removed from the splendour. An administering angel told him that this is where he'll spend eternity, watching and chronicling the outpourings of the source. The observatory is cast in gold and yet the building floats in a shadow.

He smiles because the observatory has one elaborate telescope, engraved with symbols, that everyone shares. Amused angels serve the annotators tea and cakes.

You could imagine him with the others, each taking their turn, observing the light through the telescope. They jot down notations. They discuss their ideas. Imagine Max Brod happy. He truly is in paradise.

After a time he asks an angel the inevitable question: “Where's Kafka?... Where's my gifted friend?”

Silence is the response. Even his comrades in the observatory go uncharacteristically silent. (All of them love to discuss what they've observed.)

The administering angel finally speaks in a hushed tone: “We never see him. He has a special room adjoining the splendour.”

“What does my old friend do there?” Brod asks.

There's another silence. This one goes on and on until he thinks he'll never get an answer.

At last another angel speaks.

“We never see him. We're not sure he has substance now. All we know is he writes scripts for God.”

Brod never asks about Kafka again.

The butterfly becomes a caterpillar that forgets it could fly.

The swan becomes an ugly duckling and forgets that it was gloriously beautiful.

They heard steps.

The steps were no longer behind them. She said: “Did you hear that?”

And he said: “Yes.” They weren't being pushed or followed. The steps were ahead of them.

She looked on, listening. He saw nothing, but he was listening, too. The shadowing sound was up the path, even and steady.

They looked out into the fields.

Where were the steps leading? Were they meant to be guides?

She said: “The steps must be signs, but they're sounds. I don't see prints. We'll have to make our own way, listening to them.”

So they did.

Once you've come to know yourself – assuming this is possible – would you be asked to unlearn everything? Would you know – in a golden epiphany, an oracular intimation – that you had to start over?

One of the teachings of metamorphosis and of epiphanies is surely this: there's no end to the quest to know.

Atheos (Greek) means one who doesn't know the sacred, who hasn't felt the hand of the gods: the encounter with the sacred in this understanding of theos is more verb than noun, more action than stasis. It is experiential, immersive. “We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them.” – Pascal

It's possible that the point of understanding that the cosmos is in process is to learn that the sacred evolves. It's likely that you'll find it hard to exist without a meaning of some sort. The sacred will be reinvented – in ideology, in science, in the body, in society, in art. Atheos is an impossibility. The challenge: how to keep the encounter with the unmanageable alive, so that it doesn't freeze into the arbitrary, becoming the Structure which arrests.

The sacred evolves. What does this mean? That our perception of it shifts? Or that the source itself changes shape? Or does it mean both? Does the sacred need human life to mirror and reflect on metamorphosis? Maybe you can say: humanity and its errant manifestations are the apocalypse of the sacred.

“Know thyself” – the Socratic axiom

We know this is a hard lesson. Examine yourself, understand who you are, how you exist, how you could be. And if we arrive at the destination of self-knowledge, at the crossroads, then would we know it? Could the juncture be fogged by noise and crowds? We could have the experience and miss the meaning.

“Now, since it is said that you are my double and my true companion... it is not fitting for you to be unacquainted with your self... and you will be called the man who knows himself...” –
The Book of Thomas

“—Hypocrite lecteur, —mon semblable, —mon frère.” – Baudelaire. My free translation: “Hypocrite reader, my double, my brother (companion).” Baudelaire's envoy to the reader in Les Fleurs du Mal suggests the voyage will be charged by our unknowing, that when we journey we could pass by Ithaca (home) and not recognize it. Baudelaire is modern because in his writings the trust in the quest has broken down: he recognizes that the poet and the reader must voyage through incomprehension and new perception. Knowing yourself is evolutionary.

Thomas had been writing the
Summa Theologica
for decades. He wanted to give the rational underpinnings for faith. He wrote day and night in the candlelit chambers of his monastery. He barely ate and drank only water. He attended mass and prayed. Then he scurried back to work, hoping each day would bring him his holy sentence, his daily wonder, the manna of explanation, the words like the wafers of the divine communion.

He lived among cherished symbols: the cross, a statue of Mary, the windows illuminating parables, the cups and candles. The writing of a beautiful phrase restored him. The ring of a balanced thought made him happy. Soon he knew he'd be close to completion. The end was near.

But when he came to the last sentence, he held his head in his hands and surrendered to sorrow.

His assistant, a fellow monk, asked him what was wrong. His reply became a legend.

He said what he'd written was “straw.” It was straw compared with all that he'd experienced, what he'd felt, what he'd witnessed, all that he knew, the domains he saw at the edge of words and beyond his words. Logic had taken him only so far. Now he'd met silence.

The angelic doctor never dismissed the power of mind. Intelligence and reason were gifts. We were meant to think. The gift of reason gave us detachment and inquiry.

It was a vital part of our evolution. He wasn't denigrating the waking mind – the eye of sunlight.

But he experienced the sorrow of the limit. “Straw” meant that the cathedral of ideas that he'd built through his sentences could never mirror the beauties of the cosmos, and that the church of thought that he'd constructed with such care was nothing more than an author's sublime vanity. He'd found that words went only so far. Knowledge could be non-verbal, rarely systematic. (He thought, how do you describe music? How do you catch the wind?)

And he fell into silence.

He didn't tell his kindly, worried assistant to burn the Summa. (Something made of straw is easy to set on fire.)

In the silence his sorrow was soothed. He heard unspoken words that intimated a peace through the lines of his life. Somehow that which transcended summary was with him. This he sensed deeply. His sorrow had a strange kind of joy.

He never wrote another word.

It was impossible for him to write in one voice. Torrents were in him. Other voices roared and murmured. “Find your voice,” his teachers said. But he had to answer: “Which one?... I have so many.”

He imagined that Shakespeare, or Emily Brontë, or Emily Dickinson, or James Joyce, or William Faulkner, had no singular written voice of their own. They had many fictional selves, and had to make selections from the vast cascade.

When he talked, that was another matter. Then he had one voice: to make requests, to share a joke, to explain, to complain and moan, to inquire, to pray, to beseech, to love, to ask for directions, to describe, to say thank you.

The electronic sea rolled over him with its voices. Every channel was tiding in different tones. It was astonishing, the number of voices, the number of tones, at any given time. It seemed as if one massive mouth opened and a billion voices spoke. And it seemed that every voice had its own sea, its own depths.

How did You come to me?

In your shapes You took me by surprise.

Light, colour, rhythms, links, waves, vibrations – associations, a candlelight blurring and flicking and the spark from a match – You were there in my sadness and my moments of lucid connection.

Out of the depths

How did You come to me?

Not at all and all at once... In the wind passing over the water, in the wind passing down through the crack in my window sill that doesn't fit right in its frame... In the trace of a kiss on my cheek when she said yes to my proposal of marriage... In the chime announcing someone called on my cellphone... In the clouds crossing over the skylight of my car-roof (the clouds scuttling one way, my car travelling in another)... When a quiet came into me and I wasn't in any place in particular...

Had I ever lost You?

The trees and the satellites carry You. The white curtains rustling bear your imprint. You're a part of my home and my work. Everything echoes with You. Your nightlight is on in my dark bedroom.

Could I ever lose You?

The Word has rewritten me. Your worlds and words augur in everything.

Behind us: eulogies, elegies, mourning, adagiettos, farewell songs, requiem masses and vigils held at midnight beside old graves, the loneliest laments, the rending howls, the inarticulate bawls from the back-alleys, the painful cries of creatures caught in traps, the shocked growl of the hurt, the souls who saw deeply but couldn't do more than mourn and long for the end of their sacrificial time.

Ahead of us: reveries, joy, lightness, appreciation, songs of praise, aubades, celebrations, scherzos, the taste for dancing, feasts, Christmas one day and Easter the next, strings of lights across the sky, the laughter of surprise and pleasure on our streets.

A wish: to live without simulation.

But it would be like living without a contemporary self.

Screen-light warm as a womb...

Your brain, your senses, altering to fit this warmth...

Why are we born among images?

Why have we grown inside the images?

The emanant light spheres us, and the night sky offers copies of the stars.

There are many legends about the gates of paradise. One says, when we were exiled from Eden, God told the Cherubim to stand with burning swords at those gates. The gates were sealed. Roaring flames obscured the entrance from the world. This story appears in Genesis 3:24.

The Cherubim guarded the gates for millennia. No one was given a whole vision of paradise. We'd fallen away and couldn't find the returning path to the tree of life in the garden. The Cherubim were terrifying with their imposing four faces – human, lion, bull, and eagle; but, strangely, their cloaks were coloured a deep sky blue, a welcoming shade.

People sometimes had glimpses of Eden. A sound played from paradise, like that of a crystal bell. The scent from the tree of life wafted across a field. A kiss, like your first one, tantalized you. A poem offered an inkling of the original language. A meeting of friends, a betrothal, a marriage, a birth, a death, a funeral provided moments of transcendence from routine.

All these glimpses and scents had escaped through cracks in the gates of Eden. Nevertheless, the gates remained closed. The fiery Cherubim kept their swords ready.

There's another legend. At some point the gates of paradise were opened. God sent the Cherubim to other tasks. The invitation back to paradise was transmitted everywhere.

This welcome was relayed. The message said: return – the starry shore, the glittering floor, are yours again. The gates of Eden stand open.

There were rumours that the opening had come. These rumours were misinterpreted. The possibility that the gates of Eden were open was called Armageddon or The Rapture. These were imminent ends through war or something that might be an extraterrestrial intervention (an
ET ex machina
). People began to take shifts in weather patterns to be signs. The clairvoyant, and the so-called clairvoyants, prophesied the end: nature would supplant technology, electricity would fuse out and we'd return to a golden state without machines. Movies and books provided catastrophic visions, shivers of dread.

The gates of Eden had opened. But the flood that came through them had a new shape. It looked like big data. The information battery sometimes seemed to sharpen into the callings of wisdom and the summoning of prophecy. It was hard to know if this was merely a seeming, nothing else. Experts and soothsayers appeared, and it was difficult to know if they were wiser or more gifted with insight than others. Messages crisscrossed. Technologies appeared that amplified and accelerated the messages. Sometimes these were like a calling out to eradicate loneliness: often they

made loneliness worse. Whatever was happening, it was an overflow – the abundance was a deluge.

This legend said: the gates of Eden would stay open long enough to allow people to find it, each according to the paths they'd chosen for themselves.

The realist's question about the legend was this: where, exactly, are the gates?

How many of us have arrived at gates and looked into the promise of paradise, and said: no, thank you, I prefer suffering and slavery? How many have said I want to keep working for the Structure that encourages the pleasure of exploitation and the addiction to security?

Exegetes of the legend suggested that the gates of Eden are a metaphor for our senses. We must taste, touch, hear, smell, and see, in a quintessence, to sense how paradise is around us. Other exegetes said paradise is in the imagination. Still others said the gates are made of streams of love. Others again said the gates are concepts of justice: all must march through so that the distribution of its bounty is fair. Pessimists said, since we live in exile – in cool desperation – it may take longer to get back to paradise: we aren't ready for it. Still others asked how long do we have before the gates close again?

Then there's another legend.

It's called the legend of exile.

In this story it was said that it is alright to cry out, to call up, to chant and sing, to speak out, to refuse to be a doormat, to confess, to murmur and groan, to call out your lover's name, to look for symbols, to follow the signs that were left by others who'd made their journey through the wilderness and to speak to your companions while you did so, to express a new idea, to act in love. All of this carried the traces of Eden. Open your mouth and a breath will begin to flow through. This is to say, we carry paradise, and we must find its opening in ourselves.

An opening is a time of extreme vulnerability.

Who knows what will be said?

Who knows what will come through the opened passages?

But what will happen if the gates close again and the moment passes? Could the gates be closed by fear?

The last legend: the gates of Eden are open and could close; the opening is brief. If they close again, we would have to wait another millennium. The Cherubim would be asked to return with their flaming swords and told to stand guard for centuries to come. Fear would win. And minds would close, and so would our dreams.

Maybe we are being asked to choose the legend that speaks to us.