Where Seas and Fables Meet (4 page)

... at the rim of analytical consciousness, away from the spotlight, where emotion, the numinous, prayer, poetry, music, shock, analogy, and correspondence, take possession of you...

... difficult to express or schematize, but then so is love, so is sex, so is family, so is connection, so is the wind.

... often said to be otherworldly. Asceticism, abstemiousness, it's said, must accompany the experience. But it can refer to the courage of the inward spirit, and it can refer to spiritual vitality.

... there is mystical Eros, and there are mystical trees, mystical marriages, mystical rivers, mystical art, mystical dreams, mystical expressions, mystical comedies.

... the practical path: finding the miraculous and mysterious in every way or wave, every day. It's available to anyone. Maybe one of the marks of a practical mysticism is its hopeful state, its deep receptivity.

... comes to you in flashes, cracks, probes, splinters, images, reveries, moments of stillness, by confounding zigzags, in parables, keys, protests and heartbreaks...

... in ways you can't always control or command...

... a trace, a catalyst, a crossroads in your reading room, an ecstasy, a provocation, a passage, an impure mixing, a decreating...

... a tear at the hide, a frayed nerve...

... unfolding with the perception that the soul may only be known, at this time, through jolts and glimpses...

... the windows are open, the doors are open. We can move outside and welcome the wind.

... I write these lines with passions and dreams, with the images and beats I've been given. Summon me again, be with me...

... it comes to you, in striving and evocations.

... what if we broke away and flooded institutions, the arresting Structure and its limiting meanness, its abiding fear of the personal, with the wrath and ecstasies of ourselves? Intention: to have no goals, only holy grails.

... we could revel together, you and I, in the spiritual chaos outside certainty's walls...

... the Morse code of the heart is love.

I admire the cabalist precept, ancient and venerable, that says we need lots of kisses, and thus untold amounts of intimacy, to bring forth the Messiah (or the return of the Messiah). Is the Messiah in us, or an actual being? Since the idea of the Messiah seems to be slow in his or her return, either within us or without, then surely we need many kisses. No end to our intimacies, our aspirations towards intimacy with another.

I see you passing.

And it is as if I'm walking down a dark street in an unknown small town and you're in a car driving by, going in the other direction, and we see one another, only for an instant.

And I say openly how I love you, and you mouth a saying of regret and yet of tenderness, and we pass on, and pass by. The street is quiet, full of lamplight and shadows.

You are that night, and I am, too.

In whose arms will you be tomorrow?

In what light?

A shadow keeps falling on us: we often fight ourselves with nihilism's knives.

While we're at the edge of the Tsunamis of the soul, we try to talk from our many sides.

Writing on the wall: “You have to find every way you can to strengthen your children.”

Take everyone you love to the alchemists to get them to pour gold.

The intensity of the background noise has been trying to drown this out: blessings – peace –
amen – om-shantih shantih shantih – shalom – namaste
– all mean we can bear new life inside us.

Once an originator told a story.

The story seemed clear enough.

But no one quite got it.

People were impelled into explanations. Soon no one understood the explanations either.

So there was a need for more elaborations and commentaries. This became everyone's greatest need. During this process of elaboration and explanation, the original story was forgotten. The explanations became the source. Now there were so many explanations that the world was laced with their overlapping networks. The explanations and commentaries became the world. Argument soon replaced storytelling.

But one day a person interrupted all the arguments with a wonderful new story.

The world was briefly hushed. Everyone was impressed. Something new had entered time.

But soon people had trouble understanding the new story. Explanations began again. Only this time there was a memory: somewhere (somehow) an original story lived. Would people be able to find it again?

The explanations continued. But they didn't do so in the way that they had before. They had a new design and direction. The old explanations were forgotten. The new explanations were better and they replaced the others. Traces of the old ones still existed, like a design within another design, a master's painting hidden inside the strokes of a new painting.

The world appeared larger than it did before. All the explanations kept expanding it.

Then one day someone came up with another new story. Everyone was enthralled.

The world was getting larger and larger because of the stories and their explanations.

Soon people began to wonder if they'd need another world to store all this information. The search began.

Swallow a tormenting or ecstatic book like a fish-hook.

Some books you don't read: they crack you open, so that you're the one who is read.

Reading can sometimes be a necessary distraction, like a vital daydream, for those who are tempted towards destruction. Reading can also transform the urge to exit this world by letting you enter another, without harming your body.

I need books made of voices.

I search for pages that talk and breathe. My readings become a listening.

And reading becomes sensitivity to mood.

I'm less (and less) interested in argument than in the voices inside the argument. Some arguments like poems and stories carry a voice or many voices.

Being made of voices means each book could become a call; each reading could become a calling.

The books I need: where words tremble like cells on your skin, sentences ripple like water, voices come through the images, the images are like entry points to the other worlds that wait for us, sentences remain with you like invitations to journeys.

The book that I look for is never in at the Library of Mysteries. Or I've yet to find it – or, it's been forbidden to me, prescribed on an index decided upon by strangers – or, it's been temporarily mislaid – or, it's been signed out by someone else – or, it's the book a person close to me was meant to write – or, it's the book I've already brought home but I don't know how to read yet.

Inside the books another book is written.

“It whispered: where I please.” – Henry Vaughan

“Any trip along our own path is a razor's edge.” – Kena Upanishad

“The eyes go forth to find an image to recommend to the heart.” – Giraut de Bornelh (a troubadour, 1138-1215)

“The aphorism, the apophthegm... are the forms of ‘eternity'.” – Nietzsche

“If search means that one has a goal, then finding means to be free, to stand open, to have no

aim.” – Hermann Hesse

The warriors took the captured people to the greatest city in the world.

Babylon had moats with skiffs that had decorated sails, terraces with flowers and date trees. The huts were made of shining sand and stone. Ziggurats rose up like the pyramids. Their levels were adorned with crystals. The towers glistened in the sun. Under the moon they looked lit up with silver. But the exiled people were unhappy. They were small in number. The great city held no allure for them. They'd been desert people. They were used to the wilderness. Strangers to the streets, they'd been surely welcomed but they knew, deep in their bones, that they didn't belong.

Slowly they were asked to give up their possessions to survive and prosper.

First, it was their God. (There were many that protected the city.)

Then it was the promise of a return to the desert.

Third, it was solitude. (Each of them had been a desert wanderer. Each had known the solitude of the wilds.) Then it was the subtle companionship of each other, the company of fellow solitaries. They were told to find new partners in the streets, in new communities.

Fifth, it was the heart's longing for another kind of place, another way of life, different from the one they'd found in the city.

Then it was their capacity to dream and to interpret dreams.

Seventh, it was the circle of their dance. (There were other moves to learn.)

Then it was warmth and affection. (They may have been desert solitaries, but they knew what it meant to touch one another, to sleep beside a loved one. In Babylon love could be bought and sold.)

Ninth, it was to understand that slavery is a form of necessary employment. (It wasn't essential to work with passion or desire or hope or the discipline of the soul's aspirations towards a just way.)

Then it was their poetry and music.

They were asked to hang their musical instruments in willows by the river that curled around the city. They heard them tingle like wind chimes from a distance. But they weren't to recite or sing.

Their voices were often lost in the tumult of prosperous streets. They learned it was better to speak briskly for commercial transactions.

The few who refused to give up poetry gathered by the gleaming river at night. They let the river and the willows sing for them.

In their exile they learned that love and poetry could happen outside the city ordinances. Their singing would have to continue in other ways by secret means.

The exiles developed a sign for their wandering. It was shaped like a stark tree with two branches slanting and yielding upwards. It looked like a dowsing rod, an instrument for finding underground streams or pools. It would also, so they agreed, resemble the harps they'd hung in the willows.

It resembled a fork in a dusty road. You could go this way or that. Your choice shaped you. The shape of the sign suggested a reply, too. If you followed one way or another – both were possibilities – then you'd step off the line and into freedom. In this space you could scatter seeds and make other signs.

They hoped this sign would become the sign of exiles everywhere. And because it was a symbol it could signal poetry and a return to song. What the journey would be like no one could say.

Meanwhile Babylon grew. With its growth came attractive forms of slavery. Many who had been taken forgot their origins. They obeyed the city's law.

A few escaped.

They left behind a trail of symbols. These would become increasingly difficult for others to read. The search for the symbols became like a wandering in a desert where nothing was known.

The few who escaped hoped that someday others would follow the tracks and hear the songs that had been reduced to rumour-like whisperings under trees that no longer had instruments in them, beside the river.

But it would take generations.

And the songs and signs that the wanderers carried lost their origins, and people found the city protective.

There were nights set aside in the city when the thriving slowed and people felt a need to pray or sing or recite or dance. But they weren't sure what these expressions meant, though the gestures and sounds were sometimes bewilderingly beautiful.

The next day Babylon roared.

Monsters mostly fall from above. They descend and prey. They pounce. Monstrousness comes from the act of looking down on our desire to love and to be respected.

I can no longer abide those who sneer and stoop as if from a tremendous height.

The gargoyles set on cathedrals always look down. They are forbidding, heartless beings, stuck in their observing contempt. This is why medieval craftsmen made them out of stone, rather than painted them on walls or ledges, on windows, or frescoes. If they had painted gargoyles on illuminated windows, they would have transformed in the flooding and shading of the light from the sun. By placing them above us the gargoyles were unwavering in their scorn.

Pilgrims are invariably shown to be wandering on the earth with others, their hearts set on a destination, the fulfilment of a destiny. They aren't frozen, looking down.

An era becomes monstrous and stony when people side with those who look down.

In a time of satellites, everyone has the capacity to look down, to listen in, to connect, and to spy on everyone else.

Ancient rituals carry a bloody memory of human sacrifice. When the Mysteries emerged in Ancient Egypt and spread to the Middle East and to Greece, we see the beginning of symbolic replacement. A sacrifice can be made with animals, or through offerings of blessed food, through gifts or totems. Eventually animal sacrifice was transcended, too. A statue, or an image, of a creature was allowed: a stand-in – a symbol.

The Christian symbol of the sacrificed saviour moved the Mystery process forward. It was an attempt by the early people of the church to remove violent sacrifice from humanity's vicious bloodletting. The first symbol of early Christendom was the fish, not the cross. But you'll find the sign of the cross in the fish's tail. The symbols signified that the blood sacrifice had been done, once and for all. There was no need to let blood flow again. It meant an end to “to an eye for an eye,” the slaughterhouse of history. Incarnation, on one level, surely means that the sacred has become human, here, now, at one with all people.

How ironic, and how terrible, that the Christian symbol of sacrifice is often used to ensure that the violent sacrifice of lives must continue.

How is this perpetuated? In unjust wars... Many wars are justified by leaders in terms of sacrifice for nation, for liberty, for gain, for glory, for security, for a political system, for our future happiness, for territorial imperative, for the spread of an ideology, for the protection of economic or resource interests.

Can there be a just war? Yes, if the conflict means the removal or the limiting of the spread of an evil energy. And yes, if the conflict means the war of contraries within the soul, where passionate expression must fight its way towards awareness.

The most terrifying words can become these: duty, obedience, sacrifice and responsibility, if imposed from without by unjust, tyrannical systems. These words can be easily bent towards others' definitions. (They're already vague enough.) Still you know that death isn't far off when someone begins to speak of your duty, the need to sacrifice your life for the higher ideal – an ideal established elsewhere, not in the heart.

There have been great refusers in the tradition of civil disobedience. Think of Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Aung San Suu Kyi. These are people whose duty, whose responsiveness, is to something other than what present political or authority systems insist on or see.

The demand for sacrifice always comes from above.

Leadership often watches the slaughter on the fields from the safety of walls, from the admiral's chair on a ship. The heroes of The Iliad fought and died at the foot of Troy's walls, observed from above by the gods and goddesses, all of whom believed that this sacrificial slaughter was necessary (and deliciously spectacular).

Leadership can become the power to look down on the destruction below, asking others to do their duty.

Leaders often refuse to join with others on the plane of the human, where blood is being spilled.

It's all too easy to ask for dutiful sacrifice if you're reigning from above, gazing from a perch, outside of suffering, seemingly removed from death.

Once leaders begin to call for sacrifice, there could be no end to it. There would always be the call for sacrifices. Life would be offered at altars. Deny yourself, the powers of the Structure say: there must be libations and slaughter. In return for the protection of the Structure, you must give up yourself. How did it come to be that the Structure – what people in the hippie 1960s called The System – was endowed with authority and weight?

If there would be no call for blood sacrifice, then there would be its replacement: duty. Duty could come to insist that what the universe wants is atonement and revenge. Duty implies that no breath, no voice, is truly different or special. The universe, the Structure, would then demand that your breath be returned to its fold.