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By Brian George
25
“I don't develop; I am.”—Pablo Picasso
In “The Republic, Book X,” Plato writes, “When all the souls had chosen their lives, they went before Lachesis. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the daimon that he had chosen, and this divinity led the soul first to Clotho, under her hand and her turning of the spindle to ratify the destiny of his lot and choice, and after contact with her, the daimon again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos to make the web of its destiny irreversible, and then without a backward look it passed beneath the throne of Necessity.”
26
As you read (or hear) this, my voice echoes in your short-term and then long-term memory. As I speak to myself I imagine your—as of yet—nonexistent face. We both ask, “Who let You in here?” Daylight savings time assaults the nocturnal light of dreams. It does no good. Earth suddenly goes black. The transparent moon returns. To what end should we argue about the title of the preexistent death-flash video? Dreams hang on the tree of knowledge. It continues to sprout branches. Images are waiting for whoever stops to try them on.
The dead reproduce. Cities land on clouds. An epileptic bird damns robots to the labyrinth. Earth’s rulers act at a distance, as mechanics reverse the pull of the great magnet of dissociation; you are not where you are. Your small hands violate the precession of the equinox. It is clear to me stranger that your tribe grows monstrous. Your prehistoric boats now dare to take x-rays of omphalos!
Of course, it is also clear that you do not approve of me. I copulate with a race of questionable gods. A starfish is my master. The most considerate thing would be for each of us to go back where we came from.
Symbols exchange fluids. You wake smelling of the ocean. Someone has put seaweed in your hair. A squid snores beside you. Is everything ok? A spell enforces the inviolate order of appearances.
What a strange thing it is for the self to be inhabited by the other. How strange to be almost dead, to be viewed by other subjects as an object. What a strange thing it is to forget one's mother tongue. How strange to be an omnipotent mushroom trapped inside an atom. How strange to find yourself projected into someone else's dream—to know it is not yours, but not be able to get out.
There is a unique horror to such experiences. How odd, since they are nothing if not common. How quickly the disorientation is written off as over. Hermes goes in one ear; a pedestrian falls out the other. Amnesia voids the traveling violation. The ego is a useful construct; it allows us to take possession of even the most surreal of events.
Perhaps each of us inhabits and acts out not one but many dreams. Their intersection allows us to create a role for choice. If the role is real, it is also perhaps more circumscribed than we are willing to admit.
In the physical world each actor sees himself as the enormous central character, without whom no story would exist. The actor is provisionally conscious. Let us say that the ego gets with the preexistent program. The actor follows where the death-flash video leads, as the future and the past trade places. You are that actor; the remnant of the shadow of an enigma, the warrior once swallowed by the dream. You will work with the phenomena that present themselves. You will use what is put before you.
Doors open as you pass. Impediments dissolve. Your head cracks like a seed— whose chromosomes go crazy. Junk DNA becomes an audio-book, a spiral memory theatre, a see-through encyclopedia whose symbols you can read. It does not appear that your memory is native to the Earth. Your arms reach for the land of no return—where a radioactive treasure blossoms. Omens bounce. Empires fall up. Your heart is in your mouth. A breeze harvests you.
If you cooperate with the instructions that the three fates have embedded in the dream, it is possible that you may actually have fewer choices. Paradoxically, you may also experience a greater wealth of opportunities. Freedom becomes less of a burden in becoming less rational and more intuitive; action becomes an aspect of attention. Knowledge roars like a recombinant species. An instruction manual on ecstatic death appears, a bit wrinkled from the flood, perhaps, but just lying on one’s doorstep and waiting to be picked up—as if we and not death had all along been the problem!
Water fuels the broadcast of the social hallucination. Boundaries are plastic. Voices interpenetrate. Faces serve as cues to prompt the interest of the dead, who, for the past 12,000 years, have had better things to do.
“Hey, I know him,” one exclaims, “that is Argos Panoptes, of the 360 degree vision, who Hermes—that delinquent—had once hypnotized with his music, then beheaded!” Once, the world was much smaller than it is today—about the same size as an eye—while the beings who inhabited it were almost infinitely large. Sex is happy to interpret the most abstruse of symbols. As you exit the labyrinth, light towers to the sky. You are right at home. The hand of synchronicty throws gifts across your path.
(Illustration: Rene Magritte)
By Brian George
The objective world presents us with a wealth of information. There are clues to follow, patterns to trace, enigmas to wrestle to the ground, keys to discover, signs in foreign languages to obey, labyrinths of interconnection—through which a string may be rewound into a ball. An acupuncture manikin is waiting at the exit; she is the beloved—who transforms.
“Immortal mortals, and mortal immortals, each living the other’s death and dying the other’s life,” as Heraclitus said. After study, we may more fully understand how the part relates to the whole. What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Is the self the shadow of a nonexistent sun? How does our consciousness interface with the sex-life of the world?
One approach is to regard the human body as a microcosm, in which each detail of anatomy corresponds to some macrocosmic coordinate. It is possible that space is actually no bigger than an ovum, in relation to which each life is a kind of kamikaze spermatozoon. If we say that nature is made up of “laws,” does this not imply that we have chosen to obey them, and that, with a fluctuation in our mood, we might just as easily choose to disobey?
But whatever the method we may choose to follow—esoteric or empirical—we may find ourselves no closer to answering the key questions we have asked. The whole problem may be in the method of our asking. We are too polite, and should not ask teachers for help. We must locate by blind reckoning the beginning of each circle.
In his “Oration on the Dignity of Man”—a kind of shotgun marriage of Kabbalah and Neoplatonism—Pico della Mirandola argues that human beings and not angels are the true messengers of creation. I had originally written, “Human beings and not angels ATE the true messengers of creation.” My wife pointed out the problem. But the accident was perhaps correct. And so, to paraphrase Pico della Mirandolla:
To all other species one nature was assigned; each had a single job to do. Beasts are less contemptible than we are. The damned feel glory over us. It is the very lack of a fixed role that defines our position in the hierarchy. We are many—and one self embodies the diverse powers of the spheres. In being nowhere we are able to be everywhere. In being nothing we are able to create and then interpret our own project as we go.
The Human Consciousness Project predates the disjunction worked by the Deluge. Age by age, in a series of slow, catastrophic steps, we forgot that the sum of knowledge was contained within one volume. We forgot, as well, that the human body was a star map and an atlas. Today, we write things down. Decadence makes meaning necessary.
(Illustration: Rene Magritte, The Philosopher's Lamp)
By Brian George
22
To the radioactivity of an object out of mind each detail of one’s memory is a screen. Quite suddenly, as though no time had passed, the whole of history weighs no more than a feather. It is once more possible to review one's death on video. Again, the music of the spheres is audible, or even overwhelmingly loud. There are no hypnotic fields to block access to the macrocosm. If a tribe of watchers appears to be sitting on one's head, you can rest assured that this is purely a coincidence.
23
Gaps open. There are conflicts among the forces that govern the microcosm and the macrocosm. Scientists now compete to develop a Unified Field Theory—or a Theory of Everything, as it is sometimes called—that will unify the principles of relativity with those of quantum mechanics. No one knows what the new universe will look like, or who will discover the theory, or what strange games it will play with our consciousness, but many do believe that such a theory will exist in the nest 20 or so years.
It is tempting to think that the Human Consciousness Project could be brought to some similar resolution. The ancestral war between the subject and the object would end not with a bang but with a wedding. The neocortex would be transubstantiated. Dance would spread like a virus through the Luddite version of the World Wide Web. With their planetary chanting, cyborgs would awaken every megalith at Stonehenge. Intellect would lift all symbols from the sewers of the Sargasso Sea.
The New World Order would not depend on oil, but, instead, on breath. Clones from a Calvinist think tank would give away their hearts, their car keys and their houses, as they ran to hug random derelicts on the street. Prosthetic limbs would attach themselves to torsos. Nanotechnocrats would free the great apes that were hung on the tree of recombinant knowledge.
These microcosmic adjustments would be good. It is more likely, however, that philosophy does not progress. Nagel is smart, but not necessarily more evolved than Plato. Parallel universes agree to disagree. An 11-dimensional superstring coordinates the agon. If consciousness grows from the discovery of a preexistent object—the knowledge guarded by the self, to which the other had systematically denied access to the ego—then the resolution would occur not in the future but in the past. A mysterious conjunction has already taken place.
(Illustration: Pierre Roy)
