Tetractys

John of Patmos didn't invent the Apocalypse, and Newton didn't invent gravity. These people were exceptional not for the products of their minds but for their ability to see what they saw.

Unfortunately for most of us, seeing isn't always so easy.  Luckily, in spooky moments, we're sometimes given a key.

--

I moved into a new flat last week, and I live here alone.  I realize how demented I must seem, but being able to afford a place of my own feels like a major personal triumph.  My experience since finishing grad school seemed to dictate that I had two options regarding my material situation: either I could do what felt right, natural, and moral, or I could be financially secure, which seems to be the predominant value of my society.  Das Man is strong with me--I have to wrestle that demon--and I overcome.  It took a decade of following my strange star through all manner of wilderness to finally find this place.  Here I am, in my own flat, paid for with guiltlessly acquired cash.  I've found my way to a dream life in an imaginary city.  I didn't have to compromise with what other people call the real world: I made my own.

--

When I got the keys to the flat, I was seeing it for the second time.  It had been repaired and cleaned in the meantime--it looked more presentable, and I was satisfied.  One detail:  above the bed were mirrors in a triangular formation.  I hadn't noticed them during my first visit.  I felt a bit uncomfortable with them, but I was generally satisfied with the flat, so I accepted the keys.

I looked at the mirrors again after the superintendent left.  They cover a fairly large area, and they are directly above the bed.  I thought, So, I've found my way into a porno lair.  I tried to let it go.  Ok, I told myself, I'm free and single anyway, and I'll get used to them.  A porno lair isn't what I would've called my style, but I've been told I flow well with change . . . I will adapt to those mirrors . . . it will be a kind of personal growth . . . into unfamiliar territory.

Truthfully I didn't think about the mirrors too much: I had my lessons to teach, and I still had yet to move my things.  I was in flux.  Though I slept in the new flat from Wednesday on, I didn't finish moving everything over until Saturday.  On Sunday, I went to IKEA to fill in some missing pieces.  I went to Tesco on Monday morning to fill in a few more.  The rest of Monday was beautiful: I had everything that was necessary, and I also received my copy of Philip K Dick's The Exegesis in the mail.

--

[PKD is a major hero of mine.  Prior to discovering VALIS, I basically stuck to canonical literary fiction, if only because those were the writers with true style.  Admittedly, the subject matter of those works rarely interested me.  It takes work for me to relate to a suburban car salesman who is bored with his marriage--I can't imagine myself constrained in such experience; I can't even imagine that the universe would allow it--but that's what we call realism.  If the writer is good, sure, I can do it, and it gives me insight into that lifestyle.  But give me a drifter who suddenly receives direct telepathic communication with an alien intelligence, and I identify immediately.  The world I live in is full of such weirdnesses--it happens all the time, whether I provoke it or not.  I mean, that's what I'm writing about now.  PKD was the first decent writer I read who described reality as I experience it.

But he was a madman, in a way.  During February and March of 1974 (he referred to this experience as 2-3-74) a lot of strange things happened to PKD.  A pink beam of light invaded his brain and gave him information about all sorts of things.  There were insights into the true natures of time, identity, and reality.  The pink beam of light told PKD that his son had a hernia that would kill him; doctors later confirmed that his son did in fact have a hernia, and they successfully treated it.  The pink beam not only expounded on metaphysical truths, it saved his son's life, and thereby proved that it was good.  He also received visions of three eyed aliens and robots with DNA.

The key that provoked this madness of insight was a piece of jewelry.  A delivery girl came to his house, and when he opened the door, PKD noticed her necklace.

He asked the girl what it was, and she said it was the ichthys--the true name of what many call the jesus fish: a symbol of the early Christians.  Revelations fell on PKD for the following two months.  He would later conclude that seeing the ichthys helped him to unforget what he had always known.


The Exegesis was PKD's attempt, through over 8,000 handwritten pages, to understand what had happened to him during 2-3-74.]

--

I read the introduction to The Exegesis on Monday night, after my Czech lesson.  It was wonderful to finally have a relaxed moment in my own flat.  When I finished the introduction, I put the book back on my shelf; I'm currently in the middle of reading Murakami's 1Q84.

When I sat back down, there was my mirror.

I saw what it was.

I'd seen it as a triangle; maybe I'd even understood it as a step pyramid.  But no.  On my wall, right there above my bed, directly before my unseeing eyes--for several days!--was the tetractys.

(Ichthys . . . tetractys . . . did my subconscious process this similarity of sound without throwing up the result into active consciousness, and thus my subconscious awareness of the sound of the word 'tetractys' allowed me to finally see the physical shape before me?!)

The impossible thing about this is that I've been drawing the tetractys for years--it's an obsession.  I had two of them, which I'd drawn myself, on the wall of my old flat.  It is inconceivable to me that I didn't notice it during my first visit to this flat, and then I lived with it for six days!

--

I have no idea what is before my own eyes.

--

Here is a prayer of the Pythagoreans:

“Bless us, divine number, thou who generated gods and men! O holy, holy Tetractys, thou that containest the root and source of the eternally flowing creation! For the divine number begins with the profound, pure unity until it comes to the holy four; then it begets the mother of all, the all-comprising, all-bounding, the first-born, the never-swerving, the never-tiring holy ten, the keyholder of all.”

--

Though this symbol has been firmly lodged in my imagination for many years--I think since high school, but I can't remember when it first caught my attention--I have the nagging sensation that, despite all my research, I have only the most superficial understanding of it.  When I find myself drawing it, and I have drawn it hundreds, if not thousands of times . . . I mean it's compulsive . . . I feel I'm a bit like Spielberg's character in Close Encounters who cannot stop drawing his mountain.

There is something important about this symbol that I don't understand.

--

My previous Lightning, Mirror post grew from my discovery that the hieroglyph for the ankh, which is another powerful symbol for me, also carries the meaning of 'mirror'.

Ankh

I've worn this symbol on my chest for years.  It has a story, and last night, that story grew larger.

Like every other meaningful story of my life, I can't point to the exact moment it began.  Suddenly, I noticed that the ankh was a fixture in my imagination.  I think back: impressions and memories swirl into mind without regard for order of importance or chronology.  That's fine for my private remembrance--maybe I prefer to remember in such a way--yes, that is certainly how I prefer it, and so my story of the ankh is going down just as I experience it in the telling.

--

Years ago I developed an interest in the mystical-magical, occult sect of Christianity known as the Rosicrucians.  Maybe I came to them through Pynchon: that is another beginning lost to me.  I found what I could about the Rosicrucians on the internet, and then I went deeper into a few books.  The cover of one of those books incorporated ankhs into its design.

The motif intrigued me--I had known that the ankh was an Egyptian symbol, though I didn't know its meaning, and so I was surprised to see it on the cover of a nominally Christian book.

Or maybe I'd already known what the ankh meant, and for whatever reason, my recognition of it had been forestalled until that moment.

--

At work in the library one day, a patron noticed the ankh hung around my neck.  He pointed at it and said, That's the symbol of Life.  I nodded noncommittally; I would've described it in another way, but he was close enough.  He lifted the sleeve of his t-shirt and showed me the tattoo of an ankh on his upper-arm.  He said he'd gotten it decades earlier.

He told me its story.

--

The truth is there are several different ways I might go about describing the ankh, what it is, what it means to me, and I probably alter my telling based both on my mood and the listener.  Since it has become a powerful symbol for me, I've developed numerous associations with it, and there are various ways to travel through them.  Mostly I improvise and go on faith.

--

We're a sort of tribe.  These encounters have happened to me a dozen or so times: we reveal ourselves to each other.


--

Look at it.

  
 The Egyptians didn't depict the ankh as a pendant worn on a necklace.  The ankh is a key, it is grasped, and those who survive into the afterlife carry it with them always.

--

A girl once pointed at my ankh and said she was happy to see it because she didn't know many Christians who publicly professed their faith.  I nodded.  She didn't need to know the pagan genealogy of this particular symbol, or that it was likely the inspiration for the subsequent Christian stylizations of the Cross.

We're talking about the immortality of the soul--whoever said it first seems irrelevant in the context of eternity.

--

--

And here's an Alice in Wonderland type game I like to play with myself.

I. The ankh is the key to the afterlife.

II. Whoever carries this key shall live even in death.

III.  I carry the ankh.

IV.  Am I already dead?

If you are able to ask such a question, then you are not able to answer it.  Thus the ankh conquers death, or rather destroys its very meaning, if only through semantics.

--

In the ankh, we behold a symbol from an ancient religion, if we can call it that, which is largely lost to the popular imagination; and yet, neither the meaning nor the symbol itself have changed.

It is as if Immortality is immortal.

--

Yes, it is also the symbol of Life.

--

I was raised Catholic, and I studied religion, among other subjects, at college.  When someone asks me if I believe in God, or Jesus, or any of the countless others in the entire Host of Names; if I am a Christian; if I am a believer; or if I am spiritual--you get the idea--I improvise a way out of the question.  These words are polluted.

Resurrection, however, is an experiential truth.

--

I carry the ankh in my dreams.

--

Last night I read that the ankh, as a hieroglyph, also carries the meaning of mirror.

Anthem

[distant pipes and drums]

We are Mirror People.
We're in luck.
When we don't know what to do,
We pretend we're stuck.

We have crawled through the darkness of the valley.
We have swam to the bottom of the lake.
We have climbed to the top of the mountain.
We have eaten with the lion and the snake.

When we meet, we sit for hours
in the timeless silence of forgotten rooms.
When we speak, we speak together:
no longer than a moment or too soon.

Just because we went there, doesn't mean we got there.
Just because we get here, doesn't mean we stay.
Just because we stayed there, doesn't mean we lived there.
Just because we live here, doesn't mean we came.

We are Mirror People.
We're in luck.
When we don't know what to do,
We pretend we're stuck.

Crack crack mirror mirror
Crack crack mirror mirror

THREE FOG

[excerpting an email I sent, followed by the forwarded link which provoked these thoughts.]

On Thursday, one of my students--a film director--was talking about one of his characters, as well as the actress who is playing that role.  He said several times that "Around her was fog."  So I checked the concept to be sure what he wanted to say, and told him we can say, "She was in a fog."  Meaning a sort of distraction, or numbness.  

(I find it interesting, how students make mistakes, especially when they are reaching to say something they haven't previously learned--maybe more so when they are attempting a figurative usage.)  

The next day, a different student--an economics professor--was talking about how the Czech government handled a banking crisis in the 90's, back before privatization had been fully implemented, so the government was also the bank.  My student said, "They decided in fog."  I checked the concept again, out of habit, and though I can't remember the exact correction I gave--something like 'secret', maybe I even taught him 'in the dark'--I found it interesting because he was close enough to using it correctly that I understood him perfectly, and yet as a teacher I felt compelled to tell him that his usage was incorrect.  

This is sometimes a very strange problem for me.  

Though I understood his usage, I can imagine that others might not be so generous with their comprehension.  I actually believe that some people would outright refuse to understand him--if only because my student has a slight accent.

If someone told me, about my usage of English, No Michael, you can't say it like that, you have to say . . . . .  

I would have to get my degree illuminated, apparently.  :D

So, fog.  Hmm.  I'll have to think about this.

Otherwise, it's been a quiet winter.  I've been working a lot with my dreams--it's been years since I really worked with them.  I can't quite think of anything else like it, but there is a skill to dreaming that, once lost, must be entirely relearned, as if it had never been learned.  You'd think, maybe it would be like a language: I haven't spoken Spanish in decades, but after a month in Barcelona, it'll all come back.  That hasn't happened with dreams.  First I had to build back up my ability to remember them, and now I'm sharpening up my awareness within the dreams.  

Maybe I am actually physically changing my brain???  I can't think of why else I would have to go through a training phase for a skill I'd already developed in the past.  I'll never forget how to play guitar, but of course my fingers could get slower.  

Maybe that's a misleading metaphor.

--

a brief excerpt from the initial forwarded link, a brilliant parody of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

Fog-like Sensations

by Michael Frayn

(According to some sympathisers, the reason why drivers on the motorways failed to slow down in thick fog recently, and so crashed into each other in multiple collisions of up to thirty vehicles, was simply because the authorities had failed to provide illuminated signs explaining that the fog was fog. This is a situation on which Wittgenstein made one or two helpful remarks in a previously unpublished section of Philosophical Investigations.)

694. Someone says, with every sign of bewilderment (wrinkled forehead, widened eyes, an anxious set to the mouth): "I do not know there is fog on the road unless it is accompanied by an illuminated sign saying 'fog'."

When we hear this, we feel dizzy. We experience the sort of sensations that go with meeting an old friend one believed was dead. I want to say: "But this is the man philosophers are always telling us about! This is the man who does not understand--the man who goes on asking for explanations after everything has been explained!"

(A sort of Socratic Oliver Twist. Compare the feelings one would have on meeting Oliver Twist in the flesh. "And now I want you to meet Oliver Twist."--"But...!")

. . .

696. Imagine that the motorist said: "The trouble is, I can't see the fog for the fog." We might understand this as a request for practical information, and try to answer it by showing him the definition of "fog" in the dictionary. To this he might reply: "I can't see 'fog' for the fog." We respond by putting the dictionary an inch in front of his eyes. Now he says: "I can't see the fog for 'fog'."

. . .

It Wasn't Me

I am thinking about the movement of the mind.

When I am alone and without distraction, my mind produces an object for its own attention.  My first impulse is to call this object a thought, but that is too singular, too steady-state.  Better would be to call it a thought-complex.

I am alone, the room is quiet, and some thought-complex fills my mind.  Here it is.  Now, what do I do with it?  It is dynamic.  It contains tensions within itself.  It wants to change, so it does.  I now see a new face of the object--this is how it happens.

I am interested in something that happens often enough, at least to me, that I'm a bit surprised that I've never read about it.  I should think this is a common experience, and yet it is strange--if you think about it.

I am often amused by what my mind does.  My mind entertains me ...

(There seem to be two basic ways this can happen--either the thought-complex moves in a surprisingly bizarre/humorous manner, or it transforms, in a seemingly prosaic fashion, into some ridiculous new result.)

... the mind surprises itself: the thief uses his left hand to pick his right pocket.

[this is why I love writing fiction]

And to actually make it exciting, the thief had to pretend that he didn't know if there was anything in the pocket in the first place.

I am obsessive also, for better and for worse, and maybe not everyone is like that.  I can run a phrase or a thought or a melody through my mind over and over, for hours or even days--I'll keep working at it until I get it right, which means I'll keep working at it until I discover what right is.  But this condition of self-ignorance, which is required if the mind is to surprise itself--the unexpected irruption of an old memory: a smile long forgotten.  If I did not expect it, then how, or why, did I retrieve it?

The mind contains many voices: I am only one of us.

I am playing with this idea, and I have no idea what shape it will be in when I finally put it down.  And yet, there is nothing else at work here besides my own mind.  My mind cannot predict what my mind will do.

---

Of course it's impossible to actually talk about this.  Or I could say that I will only ever be able to talk about this, but I will never be able to say it.

---

Could I force it--just to prove myself wrong, for the hell of it--and compel my mind to move along a preconceived track?  I really don't think so.  Maybe.

---

After hours of solitude, some ridiculous thought made me laugh, and the sound of my laugh made me think.  I hadn't spoken all day.  The sound came out of nowhere, somewhere around dinnertime.

It broke the spell, and cast another.  This.

So, if the mind is simultaneously both the comedian and the audience, then what is the joke? . . . this is the way to the construction of a Holy Trinity.

I read something like that somewhere.

So went Saturday afternoon.  It was bright and cold outside.

Transported, Rapt

When the divine light shines, the human light sets . . . and this is what happens to the race of prophets.  For our reason leaves home at the arrival of the divine Spirit, and at its departure the former returns.  For it is not lawful for the mortal and immortal to dwell together.  Hence the setting of reason and the darkness around it beget ecstacy and god-given madness.

--Philo of Alexandria

Dream Another Dream

I'm transitioning out of the imaginary world I've been living in, and this post will be a sort of real world confirmation of that shift for me.

I've completed a readable draft of Yesterday's Sirens, which is the long chapter in Pilgrims Dream concerned with Orestes Herpetulian and his misadventures with the Herd (giant, mutant rats with weird psychic abilities) in the Fresh Kills Landfill, aka the Dump.  I still have a few notes for revision, so there are still a few drafts to go, but I'm pulling my imagination out of that world.  There is no more imaginative work to be done there.  From now on, my only thoughts on Yesterday's Sirens will be issues of craft.

I feel a sense of relief and freedom, even as I'm a bit saddened to think I'll no longer be running with Orestes & K and the rest of the Dump crew as they deal with the Herd.  I went deep into their world, and I've lived with them for a long time.  (Orestes will continue in the rest of Pilgrims Dream, but he will be transformed and in another context.  K is done for now, but he's been running in my imagination for about 15 years already, and I'm sure he'll be back around somehow.)  I can't really explain what it's like, if you haven't experienced it yourself.  There's an entire world in my imagination, the world of the Dump and the people who work and even live there.  I've been building that world for a long time.  I've dreamt in that world.  I've watched it change gradually.  So now it's time for goodbye, and probably not a moment too soon.

The chapter is basically about how Orestes' life falls apart.  He goes all the way down to nothing, and doesn't even have his own sanity by the end.  It's a strange thing to keep in your head for an extended period.  In the context of the novel, Yesterdays Sirens is a chapter, but in itself it is the length of a novella (20,000 words) and could stand on its own.  Now, my imagination is hugely important to me, and for that reason I respect it, which means I respect the dangerous power it can have if not handled carefully.  The truth is I put myself out on a ledge with this chapter, and Yesterdays Sirens isn't a story I'd tell if I didn't know what comes after, about the reintegration and uplift to come.

An experience this weekend confirmed for me that it's the right time to leave.  I went to see a performance of The Caretaker by Harold Pinter--I didn't know too much about the play and went based on my admiration for the theater company putting it on.  It turned out to be about a drifter getting on in years, moving from place to place, and he's taken in by a couple of crazy brothers who have a sort of derelict building.  They give him a bed, and that's all: it's not like they're trying to reestablish or reform him. You get the feeling it's the guy's last chance--he won't be able to hustle his way on the street much longer, and he's already far gone enough that he's not going to get help from anyone else.  But the brothers turn on him and kick him out.  The play ends.  I thought, Jesus Christ.  Watch a man lose it until there's nothing left to lose.  It'll stop your heart.  The play has the same basic arc as Yesterdays Sirens, and the correspondence was difficult for me to confront.


Then, later in the night, in a bar at a birthday party, there was a man with a guitar.  He didn't seem to have a friend, and he approached every group in the bar strangely.  He came uncomfortably close.  It was like he forgot how to talk to people.  At one point, he was playing a song at me, sort of forcing it on me, and then he broke off and went to the other side of the bar.  I thought, Thank God, maybe something else will distract him.  But he returned to me with his guitar case in hand, and out of it he pulled a decent sized piece of tupperware, which he opened to reveal the marijuana inside.  He then asked if I wanted to smoke a joint.  This sounds perfectly normal, like the sort of thing that might happen in any bar in Prague.  What I can't quite explain is that he did these things without competence--when he showed me his stash, my only thought was, Someone's gonna rip you off soon. It's one thing to pass a joint to someone you've just met, and it's another to flash a substantial amount of drugs in front of the eyes of strangers in a public place.  It was like he thought we were friends because I let him play a song at me for a few seconds.  I wondered how long he would manage to keep his guitar.  When I told a friend about the play I'd seen earlier that night, how the coincidence disturbed me, she said people don't become homeless (meaning the crazy sort of homeless) overnight, that it's a gradual process.  The guy with the guitar was no longer able to communicate with other human beings.  He was just enough in our world to talk at people.  It was obvious that he wanted to connect, but he just didn't know how to do it.  He's in an intermediary stage, so he can still manage, though just barely, to be in a bar and not get kicked out.

After spending so much time with a character who's losing it, then to see a play that powerfully echoes that, and then to meet such a character in the flesh, yes, I'm ready to move on.  I've started to feel like I'm the one who's losing it, and that's what I mean about the dangerous power of the imagination.

So now it's on to Aleister Von Dirk, the unknown writer in exile, and his search for the angelic language, which he looks for on long walks through the empty streets of Mala Strana after midnight, where he meets Sophia Aurora, that strange, beautiful woman--then the powerful shock of his meeting with Agents Grossberger and Troutslop, who open up a larger world to him--and this is perfect timing, because winter in Prague is the season of such magic.