Like Candles Illuminating A Cave

Russ, I recently had an unusual experience while immersed in reading through some Deathling Crown Lottery text and backstories. There was a lot of material—large blocks of print, hours and days of reading. One evening after I’d turned out the light, I began to notice a strange effect. Something different was happening. The various texts I’d been reading were starting to “come alive.”

 

Though I had already closed my eyes, I was still “seeing” pages of text. The sheet I envisioned, however, was moving—“crinkling and glimmering,” as if some “ingredient” was being revealed to me, something buried in the laminae of the (imagined) paper itself, as it were. It was as if little flares were dancing up and down, or candles flickering in a cave.

 

What was happening?

 

It felt like a borderline alchemical experience—in modern times. Was that the shadow of the paper itself, yielding secrets, hidden yet emergent? Or was I seeing into the writing itself, which I found to be excellent—funny, interesting, portentous. And since it also felt like I should not forget this experience I was having, I sent you a note:

 

“Meanwhile, and in case you didn’t already know it, Russ, there is a lot of really rich and surprising material in both the “FC-DCL Transition" file and the DCL Original Document file. The writing is excellent. It’s loaded with imagination, crawling with creative “spontaneities,” as Thomas Berry called them—like tiny little sparks or beacons, or flying hearts, or fishes’ eyes … luminosities of the darkness itself, unknown messengers. The words that once we wrote, now open up and illuminate the assembled text, as candles illuminate the space in a cave. A really subtle, luminous, serpentine spirit glides over, and attaches to, this “material.” Or does it emerge from the text, as if spawned by it? In any event, it is a creative spirit. Perhaps like the Creation-image in Genesis, where the Spirit hovers over the water, brooding. I never really saw any of this before, in our text. Now the whole thing is starting to glow.”

 

Many years ago I had a similar experience.

 

I was reading two books by the French Islamic scholar, Henri Corbin. The titles were: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, and Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. I was interested in reading them because of Corbin’s mastery of the phenomenology of angels. I had been working on the notion that what people used to call “angels”—messengers in Greek—and how they could appear as figures and phenomena in dreams—including, or especially, animals in dreams. I had intuited that angels were virtually universal, autonomous psychic factors with real effects in the world, above all in synchronistic events, which join psyche and world.

 

Ultimately, Corbin did not disappoint.

 

At first, though, I found the writing oddly complex, but I wrote it off to the French academic tradition. Piling up convoluted clauses until they resembled the Watts Towers.

 

Then, on several occasions I noticed this “phenomenon”: I would open Corbin and start reading, especially the second volume: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. After about ten or fifteen minutes, and with no intentional prompting from me, the page would open up further, and suddenly I would see dozens of white wings fluttering, as if white doves were boiling up out of the pages. It was like a meta-communication from the creative background of a “magical” text, and I had to admit that the ghostly effect of the fluttering white doves came from something Other that seemed to have found its way into Corbin’s words.

 

To me, such experiences validate the sense that dreams, fantasies and creative fictions can—in ways simple and rare—bear vital life-energies along the path to their arena of realization. It makes me wonder how much concerted imagining would be required, if we wished to situate such “new” intuitions within the orienting framework of our creaking civilization. And would such imagining be directed, or “free”?

 

You’ve written about such things before, Russ, as for example in your essays, Dream As Angel and The Fictive Purpose of Dreams; and we’re touching on similar, resonant issues in Volume Three of our Trilogy, Dreams, Bones &the Future: Endings. Similarly, in Fex & Coo, in the Scene where Owl and Jaz “celebrate quantum foam,” you wrote this lovely poem for a fictional book of old Scottish poetry—an antiquarian gift from Owl Man to Jasmine:

 

The great stones set upon one another

Hide the threads of connection, those strands of mystery

That time has wrought forever outside man’s intentions

That time itself dare not reveal but to those minds

Likewise wrought in the piecing together of soul stones

Beyond, beyond the piping sounds calling kin to task

 

—Paco