Response to John’s “The Madness of Scene 7”
John, many thanks for your post. I trust readers to get your point, that you’re hitting the nail on the head, as it were. John’s post is complemented and expanded upon in his recent Academia article entitled, The Liquefaction of the Real available at the Academia website: https://www.academia.edu/84588893/The_Liquefaction_of_the_Real_2022_?email_work_card=title
John’s sense of what is going on in Scene 7 is very clear. At the same time, it must be said that none of what appears in Scene 7 was intentional in the sense of “trying” to do what John says. It was not purposeful, intentional, or the result of an agenda. What Paco and I have done in the course of writing together in this odd way for the past few years is to continue to deepen our openness to the “Other” as the source for what comes into play in what actually gets written down. From this perspective, even to claim “authorship” is dubious. But, then, what is going on?
As I read John’s post, a memory was forming that finally became clear. I was recalling reading Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books. I encountered this book sometime in the early 80s and it was one of those books that “gets through” to one’s core—
at least it was for me. The idea of nonexistent books was not new, of course, but what stands out now in my memory of all those “crazy” reviews, was the first one. It was a review of A Perfect Vacuum. In it, the critic asserts that “…A Perfect Vacuum turns out to be a tale of what is desired but is not to be had. It is a book of ungranted wishes.” The critic argues that the only counterattack against such a view would be “…the assertion that it was not I, the critic, but he himself, the author, who wrote the present review and added it to –and made it part of –A Perfect Vacuum.
This is a good example of the liquefaction of traditional literary standards, with Lem asserting the value of “something else.”
And what comes flooding into my memory now is a poem I made such a point of in Psyche Speaks, Lorca’s Cassida of the Rose
The rose
Was not searching for the sunrise:
Almost eternal on its branch,
It was searching for something else.
The rose
Was not searching for darkness or science:
borderline of flesh and dream,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
Was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
It was searching for something else.
Lorca knew—
as did Machado
Between living and dreaming
there is a third thing.
Guess it.
I was really struck by the discussion between Russ and John and by Lorca’s line, ‘In between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it.’ What popped into my head was the third thing was ‘dying.’ We spend all our lives doing those three things but most never see this clearly, I think. While on a biological scale, seamless continuity between living, dreaming, and dying is obvious. Cells are in a constant mindful cooperative state of living, repairing, dying, and regeneration. And these processes are all intimately connected and balanced. Even when there are extraordinary temporal stresses, the cell has well-used and little-used mechanisms to assess and repair the damage and then go quiescent. What would happen if people moved fluidly from living to dreaming to dying? The living seems to gobble up all the energy, the dreaming little, and the dying none and is to be rejected at all costs. But this strikes me as a crippling and nearsighted understanding of how dying fits in. It is the dying that for all of our lives, right up to the moment that process becomes irreversible, leads to the living. In the epithelia layer of the colon, some 10 billion cells are replaced daily. And where to these new cells come from? If one accepts that ‘dreaming’ and ‘dreams’ are not only the connection points between the living and the dying (which Russ, Paco, and John all seem to be saying) but the generative wheel that removes any of the constraints that are bound up in space and time, then one could ask what cells in the body ‘dream?’ I say it is the ability of mature, differentiated cells to revert back to pluripotent stem cells whose inherent ‘knowledge’ lies dormant and pregnant with the entire repertoire of human evolution, and when called upon can reproduce any cell and tissue they want; even go back in time to an embryonic state as if to say that time does not really have any specific direction. I once heard Stephen Hawking say at a lecture (when he could still speak in a garbled voice) that he once thought that before the singularity, time would go backwards. But he went on to say how limited that view was and that he was wrong to even suspect there were only two irreversible possible point of motion – forward and reverse. And that this was all wrong and a byproduct and limitation of how humans think. We don’t have the imagination to grapple with the astonishing versatility of simultaneously living, dreaming, and dying. Both John and Russ ask what would happen if inner and outer reality begin to lose their separateness? Good question. As a biologist I say that the cell by itself and all its counterparts does not make any such distinctions between inner and outer reality. The inner reality is always there, at beck and call when the outer reality (e.g., damage, etc.) needs it. There is no separation to lose or rediscover. There is no search for the guilty or the absolved. There is no time discordance between what is now and what could be. So what would happen if people could see and feel that living, dreaming, and dying were not separated by anything real? Then they would know instinctively what the rose searching. They would know what that ‘something else’ was.
I’ve been enjoying this intensifying series of comments—in all their warps and woofs—by Estela, John, Merrilee, Russ, and Tony. [Note the alphabetized format.]
The posted dates are precisely specified, but, for me, they are dissolving, turning to water, under the crush of such intense and speculative ideas as are flying back and forth. Maybe that’s one thing you mean by “fluidity,” John.
Yet for some reason, I want to take what seems like a different tack, to describe an experience I had ten or twelve years ago:
I had been working on a home re-modeling project—to re-design, re-build and re-tile a laundry room counter-and-cabinet array. Nothing unusual. A typical DIY project, especially the tile part, which requires what I call “a sledge hammer and a velvet glove.” That is to say, hard, heavy, and arduous work (the sledge hammer), combined with a delicate touch (the velvet glove). Rough, but also fine.
This was the second day of the project. I had cut, fit, and placed the field-tiles in their fresh mortar bed on the new countertop. I was tired, and needed to take a break while the mortar was setting. So, I went outdoors and sat down on a small wooden bench against the side wall of the garage. My intention? To do nothing.
It was a mild afternoon—warm but not hot, a gentle breeze but not windy. Pleasant. A good day to take a break from work, and relax.
I looked at the layered mountain ranges in the distance; the closer branches of the juniper trees as they stirred in the breeze; birds flitting in and out of the trees; clouds drifting overhead.
Suddenly, a black beetle landed on my left wrist, near a freckle. I rotated my wrist slowly, to get a better look at it. The beetle was sleek, trim, and elegant. Along the perfect outer curves of its two black “elytra,” or dorsal wing coverings, there were two thin, bright orange stripes. The colors and shapes were beautiful. I imagined that an old Egyptian wood-carver had hewn those elytra to perfection, with an adze, out of black ebony planks.
The beetle, a thing of beauty, remained in place, unmoving. Then I began to notice a change in what I might call “the atmospherics of the afternoon.” Everywhere I looked—near and far, high and low, on every side, or, as the Spaniards say, “a los cuatro costados.” Everything seemed to have fallen into place. Everything made sense. My destiny, my purpose in life. I understood why I was on Earth. All was clear. Every particle in the universe was in place. The universe itself made sense.
I was having an epiphany. It was like Lorca’s “duende” that Estela has mentioned.
It lasted about twenty minutes, then slowly faded.
The beetle lifted its elytra, and I watched as it flew away. Maybe it was an angel.
I sat for a while longer, savoring the moment. Then I got up, went back inside, and resumed working. But things were different. I was different, as if restored to something I had been all along. My place in the universe was secure, and I was free to follow my fate to the end.
Who knows why that moment occurred just then? Was it the beetle? Its utter, insectoid stillness? Was it my fantasy of the Egyptian wood-carver and his ebony planks? The perfection of the outer curve on those wing casings? The perfect orange stripes? The strange sense of visitation by a beetle? Was that spot on my left wrist some portal to another “plane”? Or what?
Am I the only one who experiences such things? People rarely talk about epiphanies. Why? I know for a fact that the experiences don’t require membership in any church or religion.
What I can say is that I have had several such experiences over the years, and they all seem to belong, like landmark events. I even witnessed a beloved cat having an epiphany while it was being “put to sleep.” That’s true.
Do our human epiphanies relate to our animal nature?
I don’t know if this association of mine relates to the ongoing conversation or not. But I do know that “something about the conversation” brought that memory to mind.
I wonder why?
Reply to Paco
I would assert that memories are not random (or even if they are, we should reformulate what random means and the surprising significance it may convey). That sentence violates “the King’s English,” as I recall the favorite phrase of my 7th-grade teacher Mrs. Brand. She would tell me in the most stentorian tones that the length of my parentheses exceeds that of my primary phrase. These judgments would be pronounced with the utmost gravity. I think this worked because that is where I learned grammar.
So, Paco, your memory belongs and belongs absolutely in some central way to the current discussion. What it is that sparked your memory is not at all clear, and perhaps that’s, even more, the point, that things belong even if we do not know why. What I do know, is that when things become more “fluid,” the boundaries baring the free flood of memory begin to break down. And that is why I now experience something I read just this morning, from a letter by Henry James Senior to his sons Henry (the author) and William (the psychologist). He wrote, “Everyman who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no mere farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential death in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.” That phrase, the obscene bird of night, was used by José Donoso to title perhaps the greatest Spanish American novel. I hope you can feel the sub currents that reveal the belongingness of this quote to the discussion.