Gospel & Universe ⛱️ Señor Locke
Aura 3: Inside Van Gogh’s Ear
Junctions - La Strada e Pericolosa - Only Disconnected
⛱️
Junctions
The past is but a dim memory, as I sit under the Guanajuato umbrellas, numb to the encroaching dusk. If the mind is a palimpsest, old journeys leave their marks. But the present journey is the one that’s making its impression.
Now when I look down into my bilingual copy of Aura I look instinctively on the English side. This is where the tracks and junctions of language have been laid inside my brain. I use the passive voice, have been laid, as intentionally as I can — and as ambiguously as the gods of language or the happenstance of evolution created it. From Sumer to England, in cuneiform or Roman script, we've been communicating since long before stylus ever cut into clay, or picture was ever sketched on the cave walls of Lascaux or Altamira.
So, English is where the tracks and junctions of language have been laid inside my brain, with the iron rails taking the present sensations to the deeper impressions, the station house that turns these sensations into the impressions of meaning. Because the present terminal (where I start and end this journey) is the topic of sense impressions which lie deep within us, influencing us whether or not we're aware of them, I’m tempted to write the station house turns sense impressions into the permanent impressions of meaning. Deep, hidden meanings. Yet the meanings shift and slide, sometimes popping up when I least expect them, and sometimes submerging themselves for decades. Or forever.
I read the English side, yet the Spanish side is always there to remind me, at times even accuse me, of reading Fuentes second-hand. The English language is a strange one, placing within us a chaotic relation between sound and letter. For instance, how can we, who have nine different ways to pronounce ough (rough, plough, through, though, thought, thorough, cough, hiccough, and lough) and who pronounce knight as if it were nite, ever appreciate the strict correlation of letter to sound that characterizes Spanish? What happens when we roll the R in our minds when we read the word terror? Do we feel the way Mexicans feel, and do we think the way they think, when we read the word terremoto, earthquake? Can we switch tracks and go down the rails to Fuentes’ terminal, or do we go off the rails somewhere between rolling Rs and different sensibilities, which have been hammered into our brains by the food we eat, the culture that surrounds us, and the geography and history that make us who we are?
But with enough practice it could be done. Partly, at least. The difference between languages here operates like the differences within a language, by contrasts and subtleties that we can largely grasp.
And yet that’s only the preliminary problem, designed to get the mind ready to go down a more uncertain track, one which is worn dangerous by use or levitating at breakneck speed on magnetic waves. To wit, how can we hope to understand the way people in places like India or China think when we can’t even recognize or pronounce their symbols hanging on the telephone wire of devanagari, or the characters loitering in the mini-dramas of Chinese?
Left: Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara Expounding the Dharma to a Devotee: Folio from a Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita Manuscript, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Source. Right: Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring, Ma Yuan (1160–1225), National Palace Museum. Source. Both from Wikimedia Commons (cropped slightly by RYC).
Nevertheless, to the dismay of Derrideans, who have turned the indeterminacy of language into an agnostic doctrine of disconnection, one side of the page mirrors the other, however imperfectly. Even the mode of writing, which has gone from the clay tablets of Gilgamesh to the iron-pressed letters of Gutenberg, has survived intact. And this for one reason: all scripts are human concoctions, ingenious systems of turning impressions into expressions, with the express aim of connecting one human mind to the next. Only the most naive of writers imagines that the connection is direct or perfect. It’s by nature mediated and imperfect.
⛱️
Looking down at these manufactured, translated letters, I see that events are unfolding quickly inside 815 Calle Doncelles. Because of his urges and his French studies, Felipe is about to enter that time-crumbling portal smack in the middle of the old town, climbing up the staircase and venturing deep inside our lady’s chamber.
What interrupts and distorts communication isn’t so much the nature of transcription or translation as it is the layers of idiosyncratic impressions that we all carry around in our brains.
As soon as I imagine Felipe approaching Calle Doncelles I also remember that he’s only blocks from where the two ladrones relieved me of my wallet and camera. In the background, Bob Dylan sang Once upon a time you dressed so fine / Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
To be fully acquainted, therefore, with the idea of power or necessary connexion, let us examine its impression; and in order to find the impression with greater certainty, let us search for it in all the sources, from which it may possibly be derived. — David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 7.5 (1748)
In my brain I’m recreating, through the alchemy of black strokes on white paper, the image of Felipe climbing a dark wooden staircase into an apartment. Once his eyes are accustomed to the light (and once I’ve recreated this scenario within the chamber of my brain, disassociating it from a dusty market in Mexico City), Felipe finds that the apartment isn't only the haunt of an old lady. There's also a fifteen year-old, green-eyed beauty by the name of Aura padding silently through the corridors and into the bedroom. The word Aura translates perfectly into English, for she’s both a person with a name and a person with a shadow, a trailing soul that only Jung could fully appreciate.
⛱️
La Strada e Pericolosa
Felipe looks deep into the green eyes of Aura. Seduced by her body and her green eyes, he’s pulled into the vagaries of her soul, which shifts and takes flight, and is replaced by another soul, aged, longing for her departed lover, Consuela’s dead husband General Llorente. Felipe’s desires urge him up the steps and into the bedroom, but what he finds there is both ecstasy and nightmare: the arms of a green-eyed nymph and the body of a crone. Because of his conflicted desire — half longing to and half escaping from — Felipe can’t bring himself to ask, Is Aura a succubus? Am I her incubus? And are we both puppets of the old crone?
Felipe climbs the rickety staircase, like the Phoenix to the pyre of the sun
in ecstasy we come, like Daedalus in his element
a drum, a drum, Macbeth doth come
like a tourist on a bus from the heart of the city
to the temple of the sun
succumbing to the magic of the old witch who animates the nymph
who brings Felipe to his pinnacle in the light
of his dark heart
through the dark art of his own fiery sun
until the old duality kicks in: too much life leading to death
his body climaxes and from his pyre in the sky he falls
archetypal like Adam, like Icarus into ashes
and into dust
like everything we know or ever knew
al fuego se van y en cenizas se convertirán, dirán
like the beauty of the old towns, the elegant cafés
and the cigars stubbed into the ashtray
in the zocalo of Guadalajara
nicotine meeting alcohol in the blood
while one city away he sought a similar release, but found only and the dusty street market with the ladies drinking beer on a step, while two ladrones…
while the Fox and the Cat approach Pinocchio in the dark
after Grillo Parlante, the Talking Cricket scolded him so amply and with such elocution, like some Swiss ex-lover, reinforcing some primal fear that the poor little marionette could only try to resist
Grillo Parlante appears like a glow worm on the castle walk, telling Pinocchio that the road is dangerous, La strada e pericolosa...
don’t venture further, don’t go out alone into the forest of the streets, like Goodman Brown into the mass of black trees
No te vayas al bosque sin mi ... para no sufrir...
La strada e pericolosa...
⛱️
Once you’re out there, and you spy a bonfire in the middle of a clearing, you start to wonder, Is it really such a good idea? But you dismiss this fear as a hindrance to direct experience of the world, as two ladrones sit down next to you, one on each side, and one of them gently slides the sharp edge of the blade next to your stomach
Once your're out there in memory you remember tambien your Swiss Romande ex-girfrield warning you not to go to Istanbul, something about human rights, yet you thought of it as a hindrance to direct experience, all the time unaware of Hume and Locke and the lesson of the senses, so you said to yourself, like Pinocchio, it's just a story invented by parents so you don't go out at night. The same old stories, Grillo! Even if there were assassins in the forest at night, I'd run away from them and that would be that.
And then there's an old movie, Midnight Express, which you saw but afterwards couldn't unsee, because you hadn't read Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and now you can't switch off the connection to the impressions made in a room in Istanbul, after you were beaten up and made to sit in a little room while they thought how to get money from you, while your friend Harb gave them his watch and while you thought of drowning somewhere between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.
And yet somehow they didn't find your money belt even though they searched your pockets, somehow you were set free, and stumbled up from the bar hidden beneath the street, up onto the sidewalk, amazed that you’re actually alive after all the dumb things you’ve done.
You look down the streets that lead upward to Haj Sofia and downward to the Sea of Marmara, yet what you’re really looking for is a first first-class hotel with a reservation desk. What you’re really thinking of is a plane that will take you back to England and policemen you can trust. Where you can feel safe.
⛱️
Only Disconnected
On the pedestal of Ozymandius we build our lives, and pretend to be heroes. We misapply literature, imagining that since we’re the protagonist of everything we know, we’re somehow also the hero. Thank God they invented anti-heroes.
While we’re busy inside the screening-room of the brain — with its impressive backdrops and scaffolding, its screenplays and special effects; its heraldic forms and national colours leading us on to victory — we tend to forget that there are as many screening-rooms as there are conscious beings in the universe. And it’s very difficult to make these conscious beings feel what others feel; to make them see the world as one.
Each being bumps up against the other, yet all we have are fingers and words to make our worlds known to each other. There may well be mystics whose vibrations scream through our heads, but we can barely hear them. The wave patterns are invisible, the sounds inaudible. Are they waves or finer particles? All we have are our fingers and tongues, and we don't know what to say.
With our dyed or typing fingers we create worlds to offer to the other sentient beings, who are wrapped up in their own worlds, finding their own ways to make themselves understood. With our mouths we speak the same language, assuming they understand it too. But mostly they don’t, because even within a single language there are a dozen dialects. And within those dialects, each person understands them differently.
True story: I chalk up the end of a friendship to the variant pronunciations of the word Salisbury. One evening, after dinner and drinks, my Nordic friend corrected my pronunciation of the word Salisbury. I told him that in North America there are two ways to pronounce the word, and that both are correct. He then insisted that the correct pronunciation of Salisbury is Sawzbree, not Salsbery. I responded with a tom/ay/atto argument, both at the restaurant and later with maps and charts online. Yet the more I made my case, the more my case bothered him. So even if we have a common language, it remains fractured and contentious, with its Queen’s English and its regional variants, its posh accents and its street slang, its ambiguities and its Derridean detractors, and all the distortions that time and space are heir to. It may be the same language, yet each of us understands it differently.
And yet, language is an imperfect solution, and not the problem — which is that there’s no direct way to contact other conscious beings. There are no nerves we can connect directly to other people. And, as far as we know, there are no wave-lengths we can synchronize with the other cerebral wave-machines that we call humans.
In meditation — or prayer or other forms of religious communion — we might do this, one mind brightening another, waves of bliss flowing this way and that, but we can't control these waves. Nor are we on speaking terms with yogis in Himalayan caves who can. All the second-hand talk of miracles and super-powers dissolves like the shroud of Turin when electrometers are set up on the altar or puja table.
When we come out of a mystical state we're left the way we came in: one circular mystery of swirling neurons standing three feet from another swirling circular mystery.
T.S. Eliot dramatized this fundamental disconnection in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prurock when his anti-hero tries to express himself but then merely feels like his nerves are being thrown onto a screen, to be examined by others, but without making any meaningful connection to them:
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
And yet perhaps my point about the brain is limited by the dependent clause, as far as we know. Perhaps our brains do emanate wave-patterns. Perhaps our DNA emits something like a viral pheromone composed who knows how, directed who knows where. This leads us back, albeit with digressions on the olfactory impressions of perfume from a dress, into the endless agnostic world of and yets and perhapses; into a world where one is so aware of distractions, disconnections, and contingencies that one is uncertain where to begin:
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Whether deep in the tunnel of words, or more widely on the planks of drama, every scenario takes place in two places: the stage of the mind and the stage of the world. The stage of the mind resembles the stage of the world in that both are constantly changing:
I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change: nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed. — David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature 1.6 (1739-40)
Two points might be added to Hume’s analogy. First, both stages are dependent on a thousand things that are themselves dependent on a million things, which themselves are dependant on a billion things. The further we look into causes for things that happen in the mind or the world, the further we extend our understanding to things that we can no longer predict or describe in a way that is solid or stable. The second point follows from the first. Because we can’t be certain about cause and effect, the understanding we construct in our minds is inevitably partial, distorted, and extensively incomplete.
The Penumbra [partial shadow] asked the Shadow, “You were walking and are now stopped; you were sitting and now rise; why are you without stability?” The Shadow replied, “I wait for the movement of something else before I move, and that something else waits further on the movement of something else before it moves. Am I waiting for the scales of a snake or the wings of a cicada? How should I know why I do one thing and not another?” — Zhuangzi (c. 4th C. BC)
⛱️
The rise of science and empiricism led us to believe that one day we would understand ourselves, but the deeper we delve into microbiology and neurology, the more we see that the brain is an overwhelmingly complex machine. In addition, each brain is different from the next in both design and understanding. It has to be this way, since the very mechanical nature of the body and mind – from differing DNA to differing geography and history — requires us to see the differing way our neurons create pathways of understanding and identity. Hume’s perspective is crucial here: he sees us not as masters of this process, but as unknowing participants in an inner and outer process (in the mind and in the world). The problem isn’t that we don’t know the nature or meaning of this process; it’s that we can’t know.
The agnostic implications of Hume’s empiricism are enormous. They also help to suggest why horror films about the occult and novels such as Aura are still disturbing, even if we profess not to believe in the supernatural world they evoke. If we can’t be sure about the world, who knows what forces might be out there? If we can’t be sure about what Hume calls “any single power of the soul,” who knows what entity might violate our inmost core? Even after the Renaissance, the Englightenment, and all the scientific advances of the 19th century, we can still imagine some dark force occluding our senses, seducing our emotions, confusing our thoughts, and possessing what we hesitantly call our souls. Our rational minds may reject this, but we’ve learned enough about the construction of mind and emotion to know that logic isn’t always in the driving seat.
Even the most idealistic of yogis, Maharishi Mahesh, admits that however wonderful samadhi can be, we can't be sure that it will always be available to us. The stars, like the tectonic plates of the world, may shift. Whatever drives a humming energy of connection to the universe through our bodies and minds may turn its current awry...
Mysterious are the ways of destiny. I cannot say, for how long in the atmosphere of the present age, we will succeed in holding on to this great and overflowing generosity of Shri Guru Deva [Maharishi’s guru, who instructed him in meditation]. I can only speak in terms of the present. I can only offer to you the dishes ready in hand today; for tomorrow I cannot promise, for, I have nothing of my own. The bulb is shining here, but the current is coming from the power house. Any time the main switch may be put off and then the bulb will cease to spread the light. Therefore under the light of the shining bulb at hand, lay out your own lines to the powerhouse and be independent and free from the fear of darkness when the light that is, chooses to switch off.
⛱️