Gospel & Universe ⛱ Señor Locke
Beneath the Aonian Mount 1
John Locke - Umbrellas
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John Locke
The smell of coffee hits the nostrils and the sound of the music from inside the cafe hits the eardrum, mixing with the sound of the odd pedestrian shouting to a friend or a mother getting their kids back to school. The real world comes in through our senses, and gives us the sense that the outer world is always there, despite what we think of it. There’s the world and there’s our version of it.
In some ways Locke’s vision of a material, sense-driven psychology is depressing. Before it, we could believe that a book could be magical, despite the black and white pages and the spine. The Odyssey could tell us about the gods and about how Fate directed their actions on a cosmic stage. The Bible could tell us about the beginning of life and about the Power that lay behind the operations of the universe. We were eternal spirits, hovering over a staging post en route to a golden mansion in the sky. Magical books once told us the meaning of life.
The golden books that once flew down from Heaven became so many black and white copies on Gutenberg’s press. They joined the new scientific books, which had nothing — and therefore everything — to say about the old religious books. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), Theory of the Earth; An Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe (1788), On the Origin of Species (1859). Editors wrote their names on the front cover, and one edition was demonstrably different from the next. All of this made it hard to believe in things that we can’t verify.
In the decades before Locke’s publication of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), most readers could believe in the opening lines of Paradise Lost (1667), where Milton places religious ideas above human experience. Readers didn’t have to make great leaps of faith to understand Milton when he coaxed the “heavenly muse” to inspire his song, “That with no middle flight intends to soar / Above the Aonian mount,” so that he may “assert eternal providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.” But now, after Locke & the Enlightenment, and after Darwin & the Scientific Revolution, writers have to take great draughts of blind faith before they can make such an assertion.
This general uncertainty makes us uncertain about the specifics too. Once we doubt the Grand Scheme — the biblical account of God’s purpose in the universe — it’s easier to doubt all the other schemes people devise to explain human nature, the nature of human knowledge, and the course of human history.
How, for instance, could anyone take me seriously if I claimed to have invoked a heavenly muse, to have soared above Popocatépetl, and to have sung the truth about Mexico, from the Olmecs to Vicente Fox?
Fumarola del Popocatépetl (octubre, 2012), 4 January 2013, by Luisalvaz (from Wikimedia Commons)
How is it possible to write with the grand certainty of Homer and Dante when all I can see, and all I can therefore be sure about, is the dark beauty of the waitress’ eyes? How can I think about Beatrice and her guidance to Heaven when all I’m reminded of Bhartrhari’s couplet, “The clear light of man’s discernment dies / when a woman clouds it with her lamp-black eyes.” And of Byron’s description of Donna Julia, and how “The darkness of her Oriental eye / Accorded with her Moorish origin / (Her blood was not all Spanish, by the by; / In Spain, you know, this is a sort of sin).”
I can shake the notion of a heavenly muse, but I can’t shake the impressions left by the soft and dusty light of Guanajuato as it filters through my eyelids and turns her image upside down into two images on my retinas. The images are then sent, as if on double rails, on the magic of electro-chemical impulses, into my brain. Somewhere along the way, all of these sense impressions turn into a train of feeling that exists somewhere deep inside me.
My body, made of wheat and wine, becomes the receptacle of light that reflects off another body, glowing in the late afternoon sun. The air turns the wheel that grinds the wheat that rises in the oven. The wheat and the wine fuel the body, with its stomach and eyes, its thoughts and its feelings about dark eyes and the windmill of the soul.
I see her inside the café, across from wall-sized versions of Van Gogh’s famous paintings.
She’s sitting at the counter and looking down at a large book. A shaft of sunlight cuts through a window, slanting across the room. This light, that has descended from the sun, that has drifted over the sacred peaks, illuminates her breasts, that hover above the pages. Occasionally they rest their heavy arcs, rounder, wider, on the countertop. This pushes the mass of tissue and milk duct upward, and lends a roundness to the smooth skin along the rim of her Madonna t-shirt, rising almost to her collarbone, upon which lies a silver necklace. She has coal-black hair, from which dangles a set of diamond-shaped jade ear-rings.
She gets up, makes herself a coffee, and sits down again. A few grinds from the espresso machine have flown onto the pages of the book. She continues looking down at the glossy pages, her breasts lifting and falling on the countertop. Fine coffee dust floats all around her. She stretches two languid arms, exposing a fine stubble rippling over the inner muscles of her underarms.
I also see that she has a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on her left forearm, just where the junkies back home stick the needle. Even with her halo, she still looks like Madonna Louise Ciccone.
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Umbrellas
Looking past the white canvas umbrellas into the blue sky, I remember sitting only a week ago at my coffee shop back in Vancouver, next to the baskets of closed umbrellas. Thank God for airplanes. It was dark by 4:15 and the girls wore puffy jackets, or raincoats down to their knees.
I wonder how I got there, on the corner of Broadway and Granville, staring up at the cold mountains. I think about my present trains of thought, and of all the planes and trains that took me to what I now think — the way I think about the street, the frosty mountains, and everything stretching into white. It leads me back in time, to campfires and hockey practices at 6 AM, to ski hills in Fernie, nights under the pool table with Marilou, and forays into Paris, Quebec City, Fribourg, Geneva — in brief, into many ways French.
