this little essay begins with my typical play of ideas over the usual topics before falling into a dream --
Closing The Circle
Mastery of the Game of Life means knowing how to close the circle. The circle of delusion, the illusions we choose as our interface to reality -- the language and the metaphors we choose to live by -- must be finally closed off, and not publicly insisted on like the evangelicals who try to convert all the world in order to finally convert themselves. Their worm of doubt is ever biting at their heart, but what is doubt to us?
Beethoven, amidst his regular panic attacks and bipolar lamentations filled in the void of his loss of hearing with this advice to himself: "Live only in your art." The discouraging plateaus and maddening regresses don't seem like progress, but they are. We're like corn, we grow in spurts. Grounded in necessity, we nevertheless know how to set all the habits in place to manage life as a game, a quest, a journey -- ultimately as a triumph. As animals, we work, as humans, we love, and as gods, we create.
Man has but one mouth, and that is doubt. Our teeth are skeptics, they analyze the world; with astringent words we scrub and clean the claims of the world. Amidst all these saints and strangers, we create gists and piths, for what lacks divinity deserves no respect: if it can't inspire you, why pursue it? The world drama is propped on inconsistencies, and the grand spinning of the earth, which is driven by money, driven by love, driven by workers who are chasing after dreams when the truth stands right before them. The layering of games is what makes the world the world, the heteroglossia of languages, each evoking its own world, so that we come together and share worlds, or fall apart and abandon worlds. Do we not define an attitude for ourselves of feelings and mood tones? A Belief for ourselves, the types of things we think about? A personality for ourselves, the style of our communication? A character for ourselves, or patterns of behavior? If we are so apt in creating a self for ourselves, many personas and at their core a unique I, then why should we be shy at finally closing the circle and giving ourselves fully to the game? Why remain so amphibious, going from one world to the next, from the world of work to the family sphere to the world of politics, to the circle of friends? Can we not reduce all these to one overarching game, a game that feeds all our goals into the same dynamic of play? For our games are like our moods. Moods are arteries -- different moods go to different organs, though the same psychic energy is the blood of all. In the same way, the ground of all games remains the same for each person: at his heart of hearts and core of cores, he is a unique Necessity; and all the universe satellites that.
The options are determined. The choice is free. We find as we kneel and pray to our God a higher divine whispers a jest into our ear; we wash our face and look into the mirror only to see our reflection winking at us. We doubt or rage or plod along like good citizens, paying our taxes, mowing our yards, raising our kids, and pretending our petty shortcomings disqualify us from the best -- but there is a part of us that never believes this sort of thinking. In your most secret place, in the abyss of the abyss of your innermost hide; there she is. Ama tempts us to good.
Stupidity finds it comfortable to obey; and the pious everywhere command us to obey. But there are rumors among us, and stories. The bad men from the past were redeemed by posterity. And we say among our intimates and enemies that what a man professes to believe before men is nothing, especially where mere believing counts already as a virtue, but when a man reveals his true beliefs, he himself doesn't recognize them or own them. They are the dream unknown behind the dreams he owns.
"Silence and soft feet" are American Indian virtues -- and I think they would be useful in catching this dream. Little hints we didn't want to believe, little voices such that the pastors warned us were the whispering of demons, but they sound to us not only a bit impish, but ... like our own childhood voices. These dancing pixies have the voice of our own ages of childhood, of our friends, and our imaginations. They tell us that the pious are the greatest deceivers. They say that what is easiest, not what is best, will always be most popular. They tell us to prize the grateful lover and warn us that anarchists are easy to herd. They point out those others who are always preparing to live, and chide us that excessive preparation is the dragging of feet. They agree with the world that frenzy cures depression, but they ask us what wisdom is in that depression. Work makes worth, the world insists, but its oh so dull, is it not? You wonder at what these pixy whisps are up to, in their vague tittering. Vagueness is open to any interpretation: will you brush them away or follow them down?
Figuring you are probably half mad by now anyway, you follow them down. Only on stolen time is intensity white hot, and you are all eyes for the darkness and all ears for the silence. "Dark as the bottom of a well is that dream I face in the mirror," you murmur as the craggy path bottoms out over a limpid pool. You look in its surface as if looking over a great womb, and are hypnotized by the ripples of its water, ripples moving much slower than they should. The pixy lights are in the trees now, watching down as your own thoughts start bubbling up. You see now why the great philosophers were bachelors. You know now that the bigger the picture, the harder it is to see. Your forgot that divinity is in solitude.
There is a tickling of déjà vu in your shadowy reflection in the limpid pool. You realize now that you've been here before, countless times, many a night, only to wake up and remember some nonsense instead. You wonder idly if you will forget the vision again, but some assurance in your heart knows that what is learned is never forgotten, even if it is only the guts that recall. "Faith is evidence" you say, and realize that all the faith in the world was only an indirect troping at the true faith of faith in yourself. You ponder over the mystery that in the end we all get what we want, and through that we also get what we deserve. All the strings you had sighted, leading up to Providence, Chance, Fate, and History, you see falling inward as intertwining cables to some umbilical cord. You think of what infinite infant could lie in these words, and your skin chills with the realization that you are speaking about yourself.
Don't let selfishness get in the way of your own self interest, you think, and with that the other players in your life for a minute dance over the surface of the pool. Muzzle your love and hold your tongue. Do not call out to them. You are speaking only to yourself, before this intrepid mirror. Do as you will, your reflection advises. You wonder at what your will is really after in all the world. World systems, they fritter away above. You had slipped into the affect systems, and they gave you layers of moods and energy -- just as a man feels elated that his sports team won, feels proud of his job, feels tense over his marriage, feels angry at the president -- all those games and worlds of games going on simultaneously as layers in his heart.
And then she is before you, Ama, as your projection of her, the full divine as best your mind can represent it, an image terribly personal and uniquely undeniable, and very anciently known in ways that scares you. She says that dreams and gods alarm the superstitious but the fantastic nevertheless gives you a space to think. She is behind you in your reflection, and you don't turn around. It is as if she were underwater. She shows you your potential -- the cosmic infinitude of your growth. But you are lulling like an infant. She shows you the unlimited triumphs and worlds of creation your mind and soul are capable of. She says that in the mansion of ideas, she has left some doors open for you. She will wink at you in your studies. You at last murmur, "I'm a hundred people and a hundred creative jisms -- each swelling and ready to burst at its time, so that life is ever one thing to the next, and me occupied and fascinated through it all!"
As you drown in those waters, you feel you are within a chrysalis, your body transfigured. You break your bonds, and spread your psychic wings; you flaunt the skies, you call to the earth and say "I have avoided your disciplines -- butterfleight is my joy! -- I eat the sweetness of every flower!"
But in the distance your hear Ama's everywhere voice cooing "The rose has risen, the height of the dawn!" and with that you awake. You try to remember what you were dreaming, for it feels as if it were infinitely important, but come up with shards unrelated to any of this.
The circle completes -- eternity is born. Your life is the same as it ever was, every day the same, the duties and the chores the same, but behind that, everything is gloriously -- different!
\ ~@M@~ /
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