What did your great-uncle do? For a living, I mean.
He was a photographer in the Air Force during WWII. I still have his black-and-white prints, looking down from the belly of the plane on bombs falling, the German landscape far below. The pictures are sandwiched in a book in my highest cupboard like the ghosts of ghosts. Of my other great-uncles, I can’t say. I wish I could have heard their stories. I like to imagine that at least one was a veil maker, threading bobbins in his loft workshop, occasionally remarking that across cultures the veil is regarded as a separation between worlds. Though this old metaphor is tame, I believe, because it posits a seer and beyond that are both passive. The closer you move to such a gate, the more you find yourself changed. With faint and subtle waves the beyond beckons you into itself, each peek ever so slightly recasting you into its own image, so that you might know it as it is, which will never be a matter of distanced apprehending.
When I was eight, I went to a birthday sleepover at a friend’s house in a pod of suburban homes. After nightfall, alone for a moment I wandered out to the pool, looked up at the stars, and was overcome by the experience of boundless, eternal love. It felt as if deep in the background of my mind a gentle hand had been softly tuning the dial of a radio for years through static, and with a shock had stumbled onto a station of such immense power that every inch of me was flooded with the sound. It was disorienting, and made no sense at a gathering of eight-year-olds cooking Rice Krispie treats and self-organizing into hierarchies based on bangs. I lacked words, though it was clearly of a different order than the lawn and redwood-chip landscaping. This difference lodged inside me on a cellular level, so that I’d never again be able to walk under the night sky and not know that love is of infinite extent, and somehow await its next tune. But I was eight, I cried a little and yearned to know it better. The truth of an experience reverberates for years, through the whole of our lives undampened, fresh and unparsable, hinting at what we will become.
I didn’t realize, of course, being eight, that my life began to change after this moment. A curious energy seeped through my days at school and extracurriculars, which seemed on the surface the same, except for a drive that only grew stronger in my expression as years passed. Now I was on some level directed, moved, by this peculiar, mystical love, in ways I wouldn’t understand or be able to speak for decades. That’s just how it was. I didn’t think much of the love because I was swimming in it. No one else knew quite what to make of it either. And how could we make sense of such things, if the only conversational order is tidy, redwood-chip landscaping.
From nowhere the fabric of everyday sense parts under a night sky by a pool, and there are glimpses like this so luminous you might feed from them for a lifetime, yet they are only another hint. They seem ephemeral. The weave turns; more of them compile here and there in our days, drifting, maybe without much recognition. I didn’t realize that I was being changed. There is no convenient explanation handy for where I started, where I’ve been, and where I’m going. I’ve read the books, studied the theories. Western psychology is an office park of the mind, and it has constructed an antiseptic bubble that doesn’t track to the wilds of the real. Clarice Lispector wrote, The explanation of an enigma is a restatement of the enigma. In art we mirror the mystery. We seek to make better mini-enigmas, never to explain them. This was my first taste.
Amazing. All I really want is to “track to the wilds of the real.”