Awake: An Inner Autobiography by J - HTML preview
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THE BLACKENING
Considering the illusory nature of the boundary of these artificial constructs we call internal and external reality it was appropriate I was lying on the couch ill that day after a sleepless and agonizing twisting contorted night of alternating fever burning sweats and arctic chills, turning on the television and watching panicked and shaken loops of the once invincible symbols of technocratic and economic supremacy and dominance to be speared by its own progeny of steel and engineering and fuel - flames of hell, tiny figures leaping from the struck tower as if from a Tarot card, collapsing into apocalyptic clouds of dust and rains of concrete, ruins of a conceptual structure that ceased to rule from that day forward.
Also considering the illusory nature of the boundary of these artificial constructs we call internal and external reality as the shadow of the war darkened the globe so did this next stage of my life darken as well.
It is an art in this life to know when to hold on and when to let go, to engage and disengage, one’s life responding naturally to the changes and rhythms of existence, to harmonize perfectly with the continual beginningless endless process of forms that never resolves. Unfortunately, when it came to this dimension of my life, it was artless.
Entranced by the radiance of that inner star, furiously pursuing it through the ascetic deserts, the dangerous jungles, the breathtaking mountaintops within me, the external situations that organized and sustained this form such as work, relationships and shelter were held on to, engaged with longer than their natural cycle, eventually exploding spectacularly or dissolving wearily, and that time of my life would be no different, blindly following that sleepwalking pattern.
When the situations that organized and sustained this form disintegrated into nothingness yet again, on a whim this time I decided to leave town and move to a city where my parents lived now. At the time that decision just another random choice in a random meaningless universe, but in retrospect was destined, foreordained, a grace.
As the world was cast into the fire of strife, the hearts and minds of humanity clouded by its hellish smoke, the periodic illuminations of the previous period had ceased, the inner light snuffed and smoldering.
No matter how exquisite those revelations of the previous stages were, in the end they were just a visit, just an experience, no matter how cosmic the expansion, how profound the visions, how incredible those alternates of reality and consciousness were, I was always returned back to that I, no matter how clever and dramatic the escape from the prison that is the self, that bliss of freedom was always caught and hauled back to the cells of division, to its ignorance and suffering, its waking sleep.
That eternal return became eternal disillusionment.
Though the instances of rapturous and ecstatic illumination had ceased during this period I was still consuming words voraciously, but now the piles of books on esoteric subjects - those symbolic machines I was using to try and understand the dimensions that were being illumed within - were replaced by piles of books on war and power - symbolic machines I was using to try and understand the world of strife and fire now unfolding without – and sitting in the pub drinking pint after pint reading fiction about figures all alone in the world, marginal, dissolute.
And while all the other mediums of creative expression had ceased their operations, I still wrote and worked on a novel that never went anywhere except into the void, the currents of creativity, previously strong consistent and forceful at times pounding like a tsunami or hurricane of the most sacred and divine energy, had been reduced to a trickle.
That period was not totally devoid of inner knowledge and insight, however. But instead of being bathed in the light and ecstasy of ascension, now the inner insight and knowledge would be found in the shadows and agony of decent.
I called you from this closed door office sterile room on my break worried – you answered with that voice I would move mountains to hear just once again – thankfully it was just a stomach ulcer that made you so weak, unable to stand up, why I took you to the emergency room earlier that day -
They had prescribed you some pills, had to change your diet –
But during the examination they had found something else -
What was it?
I want to tell you in person -
Just tell me. Is it serious?
When you get here -
Mom, tell me otherwise I'll just leave work and come over there now.
After silence.
She told me.
My heart broke.
And reality dematerialized into an infinite void of darkness.
-
After shock - the world cleaved in half - the swelling of tears hidden by hands and walls -
The naked intensity of being then softened by love hope and resolve.
-
Sitting in the cafeteria sipping on bad coffee ordering food uneaten, in the visitor's rooms flipping through old magazines, the occasional exchange of small talk a farce compared to the thoughts and emotions so heavy and dark to be almost visible.
-
Get a glimpse of you naked with your new scars.
Not conscious after the surgery for now precious days.
You tell us to come sit down beside you, pull us into you, closer to your heart.
They discovered when you were opened up like some slaughterhouse beast that the cancer had spread throughout your body, throughout that betrayal of nature.
And?
Just tell us.
The doctor said I only have five or six months to live.
Don't. Come here. Come here.
Come here.
-
Soon she was up again – but not without aid for the body frail – the infinite ever renewing will to life to exist its power blinding powerful and pure -
Needed no crutch.
-
We spent my days off from work together doing the most mundane activities usually walked through sleeping with open eyes now awakened to the precious fragile and poignant nature of this living mystery we all have somehow appeared inside - pushing you around in the wheelchair you needed to use now due to the side effects of the treatments and the monsters rapidly multiplying within your body - shopping for a hat for your chemo thinned hair patch head –
looking illuminated as you are doted on by the softened hearts of the shop girls – posing in front of the mirror until you found the one that was just right, perfect -
-
For a while you were lit up with the hope that the treatments that had concentration camped your body had somehow transmuted your dark destiny into the light of life – the supposed primacy of matter over mind placebo inverted and you were able to walk unaided again – it was almost as if how we understood reality was wrong and the body instead existed within the mind -
But the fiends within you were too strong now - armies of them rampaging terrorizing and pillaging scorching the world inside of you losing ground collapsing and soon you were back in the bedroom that was now your palace and the bed which had become your throne -
Where you played beautiful music that you had listened to, but never heard before -
I came home and you had somehow moved your chair onto the balcony so you could look at the reds and oranges and yellows that you had looked, at but never seen before.
-
From somnambulant winter to the renewal of spring the procession to summer should have been the light and warmth that is life, but as nature became fully awake the false cells within my mother - those blind infernal machines - continued their process -
Late night emergency room visits waiting always among the wounded of this crude and violent reality -
Another part of you broken down, another part of you fallen apart – another part of you patched up like a garment, repaired like a machine and wheeled back home to your bed of sleep that never stops tossing, mind that never stops turning -
-
All of us cannot control it, maintain it, restrain it - the crushing pressure as if I was pinned underneath ruins of clouds of dust of concrete incredible unbearable -
Frustration anger helplessness hopelessness despair being directed through every proxy - for how can one direct it at the true cause - that cold inevitable merciless void?
Cannot control it, maintain it, restrain it the softening waters of realization regret apologies embracing love.
-
She turned increasingly silent.
Attention turning inward with the pain unbearable.
Unable to turn away from the approach of non-existence.
From those thoughts.
As did my father and I.
The silent monasticism of our exteriors a lie.
The storms of our interiors the truth.
As we fed and carried and consoled you until there was blood.
We took you in again and this time you stayed.
We stayed sitting in those chairs around you in that room that was hell.
You turned and tossed in the agony of that body which was lost.
Already left the outside world.
The wailing and gnashing of the person who you shared a room with vocalizing that inferno inside you somehow -
I call family and let them know they should come. This is it.
-
Angelic beings in human form move us to a private room of space and white and windows large of light.
My father my brother and I surrounding her as it should be.
As close to silence and peace as could be.
Until the breath that was not followed.
One last touch and one last kiss.
Nothing could stop from breaking.
Outside concrete gray wet glistening from the shedding of the clouds.
Even nature wept.
-
One night I had a dream.
Not a dream of that peculiar dreamworld, the locations and topology that is the same upon every return, the dream world for whom our waking reality is just an expression of their anxieties desires and fears.
But the dream that has the same relation to other dreams as visions do to thought.
My mother, looking more joyous that she ever did on this plane, a form of impossibly beautiful otherworldly jewels, yet still unmistakably her.
Did she even have a voice, as we conceive of it in this fragile and perpetually impermanent world of matter?
Yet she somehow told me, let me know that she was all right.
That she loved me.