by Jerome du Bois (1500 words)
My recent post on Harold Bloom reminded me of this extended, interpretive review -- okay, it ends up as a secular sermon -- I wrote three years ago of his book Omens of Millennium. The opening is dated, so we'll skip it, but the main questions -- Just how real is the imagination? And why is the average person's imagination so impoverished? -- seem just as relevant as when I first put the words down. So let's pick it up . . . here:
It seems, as Bloom points out, that imagination may be, could be -- or used to be -- more than imaginary. Seekers such as shamans, Sufis, Kabbalists, and Zoroastrians often found access to an order of reality somewhere between mathematics and mystical ecstasy -- the realm of Hamlet and Vishnu, the original home of Einstein’s equations and Schrodinger’s Cat and the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Remember that these people lived before we divided the world into compartments. For them, says Bloom, “what we now call psychology and cosmology were one.”
In here, out there, or both? We can no longer tell. Maybe we all are both keys and keyholes, fixed in the door between everything we know and everything else. Quantum mechanics, our most rigorous science, firmly holds that door open with experiments that demonstrate signals sidestepping the speed of light. Bell’s Theorem rings its crazy truth every time they split a meson.
But wherever it manifests, this “angelic world” is a dangerous place, looming with metaphors strong enough to engulf us. From there the seekers summoned splendorous angels, astral bodies, sudden avatars, and prophetic dreams.
Bloom suggests that our world-weariness, a sense of belatedness, and our saturated infatuation with irony, allow only domesticated versions of these images to appear. But it wasn’t always so. The pastel bureaucrats that we call angels couldn’t hold a candle to Mohammed’s Gabriel, who swooped over the terrified prophet like a moving mountain of fire.
And suppose our space aliens are fictions. Have you asked yourself why we have imagined them as grey, dessicated ciphers, with heads like inverted teardrops and supersized RayBans for eyes? They strike me as naked ideas, brains on a stick, looking wasted because nothing’s wasted. (Artist Mike Kelley, a serious student of the subject, interprets them as apparitions of evil children.) Why these stark and forlorn images? They’re way too simple to compete with even the dated patrons of the cantina scene in the original Star Wars, much less Shiva, Vishnu, Kali, or Chango.
These figures -- angels to avatars, astral bodies to aliens -- have grown in popularity the last ten years partly because of the Millennial clock, now rewound, and because they each point to an even older image. This primal image is of a Primordial Person (male and female), which appears over and over down the ladder of time, like an angel “unfallen and qausi-divine,” from the shamans to the Sufis to right now. It flashes down the ages, outlined in holy fire and ringing Its changing names like bells: Anthropos, Adam Kadmon, Ahura Mazda, Garment of Light, Metatron, Resurrection Body, Hermes, Angel Christ, The Shekhinah. It ever blazes and burns like a mighty brand.
Now, look around the culture. Do you see this image anywhere? It occurs to me that we have a recent -- and domesticated -- annual incarnation of the Anthropos, already seventeen years old: Burning Man, the anarchic bacchanal which agglomerates every Labor Day weekend on a sun-blasted alkali desert in Nevada. A 40-foot wooden skeleton, the Burning Man, often tricked out in blue neon, looms over the teeming eccentricities he has drawn to his circle. On the last night he is ritually burned down to the ground.
What desire draws twenty thousand people out of our fat and happy land for four primitive days of heat, chaos, and abandon? One answer lies in the Burning Man’s genesis: In 1986 Larry Harvey burned a life-sized effigy of his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend on a California beach, with a group of sympathizers to witness this ritual of riddance, this immolation of the evil worm of jealousy and brokenness. Significantly, enough people were scanning the culture for just this image to boost it over the threshold from obscurity into visibility, and now into ubiquity. The Burning Man grew over the years, in every way. People were drawn in droves, as Catholics to bleeding Christs, or others to the Weeping Elvis of Memphis.
But the backstory is just as important as the image itself. Larry Harvey and his world broke apart; he was torn away from love, from its feelings of wholeness and sense, its assurances of the future. He was fated, perhaps, to summon a burning man as a symbol of loss and anger.
Squinting through a clumsy poet’s eyes, I would say that the Burning Man, as the faint echo of our oldest image, tells us he knows we live in a broken world. He cannot save us, heal us, or teach us. We must save ourselves. He says we can. He merely bears witness that he has heard our ancestors whisper, “We are All in the One.”
Yet we know, especially post-9/11, that we are not One, nor All, not yet and far from it. We feel the hollows and shallows in our guts, but we have forgotten how to reach that far inside . . . We need to tear open a space where, as Sufi scholar Henry Corbin said, “the soul is not the witness of an external event but the medium in which the event takes place.”
Because a forty-foot statue is not a figure that fills the sky, and a runty pale alien is not Shiva in bejewelled glory, and our angels take the forms of ministers, not mountains. We have stunted our imaginations to tame our fears, and to get along. But reader, count the cost, and measure it by the depth within you. Harold Bloom is one of the last champions of the imagination ablaze (or, with Camille Paglia, one of the first of their return). He reminds us that we still have access to the angelic world, if we can only summon the will.
CODA: I have tried this, riding intermittent comets of passion, for over thirty years -- through prayers, meditations, ecstacies, vision quests; through the shanks of the night, life’s daily grind, and the flickerings of soul in all those faces -- I have tried to access the angelic world by launching my ideas, longings, tears and my very heart upward and forward to draw the lightning.
Now, after staring into Adam Kadmon, and brooding over and shuffling images in my small corner of our shared mindscape, I imagined only these poor sketches:
-- Perhaps our deepest yearning is to return to a gnosis: that is, a knowing deep in our bones, a galvanizing somatic satori -- that we’re tight with God/the Divine, the Divine with us, now, always, and forever. If it’s a Return, then the past has a broken heart. We ache now, and feel homesick, because we sometimes see some giant fissure that broke our identity with Infinity. We wonder what happened back then that cleft the Rock of Ages. And we have only torn and ragged snapshots of what to look for, so we gather around the Burning Man, the Weeping Virgin, the black hole mandala of physics, or the fascinating media Medusa.
--Maybe we were the Word, now at a loss for words. Images -- lurid, multiform, transforming before our eyes and seething with meaning upon meaning -- have replaced words as our touchstones.
-- Maybe we are Lucifer, God’s heart, who chose self-immolation to make us all real; he scattered his atoms widdershins for billenia, but now, through each of us, he seeks himself again; he longs to belong again, to be gathered back into one Body, so to return to God. (I owe the seed of this notion to William Peter Blatty.)
-- Maybe William Blake brought back yet another truth from one of his frequent ecstacies:
God appears and God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.
So maybe the face of your beloved is one of the nine billion names of God.
--Or perhaps we were never broken. Maybe we humans got smart and visionary real early, in the morning of our selves, and we created a common dream. Bloom says, “Our dreams are less individual than we are.” So now, yes, I see it now, by the light of the Burning Man -- we shall form an Unfalling Angel from an uncanny incorporation, a constitution of souls, but without giving up our I-ness. And this Angel’s scintillating outline may be the fractally fertile Web/Net, the world’s infant Body Electric with its seething hive mind -- which, in the fullness of time, we shall awaken and use to clothe ourselves in glory as the nine billion blinding stars of the Garment of Light!
Posted by Jerome at July 21, 2003 08:53 PM | TrackBack