Dear Grasshopper,
There is something undivided in our ancient memory, something so true it cannot find earth pure enough in which to plant itself. Man, cursed and blessed to remember it, toils in the stony soil to make a Heaven of his Earth, but reaps endless dualities: good versus evil, order versus chaos, free will versus determinism. All assume fixed points in his mind, but the only thing fixed is the pointer in the moment of his pointing. The dream he clings to is not a lie, yet in attempting to objectify it, the mere existence of a point of view distorts all but the aspiration.
The world of matter appears less muddled than our thinking about space/time, though at the molecular level it is Heraclitus’ river that always looks the same, even while its water of whirling atoms changes with each glance.
As physicists Bohr and Heisenberg concluded in their ‘Copenhagen Interpretation,’ subatomic particles have no discrete reality, only probability, until a measurement forces them into a particle state. Von Neumann and Wigner went further by arguing that consciousness was needed to collapse the wave function.
In Kantian terms, there is no actual “there” there until one is framed in perception.
Schopenhauer agreed with Kant but saw two critical omissions in his premise: First, Kant left open the question whether “things-in-themselves” could be described as “things” at all. If space, time, and causation are limited to perception, and do not describe reality as it exists in itself, then objects, which require these contextual categories, cannot exist as distinct differentiated things in themselves outside perception either, for there can be no space, time, and causation to separate them. Objects are not objects in themselves but perceptual representations of something the observer can neither divide nor divine as a relational idea: what Schopenhauer called (outside our space/time/causal vantage point) an undifferentiated noumenon, or Kant’s “thing-in-itself.”
Kant’s second fault lay in believing that this thing-in-itself was entirely unknowable. He failed to realize that, though lacking a rational understanding, we nonetheless ARE this noumenon in point of fact—and what can be said empirically about our inner nature is that we “will” and are “willed.” Our very reason is a project of willing, of wanting mastery, for good or ill, over the reality we construct.
It is I, as a perceiving subject, who imposes duality where none noumenally exists. This impasse is appreciated when, like David Hume, I go to look for myself in my thoughts and find only the thought of myself looking for myself. I must be a perceiver to have a perception, but I can never know myself outside the act of perceiving myself as a perceiver. Mind and matter, hence, cannot be separated as phenomenon or operations, so what remains outside the puzzle is only the insatiable will to deconstruct the puzzle: And this ‘will,’ by Schopenhauer’s reckoning, is hardly an object of our possession. It is the oroborus that devours itself in pursuit of its own dissection.
This noumenal realm may be thought of as the last refuge of a scoundrel, in that the great philosopher sought to vilify its one definable attribute—will—as blind and rapacious. And yet, by the same cloak of invisibility, the fruits of will (art, music, and fellow feeling) were deified as acts of omission in being miraculously spared the cowcatcher. (Duality, even of a dissociative order, undid those mindful of its perils.)
We no more dissolve into madness at this paradox than did Schopenhauer. Through the firmament of our intuitions, we perceive more than we generalize in concepts, and conceive more than what strict experience provides. Whatever barriers remain in our limits to knowledge, they do not extend to separating us from our fundamental essence.
We perceive reality as being something outside ourselves, but this is merely an accident of our birth. As children of Prometheus, we pay a price for having stolen fire from the gods, and for having forsaken our heavenly identity to forge another: Amnesia is that price, every time we go to look for ourselves in our thoughts. ~Omar
Aiden stepped into the house in a perplexed state. Static and snow on the television screen heralded the arrival of electricity, although his start in seeing it was checked on remembering Brae’s earlier failed attempt at channel surfing. The bluish glow nonetheless threw a new disquieting architecture on the walls, one upwardly shifting in dark columns of shadow.
The sofa lamp was turned on to reestablish equanimity, but the bulb was faulty and sputtered out. Simultaneously, a brief image jumped across the flickering TV screen. He approached the set with apprehension and tried to raise a better signal; the same tantalizing snippet of an image darted away with each click of the dial.
Seizing the channel knob firmly, it was turned with measured pressure in hopes of stitching together a complete picture, but the incremental bursts were too short to yield anything intelligible.
The resident gave up and switched off the nuance, unwittingly plunging the house into darkness. He moved toward cloaked steps in a vague heading, and found in its bower a heaven big enough to take on incandescent feelings he had neither the will nor conceit to call exclusively his own.
Pulling himself along the banister, more by reverie than careful deliberation, he rounded the corner at the top to enter his bedroom. A second lamp was attempted on the night table and, succeeding where before he failed, light produced the edge of the wavering bed.
Indescribably tired, Aiden removed the tuxedo and sat for a time staring at his socked feet. He was shot-through with more emotion than he could bear, and between the dizzying alcohol and nameless woman, it was doubtful sleep would come because he welcomed it. A glance at the table clock revealed a flashing twelve. It would need to be reset in a moment of greater sobriety than was presently had. He muddled a minute or two around the room before peering out the drapes.
The view, like the previous evening, was black but for the same beacon-of-a-window across the way. Pondering the coincidence, he spied what must have been the same woman moving back and forth in front of curtains. She resembled a blurry microorganism until she dropped, pointedly, into an austere chair. The occasion of happening upon her felt scripted, like a performance had been delayed on his account. It was only when she reached over to turn off a lamp that the voyeur realized she was nude.
At the precise second her apartment went dark, the light behind Aiden succumbed to the impression. He skirted a bedpost and hit the rim of the lampshade; shaking fingers turned up a loose bulb in the socket—
The sleep medication sat on the same table as the rekindled lamp.
He sobered briefly, long enough to park the barricade chair, used the night before, in front of the bedroom door. After returning from the bathroom and swallowing a pill with water from the tap, nothing was left between him and begrudged sleep except the lamp switch.
His careening head had no thought but the pillow, yet in looking through the dark veil, the red eye on the camcorder was spotted hovering over him. Like the television downstairs, it was inadvertently switched on when there was no electricity. If the machine was programmed to shut itself off on reaching the end of the tape, then perhaps power was only recently restored.
Aiden tried to crawl out of his sinkhole to deal with the complication, but merely succeeded in knocking the water glass off the table.
As the glass rolled away on the floor, he blearily saw it, and even thought about retrieving it, but was too mired in drowsiness to care. It was directly banking in the hallway, and dropping down stair steps, which was impossible given the obstacle of the blocking chair. Because logic offered no barrier, the descent stretched far beyond the point where the glass should have hit bottom, and with each additional pop on hollow wooden tread, an echo grew…
Vertigo compelled the sleeper to look to his feet for assurance. They carried him along a footpath between two shadowy buildings. He pushed into an open courtyard, under a radiant cerulean sky, and was safely planted among Purcell College’s gothic architecture. Fragrant flowers bloomed everywhere: jeweled pansies, deep carmine mallows… Unsure of his destination, the dreamer walked unhurriedly to savor a rush of feeling. It was romantic sentiment remembered from youth, where manifestations of natural beauty produced in him a languid, catatonic state.
A shadow soon set a chill at his back, and each time it lurched in his direction he turned to find a spire blocking the Sun. Undeterred, he ambled on until his mysterious companion swooped down to set a riotous breeze loose in the trees. Sycamore branches heaved; their bat-like leaves nearly took flight. This eruption did not mask, entirely, the thump of a teetering stone gargoyle perched on a nearby ledge. With pollen-dusted brow, the grotesque loomed indifferently over the commotion, though Aiden sensed another pair of eyes, higher up, intent on his movements.
He tried inconspicuously to glimpse what followed him, to find its image in one of the many windows of buildings, but its form always molded itself to an expectation, like a low cloud. His gaze again dropped to his feet on comprehending jagged leaf shadows crowding the path. Crescent-shaped slivers of dimming light separated them, indicating through their mosaic that a solar eclipse fast approached.
Something else merited attention in a faraway window: a bird trapped in blinds. Or was it a beckoning hand? By the time the searcher reached the ledge, the disturbance had evaporated. Nevertheless, a little girl was some way fixed in the dark, transparent panes, and nestled in the growing womb-like shadow.
The solar eclipse, nearing totality, coaxed the last acre of campus under its umbra. Aiden turned into its twilight to see the wino materialize under a towering oak. The pirate swung his metal detector like the stick of a sightless man, yet he peered into the sudden starry sky with frightful expression—he could see it.
The dreamer, wanting to see it too, reached down to pick up a rock and hurled it into the air—
T H U M P !
The empty drinking glass struck the bottom of the stairs. Its shattering defined the outer edge of an event, and also a faint cry.
Unaware he had been asleep, Aiden glanced at the flashing twelve on his clock. He tried to close his eyes again, but light from the open doorway caught in his lashes like splinters. The chair had scooted forward, nearly to the middle of the room, and revealed how the lamp downstairs was trying to come back on. To his greater consternation, the Daedalus Monet painting now rested against the baseboard in the hall floor.
The resident threw off his covers with newfound sobriety just when the living room lamp resubmitted to darkness. He crept to the doorway and discovered, to more dismay, glass shards underfoot. The unfastened attic door creaked from a cold draft above, leading him to surmise that a gust from the open skylight shot down to unhook the painting and shatter its glass cover. Yet nothing so straightforward explained the repositioned chair.
Aiden braved the second staircase. Switching on his studio light, a stab of icy air greeted him with more lamentable news: Loose schematics—drawings unknown to him—blew over the floor. The suitcase, discovered earlier that evening, had toppled from the edge of his worktable to unleash a whirlwind of ashes and papers.
The skylight was hurriedly closed and the spilled contents examined. Charred pieces of old canvases composed most of the debris, but there was also a twine-bound bundle of blueprints, which appeared to have tumbled from the lid compartment of the case. Given the original occupant of the house was a professor of design at the college, this was likely work of his, though why documents of historical value to the school should be so casually mislaid was strange.
Being too sleepy to deal with the mess, the tenant brushed off the stack and returned it to the suitcase; the loose pages could wait until morning. Handfuls of cinders were also hastily heaped into the lower compartment; this unearthed a piece of unscorched paper materially different from the schematics. The handwriting was the same:
Here sleeps Sublimity. The Eternal-Feminine. ~Daedalus Monet
The peculiar proclamation was replaced with everything else, and the lid clasped shut. The make-do urn was interred in an out-of-the-way corner of the studio before heading back to the door.
Aiden switched off the light behind him and glanced down the multiplying stairs; the fickle lamplight again flickered in the living room; a faint, indistinct voice accompanied it. Instantly the light faded, as did the summons, but not before leaving the indelible impression of a figure’s shadow on the floor.
The mortified man scanned the dim room below (or what little of it he could see) and listened for footsteps. He thought he spied a cloak, or white gown, flung it over an armchair, or believed some lingering aspect of luminescence clung to the downstairs upholstery. This must have been his mysterious companion from the party, who followed him in and hid downstairs while he prepared for bed. Did she intend a midnight assignation? A surprise? The suddenness of this proposition was more troubling than any thought of a ghost.
Aiden knew she was the tipsier of the two, so it was probable she signaled him with the faulty lamp switch in a childish attempt to rouse him from bed. When this failed, a skirmish was made upstairs in search of his bedroom, where she bumped the blocked door and knocked the painting off the wall. Embarrassment left her no choice but to bungle back downstairs. Perhaps she believed that, in a house so large as this, he lived in a shared residence, or dormitory. It was something a college woman would be accustomed to in these matters, although there could be little clandestinity where she knocked things off walls.
He was left in fitful doubt of this reasoning some seconds later. No pitter-patter of mismatched shoes (or bare feet) took to the stair treads; no giggle (which by now he would have readily identified) rose to meet him. He strained to recast the situation, and concluded it was all an unfortunate confluence, where an unfamiliar house, faulty wires, and a chance speaker calling from the open courtyard outside inspired the worse speculation. These excellent deductions notwithstanding, his curiosity was insufficient to send him downstairs to fuss with the lamp, or to confront a drunken woman, so he returned to his bedroom.
More out of fright than a precaution against sleepwalking, the chair was again propped against the closed door and he crawled into bed; the attitude of his body in the still-warm sheets made him feel like he never left the comfort of them. His narrowing gaze stayed fixed to the slit under the door where light from downstairs continued to shamble. The irksome lamp eventually succumbed to the defect in its connection, and after a while this welcomed development reinforced a belief that whatever spirits were afoot in the house were settled for the night. The reassuring silence eased him back to the edge of sleep, and the surrounding shadows, hesitant at first, began to drift in and out of his failing eyes.
Chapter Seven, Section Two/ Back/ Contents Page
Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.