Stepping Outside

I read a paragraph by Nietzsche and stumbled through the room, discombobulated by his ideas of sacrifice. What I'm doing now is not a sacrifice. It's an indulgence. Sacrifice washed over my generation like a rogue wave of oceanic ideology. It belonged in the past. More than that. It belonged in the movies. Beautiful women heaved into active volcanos. Hearts tossed down Aztec steps. Thousands of men running with bayoneted rifles into machine gun fire. What did this extreme behavior mean? Life on TV was safe and predictable. Life outside of TV was wild and unpredictable. Stepping outside was a sacrifice. Stepping outside of convention. Stepping outside of routine. Stepping outside of the law. There was also another word for it: eccentricity. Stepping outside the circle. Stepping outside circular thinking. Stepping outside bullshit. Psychedelia had a lot of tourists. They seemed genuine at the time. But when times got rough, they stepped back into the circle. They sacrificed eccentricity to financial security. And got jobs with generous salaries and health benefits. And sacrificed themselves to mutual funds. Mortgages. And golf.  

Destiny is another odd concept. It belongs to a world of romance and grand gestures. It’s mythological. It traffics in deities and dragons. Great operas depend on it. I don’t think there’s been a time in my life when I felt I was fulfilling a destiny. The overall, prevailing feeling has been one of drift. Of drifting. Like Rimbaud going down the Meuse on his unmanageable barge. His delirium intensifying the closer the river takes him to the ocean, his life exploding into delirious skies and bottomless nights. Oceanic consciousness. Ineffable winds. So that returning home to the farm in Charleville is an option preempted by a lust for sensation. For turbulence and movement. But when he refuses his destiny as a visionary poet and chooses, instead, a destiny of caravans and guns in east Africa, his destiny turns lethal. This is destiny as a refusal. A refractory soul. Destiny suggests fate, a narrative written ahead of our existence and waiting for us to fulfill its goals. It smells of predestination, and can easily be mistaken for an alibi.

Mysticism is where it’s at. That’s always been a fascination. I’ve even, at times, been drawn to religion. You can’t help it when you enter one of those cathedrals in Europe, or the steaming rocks of a sweat lodge. I think the words of Philip Lamantia express it well: The marvelous unveils its face in front of me. It’s alluring, like the scene in Twelfth Night when Olivia lowers the veil of her face: item, two lips indifferent red; item, two gray eyes with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth. Revelation has a libidinal energy. It has a carnal aspect.

Lamantia describes it very differently. For him, it is an incorporeal rapture, a place of radiant bliss lights and color. It’s a place, but a placeless place, not a place in the conventional sense but a place at the table of the entire universe. There are sacred places. They don’t have fences or boundaries or appear on maps. It’s not a matter of real estate. It’s a matter of dimension. Light within darkness. Absorption in the Divine Presence. Union with the source of all being. A High Paradise that dwarfs the palatial with the floating architecture of a poet’s - Lamantia’s - words, a truth beauty wisdom loveliness heavenly bliss paradise. With a view of Samadhi, and free WiFi.

I can’t stay mystical for long. It’s a level of intensity hard to maintain. You need spiritual dumbbells. An open disposition. A willingness to ascend in smoke. Transport can be very taxing.  It’s the humor of all mortals to crave comfort, security, and wildlife. A place to rest. Maybe eat. Converse with a fellow human. Smell the incense. Dig the theatrics. Admire the ceremonies. The singing of the choirs. The luxury of invisible rewards. Is there a church of Dada? Is there a cathedral for gnats? Are there mosques for moss? Is there a roadside chapel for vagabonds and repentant bikers? An abbey in Cincinnati? A basilica for silica? A Holy See for Middle C? It's not often that the propeller propels the truth at a wall where it bursts into hallelujah. The Song to the Siren. Gregorio Allegri's Miserere Mei Deus. It’s hard getting a grip on the intangible. But you can express it in other dimensions, those placeless places that call out to us like a voice in a well. Cold misty nights in late October. A new moon behind a cloud mocking its own lucidity.