by Peter Onelio.
Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our mind confronting them.
—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
—William Blake
I’m on lunch in the Sugar House part of Salt Lake City. “Sissyneck” by Beck comes over the radio of my work truck. Having moved to Utah from Texas earlier this year, I look out over the Oquirrh mountains to the west which are hazy because of inversion season.
Feeling rather constricted and burnt out lately things have started to become monotonous, but with the season changing to winter, the new layer of white powder dusting the Oquirrh range has given them a fresh face. When the sight was still new a few months back I’d get a spike of elation, but now didn’t feel any oceanic feeling or sense of wonder—however, I did feel that perhaps I should have, and knew after a few months the mountains had disappeared from right in front of me, which often happens after I’ve been in one place for a while.
I’ve noticed very few things can hold up to continuous observation without vanishing somewhat, which is a strange notion: the more you see something, the more it disappears. Consequently, it takes a keener eye to see new things in old vistas than was needed to initially see their beauty, much like the Beck song. I hadn’t listened to “Sissyneck” in a long time, most of the freshness Odelay first had had disappeared having listened to it ad nauseum from its initial release until my early twenties, to a point where I couldn’t see the auditory mountains as much any more (though I will say the album does hold up well, revisiting it in full recently). This brings me to a deeper explanation behind my jaded attitude.
In the book Challenges in Humanistic Psychology, the author Colin Wilson contributed a chapter concerning his concept of the ‘robot’. He describes the robot as a laborsaving device we develop by training ourselves tasks with ‘willful intention’, whether it’s reading, typing or speaking a foreign language. We learn the task until it becomes subconscious and goes into our muscle memory. The drawback of the robot is that it can hijack these processes to our detriment, to the point where we cannot be truly present in the moment. Once pleasurable tasks like taking a walk in the park, listening to good music or making love have now become perfunctory, by rote. Wilson further explains that times of dread or inconveniences can rattle us out of our robot-induced stupor and makes us aware of how much freedom we truly have, this he called the “orgasm experience.” This realization is the true self-seeing through the mechanical actions of the robot.
I’d like to think, however, that oppressive or inconvenient experiences are not always necessary to awaken us and give us fresh eyes. The salacious writer Henry Miller had such a moment of realization in Tropic of Capricorn while traversing theater stairs to his balcony seat just before a show began. With the shift of the theater going to darkness and the show beginning, an inner shift occurred.
Miller writes:
“I could feel the curtain rising in man. And immediately I also realized that this was a symbol which was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if he had been awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man, would have mounted the boards. I didn’t think this thought—it was a realization, as I say, and so simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that the machine stopped dead instantly and I was standing in my own presence bathed in a luminous reality.”
Miller does an eloquent job describing a moment like this. Though it does seem that these transcendent experiences are largely ineffable, oblique and likely to occur while coming across some mundane patch of earth.
This prompts me to put forth a bit of my own theory, so I’d like to recall a memory from early 2017 while I was living in Colorado. In this recollection I went with two visiting European friends to the Garden of the Gods. Arriving there one late afternoon, while trying to figure out which trail to take we asked a random lady hiker walking by which path she’d recommend. She pointed out a couple trails on our foldout map, then, before parting asked if we had noticed the Indian head that was part of one of the large, jutting, sandstone rocks. We looked to where she pointed and saw the face she mentioned, which was in profile, in erosion-carved relief. The features of the Indian face were unmistakable, coming out clearly as the westerly sun made them more pronounced. The hiker was a regular at the park, and every time she went she always consulted the Indian’s head to see whether he looked sad, angry, happy, etc. This would tell her something about her own mind and the general mood of the day. I remember the woman said the Indian had a “blue complacency” this time around. After sharing this easter egg with us, we thanked her and continued down one of the trails.
I mention this not simply to say imagining faces in the Oquirrh peaks would bring back that original orgasmic experience, but that making it a point to see something fixed in a different light on each revisiting is a creative act in itself. It could have been the lady hiker had such an orgasmic realization when she saw the head in the rock for the first time and consulting it each visit was her way of keeping that realization alive. It could also be some passerby had pointed it out to her and she never had a deep realization or satori, yet the rock spoke to her in such a way she became religious about this ongoing, silent conversation. I think what is significant is that the rock seemed alive, even if briefly, subject to say something new.
Not to get my wires crossed though, there is a difference between playing pareidolia games and being struck with clean and clear moments of aliveness like what Wilson or Miller wrote about. What I’m proposing is to keep life alive in as many ways as possible. At the very least, perhaps seeing a patch of rock as a mood ring is simply a good surface level exercise of freshening up routine when things become flat, allowing the mundane to say more and something different on each return. We do this unintentionally with the random patterns in the bathroom tile or shadows, like when the sun comes through tree leaves like black ground clouds. If we were to continue down this line of thought we could enter into spiritual speculation: reality as a living oracle, quantum flirts, methods of divination like tarot, the I Ching, haruspicy, etc etc. (but we won’t go that far, though I will include a brief story of synchronicity soon).
Returning to Wilson’s robot essay, he admittedly sees the challenge that when the robot-consciousness is abated, the real ‘me’ surfaces and comes to an orgasmic realization of the beauty and freedom and presence of life, but what does one do with this newfound sense of freedom? What threshold does one literally or metaphorically cross when the proverbial perceptual doors are cleansed?
This topic came up inadvertently with Jeff, one of my roommates. With an episode of Recess playing in the background the topic of the boredom we felt in childhood came up, we talked of the interminableness and constraint that growing up in the Midwest can hold (both of us being from Kansas). Now having some distance and perspective on that period, life is, in fact, quite long, Jeff concludes. Recalling a time in his childhood home, sitting, staring at the wall, thinking: will this moment ever end? And it felt like it never would. Now, being both adults, and having a different outlook and relationship with time, could it be possible to get that mindset back, yet relish the interminable present moment, and see it for the miracle that it is? Being something of an armchair philosopher, I posed Jeff something like Wilson’s quandary of what one can do when the orgasmic experience hits, since it doesn’t seem to last. He replied that, “those moments never do last, but the goal of life is to have as many of them as possible.”
To introduce just one more element, I have recently gotten into the work of anthropologist, writer and tarot scholar Angeles Arrien. The volume that concerns us is her book on the The Nine Muses. It is a brief and succinct book, what I found most interesting is that Arrien suggests interacting with these goddesses (or energies, if you will) in a literal, creative fashion. The reader can awaken them by various means: making collages, collecting memories, journaling, etc. In the book, before she gets to the muses she begins with a chapter about the mother of the muses: Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory (think: a Mnemonic device). “For the Greeks,” to quote J.D. McClatchy, “memory was “the waker of longing.” We cannot act with direction and certainty unless we have some longing to drive us. Enlisting this Mnemosyne energy is to remember we have the ability to express ourselves in many ways and the passion to do so. If only we remember to act upon that freedom and avenue of expression: which are the muses. Being flexible of vision and mind allows Mnemosyne the ability to birth her daughters within us, i.e., the opportunities and tools to express what were otherwise unnoticed and unutilized.
I wonder if this Mnemosyne energy can make herself known, bring remembrance of our freedom and creative potential through synchronicity. Because, since moving in with my roommates Jeff and Caleb, dressy coincidences have happened that make me want to think some transpersonal force is nudging us along. One of the more memorable instances started with a conversation I had with Jeff. We were sitting around talking about music and how many of the songs we like have lyrics that don’t necessarily have any meaning, the words having been chosen because they fit the music. Jeff cited “The Sign” by Ace of Base. I brought up “Italian Song” by Jon and Vangelis and many of Beck’s songs. Beck having said in an interview that lyrics are at the same time important and not important at all.
Perhaps a week later I went to the dermatologist to have a couple of moles looked at. As I’m being walked to the examination room the Talking Heads song “Wild Wild Life” is playing over the clinic’s speakers. After a brief wait the doctor joins me and the nurse who is taking down my information. Following some initial questions, he starts his examination. Turning out to be a music lover he quizzes me about who sings the song currently playing as he’s surveying a couple carbuncles closely. I didn’t know who sang it but he revealed it was some song by The Go-Go’s. I tell him “Wild Wild Life” was playing when I arrived and if he liked Talking Heads. He did. I asked if he’d ever seen True Stories, the David Byrne film with John Goodman. He brightened up saying it was one of his favorites. He says he had watched an interview with Byrne where he said the lyrics of “Psycho Killer” didn’t have any inherent meaning. I couldn’t place the song just then, but I reply that the best songs are like that. The rest of my examination was uneventful and so was his final prognosis. On the drive home I was thinking what a coincidence it was that this theme of meaningless songs came up again since Jeff and I discussed it. After I got home, I sat watching tv with Jeff and Caleb when Jeff started singing to himself: “Qu’est-ce que c’est, run run run…” He turns to us and says, “I’ve had David Byrne stuck in my head lately for some reason.”
“Yeah?” I reply. What song was that?”
“Psycho Killer.”
“What the fuck!” He’s a little nonplussed at my reaction, so after I sit back down I explain what had just happened at the doctor’s office.
Whether this cluster of seemingly related occurrences has any significance or ‘meaning’, maybe doesn’t matter. Not only have they, to my perception, clustered together and have motivated me to speculate their meaning, (not to mention that the theme of the synchronicity itself was about meaning), but what before was a little more than dull events began to glitter and glow crisply. This is a step closer to that orgasmic mindset that Wilson wrote of. I’d like to think that these synchronicities (or my perception that these occurrences were synchronous) was Mnemosyne influencing reality, or those around me, in order to shake me out of languid habit, dead awareness, prodding me to remember the magic and music of the moment and to tie billowy time together.
I’m speculating, but perhaps one way to keep things in focus (that is, to always sprinkle a little fairy dust on every day) is to allow them to change, allow your perception to form over them, going with reality however it seems to move. Keeping your vision of the mountains in such a state that they’re in focus, yet your eyes relaxed in such a way that your mental field of vision can change like a kaleidoscopic stereogram. We would then be aware and alive enough to see the shifting mood of the Indian’s head and adjust ourselves accordingly and to find more pleasure in it.
Far more could be said on this, but for now I’d conclude, speaking to myself more than anything, that in whatever way you can find to keep Mnemosyne and her daughters alive and well in your life (and the robot relegated to his designated tasks), whether it’s putting on The Eels song “Fresh Feeling” or burning incense on the altar of Mnemosyne, may you find a way.