(please read Part I first)I CAME DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN AND MY FACE SHONE - Part II
SO I CAME DOWN THE MOUNTAIN AND MY FACE SHONE.
We walked around a bend in the road and I felt the hand in mine trembling. People were looking: a young couple staring straight ahead, hand in hand, a beautiful face stained with fear and tears. I spotted a large tree on a mound just off the path and I pointed.
“We’re here. This is a place of power. Come with me and we’ll sit, ‘and this too shall pass’,” I quoted awkwardly.
Cindy-Ann followed and I embraced her as we sat on the grassy bump at the base of the tree.
“This is the tripping tree, and a place of power, see how it looks over the city? It’s as safe as any place can be.”
She smiled and thanked me and cried the last few tears that I believe were joyous and cathartic. I laid myself down in the soft grass and she placed her head on my chest again. We looked out over the city from above, the traffic distant and shiny, buildings monolithic and swaying solid. My eyes settled on an apartment complex at the corner of two wide streets. I let myself focus and concentrate, comfortable now that Cindy-Ann was over the rough patch. I brought the visions to a higher level of depth and complexity, replete with a palette of impossible hues and shapes, the building popping into some form of multidimensional version of itself, at once apart from and integrated into the scenery and the world around it. Everything was delineated, embossed and glittering, yet all one fused thing before me, separate yet inseparable, infinite and one, eternal and non-existing. Bliss welled up in my chest and I wanted to wail and let it out, the electric shivers shooting down and seizing my groin and my junk there and arousing me, building to untenable heights until my body felt like it was coming in waves of absoluteness, a peaking and plateau-ing orgasm of purest being.
I was about to close my eyes and sink in further when I spotted someone come out on their balcony on one of the top floors of the apartment complex. I watched and focused but through the distance and the psychedelic haze I could not be certain that what I was seeing was a person. This person, or non-person, climbed up onto the railing of the balcony and stood teetering above the city. I tried, to no avail, to focus to bring the swirling visions to a stop to see if I was actually seeing someone in the distance standing precariously, fourteen or fifteen stories up, on the thin, wrought iron railing -
AND FALLING.
A rush of adrenaline and shock waved through my blood as I watched the body fall. And fall. Slowly. Turning over on itself. Rag-dolling ever down. Until it disappeared behind the three-story row housing in front that obscured my view of the street before it, where the body landed and expired. Or didn’t land. I could not be sure of what I had seen.
Clearly I had bolted and seized up, for Cindy-Ann looked into my face and asked me what was wrong. I told her nothing. My first lie to her. It would have weighed heavy had I been sure of what I had seen, and if I had not had a sense that I was protecting her from further distress.
I waited for the sirens, for the wailing of distraught onlookers below, of the noise of blooming business that follows the unsettling calm of tragedy. But there was nothing. I told myself it hadn’t happened and managed to slow my heartbeat down, but I could not stop ruminating on death. The death of the person I may or may not have witnessed, the death of Cindy-Ann, my death and my own last dying moments.
So I closed my eyes. And one by one the games peeled away: the game in which I was a student, a boyfriend, the game in which I was my father’s son, a twenty-five year old man, the game of me the ambitious, the hopeful, the dreamer… and then a web formed behind my eyelids - a nexus of sinewy coloured filaments that gave way slowly, like shattering glass shards, to a HOLE beneath, a hole where I died and the game of ME ceased to be.
I DIED.
For a brief moment I was afraid, but then, in dying, I was stripped of the apparatus with which to fear, stripped of all apparatus that recognized I was something other than a FIELD of pure awareness, stripped of all ability to sense reason and feel and be. I was in a space, if it could be called that, revealed to me through a HOLE, occupied by nothing more than a colossal letter “M” of sparkling blue in a FIELD of a colour both red and yellow, scintillating and sparkly like the blue of the “M” that was both completely immobile and rotating on an axis unseen, towering above me in a slow spin that never advanced, the illusion of motion and status at once held.
It was the root. I was down at the root looking up at a giant alphabetical monolith. There was nothing else, truly. Nothing existed but this towering “M” and my awareness of it. And, yes, it’s awareness of me, for I sensed it reflected my awareness back, in a sort of loop, a loop that sustained both my awareness of it and its awareness of whatever I had become. That’s all there was, as absurd as it seems, this eternal loop of awareness between me and a giant sesame street sparkling capital “M”!
The M was me. The M was not me. The M was God. The M was not god. It transcended all this awkward linguistic figuration. It was OTHER. And ALL. A metaphor with no signified or signifier.
OTHER, ALL - O, THE REAL
This was the single most sublime and illuminating moment of my life: my death through a HOLE and emergence as awareness before the source of everything and all, wHOLE and beHOLEd, shattered and ecHOLEss.
But of course I wasn’t dead. I rushed back through the HOLE swiftly, jerked back past glimmering shards and crackling glass and the kaleidoscopic squiggling of things coalescing, reforming, restructuring, until I realized I did not remember who I had been. All this reassembling was less like an assembling than a flipping through possibilities, as if a life was being chosen for me, chosen from an infinite rolodex of possible identities and memories and lives. A changed ‘me’ with no past memories with which to compare, new memories flooding in and forming a person who is now ‘me’ without any way of verifying that before being propelled back through the hole that I had been this person; for the very real possibility existed that I was a blank state being thrust into a new consciousness, with new memories that once imprinted would seem as though - as though I had always had them. In short, coming back through the hole, I had no way of knowing I was the same person I had been going in. Coming back through the wHOLE of awareness pure and divine, was I myself, or a ‘me’ deposited into another random body - was I now someone else?
Or was I slowly re-becoming me, awake and alive, the memories flooding back through a portHOLE where they had been stored, the games slipping back into my mind, my subconscious grasping at them for meaning and architecture and pattern and identity? Was I reawakening into ME, shit out from the assHOLE of existence, effluent rushing forth, re-meshing into the glass bubble where I am contained? Or was I now another person with the impression of duration and identity from a series of newly implanted memories?
I opened my eyes. All was still awash in indescribable colour and patterns overlaid like webbing, but I was back, and felt my heart beat in my chest, and felt that very chest heave, and felt the head resting there, Cindy-Ann’s head, bob with every beat and breath, then turn and look up at me.
“Where’d you go?” asked Cindy-Ann.
“Through the HOLE. And back again.”
Then we came down from the mountain.
And my face shone.
**********************
Thanks for reading all the way to the end! And give me your impressions - thanks!
cheers,
JBArk
JBArk is a Mandelthought; a non-fiction character in a drama of his own design he calls "LIFE" who partakes in consciousness expanding activities and substances; he should in no way be confused with SWIM, who is an eminently data-mineable and prolific character who has somehow convinced himself the target he wears on his forehead is actually a shield.