In this season of love I have been thinking about it—its relationship to desire, perception, nature, authenticity, art. It's interesting to me that the color pink should be equated to perceiving, e.g., in speaking of rose-colored lenses. I wonder if desire is just love filtered through perception. If unfiltered love is the same as unconditional love. The normal experience of love is love binding to an external object (of affection), whereas love suffuses everything, and can be found nowhere if not in ourselves. It seems that love perceived conditionally would separate subjects and objects, although love ultimately is the natural state underlying all things. As a Christian monk put it, “Thou art the love with which I love thee.” We chase our tails trying to get love, even as we are love. To set limits around it, or imagine it in time makes it so that desire can renew itself into a perennial future. Said another way, the state of conditional love or desire puts in place a delay mechanism to keep happiness at bay, kick it down the road to deny its fulfillment now.
In The Passion According to G. H., Clarice Lispector writes: "The present is the face today of the God. The horror is that we know that we see God in life itself. It is with our eyes fully open that we see God. And if I postpone the face of reality until after my death—it's out of guile, because I prefer to be dead when it is time to see Him and that way I think I shall not really see Him, just as I only have the courage to really dream when I sleep. I know that what I am feeling is serious and could destroy me. Because—because it is like giving myself the news that the kingdom of heaven already is." The function of time allays our fear of unconditional love, of a rapture so intense we would have to shield ourselves from it.
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker, a figure known as the Stalker guides clients through a hazardous wasteland to a mysterious restricted site known simply as the Zone, where supposedly there exists a room granting a person's innermost wishes. The Stalker's two clients, a writer seeking inspiration and a professor seeking scientific discovery, are melancholic figures, inherently tragic in their quest. Midway through the film is a very beautiful montage of scenes—the moon reflected in water; the Stalker sliding along, trying to find purchase on a rock wall—mapping onto an interior monologue of the Stalker quoting section 76 of Lao Tse's Tao Te Ching:
May everything come true.
May they believe.
And may they laugh at their own passions…
…for what they call passion
is not really the energy of the soul
but merely friction between the soul & the outside world.
But, above all, may they believe in themselves
and become as helpless as children
for softness is great and strength is worthless.
When a man is born, he is soft and pliable.
When he dies, he is strong and hard.
When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable.
But when it’s dry and hard, it dies.
Hardness and strength are death’s companions.
Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life.
That which has become hard will not triumph.
The description of passion as “friction between the soul and the outside world” strikes me as related to the anxiety of holding another person hostage in the impossible expectation of making oneself happy, or of imagining love as a thing to be gotten for oneself and not given freely.
When I lived in New York City I used to visit a place called the Dream House. The Dream House is filled with the sound of a drone very specifically tuned by the composer La Monte Young, as well as pink light and sculptures designed by the artist Marian Zazeela. Of the experience he wanted visitors to have, Young said, "If people didn't feel swept away to Heaven, I was failing." It seems that for Young the drone would be a way into the experience of the resonance of God in everything. The scope of his intention reminds me of something I heard recently, attributed to Nisargadatta: “It’s not desire itself that is the problem but that our desire is too small.”
Before the composer imagined one hundred years of perpetual sound in a 1964 program note for his Theatre of Eternal Music, Young was strongly connected to the vibrations of the landscape of remote Bern, Idaho where he grew up. He cites a memory from when he was not even two years old, of lying in his bed, nursing his bottle and listening to the wind whistling through the logs of the cabin where he lived. The sounds of the crickets in the sagebrush fields, the whirring lathes and the subtle concentrated harmonies generated by an electrical substation in the neighbouring town also informed his interest in drones.
In a kundalini yoga class I attended the other day, the teacher spoke of indigenous wisdom rooted in the connection to the earth and the sky. She spoke of how the American Plains Indians who sat traditionally on the ground could feel through their sitz bones the rumblings of thunder or a stampede of buffalo. Apparently the human being vibrates at the same Herz of the planet and would take this vibration with her even into outer space—something to consider in the plans to colonize Mars.
Rupert Spira said, “Beauty lies at the source of perception, not its destiny, and a true work of art has this power, to draw perception inwards to its source of pure beauty.” Art at its best is concerned with the essence of the human being and would have no intrinsic worldly value. The writer Mircea Cărtărescu referenced a Buddhist proverb to make this point (~1.10), comparing poetry to a dead cat; you cannot use it.
In a 1977 interview Clarice Lispector insists on the expansiveness of feeling for any understanding of her work. At the outset, she refuses any limit on her writing, rejecting the designation of “professional” in a way that makes me smile. It’s not that she doesn’t take her work seriously; to the contrary, she asserts that she is speaking “from the tomb” between novels, without her art enlivening her.
For my novel excerpt, we are back to a close third person point of view. Plot-wise, Elliot and Rae are now a couple. They go to the Dream House.
The stairway to Heaven was creaky and narrow and sunken in in places, and shot up from the ground of a Church Street building like something broken in its climb out of Hell. At the top of it sat a young invigilator. She wore John Lennon glasses and a rectilinear haircut, and handed out press releases from a stack on a folding table. It was her job to guard Heaven, while distributing the right messaging about it, and keep incense lit at a shrine to Pandit Pran Nath, dead singer and guru of composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela, who opened Heaven to the public in 1966.
Pandit Pran Nath whispered through the walls, “When you’re singing and perfectly in tune, it’s like meeting God.”
The invigilator said, “Welcome. Please remove your shoes before entering the space.”
Elliot and Rae did as she said and took off their shoes. They fell down a vibrating pink wormhole in the City’s space-time fabric: a hallway, more a tunnel, filled with magenta light and pulsing with the thrum of eternity, a drone in continuous flux. The hallway could only accommodate them in a single-file line—it was, after all, the entrance from New York City—and so they went, Rae behind Elliot, into the sound and light environment of Heaven, known officially as the Dream House.
The first room of the Dream House had in it: the drone, like an organism propelled by its own momentum; and very few objects, referring in their scarcity to their objectness, their immanent self-containment. Four speakers clunky as refrigerators boomed the drone’s lowest pitches, vroomvroomvroomvroom, from each corner of the room. Some pillows on the floor gave Rae the notion to lie down and let the calming sound consume her. She was thinking of doing just that when a glint from above caught her eye—a spark off of a curl of aluminum dangling from the ceiling so lightly as to appear floating. A kinetic sculpture, in contrast to the speaker monoliths fully disclosing a big power source—activated by the otherwise imperceptible air patterns in the room. One of a pair of mobiles hung on either side of the room, each lit by a duo of red and blue lights strung together from the middle of the ceiling. Nothing in its original color but stained pink; white pillows on a plush white carpet, all stained pink.
Rae looked at the curl, her eye tracing its contour, forming an open-ended question around it, a semi-circle. Incomplete, inconclusive. A wisp of form so slight it could hardly be called a form. An anti-form? Outlining no object like the cast of a ghost. No ideas about what it was could stick to it, eschewing a stable shape for her eye to construct a composite reality around. (No more could her mind translate the strange purple calligraphy it scribed on the walls, the “form” reduced to the negative effect of its shadow!) It taunted her as only a gestational thing, a thing not fully formed could, in its indefinite morphology. What it held was limitless potential, INFINITE POSSIBILITY... In its unceasing motion, the never-ending moment. It filled her with a tiny euphoric dread.
It was then that a stream of numbers began issuing from Red Monk’s mouth: “35 sine tones created on a synthesizer, the tones spread over 10 octaves, 20 of the 35 tones smashed into a small section of the 7th octave, some separated by only 1/14th of a half step...”
The numbers excited him, Red Monk now, having emerged from the deluge taken Elliot under, Red Monk the audio engineer-DJ come to guide her in traversing the outer limits of consonant harmony. The subtlety of tonal gradation! He was telling her about the system of “just intonation” that Young had adopted, the composer’s own system of tuning that did not do violence to, did not chop up the sounds as did the system of tuning inflicted on the modern piano. Rae drifted toward the back wall, where three windows wore translucent screens like rose-colored lenses. She looked out one. The world outside Heaven glowed hot pink and neon red. Car taillights beamed ghoulish and cotton candy clouds puffed cloying in a lavender sky. The stream from Red Monk’s mouth had not abated and now gushed in a very long run-on sentence beginning: "The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224..." It was the title of the drone he was reading, and it ran on and on for many lines, sprawling across the press release, enumerating numbers split and stretched and reconstituted in a multitude of ways. When he finally got to the end of the sentence, he still was not done. He began laying out for her a taxonomy of primes: Mersenne primes; twin primes; a new type invented by Young (Young's Primes!), all with their own formulae and equations. He was laying out for her the design of Heaven. He telling her that Heaven was made of primes, that the design of Heaven was One.
What he was telling her disturbed her. It disturbed her because prime numbers disturbed her. A prime number you could not deconstruct or dissect, or slice open to examine its contents. A prime number was surely displeasing to the mysterious entities she imagined at the edge of existence, the assembly of trolls arbitrating the line between order and chaos, picking out of their incisors the remnants of the numbers she fed them, the ones lending themselves to segmentation, pulling apart and breaking down. Because in her daily life she had begun dabbling in ritual, on her metronome or the microwave leaving only divisible numbers, a trail of meaty round numbers in exchange for protection. And the first signs of a numerical superstition were presenting, her phobia of primes betrayed on the dials and gauges. Round numbers were better than factors of five were better than even numbers were better than just any old odd. But a prime number. A prime number you just had to leave alone, accept. It just was.
Rae gazed out the window, onto a triangular slab of concrete bounded by Church Street, Sixth Ave and White Street, and that’s when she saw that all of her offerings, her bargaining with the trolls had done nothing because there she was, the fuzzy outlines of her face reflected in the tinted glass, gazing at the shape of three.
She had done nothing to stunt the primes in their forward procession and oh!—was it not in the nature of the creature continually fed to remain insatiate?
Of those pillows on the floor she claimed one, Red Monk another. Her blood pressure lowered as her person did. It felt good to put her head down, to subjugate her head. By now Red Monk had stopped talking—his mathematical explanations were wasted on her, but also it was becoming evident that the only way to communicate here was by listening—and so they lay silent beside each other, still as a couple of corpses embalmed pink by a setting sun, sine waves lapping them on a bed of soft white sand. There was no suffering here. No suffering because there was no distance. No distance because the mind was not creating it or compartmentalizing, putting itself inside of the body even as the body was inside of the mind. For matter had come back on top in the form of the drone, the quiet mind having made room for it: sound as the substance, the body as the sieve—not eyes, nose, tongue or even ears but skin—a sieve sifting the sound seeping into and out of the pores.
No delusion. Here in the warm mass of infinitesimal receptors, no delusion. And love was seeing through the ears. Love was the drone, emptied of all classical constraints, replete with everything.
Only when Red Monk put his hand on hers did she realize she had been humming, trying to effect a merger, blend herself into the drone.
She sat up, flush with the shame of seeing, or hearing something on the outside that had had an independent life on the inside of her—something loosed from a vital place and brought up to the surface by the drone, the drone clearing channels like a hot compress on a psychic sphincter. She curled into the shape of a hay bale, feeling the fibers of herself coarse and breakable. Red Monk sat up and came into the direct line of her vision.
He scooted in front of her and they began rocking, back and forth mesmerically, only a little at first, then more conspicuously, swaying symmetrically, almost automatically, stirring the air, composing a two-tone melody, complex rhythmic textures between them. What they were doing was painting, yes, painting—dipping the harmonies in red and blue, the pitches slipping and spinning by the movement of their bodies. Turning a single degree in any direction they could shift their entire acoustic world, and so were they entranced by the power of their perception. And their eyes locked in a volley of projection, back and forth in an infinite loop onto the site of the other, projection ardent and recycled because the content of their own minds they could not know. But her mind was full of desire. Not desire for the shallow penetration of sex, but for full occupation—possession by another being—because it was her fantasy to be hijacked, to have another drape her skin around him and see out through her eyes that she lent him, that he might see and love her for how she saw the world.
(For how she saw the world??)
The process was one of total surrender.
No, she was not ready to do that.
She got up to explore the rest of the space. The space was an instrument to play. Toward the center the tones got lower, denser, while along the perimeter they got higher, more striated, and she remembered—how could she of forgotten—the buzzing trees that were the drone of her childhood, the cicada broods of insect nymphs hatching in the unseen millions. She entered a smaller room, nothing but a wooden wall sculpture in it, at first glance a simple geometrical construction: a board turned perpendicular to the wall, its long edge visible head-on, inside of a frame inside of a frame. Light shone on the sculpture, red from the left and blue from the right, casting bright shadows in the negative space and extending from the sides. She couldn’t of said why, but something in her recognized this room as the inner sanctum, with everything that came before it in a slow build to this sculpture it enshrined—Ruine Window 1992 it was called. Red Monk appeared in her peripheral vision and they stood looking at the sculpture from either side of it. In three places down the middle her eye mixed a dirty red-blue instead of a clean purple. Light did not mix like pigment and her eye was sloppier than her hand. Her depth perspective was inaccurate but she saw: the frame was the picture and the picture was the frame.
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