They sometimes speak to us, he said, of a sixth sense; but, I think that is irresponsible, he added. We all know what the senses are, don't we?We looked at him, and he looked back at us with keen eyes, searching our own.
We know there are five, he said. In the sense that we really mean "senses" - yes; and, you see (he was smiling now) the sense in which we really mean them is not a sense in itself. It isn't, he said, no. At best, it only seems like it. The sense of something is integrative, which I believe is the basic function of "being". The being itself is, well, sensual, sensory, based on sense. But it contains an integrative factor, a knowing factor, and that's what should give us the first clue about what is sensual, and what is clearly beyond it.
He looks at us now with such deliberate, keen eyes, we are submissive. There's no arguing with it.
The sensual, he tells us, includes that which is experienced by and through the five sensory organs - the eyes, the ears, the nose, tongue and skin - but it (the sensual, I mean) includes as well, all the emotions which are triggered by sensory signals. So, when we feel basic emotion, we are experiencing something so akin to sensual activity that we can hardly distinguish it from that activity. You have your fear, for example, and it is, is it not, palpable? And it does, does it not, generate an anger which usually is not?
The keen eyes are looking at us deliberately and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Yes, and you do have your love, he said. It is also palpable - it is also intruding into the very nature of sexuality, making it seem something which it is, in itself, not; and yet into which it is transformed in a very seeming, physical way. And you have your hunger, not tied to the five senses, but which comes about in an internalized physical reaction for which there is no other recognized sense; and likewise, you have your digestive elimination, also physically based, but not perceived as such, and not mistaken for external communication, either.
And I suppose, he said, there is also this thing called fatigue, the condition which brings us sleep, that mysterious experience from whence dreams invade, offering us yet another level of perception.
The keen eyes are looking away now, perhaps into themselves.
Yes, and if, he said to us now, we are to carry this thought along, we need to accommodate intuition too, which I simply judge is the function of our sense of fantasy applied to past time - to what we know. So one intuits into the present, one feels as though there were an actuality at work spanning temporal frameworks, leading into the future. You might say, how the hell can we know something which we haven't yet experienced? That is the poet's way you see, and it is easy to say because when we digest experience through the differing levels of sensory recognition, we create an aura of reality that ultimately encompasses more than we see or hear or taste or smell or touch. We create a kingly, godly illusion of reality with its own purpose and meaning, a sense of true self. So this is the ultimate sensory experience, the sense of being one's self; but we know very little about it. We don't know whether such a thing as a "self" does or can truly exist, because, don't you see, we are bound by it, we are its product as well as its interlocutor. Can self understand creating self? Is the mother really also the child in the womb, or does she just think that is so because of the manipulation of some essential matter? Can one father oneself in some intellectual sense - can one feel what it is to create? Well, probably, to some limited extent. We have art don't you see, and we recognize the creative instinct in every culture, no matter how brutal it is otherwise.
The keen eyes return flashing to our gaze, and we are sold on it.
But how can we, he said, then distinguish such instinctive capability in man from that which exists in the balance of the animal kingdom?
The keen eyes hold us rapt, and we are doubtful. Oh, well, he said, it is so easy to do, we have just made it hard. There are so many things in nature that live, but none of them do what man does - for example, tell time. None builds artificial buildings that pass beyond the boundaries of shelter. None overcomes its inherent limitations by artificial means, deliberately applied. I dare say, many if not all of our human attributes may be found in the embryonic traits of other beings; but I feel confident that the combination, the array and scope of these human attributes are beyond those combined anywhere else in a natural sense, and I conclude from this that we are being sent, or we are evolving, mysteriously, towards a different kind of knowing, towards something seeming but not really based in revelation, no, but in discovery; and yet, I see this not as physical, ergo, scientific dicovery, but as strictly intuitive, as in recognition. I see this as one sees the savage respond to the accouterments of advanced culture, with resistance but also with recognition. I see this not so much as the primitive being encountering and resisting other peoples' culture, for this is hardly beyond his choice; but I see it as a recognition of the unknown made knowable, as in a man landing on the Moon.
He stopped and glared at us through the pale, flickering glow of the firelight. There were only the eyes there now, and only the invisible hearing to accompany the dim seeing. I don't know, he said, whether we can preserve adequate evidence of this fact. If it were man's fate to lose his technology, which I think he might if by some means he lost his technological prowess and his tools as well, then we would be hard put to explain the reality of this extraterrestrial excursion to other folk in the far flung futures of our fatal errors.
He laughed, cynically. We would be challenged, he said, as one now challenges myth, or near myth, just as one challenges the story of Jesus and his resurrection. So, one should be careful concerning what one believes, or, more importantly, he said, what one refuses to believe. If we put matters in this way, it is possible without any form of cowardice to not disbelieve our culture, and its putative truths, without insisting that they be accepted, or should I say crammed down our throats, on a universal basis. What is coming is coming, and what has been is immutable, or not.
We were so struck by the force of his conversation that we - I certainly - began to drift along gladly with these heavy ideas, these thoughts of his which seemed to disrupt the orderly continuity of our own understanding of real things. I had gotten along well enough in my own eclectic way to be comfortable in my life mostly all day, and for many days on end, without having once to ask, my god, what do you know, what is going on? But the challenge and the questions are always there, in the background, haunting composure. I had elected to believe, not that I knew, but that I knew enough. Now I wasn't so sure. I wasn't sure about what knowing is. I glanced furtively around, and saw that the others were equally spellbound, and must therefore have been driven into this reverie. You knew instinctively that when this spell was broken, the world would seem all at once very ordinary, like its special character had been sucked out of it. This is the way it goes, I thought, you can even come to see the dearest features of life as excrement, nothing of value.
(Oh, or what? Is even that which has no value of value?)
He was going on, talking about representation. I took it that this was about where something has a similitude, a recognizable value shared by something else, usually something much bigger and maybe encompassing the thing which we say represents it, or is representative of it.
In Emerson's view, he told us, representation was a means of recognizing the logic of nature. You see, if it was a mere collection of anomalies, why would it not tend to sublimate into violent contrasts, and thus disappear; or conversely, if it was uniform, suck itself into a single nothingness? If you accept that modern history (which by the way, he said, you can take for as many years past as you choose, perhaps even all of recorded history) is based largely on the indigestibility of Christianity, or indeed, of any religion and its primal authority, or culture, then you will find yourself, as Emerson did, looking for something unifying in life which would have none of the attributes of oppressive dictatorship, but none of the dismay of chaos either. So, the answer then, and maybe now, is representation, relateability, relationship. Indeed, the answer has always been framed in terms of what is not desired by the intuition. We literally hate the thought, he said, of termination. We view life as having begun, and being therefore susceptible to its ending, too. We hate that, because there is nothing else left to the imagination from it, which is the intuitive engine. So we invent, and invent, and create with all our might, and insist on the value of our self-proclaimed production of universal truth. In fact, he said, our efforts are needless. In order to find universal truth, we need not look into the nature of planetary life, which, by the way, would seem unique even if it were discovered to be elsewhere. Nor can we look to see it beyond, in universal nature. The unimaginable scope of the heavens might well suggest the futility of this; but I dare say the powerful delves we make into the nature of matter and space will not succeed in this, any more than the old metaphysical pondering did. I suspect, he said, that the unacceptability of man's ideas about himself will always provide a stop to his progress, even as it provides a spur to his efforts.
No, he said, the search for god in nature, at least nature here on earth, is futile, especially because she (and yes he laughed, it is a she) is so indifferent to our individual fates, even classing human life as an individual element of her fabric; and she is often and repetitively cruel, too, so that one is put to this humongous task of defining evil within the context of good, which is an impossible feat.
No, he said, you will not find the answer in any pseudo regime of human thought, mascarading as the new religion. We will get where we are going and want to go only by going gradually beyond, by leaving sensory experience behind and by wandering off beyond it into realms we know not of, into places where we need not travel to go.
He stopped again. He was evidently pondering what to say next. Some of us had burned our marshmallows to crisps at the ends of our little sticks; and I thought, how easy it is to divert us from our intended acts. We had come to rest, to an inertial pause, and it had been filled for us with increasing intensity by and old guy with keen eyes and a soft, husky voice, speaking by firelight on a cool October evening, under the stars. The fire had been built up as in the expectation of ghost stories; and we had assembled to hear some. But, somehow, the conversation had drifted, maybe on account of the stars spreading in massive, endless entirety across the vast sweep of a clear, nighttime sky. It had seemed to illumine our presence, to make the fire a mere accent, an intrusion into the cool of space; and we had already begun drifting in the preliminary conversation. We had gotten quickly onto beliefs, because almost nobody there trusted anyone else with his own beliefs anymore; and when something like this comes along, it just drags you in. We were maybe talking about stars, and then suddenly we were talking about life and its meaning, and we got away from the usual cynicism. And I think that's what did it. I think someone said it is tiresome to be so negative all the time. You look up there and even if you'd die instantly out there in space, it would still be beautiful somehow, someway - wouldn't it, even if you weren't around to enjoy it. This got a laugh.
Then he'd started. How do you know, he said, what space really is? We turned all heads to look at him. He is past his prime, or something - god only knows what prime is anymore - and yet he still looked healthy enough to take us on. Maybe in his day he was good looking; but I suspect that would have been in the way all young people look good to most older people, which is the same way I suspect we look at fresh shoots in the springtime, or first blooming flowers in the late June sunlight. But anyway, he is graying at the temples, a little mussed I'd say, but not really disheveled, no and not slovenly like some of these intellectuals get when they don't give a shit about anyone else anymore, and he was dressed in good, casual clothing, a nice gray and black patterned sweater which was baggy at the wrists and around the waist and hung loosely over his blue corduroy pants.
We all had on our camping boots, and I'd noticed that his were these light gray, German walking boots; and I'd asked him about them and he told me that he'd got them in Germany, a long time ago, in a shop at the base of the mighty Zugspitz, and that he'd used them for hiking on the Weissflu at Davos the next week, and had liked them so much he'd kept them and took care of them and used them lovingly whenever he was out in nature.
So we gave him our respectful, expectant attention, and he obliged this by telling us that our ideas about space might be wrong. Because, he said, we always think of space as something we can see. We think we can see the emptiness, but we really can't. We can see only light, or its reflections. And the nature of this is such that, whatever it is we see, which includes space, it must indeed be material, if light is matter.
There was a slight pause here, while one of us got up the nerve to take the bait, or become the butt of his joke, either one, if that's what he'd meant to do.
No, he said, I don't have any theory about what it is. My view is that it exists regardless of whether or not we've seen it, and that our intuition about it is basically okay. It exists and is not matter. But then, what is it really? I think, he said, that it is the opposite of matter. Yes, and that it can never be seen by us so long as we are, ourselves, self-consciously matter too; and I suppose that it is therefore, in some way, the demon "enemy" of matter, from start to finish.
I'm not saying we stared at him bug-eyed through the glow. For an instant there, for me, it was as if the glow and the universe were connected, had joined in continuity and were the same stuff mostly, I don't know. Why should you get to thinking about this?
He laughed. What maybe I could put to you as a proposition, he said, is that space and matter are opposites, co-existing within each other, each one a singularity competing for dominance in the sense of eliminating the existence of the other. Then each, in other words, is trying to occupy the other, each by and through mutually expanding and excluding the other from itself. And I suppose, he said, both being bi-polar systems, they can also be conceived as expanding and contracting at the same time, in exactly opposite relation. But, being equal, don't you see, they encounter each other, as did Sisyphus the hill. Neither succeeds, but each, in its way, almost does. And it all goes on and on and doesn't need any time in which to do it. And I have sometimes hypothecated, poetically mind you, that perhaps what we call gravity is not even the pull of matter across space, not that at all, but the oppression of space upon matter, wherever it is. I have enjoyed hypothecating this, you see, thinking that maybe space wants to squeeze matter into a point of nothingness, while matter wants to expand itself into totality, into a uniformity; and you see, according to that bit of poesy, it would also be true vice versa , and we can think that matter is occupying the seats of space by excluding and therefore contracting it into some other nothing.
It goes on you see, but neither succeeds, he said, in obtaining a final result.
We were, how do you say it... plain dumbfounded. How are you going to carry these little gems around for chit-chat? Well, what the hell, what then are we? Someone else said it. (It might just as well have been said by all of us, too, in chorus.)
It never phased him a bit. There may be a third element at work, he said, looking at us as if we were absorbing catechism. Maybe there's something else not either of space or of matter, but of equal girth - something not co-existent with either of the two fundamentals, but with both together, manifesting itself on their eternal interface.
Interface? What was this? Is he arguing here that there is some sort of an edge between space and matter, even though matter cannot (he says) exist within space, or space within matter, and that it is an interface like a universal crack in which things go on, in transformation? What? Indeed - gravity a push rather than a pull?
Okay, you say, are the physical laws of the universe based on uniformity of likeness? And if matter is all alike, even when totally complex, then you say it functions or exists in similitude whatever its exact configuration or activity? And you say the same would be true for space? Okay, but then, what is time? If we relate energy to matter, which seems wholly logical, can we simply divorce time and attach it to space? Is there something more to be added to Einstein's equation - E = MC2? Is it some kind of a mirror opposite?
He was telling us that there was. He was telling us that the notion of time in this sense can only be an approximation for distance in the material world. But it may have, he said, another meaning altogether, in the spatial world. It may govern probability itself, and it may mean that whatever exists, exists forever, so that this "ending" we tremble even to contemplate may never actually occur, and that god - oh my good god - is just that!
Oh, this went on in the shadows, the keen eyes, the beguiling talk. It is terrible and wonderful to contemplate all this, these things, wondering who and what you are, and if you really exist, and if the whole thing called "life" is just some cruel, divine joke, and you are to be left with nothing afterwards, except that you'd have to have something left even to regret nothing - or miss being; and if it is all so fucking unexplainable, then why bother?
He'd already picked up on this. You know, he said, we bother about this because we can. That's all. You bother because while the most there is of you is absolutely controlled by fate, perhaps it does not control all of you. Perhaps there is something going on here, of which we are all somehow a relateable part, which is not yet finished. Perhaps we are part of creation itself. If we could think like that, we would not speak lightly of having performed our mission in life, or of having performed someone else's mission, he said - like say, Jesus Christ's mission, or for that matter, anyone else's mission. We would be on the lookout for the new discovery, including all that which is inspired by our yearning intuition; and most certainly, we would attempt to master, and thus to manage, our earthly appetites.
I suppose everyone nodded solemnly in unison. I know I did. The marshmallows could bloody well burn. The cold of night could come on like a shroud, and the anticipated travail of the next day's existence, whatever it was, the routine of it, could repeat itself. We all knew, underneath it all, the desirability of getting our appetites in line, of sharing and holding back our own hands from greed.
Whatever we may come to know about these things, he said, it lies on the other side of being mere beasts of nature, of being earthbound. Whatever we learn, it will come to us not as simple revelation, but as a dawning of recognition, and it will come to hand through the mind.
Now he stopped short again and the keen eyes were not looking into us anymore; and we knew intuitively - yes - that he had no more to say about this. I asked him then, do you ever think about this shit during the day?
He laughed. He really laughed.
No, he said. I think about it all the time.
