FACTS

Facts aren’t about how reality works. They’re about how reality works us like a dream with a telescope. Pursue them immensely or minutely enough and they’ll turn into a phantasmagoria of worlds within worlds. One mile east is one mile west. Think omnidirectionally and you’re in an infinite number of places at once just as easily as you believe if you’re not here you’re not everywhere at the same time. I’m sitting here like a theory of everything within my senses. And yet I’m wandering in the mind-fields beyond the confines of these material fences like a gust of being among the stars as if I were a hybrid of space and time. And it’s strange that I owe as much to the lies that made me go looking for the truth and I do to the truths that all showed me they were just another way of looking at lies. I don’t know why or what or who I am because the questions answer questions with questions. Or as they say in Zen the man planting radishes pointed the way with a radish. And this is as true of a weathervane as it is of a compass or a man sitting in front of a fan on a hot summer night watching fireflies at the window encountering their opposites like anti-matter in tiny annihilations of creative insight with the lifespan of mirrors that disappear into the availability of the seven other dimensions I’m not aware of sitting here with me. Like the thresholds of seven rooms in a house without doors. Shakespeare said by indirections we find directions out. Dead ends turn into thoroughfares. But the opposite is true as well. Ask any arrow. Any atom. Any tree. Any river. Any star. Werner Heisenberg. Or any human. Directions lead to indirections that are just as true as the threads of an unravelled rope or the split hairs of a radioactive isotope of unstable starmud with the half-life of a mind. String theory. M theory. The music of celestial spheres. Hymens in space. Worlds begin with consummations devoutly to be wished. When’s the last time if ever you checked the gender of the universe you’re living in? Are you a cosmophobe in a closet of dark matter or a cosmophilic exhibitionist as promiscuous as light? Or are you trying to extract DNA from the fossil bones of extinct species of telephones without any sexual orientation to speak of? Does the universe seduce you or do you attend upon it like a seance?

Love plus knowledge equals wisdom. When are they going to add a factor of mind to Einstein’s e=mc squared? Noumena are phenomena. There’s no inside or outside or difference. It’s a particle when you observe it. It snakes off like a wave when you don’t. Even at the subatomic level among the wimps and axions and machos you can’t experiment with life. You can only experience it. Tat tvam asi. You are that. Like the great sea of awareness whose emotional life is its weather. Water drowning in water. What’s to fear? Who needs to swim? Unity is an expression of the light world. Not two says it all on the dark side. No need to bring a lifeboat.

Enough. Time to blood the clarity with flesh and bones again. Let the radiance get down and dirty in the starmud. Run the stars through the black hole of a garden hose until they come out the other end through the pores of a galactic sprinkler. Brand invisibilities with words. Study physics in the suburbs. Refuse to be denuded of my humanity by ideologues who wash the blood off their hands with antiseptic concepts. To feel how strange the suchness of a human is when no one’s looking. And how we are not so much the function as an event of awareness that elaborates a universe that keeps expanding to contain what’s missing in it. And who doesn’t want to believe that life is good and generous and just? That there are secret star maps of the mind that are leading us along like buried treasure for the blind when the sun comes up? An image of morning glory. Its flowers as delicate cool and thin as the skin of the moon. I look at the blossoms and see globlets and grails. I see suffering humanity and I want to heal. I want to be beautiful and brave. I want to be the sage-clown that treats wisdom like a laughing matter. I don’t want to live in the shadows of what I feel. I want to release my longing like a homeless night bird that sings to the stars of how lonely and savage the beauty of life is on earth. Until they’re amazed at where they’ve arrived and what they’ve amounted to like grains of sand that have been pearled into moons in the mouth of an oyster. I want to point to a water lily and and look up at the stars and say See? You did it. And it’s wonderful. Here’s what’s come of all those billions of years of shining down upon nothing. The light has turned around and taken root in the ground. And its flowers are loveletters written far from home that use our eyes for a return address.

And maybe it is and is not that way. And there are no more Edens to be driven out of. Or we’re all falling toward paradise hoping we’ve packed our parachute right. Or we’re just a genetic lottery that won ourselves by playing the slots long enough like the dancing masters of random chance. Who is it that asks? Who is it that answers? Here are the facts. Now what is the meaning of this? Do you know? Are you sure the quality of your questions is worthy of their answers? Or do the echoes answer the fools in their own voice? Is there a rat behind the arras in a conspiracy of mirrors?

There’s a drunk teen-ager pissing on the Bank of Nova Scotia across the street.There are two girls unimpressed with how disgusting he is and one who is. She’s being helped by the others into a little grey car. Knee-length cargo pants with competitive running shoes and caps askew I can see something perennially true even in the crudeness and triviality of this. But it’s got nothing to do with the facts. Or the psychology of those small human acts sordid and beatific alike that are spontaneous expressions of the indefinable. And for a moment I know who I am by the way I look upon them. Such as we are you shall be. And I haven’t a clue which of us has the greater claim to pity. The ghost writer that looks down upon them from a window above. Or the forced hilarity of their futile attempts to simulate true rapture in a state of chaos and grace when the body knows more about the improbable possibilities of God than the soul does.

PATRICK WHITE