IF A BRAIN CELL
If a brain cell went looking for its mind
what do you think it would find?
Itself as it were transformed
like the birds in Ibn Attar’s poem?
The same I by which I am God
is the I by which God is me
to pun a little on a Christian mystic?
Would there be a grail
a fountain
a lifting of the veils?
Would I see me as I am
whole and sweet and radiantly enlightened
or just another victim
of P.T. Barnum’s dictum
that no man ever went broke
underestimating human intelligence?
Oudeis aneile peplon.
No one has lifted my veils.
So says
But maybe the subtlety of it is
no one can
as long as there’s any I am
left about them.
Maybe there’s just a seeing.
No seer.
No seen.
What would that mean?
Spiritual optics aren’t Manichean?
Pure awareness?
But what could taint it in the first place?
We don’t think of the mirror as ugly
because it reflects an ugly face.
And this hall of mirrors goes on forever
like M theory in hyperspace.
Percussive membranes
and resonant strings
jamming with the celestial spheres
when physics turns to jazz
to express the multiverse
like Mingus playing Mozart.
If a brain cell went looking for its mind
what do you think it would find?
A lot of brain cells like it
up in over their head?
Like the Zen master said
looking for your mind with your mind
is like looking for your flashlight
with your flashlight.
It’s right where it’s always been.
The flower is red.
The grass is green.
Or maybe we’re all just watching shadows
on a cave wall
sitting with our backs to a fire
people are passing in front of
we mistake for the whole of reality
while there’s a fully enlightened mindscape outside
we conceive of as madness
as Plato wrote
should anyone care enough
for the future of human awareness
to mention it.
No news is good news
for those who are indebted to it.
Maybe we’re just tiny pieces of a bigger puzzle
and every ant heap
and beehive of our society
is just the way we muzzle ourselves
to keep from stinging each other to death.
Or maybe society’s just the big stone
we put on the chest of the living
as well as the dead
to keep them from rising again?
Why must evil not only be done
but be seen to be done
more often than good?
Why do we treat uranium
with more respect
than we do oxygen?
Is apocalypse more photogenic
or death less camera-shy
than the Big Bang
at the beginning of things?
If a brain cell went looking for its mind
what do you think it would find?
Fourteen hundred and seventy-five c.c.s
of neo-cortical laminations
etched like a Somalian famine
into the parched faces of the good earth
where the Garden of Eden
has turned into a black market
as a sure sign of an advanced intelligence?
Three and a half pounds of starmud
left here like a Martian cowpie
when the cow jumped over the moon
to graze like methane on the ozone?
One half the world is grass.
The other half are grazers.
Control eating and you control the world.
Withdraw the food from a child’s mouth
like foreign aid
saving thirty pieces of silver
and hope that her blood and flesh
turn into the bread and wine
of the bleeding heart that’s sent to save her.
Martyrs are a dime a dozen these days.
And messiahs come and go
like the internecine factions of a holy war.
If a brain cell went looking for its mind
what do you think it would find?
A secret stash of C-four
inside the skull
wired like a nervous system
to the occipital wavelength of a cosmic detonator
attached at the waist of a judas-goat
waiting to blow the ideological roof
off a school house learning to read
the writing on the wall
as a sure sign from God
that when he embraced
an intelligent design to the universe
in the form of a human
he embraced it
like a terrorist embraces someone
armed to the teeth by the same religion.
Who could have guessed
an opposable thumb
would one day be replaced by a trigger?
You figure?
If a brain cell went looking for its mind
what do you think it would find?
Chaos in bed with the Cosmos
like Venus and Mars
making a cuckold
of high technology
with a bad limp
and horns on its head?
The Taj Mahal or Hitler’s Bunker?
Though we prize it to death
what if consciousness
is of no value whatsoever?
Without purpose or meaning or worth
anywhere in the multiverse?
Merely the slurry and foam and froth
of a creative process it plays
little or no part in
except as something that needs to be disposed of.
Something is happening here Mr. Jones.
But you don’t know what it is do you?
A shoreless thought wave
trying to break into light
on the coast of its unending homelessness.
A bad dream that kept space awake
the night before the Big Bang
said it was time to rise and shine.
If a brain cell went looking for its mind
what do you think it would find?
The rock that struck Goliath in the head?
Or the black meteorite they kiss at the Kaaba?
The philosopher’s stone
or the Zen asteroids of the Buddhists?
Maybe something heretofore unknown
so intimately precious
and immanently radiant
it eclipses its own seeing
in the blaze of its being.
Or a realm of dark boundless hyperspace
so sensorially incomprehensible
we don’t realize
that with every blink of our eyes
with every breath we take
and let go of
with every thought
with every gust of feeling
we’re making waves in spatial membranes
like fireflies caught in the curtains of insight.
Cosmic eggs that break out of their shells
like atoms and eagles
and expand their wingspan into new worlds
like the brainstorm of bubbles
that follows the flash of lightning
that sets them free to be what they want.
It’s amazing what you can lose along the way
in the ardent pursuit of something else.
Your mind for example
until you begin to suspect
that it’s your seeking
that lost touch with it in the first place
and all you’ve done since you set out
to find it
is ramble on
like a long unanswered letter home.
So much scar tissue
for such a little wound.
Maybe there’s something worse
than not being blessed or cursed with a mind
that isn’t smooth or rough
sweet or sour
light or dark
loud or silent
big or small
and resembles nothing so much
as nothing at all.
Even to be a puppet
sitting on the lap
of an unvoiced intelligence
speaking through us
to a nameless audience
that hangs on every echo
as if they’d said it in the first place
might be better than posing a riddle
that baffles the Sphinx
with the way time thinks about things
like a human with stars in its eyes
that even the most bitter tears can’t wash out
nor all the facts in the world
cast doubt upon.
Maybe we’re just a shadow of space
with no place in the scheme of things
try how we may to deceive our wavelengths
they’re the warp and the woof of the weave
and not the stray threads
of our unravelling bloodlines.
Maybe the pointlessness of our existence
means there’s no capital at the beginning
so no one can pretend
that where they started from
and where they wound up
isn’t the same open-ended theme of life
that can’t be wounded at the beginning
and doesn’t need to be mended at the end.
Maybe the absurdity of believing in nothing
is the creative opportunity of a lifetime.
Maybe one day Sisyphus
just rolls his rock up over the hill
because there’s nothing predictable about cosmic laws
and the ongoing success of his happy descent is effortless
and worth so much more in the endless effect
of finding himself free of his drudgery
than the cause would have been
if it were not lost upon him
from the boundless beginning.
Maybe longing and seeking
the enlightened fragrances
of flowers and stars
blooming in the moonless night wood
is the way life seduces us deeper
into the darkness of being
the only living witness of our solitude.
PATRICK WHITE
