Here all is clear. No, all is not clear.

I wonder if we're too quick to decide what we believe, and too precise about it when we get there. Belief of any kind seems to hinge on our skill at either resolving or ignoring apparent contradictions; the entire focus seems to be reaching the endgame, where one may employ clear and calculated strategies and where it's preferable not to make any moves for fear of weakening one's position. The goal appears to be not having to think anymore; we make up our minds or someone else does it for us, and they're made of a few rote phrases we trudge out in the event that we're questioned. You must stand for something; you are, in fact, a collection of symbols couched in a tidy allegory, cradled in the sure hands of a narrative that carries you safely to a predictable end.

Ambiguity appears dangerous. There's too much room to wander around in, there's a chance of getting lost. It fosters an atmosphere of questions, and if these questions can't be answered comfortably within the sphere of our beliefs, if there is no right answer and no end to the questions, there is a fear that all our attempts to find meaning are fruitless. Language, one of the tools we wield in our attempts, is itself ambiguous, undermining the search for a single perspective from which we can bring order to an existence we're afraid we'll never understand.

In the beginning was the word. But the word is not as certain as we've been led to believe:

"the initial Hebrew words of the Bible, Bereshit bara Elohim, have, in fact, two contradictory translations. One way to translate the opening line...is to treat the word Elohim, one of many Hebrew names of God, as the subject of the sentence, thus rendering the translation as the familiar phrase: 'In the beginning, God created….'
The other grammatically correct way to translate these words, however, is to treat Elohim as an object, thus rendering the translation: 'In the beginning ____ created God…' The blank in the sentence has an assumed 'It,' which compels us to read the opening, 'In the beginning, [It] created God, heaven and earth.'”

Whether or not you believe in God, It, or any part of the equation at all, this is an extraordinary paradox. Literalists will have nothing to cling to here--there is no way to take it at face value when there are two faces, both of them true. For the rest of us, the tiny bridge the mind makes between one and the other, the temporary space created as we shift the words around, becomes a path we may never stop walking and an opening through which those endless questions flood.

Is this so frightening? People have an innate distrust of the oracular and the irrational, but there is a huge difference between a few words that hold many potential meanings and a great hill of words that mean nothing at all. There is the emptiness that comes from overuse--the list of truths we recite and memorize like children learning to pray, the name-tags we pin to our shirts that in turn pin us to one black-and-white image, forever and ever, amen. There is a very different kind of emptiness, before we decide we must choose one face, one set of absolutes, a centralized belief we must abide by entirely. There is also the very human experience of being caught in the grey between, an undefined, vacillating, Beckettian void: "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

We're so sure we can't go on without a resolution, we can't tolerate that slipperiness we sense in the mind. We want truth, we want precision, a life free of contradictions. We want to create ourselves once, and for all time, if only the subject and object would stop shifting. But it's hard to ignore that when we're honest enough we might recognize that what we tell ourselves should be true, what we think we know, and what we feel can fail to add up. This can break us, leave us deadlocked, or keep us climbing up that hill of rhetoric where questions aren't meant to be answered. Or we can just go on, through the unresolved and unanswerable; we can keep going on and let the going be a story too large for simple endings, brief summaries that flatten out a life. If we don't stop making our minds up, we're always creating, and creation becomes a belief in itself.

The union forever.

So often we are not at all what we thought we would be, are not, in fact, what we think we are. The problem seems to be one of twos; there is the self, and there is the projection of that self, almost always lost in translation, in the same way poets speak of never quite writing the poem they have in mind. There is what we can only understand as the self, which is a falsehood from the moment we recognize it because recognition requires us to separate from, and think of as other, whatever it is we're recognizing. There is something beyond that self, we can comprehend that with little effort, but there again is another divide, and all these splits and dualities build up in layers around us until they are absolutely opaque.

I'm quite sure even talking about it is a mistake. So often all we do is talk, and this particular subject is not a novel one. Language itself contributes to the problem, as Aldous Huxley tells us when he says, "To formulate and express the contents of the reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages." It's nothing but a code that we've invented and don't, ourselves, understand. Some can find a way to work within its constraints, wrapping themselves in those layers in order to make a daring escape, using a heap of language as a fulcrum to achieve a momentary lift.



This is one way, and it's as ambitious and elegant a use of the tools and weapons we have as any other, but it doesn't go far enough. Maybe a better way to at least begin to formulate an idea of how the divide came to be is to think a bit smaller. We can think of a letter, and a few numbers.

Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. There is some debate whether Aleph should be assigned to the number one or zero; it comes first, after all, but is last in presenting itself before God in the creation myth recounted in the Zohar. God chooses Bet, the second letter, to begin the Torah with, and Aleph is kept as the first letter, but with an important difference from the rest; it has no sound of its own---more properly it's the letter before sound, the preparation for sound, an inbreathing. For this reason it seems more logical to connect it with zero, which is the nullity that exists before we begin to count, the potential ability to define the size and shape of the palpable world.

Aleph is attributed to the element of Air, the breath and lungs in man, and the mind or thoughts of God. It's also associated with Kether, the first Sephiroth, in Kabbalah; this is the primal nothingness, the beginning of all that is, the void which may be glimpsed in the gaps of existence. It encompasses the beginning and end, and is present in all that unfolds in between. It's both part and whole, minimum and maximum, the source and completion, singular and myriad. This is all, of course, quite beyond the boundary of perception. It's at best unknowable, and usually unspeakable. To know it is to be distinct and separate from it, which is exactly the problem we're trying to solve when we think of it.

So zero is already perfect, in a state of unity with itself and the universe and the nothingness behind the universe, but since it is itself perfection and not separate from that perfection, it doesn't know that. Being the center itself, it can't know that it is the center. Potential wishes to realize itself, and seeds, by their nature, grow; we all have a desire to see our own reflection, become a being of matter. This is the beginning of consciousness, and this is how the break happens. The circle divides itself in half along a perfect line, and we have one. With it is born two--each number has in itself the next one, and every step can be traced back to the first one. When the circle splits, one (the fracture) and two (the halves) are born together.

One, and oneness, are an illusion, because oneness is not unity, it's the fracture, zero was the whole being. One lies between two severed halves, both uniting and separating them, as thin and unreal as a shadow, but still there. Nothing really keeps them apart, other than illusion. The veil of Maya, the ego which is another manifestation of one, whatever you want to call it, maintains the delusion of separation, keeps it in place, giving it the solidity of a concrete wall and strengthening it with the fear that is born of an ego that will do anything to maintain itself.

Two is, simply, duality, opposition, us and them, the always inscrutable Other. Zero was looking to know itself, but didn't realize that by breaking away from itself to look at its own face, it created the divide. Crowley came up with some bogus math telling us that 0=2, and this is valid, but I think what has to be done is to work in the opposite direction. The point isn't to go forward to two, but backward to zero--the journey isn't so much one of discovery, as it is one of recollection.

When we're caught in the illusion of two, we're stuck on the outside. Energy dissipates through the fracture. The self is a construct, built of stereotypes and imitation, it's literally the second-hand life. What is needed is a reversal, we need to go back to the unknowable and unspeakable, or so it appears to us from our side of the split. If we can go through that concrete wall that seems so solid, if what we see and hear stops being merely its corporeal self, it becomes a door to what can't be said. It is changed, and we are changed with it. The ego isn't judging, and putting things into their little boxes. When we are forced out of the rut, off the tracks, we can get a glimpse of the truth behind the surfaces. We're all stuck on the wheel, and maybe the idea is to turn the wheel backwards. And open the door, behind which waits the Aleph.

All of this is nothing more than a raft of symbols, which is not to say it's completely useless. The word "symbol" derives from the Greek symbolon, literally "to throw together". A symbolon was a piece of wood or porcelain that would be broken in two pieces, then held by two individuals that were about to be separated for a long time, and would eventually need something to recognize each other when reunited. A symbol is, therefore, a way of recognition, and the sign of a broken but repairable unity. Symbols give us the hope that reunion is possible.

All of this is nothing more than ornament, a fancy escutcheon around a keyhole we press an ear or an eye to. Where is the master key? If I find it, I'll let you know.

resurrected and revised. sometimes old emails are useful.

Seeing.

Everything is waiting for us to see it.
Anything may be read.

I'm speaking of seeing and reading in the sense of divination--not as a method of fortune-telling, nor of predicting the future, but of opening oneself to messages looking for a destination. Everyone has the potential to be a receiver of messages, and most have experienced spontaneous divination; anyone who has been profoundly moved by a work of art in a way they can't explain, felt that the lyrics of a random song on the radio were speaking to them in the moment, found a passage in a book that provides an answer to an unspoken question. Often these messages are wordless revelations--a door cracks open, and we can walk through it under our own power. Disparate pieces of a puzzle suddenly lock together. Maybe it's a divine proto-language we've tapped into, or the sudden flap of a wing, a vision descending.

We may also employ any number of tools to invite this way of seeing. Sortilege, or the casting of lots, may be the oldest form of divination; stones, bones or wax in a bowl of water, anything can be thrown down and a reading found in the spaces. The practitioners of this method took Mercury as their patron in antiquity, and the element of mercury seems to be a wholly appropriate metaphor for the act itself--its form and the meaning found there relevant only to the moment, ever-changing, impossible to pin down.

All of us have a natural affinity for images--they are the most direct form of communication, understandable at a glance, a shortcut around the gridlock our minds might encounter when we try to express ourselves with words. Images can also allow us to communicate more directly with ourselves as well. I read tarot, or rather I look at tarot and try to see what it wants to say to me, and listen to how it speaks. I use the Noblet Marseille, a restoration of a Parisian deck printed in 1650, and this is unimportant aside from the fact that the Marseille deck is free of any esoteric overlays; the history and iconography of the Marseille and its variants is a fascinating and hotly debated subject, but if we pull it out from under the weight of its history it may be read as pure imagery, and becomes a hotline to insights--literally a way of seeing into ourselves and the situation at hand.

The method I use with the Noblet is the creation of Enrique Enriquez, and he calls it Eye Rhyme. I won't explain it here, it should be read in his own words, understood using his examples. I believe it was this way of seeing, not just the cards but an entire life and its content, that Allen Ginsberg was speaking of in his famous aphorism, "first thought, best thought". This understanding of the visionary state is one aspect of what drove Rimbaud to write the second of his "Voyant" letters, where he says, "This much is clear: I'm around for the hatching of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I release a stroke from the bow: the symphony makes its rumblings in the depths, or leaps fully formed onto the stage.". And later, in the same letter, "This language will be of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colors, thought latching onto thought and pulling.". The language he speaks of may be read by looking at the Marseille, where visions indeed act out our personal dramas again and again.

I can toss a few cards onto the floor and, like stones in a riverbed, follow their various paths to any number of ends. I can see how the figures on the trumps and courts regard each other, I can listen in on their conversations. The point in all of this is, simply, to look.

Look at the Bateleur, the first Trump:


As I write this he appears to me in the guise of legerdemain, and also as the seer I'm speaking of--he looks over his shoulder to the left, the past, perhaps engaged in memory and what can be found there, manipulating the mysterious objects on his table; is he casting lots, is he a practitioner of sortilege? The name he conjures for me, "legerdemain", and the word "sortilege" itself share the same root--leger, meaning light, or quick. Mercurial.

Look at the second trump, the Papesse:



She sits quietly, an open book in her lap. Has she found an answer she didn't know to ask there? She also looks to the left, but her manner suggests something altogether different from the gaze of the Bateleur, something other--is she a visionary as well? Is this the moment of visitation?

The point is to see. Anais Nin said, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.". The tools are there for us to use, the tools are everywhere at hand.

The way.

Some of us, a very few of us, are what the omnipresent "they" refer to as gifted. Whether an accident of nature, primed DNA waiting for an itchy trigger finger, a red flare in the frontal lobe, or a bestowal from an unknowable other, some of us are touched, some are the fire-bearers. It doesn't matter what you call it or where you think it comes from, when you brush up against it you see it for what it is, and if you're at all like me, you still carry a hope that some of it will cling to you as it passes.

Do the gifted know themselves to be so? This is a foolish question. Whatever it is that inhabits them, whatever they embody, doesn't have patience for questions. It knows that beauty is worthy of expression, and it also knows that going beyond beauty, putting beauty on the rack to see how much it can take, is a far better use of time. A supernal voice, scraping itself against the infernal, and in the tracks and grooves left behind by that abrasion a bit of shining debris, the glitter of grit, the imprint of an edge.

Imagine being possessed of a voice like that, and pressing yourself up against the ecstatic. How far would you take it? And having gone there, what would you see?


The Way Young Lovers Do--Jeff Buckley