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Vishnu and Lakshmi Floating on Nagaraja
There were no gods in the First Age, and there were no demons.
The First Age was without disease; there was no lessening with
the years; there was no hatred, or vanity, or evil thought
whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. In those times, men lived as long
as they chose to live, and were without fear of death.—The
Mahabharata
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No Man, Shielded by the Hoods of Nagaraja, When All
Previous Forms Have Passed out of Existence
The late 1980s were a kind of golden period for me. Like the
antediluvian parents who first externalized our race—when the
sun rose on a different arc from the horizon, before the genome
had been scrambled—I had assumed that I had the whole of 72
,000 years in which to get my act together, that all good things
would be mine for the asking, and that only others would
inevitably grow old. Since then, the Earth has added a bit more
than five days to its cycle, and few remember that it is moving
much faster than it should.
I lived in an inexpensive apartment owned by the Boston
Historical Society, which did not care about making a profit on
the space. I had a flexible job schedule that allowed me to attend
to every flash of intuition, to wait for lightning to strike in the
same spot twice, and to sharpen my focus for many days at a
stretch. I had a diverse but mutually supportive group of creative
friends, who had not yet entirely gone their separate ways. Most
still talked to each other, if from a psychic distance, and less often
than before. They had not yet moved to the suburbs or divorced
their art to marry their careers.
If I had become just a bit more cynical about the avant-garde, this
did not lessen my own desire to take risks. If I did not expect
stylistic theorizing or word games to rip open new frontiers, I had
done my best to mute my disillusionment, and there were some
consolations. For decades on end, critic after critic had
announced the “death of painting.” If painting had died, no one
had bothered to tell painters such as Kiefer, Cucci, and Palladino.
Curiously, though, a strange reversal had occurred: most of the
best painters of this decade were both “cutting-edge” and “neo.”
The old was new; the new was less new than refurbished. I
desired to plunge even further back, to grow an alternate set of
eyes, to resuscitate traditions of which no trace was left.
So, from painters, a few clues, but what to do with the US literary
scene? Mythic plunges were out. MFA creative writing pods
hatched thousands of pod-approved wunderkinds per year. It
was disturbing to admit that I was challenged by fewer and fewer
of my contemporaries. The last of my models were repeating
themselves or would soon depart for another world. Be that as it
may. There were billions who had things worse. Life was good,
and this period was golden.
I lived several blocks and five minutes away from the Boston
Theosophical Society, the perfect low-key center at which to
explore my deepening interest in spirituality. I had hoped to
bring certain of my anxieties to the surface, to calm the disruptive
forces that were playing games with my mind. I had hoped to be
able to plunge, without fear, to the depths. I had hoped to be able
to confront the obscure parts of my childhood. I had hoped to be
able to integrate those aspects of myself that did not belong to me
but to another. I had hoped to be able to read back through
several near-apocalyptic flights to determine if they were
speaking in a language I should know. While I had no particular
interest in Theosophical writings, which I saw as somewhat
musty and Victorian, the majority of participants in the center
were not actually Theosophists. It was a place where people met
and mixed, where circles were drawn and entities invoked, and
where many things seemed, always, just about to happen.
Giorgio de Chirico, Sacred Fish, 1919
At the Boston Theosophical Society, as in the paintings of de
Chirico, large figures cast their shadows on the stage-set, without
necessarily providing accurate clues to their appearance.
Metaphysical lines led off towards multiple perspective points. At
first, you might assume that you were still in Renaissance space,
and that all of the lines, at some point, would converge. O
Newtonian geo-literalist! Deadbeat tenant of the cave! If they did,
in fact, converge, in their own peculiar manner of convergence, it
was not where your naivete would lead you to expect.
There, in that 19th-century brick townhouse, supported by the
hands of unseen powers, or “Chiefs,” as Helena Blavatsky liked to
call them, you could receive an education in how to come and go
from your body. If earlier spasms of primal energy had caused
you to doubt your sanity, if you sensed that space was waiting to
consume you, if you feared that light might strip the names from
every object in the world, the study of spiritual systems allowed
you to postpone such concerns. Like the subcategories of Piaget’s
stages of development, Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled demanded
complex feats of memorization, as did Taoist subtle anatomy. If
one system did not work for you, there were plenty of others to
try.
In that quaint but mysterious environment, with its occult feuds
that brewed around dark corners, there was something oddly
comforting about taking your first baby steps towards death. You
could smell salt in the air. The wind from a lost continent blew
softly through the windows. On the table next to you, you might
find that a starfish was just waiting to say hello. The words of
knowledgeable teachers were ships waiting to depart. If Gurdjieff
did not—necessarily—agree with Steiner who did not agree with
Bailey who did not agree with Aurobindo, that was all very well
and good. It was pleasant to inch towards the edges of your
comfort zone, to experience some hint of danger without having
to push on into the depths.
This lack of finality was in keeping with my mood. If a crisis was
imminent, that crisis was not mine, nor was it fair to expect me to
find words for the experience. In terms of creativity, this was very
much of an in-between period for me. My artwork was going
well. I had just begun a series of large black and white drawings,
in a sacred-geometric style that had emerged whole in a dream.
If my writing was neither here nor there, this did not mean I had
fossilized, let alone that I was stuck. No, the explanation was
much simpler: I had not yet managed to integrate my earlier
avant-garde and current spiritual orientations. Any volatile
alchemical elements were still held in suspension. This was not a
matter of particular concern. If a race of acupuncture manikins
had yanked me from the solar system, and if, due to their class
schedule, I had somehow lost three days, this too was not a
matter of concern. There was only the One Moment, within
which we should live. Our non-dead teachers had met and
argued and come to this conclusion, which they then proceeded
to issue as a rule.
Yui Sakamoto, Untitled, 2018
Since this period was golden, there were no deep anxieties with which to come to terms, none, at least, that could not be put on
hold. Our 24/7 lighting-grid had banished the last demon. Once,
there were tens of thousands of them. Now, they were all scared.
Why else would they have come to us with gifts? Each birthday, I
grew younger by a year, for such is the inscrutable genius of
precession. Any grey hairs would remove themselves. I had to
choose to get sick. If the stars were AWOL, if they had somehow
wandered from the spaces where I left them, if Earth’s axis had
been tilted by some 20-odd degrees, this did not mean that my
clock was set to the wrong hour. No, it only meant that a cloud
had confused my solar plexus. It only meant that I should
exercise my breathing. I barely noticed the cracked soil, the slow
incursions of the wasteland, the ash that whitened my front steps.
Life was good. I was not in any rush.
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