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like smoke in sunbeams or the rippling networks of sunlight in shallow water. Transforming itself endlessly into
itself, the pattern alone remains. The crosspoints, nodes, nets, and curlicues vanish perpetually into each other.
"The baseless fabric of this vision." It is its own base. When the ground dissolves beneath me I float.
Closed-eye fantasies in this world seem sometimes to be revelations of the secret workings of the brain, of
the associative and patterning processes, the ordering systems which carry out all our sensing and thinking.
Unlike the one I have just described, they are for the most part ever more complex variations upon a
theme ferns sprouting ferns sprouting ferns in multidimensional spaces, vast kaleidoscopic domes of stained
glass or mosaic, or patterns like the models of highly intricate molecules systems of colored balls, each one of
which turns out to be a multitude of smaller balls, forever and ever. Is this, perhaps, an inner view of the
organizing process which, when the eyes are open, makes sense of the world even at points where it appears
to be supremely messy?
Later that same afternoon, Robert takes us over to his barn from which he has been cleaning out junk and
piling it into a big and battered Buick convertible, with all the stuffing coming out of the upholstery. The sight of
trash poses two of the great questions of human life, "Where are we going to put it?" and "Who's going to clean
up?" From one point of view living creatures are simply tubes, putting things in at one end and pushing them out
at the other until the tube wears out. The problem is always where to put what is pushed out at the other end,
especially when it begins to pile so high that the tubes are in danger of being crowded off the earth by their own
refuse. And the questions have metaphysical overtones. "Where are we going to put it?" asks for the foundation
upon which things ultimately rest the First Cause, the Divine Ground, the bases of morality, the origin of
action. "Who's going to clean up?" is asking where responsibility ultimately lies, or how to solve our ever-
multiplying problems other than by passing the buck to the next generation.
I contemplate the mystery of trash in its immediate manifestation: Robert's car piled high, with only the
driver's seat left unoccupied by broken door-frames, rusty stoves, tangles of chicken-wire, squashed cans,
insides of ancient harmoniums, nameless enormities of cracked plastic, headless dolls, bicycles without wheels,
torn cushions vomiting kapok, non-returnable bottles, busted dressmakers' dummies, rhomboid picture-frames,
shattered bird-cages, and inconceivable messes of string, electric wiring, orange peels, eggshells, potato skins,
and light bulbs all garnished with some ghastly-white chemical powder that we call "angel shit." Tomorrow we
shall escort this in a joyous convoy to the local dump. And then what? Can any melting and burning imaginable
get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin especially when the things we make and build are beginning to
look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away? The only answer seems to be that of the
present group. The sight of Robert's car has everyone helpless with hysterics.
The Divine Comedy. All things dissolve in laughter. And for Robert this huge heap of marvelously
incongruous uselessness is a veritable creation, a masterpiece of nonsense. He slams it together and ropes it
securely to the bulbous, low-slung wreck of the supposedly chic convertible, and then stands back to admire it
as if it were a float for a carnival. Theme: the American way of life. But our laughter is without malice, for in this
state of consciousness everything is the doing of gods. The culmination of civilization in monumental heaps of
junk is seen, not as thoughtless ugliness, but as self-caricature as the creation of phenomenally absurd
collages and abstract sculptures in deliberate but kindly mockery of our own pretensions. For in this world
nothing is wrong, nothing is even stupid. The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a
pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs a play which seems quite
improper at level 28 may be exactly right at level 96. I am speaking of levels or stages in the labyrinth of twists
and turns, gambits and counter-gambits, in which life is involving and evolving itself  the cosmological one-
upmanship which the yang and the yin, the light and the dark principles, are forever playing, the game which at
some early level in its development seems to be the serious battle between good and evil. If the square may be
defined as one who takes the game seriously, one must admire him for the very depth of his involvement, for
the courage to be so far-out that he doesn't know where he started.
The more prosaic, the more dreadfully ordinary anyone or anything seems to be, the more I am moved to
marvel at the ingenuity with which divinity hides in order to seek itself, at the lengths to which this cosmic joie de
vivre will go in elaborating its dance. I think of a corner gas station on a hot afternoon. Dust and exhaust fumes,
the regular Standard guy all baseball and sports cars, the billboards halfheartedly gaudy, the flatness so
reassuring nothing around here but just us folks! I can see people just pretending not to see that they are
avatars of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, that the cells of their bodies aren't millions of gods, that the dust isn't a
haze of jewels. How solemnly they would go through the act of not understanding me if I were to step up and
say, "Well, who do you think you're kidding? Come off it, Shiva, you old rascal! It's a great act, but it doesn't fool
me." But the conscious ego doesn't know that it is something which that divine organ, the body, is only
pretending to be*. When people go to a guru, a master of wisdom, seeking a way out of darkness, all he really
does is to humor them in their pretense until they are outfaced into dropping it. He tells nothing, but the twinkle
in his eye speaks to the unconscious "You know....You know!"
In the contrast world of ordinary consciousness man feels himself, as will, to be something in nature but not of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]