I love writing. That's why I love me some Lennon. Always have, always will. "Across the Universe" is one of the songs I'd liked played at my funeral. Yes, I know, I know -- I AM the guy who grumbles about bongos and gazoos at Mass and the modern version's degeneration, halfway through, from a solemn mystical ritual into a sort of ersätz Lion's Club meet-and-greet ("and now, back to our blood sacrifice! Take it away, Real Presence!").
But I love writing and Lennon nailed it with that song… when you close your eyes, fingers at rest on the keyboard, and you meditate the blank screen from impatient into expectant, "Across the Universe" so gracefully captures the way words flow, turn into colors and sound and shadowed faces, morph into gentle heart-beat pulses of fractured laughter and phrases from youth that turn out to have lingered in the attic for decades, waiting for the right moment to float by and whisper one last time, one last wink, one last wistful bid at relevance that lifts past you on a breeze scented by autumn leaves from a place that's no longer there -- unless you choose to bring it back to life now, dressed up as another but bearing the soul of that memory.
"Vanity of vanities -- all is vanity," is the usual translation of the opening in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and as usual it completely misses the profound depth of the Hebrew original. Literally, the verse reads: "Emptiness within emptiness -- the universe is nothing but emptiness."
The image painted is that of a black hole, a naked singularity within a vacuum whose existence is only a thought experiment in an attempt by ants to comprehend the atom. It's all so relative, but the absolute is found in the deeper apophatic break through darkness into that bliss discover atop Jacob's ladder by the Syrian mystic Dionysius, harmonized with otherworldly swirls by the Rheinlander mystic composer Hildegaard von Bingen, articulated to his mortal peril by her spiritual companion Meister Eckhart.
I loved Hebrew when I was younger; these days I have a brain resembling moldy pie crust and I can barely manage English.
Ah, but Lennon's legacy and work. Still, it turns me on.
To-wit:
Words are flowing out like
Endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip
away across the universe.
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy
Are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me.
One of the more interesting experiences of my life came late last year when I learned I was dyslexic.
Early fifties, numerous publications including legal works, literary review and award-winning fiction -- it took some convincing. Ironically, a lot of reading. A couple of tests. Consultations. Etcetera. (I am both a very simple and a very stubborn man ….)
Turns out a lot of published writers are dyslexic. One explained she had no idea until her publisher told her editing her copy was just too expensive (and she couldn't figure out why because it looked fine to her). Similarly, it took a bit of a crisis in my professional life for me to dig deep enough to find out.This was after a sharply increased incidence of dyslexic errors now thought by the medics to have resulted from a cardiac incident I had in 2010. There is still some exploration they want to do when I line up the money, looking for stroke-like after-effects in my brain. In short: like everyone else who knows me, they think I need my head examined.
An unknown but presumptively high percentage of dyslexics learn from pre-school forward how to adapt to the condition and mask it. It's a fascinating insight into human functioning. We are children, we have no experience and little comprehensible education to fall back on, and the world we experience becomes the foundation of our reality. For the dyslexic, that reality is one where mental trickery becomes second nature in order to achieve the same outward results as everyone around us. Here's the trick: when you're five, it never occurs to you that no one else in the room is amending teacher's instructions to achieve the same result.
And even when someone does discover the condition, they face two problems. By then, they may very well be (in fact, often are) in a position where the process and evaluation of information is a key factor and any weakness in that area is professional suicide. Also, the form(s) of dyslexia for which they have compensated over years, or decades, are not those familiar to the public. As I did until being educated on it this winter, most think dyslexia consists solely of a tendency to see individual letters backwards or rearranged within words.
The two strongest symptoms that I have include a tendency to type one word in place of an intended word. The word that goes on paper will usually (in this order) sound like the word intended (roughly 90 percent of the time), begin with the same letter (roughly 70 percent of the time), and be of roughly the same length give or take a couple of letters (roughly 50 percent of the time). As you can see, it's a rough science. And some displacements defy all three markers -- "are" substituted for "I" being an example -- or on a grander scale, involving a disarranged sentence. At times, it may involve a series of incomplete sentences in which (usually) the verbs simply aren't stated.
These errors don't show up on spell check and usually escaped my proof reading unless I begin adopting strategies others have developed for spotting them. I'm a pack rat who never throws anything away, especially now that it's so easily stored in this flashy little boxes that light up when you plug them into your computer, so I had all kinds of raw drafts of all kinds of writing to work with over the past months. The computer had been kind enough to date when they were last modified and I found that my incidence rate has gone from around one every four pages around 2004-09 up to a current rate of around two per page. I choose to find that fascinating rather than intimidating.
Meanwhile, I am finding that the rapid advance in voice-to-text tech may be my salvation. Vocalized displacement (for me) is minute. But when the ability to write with any real coherence is gone, I am gone. I will breath and eat and move but I won't exist as me anymore. I sit for hours at a time pouring thought into the machine for the day I may only see myself again by pulling up files.
The funniest thing about learning I was dyslexic is that I had joked for years about my "math dyslexia," only to learn there really was such a thing and I have it. I have never, ever been able to keep a sequence of numbers three or greater straight. I can not do it. I can read them, or hear them, and within five seconds (literally) I won't be able to recite them in proper order except by extreme concentration to the exclusion of all else, including breathing.
Turns out, this is called dyscalculia. In retrospect, it is at least hypothetically possible this explains why from 1st grade through graduate school through law school, I invariably got top grades in every other subject but failed math. I assumed up to now I was just stupid -- and there's no really solid reason to abandon that theory in general -- but it was a bit eye-opening to learn I was joking about having a condition that actually existed.
I am obviously a man who needs to read more.
I've thought quite a bit lately about an English politician whose zenith was reached in the late 1980s. He was a brilliant and erudite man. I followed him closely during a period of time where for job reasons I knew much more about the internal workings of British politics than our own. He was rumored next in line to replace Maggie Thatcher as PM (and indeed came within a hair's breadth).
Everyone inside British politics knew he was dyslexic -- very much so. Only a few of my experiences since 2010 match what he spent his life dealing with. His methods of masking it were masterful -- almost like a magician's sleight of hand -- and his aides were expert at playing their part in the effort. In retrospect, what strikes me is how much time and energy went into the charade, perhaps enough distraction to have kept him that quarter-step behind the man who beat him to the PM's post in the end.
Everyone knew he was the smartest man in the room in any gathering that did not involve Stevie Hawking. What was the point, really? No one doubted his competence in a crisis, his cool under pressure, his encyclopedic cartography of the pits, traps and quicksands of European politics during the period of time the Fulda Gap was the switch that could have launched the nuclear devastation of the world. And still, because we are human, the effort was demanded of him and he made it without complaint.
As a "senior statesman" figure, essentially retired to the House of Lords, he went on to gracefully haunt the back rooms of post-Soviet diplomacy, quietly assuming an unheralded, yet crucial, part in guiding a new generation of European leaders toward a democratization of eastern Europe that was accompanied (this is the tricky part) with stability and prosperity. The histories children are taught from now on will tell them the name of the man who beat him to that PM's post, but the world they live in is much better because of his efforts, not those of the man who won the race.
It took me a good hour proofing this, and still I bet somewhere above is yet another artifact of the way my decayed mind is killing my ability to do the one thing I have always loved, in which I have always found my refuge and myself. Still, that is not the end.
Life is a quick flash in a dark place but it is worth the light and the glimpse you get into the far corners of the Room. We die like moths in the closet of an abandoned house having ruined coats no one will ever wear again but it's worth the chew. Every man and every woman is a creator. We are not gods, and there is no god within us, but we may choose to shepherd ourselves toward points in mental space no one even saw before.
My God, I love the creative act. If I may paraphase Heidegger (and really isn't even the most literal translation of Sein und Zeit really just a paraphrase in the end): We are born as Everyone but die Alone. But this truth is joyful, not despondent. This is not loneliness; this is enlightenment. This is not dying; this is transcendence toward God. This is what my brothers and sisters of Eastern Orthodox mystic faith call "theosis," what the Yaqui shaman and his western academic disciples call "entheogenic consciousness." Turn off your "here-mind," relax and float downstream.
I love writing. That's why I love me some Lennon. Always have; always will. Endless rain into a paper cup.
It's all relative in flow. Focusing well enough to find the true absolute? Ah, that's the trick!
Kurt Stallings
Good Friday, 2012
Bedford, Texas
