"That thing"

As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I'm currently reading Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche, a novel set largely in the San Francisco area in the first half of the twentieth century about a young girl who stumbles into an early career as a fraudulent psychic but who then runs away from that life and ... things happen to her.  I suppose in a sense it is a modern Bildungsroman, except it covers her whole life and not just her childhood.  But hey – education (Bildung) is supposed to be lifelong if you do it right, isn't it?

Anyway, one of the things that happens to Mei-Li Murrow, the half-Chinese protagonist, is a totally unexpected mystical experience as she sits on the beach one day, an experience in which the daylight suddenly seems to shoot through her and suffuse her in orgasmic waves of energy, and in which everything she sees on the beach – the dog playing in the surf and then shaking his fur dry when he comes back to the shore, the fisherman standing there casting and reeling and casting and reeling over and over, the children intently building a sand castle – all suddenly appear intensely beautiful and deeply meaningful.  And then it passes, of course, and the world goes back to being the world.  Except it doesn't, quite, because the memory of that event sticks with her ever after, and starts affecting everything else she does (such as prompting her to bail out of the psychic racket even though she has just then reached the point where she is about to make serious money at it).

If you know any of Dorothy Bryant's other work, this scene won't surprise you.  I think she has used that kind of experience in only one other book – The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You – but if you know any of Dorothy Bryant's work you probably know Kin of Ata.  And if you know Kin of Ata it will be no surprise to you that this experience doesn't suddenly make everything in Mei-Li's life all better.  She sees it, she knows it is there, she knows it is possible ... and she goes right on making the same ham-fisted choices in her life that she made before, with the same kinds of unexpected (and mostly unwelcome) consequences.  She even needles herself about it – "Why did I do or say this or that mean / petty / bitter / spiteful thing, when I should know better ... when I should remember that there is a glory in the world that makes all meanness and pettiness unnecessary?"  But knowing better doesn't stop her.

The same way it doesn't for most of us, come to that.

It's an interesting idea to see pursued in a story: How does this kind of experience (which any number of people must have had from time to time) get incorporated into one's life?  And it is refreshing to see Bryant not handle it simplistically, as if having the heavens open for you suddenly makes all your problems go away.  Because I assume that it never does, at any rate outside of didactic propaganda or moralizing hagiography.  So, ... what then?  Does it help you to live any better at all, or does it just help you to be dissatisfied with yourself without helping you to change?

I haven't finished the book, so I don't know Mei-Li's answer.  (Well, I've skimmed ahead the way I do impatiently in all books; but I won't say anything here because I'm sure I haven't picked up the whole picture.)  And I've never had that kind of mystical revelation myself, so I can't speak from personal experience.  I suppose the closest I've come to experiencing "that thing" (Mei-Li's name for it) is maybe two different things.  One is what I called "the Voice" in a post a couple years ago, when I talked about the quiet that I would hear in my head after I had finished shouting at God for Wife's most recent damned-foolish short-sighted betrayal (whatever it was that time), and the quiet would almost be shaped like words, or like an answer.  The other is the experience I used to have in Full Moon circles, back when Wife was a practising Wiccan priestess, when the officiating priest would call a god or goddess (usually goddess) into her body and she would go around the circle speaking to each of us in turn ... only it was plainly not Wife looking out through her eyes or speaking with her voice.  Other than those two experiences, I think my life has been pretty mundane – certainly I've felt nothing like Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light – but it's true that those have been enough for me to trust that there's Something More to the world than it looks like at first.

In fairness, I should add also that I would never have listened for the first of those if I hadn't already experienced the second.  That is, I would never have thought to yell at God over Wife's latest outrage – much less listen to the silence that came afterwards, when I finally stopped yelling – had I not earlier had the experience of speaking viva voce to Demeter or Hestia or Cerridwen (usually Cerridwen) in my living room or back yard, through the mechanism of the Wiccan ritual that allowed Her to use Wife's body.  In that respect, I owe to Wife my knowledge that the world is larger than it looks.  Like Sara Teasdale says in the poem on my sidebar, for some things you should "count many a year of strife well-lost."  Teasdale's "white shining hour of peace" is probably closer to Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light than to anything I've experienced, but I'll take what I can get.  And therefore, for all my snotty-nosed whining, my marriage to Wife may still turn out – in a very odd calculation – to have been a net positive.  Sorry, this whole paragraph has been one long parenthesis.  Where was I?

I was saying that I haven't experienced the kind of vision Mei-Li say, but I've seen something; and I was about to ask if it made any difference in my life.  The short answer is: not enough, but maybe some.  By "not enough" I mean mostly that I'm still far from wise; and wouldn't it be nice if the awareness of a reality beyond surface appearances made us all wise?  On the other hand, for one example, I think I owe to this awareness my comparative nonchalance over the concept of failure.  I wasn't always able to be relaxed about failure.  You can read plenty of posts in this blog where I've whined about failure of one kind or another.  But finally I began to think about it differently.  After all, if there is a whole layer of reality behind the one that we see every day, and if there's anything valuable about that layer (which I can tell that there is just by feeling it, when I see it), then at any rate that means that the ordinary scale of values that we are used to in the workaday world isn't the only scale.  It also makes it look a little bit more like the things we do every day are a kind of game, or a play, in which I just happen to have been assigned this role and you just happen to have been assigned that one.  Well OK then, if there are multiple scales of value I don't have to feel too bad when I get my high school alumni bulletin and hear that guys I went to school with – guys I thought I was smarter than – have just been appointed to the state superior court after many years as partner in a firm that does extensive pro bono work for the poor, or own a technology startup whose market capitalization just hit forty-nine gazillion dollars, or just sailed alone around the world.  (I made up that last one, but not the other two.)  Yes, these achievements demonstrate virtues it would be nice to have; no, I don't begrudge them their congratulations.  But one way or another it just so happens that I was dealt one hand and they were dealt others.  I got one role and they got others.  It happens.

Sorry, I realize on re-reading that last paragraph that it drips with envy.  That wasn't how I meant to write it.  That it came out so makes me think there is still a level in which my emotions haven't moved beyond envying my classmates, beyond thinking that I "really shoulda done something better with my life."  Fair enough, but my emotions can be stupid.  My mind understands that my classmates and I really were carrying around different virtues from the get-go.  I got a lot of praise in high school for being smart and doing well in my classes.  But success in the real world requires other virtues far more than it requires intelligence – virtues like energy, determination, vision, and a knack for making good decisions.  Me?  Sure, I'm smart.  But depression saps my energy (even when the depression is medicated, which it long wasn't), I dither over things, and I have (like one of our ex-Presidents) trouble with "the vision thing".  As for good decisions, ... well, I married Wife didn't I?  You tell me.

This post has evolved in a direction totally different from anywhere I thought it was going to go when I started writing it.  And actually, it is starting to bleed into another one that I got the idea for Friday night, as I read the latest Atlantic Monthly over dinner.  So maybe it's time to end this one and start that one.  Then I'd better get dinner going, if I expect to eat it tonight, because it's going to take a couple of hours.  Either that or go do my laundry ....