Visionaries peer through the grid of flames that separates us from full reality. They get closer than the rest of us, and thus can discern more of the shapes and landscapes there … although of course the heat of the grid — and the chaotic energies that drive them to the quest in the first place — distort and obscure their vision.
And so, what they bring back to us is not the gospel truth, not the whole story, not without error — but it is closer to reality than we would ever reach on our own.
***
(And then, the next week….)
The Outward Circumference
I was on the second floor of Blackwell’s,
sitting in the covered chair next to the Russian books.
I was reading Blake, in Erdman’s edition,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell it was,
when I fell asleep and had the most vivid dream.
I dreamed I was on the second floor of Blackwell’s,
sitting in the covered chair next to the Russian books,
and you walked up to me, as natural as air,
dressed smartly, in some long dark sweater,
high boots, and, I think, a thick scarf
wound and bunched around your neck;
your brown hair, longer here,
was falling and flowing to your shoulders.
You were smiling, you leaned down, you told me something,
some slight thing, some happy gossip.
Then I woke up, without knowing that I had slept.
I looked down at the heavy book in my lap, and read:
“Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and
Reason is the broad or outward circumference of Energy,”
which were the same lines I’d seen twice that week,
quoted in a book of cosmology as a prescient illustration
of the true nature of matter as discerned by modern science,
then in a book on brain structure and its relation
to our perception of reality and meaning in the world.
Then with a jolt I looked up, looked around:
Where were you? You had been here,
I remembered, your living presence,
in this very scene, intact, no dreamish muddle,
not a single thing distorted, but now ….
It took a long, disturbing moment
To fully grasp it had not been.
