Spooky Action at a Distance

There is something in the Houseman poem, the athlete dying young...  a recognition, an intimacy with death.

The artist has the ability to use the creature's native imagination, innate self-knowledge of an owner's manual of sentient beings.


I remember not wanting to leave my father's side, after he had passed.  He seemed to me in a form of deep sleep.  It was night at the funeral home on the west end of Utica, a cold clear starry night in early April.  I went out in the parking lot to look up at the sky while my brother warmed up his Range Rover.  We were still, my father and I, near each other, speaking to each other, as always, silently, things we could not say, but understood.


The conjecture of a recent scientific discovery, that the  brain has some self-knowledge of death.  So there is indeed the lingering presence of the human essence...  something that the sensitive intuitively gather...  The brain, in some form, in some effect, is still at work, even after clinical death. A person's nervous system can still report to some sense of its own being that it is in that somewhere in between.


Hamlet's father's ghost.



Looking back at the deepest source and record, The Bible, from the Book of Genesis, on to the Book of John...  there is a sense of some science there.

Each chapter will tell a story...  The artist, the poet, the intuitive creative person is left with the job of interpretation,of recreation, re-inspiring, retelling..  Each story is a metaphor, a statement in poetic form of human truth.  Science, always, and forever, can only go so far.  It takes the imagination for the facts of science to form into meaningful food for thought.

Each Bible story, the recorded intuitions, all of us have an ability to grasp.  The stories come as metaphor of what we all will know, one way or another, sooner or later, a conscious realization of things science cannot tell us.  Dim sometimes, but steady, as a communal myth of the original cataclysmic Flood found throughout the myths of early humanity.

That we even tell the story, of, say, Noah, is to invite us to see the world and the stories we make of it as emblematic.  The Flood is a story told, and we are ones who must tell stories.  We tell the stories and they become significant, indicators of the deep reality, the way we are able to perceive.  The stories have purpose, the stories have truth.  The Book of Genesis tells us so, from the very beginning of the great work of science and scholarship and poetry.


What does the story of Abraham tell us?   The artist has to, in essence, leave, leave his family, in effect offer to kill the equivalent of a dearest one, a son, a mother's fondest dreams and hopes...  to follow the biddings of the voice of God.


This is the problem with being an artist, with being a recorder of the deepest innate sense of the impersonally described human being....

The realization of a need to be free from the usual contemporary entanglements, all the things one should go, but then goes to and finds wearily drab and the same even at the height of whatever supposed pleasure might be offered (as stores of suffering always emerge, secret notes, louder and louder, that come through the fine happy tune..)




The quantum entanglement of our own lives with those lives, teachings, observations, of the spiritual being, the thinker innate in the human being...  our own atoms, now noticed, now clear, now set forth, now captured in the realm of imaginative tale and measurement, we tell our stories...

And the great thing is that there is now suddenly no distance between ourselves and the great participants of the Bible, Moses, Jesus in the desert, forty days...


Every relationship you've ever had, you and your dad, you and your mom, you and your grandparents, you and your friends... your sibling... your teacher, your neighbor...  all of it goes back to be in tune with the entanglement, the simultaneous presence of all that can be simultaneous, intertwined, related somehow...

The odd thing is, that one feels such a thing almost best while being, as traditionally considered, alone.  Alone, then you see the odd watery ocean fibers, the sea continuum, that connects your mind with the loved one's own mind and  being...


The writer scribbler is tired as he edits this, the day after the night of imagination and the rambling sentences that need to be made clearer.  He has just had his afternoon breakfast, of black-eyed peas with hummus.  His immune system is telling him to rest, and, perhaps more importantly, to find company at the spooky distance, where even a schoolboy can take a nap and be there with Jesus taking a nap in curl of ropes on a Galilee boat.

It is the need to be directly social, or sociable, that can derail him, tire him out, expend his energies in conversations, come as a misdirection of the holy creative spirit, as if he were and had to dumb himself down to the level of those who do not have the connection to the greater world, Hamlet's connection to his father, Abraham's connection to God, the whole band of people who have come and walked through this world always connected to something beyond, things of deeper truth, even compelling us to act.

The highly unlikely patriarch or prophet will not be grasped according to the understanding of common logic and conventional believability.  His mind cannot even be described.  Being of a mind that those absorbed in daily practical affairs do not readily grasp, the greater part of his intelligence and his active brain power cannot be appreciated.  Kind of sloughed off to the side.   "Fresco paint a halo around his head," is the best most can do, unless they too pick up the work of going into the holy hard-to-comprehend.


The writer is now a dumb-downed person in order to make his living.  There seems no conventional path for him to present his research.  But, one supposes, once he realizes this, he is as free as, say, a Kurt Vonnegut to explore the outer edges of his own constrained imagination.  Where a lot of us go looking for such is in Jesus and Buddha, places from which to stand upon to reach a bit further...

And without them, where could one even begin...