Dreaming of Reality from the Dark Side of the Moon

Now that my colonasscapade is behind me, it's time for a little reflatulating on the experience. I noticed that as I was coming out of the anusthesia, my mind wanted to make as if nothing unusual had happened -- as if there had been no gap or "crack" in my consciousness. As I looked over my shoulder at the doctor, my first thought was that I had been conscious throughout the grossedure. My second thought was "what an odd way to make a living."

The next thing I remember is laying there in bed with my clothes on. Only later in the day did I wonder how and when I got dressed. But that didn't stop me from murmuring a mild protest to the nurse to the effect that there was no need to call the wife, and that I was fine to drive.

I guess it's very similar to the lacunae in our field of vision. Each of our eyes has a hole where the optic nerve connects to the eye, but our brains fill in the visual gap as if it's not there.

As I've mentioned before, all of us do the same things with our lives, creating a coherent and linear narrative out of the chaos and randomness. While there is coherence in our lives, often it is unconscious rather than conscious. We superimpose a "likely story" on the outward events, but the real coherence is coming from below -- or above, as the case may be. People often enter pyschotherapy when their conscious narrative is being disrupted by an unconscious one. St. Paul is an example of someone whose narrative was disrupted from above.

In fact, it's very disturbing and disorienting to have one's narrative disrupted in this way. It is one of the big reasons the left is so crazy. For decades, their's was the official narrative of reality, enforced from on high by the media, academia, and other elites, and they just can't handle the fact that other narratives exist. So they hysterically "confabulate" like a psychotic or brain-damaged person, imagining events and perceptions in order to paper over the gaps in their narrative.

In Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus asks, "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?"

This brings us to the heart of the matter concerning the different forms of logic that govern the finite world of the horizontal and the infinite world of the vertical. Everyday Aristotelian logic is fine when applied to the horizontal, but if applied to the vertical, it will simply make a senseless and incoherent absurdity of it. Again, in the vertical world -- both the unconscious below and the "supra-conscious" above -- we are dealing not with irrationality but a sort of patterned transrationality, similar to the logic of dreams.

A purely scientific, materialistic, deterministic, and reductionist approach to the world will drain it of its vertical properties and create a sort of coherent but banal non-absurdity. Bonehead atheism is the quintessential example of this.

I am reminded of my first experience in psychoanalysis many years ago. I was laying on the couch and asked, "Am I making sense?" My cryptic analyst responded with words to the effect of, "Yes. Feel free to stop." You see, I wasn't really jumping into the uncharted world of the unconscious with both feet, but defending against it with a lot of surface rationalizations that made mere sense. Those familiar with the lingo of my book will understand that I was reducing O to (k) instead of allowing the evolution of O-->(k).

It is also possible to turn the world into an incoherent non-absurdity. This is what primitive cultures do, including most of the Mohammedan world. In other words, they create a world view that makes total sense to them and explains everything. Except that it is completely incoherent and actually explains nothing. It is a closed system that must repel any ideas that threaten it. Hence, their rejection of modernity and their consequent cultural Failure to Launch.

Finally, one can live in an incoherent absurdity. This is the world of the psychotic. It is also the world of hell, of a complete absence of logic or sense. Each moment of time becomes a calamitous novelty, as the psychotic mind perpetually disperses logic and meaning. To a lesser extent, this is also the world of deconstruction and much modern art, but for the denizens of that dark world, it is more of a contained process. For these modern sophisticates, it becomes a sort of parallel vertical world, superficially sharing certain characteristics with the religious. But it is an entirely counterfeit and ephemeral world of no lasting value.

Let us take two examples of the way language and logic are used to describe the horizontal and the vertical with regard to the origins of the cosmos. The horizontal view tells us that the universe is an Improvised Explosive Device that randomly banged into being 13.7 billion years ago. We know this because we can use logic and math to trace the outer edge of this explosion back to when it happened.

But this tells us nothing about the vertical. For that we need an entirely different kind of logic, something like this: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Now first of all, don't be like our trolls or like religious fundamentalists who get stuck on stupid and attempt to understand this vertical statement in the horizontal sense. In fact, the very point of the statement is to let us know that from the cosmic get-go "there is the vertical (heaven) and the horizontal (earth)."

As it so happens, if one is going to express the transcendent, the infinite, the eternal, one cannot do so without symbolism, paradox, myth, and wordplay. Wordplay? Absolutely. This is something that has long been known to the great rabbis, who "play" with scripture in order to mine it for its deeper meanings.

Now one of the reasons I like James Joyce is that he was fully aware of two things: that the world is made of language, of the word; and that our reduction of the richness of language to mere logical categories did violence to its creative potential for disclosing the nature of reality. For this reason, his last book, Finnegans Wake, consists solely of elaborate wordplay -- it is one long pun.

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce regards all of human history as one long dream in the mind of a single sleeping individual. Furthermore, the entire book is written in the vertical logic of the dream world, so that anything can symbolize something else and one person can stand for another or for an entire class of people. It is a timeless holographic world in which everything is internally related and happening simultaneously in the now of the dream. And, just as in a dream, there is no clear distinction between reality and imagination, nor is there the principle of non-contradiction that applies to the daytime vertical world of Aristotelian logic.

Unfortunately Joyce died shortly after Finnegans Wake was published, so he never had the opportunity to fully explain what he was trying to accomplish with his dense and seemingly impenetrable language. He saw that there was indeed coherence in the cosmos, but that it was the non-linear, vertical coherence of myth, poetry, theology, imagination, and dreaming.