by W. E. Gutman
“But....”
“Let Abraham explain,” my father counseled. He’ll do it with far more grace and eloquence than anyone I know. After two centuries of forced silence, he’s earned the right to speak for all of us. He will not deceive you.”
We hugged, my father, mother and I, and we lingered for a moment clasped in a silent embrace like epiphytes clinging to the tree of life.
“We’ll listen to Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky,” I said to my father as we parted.
“And to Ravel and Debussy and Fauré,” said my mother.
“And to Satie and Milhaud and Poulenc,” I added. “We’ll make it a gala performance.
EPILOGUE
I spent my last hour in Ein Sof with Abraham. I had grown fond of the old patriarch. Of all my long departed blood relations, all of whom bore their own heavy cross, it was the despised, the long-suffering Abraham, Abraham the Stoic, Abraham whose voice and dignity had been usurped by lies and stilled by folklore that I understood and in ways not fully apprehended, I identified with.
“There isn’t much time, my boy, and so much to tell you. First things first. You’re smart, educated and well traveled. But your optic of the world is far too broad to see everything. It misses the details, the minutiae -- you might call them trivialities -- on which average people fixate. Your antipathy for he clan, for what it stands is obvious. But consider this: A clan is a kind of corporate entity. While it’s made up of individuals with distinctive personalities, tastes and proclivities, the clan also has a character, an instinct and a unique life force of its own. It is this essence, primal and unwavering, that compels it to guard against external threats. What Yossi so clumsily tried to put across is that a clan is in peril when any of its members commit, or allow to be committed, acts that could cause it to split up and collapse. In other words, the integrity of the clan can be maintained only by limiting the power and influence of its members.”
“But what Yossi expediently ignored,” I countered, “what he could never mention without admitting a fundamental flaw in this despotic ‘life force’ that limits free will, is that the best way to protect a clan is to lead by logic, not zeal, reason, not intolerance. The prophetic order the clan struggles to maintain is at war with freedom of thought. It faces the rest of the world with a mask of unyielding belligerence, feeling threatened in its very being by rational thought whose voice it doggedly tries to silence.”
Abraham put his hand on my shoulder. “There is no more free will in the physical world than there is in the world of dreams. The human condition is one of discord. Reason propels us toward higher spheres of being; but the pursuit of hedonism, from which self-perpetuation and the survival instinct derive, slam us back into the most brutish existence. So long as men surrender to the affairs that spring from their transient identity, they imagine themselves to be free. But men are mistaken. They are not free. Men crave structure. We cling to principles the way a man overboard clings to a life raft. Conform, or the gods will be angry. Submit or you will burn in hell. Defiance of the rule of law in the name of justice is no defense, however unjust the law may be.”
“Why does everybody give in to such tyranny?”
“For many reasons. Some don’t know better. What they see is what they get and it’s good enough for them. Others don’t dare to speak up. Others yet don’t care. So what if their lives are regulated by a symbolic bond, traditions and a few perfunctory rituals? Then there are those who know by intuition or premonition that they have run out of choices.”
“Self-deception makes the obvious tolerable.”
Abraham smiled. “It’s not self-deception. It’s deeper than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Human beings have no memory of the future. They exist in the moment, untouched by the passage of time, impervious to the transformations that time sets in motion. They can only relate to their own life experience and they insulate themselves against anticipated depredations by surrendering to reflex. We are all doomed to do what we did before we came to Ein Sof, to engage in the ceaseless repetition of the activities that marked our lives. It makes time pass.”
“Or it kills it.”
“Suit yourself.”
“One last thing, Abraham. What are Dybbuks? Did I imagine them, was I hallucinating or did I really chance upon them in a moment of reckless self-abandon?”
“Dybbuks are human spirits, wandering souls condemned to roam restlessly, burdened by past sins, haunted by pointless dreams. They have always existed. They will never go away. They are our shadows. They are us inside out. We don’t acknowledge their existence because doing so would force us to confess our own imperfections. You might say we are all Dybbuks-in-training.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You came to us from Yesod -- Hebrew for foundation. You’re now in Ein Sof. Why do you think they call it that? Ein Sof means “no end,” infinity, perpetuity. Some even suggest that that Ein Sof is the least offensive definition of an indefinable God. Might as well get used to it. This will one day be your last port of call. You’ll submit like the rest of us. You’ll learn to subdue your passions.”
“Never.”
“Never?” Abraham lowered his head and peered at me over his glasses. “Just wait and see. Life is the dream of a future sleep. Waking up puts an end to the hallucination.”
“What will I do with all that time, what will I do,” I cried out, overcome with a sudden, crushing anguish.
“You’ll write, what else. You’ll write. I’ll dream in the company of Yahweh. And you’ll dream in his absence.”
He did not elaborate.
*
To dream, perchance to be. To be, perchance to cross vast dimensions that transcend psychoanalysis, popular myth and the witless and fraudulent interpretations of the spiritualist fringe. Dreams: winged abstractions that lead dreamers, thinkers, to question the validity of conventional canons. Dreams: channels of ideological disobedience. Dreams: the manifestation of folly or the spark that sets off intellectual heresy, whether endured in a lucid state or in the winding and surreal labyrinths that crisscross the psyche. Dreams: Echoes of the bewildering ugliness, cruelty, cupidity, trickery and injustice dreamers witness while awake and stirring. Dreams: a cure against ossified creeds. Dreams: a reminder that freedom is an arm’s length away. Dreams: nocturnal musings and daytime reveries that telegraph a host of emotions, buried memories, repressed cravings, a lust for inaccessible pinnacles and a fondness for preposterous hopes. Dreams: an array of uncommon ideas and bizarre perspectives. Crafted in the deepest recesses of the mind, staged against eerie backdrops, spoken in esoteric tongues, dreams challenge reality, defy the status quo and rise against doctrinaire beliefs. Dreaming, for an untold number of people, is an instrument of subliminal rebellion against enforced, often unbearable, reality. Dreams respond to frustration, discontent, anxiety, pain, anger, despair and hope by offering a few milliseconds of cathartic, escapism -- or hours of conscious but uncontrolled contemplation.
Limitless and everlasting, the world of dreams is a realm in which inhibitions and scruples are left at the door. It’s the flip side of an actuality vigilantly managed by often dissimilar but tactically congruent interests whose reciprocal objective is to restrain the errant ways of radicals and nonconformists.
*
“What did you just say,” I yelled as Abraham floated across the room and merged into the wall.
A disembodied voice responded, “Life is the dream of a future sleep.”
“What does that mean,” I cried out.
I blinked. Abraham was gone. I looked around me. Several of the people who had come to see me off as I readied to embark for Ein Sof were still gathered around as if frozen in time. The solemn, the sycophants, the snivelers, the kibitzers. They all soon stirred, regaining their voices and momentum like old clocks rewound.
“Go home,” I said. “Go home. False alarm. You’ll get your chance some other time.”
*
Dreams, however lyrical and therapeutic, are no match for reality. Pitiless and cunning, reality always triumphs in the end. It is in defeat that dreamers -- philosophers, poets, musicians, artists, writers and humble workers in the vineyard of negentropy -- find their greatest inspiration. It is in dreams that they seek comfort and hope. To them all I dedicate these musings from the brink where I transited for a time.
POSTSCRIPT
I once asked, “What happens to time when the last clock on earth stops ticking?” I had tossed the question casually, thinking it whimsical and provocative, a brainteaser worthy of reflection but so thorny as to be ultimately unanswerable. I myself had made no effort to venture into a metaphorical labyrinth from which I might not escape. The question itself was a conundrum, circular and close-circuited and containing within it, I felt, its own enigmatic solution. It was one of those “AHA!” questions; a one-liner a stand-up comic might deliver to daze his audience before firing off other similarly baffling witticisms. And I left it at that.
As my expedition to Ein Sof began to unfold, and for reasons that became obvious when I discovered Gehenna, I wrote an old friend, a scientist, scholar and humanist, asking him if he could work out an answer.
Unruffled, my friend was neither scornful of my riddle nor stumped by it. Instead, he found an existential and ontological component to the question that could be probed and articulated, not in the arcane idiom of mysticism or the dizzying jargon of quantum mechanics but with the clarity of plain talk and with images that reveal the melancholy wit of a contemplative and deeply compassionate man. My friend responded with characteristic punctuality. He wrote:
“Clocks are simply a human means of measuring the passage of time. Yet, when the last clock (and I suppose the last human to worry about time) stops functioning, nature will still mark the passage of time. Water will still trickle then gush forward to cut its path and chisel canyons. The sun will shine upon the Earth as it slowly continues a countdown toward its own extinction. Perhaps other creatures will pick up the stress and worry of getting to work on time, eating dinner at the appointed hour, getting to bed and rising (so that they can eventually be wealthy, healthy and wise) -- but these creatures will perhaps have the benefit of four arms so that they are far superior typists.
“The universe is composed only of time -- space itself and our filling it with substance and meaning is only an elaborate illusion. Space-time, the creation of early nineteenth century visionaries is, unfortunately, only one more theological stake in the sand that is eventually uprooted by a mile-high glacier that moves a few meters in a decade. Time is a two-dimensional membrane and we, poor creatures, are cast as two dimensional waves of energy upon this surface, which is hurtling past at the speed of light (a process we call the passage of time). We move with this two-dimensional membrane as it expands at the speed of light and this movement provides the illusion of three-dimensional space. Think of a holographic projection on a sheet of paper -- an image that allows us to “see” a three dimensional world within a two-dimensional surface.
“As a clock ticks and then comes to rest, the universe experiences nothing gained and nothing lost. There are no means to emerge from time, to stop the world and get off, to separate ourselves from the moment. But when the clock stops ticking, something is forever lost -- both that moment in time and the content of that moment (this loss is what science calls an increase in entropy). The universe loses content and meaning, and burns to a crisp like the very stars around us. Time goes by and the universe does not weep for our passing. Our dust and remains are swept into space, blasted to kingdom come to coalesce with the galactic fireworks and the darkness that surrounds them. Strangely, energy and matter, from which we were created, never disappears, only the means to make them human.
“This year, my mother and father both passed away. I have their remains, a few pounds of dust. Within my mind I see my mother, running and laughing on the beach, forming the glue that once held my personal universe together and filled it with meaning and love. My father's gentle smile has passed from this world. His reassuring glance and his quiet presence is reduced and condensed into a can of ashes mailed to me and now resting on a shelf. When the last clock stops ticking, the world will go on, but the last smile and the last tear shall be gone.”
Was my friend echoing Turkish Sufi master, Abdülhamit Cakmut’s caveat: “Everything is meant to serve man. If people are gone from this cycle, nature itself will be over.” Or perhaps, as only a man of science can, did he concede with the cool fatalism of a pragmatist that all knowledge is inaccessible to man and that the bubble of ignorance in which we take refuge harbors us from lunacy and self-destruction?
Spacetime is the fulcrum of modern physics. But what does it really represent? Time seems little more than an allegory, a kind of omnipresent metaphor that permeates all of our earthly experiences. But do our experiences represent a fitting measure of ultimate reality? Perhaps the delusion that we are free in time, fools us into believing that we are free from time.
The more we probe within ourselves, the more certain we become of the unreality of temporal free will. The only freedom we really possess is the contemplation of untested ideas.
