by Matt Cardin
But he is speaking again, and I am astonished at his words:
“Leave me!” he cries. He looks up to the rainswept sky and screams as if he can see my face. “This emptiness is older than you! Even you cannot fill it! You promised to fill the soul of anyone who believes on the name of your Son, but you can’t make good on this promise to me! You don’t know this darkness, this emptiness beyond eternity! You can’t even see it because you are blinded by your own light!”
His words trail off with a gasp, and he has spent himself. He stops raving, sinks back against the wall, looks with dazed eyes at the shimmering scene enveloping him. Then he begins to weep in loud, sobbing wails, and the old man hobbling past on the sidewalk with a cane and a brown felt hat (Walter Brogmeyer, seventy-six years old, a widower of two years, usually kind-hearted and generous, but at the moment frightened and disgusted by this raving derelict who sprawls on the sidewalk frothing and crying out to God) speeds up his pace and tries to ignore the maniac behind him.
Enough is enough.
My child, you must realize that none of what you have believed is true. I have looked deep within you to the very center of your soul, and there is no hole in you, no wound, no abyss. Recall the simple faith you held as a child when you and I had fellowship together. You knew then what you have forgotten now: that there is none other beside me. Remember my nature as I revealed it to Moses when I gave him a name by which to call Me: I AM! I cannot not be. You have been deceived by my rebellious adversary, who has appeared to you as something that cannot exist. There is no nothingness, no abyss, no negation. Such things cannot be when I AM!!!
He hears me through his sobs, and although he still doubts, I can see that I have awakened the hope that has lain dormant inside him for so long.
Open yourself to me. Allow me to keep my promise by filling your soul.
And in his moment of weakness, he yields. “My God . . . my God . . . it’s been so long. Yes, my God, take this burden away. Please come into my soul and fill this emptiness!”
Ahhhh, this is the reason for which I created consciousness, the reason for which I created beings who have the free choice either to accept or reject me: all for the moment of coming together, the ultimate pleasure of the restored relationship between creature and creator, the return of the prodigal to his father. Felix culpa indeed.
Thank you, child. Thank you for allowing me inside. The rift has been healed, you have accepted my gift. Now we are one, and we shall forever rejoice in realms of eternal light, I your Creator and you my adopted child through the blood of my only begotten Son. We are one in the fullness of my light . . . one in the fullness of my light . . . in the fullness of my light . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . What?
No.
It is not possible.
This Darkness, this Emptiness inside you. I do not know this Emptiness.
“Oh, God! Oh, my God! I have betrayed you! I have sold you to the abyss!” He collapses forward onto the sidewalk and claws at the filthy concrete, his fingers leaving bloody streaks as the nails catch on the rough surface and break off at the roots. He frantically wipes the blood on his head, ripping out clumps of matted hair by the handful, then digs again at the sidewalk, desperate for dirt, desperate for burial, desperate for absolution from a crime of infinite magnitude.
And now I begin to see the blackly glowing void on the other side of his soul.
“Oh, God! Your light is becoming darkness! I cannot feel you! Where are you?”
This cannot happen. There is none before me or greater than me. You are not screaming with rage and horror as I begin to spill helplessly, endlessly through the wound in your soul. I am not emerging on the other side to find myself adrift in an infinite Void, alone in a limitless Nothing where my eternal light blazes out to the farthest reaches of infinity and yet finds no end to the Darkness.
The world is not halting. The rain is not pausing in midair, the drops never to reach the earth with their life-giving touch. The clouds are not dissolving, the black furrows not parting to reveal an even more profound blackness beyond. The stars are not fading and winking out like celestial candles guttering at the end of time. I am not seeing with my all-seeing eye the deaths of a trillion worlds, not feeling the horror of a trillion trillion creatures as the created order splinters into knifelike fragments in a final moment of nightmare.
Kindly old Walter Brogmeyer is not weeping and snarling like some feral animal as he lays about himself with his cane, beating a young girl to death in sight of her mother and then slamming his head repeatedly into a lightpole until he cracks open his skull.
Pretty young Mary Beth Wilkerson is not opening the door to her children’s bedroom to wish them goodnight and then screaming a scream of madness at the furious emptiness shining from their eyes like fangs of stolen starlight as they rise above their beds.
I am not dying and taking my cosmos with me as I pour unstoppably into the abyss.
I am not dying and taking my cosmos with me.
I am not dying.
I am not.
PART TWO
Dark Awakenings
Were we disposed to open the [universal case history] of really insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a worse story still—desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem.
—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. “Fear” comes close.
—Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now:
A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927)
Teeth
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
—Ecclesiastes 1:18
Consciousness is a disease.
—Miguel de Unamuno
1
My first and decisive glimpse into the horror at the center of existence came unexpectedly during my second year of graduate school. I was earning a doctorate in philosophy and had stopped by the library between classes for some extracurricular research—or rather to pursue what I had long considered to be my true curriculum, regardless of whatever official degree program I might be enrolled in at the time. The object of my quest was a copy of Plotinus’ Enneads. I had only heard of the man and his book an hour earlier while browsing the Internet in my rented house. A fortuitous combination of search terms had yielded an excerpt from his treatise on beauty, and I had experienced a flashing moment of metaphysical vertigo as I read his description of “the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.” These words and their effect upon me had made it instantly clear that a printed copy of this book was definitely in order.
So there I was, winding my way silently through the second floor stacks and savoring the library’s familiar aura of wondrous knowledge awaiting my discovery of it in hushed anticipation. But instead of finding Plotinus’ book, I instead turned a corner and stumbled upon my friend Marco seated at a reading kiosk in the middle of the south wall. The tall window above him spilled a shaft of dusty afternoon sunlight onto the burnished tile floor, imparting a muted glow
to the kiosk and its occupant.
“Marco!” I said with genuine pleasure.
“Hello, Jason,” he murmured, and went right on reading and writing without glancing up from his books. He was surrounded by piles of them, all impressive tomes of various sizes and ages and thicknesses, so numerous they were literally spilling off the table. Three were propped open on the desktop, and he appeared to be copying passages from all of them into a lined notebook. When he did not pause in his work, I lapsed back into an uncertain silence.
Marco was a visiting student from Guatemala with an exquisite command of English and an accent so slight that it left some listeners unable to discern his origin. His auburn skin, coal-black hair, and muscular physique gave him the air of a revolutionary from some Third World country. He was, without a doubt, the most brilliant and widely read person I had ever met, a genuine savant who was simultaneously pursuing separate graduate degrees in physics, philosophy, and history. We had met at the beginning of the fall semester, and I had quickly learned that his chic-terrorist look concealed a fierce intelligence. Now, at the end of the spring term, I was still amazed at his vast capabilities. He could discourse at length on almost any subject, displaying a verbal and intellectual virtuosity that put others to shame. Adding to his mystique was the fact that he was only twenty-six years old. I found it impossible to reconcile his relatively young age with his positively fearsome erudition. The books arrayed on the desktop before him now were a perfect example; I scanned their titles and found them to be of sufficiently diverse and advanced character to dizzy the average mind.
It was as I stood there watching and waiting in vain for our ongoing intellectual sparring match to resume that I felt the first prickling of unease. Our interactions had always centered on a perennial philosophical conversation that never failed to exhilarate me even as it exhausted and humbled me. But on that day, in my beloved university library, with me standing there primed for a dialogue and brimful of a craving for neoplatonic expressions of transcendent beauty, Marco apparently had nothing to say to me. I used the uncomfortable interlude to study his appearance more closely. His mouth and jaw were tight. His eyes appeared slightly sunken into dark sockets. His shoulders were tense, his motions taut and meticulous as he continued his scribal work. He fairly exuded an air of intensity mingled with exhaustion. The word “haunted” sprang involuntarily to mind as an appropriate one-word description.
Then he said, “How are your classes?” Only his mouth moved. The rest of him maintained an unbroken focus on his work.
“Um, some good, some not.” I groped for a suitable entry point into this strange conversational exigency. “Teaching philosophy to uninterested freshmen is a bit like asking your cat to come to you. They really don’t give a shit.” I winced at my own ridiculous words.
But somehow they were enough to reach him. He paused in his writing, pen lifted above page, and appeared to reflect. “Ah, yes. Philosophy. We do love it, you and I. How was it that Will Durant once defined it? ‘Total perspective, mind overspreading life and forging chaos into unity.’” His tone implied something like a rueful smile, but as I watched him speak the words, his face remained fixed in that expression of hollow intensity.
At length he set his pen down and straightened from the hunched posture he had been holding. “Do you have a few minutes before your next class?”
I was still fumbling to pick up the obscure thread of this weirdly stilted interaction. “Uh, sure, a few. What’s up?”
He hesitated, then said, “I want to show you something. Something that I’m confident you will find quite interesting. Perhaps even fascinating, given what I know of your intellectual proclivities.”
“How utterly mysterious,” I said, attempting with a resounding thunderclap of failure to add a little levity to the scene. Marco showed no reaction other than to close and stack his books neatly, one by one, on the desktop to await collection by a library aide. Then he slid his notebook into his ever-present satchel and stood up. Without even looking at me, he headed for the stairs, and without my even hesitating, I fell in tow and forgot all about Plotinus and his promise to employ mere words to describe the impossible, delightful, delicious apotheosis of Beauty itself.
2
We stood facing each other in Marco’s cramped dorm room, walled in by bland cinderblocks and beige paint. Marco held out a spiral notebook toward me. I looked at him curiously and, in light of our meeting’s odd beginning, a bit cautiously.
“Take it,” he said. “Look on the forty-sixth page.”
I took the notebook and examined it while my mind whispered the word “anticlimax.” This was nothing special, just an ordinary seventy-two-page, college-ruled spiral notebook with a red cover. It was, in fact, the same notebook that Marco had been writing in earlier at the library, and I couldn’t help feeling a flash of irritation at what now seemed his rather theatrical refusal to show it to me in public.
But there was no use complaining now. I perched on the edge of one of the room’s twin beds and flipped open the notebook’s cover to find the first page crammed with Marco’s small and scrupulous handwriting. My eyes began scanning the text while my brain registered that the notebook appeared to be a combination of commonplace book and personal journal filled with Marco’s thoughts on quantum physics, history, philosophy, and a few other subjects I could not immediately identify. Instantly, my curiosity kicked in at the thought that I was being allowed a glimpse into my friend’s private mind.
I began to flip slowly through the notebook in search of page forty-six, which was made easy by the fact that Marco had hand-numbered the pages in the upper right corner. Naturally, I stole as many glimpses as I could of the material on the intervening pages, and what I saw quickly sharpened my curiosity into a craving. Although the notebook’s primary subject was not readily apparent, I discerned that Marco was conducting a serious inquiry into a certain matter, an inquiry that encompassed ideas from fantastically diverse fields of knowledge. He made great use of quotations from other writers, and I caught snatches of a theoretical treatise on quantum physics by Neils Bohr, a monograph by an obscure astronomer, a book of Hermetic occultism, the Hindu philosopher Sankara’s commentary on the Vedanta Sutras, and the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. These last three were familiar to me; as a student of philosophy I had encountered them more than once in my own studies. The net effect of seeing all these quotations together was to generate a sense that the comforting constellation of my familiar authors, books, and philosophies opened out into a vastly wider universe of unknown properties.
I lingered for a moment on page forty-five to examine the two quotes that appeared there. One came from a book with a strange name that was vaguely reminiscent of Hindu deities. The other was from a story by H. P. Lovecraft. I had heard of the latter, but the former was completely unfamiliar to me.
My curiosity finally got the better of me, and I blurted out, “What is all this? What in the world are you getting at?”
“It will help,” Marco said, “if you will turn to the next page.” The tightness of his voice drew my eyes away from the notebook and up to his face. His sat opposite me on the other bed, mirroring my posture of perched attentiveness. His hands gripped the edge of the mattress. A bead of sweat slid down his temple. The expression in his dark-ringed eyes was unreadable. I stared at him for a long moment before finally looking back down and turning the page.
Of all the things I might or might not have expected to find, an elaborate sacred drawing was surely among the last. And yet that was exactly what I found. Rendered in the same blue ink that Marco had used to record his thoughts and quotes was an incredibly intricate visual pattern composed of abstract shapes, shadings, and forms. Its design was dense and complex, but what made it truly striking was its lushness and vividness, which made it seem three-dimensional. At the same time, it was reminiscent of a Zen painting with its distinct dependence on space and absence to contextualize and comment on form and presence
. Most amazingly, its elements were arranged according to some alternative philosophy of design that flouted and exploded common artistic principles of harmony, emphasis, opposition, and so on. Each line led the eye to one or more angles that refracted attention like a prism dividing light. Each shape held its position and significance in relation to a hundred different elements, each of which was in turn embedded in its own peculiar nest of visual meanings and unstated implications. The overall effect was of a bold, bristling infinity.
In a word, I was dazzled. I knew the creation of mandalas to serve as objects of sacred contemplation had been developed into an exquisite art form in religious traditions both Eastern and Western, but the one I was seeing now was even more breathtaking than the ones I had encountered in my studies of Buddhism, Hinduism, and medieval Christianity. I had not known that in addition to his other prodigious gifts, Marco was an artist of genius. But there was no mistaking it. The mandala had been rendered by his pen, in his notebook.
I went to raise my head so that I could rave to him about the wonderfulness of the drawing and my awe at his secret talent. But then, with a sudden, startling sense of the impossible, I found that I could not do it. My neck was locked in place and my eyes were magnetized to the center of the picture. I blinked, or rather tried to, and found that I was likewise prevented from doing that. I was still aware of the room, still aware of the floor and bed beneath me and the walls around me, and of Marco seated across from me. But I could only attend to them with my peripheral vision. It was as if an invisible anchor had been hurled out from the page and lodged in my eyeballs, fastening them to the image and throwing me into an increasingly panicked state of immobility. I simply could not look away from the mandala, which filled my vision and began to horrify me with what I now perceived as its obscene infinitude.
