by Matt Cardin
And then it started moving. Right before my disbelieving eyes, the shapes began to stir on the page with a creeping motion like the slow boiling of liquids in an alchemist’s laboratory. Every hidden implication and mini-universe of meaning in the individual elements took on countless additional connotations as the whole structure shuddered to life. The picture’s three-dimensional appearance became literal as the page’s center dropped away into a recess of infinite depth. I no longer sat in a room beholding a picture; the picture had become the whole of my consciousness, and it encompassed me, and I stared through it into a chasm of measureless meaning whose very vastness was a horror.
Then, in an instant, all motion stopped. A dark spot no bigger than a pinhead formed at the mandala’s center and began to grow, as if approaching from an impossible distance. Ringed layers of shape and form fell away as this darkness accelerated its all-consuming approach. It resolved and clarified, and now wicked barbs and slivers were visible in its fabric, needled in endless rows of concentric rings like ivory spikes planted in rotten flesh. They churned and fluttered and twitched with a spasmodic motion, and in the tiny corner of my mind that I could still claim as my own I realized I was staring into a nightmare abyss of endless teeth, a fanged and insatiable cosmic gullet that endlessly devoured, devoured, devoured all things in an eternal feast of annihilation.
All had been a prelude to this. My whole life, my very conception and progress through the stages of human existence, had been preordained to lead me to this dreadful moment. I felt the attention of a massive and malevolent intelligence turned upon me, and as I began to pitch forward into the pit, and as the first of trillions of teeth began to sink into my mind, I knew with absolute, horrified certainty that this nightmare abyss was also staring into me.
3
A buzzing blackness. Darker than darkness. Corrosive and cold. That was everything.
Then it was as if a light switched on, and that light was the visual image of Marco’s dorm room, and of Marco himself. He was standing on the ceiling. Either that, or the entire room had turned upside down. I watched his inverted image approach a similarly inverted medicine cabinet mounted on the wall. The slick mirrored surface flashed and waved as he opened and shut it. He approached me, still inverted, holding something out to me with his hand.
I realized I was lying on my back on one of his beds, arched up and watching him backwards over the edge of the mattress. He stepped beside me and the room righted itself as my head swiveled to watch him.
I tried to say “What?” but my lungs were paralyzed. I was suffocating. There was a momentary panic. Then my chest let go and I was sucking huge lungfuls of air.
“Take these,” Marco said over the sound of my frantic gasps. Two tiny white pills rested in his outstretched palm. With the other hand he offered a bottle of water. Somehow my arms moved. I accepted the pills and washed them down while he slid back to sit at the room’s single study desk.
“Those were muscle relaxers,” he said. “You’ll feel more composed in a moment.”
To my astonishment, he was right. I could already feel the unbearable horror, the impossible horror, draining out of my mind and body, not completely but enough to let me live. After a minute or two I sat up and swung my legs off the bed. The feeling of my feet hitting the floor, the sensory solidity beneath the soles of my shoes, revived me even more.
I looked at Marco. He had been watching me but now he looked away and stared at the wall. Finally, he spoke.
“If the purpose of philosophy really is to overspread raw life with mind, to gain a truly totalizing perspective that forges unity from chaos, then how do you spread your mind over what just happened to you? How do you include that in your tidy little philosophical cosmos?”
Was he really talking this calmly? Was he really acting as if things were normal and we were back to our old conversation, when in fact nothing could ever be normal again after what I just experienced? But I could see the sweat standing out on his forehead and upper lip. He turned his gaze upon me as if awaiting my answer, and for an instant his eyes were like black holes carved in a flesh mask. The floor beneath my feet shifted ever so slightly.
Then he was Marco again, but he was still saying things I did not want to hear. “The classic philosophical project has always been held up as a good thing, a noble enterprise that will bring justice and order to people’s lives. But what if the very attempt to gain that total perspective is tragically misguided?” He shifted in his wooden chair and leaned forward in the pose I had seen him adopt many times before when he was demolishing an opponent. “What if life and sanity depend not on finding the truth but on deliberately cultivating delusion? What if there is indeed a total perspective, but to gain and know it and identify with it is to invite your own deepest disaster?” He was still Marco but he was also something else, something more, leaning forward and splitting the air between us with the intensity of his words and vision. “What if reality itself is finally, fundamentally evil?”
The words hung there, and then I answered them. “What you’re saying isn’t new and you know it. The idea or something like it goes at least back to the ancient Greeks, and probably farther. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche gave it a classic treatment a little over a century ago.” My composure shocked me. The room and my body seemed muffled and distant.
Marco straightened and slashed his hand through the air in a gesture of dismissal. “You’re talking history and theory. I’m talking about reality—pure, raw, existential. You can’t distance yourself from it or gain a handle on it by recalling who first thought of it or what they said about it. For proof, I refer you to your own recent experience, which you’re only handling so well because I drugged you.”
And indeed he was right. My calmness wasn’t my own, and when I tried to see behind it I saw a raging swarm of terror and revulsion just waiting to arise. It was this subdued awfulness that now began to respond to the idea Marco was advancing, and my drug-induced surface calm suddenly seemed a positive curse. For it left me open to a nasty interplay of unwontedly dark thoughts and associations. My usual self-absorption, my narcissism, my obliviousness to my surroundings as I indulged a constant interior monologue—all these defenses had been stunned, and in the unfamiliar calm of interior silence I heard the sound of something terrible approaching.
Marco waited a beat, as if deliberately letting this chaos rage inside me. Then he picked his notebook up from the desk and tossed it onto the bed. “Read it,” he said. “It will answer many of your questions. I assume I don’t need to tell you to avoid looking at a certain page.”
I looked at the red cover lying on the brown bedspread and felt the first real intimations of the inner upheaval that would certainly topple me once the drug had completely worn off. The entire situation had to be a dream. It could not be real, because if it were—I could not even articulate the implications. And then there was that drawing, that awesome, beautiful, horrific mandala. What had happened to me as I studied it? Flashes of unreality began to invade the edges of my vision at the mere remembrance of that mad motion, that impossible infinitude, that galactic tunnel of teeth . . .
“What is it?” My voice was small and weak, but Marco knew what I was referring to: both the drawing and the reality it revealed.
“The very question,” he replied, “approximates the only suitable answer.”
“But . . . you drew that picture yourself. How . . . ?” My strength to pursue the question gave out as he stood and began ushering me toward the door.
“Read the notebook,” he said. “We can talk afterward. Right now you need to get home and get some rest.”
I helplessly obeyed. Before I really knew what I was doing, I had left his room and was riding the elevator down to the ground floor. Then I was walking out of the dormitory and across campus to my house. Then I was unlocking the door and stepping inside.
The click of the latch as the door swung shut awoke me from my walking trance, and I saw that my hand
was gripping Marco’s notebook. I dropped it like a hot coal. It slapped to the floor like a snake. I left it there and walked to the bedroom, where I collapsed on the bed and fell immediately asleep. All night I wrestled with a dream that returned repeatedly and never resolved itself: Marco was standing outside my door talking with strangers. I heard their voices rumbling in response to his, but their words were indecipherable and their tones ominous. Then hands began to knock, not just one but many, rapping smartly on the door and progressing toward a thunderous pounding. The door shuddered in its frame. The knocks were somehow amiss, as if they were produced by the wrong kinds of hands beating on the wrong kind of wood. To my deep dismay, I heard my voice invite Marco and his acquaintances inside. The very invitation unlocked the door, which began to swing inward, and even before it completed its arc and revealed the visitors, I knew full well what I would see. I knew it; the visual confirmation would just be the culmination of a fear that had accompanied me from birth.
That was where the dream stopped, only to start again after an interlude of unconsciousness. By the time morning arrived and I awoke to the unbuffered emotions of the previous day’s catastrophe, I had seen that door and known that dread half a dozen times. But that certain knowledge of the visitors’ appearance, so inescapable in the dream, had not followed me into the daylight. All I recalled was the door itself, and the sound of rumbling voices, and the knowledge that I had invited my own deepest doom to come inside and make itself at home.
4
The next week of my life was devoted to reading Marco’s notebook. Everything else went into hibernation, intellectually and emotionally speaking. Even though I went through the motions of my daily routine, I performed my duties without spirit. All my energy and attention was directed toward a single and singular purpose: to read and grasp the meaning of the dark philosophical testament that Marco had penned.
Grappling with it was the most grueling experience I had ever endured. This was due partly to the fact that Marco’s speculations on astronomy and physics were practically incomprehensible to me, but there was another reason as well: A new sense or faculty seemed to have awakened within me, a kind of “third eye” that remained perpetually open and proved distressingly responsive to the dark suggestions unfolding on the pages before me. As I read the notebook and began to perceive the galling weight of the worldview under which Marco labored, I found that the same mingled mindstate of disgust and despair had unexpectedly taken root in my own heart, and was in fact being nourished by the reading, which, in a loathsome symbiosis, was rendered all the more clear and emotionally compelling by this new inner sense.
As I had already seen, much of the notebook consisted of long quotations carefully transcribed by Marco from a wide array of books. Schopenhauer loomed large, as did Nietzsche. It was during my undergraduate years that I had first encountered these giants of German philosophy. Back then I had exulted in the universal pessimism of the former and its extension and exhilarating transformation by the latter into an exploration of the meaning of human subjecthood. But now I felt as if I were truly understanding them for the first time. Recorded here was Schopenhauer’s famous criticism of the assertion, so common among some thinkers, that evil is merely the absence of good. “I know of no greater absurdity,” he wrote, “than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt.” The concept was not new to me, but its import, as perceived and amplified by my new inner faculty, hit me now like a blow to the head.
Also recorded was Nietzsche’s amplification of his mentor’s idea:
Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous. . . . Happiness and virtue are no arguments. But people like to forget—even sober spirits—that making unhappy and evil are no counterarguments. Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it fully would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured by how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure—or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.
The quotations spooled on and on, piling up page after page, interspersed occasionally with Marco’s own notes and observations. After the Nietzsche quotation, for instance, the blue-inked letters of Marco’s voice clarified, “And so the perfect lie would be the perfect sanctuary, the ultimate one-pointed perspective, and thus the ultimate weakness, while perfect strength would see reality cold, without blinking, and vast, without center, and naked, without a hint of cognitive or affective coloration.”
After two days of reading, I began to despair of penetrating the notebook’s secrets. On the surface it seemed to be nothing but a particularly pessimistic collection of aphorisms and observations, albeit ones whose significance I was feeling with a weight and an impact that were veritably physical. And still the searing memory of that picture on page forty-six jutted out like a broken bone in the skeleton of my psyche, leaving me frantic to find a conception and a context that would set the bone and bind the wound.
Then, on the third day, when my despairing confusion had reached its nadir, I came to a quote from the Indian philosopher Sankara that acted as the proverbial solid particle dropped into the saturated solution of my soul. Sankara wrote,
With half a stanza I will declare what has been said in thousands of volumes:
Brahman is real, the world is false, the soul is only Brahman, nothing else.
I had long been acquainted with the Hindu idea that the material world is actually maya, illusion, a kind of mirage resting upon the absolute reality which the Vedantic Hindus call Brahman. The Hindu sages generally taught that moksa, the experience of release from this illusion and the subsequent realization of ultimate reality, constitutes life’s supreme happiness and final fulfillment. But Marco, by contextualizing Sankara’s classic one-line summation of Vedanta inside a potent exploration of Western pessimism, seemed to be positing that the uniform substratum of being that underlies physical existence is an utter nightmare. And if “the soul is only Brahman,” meaning that the individual human self is at root nothing but a particularized manifestation of this pervasive primary reality—I couldn’t bear to follow this perversion of the Eastern beatific vision to its conclusion. Its repercussions were simply too awful to articulate.
Of the scientific line of thought interwoven with the philosophy, all I could comprehend was that Marco was struggling with some unresolved issue in quantum physics. The mathematical work was beyond me, but from his text notes I could gather enough to grasp the bare essence of the matter, which had something to do with the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. I read that the equations used in this science are straightforward and uncontested in terms of their practical applications, as attested by everything from television to the hydrogen bomb, but that no satisfactory explanation for their meaning, their overall implications at the macroscopic level of existence, had yet been established.
On the subatomic level, I read, particles flash into and out of existence for no discernible reason, and the behavior of any single particle is apparently arbitrary and usually unpredictable. If there is a cause or “purpose” behind this behavior, then it is one that the human mind is, to all appearances, structurally prevented from comprehending. In other words, for all we know, the fundamental ruling principles at the most basic level of physical reality may well be what our minds and languages must necessarily label “chaos” and “madness.”
This predicament of knowledge (so I learned from Marco’s commentary) had remained essentially unchanged for eighty years, and Marco possessed the audacity to believe that he had begun to solve the riddle that had haunted the keenest scientific minds for nearly a century. But he expressed his solution in a series of mathematical equations which were incomprehensible to
me, and which may as well have been hieroglyphs carved on the inner wall of an Egyptian tomb.
My experience of these blossoming revelations was appalling. It was also progressively intense. The further I advanced in the notebook, the more powerful became the rising tide of revulsion inside me. At times it grew so overwhelming that I was forced to stop for several hours. On one occasion, after I had rushed to the bathroom in the grip of an actual physical sickness, I laid aside the notebook for more than a day. Late in the week I realized that what I was experiencing could only be described as horror, a word whose referent I had never really known. Marco’s comments about the human need for illusion began to make progressively more sense, for if the ideas in his notebook really did point to reality, then I would rather be deluded. If it was strength to gaze unflinchingly into that abyss, then I would rather be weak.
It was with a veritably religious sense of fear and trembling that I turned, on the last day of the week, to the forty-fifth page of the notebook. Slowly I read through the first of the two quotations that appeared alone on the page, the one from a book whose title sounded distinctly Hindu even though I had never before encountered it and subsequently forgot it. As its significance became clear to me, I felt the words begin to sink into my mind like vicious hooks:
Foolish soul, wilt thou comprehend the All, the great Central Mystery? Man’s place is the middle. Thou approachest the Gate in both the Greatest and the Least. In the face of the night sky, at the core of a dust mote—the same One. Wretched is he who hears the call, but more wretched still the one who answers it.
The final quotation was from a story by H. P. Lovecraft, and in the margin beside it Marco had written “The Capstone.”
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
