Cartography 8: Eight Of Hearts
On Sacred Geometry
Cartography is a 52 week essay series mapping the interior life.
Oaks and thunder were once closely linked in the minds of the earliest inhabitants of Europe. They were the expression of the all-powerful. An oak that has been struck by lightning is like a powerful god that has been torn apart by its own anger.
We too can become kings and lacerated oaks within the monastery that has no walls or occupants and where our procession will continue through the night. Georges Bataille, March 26, 1937
Consider the cube, viewed in 2 dimensions.
The simplest way to illustrate a cube, a 3-dimensional object viewed in 2-dimensional space, is to draw two offset squares, and connect the squares at their companionate coordinates. This is in itself an act of creation and an act of illusion: the flat illustration is decidedly not a cube, but we have managed to show something more profound than the limitations of the medium. We’ve managed to think outside the box, so to speak.
From here, it’s easy to imagine we might have similar tricks in our own 3-dimensional reality, illusions that reach beyond us to a deeper sense of creation. But the terror of encounter, realizing we are part of a larger lattice beyond our conceptions, could force us to reject the powerful dynamics that are part of a broader liberation, a cleansing of the doors of perception.
Instead, we think about our companionate coordinates, our negative identities, and reject them despite the impossible to sever tether. We see our faces in the mirror and see traces of people and shames we reject, we see failures and challenges, and in our deepest hearts, we fear that our reflections will take our place and live our lives instead.
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
By the time we are old enough to have a concept of self, we have been introduced to the idea of the anti-self: the necessity of duality in story requires a hero and a villain, a foil and revelation to expose the shadow of the character. Cain and Abel, Jekyll and Hyde, Batman and The Joker.
But in the first written story, on 12 cuneiform tablets written in Akkadian, we don’t have eternal enmity. The king Gilgamesh, grown tyrannical and cruel, has been targeted by the Gods and they create his foil, Enkidu, the wild man taught to be human. The two encounter each other and attempt to fight to the death, but being alike in measure and strength, they exhaust each other. And a curious thing happens: they become inseparable. Blood brothers. They swear themselves to the other and join as one force.
The history of literature since has largely focused on eternal tension, eternal fear of becoming our wild and feral nature, of losing our civilized chains in favor of our darkest and most demonic impulses. But these were not always our lessons. Once, we taught ourselves that when we encounter a dirty and filthy mirror, and when we were unable to defeat it, we should reconcile and repair, we should join our souls in an extradimensional tether to our companionate coordinate and learn and teach from one another.
This concept has found its way into contemporary psychology and new age literature. From Jung to instagram witchcraft, the Shadow looms large over the modern psyche. We know the shape and the face staring back at us, and if we don’t, there are thousands at the ready to tell us who we are and what we are not and how to buy their course and journal through it to be at peace with ourselves.
But the terror of the mythical encounter with ourselves persists; and in doing so, we fail to act. We fail to wrestle with ourselves. We fail to examine the mirror ever closer. We think of ourselves as Abel, awaiting the inevitable crashing rock against the backs of our skulls.
This is why I have chosen to compare our potential situation to that of the monastic orders of the Church, in order the underline our desire not to deny in any way what might already exist outside us: we believe only that a shared and rigorous affirmation is commensurate with the failure of the real world, especially if we think of the ridiculous disproportion apparent between the emptiest political action and the already much more profound reality of physical violence, which is poised, even as I speak, to tear us all apart. George Bataille, February 7, 1937
When I moved to Philadelphia, I was broke. This is the reason most people move to Philadelphia in my experience. My rent was $250 a month, and I owned a steel frame bike that I bought out of a man’s Cadillac trunk in Delco. I drank black coffee for breakfast. I ate french fries for dinner, avocados for lunch, and the occasional sandwich or bagel when I wanted to treat myself. I would ride anywhere between 5 and 25 miles a day, and I slept 5 hours or less a night to go out with my friends, to chase the world and experience as much of it as I could.
I was living a monastic life: fasting, spending long hours in monotonous tasks working in retail on Walnut street, and exerting my body to its limits every day. It was in this state that I had the most rewarding mystical experiences of my life.
After a month of living in Philadelphia, I took my bike for a ride along the Schulykill river, pushing myself to go as hard and as fast as I could go. I had eaten next to nothing, and my body still responded, pushing me farther and faster in the perfect April weather. And after a while, I stopped at the Ellen Phillips Samuel memorial, a sculpture enclave right off the river trail. And here I watched the sunset as the cool breeze evaporated the sweat off of my body.
At this moment, I felt the most full I have ever felt in my life. I felt connected to the entirety of existence. I felt connected to myself. I felt the lattice of the world, neither supportive nor repressing. I felt the capacity to contain every multitude because I was part of every multitude.
And with that connection, late in the night, came the terror. If I had spent years of my life, decades denying anything except the material, what was left for me? What was left of me?
That moment was almost eleven years ago. Since then I have had similar experiences in smaller degrees. Driving through the endless expanse of West Texas as a storm bears down and surviving on a 5lb bag of sunflower seeds. Driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway in the lightning at 2 AM, the terror mixing with the waffle house coffee in my blood. Riding 8 hours on a Megabus in a snowstorm, trying to outrace it, after working long hours in the café with nothing besides a bagel to eat for the day.
The world beyond me exists beyond terror, and glimpsing infinity, reaching towards a unified coordinate in the aether, blindly searching, has become the only reality for me. There is a me beyond me, a world beyond the world, and like the book says, each man must work out his own salvation with fear and trembling.
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the ass-hole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down—the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried. We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown. Henry Miller, “Tropic Of Cancer”
The demonic in myself, the evil, the manipulative, the energetic; I have put it down since I was a child. I have sought to save people neither in want or need of a savior; only a messiah complex taking place in my heart as I attempt to lift them out of their debris. I have swung the pendulum the other way and given in at the worst times to my basest impulses. I have become a caricature of myself, and sought to harm without intent other than the reaction of a wounded beast. I have sought to save people neither in want or need of a savior; only a messiah complex taking place in my heart as I attempt to lift them out of their debris.
I don’t want to fear the greater planes and mysteries. I am instead seeking unity with them, vision beyond the veil of who I see myself as and rather seeking who I am. I make junctures, assemblages, collages of myself and my desires. I am seeking a spark to set off a fire of my own personal apocalypse that will unveil reality to myself.
Whether or not I will reach it, I don’t know. I only know terror is the suggestion of the world to come. I only know that fear is the art of love, the deepest heart I know. I ache for the storm and the wilderness and to meet myself in struggle on the mountaintop.
I said my children would have loved the show.
He said we were watching youth at a great distance,
and I thought how the young
are truly boring, unvaried as they are
by the deep scar of doubt, the constant afterimage
of regret—no major tension in their bodies, no tender
hesitation, they don’t yet know
that this is so much work, scraping
from the self its multiple desires; don’t yet know
fatigue with self, the hunger for obliteration
that wakes us in the night at the dead hour
and fuels good sex.Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Blue Ridge”