The thing I am trying to convince myself of, though convince is not the right word—the thing I am trying to remember, I am told—is that the world is inside my mind (and my mind is as big as the world). “The world is all that is the case,” a man was once translated as writing, and surely the world (the universe, reality) is precisely as big as the mind that can cognize it. Man’s mind or God’s mind; man’s and God’s. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” God must have words for it even if we do not. But if God does, then we will, and if we will, than we do already and always have. It is only a matter of remembering.
I have been remembering, in flashes. I would call it déjà vu, but the memories seem to exist outside time, if not in the future. Last week, I was rereading Susan Cooper’s “The Dark Is Rising,” a series I loved as a boy updating the Arthur and Merlin myth. By The Grey King, the fourth book of five, I had no memory of having read this, only of the circumstances of the reading: frantically finishing books four and five on the lawn outside my grandparents’ home. In The Grey King, the protagonist, a boy who’s also an Old One, Merlin’s successor, is amnesiac from hepatitis and trying to remember. “He felt there was very little time left; that it was urgent for his quest, so oddly lost by his memory, to be accomplished very soon.” I looked up at the sky for a second. These words had been written for me. These words might have been written by me.
UFOs, among other things, hover at the edge of our world and our psyche and New Jersey. Are they real or not? Yes. Our world is bigger than we think we think. First we find Mars, then Zeta Reticuli; first atoms, then quarks. Reality fiction proliferates cancerously, for a time, until we throw up our hands. Then it starts collapsing into one singularity after another. To be as simple as a child who remembers everything and knows nothing. This is where the quest begins in earnest, and yet with nothing to do.
Remember childhood reading. Dropping into a book and crying when it ended, or perhaps I was particularly sensitive. Sometime in elementary school, Ricky Ramcharitar told me he was reading The Hobbit, so I went home and read it and The Lord of the Rings in a week, fueled initially by a large bag of Wise potato chips. I wanted to beat him, at first, and soon I no longer cared.
Thanks, I vibe with it 🥝