Jon Orsi- On Books

Too little thought went into my last blog on Epiphanies. Specifically concerning the venue of Books- I really didn't have a whole lot to say.
There is no easy way to describe the phenomena and I suppose that's what particularly drew me to The Aleph because its subject is epiphanic. I felt and still feel today that this short story is the magnum opus of my literary vocabulary thus far.
Instead of breaking some sort of copyright by posting the story on here, I'll just give you the option to check it out yourself here (though I have sense that this translation is lacking somehow)

But what came to me was the acceptance that though this story  "IT" for me there are many other "it's" I have come across and each has it's place. Some are very small, the "light-bulb" that clicked over my head with these may have only been one of those eco-illegal 70W incandescent bulbs.

I will share these in the hopes that further meditation on them will help me reseed the fields of my mind.
I often have held the view that literature is sort of womb, fruitful and ceaseless in it's births yet each one can yield a new (both fresh and varied) life.
(Dr. Luebner had a great discussion skirting this idea that, he described the importance of where one reads a book and the idea that one copy of a book can be very different depending on where, when, how and by whom it is read.)
Where was I?
Ah yes, So these following bits and pieces of epiphanic literature influenced me in former life-as each passing day creates another life lived formerly- and revisiting them now may have a different effect. Or perhaps they may spark interest in whoever may be reading.

Ezra Pound-

IN THE STATION OF THE METRO
These appartions of faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.

-the simple radiance of beauty, the simple radiance of simplicity. This made me love poetry.

From The Tempest-

The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again. (III.ii.130–138)

Though I truly love this play because its role in the disillusionment of the theater, of literature, of all things really, Calliban's soliloquy expresses the power of the illusion. Both sides to this coin comprise the coin itself. The yin and the yang. This symbol is not just something cool to draw on your grade school notebook, it is representative of the balance of life and in this case epiphanic literature. Wikipedia actually puts it quite well, "describe how polar or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn."


From Finnegans Wake-

"in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can't stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strummans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deep-dark and ample like this red bog at sundown" 

 -There really isn't a "word" in this book that with enough investment wouldn't yield and epiphany but, this passage in particular struck me quite well. Very beautiful, very sensual.


Wallace Stevens-
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.


-This distills beauty, simplicity and notion of epiphany reappearing  in different form.
If pound was my first poetic love. This was my re-bound. upgrade.


I was wrong to attempt to classify or issue quality to any epiphanic moment. They occur at every moment, in every moment.
as Eliot puts it
"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before or after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment."

But, these instances, I find, are worth mentioning.

Jon Orsi- Things I think about

As I recall, we were assigned to have an epiphany. Now I can’t remember if the assignment was for this class (Bible) or the other (Mythologies) or perhaps one of the others (…) but I feel that that bit of information is trivial.

The notion that this could be an assignment is also quite flawed. These are happenings that cannot be conjured, and the implication of ownership seems to diminish the instance.

I can never presume to have and epiphany. I can only be fortunate enough for one to have me.




At some point or another I concluded that there are only two instances or scenarios that have provided an appropriate venue for these visits of a divine visage.

One being dreams.

The other: Books.




To begin with I’d really like to talk about a dream I just had—this statement I realize, usually prefaces a long winded story that has seemingly blown the mind of the emphatic narrator, while the poor listener feigns interest and secretly awaits this awkward retelling to end. I’m sorry. But flatter me—It wasn’t necessarily an extraordinary dream by any means, but something about it still claws at me. It involved a gunfight which is strangely common in my dreams. I was positioned in a bell tower of my own construction and I was fending off some adversary, but the situation quickly soured and I sense my impeding doom. This may sound bland to the reader, but imagine if you will the undoubted sense you are about to die. I realized that this was it. Uncreative people on a first date often ask the question: If you had five minutes to live what would you do? And the answers are usually as uninteresting as the people discussing the question. But now this question was upon me and there was no possibility of sex if I answered right, there was only death. I wasn't in a state of panic. I did not feel defeated. I knew that this was the end but, I did not feel as though things were overI took what little time I had to simply be.
You could ask me today or any day in the future and I could recall every finite detail of those final moments down to the smell and feel of my oilskin shroud, the sound of cracking pinewood panels, or the pressure of the book I clasped to my breast.
There was recess in the wooden floor that led to a steep stairwell. A fitted door was in place and though it could have been easily opened, I knew that there was nothing for me beyond it. I lay myself in this shallow grave and draped myself in heavy canvas. Bullets tore through the pine box tower yet their impending closeness did little to stop my ceremony. In my right hand I held a Bible but felt no urge to read it. Instead I placed it under my head as I lay prostrate. In my left hand, pressed against my chest with an unmovable weight was the novel Form Whom the Bell Tolls. And even though this was a good book, it was by no means one I would have ever called sacred, or one I would ask for on my death bed, but something at that particular moment, something very really, wanted this novel with me. I kept repeating the last paragraph to myself without having to open the book. I felt something beyond solace in the novel's closing words, I felt a sense of immortality.

What is beyond explanation is when I awoke I stumbled to my bookshelf and deposited a cache of books on the floor, eventually finding For Whom the Bell Tolls I flipped to the last page and I saw the words exactly as I had repeated them in my dream. Verbatim.
I can truthfully say however, that prior to this dream. If I was called upon to recite those lines I would undoubtably fail. I knew something about pine needles on a forest floor but that's about as far as I could go.
Even now the words are fleeting, but in that dream they were clear to me as any. In fact these words were all I wanted. My answer to that abominable question--in that moment at least-- would have been: I want to hear these words:

Lieutenant Berrendo, watching the trail, came riding up, his thin face serious and grave. His sub machine gun lay across his saddle in the crook of his left arm. Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding onto himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady. He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.


This whole ordeal for me was pretty mind blowing and I've tried to share this with others but, and I am guilty of this myself, I know that everyone who is being told a "dream story" Is really just thinking: "Man I can't wait 'til this person stops talking so I can tell an even better story that really centers more around the idea of me."

But--And this is what makes the story so interesting for anyone who can conceive of it-- When I remembered that passage- it did not have anything to do with me.

What I mean by this is pretty tough to explain but, I will try.

I did not know those words. So when I was recounting them, I was tapping into this unconscious aquifer that sits beneath the bedrock of all our minds.

Dreams seem very "me" oriented, but they are about as personal as breath and air and we can only claim as much ownership. For we share this ether of life and dreams. And in our sharing we snip fences and topple walls, we dissolve borders and emancipate our minds.

This shared consciousness is explored by Jung with his Archetypal roles. In the final chapter of Words With Power by Northrop Frye, Frye discusses Goethe's evocation of this world. Frye states, " In the second part of Faust we are told that Faust himself, without the help of Mephistopheles, must descend into the realm of the "mothers' to bring up the deeper mythical archetypes such as Helen of Troy".
  Joseph Cambell also discusses it at length as the shared mythic realm of our minds. A realm that is "controlled" by the entire sea of stories, A sea that is comprised by mythos both learned and un-learned.

There are fascinating studies that attempt to define this phenomena, (again I am reminded of Dustin's paper discussing the "gaze" and the very confined and constricting nature of definition and designation) but alas, some of these studies are very interesting.
For example, a study that has been conducted a great number of times with the same result revolves around Crossword puzzles.
A large group is given a crossword puzzle and their success and completion rate is documented, these puzzles are broad casted and published in various newspapers thus making them and their answers well known among the broad community. All the while a separate group, isolated during this time, is then administered the puzzle and their success and completion rates are consistently and stunningly much higher and faster.
More can be read on this subject here

But I digress,
Whether or not I can really understand what particularly drew me to that novel other than it too describes the moment in detail before death, It is a perfect thread in the tapestry of collectivity
Those clever enough or deeply in tune will have already pointed this out to themselves, but the Tittle of this Novel is taken from A John Donne Poem:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

The significance of this is pretty self evident, "No man is an island" concisely summarizes my entire point (though there is nothing concise about it).

This comes into my next, and orignal point:

There are only two instances where I feel as though I have experienced an epiphany.

Dreams

and Literature.

I've tried to express how this is true in dreams but its a very abstract concept and the less that's said about it- I fell the better.

Literature, books and poems are a little more tangible.

The Donne poem above provided me with the slight onset of such an experience, yet I liken it's strength to the moon's pale fire*

(*aside: I truly loved Nabokov's Pale Fire, but  its radiance I still find has been eclipsed by Lolita's might)

these experiences run on the same frequency, but Epiphany is reserved for those whose power is deafening.

 It is almost orgasmic but in a tantric sense, there is no release so to speak, but something has undoubtedly  changed. One can describe this moment as apocalyptic as we have discussed in the sense you find your self unveiled. with unshaded eyes the light simultaneously blinds and illuminates all.
In my attempt to describe or define this moment I am diminishing it. So I will leave it as it is.

But this moment came to me not in a fire of a burning bush, nor did it come to me atop any mountain. Instead it happened on night, In the s.u.b. of all places. I cracked a new book I had picked up on a whim (I really did "crack" it--the spine is ruined) The book was a collection of the works of Jorge Louis Borges, and the story I came upon was The Aleph. And it changed my world.
I realize I talk about this instance a lot and I hope its not sounding tired by now, but this particular moment was for me very sacred and I will never let that go.