Meditations IX

”Altar,” Lomography Color Negative 400 35mm film, Capri, Italy, Derrick James Cullen, 2016.

Could it be that God was actually speaking with him?

He knew that he had caught the voice speaking in a dream. A booming, triumphant sort of voice. It had authority. A lion’s roar. And he had caught it. He knew that the voice wasn’t expecting his sudden moment of lucidity. Yet it had arrived and he had heard it.

He couldn’t recall its exact words—but he knew by its cadence that it could belong only to God himself or the Antichrist. The prophets were the ones that had spoken with such omniscience. Therefore, it could not be a mistake that he had heard it. Either the Creator or Satan had wanted his or her voice heard. And that was the terrifying part—that made him stay awake until his conscious mind was exhausted. And then he would collapse. Perhaps exhausting his conscious mind was the reason that this kept happening.

His brief glimpse of either the sacred or profane was punctuated by a vision. Those authoritative sentences were joined with a sacrificial scene. A rock altar and a lamb. The stream of light from behind a cloudbreak. This is what he had seen.

He was certain they would tell him he was slipping from reality. His bicameral mind—that of the Ancients—was breaking through his ego and threatening to undo him. He could not tell them. No one must know. He was being set apart. But he must be the only one with knowledge of it.

Unifying with the Divine was his only option. But how should he differentiate It from the Beast? He must have been provided with an intimation at some point during his lifetime. His childhood nightmare.

What details could he pull form that early experience? The Enemy. He had been tiny—microscopic. His first tool must be the magnifying glass. The Enemy called for a visual distortion designed to falsely intimidate. Falsity must be the marker that he searched for. But what was truth? What did that voice proclaim? He must go under to discover. He would have to induce a drowning. Auto-asphyxiation without the sexual connotations. He was engaging in a quasi-martyrdom. Surely that was understood! He realized that he had begun drifting.

Daydreaming seems harmless in children but becomes worrisome in adults.

The man became aware that he could become catatonic if he so wished. Maybe he should. Was this how madness began?

Here begins my story of madness. The inner takes over the outer. The inner subsumes the outer.

Incipit.