WIM Mystic

WIM MYSTIC

 

                                    To be, and not to be…

                                     by Marco M. Pardi

 

For decades my mother was fond of telling people, anyone, that I did not start speaking until about age 4. This apparently was one of her ways of proving that I was, in the language of the day, retarded. I prefer to think I was just considering my words.

By that time I had been made well aware that I was “the biggest heartbreak” in her life, being born male. But it was hard to feel something for someone you barely knew. A debutante raised in Italy, Switzerland and France, married to an Italian aristocrat naval officer, and soon to be an OSS officer herself, she was confident that I was well taken care of by my nursemaid, Rosa, who walked me daily through the Piazza del Popolo of my birthplace, Roma.

My earliest memories of Cara Mama were those nights when she came into my room, took my hand to stroke her cheek, and slumped over feigning death. I would cry and wail. She would then get up laughing and leave the room. A bed time story.

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I hope tonight I will not weep…….

I remember the night I got my wish, probably sooner than she expected. She sat, I stroked, she slumped.  I probably did not say anything, certainly not what I like to think I was thinking; “So, you’re dead. Fuck ya'”. After that it was just lights out, a wonderful metaphor for those opportunities to find peace and joy in life. I would seek lights out in various ways over the years.

My pre-school days in the U.S. were spent in solitude, eavesdropping on the tutor teaching my older brother American English. He was soon to go to boarding school 130 miles out into the country. Posing as a household fixture I watched the reading lessons, later using them to decipher the newspaper comic pages where the illustrations helped with the meaning of the dialogue. My favorites were: The Phantom; the Lone Ranger; Krazy Kat; and, Pogo. The common denominators were solitude, albeit with a sidekick or a non-human companion. Lil’ Abner figured in there as well, Daisy Mae being important to a developing young prostate. But Pogo centered me. Not yet having developed an English vocabulary beyond a few words, I misread one of his favorite sayings, “Woe is me” for “Who is me”.  Who is me? This was more than merely profound, it was deeply personal. It went straight to the soul of the person that I felt I was becoming; straight to the soul of the person I was beginning to understand and could not reconcile with the apparent attitudes toward me of the people around me.  And, it was private in ways no one could breach, lights or no lights. Whatever I found, it was mine.

And so began my intrusive analysis of words and their meanings. The most elementary level of analysis is one through which one determines if one understands what someone else means when they say something. It presumes a great deal about the other person, and where there is misunderstanding it places the blame on the self.  That level came quickly, especially to a child more accustomed to listening than to speaking.

The deeper, and potentially far more troublesome level of analysis is that wherein one examines and determines whether the other person fully understands, and therefore means what it is they are saying.

Ordinary and mundane utterances and conversations, illogical and presumptive as they may often be to a young but growing mind, usually prove not worth the cost of the attempted analysis. “Because I said so!” is too often followed by elevated and harsher responses; the search for why often ends with an hour long stand in the corner, or worse.

At age 5 it happened.  I was dropped off at the boarding school, a monastic military school run by the Ursuline Order.  Here I was presented with my first opportunities to examine the meaning of words, and whether their users really understood their usage.

The nuns (the “Twisted Sisters” as I would later recall them) began working on my recently minted immortal soul. Oh?

What is immortal?

It lasts forever.

What does forever mean?

It has no end.

I’ve been forever?

No. Eternal God created you.

But, isn’t a beginning an end viewed backwards?

That is one of the Mysteries to be revealed after you die, Mister. In the meantime, you will report for your meeting with the paddle before bedtime.

 If “well rounded education” means getting hammered on both ends I was an over-achieving student. I was determined to pick the lock to the Celestial Mystery Safe, the fall-back of cornered believers.

But through the years the adventures in epistemology broadened and deepened.  The first and most obvious opportunities arose in the context of theology, and I was a voracious consumer of theological thought. Though I never went through the “invisible friend” stage of childhood, it was always Pogo, not Jesus, Mary, or even “God the Father” at my side. An absentee father had been my reality since age 1; that closet was already taken. No, my interest was not in mythical or long dead – or both, figures; it was in Who is Me?

Egocentric?  Not if you actually examine the theologically based utterances so glibly exchanged in religious and in everyday life. Eternal soul, I’ll love you for eternity, that pot roast will take an eternity. Most people envision being drawn into the future, over the horizon in time, a true long shot; endless. But that makes eternity linear, raising again the nun’s mystery of how I, as a freshly minted eternal soul, should not consider my “creation” as a beginning and therefore an end, depending on which way I am facing. Furthermore, no mysterious indoctrination is needed to realize that a line, even if infinite at both ends, has other points of termination (or non-line) by virtue of its width and its depth – each of which constitutes an end point, as anyone who has gone through veni-puncture training would certainly tell you. In eternity there could be no limit on width, or on depth. The linear model of eternity clearly does not hold up, or even down.

What about a point? Again, a point has dimensions. Our very ability to identify a point is firmly bedded in our ability to perceive non-point, its surroundings. Point will not do. In fact, nothing (no-thing) can represent eternity.  And, since eternity has no dimensions, we can’t “experience” it.

No dimensions? What about the Universal Constants, such as the speed of light? Actually, the speed of light (C) has varied in measurement as much as 1.3% between 1928 and 1945.  What we now have is universal consensus, not an absolute value, of 299,796 kilometers per second. And a meter?  Again, with recognized variance, the consensus is that a meter is the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Okay, how long is a second, anyway? Here, too, there is no absolute. It is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of vibration of the light emitted by cesium 133 atoms in a particular state of excitement defined as the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state. (Science Set Free, Rupert Sheldrake 2012)  We’ve already seen that light varies in emission speed.  We must also recognize that, as in the Theory of Relativity, all of these concepts are relative. They are as meaningful as the tank toys we put in fish tanks. More interesting would be to ask the fish, “How’s the water”?

Everything in the preceding paragraph is reckoned in finite terms. Infinity, a synonym for eternity, is boundless by any measure, in any direction. Even the act of labeling it as a meaning domain in one’s mental conceptions is the act of rendering it invalid; thinking “infinity” is meaningful only in the context of finite, which then posits something outside what we have agreed are the non-existent boundaries of infinity.

Where does that leave us when someone says God is infinite?  And how do they commonly pose that proposition? My early training emphasized that God was indescribable but then quickly stipulated the Three Heavy Omnis; God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.

 Not consciously foreseeing my career as an educator, I demurred from pointing out that the Omnis are redundant. Grant any one and you automatically get the other two. Reduce or make conditional any one and you automatically invalidate all three.  My erstwhile colleagues zeroed in on omniscience – “If God knows everything in advance, how can you sin?”, and omnipotence – “Can God make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it?”. While they were recovering from their meetings with the paddle I was considering omnipresence. People said God was in heaven. Okay, does that mean everything not heaven is where God is not? If so, no omnipresence and by instant extension no omniscience or omnipotence either.

If God is only in certain acts, e.g. love and selflessness, or certain places, e.g. anointed sanctuaries and not in the rape of an infant or the crack house in “that” part of town then we have restricted God to being only in what we like, which is often a far smaller portion than that which we don’t. Pretty small God.  Granting the infinite descriptor, we would have to say God is fully and completely in everything (acts, places, things, ad infinitum), no thing more and no thing less. That being the case, it is again clear that even conceiving of a God is limiting a God. And the feeling of being God is “wrong” only when it implies exclusive proprietorship. Of course, the larger issue of whether anything can be “wrong” is food for another day.

Throughout the years I have spent in at least two major careers I consistently found myself having to formulate questions and listen carefully to the answers. I have also faced harsh interrogations. An old axiom is: Framing is everything. People have asked if I think there is a God. My consistent answer: the question is irrelevant. If there is a God, there is no God I can point to.

What about afterlife?  The way this is commonly asked presumes that some sort of eternal spiritual existence begins once physical life stops. Hence, the use of “after”. But we have already seen that eternity logically has no dimensions; it doesn’t “begin” anywhere.  My lifelong (physical) history of a multitude of the various kinds of experiences described as non-physical enables me to comfortably feel that I was never not. But that does not deny my physical conception as a zygote turned old crank.  My physical attributes are only the clothes I wear on going out, or in, for the day – my “time” on this plane.  I always was, I always am, and I always will be, per omnia secula, seculorum.

I do have serious questions regarding how a spiritual entity maintains a sense of self-identity, and if that’s even necessary. Is it only a habit, to be dropped in the same way that obsessive-compulsions are dropped? I get tired of me even now. Hell must be a mirrored room. This is reminiscent of the early Harvard studies with stimulus deprivation and with LSD and the recent studies with DMT.

Years ago a student asked me if I believed in reincarnation.  Not wanting to excoriate him over the insulting implication that I would be so utterly simple as to believe in anything, I said only, “I reincarnate every instant. I appear roughly the same only because I haven’t quite dropped this habit.” 

Pogo is telling me to give it a rest.

 Marco