By
James Curcio
Although we need to make many assumptions - as we often do in life, let alone death - there is often a connection drawn between life and waking, and death and dreaming.
This connection is specious, but not because it is shallow. It is rather wrong, and yet strikes very near to a profound truth about consciousness, if not the nature of reality itself. (How can we draw a distinction between the two when we are ourselves housed within a bio-mechanical walker? That is a subject for another book to be sure, much as we tried to touch on it in
The Immanence of Myth and
Apocalyptic Imaginary.) These epistemological uncertainties aside, death itself is the void of the great unknown. Whatever our conjecture is of that nether region, it is the point
beyond the point of no return - the dark side of the moon - a place that is no place, and certainly no story exists there. The world is full of damn near verifiable near-death experiences, but no verifiable death experiences. There is a reason for that.
The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead is also, more accurately, called the Bardo Thodal. This translates loosely as the "intermediary space." And Bardos are spaces we are actually quite familiar with. When you are falling asleep, but have not yet hit the bottom of the well - that is a Bardo. When we are coming awake, but the curve of your lovers neck is still at one and the same time the scroll upon which the history of another world is writ in blood - a Bardo.
It is in these spaces that all mythic artists carve out their homes. We may not even know it, making that rote flow a part of an unknown process. Or, like me, you might instead be very conscious of the process, intentionally allowing yourself to almost fall asleep, time and again, with notebook and pen in hand, dredging up symbols and the threads that connect plot, character, and something deeper than that - some archetypical knowledge that does
not come from pat books on Jungian symbolism.
This reminds me a bit of the plot to the movie "
Flatliners," where med students kill themselves time and again, and then bring themselves back, all so they can unravel some mystery that perches at the brink between life and death, like a gargoyle, part stone and part something else though not quite flesh. This theme returns again in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, where one cylon kills herself again and again so that she can look upon the face of their archetypal parents, the faces of God.
This too is an archetype. To see the face of God is to not only court death: it is to die. This premise exists in Greek myth, where Dionysus' mother is consumed in a pillar of fire when she discovers the true nature of her paramour - Zeus. It exists equally in Jewish mysticism. The Zohar is laden with this idea, though like a bad scholar I'll not look up all the references. The reason is not so much laziness as that it is actually not particularly important to our point, so much as you recognize the general ubiquity of this idea.
And as in "Flatliners," there is indeed a price to be paid for this knowledge. I myself paid for it rather harshly, as my experiments with creative liminal spaces led me to rather extreme lucid dreaming experiments that I explained by tying it into my creative work. Eventually some sort of threshold was overcome, and this passage that I put in my first novel "Join My Cult!" is actually entirely truthful, as is a surprising amount of the material that finds its way into my 'fiction' (that is a topic for a later article, I'm sure.)
A burst of pleasure runs through me, unbearable ache. There is a
yanking, rending, of my insides and the room around me. I am reaching
out to her, I so desperately want to stay here… To get close enough to
allow her to become first person and myself third, let myself go to let her
in… I can’t even remember what she was saying, now.
