Revelation

I was lying on the couch with the television on mute and a book in my hand when I fell asleep in one of those really exhausted stupor kind of sleeps – both really deep and light at the same time, and that you wake from disbelieving that only a couple of hours have gone by, because you know something you didn’t know before. You open your eyes wishing you had a pen before this new thing you know fades – and you open them and there’s a pen right in front of them, on the TV table, at eye-level. On the floor, but still in reach, is a book marker that fell out of the book, and you take the pen and the paper and you write it down and wonder why it felt so life-changingly profound and yet you’ve already got a vision of tacking it up on your mirror or your computer even as you’re scrawling it, and you like the way the scrawl looks, almost indecipherable like an M.D.’s prescription, the kind you used to get before they printed them out, and that feels just right too.

The scrawl said, You can’t bring the thing with you fully formed.

I don’t know what it means…and I do…which is what all the great realizations are like. In “The Dialogues,” there’s this expression: Carry it with you as a pregnant woman carries her child. This editor friend of mind is always asking What’s the antecedent? What’s the it? In the sentence, “carry it with you,” he’d ask what’s the it? I’d say something like “the vision,” and he’d ask, What vision? Well, that’s the fill-in-the-blank nature of the thing…what’s your antecedent? What’s your it; what’s your vision? I always thought of that “carrying” thing as no separation, you don’t carry this new knowing like information or a book you can pull from a bag. It’s you. It’s in you. This was like a second piece of that. You can’t bring anything with you fully formed. … like you’re the carrier of an incompleteness that finds completion…like you have the answer without the question. What the revelation refers to remains unknown, there’s no logical progression of things.

You’re not exactly meant to “get it.” You dwell with the ungraspable. That’s pretty much what it’s all about. You don’t know “stuff.” I met this one guy I thought was pretty admirable one time and mentioned him to a friend. My friend said, “Oh, Tom? He just likes to know stuff.” It’s not that kind of thing – not that way. Not a bunch of information or right answers. The heart “stuff” isn’t definable. It might be describable but not definable. That’s its beauty. It gets you living with description rather than definition. That’s a little kid kind of thing…that’s being like the little children. Seeing something or knowing something as a describable event of feelings or senses and not as a concrete answer. There’s no concrete answer or definition for love…you know?