Levine’s first concern is with what she sees as the public’s indifference to the ongoing threat of Covid, with how the virus has changed our relationship with both the world and each other. How had the author, normally so sociable, come to see her neighbours as walking disease vectors and to rush by them on the stairs? Perhaps Covid too was a kind of prompt, a catalyst for the release of contents from the underworld, a call to confront wider existential fears that, by unspoken consent, we’d kept at least partially hidden.
She begins her essay with a story about an 18th century rebbe2.
Reb Simcha Bunim, a Hasidic rabbi born around 1765, supposedly carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. One contained a saying from the Talmud: ‘For my sake the world was created.’ The other had a quote from the biblical Abraham: ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ I’ve heard that he took out the appropriate piece of paper at various times, depending on the situation.
Was the world created for humans, and for me? Am I – are we – no more than dust and ashes? Levine takes this opposition as a multiple-choice question. How wonderful it would be if we could keep one piece of paper and crumple up the other. With one of our pockets empty, we could look on the world with fresh eyes. The sun would slip from behind a cloud, and we would find ourselves standing, holding hands with our siblings and parents, as in a kindergarten drawing, in front of our childhood home. If G-d3 has placed us in the centre of creation, or if we are, indeed, the co-creators of the world, why is reality so intent on conspiring against us? Why do we find ourselves in a wasteland, not a garden? If only history were not dark, and children did not age. If only our human vehicles were not reducible to their elements. Levine, quite reasonably, writes,
My take on this is immediate and intuitive. ‘For my sake the world was created.’ Yes! ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ Absolutely not. Never. Not ever.
As I contemplated this opposition, I found that I was led less to a different set of answers than to an entirely different method of envisioning the questions. Perhaps I wasn’t as comfortable as I assumed with being dust. Perhaps my spiritual vision had led me to see ‘extinction’ in too positive a light. ‘We’re all going back to the earth, the sea, the sky,’ I thought, ‘but how honest is my stoic calm?’
*
I often ask, in both personal and more general ways, ‘If…?’ For a writer, questions and statements are just variations of each other. One question may be good. Three may be far too many. Then there are questions which, by their very nature, will turn out to be inscrutable, which, no matter how well they are articulated and explored, must lead to fog and silence, to the shards of demiurgic dreams, to worlds we now acknowledge only by the lengths we go to erase them.
There are questions which no matter how well they are articulated and explored, must lead to fog and silence, to the shards of demiurgic dreams, to worlds we now acknowledge only by the lengths we go to erase them.
Why was Azazel cast into the desert? Where did the Kings of Edom go? Why are so many ancient sites with massive polygonal blocks found at 30 degrees north latitude in a ring around the Earth? What do you call that Manhattan-sized city just off the coast of Gujarat, 120 feet underwater, which carbon-dating has shown to be 9,500 years old? Don’t look over there. Look over here. Such things are feats of conjuration, no more than tricks of the light.
‘If’ is quite the useful word. We have only to go through the appropriate steps to arrive at our favorite answer. ‘If for me the world was created – as certain entheogens have tempted me to believe– why then…(fill in blank)?’ This is no trivial question. To ask it is to potentially be sucked into the depths of displacement, into a labyrinth filled with ghosts, into a confrontation with the extent of my stupidity, into the hopes of a ‘safe space’ now proven to be false, into the cries of vanished worlds. ‘Hello?’ I say, and then find that a stone has landed on my chest. Why has it suddenly become so difficult to breathe?
There are other times when, to console myself, I ask such questions lightly. ‘Cosmos,’ I say, ‘If G-d has, as Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola4 insists, placed humans at the mid-point of creation, with a job to do, with a rank a bit higher than that of angels, with a capacity to go where we would go and to do what no other creature can, why do the 26 richest people hold as much wealth as the poorest four billion? If, in 1984, there were more than 50 large media corporations, why do six of them now control some 90 percent of US news? How many yachts and underground bunkers can these 26 Archons buy? Why shouldn’t they volunteer to give their wealth to me, so that I could give some reasonable portion to each person, so that I could use the rest of it to keep the Earth from turning into Venus?’
Or, in a more troubled mood, I might choose to pose a question to Fortuna, the almost smiling goddess of the wheel, for whom no height is fixed, for whom no gift belongs to its receiver. ‘Goddess,’ I say, ‘you who normally show just one face out of three, would it be such a bad thing if more people bought my books, if my readers increased geometrically each month, just because my work is good, without my having to bother to do podcasts?’
Sadly, I have only as much money as I need to pay my bills, and no tens of thousands of book sales have followed my instructions to appear. Time passes, and I must wrestle with the injustice of not getting any younger. My back isn’t in great shape. My right eye, with its lens replacement, works. The cataract in the left gets thicker by the day. If there are other eyes I can use, other modes of vision to which I’m sometimes granted access, the vistas thus provided are here one minute, gone the next. My other-dimensional guides are undependable. Their bad faith forces me to turn to the expansion of my memory.
I am grateful for what I can see of my standing in the cosmos, less for the review of past actions that humourless teachers have forced upon me. In my attempts to penetrate the heart of the beyond, I have incurred a number of debts – for teaching moments squandered, for the giving of too much importance to my moods, for changing my habits the same way a thousand times and expecting a different outcome, for thinking I could talk my way out of the inside of a clock.
So, the reminder that ‘I am but dust and ashes’ doesn’t come as a surprise. Since my goal, from the age of 18 or so, has been to ‘die while still alive,’ my regret is that I haven’t fully carried through, that I haven’t been adventurous enough. If I were to allow myself a flight of guarded optimism, I would hope that the moment of my passing not be unusually painful, that I have time to say goodbye, that I exit the world with the same joy that I entered, that I’m able to gently push shadows aside, that I pause to remember enough of what I learned, that I be able to keep my focus as I plunge into the light.
I turned 69 this year. I hope to live to 88, to see the rest of my eight books published and my daughter, Liz, happily married and successful in her career. After this, who knows? My use of mercury and forays into Taoist alchemy may add a century or two. ‘I am but dust and ashes,’ however, in whatever year this may come. Since I’ve chosen to be cremated rather than buried, this will be all too literally true. But then I think, ‘What of it? Why is your memory so short?’
‘Why is your memory so short?’ a voice says. ‘I will ask, and you will answer, please, if you are not too busy, if you would be so good5. Can you grasp what your body is, where it starts or where it ends, on what scale it exists, or why, having seen the One, you are not yet at peace? Since you have died at Verdun, at Dresden, at Hiroshima, at Aleppo, at Kharkiv, your eyes wide, not even screaming, not more than a moment ago, why have you bothered to come again? Why are you forced to feel so much pain that’s not in your possession, that comes and goes like a dream? No doubt, the wind detests you.’
At certain moments, to remind myself that time is deep, that the same haunted atmosphere presses on us all – an atmosphere which, in spite of the best of precautions, we have no choice but to inhale – I must pause to ask who and what is living in my body. At such times, I can only listen to the voice that asks the questions. I hear the voice ask, ‘How many humans and cultures have died and gone before you? What is left of all their arts, and is this quantity, perhaps, far greater than you think? What do you owe to those who have gone before you, to those immediately around you, to those on the other side of the Earth, to those who may never be born, to the eight billion now alive?’
I leave my body, rigid, then must scramble to get back.
The voice says, ‘If I ask, would you be good enough to answer, if you are all done feeling disoriented, if you do not have any better things to do? By what method should you read the Book That No One Wrote? Why would you dare to translate some few excerpts from a book that feeds on silence, to risk the laughter of critics, when no one even knows what language you are speaking? And yet … and yet this is probably not such a bad idea.’
When you exhale, G-d tells me to inhale. There is an impenetrable cloud of ashes in the air, a cloud that causes us to choke, a cloud composed of the countless humans we do not know we love. There is no way through or out of this obstacle but to go. Just as we must figure out how to breathe, we must figure out how and in what way we want to burn.
*
Am I afraid of Covid-19 and long-Covid? Sure, as I’m afraid of the spread of H5 bird flu and Mpox and the covert strategies of plutocrats, as I’m afraid of the toxic smoke that blows south from Canadian wildfires. I’m anxious about learning to live in a city 120-feet under the ocean. My main concern, though, is with what we owe to other humans and the cosmos in whatever time is left. How can I give what I have to give? How can I speak of that which has been for too long guarded, of the courage it took for us to leap through the abyss, of the instructions left by a race of primordial teachers? I would call from a cloud the role we humans have forgotten how to play. There is little chance of success. Nonexistence is not all that different from a lover. Art is long. Our attention spans are short. Let us now rush foolishly ahead.
The good thing about being born is that it cancels all the traumas that we’ve suffered, the dozens of types of torture we’ve endured. I’m sad to find that my human vehicle is much weaker than it should be, that it refuses to carry out more than a small fraction of my plans. Thank G-d there are others just as flawed as I, that this gives us an opportunity to welcome home the Stranger.
What a shock it would be to discover that the Earth was actually round, not flat, as certain YouTube theorists have claimed. If only Yahweh had not abandoned his first wife, the Earth, and their intercourse were still as ecstatic as before. If only we could find some way, together, to turn our incorrigible bad habits into virtues. If only we could wake to find the decapitated bodies of our enemies, in their hundreds upon hundreds, in their thousands upon thousands. How simple this would make things. If only we could bring our happy childhoods back from dreams. I’m still afraid of the malice and stupidity of average humans, of those I would like to call my collaborators. I’m afraid of the near certainty of death.
When I walk between the tall glass towers in downtown Boston, I can’t help but notice that most of the windows have gone missing, that fish swim in and out. This isn’t at all something that I’m trying to imagine. It’s happening at this moment, even as I speak. There are nonetheless a great many more things I must do. The list grows longer by the day. My retroactive preparations are exhausting. For example, how am I going to breathe when I am dead? And yet I must. If only my contemporaries shared some small part of my vision. If only they would put away their smartphones, to see what I see, to hear what I hear. I would have each of them test the thread that connects them to the stars. Stranger, be my guide to the abyss. Now, opening to a page at random, let us read out loud from the Book That No One Wrote.
*
So, what should we do with Reb Simcha Bunim’s statements? ‘For my sake the world was created’ versus ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ Any maxim, parable, or commentary can be read in multiple ways. I feel that I utterly lack the freedom, though, to choose between these statements. I see the tension between the statements as less of a contradiction than a paradox. In spite of the subtle humour of Reb Simcha taking the pieces of paper from his pocket at different times, as the situation demands, I believe that both perspectives are meant to be simultaneously grasped. So, even more than being a paradox, perhaps they should be understood as a kind of koan.
[The world] is also a stage-set on which a war is being fought, an alchemical contraption within which we have been called to transmute the elements.
First, let me see what I can find in my right pocket. ‘For my sake the world was created’ – I don’t believe this means that the world was created for our comfort or pleasure, quite the opposite, perhaps. I would interpret the statement as defining a cosmological role, as setting out a responsibility – to extract the sparks of light from the weight of matter and the darkness of history, to learn to subtly discriminate between good and evil, to do what angels – who live in higher worlds than we do but are more limited in scope of action, choice, and understanding – are not equipped to do, to lift the gifts of our experience to the beyond, to repair the schism in creation that followed from the ‘Shevirat ha-Kelim6, the ‘Breaking of the Vessels,’ and to restore the link between dimensions that have now grown far apart. If we might wish that the world were a playground, which it may well be on some transpersonal level of understanding, it is also a stage-set on which a war is being fought, an alchemical contraption within which we have been called to transmute the elements.
As to, ‘I am but dust and ashes’ – while this can be understood in terms of the passage of time, the inevitability of death, the frailty of the human vehicle, the limits of human intelligence in the face of the beyond, the statement can also be read as a mystical injunction, that one must go down in order to go up, that one must empty oneself in order to be filled, that one must plunge into the abyss to discover what lies beyond it. It is less a call to fatalism than to surrender, an acknowledgement of the depths of exile, a call to courage in the face of the divine presence. The statement also points to a mystery – that being and nothingness, the existent and the seemingly nonexistent, beauty and terror, one’s immediate incarnation and what lies beyond it, annihilation and primordial knowledge, are quite intimately connected.
How can we grasp the generative relationship between Ain (absolute nothingness), Ain Soph (the knowledge inherent in this nothingness), and Ain Soph Aur (primordial knowledge projected into visible light and form)? This is the challenge posed by Reb Simcha Bunim’s two pieces of paper.
If we think of the cosmos as a toroidal sphere7, ‘For my sake the world was created’ may have as a corollary, ‘For the world’s sake, I was created.’ There was and is, perhaps, a role that preexists the downward projection of the light, its catastrophic overflow into the vessels first meant to contain it, the wound that opened in the unedited version of perfection. This role may only be realisable through the experience of exile, through the chaos of multiple revisions. Why can we no longer see the body of the cosmos as a whole? Because we have gotten much too big.
Dark Mountain: Issue 26 – Dark Ocean
Our Autumn 2024 issue is a full-colour exploration of the world's oceans in an era of collapse – in narrative, verse, art and photography.
Read more
ENDNOTES
1. Stephanie Wellen Levine: Levine is an essayist and poet who writes about spiritual dilemmas, personal anxieties, mystical experiences, and her quest for insight into the fate of human consciousness after death.
2, A rebbe” is the spiritual leader of a Hassidic movement, as opposed to a rabbi, who is a teacher of Torah.
3. The word God is sometimes written this way in Hassidism and Kabbalah, as a kind of placeholder word. ‘G-d’ suggests an unnamed mystery, not a person or idolatrous object.
4. Pico della Mirandola was a 15th century Italian philosopher, whose Oration on the Dignity of Man has been called the ‘Manifesto of the Renaissance and a “key text of the Hermetic Reformation.
5. Allusion to the Book of Job in which G-d questions Job from a whirlwind:
Who is this whose ignorant words
smear my design with darkness?
Stand up now like a man;
I will question you: please, instruct me.
7. Toroidal sphere: The simplest way to describe a toroidal sphere is as a donut that turns through itself, i.e., as a sphere whose circumference turns through its centre. This is a key image in Kabbalah.
On the centring of humans in relation to the cosmos
Where and how should we locate humans in relation to the cosmos? If, for example, as Pico della Mirandola argues, G-d has placed us at the mid-point of creation, this is a concept that doesn’t reveal itself at a glance. In terms of the mystical traditions Pico was working with, this is a mid-point that’s also a circumference, and being placed at this mid-point also locates human action within a vertical axis- –i.e., not “on” a vertical axis but rather “within” one- –-at the mid-point of a turning torus, at Omphalos, the way that the great majority of ancient cultures did. This could be framed in terms of the Siberian World Tree, the steps of a Sumerian Ziggurat, the Native American Medicine Wheel, the Sufi Mount Qaf or the Vedic Mount Meru. The whole purpose of building a sacred site—or city, in its original form—was to “centre” what had been de-centred, in relation to the four directions, to the Pole, to Earth’s geomagnetic grid, and to constellations such as Sirius and the Pleiades.
If, in this essay I tentatively place humans at the centre of the cosmos, at Omphalos, doesn’t this contradict the Dark Mountain tenet that “humans are not the centre of life”? My position is not that humans should be the Technofuturist Masters of the Earth, quite the opposite. I see this as an enormously destructive fantasy, a dream whose sell-by date has long since passed, a Faustian bargain whose end has already come. Sadly, those beneath its spell have too much invested to allow themselves to see it. Since the 18th century, we’ve tended to relate to nature as a picturesque landscape, or as a Darwinian battleground, or as a concept to be reduced to its component parts and analysed, or, more recently, as a set of interactions that can be modeled on our computers. Most ancient and indigenous cultures didn’t/don’t see the cosmos in this way, or “nature” as something that could/can be separated out from it.
Kabbalists might speak of ten worlds, Ancient Egyptians of 14, and Mayans of 13 heavens and nine underworlds. Even in more materialistic cultures, such as that of Rome, it was felt and understood that we existed in relation to a vertical axis as well as a horizontal one, that there were subtler levels to the cosmos, and that we moved in relation to at least three worlds, not one. A key part of this vision of multiple worlds was the understanding that breaks could occur within them, that what was originally close could grow distant and had somehow to be called together. This was the function of ritual, sacrifice, the arts, and invocation—of language as I try to use it. In Pico’s term, the role of humans is that of ‘messenger’. It’s a role that’s been mostly now forgotten, and it comes less with privileges than responsibilities – that we align ourselves, that we lift up gifts, that we empty ourselves so that something larger has the space to enter. In relation to Omphalos, our role is not that of masters but of servants.
Thank you for writing this, Brian. As you know from our previous correspondence, I have trouble understanding much of what you write. But I hold out the hope that this is just a personal limitation of mine, and that among DM readers there are many who do not share this limitation, and that it is for them that you have written this deep, underwater essay. It also seems to me that one can celebrate the fact that we do not understand the world/life/ourselves, and that by dwelling in this state of not-knowing (rather than beating our heads against the proverbial wall) we can enter into a liminal space of non-verbal clarity, a state of being where words are not necessary and do not help. A kind of spiritual “bird-watching” without needing to know “what bird that is.” Hope this makes sense. Thanks again.
Hi Judith,
When I first met my wife, in 1994, she described the style of my poetry at the time as “hieroglyphic.” When I first discovered that I could write, at the age of 16, this creative breakthrough was accompanied by a somewhat violent and unsettling sense of spiritual expansion. Ever since, though many diverse periods, I’ve attempted to use my writing as a kind of yoga, as a method of both testing the upper and lower, inner and outer limits of my awareness and then organizing what I find. For many years, I wrote mostly poetry. Then, in 1998, my father died, quite unexpectedly, at the age of 66, killed by his doctors. His third wife, Judith, asked and then asked a bit more firmly that I give the eulogy.
Our history was a difficult and complex one, with many contradictory emotions. My parents had divorced when I was four, I saw my father maybe once a year until I was 11, and then he disappeared to Mexico to start a company and second family. I didn’t see him again until I was out of art school and married to my first wife. We shared any number of interests and character traits, but—in spite of his youthful goal of becoming a classical cellist—he was mostly focused on business and social standing and thought—well said—that I was “wasting my life,” that I should forget about art and writing in order to become “a man among men.” We lived in separate worlds that intersected in strange ways. We did manage, by the late 1980s, to push beyond our differences, but how could I sum up the intricate tensions of this relationship?
I had no desire to give any sort of conventional, euphemistic eulogy, but I found myself tongue-tied about how to even begin to do something else. I didn’t sleep for the three days before the funeral, and then came down with a cold on the flight from Boston to Denver. I tried writing down some memories, but this went nowhere. Then, something like a sweat-lodge trance state seemed to take over, and I found myself projected into many decades of experiences as though they were happening in the moment. Turning these upside down and inside out, I tested how all the contradictory pieces connected and finally managed to assemble them, as though I were slowly piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. I almost lost my voice, and had to sip hot tea constantly in order to be able speak to my father’s relatives, many of whom I’d never met. Before giving the eulogy, I was concerned about speaking way too bluntly, but my comments resonated with those who knew my father.
Almost immediately after the funeral, I realized that I’d left a vast amount of personal experience out of my poetry, which I had indeed been conducting in a kind of “hieroglyphic” realm. This was the start of my career as a prose writer, of my desire to tell something in the direction of linear stories. Before this, it just didn’t seem possible. I saw things from too many different angles. Depth and surface, intuition and structured argument, meditative silence and speech, visionary flight and personal messiness seemed to be at odds. My concern was with leaping from the biographical to the transpersonal rather than with using the one as the raw creative material for the other. So, my approach to the essay is not a conventional one—I kind of backed into the form. I didn’t so much let go of my earlier creative goals as I reformatted and expanded them.
I almost never write to prove a thesis. Even when I do start with an outline, I tend to work against it rather than with it, as a place to start rather than a form to be filled out. I then revise five, ten, two-dozen or more times to get the type of musical structure I’m after. I don’t write to tell people what I think. Instead, I write to discover what I know, with the goal of taking readers with me on a journey. I do realize that my approach might seem to create some unnecessary obstacles. Since I first started to publish essays online, in 2007, in Reality Sandwich, one of the most common comments has been, “Why can’t you just say what you mean?” From my own vantage point, “Stranger, Tell Me How to Translate from a Language I Don’t Speak” is relatively plainspoken, at least as much so as I can make it. Among other things, it’s a direct expression of my relationship to aging, death, and what lies beyond—although certain mystical experiences and esoteric concepts are, no doubt, by their nature inexpressible. I do hope that, upon close reading, my words will come to seem less like obfuscations than like catalysts.
This excerpt from the “Forward” to my book Masks of Origin may be relevant:
The word “essay” originates in the French “essayer,” which means “to attempt; to put to the test; to set out on a journey; to explore.” When Montaigne explained his use of this word, in 1580, in the “Preface” to his first volume of Essays, he made it clear his work was intended to be revolutionary both in content and in form. “I dare to write all that I dare to think,” he wrote, and, “In every one of us is the entire human condition.” This later statement may call to mind certain Renaissance illustrations, such as those of Robert Fludd, in which the human body has been set inside of a circle, with each part corresponding to a planet, star, element, or other level of the cosmos. “So, reader,” he somewhat paradoxically declared, “I am myself the substance of my book, and there is no reason why you should waste your leisure on so frivolous and unrewarding a subject.”
Like Montaigne, I would not argue that my experience is significant just because it is mine; no, I would suggest that the personal life—so apparently familiar—is a sign that points towards an undiscovered continent, and then beyond. It is the source of raw material, a kind of fossil fuel, the small version of something almost infinitely large.