What I Mean Is

What I mean is that rationality is the equipment. The substratum. Like maybe it’s here for the basal needs. The lower level needs. Like it isn’t actually where we’re going. It’s on the road or maybe the road itself but isn’t the destination. Therefore isn’t all that interesting. Like maybe mind is in the service of heart, let’s say. Just for the sake of argument. Just for the sake of being a little provocative. A little First Century. A little Johnish, maybe.

John. The one whom Jesus loved. I imagine him simultaneously old and young. Don’t you. In the Gospel, he’s young. But the writer of the Gospel is old. I imagine him walking and talking and supping with Jesus, both of them young men. And then I’m thinking of the white-haired guy with a quill pen, for example. At a writing desk. With paper. Outside, brilliant sun. The wind blowing. Dry. The earth very dry, under the white-hot sun.

All of the Gospel still happening. Still lodged in the present of John’s heart and mind. The mind retrieving the bits to assemble the moving pictures of what happened. Assemble the moving bits of the acoustic files. The acoustic registers. And then he plays them. Starts the player up in his mind and plays them out, paying attention. Super present. Super real. Super actual in the days of his master. Super aware in the presence of his master. Unconscious of the brilliant sun today decades later. Of the wind. The present dry earth. Aware only of Jesus moving about him, with him. In that present. Present in that present that is brought forward bodily into the current present. Living that. Living that over and over. Because. Well. That’s where his heart is. That’s when his heart is. That’s how his heart became involved, you see. And once the heart becomes involved. Once it connects out into that. Oh. That erosphere. That agape-erosphere. That connection that informs every other. Maybe.

Maybe the shape of the room into which one enters, then, is curved. Space is curved and maybe time is curved also. And relation. Maybe all relations are curved into one curving shape that defines a room into which we go in love. In truth. Maybe all love allows us entrance into this room because this is where all love resides. This room that John exists in as he writes. As he walks and in his walking writes out his walking and walks out his writing as he speaks with the master. As he moves there with the master in a space that has been divided off into a place one might call a room but that has earth and sky and sea and wind to it like earth but is another earth that maybe exists right here. Right in the heart of the physical. That is both in the physical but is metaphysical also. And this new world, this other world, in its metaphysicality reveals the heart of the matter. The heart of things. Informing sense of why all this equipment is strewn about like dust and water and sky.

Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. Sometimes it seems like one’s saying strains. One’s saying gets beyond one and then blurs. Gets blurry as one’s sight out at the horizon, where the world drops away over the rim of itself and hides. Hides plainly from one’s view. Runs so far out and away that it starts to drop off and curve underneath where one cannot see, from here. And begins its long sneaking up behind. Its long curved blue and green curving that is beautiful as a promise or an ornament. An essential ornament. In the black great surround of space. The starry great sphere of space. And beyond this, the unstarry great sphere of nothing.

And hanging here in the midst of all this. All these concentric spheres. Dangling at the end of gravity’s odd string. Wandering about on the next innermost sphere. One quickly discovers what the heart knows. Which is love and joy and gentleness and pain and loneliness and death. Inside the curving inner room is love and joy and gentleness. And outside this room is pain and loneliness and death. And of course one wants to find a way into the inner room. The hidden place. Wants to locate the door, open it, enter, and remain forever. But one cannot. One tries, but one cannot. There’s something about the way all this works. I don’t know what it is. But soon—much too soon, always—one finds oneself wandering about outside the room looking for a way back in. Wandering and wildering. Caught in a rain of ice and slate and burst metal and every sort of stone. It feels like. Sometimes. Caught in that or the other. The long shining metal surface that extends forever in every direction. That leads nowhere. That is populated with wanderers like oneself, moving slowly or quickly, they don’t know where. And sometimes it is both of these. And the light is a grayish metal light. A fluorescent metal light. And then something happens, and one finds oneself in the inner room again. The room of joy and love and truth and tenderness. The room in which the light is a light of fourteen different tones of red and yellow and orange. A light that has music in it. And one is happy. Happy. One cannot find the words for what this is precisely, except to say it is the place all words ultimately want to go. Ultimately want to go to arrange themselves in songs. Songs that one wants to sing forever. Together. With the others, who are oddly bursting into light sources themselves. Song sources and light sources themselves because they no longer can contain themselves and must extend. Must change. Must metamorphose into what they must become. What their hearts know they must change into. And so they do.