The
Rulers of the Continuous Universe: Memory, Sleep and Death
One might begin by asking, what is the
continuous universe, and why single out memory, sleep and death as its
rulers? What about them govern the
way we approach life? They are
essentially unknown and seemingly unknowable.
To begin to speak of the nature of the unknown, it might be best to begin with the words of poets.
For example; Novalis says,
“Life is the beginning of
death. Life is for death’s
sake. Death is the end, and a
beginning as well, a separation and yet closer to a reunion with Self. Through death the Reduction is
consummated.” Pollen
and Fragments, p. 26, #8)
And Shakespeare says,
“…and like this insubstantial
pageant faded,
Leave not a wisp of cloud behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little
life is rounded with a sleep.”
Prospero in “The Tempest”,
Act IV, Scene I.
MEMORY:
On awakening we say “I had a dream,
but I can’t remember it.”
Do we forget the dream, or the
sleeping? Can we memorize or know
by memory a dream, or do we just sleep through the dream, and in dreaming,
forget that we are sleeping. Is our
sleep the little brother of death, as the poet says, but which we have
forgotten because of a faulty memory, or because we are only sleeping?
Do we memorize death through our dreams,
and in dying, return to the memory of all our sleep?
Is death the threshold to the memory of
our sleep?
Are dreams the only threshold to capturing
where memory comes from?
How do we know the dream is ours, the
memory is accurate or that death will be like falling asleep and waking in the
arms of those we remember, those we memorize, those we hope we go to the land
of sleep with every night…only to forget the journey when we wake?
Dreams speak the activity of spirit; and
memories play the body of substance.
But we do not remember dreams, dreams remember us, and we forget them
because we sleep as if dead. We do
not dream memories, we cannot say from whence they come. We suspect that they come from the
brain, or the body. Maybe from the
scent of yesterday, or the taste of some other conjunction of time and
space.
One could speculate that memories are the
call of dying, the call of the dead, the doorway to the sanctuary of the
continuous universe.
Sleep is then the tenuous rehearsal that
we spend half our life entering, and the other half pretending it will never
call on us.
And yet, here we stand, at the threshold,
peering into the continuous universe.
It is a most holy and sacred place to direct our profane gaze. It is too precious to speak, too
intimate to share, too universal and yet wholly and only our own, to not
acknowledge that indeed here is our very substance, the thing that makes us
whole. The initiation into our
destiny.
Our destiny - to come to live our
sleeping as awake, remembering the future, as Robert Sardello says, and
understand and relate to the gift of death, and that it has been overcome. Then are we being human, and may
commune with the angels, the dead, Sophia.
Remember Sophia? She who has fled into the wilderness,
she who remains in the center of the earth with the lion faced being filled
with pride, she who is hidden from all who seek her for the sake of the
world.
But She cannot stay hidden in regard to
the holy realms of memory, sleep, and death. Here she stands with us. Here we will be protected and accompanied, recognized and
remembered. For here is
wisdom’s realm, and that which we have lost abides and waits, not just
for us to remember, but also for us to enter into through sleep, or even
death.
How do we come to wisdom? We think it may be through knowing, and
so we seek to think clearly and accumulate more information. This, however, is not the landscape of
wisdom. Wisdom is in the
perception that memory is not our remembering, but the memory of the whole of
the world; that, like dreams, we don’t have memories, but that memories
have us. The memory that can be
trained is not true memory, but what is called “artificial” memory,
or one could say ‘re-memory’.
Wisdom leads us to the experience that sleep is not going into our own
unconscious bliss or nightmare, but is leaving the personal to participate in
every living thought and true feeling, every expression of humanity. And the wisdom in death? Death is not simply the loss of the
body. It is indeed also the
awakening of that in the body that has been holding it in time and space, a
stepping into the timeless continuity – the spaceless universe - and the
releasing of that wisdom back into the whole.
In the loneliness of our insomnia, grief,
unsurpassable joy, debilitating sorrow, Sophia is our constant companion, for
here we are steeped in memory, and we long for sleep as a death to that which
is uncontainable. It may be but
the little death of sleep, but sleep can offer enough to sustain us for the
work of life. Sophia knows that to
stand before the hallowed ground of death and peer unflinchingly into that
mystery wrenches from the body all that is comfortable and familiar. And sleep, only rehearsing for death,
allows memory to cloud its true allegiance to Thanatos.
Does the only personal experience of
death abide in our “little death” of sleep? And what do we know of this little
death but a vague notion of the limited activity of those periods of which we
have no memory? And having no
memory of it, we create a version of a memory from our concepts and abstract
thoughts, a re-memory, from our waking understanding, that we clothe the
darkness with, to make it more familiar.
How do we abide the totally unknown? Why are we so sensibly afraid of the
dark, so courageously indifferent to its’ secrets?
We enter it with our hopes and faith that
the unseen will be, at least, friendly, and at most, the home so long lost, so
long sought with aching heart and fierce devotion.
These monarchs of the continuous
universe, Noble Memory, Blessed Sleep, Reverend Death, rule our every passing
moment from a place lost to our control, thereby beyond our rational
analyses. And so we are filled
with fear. Driven by fear,
but also with what Kipling called “insatiable curiosity”, we try to
comprehend these Rulers from the place of our intellect, where we think
we’ve learned so much about their nature and meaning. Memory, sleep and death are the
subjects of every possible expression of our questing nature. Yet in our heart, we sense most deeply
that the expressions fall short, they leave something out, forget the essential
quality that would open the heart and heal the aching, longing and sorrow of
our soul.
What we know about memory, sleep and
death could be seen as only so much illusion, in spite of the innumerable books
written by worthy scholars and wonderful artists.
For some reason, we think that what we
hold in our heads and our hands and call by the name of fact about the nature
of the world makes us believe that we are coming to some understanding of our
own questions. But all the
information we have on the Rulers of the continuous universe does not begin to
unravel the questions of their true nature, of what is lost between speaking
the explanation and the actual experience. How do we know what memory is, or where it comes from? By neurobiology? Or by psychiatry, or psychology?
With all the scientific research and the
mapping of the interior of the brain, why can we not say what
‘memory’ is? Is it
because we cannot find its origin?
Where do memories come from?
Out there? Or is it just
from experience and education?
Maybe it’s inside?
From the magical feats of dendrites and synapses? How IS memory related to death? Of all the things we memorize, how is
it that they get lost, sometimes in a moment, or often over time? Are they gone forever when we die? Isn’t it interesting that
memories can be trained to perform better, or be neglected and become
lost? Is memory an organ of
perception, like a sense? Do we
not sometimes ‘perceive’ memories, and other times are literally
assaulted by them? What is it
about memory that makes hope so tenacious, so unbearably bittersweet, and so
cruelly insistent? Memory as image
can be as ferocious as violence, or as playful as a butterfly, (or, as children
often say, a “flutter by”).
I know for me memory’s attempts to
be playful are very frustrating. Like when I’m trying to remember
something, and instead of the little tidbit of information I need forming
itself properly in my head, available to be shared with others, or incorporated
into whatever I’m thinking about, it literally goes off and sits on the
end of my tongue, teasing me by its proximity to my brain, but useless and
annoying by its inappropriate landing in the wrong part of my anatomy!
Memory can be capricious, but also somber
and relentless. What about the
things we would dearly love to forget, but cannot. They will not leave, and the more we wish for their demise
the more tenaciously they cling to us, like symbiotic vermin, desperately
sucking life out of us so that they may live. Is part of the secret of memory lost in the difficulty of
knowing how or when to forget? And
if we could control the inner images to the extent of developing a truly
selective memory, would that change the nature of our humanity? Could we learn to express the image of
life in such a way, that we could forget what we think we know about death, and
remember that death has been overcome for 2000 years?
Our entire life is a process of
developing this memory that becomes the creation of our being in the world (and
the creation of the being of the world.)
Are we what we remember, and what is remembered about us? Are those who have died present just
because we hold them in memory? Or
is it them, the very one themselves, that comes to touch us, and move us to be
attentive?
Our intelligence was quantified early on
by what we could remember. Now it
is how well we follow our own memory in the processes of understanding the
things of the world. (The
educational tenet is not now to “learn by heart” through rote
memorization, but to “learn to think” through analyses and
abstraction. Maybe we are not
seeing the entry of new “kinds” of children into the world, as
being claimed by educators, but are creating a new version of ourselves through
the image of who we are, which we hold before the child is born, and later give
to children as parents and in school.)
Could the phenomenon we think of as a lack of conscience be the complete
loss of imagination, the inability not only to make images, but also to
perceive the activity in the imaginal?
When “image” (meaning an activity) becomes
“picture” (or that which is static, contrived, interpreted,
simulated) then the inner activity involved in the making stagnates, becomes
sclerotic and empty. Sophia is
exiled. Any simulated picture can
be offered, and any will be accepted without question or concern for the
implications. We lose discernment.
Speaking of the culture “in
general”, (which is odd, because you cannot find the individuals that
make up the “general culture”…) we are changing as human
beings by the way we measure intelligence, as we move from containers of
information and memories of personal experience, to processors of amounts of
information, with shared memories of media given - simulated experience. If we change – or evolve –
to another level of living being, would we not therefore also experience death
differently, just as we are now experiencing life as different? By reinventing the needs of
intelligence and thinking through the new devices that hold information for us,
we are now in the throws of re-imagining what it is to be human, to educate, to
develop capacities of moral strength and character. As the need to educate memory changes, we are called on to
understand other aspects of our spiritual nature in the unfolding of the young
and the intellect of the student.
As our relationship to our own memory changes through technology, we are
caught unprepared. We are not asking the right question; the very questions
that would lead us to depth of understanding our own nature in relation to our
own inventions.
On the old model of the human being that
we have evolved under for lo these many millennium, our memory gave us the
possibility to become more human, better citizens, morally upright and pillars
of the community. We taught
children to know right from wrong, and they memorized the lessons, learning
from the lives and deaths of those around them, and thus became better
citizens. Even as recently as when
I was a child, we received ‘citizenship’ grades, and this was
probably the single most important grade one received, at least where I went to
school. It indicated if one were
being a good person or not. It was
the existential grade, on which one’s parents determined if they were
doing their job as parents, and in a sense, it graded them as much as it did
their child, for it pointed out that they were passing on the laws and customs
of acceptable behavior, from their memory of how to interact with others to
mine. My son, born in 1975, in the
midst of the ‘self-esteem’ debacle, has never received a
‘citizenship’ grade.
“Citizenship” grades have changed into
“self-esteem” training, for which no “grade” is given,
and no behavior is challenged. There can be no memory to make or call upon in
self-esteem training, for there is no model of behavior except one’s own,
and therefore no establishment of an aspect of who I am to be, molded and
supported by my community, and the memory carried by that community.
In North America, children have no memory
of where their community came from, what their parents are judged by, what the
history of their own family is, and consequently do not remember what to do to
become human. They rarely
participate in the deaths of extended family, and so see actual death only as
horror, not as part of life. On
the other hand, they see hundreds of deaths on TV by the time they are five
years old and have a kind of off hand dismissal of death, because it is usually
followed by a hemorrhoid treatment commercial or dancing cleaning
products.
Stories are given by the technology that
is later going to claim to hold all the history of the world for them, so they
do not have to memorize that, either, much less hear the telling of it, for the
only real history is that which will be seen in predigested, pre-selected,
choreographed memories. This will
tell our children who they are and what is expected of them. We must consider carefully what it is
that they are learning about who we are, who they are, and what the world is
about. If one watches movies,
television, and the news, what children are memorizing about themselves and the
world is right before our eyes, every day, and every minute.
Steeped in images of unimaginable
violence, or, perhaps, even worse, nonsensical sentimentality, Death has a
whole new face for children. Perhaps this is true for each generation, but I
think especially now, because children do not have memories, but are now given
‘simulated’ memory. (It is not just children who are not allowed
‘natural’ memory, due to experiences coming from TV. and movies,
rather than life and hearing stories; everyone who lives in the culture totally
engulfed by it becomes filled with simulated memories.)
We see that memory is no longer what is
taught in school, or told in story, or experienced in life with other
people. If memory is part of the
quality that makes it possible for us to ‘make’ inner images, and
we do not exercise the capacity for memory, are the inner images affected? Moreover, are they even possible? Do we dream differently? Or even more troublesome, do we sleep
differently? (And how does this affect the way we die, and how we feel about
those who have died before us? We
lose not only their memory, [N.B.
not our memories of them, but their memory] but are unable to make the
image that is their being, or be receptive to their memory [N.B. not our memory
of them…them as memory] coming toward us.)
People who go to sleep with headphones on
listening to tapes of heavy metal music or those who go to sleep in front of
the television, are definitely sleeping differently, dreaming differently,
perhaps dying differently.
But even if one does not own TV,
stereo’s, etc., sleep is changed now, and the work of the body and soul
and spirit during sleep may indeed be impaired by the demands on the body in
the waking world. If sleep is
different, so must it have an effect on death, and dying must be something
other than it was. All from
changing the nature of memory?
There is something of crucial importance
here that must be attended to.
So, what else about memory?
Memory is the demon of the drug addicted,
the alcoholic, the shaper of the illnesses of the soul. It is also the very soul of the
virulent diseases of Alzheimer's and AIDS, strokes and schizophrenia. It is of interest to note that these
diseases rob one of the ability to sleep; and what sleep is caught, is flat and
hard, or plagued with nightmares, or of necessity, drugged. Diseases of memory are interesting
today, as they seem to point to what we are annihilating on the one hand and
trying to retain artificially on the other. If we can make all memories the same, say, electronically,
or via genetic engineering of body memory through gene manipulation, then we
will no longer have individuality, and everything should be easier to
control. However, then if people
get illnesses that take all memory away, we have to remember for them, and we
can remember them any way we like.
Or even more interesting, if people are given body memories, or genes
that prevent illnesses from happening, will the body lose its own wisdom to
hold the spiritual nature of the individuality who is incarnating? What is healed, and what is made weaker
by our lack of compassion for and understanding of the wisdom of memory? If the body’s memory, carried in
the DNA can now be manipulated, as well as the memory given by simulated,
electronic experiences, every aspect of life can become predicated on
prediction, prevention and programming.
Memory is a ruler of the continuous
universe. It is the keeper of the
key to the spiritual and soul qualities that access the depth of meaning
required to step into the continuous universe, and out of the literal, and
consequently, to know the meaning of the death of the body.
If we are comprised of the qualities of
our activities that are remembered, and the qualities of our memories that we
retain, then our memory becomes part of the forces of the cosmos, and the
pavement on which we tread on our journey to other realms. In addition, it is the gateway through
which we are met, by those who have gone before us.
My memory is not celebrated for its
resemblance to a steel trap. It
holds onto little of what it encounters in the literal world. I can’t tell you what Plato said
in the “Republic”, or in which level of hell Dante placed the
lawyers. No, mine is not a memory
of the old form of the evidence of the educated that would hold all information
and in its correct sequence.
Science leaves me in kindergarten when
offering its explanation of how things work. But give me a good phenomenological scientist, who can
describe the dance of the atoms, the harmonies of the spheres and the love of
the stomach for the intestines, and I understand deeply physics and astronomy
and physiology. I console my seemingly
frail memory that it is the memory of the future, for though it helped me limp
through school in the past, then I was constantly berating it for being flabby
and irresponsible. Now, however, I
believe it is coming into it’s own as a memory of the qualities of the
things of the world. My frail
little memory begins to emerge as being of significant value for the
future.
In fact, my memory is what is classically known as
“natural” memory.
Natural memory is defined as “being that which is engrafted in our
minds, born simultaneously with thought.” What is weak in me is the “artificial” memory
that can be “strengthened or confirmed by training,” (p. 12, 13; The
Anatomy of Memory, James McConkey) and was so highly regarded from ancient
times till about the dawn of the previous decade. This is what I have been calling
“re-memory”. The
development of “artificial” memory has been the cornerstone of
education since the Greeks. It is
also what we are losing to the technology of stored memory, or memory that is
supposed to remember for us. It is
interesting that this was called “artificial” by the unknown
classical author (thought to be by Cicero, but not) in 82 BC of Ad Herennium, the undisputed
textbook of the classic art of memory, considered an essential element in the
Cardinal Virtue of Prudence. Most
of the book covers the techniques required to develop “artificial
memory”, and was the main sourcebook throughout the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance in teaching the art of memory. Until psychology came along and invented the unconscious,
“natural and artificial memory” contained the images of the stories
of humanity, the group soul, the Sophianic.
There is in fact a story of the Invention
of the Art of Memory.
“At a banquet given by a nobleman
of Thessaly named Scopas, the poet Simonides of Deos chanted a lyric poem in
honor of his host but included a passage in praise of Castor and Pollux. Scopas meanly told the poet that he
would only pay him half the sum agreed upon for the panegyric and that he must
obtain the balance from the twin gods to whom he had devoted half the
poem. A little later, a message
was brought in to Simonides that two young men were waiting outside who wished
to see him. He rose from the
banquet and went out but could find no one. During his absence the roof of the banqueting hall fell in,
crushing Scopas and all the guests to death beneath the ruins; the corpses were
so mangled that the relatives who came to take them away for burial were unable
to identify them. But Simonides
remembered the places at which they had been sitting at the table and was
therefore able to indicate to the relatives, which were their dead. The invisible callers, Castor and
Pollux, had handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing Simonides
away from the banquet just before the crash. And this experience suggested to the poet the principle of
the art of memory of which he is said to have been the inventor. Noting that it was through his memory
of the places at which the guests had been sitting that he had been able to
identify the bodies, he realized that orderly arrangement is essential for good
memory.” (Ibid. p. 10).
He thus outlined the principle of
organizing everything to remember and putting it in appropriate rooms in the imagined
house of the mind.
As a formula for developing individual
memory – this also was significant in the formation of individuality, and
established the kind of consciousness that was able to develop the scientific
method. This worked well as long
as people could still MAKE images.
This ability to make images became lost. For evidence of this loss, we could
look at how memory moved through time.
Through the observation of the Czech writer Milan Kundera, who says in The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “In times when history moved slowly,
events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted
backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk
clip. A historical event, though
soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer the backdrop, it is now the
‘adventure’ itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the
commonly accepted banality of private life.” (p. 8)
Memory become history as
entertainment. Entertainment
becomes simulated memory, so no image is from the context of personal,
familial, or within the realm of responsibility.
We learn slowly, and history has not
proved to be an especially good teacher, for we are still, if not increasingly,
engaged in wars of all sorts, cheating and greed - power and abuse. History as the adventure itself, seems
to be contributing to the general decline of civilization. Indeed, we have still not learned many
significant lessons taught by historical events.
The irony is that now memory truly is
“artificial”, as in FAKE, and the technology that has replaced the
need for training in the faculty of memory is obliterating the
“natural” memory as well.
We do not now remember history – now we wait for the next exciting
installment, like Kundera says, and judge it against what happened before,
mostly based on it’s “thrill quotient”, not its portrayal of
actual events or the unfolding of the lives of individuals.
Paradoxically, very little now qualifies
as worthy of our own, personal re-memory, and this makes necessary more and
more questions of, for and about death.
Psychologically, we may count the personal experiences that accumulate
to make up our ability to maneuver in the world, called euphemistically
“life experiences”.
But then memory is only personal, mine as opposed to everyone’s,
it is contained in my head, and offers nothing to the creation of the world, is
not responsible for the destruction or loss of the world, the other, the
dead. We think these memories are
irrelevant in the whole scheme of things, for they, in their subjective
isolation, can not touch and be touched by anyone else. And we do not realize that they are
never the absolute actual event, like the replaying of a video. All memory is colored and clothed in
the passing of time and the enfolding of experience. Here memory is also Sophia. Alone. Imprisoned in the definition of conceptual
thinking. Lost from the true work
of weaving the world of the natural and the spiritual into the mantle of our
living and dying.
We hold these memories as the interest
against the principle, which we deposit at our death against the sum of the
life we have just led.
Everything else, all the “important”,
“historical” stuff, is stored, in units of bytes, digitally
retrievable, and no longer of value except as commodities.
The commodification of the larger,
cultural memory, not just of events, but also of the significance of those
events, is worthy of our attention in this re-imagination of death.
The control of information as memory
seems like a small thing. But we
are just beginning to realize the enormous potential for power such control
will wield. As the language
evolves to describe technology, rather than simultaneously inventing new words
to describe the activity in the technology, we (or is it “they”)
pre-empt old words that were once used to describe human activity. Like the word memory. It is being held captive by the
computer, and has, in it’s captivity, transformed into something one can
buy and sell, increase or be shamefully short of, be too full, or be lost in a
‘crash’. And what
happens in the imagination that memory once played and danced with, when the
very image of ‘memory’ is but a component of a machine…a
machine that has a faster, better, more reliable memory than the original
memory device? Does memory,
atrophied and gasping for life in the human, transform into imagination in its
prison cell? (The computer) Does it play with images in the
integrated circuitry, pouring out wondrous new ideas and delighting us with
poetry, song and inventive ideas to save the frogs? Does it tickle our funny bone by remembering a joke it heard
last month at dinner?
Our very language of the nature of memory
is causing us to be too “full”, like our computer programs, to
remember, and therefore having to rely on this ‘back-up’ instrument
to remember for us. Which believe
me, I do assiduously.
But what does this do to our memory of the
future? The loss of the past in
embodied memory, the holding of it in linear integrated digital circuitry will
change the past irrevocably, and therefore the future, as well as the past,
could be forgotten.
(And so could we lose what Christ gained
for us – the ability to overcome death?)
Memory creates, nurtures and sustains
imagination, imagination as the ability to make living images. If we cannot make images, the dead can
not perceive us, and we in turn will not be able to perceive the living when we
die, or be perceived by anyone else.
Our connection with the spiritual world is weakened – or cut off
– and this is from both directions.
(Instead of being overcome, could Death
be worse than it once was thought to be?)
The images that we make, not the pictures
that we remember, the images we make, are the activity of the spiritual nature
of our being that can be given to the spiritual world. Even the images that are the activity
of our dreams tell us that to translate the image into the story of a dream
causes us to lose the essential quality of the dream itself. It’s always a little unsatisfying
to tell a dream, because we lose the dream-ness of it…it’s own
inner logic is gone by being told.
The words of the everyday are not sufficient to the real memory of the
dream; they are only good for the re-memory of the dream. In imagination, we can think in images
we make, with practice and meditation.
In speaking through thought, we explain pictures, or sequences of ideas,
and spare the other the trouble of making their own image. Thinking is only available to the
spiritual world, to the dead, to the incorporeal citizens of the continuous
universe if the thinking is what Rudolf Steiner calls “living”
thinking, thinking in images that one makes from memory. Not re-membered pictures, but images
made anew with each thought.
Each thought can be a new making of image. Even a story told a thousand times can be told as if for the
first time, every time it is told, if the images are made from the heart, not
recounted from the head.
SLEEP:
While memory is the foundation of
imagination, sleep creates nurtures and sustains the possibility of
inspiration, inspiration as the ability to exhale the spiritual forces that
make up our being into the spiritual realm, and inhale those same forces on
awaking. While I could speak with
memory for hours, and we could exchange views and images, ideas and thoughts on
all manners of subjects, sleep wouldn’t have much to do with me. Consequently, I do not have as
extensive a phenomenology of sleep.
Except where sleep had been poked and prodded by science since 1953,
with the discovery of REM sleep and the creation of sleep as a research field,
it is a very uncooperative conversation partner. Sleep insisted I enter her house, she would not come to
mine, so – of course- I slept through most of this part of the research,
and except for a few dream images, which were very inspiring, for the most part
I had to leave my friend memory behind.
Memory did not seem to mind, for the house of sleep does not seem to be
a place ordinary memory enters often or willingly. Memory has to be coaxed into the house of sleep, and new
capacities have to be developed to bring him there, and bring him out again.
Hamlet said…
“…To die, to sleep – no
more – and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural
shocks
That flesh is heir to! ‘Tis a
consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep –
To sleep – perchance to
dream…” (Hamlet,
Act III, Scene I)
The sleep of all the nights of all the
world cannot give summons to the sleep of death, not identify itself with death
except death ask it to. For how we
call on sleep is to bring the new day, and death but turns us out of day as we
know it. We do not call on sleep
to bring us death, though sometimes sleep does. It is of interest that we say, when we want to dispose of
unwanted or sick animals, that we “put them to sleep”, meaning we
kill them, without causing them pain or anxiety. So much of life, of those we love, we “put to sleep”
by killing the memory, the image that is made in their particularity, according
to the individual soul. We
categorize or idealize others or events into abstract compartments. We turn away, and drown perhaps in our
own sorrow, or our own interest, or our own fear…and do not hear the
music of creation in the act of creating or the individuality of the other
– the particularity of the interrelationships of the natural world.
To kill, to murder the soul, to put to
sleep life as it enters creation, has been our legacy to Sophia for the past
few centuries, at least. Because
we sleep through memory. Because
we die in sleep, and wake as if we’ve never slept, as if we never died,
as if life has never died for us, or lived for us, or offered us the possibility
of memory.
We do not dream the creation of a new
heaven or a new earth.
Much research has been done on sleep,
which, as a field of study has created quite a body of work in the last half
century. In our current rush to save
time and create our use of it in the image of the computer’s virtual
reality, there is even research to try to disprove our actual need to sleep at
all. In Audrey McAllen’s
book titled Sleep, she says “it (sleep) is viewed as having been
programmed into us, and can therefore be overcome.” (P., 1) But the poets know that behind the materialistic science, is
a consciousness in sleep that hides the spiritual forces at work in the body
and the life of the earth, and communes with the dead and the spiritual
realms.
The reason for so much research in
relation to sleep is that the sleep we experience is, like I said, for the most
part forgotten. We do not
seem to relate to anything in the unconscious state of sleep, except dreams and
perhaps the difficulty of going to sleep or, if we are paying attention, the
mood we are in on awakening. But
even these subtle indicators that there is more going on around the activity of
sleep are usually not even noticed as the day takes over and demands our full
attention. With no relationship to
sleep, except whether one has or has not slept, we do not recognize the
indications sleep gives us of death, or the spiritual activity of sleep that
unites us with the dead and the angels.
Because we think of death as the end, a
loss, the final failure to maintain life, we ignore sleep, or put up with it as
a necessity that nothing can be done about. Or, we research what’s going
on in sleep, to domesticate and train the time lost to sleeping. We lose the memory of sleep, just
as we have lost the memory of death.
Not the re-memory, the Memory.
The memory of Death is in what Michael
Lipson means when he says, “we are already in each other”. We know this when a loved one dies and
we cannot fill the cut out shape of their being that was once so integral to
our being. The gaping hole reminds
us not only who they were, but also who we are; made in the image the other had
of us. Their memory of us helps us
be more whole.
So, I offer here a memory. Of sleep. Of memory itself. Maybe of Death.
Novalis says: “When the spirit perishes, it becomes human. When the human perishes, it becomes
spirit. Death frees the spirit,
death frees the human.” (Ibid.p.75 #269)
And
“Dissolution of the differences
between life and death. Annihilation
of death.” (#248)
These rulers of the continuous universe
are not benign, they do not sit about passively happening whether we like it or
not. They, like Sophia, are
awaiting our wakening into the activity they make possible for and between us
and the spiritual worlds we fail to recognize, except as an idea. They are keeping the path open, we must
choose to hazard it’s difficulties.
It is hard and painful work, to become memory, to awaken to sleep, to
live into death. This is where
Sophia stands, waiting to be joined by human beings. And I (personally) feel it is where Christ entered, and
continues to enter, to retrieve the memory of Sophia, to redeem us from our
sleeping consciousness, and to save each of us, and the whole of the earth,
from Death.