The Magician Awakes
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“Aye,
harpoons…stuck in him like so many corkscrews. Aye, his spout is big,
like Nantucket wheat. Aye, by death and devils, the white whale is
Moby-Dick, if Moby-Dick you see! It was Moby-Dick that dismantled me,
that reaped off my leg like a mower, a blade of grass and left me with
this dead stump I stand on…The prophecy was that I should be
dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will
dismember my dismemberer.” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick)
Scattered among my files, there are notes for a work called The Magician Awakes. Some
notes I’ve already included in articles. Here is one passage I’ve never
published. It’s narrated by a character who is wandering through a
labyrinth:
“I’ve
read everything, and I remember what I’ve read. I’m one of those people
who eats books and authors. I’ve read philosophy and mysticism,
physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry, mathematics, literature,
poetry, history, and so on. And this was all by age 30.”
“After
that, I found myself reading only one book, Moby Dick. Now I read it
over and over, and the ideas and feelings swell up ever larger.”
“The
whale, Ahab, Ishmael, the sea, the minor characters, they keep rising
and swelling and increasing. Last year, they were at Saturn and Jupiter
size; next year they’ll be consuming a quadrant of the Milky Way; then
the whole galaxy; and finally, they’ll be out in indefinable space.”
“I
had a dream about God. He, too, was reading Moby Dick over and over,
and when I arrived in Heaven, he brought me to his table for a meal, and
we sat down. He said, ‘I keep discovering new scenes I’d
forgotten. Most people can’t understand I’m always exploring. After all,
if I’m infinite, how could I be a finished product? I gave up reading
the philosophers a long time ago. You need the sense of the poetic to GO
FARTHER. No one seems to realize I didn’t make humans limited
creatures. I gave them all doorways into the infinite, without me
knowing the whole or even half of what that was’.”
“Where is Melville now?”
“’I gave him a cottage down the road, but he’s been gone from there for some time’.”
“You made the whales. You should know a great deal about them.”
“’I
didn’t make Melville’s white whale. That’s his domain, and even he
didn’t understand everything about it. How could he? You don’t explore
with full knowledge of the map. By the way…look at the Earth. When the
intrepid explorers die and rise above the planet, do you think they want
to go back and incarnate again? Unlikely in most cases. Because the
people in charge down there are obsessed with organizing and controlling
the scene in all aspects. THAT means, little by little, Earth is
drained of the most adventurous types. Do you see? An unintended
consequence. A serious one’.”
“When you say ‘intrepid explorers’, you’re talking about imagination?”
“’How
else are you going to navigate the uncreated spaces? In Moby Dick, it
seems at first no one has it, but as you read the book over and over, it
leaks out to you. Melville is the one with imagination. The course of
the whale and Ahab and even Ishmael is set, but something else is
there. An X factor. It’s the book above the book. It’s as if Melville
wrote TWO. He wanted to. He wanted the inevitable tragedy. But something
else in him couldn’t abide only that. It was his poetic sense. It
shines through’.”
“Remember
this Melville observation? ‘There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is
a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that
can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them
again and become invisible in the sunny spaces’.”
“’That
eagle-soul. Did I make it that way? Yes and no. I gave it an abundance
of courage, but the soul decided he could range and roam in those
extreme places. It’s freedom. Without it I would have created nothing
more than a puppet show. People start out believing in a closed
system. They think everything they want they can find inside that
system. They can make magic from the inside. But they can’t. They never
have. They have to get OUTSIDE, and then they have the
ability. Sometimes what starts out as freedom turns into a
system. Because they want to organize the parts. They’re rabid finishers
and polishers. So then they’re INSIDE again. I’ve been writing a poem
for some time. It’s about 100,000 pages now. I’m just getting warmed
up. If you, the soul, were a physical form, which you’re not, MAGIC
would live in the muscles and ligaments and arteries and nerves and
heart and spleen and brain and liver and fingers and toes and ears and
of course the eyes---it can’t be contained. It’s everything that exists
outside systems. If my image is put inside a system, drop it off at the
side of the road. It’s lost any value it might once have had. Infinite
means INFINITE. I’m not messing around. The obsession with the little
stuff is an affectation. That doesn’t mean you go with vague dead-leaf
generalities. You throw every single thing you can think of into the
mix. Cars, old tires, trinkets, gold shoes, bullets, road signs,
rivers…I like to assume every person is writing an endless poem, whether
he knows it or not, and there are plenty of bad ones, believe
me. That’s because people are hypnotized by empty ideas. But it doesn’t
matter. They’ll catch on sooner or later. Because again, INFINITE is
REAL. There, two birds on every branch. The first one is a piece of the
white picket fence and the white clouds and the horse and buggy moving
along on the familiar street in the middle of town, but that bird is
also one thing and creature in the mix of an endless poem that has lines
as long as you want to make them…old Walt Whitman knew that. Read one
of his eruptions. There are some truly terrible lines in there I would
have edited out, but they have to be there, because he’s working up a
head of steam, he’s moving toward a few immortal and unpredictable and
unfathomable words strung together, and when you read them you’re
stunned in your tracks, you can’t move for a few moments. I see you’ve
been wandering in a labyrinth for a long time. You’re trying to figure
out how to escape. This is a joke. There is no escape, which means there
is no exit. That place where you came in? It’s closed now. You’re in a
system, lad. Don’t fret. Just keep writing the poem. Look around
you. What’s there? Throw it all into the mix. The old socks and the
kitchen sink. And pretty soon you’ll be outside. Not by finding the
exit. By magic. Come back around in a year or so and see me. I do
readings now and then. We sit around and tell stories. There’s music. A
few pals of mine, Ravi, Bird, Bud, Sonny, Igor. Bust the system,
kiddo. That’s what it’s all about. The system in the mind. Just go the
other way. The long shot turns out to be the favorite every time. It’s
magic…’”
~~~
(Follow me on Gab at @jonrappoport)
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