Because this analysis ended up being so long, I’ve broken it up into two parts. Some of the ideas and arguments in this article will not be resolved until the next article.
If you haven’t watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, I would recommend doing so. Also, while this article and the next focus on the first two episodes, there are a few references to events in later episodes.
Introduction
Neon Genesis Evangelion has evaded any conclusive analysis due to its complexity, depth and ambivalence. However, given the proper framework through which to understand the show, the ideas Neon Genesis communicates to us become far clearer. Much of this framework can constructed from an in-depth analysis of just the first two episodes. With this analysis, we can understand Neon Genesis through a lens of psychodynamic symbolism and the thematic contexts of Violence, Pain, Fear and Individualism vs Collectivism.
We can use these to examine the characters, the narrative structure, and—quite possibly the key or cornerstone element—the setting of Neon Genesis in order to understand this impenetrable anime.
Gendo and Shinji
Neon Genesis is about many things. Primarily, it is about our relationships with other people, and how we perceive, construct or conceptualize those relationships inside our own minds—our subjective understanding of our personal relationships.
The nature of these relationships may be that of friendship, that of duty, that of transaction, that of recognition-seeking, that of sexual attraction and so forth, but they are all forces acting upon us—forces of the Id and Super-Ego (sexuality, survival and society) acting upon the Ego.
However, these relationships are not necessarily shown explicitly through the interactions of the characters, and the tensions between characters may often be manifested in the major physical conflicts of the show through Angels and Eva’s
The Ego in Neon Genesis Evangelion is represented with Shinji. Shinji as the protagonist is the character we are supposed to relate to the most, the character we are supposed to invest in the most, and the character whom the entire story revolves around. Shinji (as many protagonists are) is a stand-in for our conscious sense of self, and Neon Genesis shows the subjective psychodynamics of this conscious sense of self relating to the world around us.
It shows us our relationship to society (Shinji and Gendo). It shows us our relationship to those we become close to (Shinji and Misato). It shows us our relationship to those we become romantically attracted to (Shinji and Rei).
This last one is arguably the most important. This romantic attraction, as I will show later, is the most powerful of these varying psychic/subjective forces. Attraction, love, sexuality is what drives us forward, into the harsh reality around us, to confront the horrors of the world (the Angels).
Eva Unit 01 Tearing open Sachiel’s AT Field
Violence is a physical tool in Neon Genesis. We see this with the angel penetrating into the inner sanctums of Tokyo-3 and penetrating the body of Eva Unit 01, and Eva Unit 01 tearing down the Absolute Terror (AT) Field down around the Angel and tearing open the Angel’s body with its hands.
Violence is also a psychological tool. It is the violence necessary to confront reality, to penetrate into the world, and the violence necessary to become closer to someone, to slowly tear down the boundaries between you and the other. It is finally the violence of sex, the ultimate state of vulnerability between two people.
And, of course, violence in all its forms causes pain, physical and psychological. We are at all times vulnerable to violence, vulnerable to assaults from others, vulnerable to intimacy, and vulnerable to the pain caused by closeness to others. This is Schopenhauer’s Hedgehog Dilemma.
Neon Genesis is about the individual and the collective.
Evangelion, or Eva, Unit 01
We are all singular beings, and yet we are all pieces of something much larger. Very few humans could survive long without other humans, especially in the current organization of modern society. We are all individuals, but we are all individuals exist as one larger super-organism. As stated in Fullmetal Alchemist, “One is all, all is one.”
Humanity is made of many individuals, but humanity operates as a collective. Angels, by contrast, operate as individuals. Angels, you could say, operate as “hyper-individuals”. Though their motivations may align with the other angels’ motivations, each Angel operates autonomously, and are capable of waging one-man wars against the human collective.
Eva’s are the human response to the Angels’ hyper-individuality with their own hyper-individual constructions, but this necessarily requires the Eva’s to still be under the dominion of the broader collective, and the singular Eva’s would not be possible without this broader collective.
Finally, on a deeper examination, the setting of Neon Genesis reveals to us that we are not witnessing physical events when we watch Neon Genesis Evangelion, but we are actually witnessing internal, psychological or subjective events.
The Geofront and NERV Headquarters
Neon Genesis Evangelion is a symbolic representation of the inner struggles, machinations and battles of the psyche, as experienced by the conscious Ego—Shinji.
In Neon Genesis, we witness the psychic theater of the unconscious, and the ambivalent, complex nature of Neon Genesis is the same as the ambivalent, complex nature of our own psyche.
Episode 1
Sachiel in battle with Tokyo-3’s military
Neon Genesis begins with the Sachiel, the first Angel, swimming through a ruined city flooded by the ocean. Hundreds of military tanks are lined up in near-perfect order along a highway overlooking the ocean. We see the ocean erupt in the distance with the emergence of Sachiel.
Next, we are shown an abandoned city, abandoned, presumably, because everyone has been evacuated. One of the only the only people left in the city is Misato, who is driving through empty streets searching for Shinji to bring him back to NERV headquarters.
Shinji is standing at an inoperable pay phone, wondering if he’ll be able to find Misato. Shinji catches a brief glimpse—a hallucination, most likely—of Rei. The ground and surrounding buildings shake, and Rei is gone. Shinji turns to see helicopters retreating into the city, followed by the towering, impossibly large Sachiel, relentlessly invading Tokyo-3.
We briefly get our first look inside NERV and are introduced to Shinji’s father, Gendo Ikari.
Next, Misato saves Shinji from an explosion caused by the Angel, Shinji gets in the car with Misato, and she begins driving him to NERV headquarters.
The detonation of the N2 Mine
At the same time, the military has exhausted most of their resources in combating the Angel, with little to no effect, so they resort to a weapon referred to as an N2 mine. Although this N2 mine is roughly equivalent in power to a nuclear bomb, even the detonation of an N2 mine can do little more than briefly slow the progress of the Angel.
Because of this Ikari, the director of NERV, is given command over defeating the Angel. His intention is to use the Eva Unit 01 to combat the Angel.
Shinji and Misato, who were nearly killed by the detonation of the N2 mine, flip Misato’s car back over before continuing on to NERV headquarters.
The two of them reach NERV headquarters, descending in a car-elevator deep underground. Here, it is revealed that NERV headquarters belongs to Shinji’s father, Gendo. Though Shinji doesn’t know what his father does, he comments that his father’s work is important to the safety of the human race. As the two descend further, we learn about the tension between Shinji and his father, and their somewhat troubled past.
They go far enough underground to enter the Geofront. The Geofront is an underground city which is designed as both a fortress to defend against the Angels, and a fortress to house the Angel, Lillith. It is depicted as a vast cavern with a city hanging from the ceiling and a pyramid conjoined to an inverted pyramid, with everything cast in a golden, heavenly light.
Shinji meeting Eva Unit 01 for the first time
Far, far underground now, in the depths of the pyramid housing NERV headquarters, Shinji and Misato encounter Ritsuko, who finally takes Shinji and Misato to Eva Unit 01—the first time we are fully introduced to the Evangelions, which are referred to as mankind’s last hope.
Far above the Eva Unit 01, Shinji’s father, Gendo, calls down to Shinji from an observation deck overlooking Shinji, Misato, Ritsuko and the Eva. Gendo tells them they are moving out. They will use Unit 01 to combat Sachiel. Shinji, who has never seen or even knew about Unit 01 until this moment, will pilot the Eva to battle the Angel.
Misato and Ritsuko argue about this, until Misato finally concedes that Shinji must pilot the Eva to save humanity. Shinji refuses. He is hurt that he would be asked to do such a thing—hurt that he is being pressured to perform a task so terrifying and harrowing as this—and he is hurt that this is the only reason his father even wanted to see him. Gendo doesn’t seem to care about Shinji except as a tool to be used.
When Shinji insists that he will not pilot the Eva—when the tool refuses to perform its task—Gendo coldly ignores Shinji and calls for Rei, another Eva pilot, to be brought to Unit 01 so she can battle the Angel. Misato and Ritsuko turn their backs on Shinji, and Shinji, now essentially abandoned because of his refusal, thinks to himself “I knew it, I’m not needed after all.”
Rei, who is badly wounded, is wheeled in on a gurney to Unit 01. She struggles to get out of the gurney, obviously in much pain. As Sachiel continues its assault on the aboveground city over NERV headquarters, parts of the building begin to collapse.
Shinji and Rei
Unit 01, which has been completely motionless until now, reaches out to save Shinji from falling debris. Shinji holds the struggling, wounded Rei, and pulls back his hand to her blood on his fingers. Shinji, seeing this, repeats to himself, “I mustn’t run away”, and finally agrees to pilot the Eva.
After Shinji enters the cockpit and the Eva is prepared, Shinji and Unit 01 are sent aboveground to the surface of Tokyo-3 to confront the Angel. Here, episode 1 ends.
Breakdown of Episode 1
A lot of information has been packed into just this first episode, and this episode is evidence of the genius of Hideaki Anno’s brilliant writing. In just over 20 minutes, we’ve learned an enormous amount of information, and we can’t help but want to see what happens next. However, this means that there is a large volume of information that must be parsed apart in order to dissect this episode, but this concentration of information is reduced if we focus on our psychoanalytic and thematic framework of understanding Neon Genesis.
The opening shots, showing us the ruined, flooded city, the Angel, Sachiel, and the array of military tanks awaiting the Angel can be viewed as a number of things, but, overall, it is representative of our threat-response.
The Second Impact caused by the Angel Adam, which wiped out half the Earth’s population before the current events of Neon Genesis
The ruined city is our past. It is our past society which has been destroyed by the Second Impact, an event which humanity is still recovering from. It is symbolic of previous generations and eras of humanity which once flourished, but fell to the wayside because they could not adapt. They are also the past generations that we have built our new society upon. While the ancient, classical, medieval and pre-modern societies of our history are either extinct or no longer exist as they once did, they have provided the foundation by which we’ve built our modern society, just as Tokyo-3 has been built nearly on top of this former city.
Though our new society has adapted to the threats we once faced, we now must face a new threat—albeit a threat that has likely adapted from the threats of our past.
The ocean that has flooded the ruined city is representative of both the unknown, and the dangers which emerge from the unknown, and of the unconscious—large, deep bodies of water being symbolic of the murky, lightless depths of our own psyche.
Sachiel is a new threat to our society, as humanity has never had conflicts with Angels in this manner, but it is a threat that has evolved from the calamity of the Second Impact.
The military that has been sent to combat the Angel and the evacuated city of Tokyo-3 are both symbolic of our cognitive threat responses.
When humans perceive a threat, when they go into fight or flight mode, their empathy, their sociability and their rationality are all shut off, and they rely on their instincts or their learned defense mechanisms. When the Angel emerges from the ocean (either the external unknown or the internal unconscious), the civilians of Tokyo-3 evacuate (our prefrontal conscious minds evacuating) and the military is mobilized to combat the threat (our survival instincts and our defense mechanisms).
However, our conventional threat-response mechanisms are incapable of responding to this novel threat (conventional weapons, even our most powerful conventional weapons, doing nothing to combat the Angel).
Because of this, humanity must adapt, but how can we adapt to this?
To defeat a monster, one become a monster.
Misato saving Shinji
Shinji is brought to NERV (German for “nerve”) by Misato. While it has been argued by some that Rei is Shinji’s Anima—a Jungian term describing the feminine aspect of the male psyche, and a psycho-spiritual guide of the Unconscious—Misato is at the very least another aspect or manifestation of Shinji’s Anima. Misato as a character at the very least functions as Jiminy Cricket functioned in Pinocchio—as our moral compass. Shown in Shinji’s relationship with Misato, our relationship to our own moral compasses is not an easy one. There are conflicts, misunderstandings and personality clashes between us and the voice telling us who we should be.
Ritsuko (left), Misato (right) and Shinji (center)
We then meet Ritsuko, who is the scientific, logical and introverted foil to the intuitive, emotional and extroverted Misato. Misato’s character here deepens in contrast to Ritsuko, and the two can be seen as representative of the left-brain/right-brain lateralization of the brain. Nonetheless, the two of them can both be seen as different manifestations or incarnations of Shinji’s Anima, and the act in conjunction as Shinji’s moral compass.
Recipient of the 1995 “Dad of the Year” Award
The two guide Shinji deeper and deeper into NERV headquarters. NERV HQ is highly symbolic of the brain and the psyche (Nerv being German for “nerve”, and the underground architecture being symbolic of the underground architecture of the brain).
Shinji is tasked by his father Gendo to pilot the Evangelion to defeat the Angel.
Shinji is the Ego—the conscious perceiver.
Gendo is the Super-Ego—society, symbolized by God the Father (recall Gendo speaking to Shinji from on high).
The Evangelion is the monster we must become. Eva Unit 01 is, in essence, a giant suit of biomechanical armor (defense-mechanism) and a living weapon (a monster).
Unit 01 “Berserk Mode”
Shinji—as everyone is—has been tasked by society to confront the threat that society is faced with. The new generations of humanity must step forward to confront the problems that the older generations of society could not overcome, and possibly the problems the older generations have caused.
The Evangelion is the suit of armor we must all wear as we confront the world and its horrors. It’s the brave face we must wear, the armor of conviction, duty and love. The Evangelion is the person we must become in order to save society.
What is important to note here is that Shinji did not pilot the Eva until he met Rei. He refused to obey his father. He refused to obey Ritsuko. He refused to obey Misato. But he willingly volunteered to pilot the Eva when he met Rei.
This is Rei, and this image is impossible to explain without spoilers. Just watch the show.
Shinji here retains his individuality by conforming to society’s standards and needs, but only because he aligns his own values and desires with society’s. By helping society attain their goals, Shinji achieves his own goals.
If Rei is Shinji’s Anima (Rei meaning “spirit” or “ghost” in Japanese, among other things) then Shinji decides to pilot the Eva out of his own, deeper sense of morality and psychic individuality—which supersedes that of society’s. He is not acting out of duty to the collective—Shinji is acting out of duty to his own psyche: to his own spirit.
This concludes part 1 of the analysis. In part 2, I will discuss episode two, delve deeper into the characters, the Angel and Eva, and the setting, then bring the ideas together to reinforce my broader analysis of Neon Genesis.
Williem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in director Robert Eggers THE LIGHTHOUSE. Credit : A24 Pictures
Max and Robert Egger’s 2019 “The Lighthouse” is a surreal dark comedy horror film, reminiscent of “Eraserhead”, “Dead Man” and “The Wickerman”. Set in the late 1800’s on a small, isolated island, “The Lighthouse” portrays the slow descent into madness of Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) with a subtle, well-balanced mix of gritty realism and dream-like paranoia. The film is both disturbing and fascinating, bewildering audiences and critics with its near-schizophrenic plot, bizarre and bipolar dialogues and the stark, dream-like imagery presented in Ephraim’s growing insanity. However, despite the tangled web of absurdity, ambiguous symbolism and distorted reality, the film is highly intentional in its events and imagery, and “The Lighthouse” yields great depths of meaning once the layers of its web have been dissected.
The first problem with understanding this movie is the immense intentionality in every shot. Many scenes in “The Lighthouse” might take an hour or more to decompose, especially in relationship or in context to every other scene in the film. Despite this, I will try to summarize the movie as briefly as I can without losing important cohesiveness. The second problem is this problem of density and complexity. There’s honestly too much in this movie to discuss without writing at least another 2-3 analyses of the same length as this one. However, I intend to only follow one thread of analysis here (a long and at times winding thread, but one thread nonetheless).
“The Lighthouse” begins with the arrival of Ephraim and Tom to the mid-ocean lighthouse they will be manning for the next four weeks, the two of them entirely isolated from society for a month. Tom, the senior lighthouse-keeper, makes it clear to Ephraim, the new junior, that the duty of maintaining the actual lighthouse will solely be Tom’s responsibility, and the manual labor (shoveling coal for the foghorn, cleaning and maintaining the house, purifying the cistern and so forth) will be left entirely to Ephraim. Tom wavers between being intensely critical of Ephraim and tyrannically domineering; and being warm, friendly and jovial with Ephraim, usually during their dinner.
Shortly into the film, we witness the beginning of both characters’ insanity. Tom stands in front of the Lighthouse at night and removes all of his clothes, speaking to the lighthouse lamp affectionately. Then, Ephraim goes out to the ocean shore and sees wooden logs floating in the water, before seeing a dead body in the water. Ephraim walks into the water until he is fully submerged, then sees a mermaid or siren swimming in the water, screeching at him.
Over dinner, Tom tells Ephraim about his time as a ship captain and how he solved a mutiny by giving his sailors liquor until they made it to land. After telling Ephraim how his former junior-keeper went mad and died, Tom tells Ephraim he shouldn’t kill seagulls because its bad luck, and Tom later explains seabirds are the souls of dead sailors. In the next scene, Ephraim masturbates in the supply shed to a small, ivory trinket shaped like a mermaid he found in the beginning of the film.
Leading up to the midpoint of the film, we begin to see the intensification of a master-slave relationship between Tom and Ephraim, with Tom repeatedly calling Ephraim a dog and treating him as subhuman, juxtaposed with a much friendlier relationship between the two.
Ephraim goes to the top of the lighthouse one night, where he hears Tom muttering to himself. White slime drips from the metal grate above Ephraim, where Tom is standing, and Ephraim then sees a tentacle slithering across the metal-grate above. Ephraim eventually kills a seagull, which has been continually harassing him, and this action causes the wind to change direction. A storm rolls in just before the two are to be relieved of their duties at the end of their four-week stay. They find themselves marooned on the island, and either Tom’s or Ephraim’s sense of time begins to slip.
At the midpoint, Tom gives one of the greatest monologues in cinema-history as he curses Ephraim in the name of Neptune for a whole two minutes (as a side note, Willem Dafoe won at least 8 awards for his performance in this film, and was nominated for at least 17 others). As the two keepers remain stranded on the island, they steadily drink more and more alcohol, Ephraim continues furiously masturbating in his spare time and reality slips into a strange back-and-forth state of hallucination, paranoia and glimpses of sanity. Ephraim reveals that his name is actually Thomas Howard and that he let his former foreman, Ephraim Winslow, drown to death before taking his foreman’s name (you will probably forget this detail, but, nonetheless, try to remember it for the very end). Ephraim (or Tommy) tries to leave the island, but Tom chases him down with an axe and destroys the island’s only lifeboat. After calming down, Tom tells Ephraim that they’ve run out of alcohol, so the two begin drinking lamp oil (likely to be kerosene).
The storm, which has been raging for weeks, days or months now, finally ends after flooding the island and the lighthouse, all but ruining the home they’ve been staying in. Ephraim wakes up and finds Tom’s logbook and finds that Tom has been writing highly critical notes about Ephraim, even going so far as to say Ephraim should be fired from the job without being paid. Ephraim attacks Tom, and the two begin grappling, punching and strangling each other. After a hallucinatory moment where Ephraim sees Tom as his former foreman, the siren he’s been fantasizing about and masturbating to and as the sea-god Neptune himself, Ephraim nearly beats Tom to death.
Stopping himself before killing Tom, Ephraim stands over Tom and begins commanding Tom to bark like a dog. Ephraim then leads Tom out of the building on a leash to a hole they previously dug in front of the Lighthouse. Ephraim begins burying Tom, while Tom gives another masterful dialogue about “Protean forms”, “Promethean plunder”, “divine graces” and “the fiddler’s green”. Once Tom is presumably dead, Ephraim steals the key to the lighthouse, but, once inside the building, Tom returns with an axe and strikes Ephraim with it. Ephraim takes the axe, kills Tom and proceeds to the top of the lighthouse.
Ephraim reaches into the lighthouse lamp, presumably reaching into the lamp-flame, and begins laughing and screaming as the light engulfs him, then falls down the stairs to the bottom of the lighthouse. The movie ends with Ephraim laying naked across a rock formation alongside the ocean. Seagulls have shit on his body, and they are now devouring the innards of a still-living Ephraim. And that’s the movie.
There are a few other notable details to mention here. There is a foghorn on the island, which can be heard in the background throughout the movie, as well as a ticking clock which is likewise heard throughout the movie. There are a number of Christian and Greco-Roman allusions throughout the movie, as well as allusions to maritime folklore. In addition, there are quite a few phallic symbols throughout the movie, as well as a large (like, dinner-platter-sized) mermaid vagina. However, I probably won’t be able to get into all the various symbols and their potential meanings.
To begin understanding the movie’s deeper meanings, we need to understand the relationship between Ephraim and Tom, Ephraim and the mermaid, the lighthouse itself and Ephraim’s character. What we find here are the psychoanalytic dynamics of the Ego (Ephraim), the Super-Ego (Tom), the Id and the Anima (the mermaid/siren), and the Self or the Godhead (the lighthouse). Ephraim is the individual struggling against the forces of the Super-Ego/Authority/Society and the Id/Sexuality/Material-Satiation in order to find freedom and independence, as well as to reunite with the Self or the Godhead, symbolic of the power and freedom of true individuality. How do we pull such a lofty meaning from such a bizarre movie?
At its core, “The Lighthouse” is a mythological psychodrama. The movie is about an individual struggling with God the Father and the Sirens of instinct and sexuality. It is about an individual struggling with the oppressive demands and absurd behaviors of society, as well as struggling with one’s own nature—an individual struggling against these forces in order to maintain their individuality.
Ephraim is the Everyman, a term describing an ordinary, non-spectacular character whom the audience can sympathize with because of their mundanity. Ephraim, despite moments of fluctuating insanity, is mostly level-headed throughout the movie, and most of his actions or reactions seem sane compared to Tom’s. Ephraim is relatable—he’s the average person working a shitty job with an overbearing boss—and he reflects many of the ideas and hopes that most people share. Not only does Ephraim share these hopes with the audience, but Tom frequently reminds Ephraim of the mundanity of these hopes.
Ephraim remains pretty quiet throughout the first act of the movie, to which Tom tells him he’s not special in that regard. At one point, Ephraim tells Tom about his plans to build a house somewhere, so he can be free of others’ demands. Tom replies to this with, “Same old boring story, eh?” Midway through the third act, Ephraim begins telling Tom of his troubled past, and Tom tells him, “Yer guilty conscience is ever as tiresome-boring as any guilty conscience.” Then, near the end of the film, Tom begins telling Ephraim how unspectacular he is, saying things like:
“Come to this rock playin’ the tough. Ye make me laugh with yer false grum.”
“Ye pretended to mystery with yer false quietudes, but there ain’t no mystery.”
“Ye’re an open book. A picture, says I.”
“And by God and by Golly, you’ll do it smilin’, lad, ’cause you’ll like it. You’ll like ’cause I says you will!”
Not only is Ephraim subjected to inglorious manual labor by Tom throughout the movie; not only is Ephraim constantly criticized throughout the movie, culminating in Tom’s logbook full of Ephraim’s many supposed infractions; and not only is Ephraim led to disaster by many of Tom’s actions (such as the insistence on constantly getting drunk (which Ephraim is later blamed for)), but Ephraim is then told he isn’t even special in any way, and his existence as an individual is denigrated to a final extreme
Tom calls Ephraim, “A painted actress, screaming in the footlights, a bitch what wants to be coveted for nothin’ but the silver spoon what should have been yours.” Ephraim begins crying here, for which Tom mocks him. As this scene escalates, Tom begins calling Ephraim a dog over and over again.
“Thomas [Ephraim], ye’re a dog! A filthy dog! A dog!”
All Ephraim wants is a life free of servitude and domination. He tells Tom at one point, “I ain’t never intended to be no housewife or slave.” And yet, despite his dreams of freedom, he seeks that freedom through servitude, by taking a job to save up money. Anyone and everyone can sympathize with the desire to be free, the necessity of working for this freedom and the eventual boot on our necks that weighs heavier and heavier with each passing day. Perhaps there is nothing special with Ephraim, as he is just like everyone else, but it’s that normalcy that makes him such an empathetic individual, and why his role as the Everyman plays such an integral role in the meaning of this story.
Connecting this back to the Ego, all of us, in our immediate, conscious sense of reality, are confronted on the psychic level by the injunctions of the Super-Ego (society, law and order, Tom, God the Father) and the needs of the Id (survival, sexuality, the Siren, Mother Nature). Among the injunctions of the Ego, however, is that we accomplish this in a manner that will maintain our dignity and ensure our freedom and independence. Survival, security and self-dignity are three of the deepest desires of every human, and they all stack like weights on the shoulders of the Ego: that which consciously perceives and consciously decides.
There is a Camusian element of absurdity in this movie. Ephraim took the job as lighthouse keeper out of sheer arbitrariness. It paid well, that was it. Tom treats Ephraim like dogshit for no real reason, other than the fact he has the authority to, and then randomly starts treating him warmly at various moments.
At the end of the film, Ephraim is judged by Tom both verbally and in his logbook, and that judgement is almost entirely arbitrary. Some of the things Ephraim did were reprehensible. Some of the things Ephraim did weren’t. Some of the things Ephraim is judged for have no evidence to back them. Some of the things Ephraim were judged for were influenced by Tom himself. And that’s fucking life.
These events have parallels to one of the greatest works of absurdist art, Albert Camus’ novel, “The Stranger”, in which the protagonist’s mother dies one day, and he feels indifferent about this (death just happens, and why should we act one way or another about it). The protagonist’s neighbor is a volatile human, who careens between abuse and friendliness. A woman randomly begins having sex with the protagonist, then wants to know if he’ll marry her. He tells her it wouldn’t make any difference to him, and later tells her that marriage wasn’t special and he would have married any woman. In a half-awake daze, the protagonist is walking on the beach and runs into a man he knows nothing about, except that he has a feud with the protagonist’s friend, and so the protagonist kills this man for no real reason.
In the end, the protagonist is brought to court for killing this man and is found guilty essentially because he doesn’t feel one way or another about things. The primary evidence used against him is the fact he felt indifferent about his mother’s death. Things simply are the way they are, and the protagonist simply acts the way he acts out of his own detached volition. Because the protagonist does not wish to play the same games as everyone, carry the same sense of morality and imbue things with the same emotional weight as everyone else, he is sentenced to death, he is hated and he is, essentially, declared evil. The protagonist finally accepts his fate and accepts the absurdity of life.
“As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”
I would argue that meaningfulness—true meaningfulness—can be found in life, but there is indeed an enormous degree of arbitrariness to reality. We’re just born one day, in a certain period of history, which has its own set of rules and customs we’re told to abide by. We’re told to be a certain person, to act a certain way and to feel certain emotions for given events, and we’re told not to question any of it. We’re called a villain for questioning or going against the status quo. We’re judged for things that are out of our control, or that have no real impact on life. There are seemingly arbitrary standards and traditions by which we’re judged, and then there’s entirely novel arbitrariness by which we’re judged (things that aren’t even a part of broadly accepted standards), and then there’s false or fabricated claims about us by which we’re judged.
This is the weight foisted upon Ephraim, the weight of arbitrary judgement, and this is the weight foisted upon the Everyman, the proxy of the collective individual or collective Ego. This is the weight carried by everyone living within a society. This is the guilt and condemnation which degrades: the arbitrary tyranny: the absurd, laughable, comically bizarre oppression of culture. And yet, that’s just life. Camus’ protagonist in “The Stranger” becomes what Camus called an Absurd Hero. The Absurd Hero is the individual who does not shy away from or seek to destroy the absurd reality around them, but rather accepts the empty arbitrariness of life and continues to live their life as an individual: continues to affirm life as being good and worthy, without the dishonesty of dogma, ideology or personal delusion. Shy of eradicating life, or at least eradicating your own life, one must learn to live heroically amidst absurdity, to remain free, individualized and dignified amidst our bizarre world because there is no escape from the necessary evil that is society, which is the Super-Ego, which is Tom.
“What?”
Tom is the nagging, oppressive and at times nonsensical voice of the Super-Ego within Ephraim’s mind. Tom is the smiling, friendly face of society, which barks commands at us, and condemns our actions with spite and fury. Tom is society keeping Ephraim from achieving individuality by flooding his life with menial tasks, deprecating the value of the individual and forbidding Ephraim from witnessing the divine, and Tom is the same society which asks Ephraim to be as a friend: to love Tom, to forgive and overlook Tom’s flaws (of which, as we see at the end of the movie, Tom seems completely blind to).
Tom is what pushes Ephraim to insanity, and then denounces Ephraim as a madman. And yet, Tom is also what guides and protects Ephraim. There is an ambiguity in the nature of Tom and Ephraim’s relationship, just as there is an ambiguity in the nature of the Ego and Super-Ego’s relationship. The Super-Ego is typically represented in mythology as God the Father, or as some other variant of the masculine-authority archetype, which is simultaneously protective and wise, and oppressive and tyrannical. It is culture and society which protect us from the ravages of nature, and it is culture and society which tyrannize us with unyielding dictates. It is culture and society which rewards us meaningful work, and it is culture and society which enslave us with meaningless tasks. It is culture and society which gives us the wisdom of tradition, and it is culture and society which fascistically conforms individuals with this tradition.
In “The Lighthouse”, we quite clearly witness this paradoxical relationship between Ephraim and Tom, the Son and the Father, the Individual and the Society, the Ego and the Super-Ego. Tom teaches and guides Ephraim. He tells Ephraim when he’s doing something wrong or foolish. We see this in the concrete form when Ephraim carries the drum of oil up the lighthouse stairs rather than fill the small pail with oil, and we see this in the absurd form when Tom superstitiously warns Ephraim of the dangers of killing seabirds, which he later explains are the souls of dead sailors. There’s an ambiguity even in this superstitious tradition, since Ephraim’s act of killing the seagull that’s been harassing him is implicated as the cause of the storm which maroons them on the island.
Tom is also a part of what protects Ephraim from the terrors of nature. Tom cooks food to feed Ephraim, keeping him from starving; Tom gives orders to Ephraim to maintain the house they live in, thus protecting them from the cold and the rain; and Tom gives Ephraim advice that helps him stay alive and healthy. The island is a lone territory of protection from the chaos of the ocean (the suffocating depths, the dehydrating waters, the monsters of the sea), and the lighthouse itself is a mechanism of security: a light in the dark which keeps sailors from crashing their ships in the night.
Yet, Tom is also the highly critical or judgmental aspect of society and the oppressive or tyrannical aspect of society. Tom is constantly criticizing Ephraim, telling him how poorly he’s performing his tasks, even at one point asking Ephraim if he’s a “dullard”. Tom not only criticizes Ephraim’s work, but also criticizes Ephraim as a person, essentially calling him boringly normal and morally reprehensible throughout the film.
Beyond just the criticism, Tom is constantly giving Ephraim orders and loading him up with manual labor, while Tom’s sole responsibility (beyond making sure Ephraim is performing his tasks) is to man the lighthouse lamp, which is the most glorious and honorable of tasks. Tom gives Ephraim all the shit jobs, while Tom gets to perform the single easiest and most respectable job. Even then, Tom does his one job poorly and strangely. While manning the lighthouse lamp at night, Tom drinks and, presumably, masturbates (though we’re not shown Defoe’s jerk sessions as explicitly as we’re shown Pattinson’s). Tom orders Ephraim around and judges him for all his faults, while declaring himself to be the unfaultable and supreme authority of the island.
And, just to hammer it home, that’s life.
You can’t live with society, and you can’t live without it.
So where does Ephraim’s heroism come in this story? It comes in his insanity, as it does with every individual striving for freedom within society.
It comes, initially, from his repeated visions of the mermaid and her siren’s call. I’ve come to believe the mermaid is symbolic of three things.
The mermaid is Ephraim’s Id, represented as his sexual desires (the siren’s call). The mermaid is Ephraim’s Anima, which, in Jungian psychology, is the feminine, psychic force in men, which guides the Ego into the depths of the psyche. The mermaid is also Ephraim’s Shadow, or at least that which guides Ephraim to his Shadow. In Jungian terminology, the Shadow is the repressed part of the psyche, oftentimes synonymous with the Id, though not necessarily. The Shadow is the parts of our personality that we bury or repress, such as sexuality, aggression and even self-importance or self-love. Though the Shadow contains many negative aspects of our personality, those aspects of our personality might be what save us from the problems of our lives. Holding back the contents of the Shadow holds back the individual’s potential for actualization, or from becoming the free, independent, dignified individual we all hope we can become.
The mermaid in Ephraim’s hallucinations is repeatedly coupled with the image of Ephraim’s previous foreman, whom Ephraim effectively murdered by letting him drown. Throughout the movie, Ephraim is repressing three things: his sexuality, through nearly constant masturbation, his aggression, the same aggression that let Ephraim dispassionately watch his foreman die, and his desire to see the lighthouse lamp. The ultimate repression is the latter, repressing the desire to climb to the top of the lighthouse. The lighthouse is a phallic symbol of divine power, which is roughly parallel to Ephraim’s inner divine power, which is roughly akin to the Libido. The lighthouse can also be seen as a symbol of social power, as in the social hierarchies of society, or as moral authority, the light being the highest moral good.
Though I argue the lighthouse to be a symbol of psychological hierarchy, I would also argue the lighthouse is symbolic of all three of these at once, and that these representations may in fact be synonymous with each other at a certain level of analysis.
Ephraim represses this divine power, the psychic energy of the Libido, through masturbation, and, by repressing his aggression, represses his ability to overthrow Tom, the Super-Ego, which is also denying him his divine power. Throughout the movie, Ephraim masturbates to a small, ivory trinket carved in the shape of a mermaid. He’s not actually having sex, he’s not actually incorporating the repressed portions of his psyche; he’s fantasizing about the act and arbitrarily giving himself pleasure and release from the repressed Libido. He’s worshipping a false idol, he’s worshipping a fetish, and he’s silencing the siren’s call by sexual release, rather than actually uniting himself with those repressed forces (the divine or psychic marriage).
Ephraim is keeping himself from attaining his desires by shutting down and repressing those desires with short-term gratification. Ephraim wants to be a free human being, that is his ultimate desire. He wants to have power—not power over others, but power over himself: not the power of authority, but the power of individuality. However, rather than fulfilling that desire, Ephraim spends most of the movie bending to the will of Tom, the Super-Ego, or, in other words, bending to the will of society. At the end of the movie, Ephraim fulfills this desire by first destroying the mermaid trinket, the object of false sexual desire, and then by killing Tom, the judgmental and tyrannical force of society. It’s at this point that Ephraim finally ascends to the top of the lighthouse and finally witnesses the glory of the fire within the lighthouse lamp.
What is the lighthouse, and what is this divine power within its lamp? The lighthouse symbolizes a number of things. It is that which protects sailors from death as they sail through the horrors of the night. It is that which is most high upon Ephraim and Tom’s little rock, as well as that which shines most brightly. It is the most valued and coveted thing upon the island, and it is the most important thing on the island (it’s literally the only reason they’re there). The lighthouse is also a phallic symbol (among many), as previously mentioned, and an analog in some ways to Ephraim’s sexual frustrations. He is denied actual sexual release, and he is denied access to the top of the lighthouse.
I mentioned earlier that the lighthouse is the Self or the Godhead, which it is, to a certain degree. It is the source of divine power within ourselves. It is the axis mundi, source of all life-renewing energy: the world navel. As Joseph Campbell explains in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”:
“The torrent pours forth from an invisible source, the point of entry being the center of the symbolic circle of the universe, the Immovable Spot of the Buddha legend, around which the world may be said to revolve… The tree of life, i.e., the universe itself, grows from this point. It is rooted in the supporting darkness; the golden sun bird birches on its peak…Or the figure may be that of a cosmic mountain, with the city of gods, like a lotus of light, upon its summit…”
The lighthouse is the axis mundi, with the bright, burning spirit or entity of light at its top (sunbird/phoenix, city of gods, lotus of light, etc.), and it is from the lighthouse that Ephraim discovers reinvigorating, life-giving energies.
However, there is more to the lighthouse than simply this. What is interesting about this Axis Mundi or Godhead (this source of divine energy and the divine “Self”), is that it is manmade. The center of Ephraim and Tom’s universe is a manmade construction, and it is designed to keep sailors safe amidst the ocean’s turmoils. In some sense, this is showing that the new source of rebirth comes from the humanity’s creations, or their ability to create, alter the world around us and constantly innovate.
The new source of divine energy comes not from our ability to confront the natural world and its horrors, or from society and its oppression, but from our ability to create, a traditionally divine ability in itself, and through our creations, alter nature and alter society. Originally, creation was seen as the province gods, and then, in the West, the cosmos was seen as crafted by Jehovah or Yahweh, the Judeo-Christian God. Now, the divine power of creation is a human power.
Now, there’s another piece here, you may have already noticed it, and this is the Greek story of the Titan, Prometheus. There are many details and variations to the myth, but the central story is that Prometheus stole fire from the Greek gods and gave it to humans. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to rocks, and everyday his liver was eaten by an eagle. This almost directly parallels the ending of “The Lighthouse”, in which Ephraim “steals the fire” from the lighthouse lamp and is then seen lying naked across oceanside rocks, his insides being eaten by seagulls.
To add to this, one of the details of the broader Prometheus myth is that Prometheus is seen as a hero in a Greek Deluge or Flood myth. The son of Prometheus, Deucalion, builds a boat with the help of his Titan father, and Deucalion and his wife survive a massive flood brought on by the wrath of Zeus. Just before the climax of the story, there is a similar flood in “The Lighthouse”. During their night of drinking lamp oil/kerosene, the unending storm that has been assaulting Tom and Ephraim floods the lighthouse and ruins the interior.
There are two things to parse apart here: Prometheus and the Deluge, or the Flood.
Beginning with the Deluge, because it occurs first in “The Lighthouse”, the Great Flood represents the Flood of Chaos. In mythology, from Greek mythology to Judeo-Christian myth, the Flood is typically a punishment on humanity because of their hubris or their sins. Why is a society of sinners punished with a flood? Because they were too arrogant to prevent or prepare for a flood. The floodwaters represent the accumulation of Chaos, disorder or poor behavior, accumulating over time until the water level, or the Chaos level, is too high to stop.
If a society, a group of people or even a single individual do not take the time to deal with all the small annoyances of their lives, or all the small problems they know they should fix (internally or externally), those problems begin to accumulate until your life is flooded with them. Maybe there’s a leak in your roof, and you do nothing about it. Maybe there’s some damage to the electrical circuits in your house, and you put off having it repaired. Maybe you feel like you should buy home insurance, and you never do.
Maybe that leaky roof keeps getting worse: the wood rots and more water gets into your house every day. Maybe the state of the wiring in your home continues to deteriorate, and maybe it does so without your knowledge because you don’t think it will ever be a problem. Maybe one day, a huge storm rolls over the city you live in, and your roof does nothing to keep your house dry. The water comes into the attic, maybe it drenches your floors, maybe it interferes with the damaged electrical circuits, and maybe the day after the storm, you’re left with a water-damaged house, ruined furniture and no electricity, and there’s nothing you can do about it because you don’t have home insurance. That’s the Deluge.
It doesn’t have to actually involve water, it might involve parking tickets, or it might involve bill collectors, or it might involve that skin rash you’ve been hiding for three months, hoping it’ll magically go away, or it might involve the steady and growing supply of alcohol you’ve been consuming for ten years, or it might involve anything in your life that you know you should have fixed, prevented or prepared for, but didn’t.
In “The Lighthouse”, the Deluge begins with Ephraim killing the seagull, thus bringing on the near-unending storm as a result. Once Tom and Ephraim are thoroughly marooned on the island, they begin drinking copious amounts of alcohol, which results in them acting irrationally, damaging parts of the house and not performing their tasks as well as they should be. In the end, the storm floods the lighthouse and ruins the interior of the first floor, but the question here is:
Was it the storm’s fault? Or was it their fault?
The other part of this is the Promethean mytheme of stealing the fire. If Prometheus stole the fire of the Olympic gods, and Ephraim’s tragic character arc is a parallel to Prometheus’s, then what fire does Ephraim steal?
Here, I come back to the Self and Ephraim’s desire to unify with his inner, “divine” Self.
Ephraim has two core desires within “The Lighthouse”. One is to become a free, independent individual, and the other is to gain access to the lighthouse lamp. The desire to become free and independent aligns with the Jungian notion of Individuation or Actualization, in which an individual unifies the disparate portions of their psyche or personality (their Ego, their Super-Ego and their Id, for simplicity), in order to become the greatest version of themselves: in order to become a complete, unified individual. Once they become this complete, unified version of themselves, they are capable of actualizing their fullest potential. They become a person who is fully equipped to seek out and satisfy their deepest desires.
Another description of the Jungian process of Individuation and Actualization is unifying oneself with the deeper Self, the True Self. There are the superficial, extrinsic and animalistic parts of one’s personality: the Persona—the mask we wear for society—the Ego, the Super-Ego and the Id. Then there is the deeper part of one’s personality: The Self. The Self is our true identity, the unified whole of our fragmented personality, where our most pressing desires and profound personal capabilities reside.
It is this Self, this deeper source of individuality and personal power, which Ephraim is seeking throughout the movie, both as his desire for freedom and his desire for the lighthouse lamp.
In this sense, the Self, the divine spark of the Godhead, is what Ephraim is stealing and giving to humanity. The cure for a sickly, stagnant or corrupt society—symbolized by Tom—does not come from a collective—the cure for society isn’t society. The cure for society is the individual capable and willing to transgress society. Ephraim’s theft of the divine flame—of the inner Self—is punished in the form of laying naked across rocks and being eaten alive by seagulls, which is a reflection of the actual punishment such an accomplishment might engender. Much of the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche centered around the notion of the Ubermensch or the Superman, a hypothetical individual Nietzsche posited as not only being able to overcome the horrors of nature and the shackles of society, but also capable of overcoming themselves and their own flaws—an individual capable of personal greatness. However, this Superman is an individual who is misunderstood by broader society, sometimes envied, oftentimes villainized, and, in many cases, abused by society.
Ephraim achieves Individuation and Actualization, then returns this divine spark of freedom and personal power to society—symbolized by him falling back down the lighthouse, or falling back to Earth—but then is punished for the very same act. Ephraim steals the fire of the lighthouse, returns to society, and then is consumed by the souls of dead sailors. Not only is he consumed by the souls of the dead sailors, but he was never saved by living sailors—no one came to rescue him from his isolated island.
In this sense, Ephraim becomes like the lighthouse. He becomes the beacon of light keeping sailors across life’s ocean from death. However, twisting the meaning of Ephraim’s punishment a bit, he, like the lighthouse, becomes a stationary object, neglected by the very people he has saved. Not only is he neglected, but he is also abused by those he couldn’t save—the sailors who weren’t saved by the lighthouse. This could be guilt, these could be parasites of society, or these birds could be metaphoric critics eating Ephraim alive. The lighthouse is revered, and yet it is also an object used as a lifeless tool by the society that reveres it. Ephraim saves society, so to speak, by his actions, but then is left for dead and eaten alive by that society. No deed goes unpunished.
Now, despite the dissections of these symbols, the meaning of the story still hasn’t fully been articulated.
“The Lighthouse” is a movie about an individual attempting to maintain their individuality within the confines of the Id and the Super-Ego, but, moreover, attempting to transcend those confines in order to save that society. Ephraim and his story are offered up to us like a sacrificial lamb to feast upon. The lighthouse is a construction of individuals, and this construction is a gift to society, a gift which is both revered and abused. Similarly, we in our own lives can become individuated and actualized human beings, which in turn makes us beacons of light that save our society from death at sea. This in turn makes us something like sacrifices to the society we are trying to save.
Now, there’s an interesting dynamic to this all. The individual attempting to save society—the individual stealing the fire from the gods—must first transcend or overcome society in order to then save society. This exact structure can be found in the Christ myth.
Christ is born on Earth as a normal human. Christ led a revolutionary movement in his society, rebelling against the authorities of that society, as well as challenging the traditions and social norms of that society. Christ was then crucified for his rebellion and revolution. And yet, there is an even deeper sub-structure to this.
It is interesting to note that this film takes place in the late 1800’s, which was around the same time Nietzsche made his famous declaration, “God is Dead”.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” In order for Ephraim to ascend the lighthouse and steal its fire, he first had to kill Tom.
As I mentioned before, the Super-Ego is often symbolized mythologically as God the Father, or as the Benevolent or Tyrannical King. Society, as well as the fatherly-authority god, are both derivatives of the Super-Ego—the standards, traditions and practices of society which both protect and oppress us. Ephraim killed Tom, the analogue of Society, the Super-Ego and God the Father. It was only through this act that Ephraim was able to attain wholeness and individuality, but this was not necessarily a happy act. Through killing Tom, through killing God, Ephraim’s world fell apart, and he was punished for it.
Christ, by challenging society, by challenging the Jewish high priests and by challenging the governors of the Roman Empire, was in fact challenging God himself.
To dig deeper into this, and to dig deeper into what the Death of Christ ultimately means, I’ll now come to the work of the contemporary Hegelian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. Nietzsche believed that Christianity, by holding Truth to be its highest virtue, was inevitably a self-extinguishing religion. It was Christianity’s insistence on Truth which led to the Age of Enlightenment, which led to Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead”. In a similar vein, Slavoj Zizek has made claims that Christianity is in fact an atheistic religion.
In Slavoj’s words:
“I think that this [the story of Job] is maybe an incredible ethical revolution because this is already the first step out of this traditional pagan view where justice means you should be at your own place, do your particular duty, and so on and so on, you know, this withdrawal, which then I think culminates in the death of Christ.
“What dies on the cross? … As Hegel says, what dies on the cross is God of beyond himself. It’s precisely God as that transcendent power which somehow secretly pulls the strings. This is, I think, the secret of Christianity… This God abdicates. I think that something tremendous happens in Christianity because remember, after the death of Christ, we don’t get back to the father. What we get is Holy Spirit… So, for me, again, this is a tremendously important message of freedom.
“Again, as my beloved Chesterton said… in all other religions, you have atheists, people who don’t believe in God, but Chesterton‘s reading of those famous ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani?’ (‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’) is that only in Christianity, and for him this is crucial, God himself becomes for a moment an atheist.”
To sum up what Slavoj is saying, though eroding much of the subtleties here, at Christ’s death, Christ looks up to the sky and asks, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” Here, Christ, being a manifestation of God himself, is God realizing the truth of his own non-existence.
The revolution of Christ was not the continuation of a religion, but the annihilation of a religion, albeit a slow annihilation, and, to this day, not a complete annihilation (which might be evidence of the psychological vitality of the Christian myth). Christ: the Logos, the Word of God, the Truth made Flesh—Christ is what killed God.
The resurrection of Christ is not the resurrection of the flesh, but the resurrection of the spirit. Christ as spirit—Christ as the spirit of the Logos—paradoxically could only be kept alive by the Death of Christ as flesh, or by the Death of God by science and the Enlightenment. And now, this concept of the Spirit, decoupled from God as flesh and God as Divine Authority, lives on with us as the Logos, or rational thought and truthful speech.
Just as God died because of what Christianity valued most highly—the Logos, or the Truth—Tom, the analogue of God, died because of what he valued most highly, the lighthouse, or the Divine Self. It was Ephraim, the analogue of Christ, who killed Tom and sacrificed himself for the betterment of society. Just as Christ was the Logos, or Truth, made flesh, and it was Truth which murdered God; Ephraim was the Self, or Individuality, made flesh, and it was Individuality which murdered Society.
Just as Christ saved society and saved God by killing both society and God with Truth, Ephraim saves society and saves the fire of Individuality by killing Tom and both murdering and sacrificing himself to society with Individualism. In both stories, the murders are in fact suicides. God the Father, the manifestation of society and the Super-Ego, the manifestation of the crowds at Judaea, sends Christ as a sacrifice to die at the cross, and, in doing so, sends himself to die at the cross. Christ, the manifestation of the Logos, kills God, thus killing himself. Ephraim’s real name is Thomas. This means that Thomas killed Tom, and, in doing so, Tommy essentially sacrificed himself.
Just as Catholics consume the body and blood of Christ, an act of ingesting the divine Logos, the seagulls now consume the body and blood of Ephraim, an act of ingesting the divine Self. Christ will become resurrected as the Holy Spirit, the dove, and Ephraim will be resurrected as the soul of a dead sailor, a seagull.
My travels have taken me to the Maelulos Forest, in
search of the Autonsitor. How do I describe either of these? How do I describe
what drew me here? How do I describe what I actually believe I am doing here?
I had been drinking with wily company in Sairn, the
City by the Sea, and listening to weathered travelers tell half-remembered
tales. Something was in the air, you could smell it above the hops and the
pipe-smoke—you could feel it like a static in the air. Yet, it was approached
with caution. The Maelulos would be mentioned, and there was a quiet, knowing
look in everyone’s eyes. Then the conversations would be diverted—consciously
or unconsciously—to something else.
After a story about whaling and battling leviathans
off the Garvreil Peninsula, I asked, “What’s the Maelulos? I keep hearing you
all mention it, I’m curious. What is it? What’s there?”
Everyone looked at me. I had been quiet for most of
the night—laughing yes, jabbing a tease and asking a few questions, sure, but I
hadn’t directed the conversation at all until now. A woman who had been a
traveler and a woods-woman for the first half of her life, and then a farmer’s
wife until three years ago. “You’ve never heard of the Maelulos?” she asked,
“The Maelulos Forest?”
“No,” I said, “I’m not from around here.”
“You don’t have to be from around here to ‘ave heard o’
the Maelulos,” a thick-bearded man piped in.
“I’m from far away,” I told him. “Worlds away.”
The bearded man gave me a long look, then the woman
spoke up and I turned back to her. “The Maelulos is a forest in Sha’Haro where
the Aether spills over into the land. It’s—“
“Aether?” I interrupted.
“What?” the woman asked.
“Did you jus’ ask what Aether is?” the bearded man
asked. “How foreign are you? How do you not—”
“Just get on with the story, Freirdei,” a second man—a
tall, wiry man with rough stubble—interjected. “We can’t give ‘im physicka
lessons tonight, give ‘im directions to the Uni’ if he doesn’t know.”
The woman sighed. “The Maelulos is a forest in
Sha’Haro—its own forest, isolated from all the others by miles of plains on all
sides—where the Aether… Think of… It’s magic, it’s part of magic, but smarter
people than I—or anyone else here—say its more. It’s a part of the fabric of
everything, we just can’t see it. They’ve been trying to measure it like
electricity or like brain-waves for years, but they haven’t yet. It doesn’t
work the-“
“Freirdei,” the thin man interrupted.
“Right,” she said, “the Maelulos. It’s… It’s like
walking into a dream. Things aren’t real there the same way they are here.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The fabric of things is torn there, or perhaps it’s
that it blends together there. What separates the physical dimensions from the
Aetheric dimension, it’s not there—the borders begin to blur. It glows with
colored lights, but there’s no source of the light. There’s things there—there’s things that happen there that can’t be explained. It’s
like a dream and an ocean and a storm all at once.”
“But… it’s a forest?”
“Aye,” said Freirdei, “in the easiest of words, it’s a
forest.”
“Home of the Autonsitors,” said the thin man, “the
only place in the world they live.”
“Autonsitors?” I asked.
“The Lords of the Maelulos,” said the bearded man.
“Not the Druids nor even the Veritasians dispute it.
No one owns those woods but the Autonsitors.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
“They are not a ‘who’,” said Freirdi, “they’re
beasts.”
“Beasts’ doesn’t do them justice, Freirdi,” said the
thin man, “they’re equals with the Dragons.”
“Well, what are
they?” I asked, “What are these beasts, or whatever they are?”
There was a small silence. I could see in all three of
my companions’ eyes that they were searching for words. The bearded man spoke
first. “They make bears look like puppies.”
“They’ve got these tusks,” Freirdi began, “they move
like a tiger, and-“
“You’ve never seen a tiger,” said the bearded man.
“Fine, it moves like a mountain lion, you can’t tell
me I ‘ahven’t seen those. And it’s got a wolf’s maw, ‘cept its teeth are as
long as your forearm.”
“They’re ferocious,” said the bearded man, “they’ll
let you into their forest, but you ‘ad better not disturb a single leaf.”
“It sees things,” said the thin man, “that’s what’s
important. Something can be big, something can have teeth, and something be
fierce, but the Autonsitor sees things. It knows things—like the Dragons, an’
the Elves know things. They spend their entire lives in the Maelulos; their
entire lives with those eyes of theirs.”
“That’s enough,” said the bearded man, “let’s-“
“’Ave you ever seen its eyes?” asked the thin man,
turning to his bearded compatriot. “Have you ever seen it open its-“
“That’s enough,
Pater,” the bearded man said to the thin one.
“Aye, enough,” said Freirdei, “tell us about Korsik,”
The bearded man stared at Pater for a long moment,
then smiled slightly. Any tension slowly dissolved as he spoke. “Mah favorite
story,” he said, “don’t know why I’ve never been back.”
More stories were told for another hour or so. All the
while, the static in the air still hung. I would listen to it ringing, and I
would begin to imagine the Maelulos. My mind’s eye would wonder to the Autonsitor.
And every time, I would catch Pater looking at me. I’d catch his stare for a
moment, and he’d seem to smile with the crease of his eyes. Then he’d look
away, back to whoever was telling the story.
Eventually, we all grew tired enough to call it a
night. As I was walking up the stairs of the inn, going to my bed, Pater
stopped me.
“Are you interested in the Autonsitor?” he asked.
“Interested?” I asked.
“In finding it,” he said, “in going to the Maelulos.”
I stared at Pater for a moment, silently rolling the
thought over in my head. “Yes,” I said. I was.
Pater smiled.
In the morning, just as this world’s star—the Sozl, I
believe they called it in this country—rose above the horizon, I boarded a
train—engine #64, just as Pater had told me to. It wasn’t a long journey to
Sha’Haro from the southern hill country of Veritas. Pater had given me a map to
the Maelulos, along with some directions and words of advice:
“Stay on the roads. Don’t journey into the forests—it’s
the Druids’ land. Once you enter the Mael—the plains surrounding the Maelulos—keep
your eye to the Rais [their word for East]. You’ll eventually see the Maelulos
from the road.”
Once my train arrived in Sha’Haro, I began walking
down the Vahn’Ozl road to the South. For a long time, there was nothing but
forest. The first night on the road, I slept just off the side of the road,
though I didn’t go any farther than the nearest tree. On the second day, around
noon, a merchant came by with a horse-led wagon and offered to let me ride with
him. By the end of the second day, we had made it to the Mael.
Night was falling, so we camped out in the grass a few
yards from the edge of the road. When I woke up the next day, the Sozl was just
beginning to rise on the Mael. It stretched on for miles and miles—a seemingly
infinite stretch of grasslands. The merchant and I took to the road again, and
by the afternoon, I could see the Maelulos to the East. It looked like a normal
forest, though we were still miles away.
An hour or so later, when we were parallel to the
Maelulos, I told the merchant to stop so I could get off and go on to the
forest. He looked at me for a moment as though I was insane, then nodded and
slowed to a stop. He didn’t say anything while I got off and collected my
belongings, but as I was about to thank him, he interrupted me and asked, “Are
you sure?”
I didn’t understand the question at first, it seemed
taken out of context, but then it clicked, “Yes, I’m sure,” I said, “thank you
for the ride.”
The merchant nodded and grunted something, then went
on his way.
I began walking across the plains toward the Maelulos.
As I near the Maelulos, it seems stranger than when I
had first seen it, and with each step it seems to grow wilder—less constrained
by any words an individual might craft for such an occasion. Within a mile of
its edge, the Maelulos has become a storm of green arms reaching up into the
sky. It is comprised of trees, yes, but not like trees I’d ever seen. Not trees
of our world, nor trees I’ve seen in other parts of this world.
Maelulos, the Glowing Wood, Pater called it. I am
closer now; the Sozl is falling onto the horizon behind me. The forest begins
to emanate soft, blue light. The Sozl is now beyond the horizon. All that’s
left of it are deep reds and violets exploding into the night’s deep indigo.
I am approaching the edge of the forest now, despite
the fall of night. Pater told me the Autonsitor is an animal that never sleeps,
but it only walks through the Maelulos at night. By day, it exists invisibly
and universally in the leaves and vines and branches of the forest, and in the
flowers, seeds and fruits of the forest.
The light blue of the forest is now becoming infused
with every color imaginable. Yellow lights like wil-o-wisps dance between
shifting boughs of the sprawling, monolithic trees. Indigos of the night sky
seem to drift and swirl about with the green of glowing leaves, and echoes the
sky blue glimmer permeating the air. Currents of orange, wild violet and burnt
red swim between trees like autumnal whales swimming through the forest’s
depths.
At the threshold of the forest, I see red fireflies
dancing in the air with white moths. In the distance is a great bird—it looks
like a giant shoebill, or some monstrous crane. Its feathers are grey shadows
painted across snowy fields, and its eyes are yellow gems with piercing abysses
cut across them. Fish as large as my head are swimming through the air—possibly
propelling through the invisible “Aether”.
The static from the night I first heard of the
Maelulos seems to return. Something hums through the air. A ringing brushes
across my body like a cool breeze. Why am I here? I wonder. The question is
like ice running across my nerves. I couldn’t answer it. My same words that
fail to describe the Maelulos begin failing to describe me, or my motivations.
I couldn’t tell you why I was here. Could the Maelulos tell me why it was here?
The static and the hum and the ringing grow, drowning
out my thoughts until all I hear are the shapes of the trees. All I can think
are the colors of the air.
I’ve entered the forest now. My grip on reality begins
to fade here, or perhaps there’s simply less reality to hold onto. Less than
fifteen minutes of walking—as far as I can tell—and a mouth formed from tree
roots and loamy earth opens up, and from its lips fly flocks of birds. They all
chirp with distinct melodies in a unified rhythm, and their small, ringing
noises form a chaotic yet beautiful and haunting song—a composition that was
easily far more complex than even the Elvish symphonies could produce.
Further into the forest. I don’t know how far I’ve
walked. I watch a deer bite the air—nothing in the air, it bit the air itself—and
tear a hole open. From that hole, a rabbit, a crow and a moth, each the size of
my chest, emerge. They all walk together through the forest.
I want to follow, but I realize I’m watching them from
above. I realize I’m standing in a canopy of branches and leaves. I thought I
was standing in grass and earthen debris, but I realize I must climb back down.
A giant earthworm emerges from the ground. It rises up
into the air, then splits into seven. These all become the boughs of a tree,
while the part of the tree that remains unified becomes the trunk. A black beak
the size of sailing vessel crashes through the forest and plucks at the tree,
but pulls a worm from the ground.
I look up to see the crow again. I realize the worm
was not giant, and the beak was not the size of a ship. I realize I had been
staring at the ground, watching the earthworm, and my eyes had only been inches
from the ground. I am sprawled out across the ground, covered in dried leaves
and dirt.
The deer, the moth and the rabbit are here as well. I
stand up and follow the four animals. As I walk, I seem to be traversing
through a tunnel of leaves, boughs and museum exhibits, though I couldn’t tell
you which displays I saw. All that stayed constant, all that I can really
remember, were the four animals.
So, I come back to my first question, how to describe
the Maelulos.
I couldn’t say the Maelulos is a forest anymore. That
wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t begin to describe what I see.
As I step into a clearing with the four animals, I
watch a small star—one of the wil-o-wisps—burst into a spiraling flower stock
that hangs in the air. The bud of this flower opens into an endless pit of
sunlight and fire. What I thought were seven golden petals begin to move, and I
realize they are seven yellow bees standing on the edge of this fiery pit. They
lean in and pluck seven strings from the inferno of sunlight, then fly off into
the forest—weaving the seven strings throughout the trees and bushes and limbs
and creatures and colors and lights.
But even that doesn’t describe what I see. How do I describe this? How doI describe an object I hear with my
body? How do I describe a thought I see with my hands? How do I describe a
sound that I feel in my thoughts? Because that’s what I saw, a storm of perception
wrapped inside of a single event.
From this clearing, we follow one of the bees as it
weaves through the trees. Flower to flower, wrapping a curving vector about the
forest. We step inside the hollow of a tree. The tree was no more than three
feet thick from the outside, but suddenly we’re walking through a dark hallway
carved into the tree, following this bee. We come to a small, circular room,
with a hole in the floor. From the floor comes a golden light.
The bee flies into the hole. I look down and see three
naked women—one with white hair, one with blonde and one with copper hair. I
couldn’t say if they were beautiful or ugly, I couldn’t say if they seemed
clean or unkempt, and I couldn’t say if they were happy or furious at the
arrival of the bee. They were like oil paintings in the air, their features
were crisp yet distant, and I wanted to climb into the golden light to be with
them.
From yards away, they might seem perfect. Examining
them inches from my face, I might see the Truth. But, from right here, I only
saw confusion. I only saw the ideal and the material meeting in the middle, and
blurring like rivers of opposing thoughts crashing into each other.
The animals kept walking, and I followed.
We move past the golden light, and onward across this
hall through the dark. For a moment, I wonder if the darkness will swallow me,
if there will never be an end to it, if I will ever return. Then I see a light
at the end of the hall. Now we’re walking out of the hallway, into the forest
once more. The descends from the air above us, still carrying its string, and
we follow it once more.
How do I describe this?
The Maelulos is like an estuary of what is and what
could be. It is where the briny depths of life’s oceans mix with the meltwater
of snowcapped epiphanies. It’s where reality doesn’t have to be real anymore,
and the thoughts of ours that can never be step foot on solid ground.
I tell you this, I tell you what I’ve seen here, and
now I have just as much difficulty telling you what has drawn me here. How do I
tell you what pulls me? How do I tell you what strings tug at my joints? How do
I tell you what thoughts I followed to find this forest?
Like the search for something you’ve seen once and
forgotten. Like the investigation of a dream lost to time. Like you’ve been
following a map you didn’t know was in your hands, hunting for something you
never knew you needed. How else could I describe it?
It is unknowable, ungraspable and undefinable, yet it
is so real. When it brushes up against you in your dreams, it feels far more
real than anything you’ve held in your waking hands. When you dance along the
edge of reason and the irrational, it embraces you like a star embracing the
empty vacuum surrounding it.
This—whatever it is; whatever unknowable angels dance
through my head—has drawn me to the Maelulos.
And so I tell you that I search for the Autonsitor,
but I tell you also that I search for more. I tell you I hunt for the
Autonsitor, but, if you knew the Autonsitor, you would understand what I truly
hope to find.
The four animals and I follow the bee on through the
Glowing Wood.
We are walking in a space where reality seems to have
calmed down once again. I can think again, I can look around, and I can see
myself as an individual nested in reality again. Then I hear it. A roar, a
howl, a cry—something I’ve never heard in my life, yet it couldn’t be mistaken.
The Autonsitor. I hear it from deep in the forest ahead of us, but then I watch
as the bee flies into a river, still carrying the string. The four animals
follow. I hear the cry once more and hesitate, but I know—for whatever reason;
the same reason for why I must search for the Autonsitor—I must follow the four
animals into the river.
All of the animals and the bee immediately submerge
beneath the water, unafraid of its current, and unafraid of having no air to
breathe. I step into the water, and it’s freezing. I walk in as quickly as I
can, though I don’t have the same disinhibition as the animals and the bee. The
water is up to my waist, then my chest, then my chin. I take a long breath,
then submerge my head into the cold water.
On the other side of the river’s surface, I open my
eyes and see normally, as if there were no water. Everything around me—the
plants, my clothes, the rabbit’s fur—all move as if they were underwater, but I
don’t feel the water itself, and I find that I can move normally, as if there
was no water. I sip the river into my mouth, and find that I’ve sipped in air.
Cautiously, I exhale my breath, then inhale normally. I can breathe underwater,
or under-whatever-this-river-is.
The animals and I walk across the silt of the
riverbed, following the bee. I glance down the river to either side of me and
see fish, but not normal fish. They’ve all got heads of various animals—elephants,
tigers, monkeys, goats and snakes—and their dorsal fins were made out of arms,
while their tailfins were like long trailing flowers.
As we walked across the riverbed, I watched each fish
pick up a stone with its mouth, then carry it to another fish. Two fish would
meet with each other, and pick the rocks from each other’s mouths with one of
the hands on their dorsal fins, then go to pick up another rock and meet
another fish. Eventually, a fish would have every hand of its dorsal arms full
of different rocks of different shapes, sizes, colors and origins, and they
would find some safe place along the riverbed—either a sunken log, the roots of
a tree, or a bush of reeds—and lay down to set every rock in a pile around it.
I watched this for as long as I could, but then I saw
from the corner of my eye that we were approaching something. I turned forward,
toward the animals and the bee, and I saw we were nearing the bank of the
river’s other side, except the bank was opening up like a dark mouth—the same
mouth I’d seen the birds fly out of earlier.
Together, the animals and I follow the golden bee into
this earthen mouth underwater. The riverbed swallows us into its dark silt. We
are walking, though I begin to lose feeling of my body. I know I move my legs,
though I don’t feel them move. Maybe it’s too cold to feel anything. A part of
me wonders if I’m dead. It seems foolish, I acknowledge that, but it seems to
make sense as well.
Warm light shines from ahead. Soon, we are stepping
through a tunnel of soil and clay. Ahead, I think I can see buildings where the
tunnel opens up. They’re buildings made of metal, I think. They’re buildings
made of tree roots, car frames and engine blocks, and a mismatching of many
different bricks—red bricks, cobblestones, fired clay, cement blocks, and so
forth—I think.
Eventually we come to the end of this tunnel. There is
a city, I can see it fully now. There are people here, I see them now. They are
like geometric shapes painted into the riverwater-that-isn’t-water. Their faces
are squares and triangles, and circles inside of circles, and their bodies are
gaunt rectangles, hobbling trapezoids and tall, thin triangles.
We pass the first two blocks on our left and right.
Then the bee flies into an open doorway. We follow it, take a staircase to the
basement floor. Except the staircase keeps going. And going. And going. It
enters my mind, how long has the bee been pulling its string from the flower?
How many paths has it woven through? How many paths have the six other bees
woven? It enters my mind that—
But we’ve come to the end of the staircase. It empties
out into a vast underground—a cavern. A cavern, with doors everywhere. The
animals and I follow the bee through one of the doors. There’s sunlight down
here, though I don’t know from where. We walk into a hallway, and it leads to
endless hallways streaming with sunlight. Hallway after hallway—how many places
has the bee’s string woven through by now?
We step out to a dark, midnight beach—the sunlight
stays in the halls behind us—and we behold an ocean ahead of us. I wonder how
there can be an ocean when we’re already in a river. I don’t know. I couldn’t
tell you. But I know there’s a ship waiting for us just offshore. We’re
swimming in black water now. My legs are treading air, and my head is
underwater, but we’re moving. Now we’re climbing the sides of the ship.
The animals and I stand on the sides of the deck. The
bee wraps its string around the masts, and ties a knot around the bowsprit. The
bee is pulling now on the ship, pulling the ship through the ocean. We sail for
hours, it seems like, across charcoal black waters. Above us, the sky begins to
crack and shimmer with color. The sky becomes a wine bottle green, cracks of
light barely escaping the underground sky.
In the distance, I see a massive black shape
converging to a point above the horizon. Eventually, I realize that this is our
destination. We crawl across the water. As time passes, I see phantom shapes
find life in the air. I see mice run across the water. I see the ghost-forms of
foxes dance in the dark. I see tresses of pale vines climb through the air and
disappear.
Then I see the moon come out. It means something. I
don’t know what it means. It’s telling me something. The still image of the
moon opens an invisible mouth and speaks. What is it saying?
A sudden jolt, a crash. The ship has hit land. The
animals begin walking toward the bowsprit. I follow. I end up walking faster
than them and make it to the bowsprit first. I climb down from the side of the
ship, and my feet touch solid ground. The ship begins to move. I turn around
and see the bee pulling the ship away from the coast, the animals still on it.
For a moment, I wonder if I should try climbing back
aboard the ship, but I know it’s too late. The ship has left land. It’s gone. I
watch to see if the animals turn to look at me, a part of me wants to wave at
them, but they don’t.
I turn back.
I am standing at the summit of a black mountain, I
realize. I am standing at the summit of a mountain made from the darkest
substance I could imagine—something beyond charcoal, something beyond simple
shadow, something wholly un-seeable—ore of a black-hole, perhaps, mined from the
cosmos.
I know I must begin climbing.
There are rocks beneath my feet, and stones against my
hand, but there is no seeing them. Far above me, at what I assume to be the
peak, I see a faint light. Hand over hand, I climb this un-seeable mountain. As
I do, I feel the pressure of the water I’m in grow stronger and stronger. It
grows until I think I feel a hand gripping my entire body, and I wonder how
much more I can take. Above me I see the light still, so I go on. Hand over
hand, I go on, until the pressure is so great, and the light is so near that I
am nothing but a war with myself. The pressure grows, and the light comes
closer until I am nothing but collisions of thoughts.
Then my hand finds nothing but water—thick water,
which squeezes my hand in a crushing grip. I reach down, and I feel a rounded,
pyramidal point where the mountain must end. Above me, there is a small point
of light. Then, above me, there is a call.
Above me, I hear a long, trailing keen. If a single
saxophone could howl like a wolf, roar like a lion, screech like an eagle, and
still croon sweet, blue lullabies in the quiet of the night, it might sound
like this keen. It might sound like the call of the Autonsitor.
From the top of the mountain I have climbed, I breach
the earthen ceiling with my hands and pull myself through the dirt, back into
the forest. The abyssal pressure is gone. I crawl into the hollow of a tree,
and turn the bark’s door handle. I crack the door of the tree open just enough
to peek outside, into the woods.
There, it stands. The Autonsitor.
It has the body of an ashen-furred lion, except it
stands as tall as an elephant at its shoulders. Its head has an elongated
snout, like a wolf’s. Thick tusks emerge from its mouth, bent backwards beyond
its shoulder blades. Its back is covered in twigs, branches and thick tree
boughs all laden with deep, green leaves. It looks just as Pater had described
it to me.
I step out of the hollow in the tree and step into the
forest. I watch it, and wonder what the Autonsitor is doing. It seems agitated.
It seems confused. This wasn’t what I had expected. Sure, it looked like a
creature of beauty and elegance, but not in the way it moved.
Lumbering about as though it were in pain or scared,
the Autonsitor walked further into the woods—it’s head moving side to side as
it did, searching. I follow after it. The woods have seemed to congeal into a
less frantic reality here. It is no longer shifting between reality and dream,
but rather seems to be one or the other. Whichever one it is—whichever of the
two that the forest has chosen—it seems to be holding true.
The Autonsitor stops in a clearing. I come to a stop
several yards outside of the clearing. The beast looks around, then its eyes
become fixated on something to its left. A song is playing somewhere in the
forest, and it gets closer and closer. The Autonsitor begins to open its mouth.
A flock of birds—the source of the music in the woods—comes flying directly at
the Autonsitor. It opens its mouth, and they all fly into the beast’s mouth.
I step forward to get a better look. The Autonsitor
tenses up suddenly. The odd panic in the creature’s body seem to peak. Each
movement of its body is quick—its head jerks to one side, it’s legs move to
reposition its body, its back arches, ready to lash out. What’s making it so
agitated?
It turns, and I see its face from the front now. It
has two light blue eyes—the same color as the light permeating this forest—then
a single, closed eye at the crown of its skull. It is sniffing the air and turning
its head slowly to scan the forest. Its eyes stop on me—it sees me now, I know
it does.
For a moment, all the Autonsitor does is stare at me.
All I can do is stare back. Then, step by step, it begins to move toward me.
There is no running away, so I don’t even try. I just stand there and stare
back into the beast’s eyes. It comes to a stop only a few yards away. My fate
seems indeterminate for a moment. Then the Autonsitor rumbles and closes its
eyes.
The eye at its crown opens. It is white, with a black
center.
From this black center, I see seven bees holding seven
strings crawl out and fly into the forest. The Autonsitor stands motionless now
as the bees fly all around me, wrapping me with their string. Is it looking
through its white eye now? Through the black pit at its center? Through the
eyes of the seven bees? Is it searching for something? And what does it search
for?
The bees wrap me entirely with strings, and I let
them. They form something like a chrysalis around my body. The strings cover my
face until I can see no more, and then they all melt into my skin, melting me
with them. I open my eyes again, and I am floating in an endless, white space,
with spirals of color spinning all around me.
Then, the spirals coalesce into a single circle. The
circle shimmers. It becomes a mirror. I look into it and see photographs of
myself. They are photographs of me from the day I was born until the day I die.
They are all layered on top of each other, yet transparent, so I can see them
all at once, and so they form one face. In the reflection of the mirror, I see
a mirror behind me.
I seem to have no body here, so all I see are two
mirrors reflecting each other infinitely, and all the photographs in between. I
am just an ethereal body here, watching these two. I move toward the first
mirror, and try to push myself through the glass.
The mirror is like a liquid, and my body—whatever my
body is—moves into the mirror as though I am emerging from water. My body
breaks through the liquid surface of the mirror. I stumble out of it onto
grass. It is nighttime. No. I see light on the horizon, it must be morning
time. All around me is grasslands, plains—the Mael.
I turn around, and I see Maelulos just behind me—the
edge of the woods calling for me to return. But, I know I must leave, though I
don’t know why (I assume I must leave for the same reasons I came here,
whatever they were). I turn to the horizon, and watch as the Sozl rises above
the edge of the horizon. A new morning is here, and I must travel on. I turn to
look once more at the Maelulos.
At the heart of this forest is a great animal,
searching for something. It turns itself into an instrument. It turns itself
into a telescope that scours the surface of pebbles. It turns itself into a
tool that navigates from flower to flower, color to color, life to life—a tool
prying at the night, prying at the forest, prying at its reflection.
Perhaps one day I will return to the Maelulos.
Perhaps one day I will lose myself in the Maelulos.
Perhaps one day I will find myself still wandering through
the Maelulos.
What do we know about the world we live in, the people we
live with, and the person we are?
Light comes in through the cornea, and is refracted into
your pupil, then through a hard lens, where the light is focused into the
retina. Our retinas capture this constant bombardment of trillions of
light-waves/particles, and process this light with millions of special nerves
called rods and cones. These rods and cones convert light stimuli, which are
picked up by the optic nerve, and sent to the brain.
Your brain processes the optic signals with the limbic
system first, where our brain scans for threats or rewarding opportunities. The
limbic system first “communicates” with the Automatic Nervous System, which
governs our fear response, our fight-or-flight instinct, and our sexual
attraction instincts. If there’s an immediate threat, such as a snake on the
ground, or a potentially rewarding opportunity, such as a person you find
attractive, your brain and body begin responding before you know what you’re
looking at.
Finally, the processed light-signals are sent to our
neo-cortex, where we consciously “see” the light.
Similarly-complex sensory systems detect what we smell, what
we hear, what we feel and what we taste, and this is the foundation of how we
understand the world around us.
These senses alone are nowhere near what you need to
actually understand what’s happening around us. Humans have an incredibly weak
sense of smell, we can only detect a narrow range of light waves, our
easily-damaged ears can only hear a certain range of sound, and we only see so
far, or so close, with limited clarity. The parts of our brain that process
these signals can misfire, or misunderstand what it’s looking at (optical
illusions).
In addition, our senses alone don’t tell us how a thing works.
We only began to understand gravity in 1687 with Newton, then
with Einstein in the 20th century, and we still don’t fully
understand how it works.
In fact, we don’t understand how most of the universe works.
27% of the universe is made of Dark Matter, which
constitutes 85% of the total mass in the universe. 68% is Dark Energy.[1]
That’s 95% of the universe that we don’t understand. All the stars, planets,
black holes, comets, asteroids and space debris make up only 5% of the
universe.
But let’s go smaller.
The universe is much so much bigger than what we experience
normally, we at least know what’s happening on Earth.
Do we?
As a species, we’ve all but mastered mechanical, electrical,
optical, thermodynamic and nuclear physics… To a degree.
We now know vast amounts about of biology, evolution and
genetics… Relatively speaking.
We have a deep and accurate understanding of psychology… In
some ways.
And we’re more informed about the world around us than ever
before…
Except we’ve learned enough to see how little we actually
know.
We now know enough about quantum mechanics to know that the
subatomic world is bizarre and nonsensical, and often violates “laws” of
nature, such as the Law of Conservation.[2]
Not only does it
violate the Law of Conservation,
but quantum mechanics is incompatible with Einstein’s Relativity, and has led
to decades of scientists trying to reconcile the two.[3]
Decades later, we still haven’t reconciled the two.
Do we at least understand how people work? Why we are the
way we are? Why we act the way we act? How we’ve come to be who we are?
Well… Yes and no…
To a certain degree, we understand how humans work. We
understand what our bodies are made of, how our muscles, bones, cardiovascular
system and so forth work, and how our nervous system works.
We understand that genetics and the environment affect our
physical and psychological development.
We understand that genetics, our brain, past experiences,
learned behaviors, hormones, psychological states, emotional health, and
physical health all play roles in our behaviors and decisions.
We understand how evolution has shaped and changed us over
billions of years into modern humans, and how epigenetic adaptations on the
individual level.
We have a pretty solid, foundational understanding of how
the human body works, but this foundational understanding has shown us the vast
amounts of our genetics, biology, physiology, and psychology that we don’t know.
Let’s take something as simple as hair. We have hair
follicles in our skin. They grow using nutrients from our body, and they grow
according to chemical signals from our nerves.
However, everything is also controlled by our genes. Everything
from the follicles, to the structure of each hair, to how fast each hair grows,
is coded by genes. And, there can be multiple genes that code for the same
thing. You can have multiple genes controlling the color, length and coarseness
of your hair, or one gene that codes for several different traits. These genes
can be turned on or off, they can perform different functions based on the
hormones in your body, and they can also code other genes.
However, genes are only one part of the equation, and things
like your diet or how often you exercise can affect individual traits. Everything
in the body is interconnected, and it’s highly
We’re only just beginning to know the ins-and-outs of our
body.
There are still mysteries to evolution, unanswered
questions, and long-debated ideas.
There are still mysteries about genetics, how genes work,
and how genes affect our anatomy and psychology.
And there are still mysteries about the brain. We’re still
trying to understand all the ins-and-outs of brain function, of how we think
and process information, and why we behave the way we do.
Consciousness is a perfect example. We still don’t even know
what consciousness is, or if consciousness is real or an illusion. We don’t
know why we’re conscious, or what causes consciousness. Yet, consciousness is
one of the most important aspects of being a human.
But what about the basic world around us. What do we even
know about something as simple as a desk-lamp?
It’s an object that “stands” on our desk. It has a “lightbulb”
you can put in or take out. You can “turn it on” to make light come out of the
lightbulb.
But how does it stand without falling? How is it constructed?
What materials does it made of?
What even is a lightbulb? How does it work? Why does it work
the way it works? What is it made of? Is it incandescent? Is it an LED bulb?
How does an LED work?
Yes, you can take the time to answer all these questions,
even down to what metals and gases are used inside a bulb, and the reasons why
they are used, but can you do that for everything? And can you do that for
everything all the time?
What is the desk made of? How is it constructed? What
materials? Why does it even work?
What about a flash drive? Or headphones? Or your computer?
Why are we able to look out a window and see what’s outside?
Why does one flower look prettier than another flower? Why are the walls of a
room painted the color they are, and, for that matter, how does paint even work?
Yes, we can stop and explain everything around us, but how
often do we do that? How much do we actually know, from one person to the next,
about the fundamental objects of daily life? How much do we take for granted
when we walk out the door, or even when we wake up in our bed?
Jordan Peterson has a great explanation of this. A car is a
thing-that-gets-us-from-one-place-to-the-next, until it stops working. As soon
as it stops working, it becomes a chaotic-object-of-anxiety-and-ignorance—a
terrifying monster made of valves, wires, pipes, pulleys and gears. But as soon
as the car gets fixed, it transforms back into a thing-that-gets-us-from-one-place-to-the-next.
Even more basic than basic objects around us, do we even
know what’s going on half the time?
What’s happening on the other side of the four walls around
you? What’s happening next door? What’s happening down the street? What’s
happening in the next town over? What’s going on in your state, or your
country, or the rest of the world?
Unfortunately, we barely even know what’s happening outside
our front doors.
When we do see something happening, how much do we actually
know about it?
If we see two strangers arguing, do you have any clue what
it might be about?
What’s going on in those people’s heads?
What’s going on in anyone’s head, for that matter?
A friend of mine explained something called a “black box” in
computer programming. A black box is a piece of code where you can see what
information goes in and what information goes out, but you can’t see what
happens inside that code. For example, you input X into the black box, and the
black box outputs Y, but you don’t know why the black box took in X and put out
Y.
Humans are a lot like this.
As I’ve already mentioned, we’re complicated motherfuckers. We
barely know why we do the things we do, let alone why other people do the
things we do. We barely even know basic information about people and their
lives.
What was someone’s upbringing like? How did their parenting,
their early experiences, their education, their environment, and so forth
affect their personality? What’s their health like? What matters to that
person? What does that person go home to each day? What goes on in that
person’s head?
Even things like what a person ate on a given day, how much
they slept, or the state of their gut bacteria on a given day can alter their
personality.
So how much do you know about the person you’re talking to?
How much do you really
know, and how much do you make up, or assume?
How often do we make assumptions about people we know? How
often do we make assumptions about who they are, what kind of person they are,
and the reasons why they behave how they behave?
How often do we project an easy-to-understand, cookie-cutter
identity to a person? How often do we then treat them as if they were a
cookie-cutter person, instead of treating them as the complex, dynamic human they
really are?
The problem is, we can’t do this for everyone.
We can’t take the time to deeply understand each and every
individual we come in contact with. We have
to make assumptions about them.
At the very best, we have to make educated guesses about a
person, but even these guesses can be way
off the mark.
Let’s take it a step further.
How do we know how we know things?
How can we be sure we know what we know?
How can we be sure we know anything?
It seems almost stupid to ask (“You just know, you know?”),
but it’s really hard to pinpoint how we can be sure of what we know.
Even asking, “What does it mean to ‘know’ something?” is a
rabbit hole in and of itself.
We only know what our brain tells us to know. We only know
this because our brain tells us we know this. Our brain can be wrong, our brain
is forgetful, and our brain is biased. Our brain can be lazy, tired, confused,
misguided, and deliberately irrational.
Beyond that, how sure can we even be about the things we
“really” know.
There’s a thought experiment about a brain in a jar (which
may or may not have originated with HP Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in the Darkness”).
Let’s say you’re a brain in a jar, with all these wires
hooked up to your brain. These wires send signals telling you what you see,
what your body looks like, what you’re doing, and what emotions you have. As
far as you know, you’re a person walking around in the world, doing your thing,
but in reality, you’re a brain in a jar.
This sounds sci-fi-ish (it’s one of the ideas behind The
Matrix), but there’s legitimate speculation in the scientific community about Simulation
Theory. Simulation Theory states that we may be in a reality simulated by a
computer-like technology, or some higher form of technology that transcends our
knowledge of physics. We could be living in a computer-fabricated universe,
dictated by lines of 6th-dimensional computer code.
We are reaching an age where our technology and our
computing power will be so powerful that we ourselves might be able to create
our own simulated realities. We already have virtual reality goggles, we can
already create computer-generated realities and interact with these realities
(video games), and people like Elon Musk are already creating technologies that
can directly link our brains to computers.
What’s to say a civilization before us, or a civilization
“above” us, or an indescribable entity in some multi-dimensional tangent of our
own reality, hasn’t already created technology that can simulate a universe?
What’s to say some civilization hasn’t created our universe
in one of their computers, and has made a simulation that is so sophisticated it
replicated consciousness and physics? (Except it starts to fuck up in black
holes)
We kinda don’t know.
Many great minds have pondered, many great minds have
searched for answers, and many great minds still haven’t figured it out.
We simply don’t know. We don’t know a lot.
We know some things.
We know coffee makes people (not all) hyper. We know some people shouldn’t eat
gluten (actually, probably no one should eat it, but it’s whatever). We know
monkeys and humans both get weirded out by direct eye contact.
We know the Earth spins, and we basically know why, but we
don’t really know why gravity works,
and we’re still arguing about how gravity
works.
We know humans only live for a short amount of time, and
then we die, but we know this is controlled by genes and our biology, and we’re
starting to be able to control our genes and our biology, but we know enough
about genetic editing to know we maybe shouldn’t fuck with our genes until we
really, “really”, really know how our
genes work.
We know enough to know we don’t know much.
We know enough to know the world is a crazy god-damn place.
We know enough to know humans are crazy motherfuckers. We know enough to know
the universe is stranger than fiction.
And beyond that, we don’t really know.
Which can be scary to think about. It can be terrifying to
know that our world may not be what it seems. It can keep you up at night,
thinking about all the people around you that you barely understand. It can be
anxiety provoking to think about what will or won’t happen tomorrow, or in the
next week, or in the next year, or what will or won’t happen before you die.
But it’s also kind of fantastic that we don’t know.
How boring would it be if we knew everything?
Einstein isn’t one of the greatest historical figures ever
because he knew exactly how the universe worked. Einstein went down in history
because he explored the unknown, even to his death. He relished in the things
he didn’t know, in the things he couldn’t explain, and devoted his life to uncovering
the secrets of the universe.
We don’t like spoilers because we want to find out the end
of movie for ourselves.
We don’t like people telling us what to do or how to do it
because we want to figure it out on our own.
We don’t like learning about the same thing over and over
again, because it doesn’t get us anywhere.
It’s okay not to know things. It’s okay if there’s a little
bit of fantasy in our reality. It’s okay if life is more theory than fact. It’s
okay if we have to fabricate a few details along the way (so long as we can
un-fabricate them at some point).
It’s okay, because what we don’t know is far more
interesting than what we do know.
We don’t know where this ride’s gonna take us, and that’s
half the fun.
Hours after I planned to
begin, hours after the sun had risen above the horizon, I lowered the stairs to
my attic. At the top of the staircase, I stopped half inside the attic, half
inside everything else.
The Sun beamed through
the left-hand window. Outside I could see the forest surrounding my Father’s
house. Dust covered everything up here, most of which hadn’t been touched in
years. It was a mess up here, a chaotic city of boxes piled against dressers,
cardboard towers leaning against bookshelves. Dust covered the city like the
snow of an ashen winter. Some parts of the attic clearly hadn’t been explored in
years, where some objects were almost invisible beneath a couple decades of
dust.
For a moment, I stood
still and stared around the attic. For a moment, the attic seemed to stare
right back at me.
I had no idea where to
begin, or what I might find. Everything in the attic was an accumulation of my
Father’s forty-year stay in the house. I had moved in when things first started
going downhill, about five years ago. His life slowly came to an end two years
ago. Only now did I finally force myself start cleaning the house out, deciding
what to keep and what to throw out.
I looked around the attic
once more, mentally preparing myself for hours of digging through old memories.
I sighed, then stepped forward.
My first steps across the
floor were slow and cautious. One wrong step, and who knew what might come
tumbling down. One moment of incaution, and-
Shhhf.
…
Something had moved.
I looked around. There
was nothing.
Probably a rat, I
figured, or a mouse. And god knows how many spiders, cockroaches and cluster
flies there up here.
No… No, no, no, I don’t
want to do this, I don’t want to deal with
I turned almost went back
down the stairs. I’ll call an exterminator, then maybe I’ll hire someone to
haul all this stuff downstairs.
But then I stopped, and
looked around one more time.
Maybe I shouldn’t have.
Maybe I should have looked away. Maybe I should have kept going, closed the
ladder, and never looked back, but I didn’t. I looked around, and I started
catching sight of things I’d completely forgotten about. Stacks of books my
Father owned, old furniture, and ancient relics from childhood.
Old memories began
wrapping themselves around me, and I tried pushing them away. Just leave, call
the exterminator, and come back to this another day.
Then my eye caught a lone
box on the floor, only a yard from the ladder.
“PHOTOGRAPHS” was written in sharpie on the
side.
I studied it for a
moment. Then took a short step to where it lay on the ground, and knelt down to
it. I studied it like it was some curious yet potentially dangerous specimen I’d
found in the jungle. I almost stood up to leave, but I wanted to know, “What
memories are in this box?”
I picked it up, and the
bottom fell out a few feet into the air. Half a dozen 6”x8” albums crashed to
the floor. I jumped back, and cursed, “Fuck,”
at the sudden calamity.
Then everything settled
into a new, stable chaos. The box was empty, and the albums were still.
Again, I almost left. I
almost called it a day, right then and there.
But maybe, I thought to
myself, I should at least pick these albums up. I set the box down, and knelt at
the pile of photo-albums, beginning to re-stack them. At the bottom of the
pile, one of the albums had completely opened. I glanced briefly inside. They
were pictures of my friends and me, pictures from high school.
I’m not old, I’d say—early-thirties—but
people I saw in those pictures were so much younger than the people we’ve
become. I honestly don’t know who a lot of these people became.
I flipped through the
pages, and wondered how much Joey has changed, or Mike, Kris or Drew—how much they’ve
all changed; everyone I knew. Who did they all become? Who are they now? What
are their lives like?
Then I saw a picture of
Mary, the last we ever took. The one after we’d both graduated from college,
after we hadn’t talked in months. We took that picture, ate dinner, hugged and
said goodbye, then never talked again.
And then all my memories
of her pulled themselves out from the old closets of my mind, like ocean Leviathans
being reeled in on 30-pound poles. All the peaks, and all the ravines. All the
steps forward, and all the stumbles down. All the nights out, and all the days
lost.
Everything we did
together, all the thoughts we shared, constructed itself like an architecture
of memories. Words we’d spoken that built bridges between us, and dreams we
painted onto a shared canvas.
What secrets did we share
in our dreams? What cities did we walk through that will never have a map? What
people did we meet that will never have a name?
Something moved again.
I looked up.
No.
Mary was standing in the attic.
She was looking at me. Looking into my eyes.
I blinked, and she was
gone.
No… No, this is
impossible—I must have just imagined it—this is impossible.
She had been standing
there only a moment ago, but now she’s gone. She had been standing there,
standing by my… By my father’s…
My father’s old hunting bag.
No. I stood up. I didn’t want
to deal with this, I didn’t have to deal with this. I’m going crazy just being
up here. I need an exterminator. I need to hire someone to do all this for me.
I flew down the attic
stairs. I didn’t even bother closing the attic up, I just kept walking through
the second story, down to the first floor, and out the front door. The moment I was outside, walking out into the
trees surrounding the house, I lit a cigarette and took a long drag. I kept
walking, and walking, and walking away from the house. I didn’t want to think
about what I saw, I just wanted to fall into the trees.
These woods had been my
father’s woods—a whole square mile of it my father bought in the 70’s. It was
on the outskirts of the suburbs, and in the suburbs, the city at the center of
us all kept encroaching on us, so these woods were like a last bastion of something
old and natural. They’d been my father’s woods. I guess they’re mine now.
I kept walking, and
walking, and walking away, but I was still in my father’s forest—my forest.
Autumn had crept into the world, slowly and
subtly until its presence was undeniable. The forest was a small world of
silent giants carrying a canopy of green, yellow, red and orange on their shoulders.
Beneath the giant’s feet were roots dug into soil, roots cracking stones
beneath the earth. Worms, beetles and mice burrowed beneath the grass. Deer eat
the grass, wolves eat the deer, vultures eat the wolves, and time eats the
vultures.
I kept smoking
cigarettes. Each one, I put out on the sole of my shoe, then put in my pocket.
I wouldn’t dare leave them in the forest. I wouldn’t dare drop them on the ground.
Not even the vultures would eat them.
My father was somewhere
in that world now, buried in rock and roots, rivers and grass. Buried somewhere
where the world dies, only to feed the dying giants above.
I never made it anywhere
near the edge of the forest, I never made it to the deeper trails and through
the deeper glades. Eventually I stopped, and sat down on a tangle of knotted roots.
I lit one last cigarette—I’d gone through three already—and stared into the forest.
I tried not to think about the attic, or my father, or going back to the house.
I tried only to stare.
But then I turned back
toward the house. What had I just seen?
Was that real?
There wasn’t any answer—not
from the woods, not from the grass, not from the dirt, not from my head. The grass
churned with the air, the birds chirped, and the air danced across my skin, But
there was no answer.
I stood up, and turned
toward the house—well out of view through the trees.
It doesn’t matter. No, it
wasn’t real. It was your imagination, that’s it.
I have to go back soon. I
have to… I don’t know, I have to do something. I’ll call pest control, that’s
what I’ll do.
When the house came into
view, something seemed odd, but I couldn’t tell what it was at first. The front
door was open. I didn’t remember leaving it open. Closer now, and I could see
colors across the windows.
Ribbon? Tape? What was
it?
And… And there were
colors coming out the front door? I started jogging up to the front of the
house.
Yarn trailed out from the
front door, across the wooden patio, and onto the grass and dead leaves. Yarn
of all different colors, and string, twine, strips of silk—what the hell
happened? It didn’t make sense—nothing made sense for a moment. Then I saw
something run by the windows of the second floor, then through the front door I
saw something run across the living room.
Kids. A bunch of dumbass
kids tearing up the house. That was my rationalization. I don’t know what they
were doing, I don’t know how, but I didn’t care. I would get them out of the
house, and I would clean their mess up. I forced myself to be mad, forced
myself to be furious, and walked inside.
And the moment I stepped
inside, I wasn’t furious anymore. It wasn’t kids. It couldn’t be. The yarn, the
ribbon, the string and the twine were everywhere.
All across the walls,
coming down from the ceilings, wrapping across the floor, and tied in chaotic
nets through the air. Like fauvist cobwebs, ribbon, string and silk covered the
walls, and like a surrealist’s spider-webs, all the string and silk and ribbon wove
in and out of each other through the air, forming an insane cloud of color
between the walls.
Thud
thud, thud thud thud…
Something ran across the
floor above me. There were voices, people talking.
I looked across the ribbon-strewn
ceiling, then around the rooms of the walls, and then to all the doors and
hallways littered with yarn.
My heart thumped in my
chest, and I could feel my palms getting sweaty. What the hell had happened?
What was this? Who was upstairs?
I turned to the staircase.
It was almost completely clogged with webs of twine and silk. I studied it
nervously for a few moments.
THUD
THUD THUD THUD.
I whipped my head up to
look at the ceiling. Someone had run across the floor upstairs.
I looked back at the
staircase. I had to do something… I had to find out what the hell happened, and
who the hell was upstairs.
Slowly, calmly, I
approached the staircase—evading hanging webs and bridges of string as I did. I
stopped a foot away from the bottom of the stairs. There was so much hanging
between the walls—I could avoid getting touched by most of it, but I’d have to
come into contact with most of it. I don’t know why it made me so nervous, but I
hesitated there for a moment before plunging in.
There was a moment where
I wondered if this was real or not—like the moment before you dive into cold
water, and wonder if you’re actually diving into cold water.
But as they brushed
across my skin, the ribbon and silk and yarn all felt real. This schizophrenic
tunnel of craft-supplies felt real—felt tangible, physical, material. There was
a part of me that had been wondering whether this was Along
the way up the staircase, I began to notice photographs dangling from the webs.
Photographs, then newspapers clippings, and then lines of text cut from books, cities
cut from maps and definitions cut from dictionaries.
They were all hanging
from the string and yarn, like they were apart of some arts-and-crafts mobile,
or the creation of some conspiracy theorist. What the hell was this? What had
been made in my father’s house? What was this filling the halls and filling the
staircase? What happened?
Someone—a child—I think
-ran across the top of the staircase. They flitted into existence one moment,
then ran into oblivion the next, but I could still hear their footsteps
pounding away at the floor. No…
Had children done this?
Was this the work of small kids? With many careful steps and uncertain
maneuvers, I made it to the top of the staircase. Immediately, I noticed small
movements that seem to fill the second-floor hallway. Crawling all across the yarn
webs were mice, bugs and spiders… And they were all carrying objects with them.
I saw small mice carrying
little nick-knacks with them—pens, miniature figurines, keys—bugs rolling
marbles and dice across silk bridges, and spiders preying on toy soldiers caught
in a twine web. They all maneuvered through the webs, around and across photographs,
and between pillars of newspaper clippings.
For a few moments, I
tried to digest what I was looking at. I tried to digest the sight of all the
bugs crawling across the silk bridges and yarn spirals, with all the little
objects they carried on their backs and in their mouths, and all the mice running
through the air like naked tight-rope walkers. But several moments later, it
still didn’t make sense. Several minutes later, I still couldn’t understand
what I was looking at. It seemed so obvious though, it seemed like everything
was right their, like all the pieces of the puzzle had already been put
together, and it was just the image the puzzle formed that didn’t make sense. My
eyes travelled to the end of the hallway. The staircase to the attic was still
open. Mary was standing at the base of the staircase. She was staring at me.
No. No, she couldn’t be
real, that couldn’t be right. That person standing there, that can’t be a real
person, that can’t be…
“Mary?” I called out.
Mary didn’t move. She
kept staring.
I put my hand out, almost
as if to wave at her. “Mary,” I spoke, “is that you?”
Mary stood and stared a
moment longer, then turned and walked up the stairs into the attic. “Wait!” I
called out, “What’s going on? Where are you going?” But she wouldn’t stop.
She disappeared into the
attic.
I hesitated only another
moment, then plunged into the hallway.
As quickly as I could
without tearing the webs of yarn and string down, I made my way down the
hallway, toward attic. The webs got thicker the further I went. Only a yard or
so from the stairs, the webs were so thick that there was no maneuvering around
them anymore. I had to push through thick mats and nots of fabric, ridden with
crawling creatures. Mice investigated the back of my neck before scurrying back
to the webs. Cockroaches and water beetles crawled across my arms and hands. One
spider stepped like a manic dancer across my face before I swatted it away, and
god knows how many other spiders had found their home on me.
Finally, my hands found the
staircase to the attic, and I swung my feet onto the bottom steps. As I climbed
the staircase, the webs only got thicker and thicker toward the top. I was immersed
in the fabrics—my entire body—and all across my body was a crawling, scampering,
skittering sensation—my scalp, my ears, my lips, my nose, across my chest,
inside my pants, and down to my ankles—but I couldn’t see the things crawling
across me, and I couldn’t do anything to stop them.
The webs suffocated all
light, and the clutter and fabric grew so dense it was like digging my way up
from the bottom of a landfill.
Then suddenly my body burst
through a membrane of fabric and photographs. I was gasping for air, as if I’d
just emerged from underwater, and I pulled my body through the writhing fabric
into the attic.
Laying on the ground, I
looked around the attic. Networks of yarn wove through the air in complex
patterns and structures. Photographs and newspaper clippings dangled from the material
like cosmopolitan leaves. The entire attic was a thicket of chaotic material,
with a clearing at the center—surrounding the entrance of the stairs—but
otherwise there was nowhere to go in here.
Mary was nowhere to be
seen.
There was no path to the
windows. The only other way out was back down the crawling hole next to me.
There was no path to
anything in here.
I sat up and looked
around. No path. Nothing. No where to go. No path.
Then my eyes caught sight
of something.
No. That wasn’t true.
There was one path.
It led to my Father’s old
duffel bag. It was my father’s duffel bag he used when he went hunting in the
midwest. He would carry the few changes of clothes he brought into the
wilderness, his compass, a map, knives, and other small things he brought with
him. I crawled across the floor of the attic, hand over hand through to the
duffel bag.
It smelled like oiled
leather. Gun powder from spent bullet casings. The earthy aroma of dried
leaves.
It reminded me of him.
I never went hunting with
him. I was afraid of guns. But I can’t count the number of times I wish I’d
gone with him.
My thoughts travelled
back to when he’d be gone. My mother let me rifle through his things in their
room. There was his bed and his closet, his flannel and his coon-skin hat. In a
dream I had when I was a small child, I crawled across his floor at night and
into this same duffel bag. I wormed my way through the contents until I came
out into a forested mountainside. In the dream, my father was there, waiting.
Next to his duffel bag, I
saw a pile of old drawings I had made when I was a child.
There was an old picture
of mine where the moon was keeping me safe as I slept. When I was a child, I
used to think the moon followed me overhead. The moon was alive and thinking.
No longer. There’s a picture of a half-man, half-deer person. I’d shown it to
my father, and told him he’d meet the deer person one day in the woods.
So many ideas I had, so
many creative and beautiful thoughts. Elves in the woods, dancing in whispering
glades. Towering monsters that stalked forests in twilight hours. Aliens lost
from space, trying to survive on our planet. So many small ideas from when I
was child. From long before my father’s disease had taken hold, long before he
had passed on.
Something moved behind
me.
I turned around. Standing
in the center of the room, in the clearing of strings and yarn, stood my
father.
It was as if he had never
died. As if he was still here with me. No. He was there with me. He looked at me with watery blue eyes and
smiled. Every wrinkle cracked across his face with stark detail, and every line
was so beautifully human.
“Dad?” I asked.
He only smiled.
Standing up, I took a
step toward him into the attic, and stepped into the forested mountainside.
I was in the attic still,
I knew I was, but… I was in the forest with him.
My father beckoned me
over to him, and I walked with him through the forest. We walked together
through this dream, and then we began walking through all my other dreams. He
knew the way through all the moonlit cities, where shadowy creatures flew
across the sky, and knew the paths up spiraling architecture—bent and contorted
as they pierced into the starry heavens.
We went into the castles from
various nightmares and spoke happily with the ghosts and the vampires, like long
lost friends. Old, hidden caverns and buried temples were rediscovered. We admired
these galleries of secrecy like children in a museum.
There were beaches we
walked across. Waves crashed against our ankles, and soon we were walking into
the ocean. Fish of all colors swam by. We stepped through the streets of coral
reefs where eels snaked across winding alleyways and dark tunnels.
A coral reef bloomed
around us into walls of buildings, with windows from old shipwrecks, and
statues from drowned civilizations. The city in the ocean became every city in
the world, and the people of the city became every person I’d ever met. I
looked around, and it was still my attic, but the attic was so vast now, so
infinite. Time was nothing, and for brief seconds we visited infinity together.
The cities we visited, the people I met, the dreams I had, and all the memories
forgotten; all were right there, right in front of me.
All of it was right
there, right before my eyes.
All the thoughts I had
never shared, all the ideas that fell apart and were lost in my head. All the
people I hated, all the people I loved, and all the people I passed by without
a second thought. We were all standing in my attic, we were all walking through
our memories of each other, we were all talking in this forest with my father.
There in the attic, I could hear every word and every sentence we’d ever spoken—every
movement of the eye, every posture we ever held, every movement we ever witnessed.
All of you. I could see
all of you
There in the attic, I
could see all of you, and you’re all pulling on me with fistfuls of yarn.
And you were all me. You
were all pulling these strings in my head, and you made me all I would ever be.
Every word you’d ever said is all I am. Every memory of you is all I am.
Everything that you are is all I am. All I could ever be is all of you, because
all we are is pieces of each other.
I saw all of you, and I
saw the truth. I saw myself, and I knew what I was looking at. I saw all of us,
and I knew exactly where I was.
Then it all began to slip.
Fall away. In my dreams, I was alone. The vampires slept in coffins I couldn’t
open, and the ocean cities were abandoned. In my memories, we never spoke again,
and I never found out if any of us had quit smoking. In my childhood, I
deciphered all the rational truths, and the moon couldn’t keep me safe anymore.
In our forest, you all turned your backs to me. In my attic, you all walked
back into the pictures in the boxes.
I ran after all of you,
yelling for you to stop. Bookshelves of all our stories fell down around me.
The bedrooms of friends I sat in collapsed brick by brick. Kitchens, dining
rooms and living rooms of family—blood or no blood—crumbled with age.
I scrambled through all
the wreckage, chasing after you all. Secrets glittered in the debris like small
gems, but I couldn’t stop to pick them all up. My lost thoughts peered from
ruined classrooms I couldn’t go back to. Wherever I looked, I couldn’t find my
old memories, or those old feelings I’d felt.
“Come back!” I yelled,
pulling on all the strings.
But you all turned away,
and now I can’t picture your faces in my head.
“Wait, come on! Where are
you going?” but you wouldn’t answer.
You all disappeared
somewhere, and I can’t see the lines on the map telling me where.
“Come on, Please! Please!
Come back!” I screamed, reaching out for them.
But I couldn’t believe
that the moon watched over me anymore, try as I might.
“No, tell me again! Just
tell me one more time!” I called out to all my old thoughts.
I couldn’t believe that
there were fairies in the forests, dragons in the mountains.
“What did I lose? What
was in my head? No, no, what was it? What was it?”
And, despite all my
effort, I couldn’t remember the truths I’d known as a child.
In my attic, you all left
me to the dusty relics and lifeless debris. In my attic, you all disappeared
into the walls, filed down the creaking, wooden stairs, and climbed out the
windows. All the webs of strings pulled themselves back into the cracks in the floorboards.
I wanted to stop them, I wanted to pull them back, I wanted to dig at the
wooden floorboards until my fingers bled, and find wherever these strings led
to.
I didn’t know who I was
looking at anymore, and it didn’t make any sense. I didn’t see the truth, and I
didn’t know the answer. I looked around for everyone, but everyone was gone. I
looked around, hoping I was still in a forest of people at the bottom of the
ocean, but no. I was here. I was in this attic. I was alone.
It was evening now. Yellows
and oranges were streaming in through the right side of the attic. “Damn,” I
said to no one, “damn it all.”
I looked out the window,
and imagined going outside for a cigarette. “Damn. Damn, damn, damn this place.”
Something moved.
I turned.
Mary stood there in the
attic. Staring at me.
I stared back.
Not even meaning to, I
blinked. She was gone.
All of it. All that I had
seen. All that I knew now, all the places my father had taken me, and all the
people I had met. It was almost too much.
I looked around the attic—completely
normal again, with no strings or lengths of yarn or ribbon—and imagined myself
clearing this room out.
Fifthwall Renaissance 