Sunday, April 9
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Monday, April 10
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Tuesday, April 11
I had the most powerful dream last night.
I was being shown
a mandella that consisted of interlocking triangles inscribed in
a circle. The circle was bordered with lotus petals. It was a
figure I had seen before (and afterwards, as I described it to Don,
he said it was the Sri Yantra mandella). I was being shown the
figure so I could draw it in a new way and use it to draw Don's
attention to certain parts of it. I was directed to look below
the mandella to see how it was constructed.
There was a line of images or icons. A voice told me that between
any two icons a line could be drawn, and this line was the base of
one of the triangles in the mandella. "The two forces appear to
be in opposition," the voice said, "but the third point of the
triangle, the point that touches the circle, shows that they are
really part of the same thing." Then my attention was drawn to one
particular line, which connected an image of the foot of a dancing
Shiva on the left with the image of a snake on the right. "Draw
a line between these two," the voice said. I did. "This is maya,"
it said.
Then it showed me that one of the images in the row of icons was
Vivekan. This is unusual. I never dream of Don as Vivekan. But
this icon was clearly him, and it clearly stood for Vivekan. I
drew another triangle, with Vivekan on the right and something I
don't remember on the left. It was conveyed to me that this triangle
represented Don--but more than Don as I knew him. All of him: the
Don I know and the other force that pulls him in another direction
and the third point, the perspective that unifies them.
The two triangles were side by side: Don's triangle on the left
and the maya triangle on the right. The Vivekan side of Don's
triangle was almost touching the Shiva's foot of the other triangle.
Don's triangle was bright yellow. The triangle of maya was a dark
color, green or dark red.
Then something magical happened. The triangles I had been drawing
became animated and ascended back up into the mandella, where they
fit into the geometric pattern and were indistinguishable. Then
they glowed and descended again and lay before me on the ground.
The voice said, "Tell him not to fight the fear. The fear is not
him, and he is not the fear. But it is a necessary part of the
design, just like he is." And the triangles ascended and became
part of the mandella again.
There the dream ended. I awoke, and although it was very early in the
morning--sometime around 5:00 AM--Don was awake, too. I told him the
dream. He said I had been given a wonderful gift, and he thanked me for
sharing it with him. "Your subconscious must really be working overtime,"
he said. "Yeah," I said, "postcards from the infinite."
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Postcard from the Infinite
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Wednesday, April 12
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Thursday, April 13
I wanted to see The Trouble with Harry with Don, so I left
work early and we caught the 5:35 show at the Stanford. We drove
to Palo Alto and found parking easily, but before we got out,
he told me, "it's not dying I'm afraid of, or death or what comes
after. It's just that I don't want to leave you."
I can tell he is close to tears as he says this. So am I. I
put my hand on his shoulder. "You'll never leave me," I say.
He smiles and puts his hand on mine.
"Do you remember our vois?" I say, "the Rumi poem? 'We become
thse words we say, a wailing sound mobing out into the world.'
I mean it: you will never leave me. You've changed me
forever, you'll always be here.
He smiles and nods.
"I know you love me with a certainty I've never known before."
"I do."
"That's something new for me. That will always be with me. Anywhere
you go, I'll go, too."
Then we got out of the car and go see a movie.
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Friday, April 14
The brouchure from MidPenninsula Hospice arrives. I open it up
and start reading, looking for the services and price list, as if
shopping for a mechanic. Then I open a brouchure with a timeline
on it. It starts with, "Six months before death, what to do, what to
prepare... Five months before death, what to do..." And so on,
horribly laid out like a spreadsheet. I glance at it only long enough
to notice it goes on to, "Death: the month after death, what..."
I cannot take this level of reality, of concreteness. I close all the
brouchures and put them away, hidden under the tack of files for
monthly bills, landscaping, and the up-coming GALA festival.
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Saturday, April 15
We go to visit Sonny and Gretchen in San Diego. Gretchen takes us to
the Zoo, where we opt not to join the line of folks trying to see the
pandas.
Later, at their home, I come across a quotation in a book about
art that I find very interesting. It's from
John Briggs's Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos
(Touchstone: 1992):
We might specultate that the form of an enduring work of art somehow
resists the brain's tendency toward habituation. A great work seems
to evoke a new, wild strange attractor every time the human brain
encounters it. No matter how many times we read some great poem, listen
to some great symphony, or gaze at some great painting, no matter how
familiar we are with that work, it remains, at some important level of
our perception, unfamiliar. [p. 174]
[The provokative artist] is being more than merely outrageous;
he is doing what artists have always done in order to keep us alive to
the mystery of life.... Thus art does not progress but tries in each
generation to connect the unique spirit of a time with a primordial
insight that lies deeper than chaos. [p. 178]
I think the political conservatives that want to control art
are basically doomed to failure. They want to control the
impression the art makes, and great art is constantly creating
new impressions. If you try to limit it to predefined expressions
and predefined outcomes or effects, you rob it of its life. It
ceases to be art and becomes instead an artifact.
That evening, Gretchen shows us a videotape of a talent show
that was put on at the ashram. She and Don teamed up to portray
a baby while Lalitananda played the mother. The baby wants to
got with Mother to the chanting in the temple. "Why do you want
to do that?" she asks him. "I want to see God!" the baby brawls.
After much slapstick action involving Gretchen's arms combing Don's
hair and brushing Don's teeth, the baby finally makes it to the
ashram. Immediately, he drops into samsara, and a dazzling light
(in the form of a golden sparkler) appears above his head. The
Mother is amazed. Baby has seen God after all!
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Postcard from the Infinite