Our painful love, born from the center of time, our daily nostalgia given to us today, itself the larva of the great and true nostalgia, projects into the past what it foresees as our destiny and future: it searches deep within the caves, cellars, basements, cells, and grottoes of time for what might be found in the rarefied air and metaphysical light of the attic. It desperately searches for something that must be found, a way out that must be uncovered, even though no organ exists that can sense it. We are constantly searching in the opposite direction, but the more mistakenly we search, the more we feel joy and certainty, because diametric opposites must lie on the same axis, and this itself is a powerful connection. We can only see our target in a mirror, in illusion, but we know that it exists somewhere in reality. Our blindness toward the future is like some patients’ corporeal agnosia: for them, the right (or left) half of the world has simply disappeared, along with the respective half of their bodies. There is not even nothingness for them. It is like the absolute silence of those born deaf, who lack any idea or intuition of sound. Metaphors, circumlocutions, approximations, the basest or most ingenious of verbal tricks, definitions by negation — you can try everything, but for someone who does not feel, for whom an area of reality does not exist, it quickly becomes tiresome to keep asking what it is like, what is comparable to something he will never know. Metaphorical speculations are, for him, simple parlor games, symbols of aesthetic value more than a deep need to define. Would we fall back on these kinds of glass-bead games, were it not for nostalgia? If passivity did not cause us pain? If we did not suffer like dogs when we weren’t searching, torturing ourselves with questions we know all too well we cannot answer, because the answer would not be a word or phrase but a deep and dramatic modification to our body’s schema and our being’s essence. We are not like someone blind from birth, but like someone who lost his sight in childhood, who sometimes dreams of things he cannot conceive: images and colors, shapes and shadows, lips, eyes, a hand that he only recognizes as an evanescent emotion, a foreboding that someday he will see again, not with his eyes, but with all the skin of his body, and not just with his skin, but his viscera, his veins and arteries, his trachea and esophagus, his pelvic bones and endocrine glands, his blood and saliva and the musk of his sweat. And not just with his body, but with the dogs and acacia and apartment blocks and cars and stores all around him, the seasons and constellations — a foreboding that he will see, someday, with the great eye, clear and pure as the whole, outside of which only non-existence exists.
Abjection and glory, like mucous that can just as well be holy myrrh, both vest the form of our body. Abjection, because we are worms, tubes with a double symmetry, nutrition in our center, relation and reproduction at our extremities, guts full of fecal matter between our brains and our genitals. The capacity for thought that we trumpet is no more wondrous a phenomenon than the ability of deep-water fish to generate light, or the power of an eel to produce electric shocks. Maybe we do have an organ to sense the divine, but it’s rudimentary, a plus or a minus, an “it is or it isn’t.” It perceives the divine the way paramecia sense light with a red dot, without actually “seeing.” What can be rescued in us? The soul? The astral body? Consciousness? A simple tumor wipes out all of those things, an epileptic nucleus shakes away memory, the sight of a woman’s hips stops a man’s thinking, an injustice drives us into the purest paranoiac delirium, a dream chills our necks and makes our hair stand on end. The harmony of a billion billion tiny, mushy things (systems and devices composed of tissues composed of cells composed of organelles: ribosomes, lysozymes, mitochondria, Golgi apparatuses, nuclei with chromosomes composed of chains of DNA and RNA composed of nucleic acids composed of molecules of hallucinatory stereosymmetry composed of atoms composed of nuclear particles composed of quarks) barely leaves any room for a splash of sparkling liquid, a clear thought, where the structured dust of worlds could develop. And this is only for a few of the billions of sentient worms that crowd together inside the stomach of a larger worm. They live as long as they’re given, and then they’re reabsorbed into the spiraling conglomeration of the earth. Everything is a grain of sand on a beach as wide as the universe. Where is there room for salvation? And why would you, you in particular, atomic bog, receive eternal life?
Glory is analogously disorienting because the symmetry of all worlds follows from the symmetry of our bodies. The human embryo recapitulates an abbreviated phylogeny of the living world. Swimming in the muscular pool of the uterus, feeling the warmth of the urinary and rectal canals, translucent and curled up, we envelop ourselves with the complications of embryonic layers, becoming, one by one, coelenterates and worms, fish with fluttering gills, amphibians, insectivorous mammifers and primates, until we break the blood-filled vulva and, dirty with meconium, we emerge headfirst into the new place where we live until our next birth. The same magical link exists between the stages of this life and the corporeal scheme of our flesh, as if we could see through time the way we see the panorama of space — as if our lives themselves were human beings made out of time, with structures identical to ours down to the smallest details, and analogous in surprising ways to a gigantic being, whose organs were the countless generations of all living creatures. In a way, by being born, playing, loving, maturing, aging, and dying, we live and breathe the gonads, vertebrae, sphincters, intestines, diaphragms, lungs, hearts, jugulars, jaws, brains, and skulls of our own lifespans.
If our whole lives are only the shadows of our bodies projected onto time, maybe we have super-shadows too — projections that are truer and more complex than the objects themselves. Maybe these shadows live inside us, the way parasitic crabs extend their own substance into the bodies of the host-crabs, but not exactly, because here the parasite is far superior to the host. Our heavenly body, like our physical bodies, has a paradoxical anatomy. It’s assembled from spiritual material, gaseous crystal circulating in diamond veins and jade arteries, pearl capillaries and marble canals, turquoise interstices and opal lymph nodes, jasper kidneys and quartz skin and a zirconium heart and a beryllium brain and sapphire testicles, our interior angels and our interior shadows, and superimposed over the stench-ridden mud of our flesh.
There are seven chakras along the spinal cord, and seven plexuses in the viscera. Three of them are below the diaphragm, the pole of time, of sex, of vegetable life. Separating the spirit from matter, the diaphragm is the border between two kingdoms, because we are amphibious beings between heaven and earth. The diaphragm is the surface of the earth: below it, blind roots grope among the moles, and above it, the corona and its gifts push toward the sky. Under the diaphragm, Muladhara is wrapped like a snake around the sacrum, innervating the snake between the thighs with four petals of thick light. A bit higher, in the small of the back, Svadisthana has six multicolored petals, the queen of the kidneys and bladder, the Leyding cells and the rectum, the place of will and vitality. Manipura has ten petals and illuminates the solar plexus. It tames the anaconda of the bowels, the pallid tongues of the pancreas and spleen, and the blood-red liver with its sack of bile. Above the diaphragm are another three chakras, the pole of the animal, space, and brain. Between the shoulder blades is Anahata, the seat of the feelings, the one that washes our interior islands in blood, the one that nourishes the timus. The gland of childhood, Visuddha, with its sixteen transparent petals, illuminates the vertebrae of the neck, aids the rhythm of respiration, protects the lungs and thyroid, and opens the frozen eyes of the intellect. The triangle between the eyebrows is inlaid with Ajna of the three fires, because there, in the pituitary gland, the queen of the nervous system, is the seat of the soul. And beyond these symmetries, beyond space-time and brain-sex, but toward space and the brain, Sahasrara glistens — the diadem and the spherical eye on the crown of the head, the Aleph of Alephs, the diamond of a diamond world.