“ ‘Churches are machines to travel to the past, and the sacred is a mode of feeling your first childhood. The past is everything, the future nothing. That is why they crush us, that is why they frighten and overwhelm us with their sparkling vaults of carnelian and their niches with statues made of mercury. They are enormous because we are miniscule. We are human mites, wandering through temples and basilicas and circular labyrinths, over gentle stone slabs with mosaics, watching the ceiling rise immeasurably high on the nerves of ogives, sparking from the light filtering through magisterial rosettes. We do nothing but remember, we see again with a child’s brain the house where we first opened our eyes, the fantastical room where we learned to perceive shapes and colors. And especially, we see how the gods — our mother and father — changed the lines, interfering between our eyes and the walls, furniture, pictures — in the space that had just gained consistency. Yes, Mamma and Pappa, we meet them in the church, and the myths speak about them. Their emblems decorate all of the iconostases of light, because they are the torero’s cape, they are the idols, they are the gods, they are what they are … The inflexibility of sects, the monotony of voices, and the smells of the censers open a conduit in our minds (or our navels, our genitals, our hearts), there where we are the most naked and soft, toward the Precambrian era of our lives, when we were the passive subjects of quotidian salvation, sucking, swaddling, elimination and sleep, with its enormous freight of dreams. Then there’s our waking, the smile of the gods, always in the same forms: the ceiling, the walls, furniture, and pictures, and then emotions impossible to express in language, since language comes only with a sublimation of emotions, on the fossilized earth of true fear, love and hate. The words we use for those things today are only the shadows of shadows, and even much worse: betrayals, contortions, forced etymologies. We will not sob our hardest anymore, not under torture, not in Job’s despair, the way we did when we were infants, and we will not be able, it is not given to us, whatever we do, to love the spirit of God with passionate abandon, childlike, the way we once loved our mothers, when love was not only love and we were not only ourselves, and Mamma was not only Mamma. The essence of the essence of the sacred: memory. The memory that precedes memory. The transport to the world of an encephalon largely free of myelin, that sees, thinks, and feels differently, closer to the seed we exited — namely, the Exit. Even in the embryonic state, the process of maturity begins, the process of betrayal. Even then the basal axons of the mind are swaddled in blankets of myelin, and thus mummified, separated from one another. They become simple logical cables, barely communicating through their terminations, which still never touch. What used to be a unity of minds, the intimate epidermic contact of neurons, is destroyed even more completely in early childhood. Once the vital circuits are complete, the emotional circuit has its turn for mummification. The white substance spreads like scabies toward the edges of the brain, shaping, sparking, isolating, estranging. And in adolescence the oligodendrogliomas triumph almost in fulclass="underline" thought itself is myelinized. This is how we forget, we forget ourselves, and the blinding reservoir, the central canal of our life’s plasma only appears in dreams, rites, psychoses, per speculum in aenigmate … Oh, if just once, one mystic would be able to melt, through meditation or inspiration, the deceitful white substance, recontacting the skull’s neuronal matter, a billion times more than critical mass, remaking our original brilliance! What fusion, what a magnificent spark and total dissolution of the cosmos and maya! What a rose of nonbeing pearls! Saints and illuminati, gods and archangels would perish with carbonized wings like flies around this fire, original and terminal and incomparable … Like a salmon, this mystic would have to travel backwards, thrashing upstream against time, his brow cutting against the currents, leaping over the high threshold of cataracts and waterfalls to ever purer waters, sweeter and colder, to the point where the spring is lost underground, in the kingdom of pyrites and agates. Simultaneously, he would cross, in reverse, the entire structure which corresponds point by point to the ages of his theology, noology, biology, geology, and nadalogy, all of it illogical and impermeable. He would descend below the pia mater, through the six layers of the neocortex, go deeper through the limbic system, wander the paleoencephalon and the dozens of Arcs de Triumph of the vertebrae, cross with great thrashing and effort the blood-brain barrier, which estranges the central nervous system and buries it in the sarcophagus of the body, unrecognized by antibodies as flesh of his flesh. He would collapse into the somatic, drenched in humors and tissues, and then cross, with intense effort, the second barrier, the body-world barrier (because we are Russian dolls stacked one in the other), cross the golden platter of the world, and reach that same light of the happy void in the end, because time and space and being are one …
“ ‘There are gods, but where is the God? Why have you come here, from your towers, from your rotating lighthouses? Why have you descended snail-spiral stairways within your self, coming here, in the self of all, in the Self? Did you realize that any kind of diving (into thought, dreams, crystals, seas, reading) leads here? That whenever you took a step down the greenish stairway in your block, or a basement, or a grotto in the mountains, you were coming closer to this place? I look at you: you are all here: the real and the potential and the illusory. Real people, characters from books (welcome Dionysus! and you Oliveira …) or films, or computer games (Mario and Luigi, each holding a fat koopa), opaque as the Zohar, semitransparent as agate or transparent as abyssal worms — you are all here, for what? Naturally, for Him. For the constructor. For the one who created. For the weaver. For the shoemaker Arepus who holds us all on his craggy knees. For the brain that dreams us and the sex from which we spouted, hot and screaming in pleasure. For the one who saves by beginning and who does not save, so all may begin. Like a female butterfly, he has scattered his pheromones in the world, and you swarm now around that stomach, musky with sacredness, wilting deeply, so deeply with the desire to be, that is, to be saved!
“ ‘Since you arrived, however, you haven’t seen a single god. Only a cerebro-genital cavern and an Excalibur of light. Chalice and sword, greater than the mind and more eternal than the sex — but no god. So one of you might raise the chorus again, like a spider, “God is dead” and shouting we are in the cylinder of death, we agonize, we agitate, we search stubbornly for exits, we move the ladders here and there, we find dead-end caverns and return to the cylinder, gripped by sudden flashes and folded vibrations, and in the end each of us is extinguished, one after the other, like tiny light bulbs, and we leave behind putrid carcasses, dried shells, and dead eyes at the bottom of the jar. But even in this case, the triumph would be ours. The ashen inventor of the jar would not, as we might have thought, fill it with disappointment, but with pure and fresh happiness. Because where did the cylinder come from? And who crafted the stairs? And whose fingers send out the folded vibration? The fact that he kills us is nothing compared to his great mercy, to the terrifying patience that sprang from his heart when he let us live. Living, we knew him. Being, he saved us, and will we be saved eternally, even when we are smashed to pieces, even when we are crushed, bone by little bone. No one, opening his eyes, sees anything but you, Lord! No one, battered by suffering, howls anything but your name. And any living person who shouts, “God is dead,” moves his larynx with the trade winds of your breath.