The Lightning Stenography Device: A Psychedelic Odyssey, page 14
Snorting, I said, “They’re obviously people, Lazarus, and you would know. But that doesn’t mean I’m creating a universe.”
“See them over there?”
On Lazarus’s soft words, I acknowledged the family chattering to my left, a nice-enough soccer mom sort with her hair in a headband sitting across from her beefy husband while their children, laughing, threw ice at once another. Quietly, I sucked a tooth.
“What’s wrong?” asked Lazarus.
“Acting like that in a restaurant,” I muttered, while my dining companion picked ice from my glass and slipped it down my shirt. I yelped in surprise, and the children laughed while Lazarus, with a too-big grin, folded his hands.
“I couldn’t resist! You were being such a curmudgeon. They’re just kids, Cassius. See how much fun they’re having? Ah, that’s pure! And you know what’s even more incredible?” he asked, eyebrows lifted. “Those people exist so we can see them.” At that, I laughed because it seemed such a solipsistic thing to say, but he was undeterred. “The entity who orchestrates this universe, who operates it, who positions everything together, created them—or at least accounted for their existence and unconsciously shepherded them here—so that you and I could have a conversation about them.”
“Doesn’t that seem ludicrous to you?”
“It’s true! I mean, God didn’t consciously create those people. God didn’t say, ‘All right, I’m going to branch off this ancestral line here, and through this point, these specific things have to happen to get this family to this restaurant on this date.’ Remember our ‘crowded street’ metaphor from before. You don’t do that as an author, do you? There’s an unconscious, material function which takes care of that so consciousness doesn’t have to: the forward movement of genetic evolution instead of the upward, memetic one. There are a lot of layers to this operation. And that’s why the whole thing is so incredible, so intricate. I mean, think about it: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?”
“Oh, come on.”
“Something has to be observed to be real,” insisted Lazarus, tapping the Formica table.
“Those people would observe themselves, then.”
“Not necessarily. I will refer you to a one-panel comic by the Sunday-morning strip artist, Gary Larson.” He pulled from the lining of his robe a phone and began tapping away. “Two microbes are married, and the husband microbe is watching television while the embittered wife microbe shouts, ‘Stimulus, response! Stimulus, response! Don’t you ever think?’” Laughing at his own shrill impression of the lady microbe, he slid the phone to me. I chuckled to see the comic.
“I remember this one. I never really got it. I remember reading it a couple of times as a kid and being almost bothered by it.”
Tapping the temple of his forehead, he said, “That’s because it made you think.”
He leaned forward, but as he opened his mouth, he realized that wasn’t close enough for him. Instead, he slipped from his seat and into my side of the booth, forcing me to scoot over if I wanted to avoid touching him. Even that wasn’t enough, of course, because he draped an arm around me to draw me close to his whispering mouth.
“Those people over there are unconscious, Cassius. They’re not awake like you and I, really. And I know that sounds like a shitty thing to say,” he agreed, lifting his free hand to silence me before I spoke, “but it’s not an insult. It’s just the way it is. People can choose to wake up at any time. There are advantages to it, and disadvantages to it, but it’s always easier not to. Most don’t want to, and most never will, and, frankly, some people probably shouldn’t. But some people should, and will, and do.”
“Wake up from what, exactly,” I said, scouting out the exits from my uncomfortable position.
“It’s hard to explain, because you have to use a metaphor to explain it, and the problem with metaphors is that they hypnotize you back to sleep. You start taking them literally. I read this book once, about blue feathers and movie theaters; and another one about smoke and mirrors and moonlight; and another one with a talking snake in a garden giving fruit to sexy ladies. They all pretty much say the same thing, but the more you become invested in one particular metaphor, the further you get from the actual truth, until the truth and the symbol are irreconcilable.”
Barely hanging on to what he said, I asked, “What does this have to do with waking up?”
“The waking up comes when you realize the truth being implied.”
“What, the hippie, ‘we are one’ Buddhist thing? Not that that’s not a nice way to be if you get around the nihilism, but—”
“Oh, it’s not nihilistic. Maybe to those entrenched in a Western mind-set, who have experienced only their egos and believe in the power of materiality to the exclusion of the power of the mind. But this isn’t the Buddhist thing. Well, it is that,” he confirmed, spreading his hands, “but it’s not that. It’s that and less than that and more that. Absolutely, we’re all one, all part of the same entity, the same experience. But I’m clearly not you, physically or psychologically. Right?” He patted my arm and then touched my head and his own head, saying, “Unless you’re writing about me, you don’t know I’m thinking about how I want to blow this joint and go get a bratwurst at the place by the hardware store.”
Laughing, I drew my wallet from my breast pocket and said, “That’s fine. We should probably continue this conversation someplace more private,” but he was already up and going for the door. Shaking my head, I opened my wallet and found there three thousand dollars through which I rifled, having difficulty with both the amount of bills and the bills themselves, which were one figure at first but proved different on second consideration. I’d taken the three bills in my left hand to consist of a five-dollar bill and two ones, but when I looked closely, there was a wrongness to them. I frowned until, from the doorway, my friend said, “Cassius,” and I dropped the bills upon the table to follow him.
On the crowded street, Lazarus lead me through downtown without a word, his eyes bright and cast on the sky, the trees, the buildings and street signs and people. He took in all things and paid the utmost attention to every detail, laughing at a sticker on the back of a Kesey-style acid bus, smiling at sunflowers laconic in the breeze. By the time we were alone in a quieter part of town, he had noticed a raven’s feather lying in the black background of the gutter and snatched it up with a cry of delight.
“I have no idea how you noticed that,” I said, and he grinned, handing it over to me.
“You just have to observe! That’s the thing I’m trying to explain to you. See”—he led the way, and I realized he had given me the feather, so I shrugged, slipped it into my breast pocket, and followed the man down the narrow sidewalk—“there’s a duty to observe the world around us. To be the most successful, knowledgeable versions of ourselves. If you’re knowledgeable, and doing everything you’re supposed to be doing—which is really all anybody can ever do when you think about it—then God can come into you, and observe through you.”
“Isn’t that fatalistic? Doesn’t that leave a lot of room for people to say, ‘I guess God destined me to be lazy’?”
“Sure, people will say that, but it’s a middle-ground, give-and-take thing. The idea of a person erecting a temple, the idea of the body being a temple, the idea of the spiritualization of the body and the will, these are all very important. You can’t host God in a cogent way without being prepared for it, the way certain molecules can only bond in certain ways with certain other molecules. That means the psychological experience which people interpret as the divine is a two-way street. God chose you because you write, because you have the proper context and set of experiences to bear the weight of this story of knowledge. Meanwhile, you’re turning toward God because it’s what you’re meant for, like an acorn destined for the oak.”
Sighing, I shook my head and said, “I really don’t know about you, pal.”
“Of course you don’t! That’s why you’ve been reshelving me for all these years. A—granted, excellent—singer dies, leaves behind a rock opera, and you sit on me for years just because I happen to share a name with its title, then get too caught up in your own drama to consider me for a decade.”
“It seemed respectful, holding you back. The timing was poor. And as for my personal stuff—”
“Ah, fiddlesticks, excuses. You were writing about me for years before that album came out. You just wanted an excuse to work on something easier. Know what a ‘zeitgeist’ is? The same thing that’s writing your REM Story. Ride that wave, baby.” Laughing, Lazarus patted my cheek, then without so much as faltering for the overly polite, quick-to-stop Oregon drivers and autos, dashed across the street to the hardware store parking lot and the Bento-Dog stand there situated. One agitated purchase later I, at the wrought-iron table nearby, remembered what had bothered me in the cafe. “It’s hard to focus with you. Jumping from thing to thing like this isn’t good for my brain. This business with waking up— Hey”—I was again derailed, this time by a nakedness, an ice-white urgency which had me reaching into my pocket, then patting again and again as I sat up to realize—“my wallet is gone!”
“Just relax,” said Lazarus, munching away, grimacing as onions flew from his lunch but then getting the idea to feed the birds.
“What do you mean, ‘just relax’! I just had it, we just bought the damn—” I got up from the table, but Lazarus didn’t so much as sit upright as he busied himself tearing off pieces of bread.
“It’s not going to be there.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s not anywhere, where we are and the way we’re being. You follow me?”
“No!” I knocked on the window of the bizarre establishment, calling, “Excuse me!”
The person who had sold us the hot dogs (unnerving resemblance to Minerva, as it happened), slid open the window. “No refunds, sorry.”
“I’m not interested in a refund, but did you see a wallet up here?”
“I watched you put it back in your pocket,” said the clerk, and I patted my breast pocket, empty even of feathers, while grumbling, “Thanks,” before dropping back into the seat across from Lazarus.
Being angry never solved anything. That was what I told myself while I assessed this madman’s face. No, it never solved a thing at all, but sometimes it felt good. Granted, it didn’t make sense to be angry at Lazarus. There was no way he had grifted the wallet from me. But still, he was talking as if he knew something about it. I asked at last, “Where is it?”
“You’ll get it back,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Just deal with it, you’ll be fine. It’ll seem like another hour or so now, but it’s the blink of an eye. You won’t even know you lost it until you read the printout.”
“That’s a pretty big gap, between an hour and the blink of an eye.”
“Time doesn’t matter as much when you’re in a situation like this, like I keep telling you.” Dusting off his hands, he belched into his fist, excused himself, and continued. “So, what are some of the things you need in a character?”
“What the hell do you mean?”
Laughing, Lazarus asked, “When you’re writing a story, what are some basic things you need from a character? What do you, as a writer, tend to write about?”
“People ready for change?” I asked, and Lazarus’s eye drifted sidelong to the store across the street with its bright-pink tuxedo on display like a siren.
“Sort of, but it’s more than that. You write about somebody you can empathize with, right? Somebody with whom you have an emotional tie.”
“Generally—” I said, beginning to qualify, but Lazarus waved a hand.
“I’m not interested in counterexamples. I just need you to follow me for a minute, Cassius, because I’m here for something serious.” He folded his hands and lowered his head. “Something which requires our focus.”
Humbled, I folded my hands in a manner similar and, shifting, said, “Sorry.”
“The thing is that, yeah, sure, you can write about somebody you don’t empathize with, but what kind of story is that? To make a compelling character, whether hero or villain, you’ve got to empathize with them, and the same is true of reading. In fact, if you can empathize with both the villain and the hero, it’s a lot better, since that’s how life is, right?” I nodded, and Lazarus went on. “God wants to empathize with us, and God wants us to empathize with each other, because in empathizing with each other, we’re empathizing with God—even, or especially, when we empathize with the worst of mankind. ‘But I tell you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,’ in Christian parlance.”
“I hate to interrupt you, but you mean to say that God, some pan-dimensional entity so far above us we could never conceive of it, wants empathy?”
“Well, again, it’s more complex than that. What God is really after is understanding, which is just a kind of pathos. Doesn’t everybody want empathy? Isn’t that why we read stories, why we interact with one another to begin with? To have somebody to empathize with, somebody to empathize with us? But, of course, there’s no way to completely empathize with another human being, because we haven’t been through every moment of their life: we don’t have their brain or an understanding of exactly the type of person they are inside. We only have our own, personal consciousness. That’s why I hate books that flip from viewpoint to viewpoint without an in-text explanation. That’s just not how life works. Aren’t there some lives you wish you could understand end to end? Isn’t that why you write? So you can really understand what makes people, people?”
“I write for a lot of reasons,” I said, and Lazarus spread his hands.
“That’s right: lots of reasons, probably as many reasons as you have characters. And characters, themselves, are created for specific reasons, like those guys.” By pure coincidence, the family from the restaurant walked down the side of the street opposite us, past that pink tuxedo. “Think about that. All their ancestors, all their friends and relatives, all the people who happened to interact with those relatives to propel them, one way or another, toward their fate. All of those countless people have had to exist just so that you and I can see this family twice today. Probably a third time later, because that’s how these things work.”
I shook my head, finished my sausage, and said to my friend, “You’re a narcissist.”
“If no one was conscious enough to observe them, Cassius, could those people really be said to exist? If they’re not conscious enough to observe themselves, somebody has to do it for them.”
“Is that what you mean by this business of waking up? Consciousness?”
“Absolutely.” Lazarus hopped up, disposed of our trash, then uttered a delighted squeal as the hardware store’s Tom Bombadil–esque busker began playing “Cindy” on his banjo. “I love that song!”
“Don’t get distracted,” I told him, and he laughed, catching himself.
“Multitasking is physically impossible for your brain,” Lazarus told me, beginning to head down the street and adding, “Do you want to go to the beach?”
“Sure,” I said, as if Ashland had a beach, not even registering that we were nowhere near the shore because I was too busy correcting him. “People are conscious, though. I mean, they’re alive, they’re alert and aware. You ask them a question, they answer it.”
“Yes and no. They’re alive, sure. But conscious? That’s sort of a difficult thing to say. The more you follow the crowd, give yourself up to group psychology and society’s standards of ethics, or religion, or whatever, the more hypnotized you’ll be by all of this. Then, like the microbes in our Gary Larson strip, we’re just sitting in our chair, watching television, acting unconsciously in response to stimuli: buying things, doing things, even creating things unconsciously, all because of the exquisite illusion pervaded around and within.” He waved a hand before him, indicating everything, the fixed-gear bike shop, the trees, the prattling jays. “The illusion is that you are separate from everything else, and this is all there is, and death is the end. It’s all parlor tricks. Trick of the light, if you will.” He laughed at some private joke while I huffed.
“I fail to see how you can be hypnotized by reality.”
“You can, though! The Hindus say, ‘Maya,’ or ‘illusion.’ I mean, sure, life is absolutely real. If I were to pinch you”—he tried to pinch my cheek, and I dodged it, barely—“you’d feel it, or if you were to trip”—this, I very nearly did, my right foot dragging as my left foot caught me—“you’d definitely feel it. All the things you do in the world, all your accomplishments, all the people you love, they’re real! Absolutely. But they’re also a fiction.”
“That sounds like indescribably high levels of bullshit,” I said, failing to recognize that we turned a corner near a yoga studio and emerged on a boardwalk populated with a murmuring sea of excited people where there was normally, I would come to find, a railroad, a field, and a series of small businesses with second-floor apartments. Certainly no beach. Never offended, Lazarus laughed, leading me past the ticket stand where I was forced to do a double take upon seeing again the family from before.
“It sure sounds like bullshit, I know! That’s why there’s a lot of trouble with using symbols and metaphors. Of course, that’s what all words are: symbols and metaphors.”
The arcade was packed but the Skee-Ball alleys were empty, so we took up the two on the end and began feeding quarters to the machines, even though I couldn’t remember having change in my pocket. I supposed it was from the hot-dog clerk, but there was no placing it. As he got his first ball in the upper-left-hand corner, my friend said, “It’s sort of a challenging notion to get across in words. Like I said before, with empathy, you can know something, or you can experience it. I can just tell you about me and what kind of person I am, but if you write a story about me, you’ll live my life and feel what kind of person I am the way a reader who reads about me will, too.”
