This cold I’m still getting over started with a “choking on water” feeling in my chest and moved quickly to a bad fever. My fevers are always bad, Hieronymus Bosch affairs; one of my earliest memories is of a fever dream that has stopped just short of haunting me (it’s like a ghost in my next door neighbor’s attic) the rest of my life.
The dream was more of a (though I hesitate to use the word) vision. It’s hard to delineate it in non-shamanistic language. I think that I hallucinated the ability to see simultaneously telescopically and microscopically across the room (or else could actually do it), and the minuscule borders between objects became gigantic and very distinct in my enhanced sight.
I say distinct, but I don’t mean particularly discrete, or maybe I mean horribly so. The borders didn’t overlap at all, but they abutted in a violent and churning way. I don’t remember which two objects they were, or even if I then knew. But these two objects, or states of matter, or whatever it was I perceived were struggling with each other for dominance of the boundary between them. One object would send fingers of itself, like grains of sand or salt, over into the other and the other would push back with the same. The competing structures looked like the organic crenellations you sometimes see in basalt formations (like the beaches along Vik, in Iceland and the “steps” in places like Yonaguni-jima), and would alternately appear to move very slowly or very rapidly, with an accompanying buzz or whistle that sounded exactly like the temporary tinnitus that you get from listening to live music too loudly (which I now have permanently—wear your earplugs, kids). But I understood that it wasn’t a surge of one thing into the other, it was a competition for the space along the border. Dark would push into light, and what had been light would become dark. Light would retaliate further along the line, and the struggle would continue in a stalemate of shifting fronts.
It was probably the desk and something on it that I focused on or imagined focusing on, but the inference I made at that age (and we’re talking five or six years old) was that these two objects were typical of all objects, constantly struggling with everything around them for space and dominance, pushing the boundaries of what they were in a struggle to assert themselves beyond elementary particles. I think I may have had been recently exposed to the concept of molecules and atoms, and learned that “thin air” was as full of invisible-but-everpresent things as a brick! of lead!, so the idea of moving through various states of matter had been on my mind. It doesn’t matter what two objects started it, it cascaded down to everything I could see (or again, could imagine I could see, as I’m not even sure I was awake). Everything chewed against everything else, all the time, and jealously.
The idea was terrifying and suffocating, and left me with a feeling that reverberates now at least thirty years later, that we are all in constant struggle with the seen and unseen world around us for continuation of our coherent selves, and without some constant and consistent autonomous effort (as terrifying as breathing!), we would become inchoate and diffuse. Thinner than steam, because steam would surely be having that border-line battle with the cool air and the tea kettle and everything around it. “I am steam!” repeatedly endlessly in little drumbeats at the edges of itself. “I am kettle!” in reply, frantic and desperate to keep itself itself. And poor water, slowly turning to steam, somehow losing the battle.
Who knows where these ideas originated from? I have no more concept of how I saw the world at that age than how a child that age now sees the world. I think, though, that just coming to understand all the activity at levels below our sight (and nothing is as alien and strange as an image of a familiar object taken by a scanning electron microscope) had a profound effect on me and led to this fever dream about the very large differences between the very small edges of things. Isn’t it true that at our outermost edges, we fade away to nothing? Or is that nothing something else trying to get in, or out? This shit still bends my mind.
It wasn’t until many years later that I’d learn the Buddhist concept of the material world as being illusory, and the thought of that fever dream (which would regularly recur every time I got sick) came back to me in a rush, the idea of everything constantly boiling itself up out of itself in an endless struggle to be, and enlightenment presented itself to me as an ability to sort of sit at absolute zero in the center of all things and make them stop. At that point, without the constant surge of invisible whitecaps along the borders, wouldn’t everything become cohesive and homogeneous? Wouldn’t everything become simply itself, and at the same time sort of cease? Wouldn’t time end? Buddha on ice. As ice.
No interesting fever dreams this time, though I did have chills so bad I hurt my gums from chattering my teeth together so hard. We don’t have a working thermometer, but I bet I was up there around 104° or 105° for a while—whenever I get a fever, it always goes that high for a bit. Maybe the universe is overclocking my brain to get better performance out of it.
Anyway. Starting to feel better. Looking forward to posting more regularly.
