Liminal Space

I tinker in the liminal space, where idioms go to die, in a flail of mixed metaphors, implications, and asides. My mental universe houses Brahma, Neptune, Jehovah, and many more besides. I don't fuss over paradox. I am a citizen of the imagination.

Sequestered in confusion, so that I might be open to the suggestion of a stranger -- to a stranger suggestion; to music in the mind; to found words, I never knew the meaning of, and had to make my own; like alien instruments I could never play, but knocked against the rocks, and was happy if they only made a novel sound.

Ideas, that, in some other order, might harmonize the cosmos, I took for simple chalks and paints, and arranged according to my taste. As a metaphysician, I was no rigorous explorer and scientist, but a visionary; an artist. I did not seek sense in things, but demanded that things have no sense at all apart from the sense which I, according to my inspired whims, attributed to them.

Out of an apparently chaotic universe, I could make and unmake a thousand likely schemes. But what I could not allow, -- what I could never even permit myself to consider, for more than a trembling moment -- was the possibility that a truth existed; a single truth, which one must find, and endeavor, with all one's strength, to come into alignment with; or else, leave unfound, but governing one's actions nonetheless, albeit unconsciously and in secret.

If such a proposition was considered, I swear, it could only have been for an instant, and never in all sincerity. For the true artist's heart refuses to respect any authority but it's own. To be an artist is to create, but if there is a Creator, and a Creation submissive to His will, then what is there left to create?

If man is made in the image of God, then the artist must be made in the spitting image of God; jealous, and unable to abide any other gods before him. The artist dispenses with God in order that he may exemplify Him; in order that he may create, as God creates, but on a level congenial to himself.

Only for the artist has Creation not been exhausted. Only for the artist are all things superabundant still. Laws are not laws. Circles are not round. If he suspects it, it is possible. If he thinks it, it is so. If he doubts it, suddenly, all is dispersed, and it is as though the thing had never been. Worlds come into being underneath his ponderous eye, only to be annihilated, when he yawns and turns away.

While other men scramble with one another, like rats fighting over a clod of cheese, he is content to be a god in his own mind. And if the world should not leave him to his daydreams, he'll respectfully take his leave of the world (which, in any case, has never held significant value for him as anything but a grist and mill for his daydreams). Who does not envy, -- or is not, at least, tempted to envy, -- this radical freedom and detachment from worldly affairs?

Many struggle to find meaning in the world, and to defend the general faith in the importance of that search for meaning. But here is a type who irreverently insists that there be no ultimate meaning, and that the only meaning which may be attributed to the world must be a meaning which he feels in his own heart. And when he ceases to feel it, it ceases to be meaningful. And then a new feeling, and a new meaning is found.

The heartbeat of the universe is his own. The eye that creates is his own seeing eye. He sleeps under a sky which exists for him alone; as the Sabbath exists for man. He gazes on the tree of life, and basks in its shade, for it sprouts from his own navel.

Now he is Vishnu, but, quicker than the thought, he has become a flaming sword in the fist of Agni. He is a dervish whirling over mountain ranges, glaciers crumbling underfoot. He is ivory in the mouth of a furious tiger. He is polished shell in the riverbed. There he is, carried up into the wind, and pulled apart like a cloud.