That Day

Nowhere is a clear presentation so necessary as in a good mystery novel, and particularly at its conclusion.  Then you discover, as the hero finally explains all, that clues were planted for you pages back.  They were cleverly camouflaged, to be sure, but they were there.

I have no explanation to offer for That Day, just a mystery.  But I do supply you with clues.  I first used the words "That Day"‑-and I always capitalize them‑-in the introductory essay, "The Lonely Limb."  I used them to give the when of my discovery, but‑-did you notice?‑-I never told you the how.  "How" is the mystery of That Day.

Before I tell you about the strange ten seconds I experienced, we must come to an agreement on terms‑-two terms.  The first is "objective reality."  When I use these words I mean the reality we experience through our senses and which we can demonstrate to one another.  It's Aristotle's reality, science's reality.

I accept objective reality as the "really real," with one reservation.  I can't hook into your nervous system and be absolutely sure it's sensing what mine is.  If we both put a teaspoon of sugar in our mouths, each of us will call the taste sweet.  We've been taught to use that adjective for what we experience, but there's no guarantee whatever that we're getting the same sensations on our tongues.  It's possible that if I could link up to your taste buds, I'd say, "Oh, but what you're tasting I call salty."  Nonetheless, we have to trust that our neuron networks are similar.  Without such faith Aristotle, science, and all human communication become meaningless.  I'm not asking that you agree philosophically with my definition of "the real."  I beg only that for these few pages you follow my mind and the way it thinks.

I was born with a scientific bent to my mind, and my training increased these tendencies.  The very first scientific experiment I performed I conducted at age four.  The fastidious had best take my word for its rigorous controls and skip the next two paragraphs.  The details may offend.

When I was awakened each morning as a four-year-old, I was handed a glass of orange juice.  Only after I'd downed it did I toddle to the bathroom and pursue the rituals of my toilette.  It occurred to me one day that my liquid wastes were colored amber, and that this might well be the result of drinking that orange juice.  Tomato juice, I speculated, might turn urine red, and grape juice might make it purple.

True scientist that I was, I didn't seek enlightenment from Authority.  Instead, the following day I refused not only to drink the orange juice but to eat anything else colored yellow, orange, or red.  The morning after this, the first step in my experiment, I dutifully observed the data.  No, lack of these tints in my diet didn't affect the color of my waste.  Now for step two.  For the next twenty-four hours I ate anything I could find that was red, yellow or orange.  Still no effect on my output.  Conclusion: my urine's color is not dependent on what I eat.  To be sure, this isn't a conclusive experiment, but for a four-year-old it's not bad, not bad at all.  I ask you now to remember that this kind of thinking was and is basic to me.

My mother died when I was three and a half, and the bright, fearless, sunny child I was vanished.  Not only did I have the trauma of her death, but the shock of abandonment by my father.  Distraught with grief at his wife's passing, he left me in my grandmother's care.  I seldom saw him after my mother died.

By the end of that year I'd sunk into the twin hells of loneliness and terror.  There was nothing I didn't fear, and most particularly was I afraid of loving people.  They only abandon you, I reasoned, but if you don't love them, then their leaving can't hurt.

The logic was flawless, but the conclusion wasn't.  Loving was as intrinsic a part of my nature as scientific curiosity: I had to love something.  I turned, thus, to the sea.  Not the sailor's world of broad expanse and plumbless depth, but a child's sea, the surf world of the tide.

This world became a person to me.  I called it‑-her‑-the Sea Lady.  She was my playmate, my mother, my confessor.  And she was my teacher as well, for I learned from her what joy was.  With her embrace she gave me freedom, serenity, and strength, and she does so still.

Through her I also learned to explore my inner world, the shrouded land of intuition and imagination.  Soon I became as adept on its byroads as I was in the cool corridors of logical thought.  Unlike most people, I don't favor one pathway over the other, but move effortlessly between them.  Sometimes, in pursuit of an idea, I jump the gap between these two ways of thinking and completely lose my audience.  This in part explains why I seem different.  Curiously, however, such "dual" mentality is available to everyone, and with surprisingly little practice.  I often wonder why others choose to see the world with one eye when double vision, so readily attained, can be theirs.

But next that second term we must agree on‑
"subjective reality."  Most of us first hear these words in a philosophy discussion, but not I.  I learned them in science class, studying the optic system.  For it was then I recounted an experience I'd had at the age of eight. 

The day I referred to had been a rainy one, and grade school classes had assembled in the school's cavernous hall.  We were forbidden to speak or step out of line, and there was little to do but stare and fidget.  I chanced to gaze at a light bulb on the ceiling.  When I looked away, I saw an afterimage of the fixture.

I know now, as do you, that this is the result of fatigue in certain eye cells, and that such an image has no objective reality.  I know now that if I reach for this vision it will recede before me, or, if it's close, that all I can grasp is empty air.  But I didn't know that in second grade.  Hence that scientific curiosity of mine took complete charge, and I walked out of line, fingertips extended.

And I did touch it; I felt the afterimage!  It registered a shock of static electricity, no more painful than when we brush across nylon and touch metal.  My need to know satisfied, I stepped back in line and fidgeted some more.  I never gave the event another thought‑-not until that high school class years later.

Although I knew with absolute conviction that I'd felt that static shock, I also knew, courtesy of science, that I couldn't have.  And so: subjective reality.  And what a tricky little devil it is!  It masquerades as objective reality, you see, and there are only two clues to help tell them apart. 

First, you can't demonstrate subjective reality‑-it cannot be shared.  And second, subjective reality always answers some need in the person experiencing it.  My curiosity when I was eight had been so overwhelming I'd hallucinated an answer.  Again, I don't insist you accept my theories on subjective reality.  I ask only that you remember what I mean when I use the term.

And now, That Day.  That Day was July 12, and all by itself, without its ten-second experience, it would've been significant.  On another July 12, exactly one year earlier, Bill Stevens and I had broken up.  We'd gone together for many months, but on that day he told me he was interested in someone else and wouldn't continue to date me.

Suddenly I was three and a half again.  To love is to be abandoned is to be hurt.  And the only way out is....  But I wasn't three and a half.  I was an adult with a double-jointed mind, and a thousand thoughts swarmed through it now.  I knew better than to sort them immediately, and instead, to distract myself, I went to the movies.  Mondo Cane was playing.

Shaken by the film, I stood outside the theater when the show was over.  There's a reason no one has the right to make me unhappy, I decided.  It's because no one has the power to make me happy either.  Ultimately, only I can do that.  And if what I want is love and acceptance...and if my theory is correct‑-  I'm giving myself a year to prove it.  By next July....

I survived that year, but it doesn't rank as one of my favorites.

Since we traveled in the same circles, Bill and I would meet occasionally.  At first we were coolly polite.  Then, warmly polite.  Then, friendly.  And then it was July, and the phone rang.  Bill had a conference to attend at the shore, and if I'd like to come along, he could see me for lunch and from three o'clock on.  Unless I'd be bored so many hours?

Me, bored?  At the sea?!  Waiting for Bill?!!  I have a genius for understatement: I told him simply I would go.

I spent that shimmering morning at the shore in silent thanks‑-at first with direct prayer, then, when words ran out, with my being.  Reveling in the sensations of gratitude and contentment, I lay, that hot golden hour after lunch, counting the minutes till I could call on the Sea Lady.  There was so much I wanted to tell her.  Time passed, and I sat up abruptly, reaching for my cap.  Others were on the beach, chatting, lolling, playing ball.  I could see them, and directly over them‑-colors.

It was a blend of colors, predominantly warm and golden brown, but eddying, churning, swirling.  As it did so, streaks of single hues would show.  This blend emanated from somewhere on my right (where the surf waited) and seemed headed, purposefully, to my left.  I was incapable of turning my head to trace either its origin or its destination, and, with the exception of a single word, bereft of verbal thought.  That exception was the word: majesty.

But awareness, which is different from thought, flowed through me, replacing the gratitude that had been coursing within.  I was conscious of power, purposeful power, that made the colors irresistible.  But theirs was a purpose I couldn't fathom, only acknowledge.  Similarly, I sensed rightness, and good.  But not in their everyday meanings‑-they were as far beyond love and kindness as these are beyond courtesy.  And lastly there was an awareness that what I saw was a glimpse, a mere peek at something so huge it couldn't be encompassed.

Then the colors were gone.  Everything was as it had been before, my cap still within my hand.  Donning it, I ran to the Sea Lady.

"You aren't the source of those colors, I know that," I told her.

"No," she agreed, embracing me.  "Nor are you."

"But you're part of them somehow, aren't you?"

"As are you.  As are all.  All, all fragments in the kaleidoscope."

"Fragments...in the kaleidoscope?"

"All that is, the concrete, the abstract, all that's animate, all that's not, all you've known and all you can never know: fragments.  An infinity of fragments, each distinct, each separate, each different."

"And each lonely, then.  Infinite loneliness."

"No, not loneliness.  Oneness.  All fragments are joined in the oneness of the pattern.  All are seen together, reflected in the mirrors."

"The mirrors?"

"The mirrors, the twin mirrors.  Without them there'd be no design."

"But what are they?"

"Ah, so many names for them.  They've been called Truth, Illusion, Paradox‑
"

"But I, Sea Lady, I never called them that!  I called them Reality and Imagination!"

"Yes, because you had learned the mirrors reflect more than the fragments.  You had discovered they reflect each other as well."

"Oh, Lady, Lady, my mind reels!  Infinite fragments making infinite patterns and seen in mirrors that reflect each other infinitely.  How can I find answers in such complexity?"

"Must you have answers?"

"I must, I must.  It's the nature of the fragment I am."

"Poor fragment.  It's not the answers that bring satisfaction; it's the search for solution that is happiness.  You're more blessed than you know.  You'll never have all your answers."

"But I must learn about the colors!  What are they?"

"Something you saw in a mirror that reflected a mirror."

"But which mirror?  Reality or imagination?  How did I see them?  And why did I see them?"

The sea had no answers for that, nor do I.  There is only mystery, and my driving curiosity to explore it.

First, I was neither daydreaming nor imagining for those ten seconds.  Intent on going toward the surf, I was certainly not in reverie.  Furthermore, entering the world of imagination is an act of volition, and daydreams are subject to control.  But for those moments my will was totally suspended.  Therefore it wasn't a fantasy but some kind of reality I experienced.

But what kind?  It can't be objective reality.  I knew, even as I saw the colors, that no one else on the beach was seeing them.  Moreover, I can't demonstrate those colors to you nor share directly through any sense the awareness of majesty I had.  So objective reality is out.

And paradoxically, if objective reality is out, so is subjective.  Remember the terms we agreed on?  Subjective reality feels, while we experience it, as though it were objective reality.  Beyond this, we agreed subjective reality comes in answer to some need.  But at that moment, if never before in my life, there were no needs unfulfilled for me.  So subjective reality is out, also.

Is there then another kind of reality, one we haven't defined?  Perhaps more than one?  I don't know, nor does anyone else I've ever asked.

But this isn't the only puzzle.  What about the second question I asked the Sea Lady?  Why did I see the colors?

Let's try explaining it physically, first.  I'd sat up suddenly after lying in the hot sun, and I do have low blood pressure.  Could this have produced the swirling colors?  Well, yes, you can have distorted vision given such conditions, but then you don't see anything, least of all other people on a beach.  Most certainly your awareness becomes limited, not increased, and it will be directed to sensations of dizziness, nausea, and prickly ice along your neck and face.  Now, I had none of these unpleasant sensations, so while low blood pressure might‑-just might‑-cause me to see the colors, it certainly won't explain the total experience I had.  In short, it isn't a satisfying answer to "why."

Well, then, let's try my psychological state.  Could the presence of the strong emotions I'd felt all morning, pleasurable though they were, have put me into a ten-second trance of sorts?  Maybe, but then why would that trance give me the strange consciousness I had?  Using trance as an answer runs us right into the problems that subjective reality did.  Why would I need to go into a psychological trance?  For relief from my emotions?  And can such overpowering awareness be called relief?  It won't wash, I tell you, it just won't wash.

Of course, there's a conveniently handy basket into which we can dump my ten seconds.  We can call them a religious experience, and say they're part of spiritual reality.  But what does all that mean, once we get past the high sounding words?

Certainly that awareness of mine can be regarded as some kind of religious vision, but still, to what purpose?  I felt no call to ask sinners‑-other than those I might meet in my classroom‑-to repent.  And most assuredly I did not feel impelled to remind the righteous to rejoice.  Those colors left me with no instructions whatever, just awareness.

Well, then, was the experience meant to make a better person of me?  But I'm no more kind and generous, no less stubborn or quick-tempered than before, and it's been many years now.  I blush to admit I'm not saintlike, but we are searching for truth.  I'm not a finer person, only a more bewildered one.

Yet can a religious experience have no intent?  I can't believe that, and surely those colors were characterized by purpose.  So the religious theory, like all the others, leads to a paradox, and we are left chasing ourselves in circles.

I've warned you from the beginning: I can offer no explanations.  But I do have, for what they're worth, two clues.  First, because of That Day, I found out where everyone was.  I'd always wanted to know that, sitting on my "lonely limb."

And second, since That Day, my limb's never been lonely.