uriosity
He fell into the memory.
He was twelve. He was in a gothic church, and the walls were grey stone, peaking in a graceful pointed arch. A crack in the foundation spidered the floor shooting up the wall. The light was beautiful, filtered in through the mosaic-colored windows.
Stained glass chandeliers lined the walls, black iron, hung on heavy iron chains from heavy wooden beams. The pews were straight dark wood, with carved accents, facing toward the center, where Dan stood behind a pulpit carved with a dove-shaped hole bearing an olive branch. Isaac could see Dan’s purple stole against the white of his robes through the dove-hole, now purple, now white, as Dan shifted. He set the music to the shifting of colors and tried to zone out.
He looked up suddenly as the pastor began to read from the book of John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Isaac caught the verse halfway through and turned down his inphones. The Word was God? That would be “pict,” right? He saw himself replay the clip from his stream as Dan continued, “The Word of the Lord.”
The congregation responded, “Thanks be to God.”
“And now a reading from our elder brother Paul, from the book of Romans:”
“I delight in God’s law, you see, according to my inmost self; but I see another “law” in my limbs and organs, fighting a battle against the law of my Mind, and taking me as a prisoner in the law of sin which is in my limbs and organs.”
“Today, we seek to serve God. Let us bow our heads and unite ourselves in prayer.”
The congregation silently united their minds and received a feeling of united tranquility as the Mind helped them center and focus, releasing the alpha waves that mark the brain during deep sleep or meditation.
It was kind of weird to experience this feeling through the naïveté of his twelve-year-old self. It felt strangely right. Now, he would fight against such a surrender to the emotions of the collective.
Dan began, “Amen.”
“Paul speaks to us today about the struggle that he has against his own self. He’s speaking of his bifurcation. He’s speaking of his habits, his traumas, his addictions. Of his angers and hungers. Of limits. Of his inability to become who he desires to be.”
“It’s difficult for many of us to relate to Paul. It’s difficult for us because science has given us the key to unlock the neural structures that kept us at war with ourselves. So how can we understand Paul? How can we relate to this passage?” he asked.
Isaac felt himself think that he wasn’t sure if he could ever understand Paul. But sometimes Dan’s reflections on a world so distant from his own were interesting and so he left his inphones on low and set them to sync to his metemotional content as Dan spoke.
Dan continued, “I believe we can appreciate where we are at by looking at where we’ve been. Before the Mind, we were at war with ourselves, slaves to the traumas we’d experienced. Our habits of pleasure fed our dopamine reward circuits and we were bound to behavior loops that stretched us to our limits. Our bodies’ turmoil fed itself, cortisol release triggering more cortisol, and we decayed into inner violence.
“This is the state of original sin, this is the imbalance we are born into and, eventually, die from. We worked against ourselves, drinking too much, staying up too late, eating too much, wanting too much, spending too much… never enough. And we paid, every time. We went through life hung over from too much or too little, never able to achieve the unity of body and Mind.
Inside his memory, he heard the music beat slowly through his inphones, a pulsing like blood, the notes like corpuscles squeezed through a rushing vein. It was kind of annoying that since this took place back before the 2Mic system separated inner from outer audio, there was no way to remove the dated soundtrack without distorting Dan’s speech.
Dan continued, “We waged war against ourselves to achieve inner peace. Isn’t that ironic? Many of you have been integrated your whole lives, and to you this sounds completely ridiculous. But this is how it was: our bodies were divided against themselves.
“I was a counselor in those times, and it was only through much time, effort, and prayer that we found some healing for my clients from the traumas of experience. Stretched as they were, their bodies would spike with fear or rage at the slightest triggers.
We struggled for peace. You see, it is as brother Paul speaks it, ‘but I see another “law” in my limbs and organs, fighting a battle against the law of my Mind.’
Layered guitars sliced through the music like a knife through meat, laying it open for the grill. The young Isaac turned it up slightly, the sermon driven by the music.
“But we no longer need to be at war with ourselves. As we open ourselves to the Mind and it learns who we are, we become who we choose to become. The choice for us is: ‘who do we want to be?’ Not ‘how can we become what we want to be’ as it is for Paul,” he said, making air quotes.
“When Goopple offered the Mind, many of us were tired of the constant struggle to be good, from our partial healings. We were ready to become whole.
“But part of our call is to remember those who are not able to be integrated. The Operateds. The lúcidos. Those whose past traumas awaken them with the night terrors and keep them from knowing and being known by the Mind. Those who overbalanced.”
The music percolated from beneath, gradually increasing in intensity, like water slowly heating around him to boiling.
“I watched our church’s homeless shelter fill and run over during the Dreamer’s Depression, when the lucids were free to anyone with thickspace access. Many lúcidos were once important people: doctors, stock brokers, and technologists. But they had used up their families pursuing the lucids. Their lives were broken, fragmented, disunited. Their flesh needed the lucids. And they had ceased to struggle against that need. Ceased to desire any sort of moderation.”
The music crashed like a glass against the wall, the notes slivers of glass tinkling against the ground. Tiny bells arpeggiated over the steady beat.
“Again it as Paul puts it, ‘there is a law in my limbs and organs, fighting a battle against the law of my Mind.’
“But while lúcidos are divided, they are not like Paul. Paul is divided because he wants something good with all of his conscious self, yet a piece of himself drags behind him like a dead limb. The lúcido lives to be swallowed forever in dreams, which cannot happen. The lúcido wants, and only wants, a thing that destroys her. A lúcido drags her entire body toward a dead limb.” Dan always used to use the feminine inclusive pronoun. It sounded so quaint now.
“Who are we to become? Are we to be like Paul, willing toward the good and achieving it through the Mind? Or are we to be like the lúcidos, willing toward sleep? The Mind will help you become, but it can’t choose your direction for you.
“There are things that give us life and peace, and we may choose to drag ourselves away from them.
“Sometimes changes happen so slowly you don’t realize they’re happening. Sometimes you can’t even see the ways you’ve been changed,” said Dan.
“Eventually, my psychological practice dried up, and you all stopped calling me with your problems.” He smiled and chuckled, “To tell the truth, sometimes I wish you’d call more often.”
Isaac sighed. Was this to be another one of Dan’s confessionals? The ways he’d failed his dead wife? The ways he’d failed to serve the congregation, his metric the empty pews. Maybe Dan didn’t even realize how totally irrelevant his old text was to a world of instant dreams. In the memory, his attention started to wander. Would he ever talk about “The Word?” Drop some sort of clue to the books that lined the shelf in the basement?
Dan continued, “And so it is, the Mind gradually sews us back together during sleep, flesh and Mind.”
“But those of you who grew up with the Mind were never ‘sewn back together.’ You were never divided. And that’s why I’m handing my senior pastorship to Ricky and moving down to part time. It’s time for leadership from those who were born outside of original sin,” Dan said.
Isaac watched himself replay the clip. Dan was stepping down?
“Words constantly fuzz and abstract my picto. A barbarous lecto-slant. And these artifacts of my literacy are part of why my dreamscape is only partially known. And it’s why I give my sermons in lecto,” said Dan.
Huh. Yeah sure, Dan spoke an old language, but sometimes that was actually cool, Isaac felt himself think.
Dan continued, “But there are deeper things than can be expressed in lecto, in fact, most of the spiritual truths are better expressed directly in picto. Some of you young people think in ways that I can just barely understand. The brilliance of your pictographs, the ways you assemble things you’ve seen into new images, and always, always, with a special flair that’s your own. Me, I have to comb through my cloudmemories for minutes to say the sorts of things that you can say in seconds. And what I come out with looks like a pictograph, while yours look like something out of Hollywood!” Dan said.
Isaac laughed. It was true. But he’d always liked Dan’s picto.
“The written word itself is to blame. Having once learned to write and read, for many of us, it’s impossible to think of anything at all without the word clouding the image,” Dan said.
So how did it make sense that the Word was God and God was the Word? Isaac asked himself. Was Dan even aware of the contradiction between what he’d said and the text?
Dan continued, “I’ve lived through many changes, and each time I’ve adapted. I will miss pastoring you, but I have sense enough to know when it’s time to move on.”
“Let us unite ourselves in prayer.”
As the churchmind gathered, Isaac was still thinking.
****
After the sermon, while Dan was stripping the altar, Isaac approached him.
“Pastor Dan! Why are you leaving?” asked Isaac.
“I’ll be around, Isaac. Don’t worry,” said Dan, finishing off the communion grape juice and packing up the plate. The Isaac watching the scene thought to himself. // add something here
“I have a question. Was the Bible written in lecto?” asked Isaac.
“Of course it was, Isaac. Why do you ask?” Dan said.
“Well, what’s lecto like?” Isaac asked.
“Hmm, well, reading’s like hearing with your eyes,” Dan said.
“Huh. So that’s bad for picto?” Isaac asked.
“Yes it is. Words colonize your picto. When you’re trying to picture something, you see words instead of pure images, and it triggers different brain regions that the Mind’s doesn’t read. So that makes it harder to be known,” said Dan.
“But everyone used to read, didn’t they? Even Jesus?” said Dan.
“Well, lots of scholars think that Jesus and most of his disciples were preliterate, so they didn’t have the same sorts of problems that literate folks did,” said Dan.
“What’s preliterate mean?” asked Isaac. He was still in the childish habit of asking questions instead of searching pictopedia for answers. But he liked hearing people talk. Sometimes you could learn a lot from people.
“Sorry, not knowing how to read lecto. But also not understanding picto,” said Dan. Dan was always good at explaining things. Some people didn’t even seem to know how to explain things.
“Huh. I wonder what that’s like,” said Isaac.
“You know, that’s really hard to say. It’s lost, gone, like the shape of a wave on the water. Everything was sound before the written word. So part of it is that we really can’t understand. For instance, can you understand my problems with speaking picto?” said Dan.
“Sort of, but not really. I like your picto though. It makes me think,” said Isaac.
“Hah, well, thank you. You understanding my problems with picto is the same way it is for me trying to understand pre-literate people. And you’re one jump further away. Or, you know what, maybe you’re closer to pre-literate than I am,” said Dan.
“Alright, but why does it say that God is the Word?”
“Ah, well, Isaac. That’s the lectionary reading for today. I didn’t really touch on that today, did I?” said Dan.
“You sort of did. That’s why I’m asking,” said Isaac.
“What do you mean?” asked Dan.
“You talked about how ‘the word’ colors picto,” said Isaac. “But if the Word is God, isn’t that good?”
Dan stopped folding the altar cloth and set it on the altar. He looked down with twinkling blue eyes through the glasses perched down on the middle of his nose and chuckled. “I see what you’re saying. You’re a very clever boy, Isaac. But Word in this case has a much bigger meaning than just that.”
Dan continued, “For instance, Jesus is called the ‘Word of God.’ But he was a human being, and later, the spirit of peace. Picto is a type of language, too. It uses words, just a different kind of word. But these are ancient languages! You can’t translate something exactly across time and language. Words shift underneath us as culture changes.” said Dan.
“You talked about how the word colors picto. But if the Word is God, isn’t that good?” said Isaac. //check here for repetition
As Dan spoke, Isaac pulled up the picto Bible to the book of John and found the passage. The pictograph used for “Word” was a person talking or picto-connecting with another person. So “word” here in picto meant both picto and speech. But it had no lecto flavor of reading or writing. “Okay but ‘Word’ in my Bible doesn’t have anything to do with lecto,” Isaac said.
“Yes, that’s true. Some things are untranslatable, or if they are translated, they pick up different meanings in the new language. For instance, if ‘Word’ had a lecto-coloring, it would have a negative meaning in picto. It might even lead people away from knowing and being known by the Mind. I was a part of the translation team,” he said. “Part of why my picto is the way it is is because I spent so many years in the Greek and Hebrew for the translation.”
“That’s not fair,” said Isaac.
“Well you know, life’s not always fair. I love the old texts and so it’s hard for me to change. So that’s what I chose,” said Dan, turning back to folding the altar cloth.
“I want to learn how to read lecto. I want to know more about how things were. Things here are so boring,” said Isaac.
Dan looked down at Isaac and put his hand on his shoulder, shaking his head. “Son, I don’t think you do. You don’t want to become an old fossil like me. You can always query for translations from minds like mine. I think you want to think about the future. About understanding people around you. That’s hard enough. Now, I have to pack up so they can get on with the next service,” Dan said. He smiled at Isaac. “See you soon, Isaac. Take care.”
“Okay, Pastor Dan. See you soon,” said Isaac. Dan picked up the box with the altar dressings and moved toward the side door. But Isaac could feel curiosity rising inside him.
He didn’t really care if his picto was beautiful. He wanted to see into other worlds, brighter worlds. Worlds of prophets and Caesars, pirates and navies, hackers and corporations.