When Descartes counts to three
By Derek Shirley
Tyger, tyger, burning bright In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
"The Tyger", William Blake.
Blake's was awed that both the hand of the God, and the observer's eye dare frame that creation. At the dawn of the new millennium, we hear the echo of these words, for we now begin to suspect an awesome truth that to see is to create.
My question is this: What mind, confronted with an amber snarl of spirit and sinew, loses its awe and creates a literal, reduced, objective tiger? Another poet offers us a possible insight:
His gaze, going past those bars, has got so misted with tiredness,
it can take in nothing more.
He feels as though a thousand bars existed,
And no more world beyond them than before.
"The Panther", Rainer Maria Rilke.
Can the caged tiger exist only in the reduced mind? Do we separate the panther from the world so that we may slowly wring the essence out of each? This mere, literal mind was the one that the old villain Descartes used to torture cats, thereby demonstrating his faith that animals have no feelings.
We could well ask what sort of world this mind creates, as it makes the soul impossible. Does the mind of abstraction destroy the soul of the tiger, and all other souls with it? And what part does psychology play in this extinction?
An old cinema, converted in the age of the mall complex, is now host to incidental theatre. The old ashtrays from its heyday are still here, on the black backs of the seats, and the cracked and occasionally torn, red, leather upholstery simmers guardedly under shadow and weak yellow house lights. Carpet and dust smells wander in here, mingling strangely with the exotically perfumed whims of air stirred by the night audience. These scents whisper Europe Paris, London other nights, other trances, ah, romance.
Monsieur Anton, The Hypnotist, cupped in a pool of silver light, is holding the stage. His eyes ricochet off dark and light polyps of audience, from behind the smiling curtain of his mouth his teeth flash, his palms flap like tame birds, and his confidence exudes itself into the darkened air, like another thicker and more fundamental aroma.
And who is more mesmerised here? The audience, perhaps? Lost in legend, their shadow-mottled faces bob excitedly, splashes of tungsten highlighting instant eye-whites, eager faces drinking a jillion photons, eager neurons translating the news into laughter, movement, perplexity, a sense of mystery?
Or indeed, is it M. Anton himself, as beguiled by the power of his beguilement as anyone? For deep indeed is his trance, art's transport deepening even now, as the age-old rite that he and the audience conjure lifts even him to his own hallowed frontiers with magnificent abandon, where his art can flow through him like live coils, snakes of pure current, each thousand-time repeated phrase being reborn on his tongue like the thunderbolt in the void.
Or are the official subjects more profoundly hypnotised? What is their trance, to the deeper well of trance in which their trance becomes 'trance'?
The audience laugh now one of the official subjects is stumbling around a table that she has been told is not there. Another slurps tea loudly from an invisible cup, one we may suppose not to exist - not doubting that it is the subjects that are hypnotised and not we ourselves. "As I count you will begin to come out of trance, and when I reach three you will awaken, having forgotten everything that happened while you were hypnotised one two three and"
"Wake up - you have slept enough! Wake up, now..."
Baba Muktananda, the master of yoga, he urges this awakening - and whom does he address? Those subjects? The hypnotist? The audience? You, dear reader, perhaps momentarily lost in the playspace of reading?
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