The alarm sounds at 3am, and while my consciousness still wavers, a thought barges through my brain: "You have interrupted the morning-making." This feels strange even while reading Mircea Eliade all week, but as I stumble out of bed and prepare my yerba mate, the translation crystallizes slowly.
Ancient cultures believed the world was re-created anew every morning, a mini-genesis before breakfast. It's not about the gods weaving reality, thread by thread, before we wake (and if you wake too soon, you'll catch Santa Claus, so to speak), but rather about our brains layering on the clothes of consciousness every morning, digging up language and concepts from the debris of night. I had woken before reality had been re-stitched, and so my brain still felt wavy and incoherent, lost over the waters of the deep.
It takes time to de-beast every morning, to become human and a citizen again, bound by the architecture of the brain like space and time (inevitable) and the architecture of culturally-constructed thought like independence and industry (almost inevitable). The light will soon come to clarify us into conceptual, abstracted beings. And there is something brutal about this clarification, our conceptual gods sweeping in to re-mold this beating amoeba into something seen and capable of seeing. But seeing too is a language, a language not nearly as profound as the darkness which it organizes into objects. Seeing, like speaking, is a translation which hovers over more dynamic and primeval things. Thus we humans are clarified into tiny, time-bound things, only blipping momentarily over the vast Being beneath.
I feel this when I begin to make my to-do list, the Human stepping in to take care of things. Later, when Sophie wakes up, I will turn on the TV and play a Bach concert. Art which produces awe- this is the bridge, I think, between the pre-conceptual beast and the abstracted human of society. When struck by awe, our concepts fall to a heap, swept in the tide of some immediate and yet universal thing.
-Sondra
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