Chapter Twenty-Three Effing the Ineffable
Twenty-Three
Effing the Ineffable
That time with David had changed everything. For as much as I’d been shaken up by falling in love and by the drama of an open marriage, I was undone most by what I considered a hierophany, the sacred breaking through into everyday human experience.
What did it mean? What were its implications? I’d been called to a new life, but I didn’t know exactly what the call was or how to answer it. I tried very hard to make my new revelation fit into my old life, to do right by everyone I’d made promises to, to keep things just as they had been, even though nothing was the same.
I returned to some of the same books I’d read as a teenage seeker hoping for a vision, only now I was looking for an explanation of the one I’d had. I thought of how na?ve I’d been to want this. I’d asked for it, then I’d gotten it. Now what?
Everyone, even William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience , seemed to agree that there was no easy way to talk about that sort of thing, that it was ineffable, and then they all went ahead and talked about it for hundreds of pages. I found myself underlining phrases like “the Initiation of Man into the Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being.”
One of James’s subjects talked about what he discovered coming out of anesthesia, that he emerged a half second before the spiral of time started back up again. He got to see “a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting.” Foreshadowing Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure , James said one could encounter oneself in that moment: “You could kiss your own lips.”
At the library I found a trove of mysticism books by Evelyn Underhill that I felt had been waiting in the stacks just for me for a hundred years, books with titles like Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People . A mystical experience involves a “violent shattering and rearranging of the self,” she wrote. This allows you to “find yourself, literally, to be other than you were before.”
I asked everyone I talked to if they’d ever had a mystical experience. A surprising number had, usually one or two times each. One woman told me that sitting on an airplane a few years earlier during a hard time in her life she’d suddenly been hit with a vision: “I went in and out of consciousness. I thought I might be dying. And I didn’t think of my parents or my children. I just knew for a fact that I was alone in the universe but also not alone at all. The message that kept repeating was, ‘Love—it’s all love.’?”
Another said that when she went to sit with grieving friends after another friend of theirs had died that there was a strange energy in the room, “like we were outside of time.”
Walt Whitman kept showing up in my mysticism research. According to a book called Ineffability : “Whitman is an example of the prodigious desire for connection and for flooding of the channels.”
I tried to remember the closest I’d come to feeling this way before, and the best I could do was four months into my pregnancy. The word “quickening” felt old-fashioned, but it was the only good word to describe that point when you know there is another person inside your body, and they’re moving around . The only other word that approaches the feeling is “flutter.”
I regretted that I hadn’t pushed back harder when Paul said he didn’t want more children. Now it was too late. I’d had all the babies I’d ever have. From there on, I’d have to make do with giving Ring Pops and legwarmers and picture books to other people’s daughters. That I’d never have a child with David struck me as the saddest thing in the world. I wondered if it meant anything that so many female saints seemed to have had their religious experiences at a stage in life when biological miracles aren’t available anymore.
Talking to Veronica on the phone I said, “Let me read you this quote from Hildegard of Bingen: ‘In the year 1142, when I was forty-two years and seven months old, it happened that a great light of brilliant fire came from the open heavens and overwhelmed all my mind, my heart, and my breast, not so much like a flickering flame, but rather like glowing heat, as the sun warms other things on which it sheds its rays.’
“And here’s Saint Teresa of Avila: ‘My soul suddenly became recollected and seemed to me to become bright all over like a mirror: no part of it—back, sides, top or bottom—but was completely bright.’ Bertrand Russell—”
“Okay, enough!” Veronica said.
“I just want to know what it is I’m being called to do,” I said. “Is the universe pointing at David, saying, ‘Be with him’? Or am I just supposed to, like, tithe ?”
As a teenager, I’d wanted to have a mystical experience. Now that I had, I learned epiphanies had consequences.
Sex was part but not all of what had happened. When I read the Song of Songs or books about kundalini awakening, I thought of David’s strong hands on my hips pulling me toward him, of the way his mouth garlanded my neck in little bruises. I remembered him holding on to the headboard behind my head. Kissing me for hours, so hard my lip bled. Part of me had never left that bedroom. Part of me was there still, my skirt and his shirt balled up together on the floor.
And yet, whatever it was that had happened was not purely physical. That moment had changed me in a fundamental and permanent way.
In the day-to-day world of meal planning and deadlines, I kept my head down, worked hard, drank water, went for walks, filled the fridge with food for my family. Then one day on the way to a work meeting, I heard “Remember the Mountain Bed” come on in my headphones. Woody Guthrie’s lyrics about a perfect physical and spiritual encounter transported me from a busy sidewalk to that California hotel room. I saw a plane in the sky and the wind kicked up and everything started to shimmer.