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THE “SUPERNATURAL” SAGUARO

The reality we experience is but a glimmer of the reality that is.

—Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (p12)

On this page is the entire short chapter THE “SUPERNATURAL” SAGUARO.
To start reading where I discuss Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, scroll to the first dotted line.

If continuing from YouTube scroll to the second dotted line.

Another year we were all set to leave for Cabeza in the last week of March—any later and we risk serious heat—when the truck thoughtfully, just before we left rather than in the heart of Cabeza or perhaps worse, i.e. central Indiana, advised us (as mentioned previously) that, at 202,000 miles a new clutch was required. This was the only time I have ever let it see a mechanic, and it proved a great tragicomic error. So we departed two weeks late, $2000 poorer, and hoping for the best . . . as record heat in the 90s had already gripped the area. But we needn’t have worried, at least not in New Mexico. Originally we had planned to backpack overnight in White Sands National Monument; a dozen years earlier we’d spent a dramatic afternoon there awed by the rushing clouds, the ever-changing light, and the supernally pure windswept sand. But this year was a bit too dramatic for us sissies. Snow at higher elevations, thunderstorms and driven rain alternating with blinding sun at the dunes . . . and we chose to press on, knowing we’d arrive quite late in Cabeza.
    So it was almost midnight when we left the pavement at Tacna and I took over the driving from Anne. Here in Arizona it was mild, calm, and a full moon illuminated the whole desert with a magical sheen. We headed in and sure enough, within five minutes there was a dazzling pair of headlights in the mirror. Anne pulled out our permits and I said, “Howdy” to Mr. Border Patrol, who advised us that since only smugglers and aliens were out here at this hour, driving at night was prohibited. Refraining from commenting on the tautological aspect of this I apologized, noting that somehow I’d missed that in the regulations (I still can’t find it written down), and then inquired if we might continue to our projected campsite. He kindly assented.
    So it was well after 2 a.m. before I finally cut the engine. Even though we’d had a good sleep in New Mexico and had dozed in the back while the other was driving, we were pretty wiped from our three-day drive. But still, we could not rest quite yet, not here, not now. There . . . was . . . not . . . a . . . sound. Not . . . a . . . single . . . solitary . . . sound. Full moon drifting towards the west. White sand luminous and numinous in all directions. Tall saguaros with their equally long shadows. Ghostly bushes of creosote and mesquite. A notched and pointed black silhouette of cliffs to the north. And right by the truck a huge monster, king of all the cacti. Tipped with oval buds awaiting next month’s heat, it was multi-branched at the base and again halfway up—giant fingers reaching for the moon and stars. All balanced on an astonishingly small shrunken base. What a saguaro!
    We stretched and wandered about . . . and . . . listened to the silence, inhaling its essence. Then we climbed in the back, closing the rear hoping the sun might not wake us. But of course it did and before pulling the sleeping bag over my head I couldn’t help but notice through the small side window of the cabin the golden brilliance reflected off our mammoth neighbor . . . and resolved to be up early the following morning.
    A bit more sleep, tea, sitting, and breakfast. A modestly planned hike into the hills that became even more modest as we realized how tired we were. Then, as Anne prepared an early supper, I set up the tripod, planning for the next day’s “shoot.”
    A line of mountains rested on the eastern horizon but low and far enough that the sun’s first rays were virtually parallel to the ground. I used a polarizing filter on my favorite wide angle lens to deepen the sky’s blue, and as I rotated it for maximum effect I was struck, even shocked, by how dark the sky became . . . and how the upper trunk of the cactus glowed with a fierce radiant intensity against its almost-black background. I took three shots at varying exposures and then, having no idea how it would turn out, three more without the polarizer.
    Of all the pictures I’ve taken only a handful, really, have stayed in my mind after the shutter snapped. The others, after trying to eliminate everything that’s boring and taking in what’s left . . . well, they might turn out okay but . . . more likely not. A few however have haunted me, and even come to my dreams, as if that little viewfinder had been a window into another more profound, more complete reality. So it was with this saguaro, and I was bitterly disappointed when the slides came back seeming much too dark when viewed on my light box. On the next roll my thirty-year-old Nikon’s light meter had screwed up, requiring disassembly and a creative repair, but the shots before and after the saguaro were fine. How could I have been so far off in the exposure? When I showed them to Anne with the projector however, well, maybe the lightest one with the polarizer wasn’t too bad after all. The sky . . . such a deep dark blue, almost black like night. The landscape . . . suffused with unearthly light. And the trunk . . . any lighter and it would have lost its fervent glow. Strange, strange picture, not the way I had intended it at all but . . . perhaps just possibly okay. I decided to call it The “Supernatural” Saguaro.
    Here I feel obliged to note that we are not at all into “New Age” stuff, the occult, or the mystical in its lower, more mundane sense. Just sitting and protecting our bodies with proper—i.e. based on scientific studies—diet and exercise, yes; anything else, you name it, and it’s just not, pardon the expression, our cup of tea. And it riles us to read of self-proclaimed “spiritual” people going out into the desert, moving rocks into “magic circles” to “tap” into the “energy”; this to us is equivalent to doing wheelies in the sand with ORVs.
    Not that I’ve never experienced anything out of the ordinary. When I first started meditating in Ann Arbor, I was taking a psych course that included a “sensitivity training group”: ten or so of us sat around trying to express our feelings and “relate.” The utter impossibility of doing this in words led me, one time, to simply lock eyes with a fellow directly opposite me and, without any thoughts, project my being, everything that I was, towards him. The remainder of the group was oblivious to us . . . and we to them. He was stretched out on the floor on his back, arms at his side with palms up. Suddenly, after a half-hour or more of this intense and wordless interaction, I had the thought for him to raise his lower arms. This . . . very slowly     . . . he did. I . . . could not believe it . . . and broke out in laughter, shattering the spell. He told me he had felt a power coming from me, and finally the involuntary impulse to lift his arms.
    Well, evidently the word got out that I had spiritual powers (Yes!) and later I was approached by someone who had a friend involved with communicating with the dead. I was asked if I might be interested in assisting. No. Thank you very much . . . but . . . no. I mean, even if the dead did exist in a form we could communicate with, would they have anything interesting to say? Imagine someone from a lower dimension asking the average American, “Hey, what’s happening, man?”
    “Well, let’s see. The Yankees got A-Rod and we’re really bogged down in Eye-Rack.”
    No, no thanks.
    After moving to Rochester I was at one time involved with a woman who, like a number of Zen people, was into all the alternative stuff: homeopathy, acupuncture, Rolfing, shiatsu, etc., etc. The only thing she wasn’t into, though she was a member of the Zen Center and later its generic offspring the Springwater Center . . . was sitting regularly . . . which contributed greatly to our splitting. But I did accompany her a few times to see a certain practitioner in Toronto. The last was during a time of intense crisis for me. I will spare the reader the gory details, but it involved learning the extraordinarily hard, painful but utterly necessary lesson that what is commonly referred to as “love,” idealized and idolized on screen and in song, craved so desperately by us all, is in fact, whether we admit it or not, the most selfish emotion imaginable. (Although my “lesson” involved romantic “love,” it also applies to the “love” of friends, family, and society.) The “doctor,” a chiropractor officially, had me lie on a couch and placed a metal plate, connected by wire to a black box, on my abdomen. On the wall before me was a profoundly calming painting of a stream gently flowing through deep woods. Somehow that simple scene struck me as being nothing less than a view into the very heart of all creation, and my mind slipped into a rare tranquility. Then after a while my time was up and we left, stopping in a park on the way back.
    And the walls began to crumble. And through the cracks, with relentless insistency of infinite intensity, came what I have come to call the IT. A medieval mystic, who wrote of meditating on the words God or Love in a very Zen-like manner, also wrote that to know God we must go into what he called The Cloud of Unknowing (the title of his book; he did not leave behind his name). I think he must have understood, as it did seem like a cloud, an immense storm approaching, terrifying . . . yet   . . . it was clear . . . absolutely . . . totally . . . 100% clear that my life had no meaning but to relinquish myself to its devastating power. It was a perfect late summer’s day and, as I lay on the grass, IT coursed in waves through my resistant body-mind. I sobbed and shook with convulsions, fully conscious, just seeing if, despite my fear, despite my terror, I could allow it to happen. The woman, who had no idea what I was going through, tried to hold and comfort me, but eventually became too frightened by it all (IT ALL?) . . . so I had to stop.
    We split up and I never went back to that “doctor.” Why? Because I have had other similar experiences in totally different circumstances, also during periods of internal crisis. They were not repeatable . . . through my volition. I think now of a science fiction story where an adjunct to the main plot described how humans had learned to teleport. People were zooming all over the solar system in personal spacecraft like, God forbid, jet skis, four wheelers, and ORVs. Periodically one would be hit by a meteor, lose its air and the person would die. But one in, say, 10,000 somehow teleported themselves to the nearest intact craft and survived to pass on the secret to others. In my family I had two cousins and an aunt who didn’t make it: they killed themselves. A sister, most of whose brief thirty-nine years were a sad parade in and out of mental institutions. An uncle I never met, writer and pianist who, probably with semi-suicidal motivation, joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight Franco and fascism in the Spanish Civil War. And never returned.
    This is perhaps oversimplifying (I did not intend to write a memoir), but I think it’s fair to say that when my very survival was at stake, in one way or another I did open up . . . was forced kicking and screaming to open up . . . to a deeper understanding. (And don’t think I remain there; I have to relearn these lessons over and over, and over and over.) There were always triggers of course; in this case I “believe” far more in that painting of the stream than the metal plate. But what prepared the ground was all my sitting, which, at root, is only an attempt to not run away from what a human being really is.
    Some readers must be thinking, “Wow, this cloud thing is pretty weird.” Well, the cloud is an image and at least partly represents my reaction to IT, and it may be worth noting that, as was discussed in “And the Stars,” everything we call matter and energy is—in Reality, the reality of quantum mechanics—only a “cloud” of possibilities. And IT is just my name for God, but without all the connotations of the latter. In Handel’s Messiah are the words from Malachi 3:2: “But who may abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when He appeareth? For He is like a refiners fire. And He shall purify.” # It is obvious to me from the music that Handel understood, and likewise the librettist who searched long and hard through the Bible for these phrases.

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    But if you’d really like to gain a little feeling for this IT for yourself . . . listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The fourth movement, the “Ode to Joy,” is the most famous, but it is the first three that are the most profound. This is not easy listening; it took me multiple hearings to even begin to appreciate it (IT). (My initial reaction to the first movement was: he’s totally deaf now and can’t write music anymore. Ha!) The first movement begins with a quivering pianissimo of “open fifths,” i.e. cords without a major or minor third so, like parts of the last movement of the Schubert Sonata it’s beyond either “happy” or “sad.” And out of this little bit of almost nothing . . . arises an immensity of such boundless proportions that it can be likened to nothing less than the creation of our Universe in the Big Bang.
    The second movement I feel as a continuation of the first: unfathomable and illimitable energy galloping across the Cosmos . . . and through our minds. And the third . . . the third. If you want to know; if you need to know; if you have to know . . . what Love, not “love,” but the Love that “passeth all understanding” really is . . . well, you can start by listening to this movement. And incredibly, unbelievably, but ultimately understandingly, Beethoven wrote of these movements: “This chaos reminds us of our despair.” Again, T.S. Eliot: “Humankind cannot bear very much Reality.” [More on the Ninth further down.]
    So . . . to continue with my short supernatural saguaro story made long: A week or two after we viewed the slides I told Anne that I’d get an enlargement made of “The ‘Supernatural’ Saguaro”” for “my” room (the piano room). Then she said she wanted to tell me something, but first I had to promise not to put it in my book. Of course I promised, but with a little proviso “without your permission.”
    “There will be no permission!” she staunchly insisted. Well, we’ll see. If this sentence ends with an ellipsis and a new paragraph, then she didn’t relent . . . but if you are reading this, then she did.
    The morning I took the picture, after the usual tea, two hours of sitting, and breakfast, we were all hustle and bustle preparing our gear for a backpack up Tule Mountain, to camp on the top as I was hoping to get there in time for pictures of the sunset; “The Light of Cabeza” was the result. But at one point, while I was still busy fussing away, she had time to pay her last respects to the cactus . . . and walked slowly towards it admiringly. Suddenly she felt an intense (yes, forgive me, but it’s her word) “energy” coming out of it and she didn’t quite jump . . . but she did step back away from it quite rapidly. She had never, ever, experienced anything like that before. She’d decided that was enough and she’d just find something else to do. There hadn’t been a good time to tell me before now.
    Later that trip we were in Death Valley National Park and afterward Anne said that the immensity of that landscape—the vertical drop of over two miles from Telescope Peak to Badwater being the largest in the lower forty-eight—helped free her from the enclosure of her little mind. But later she missed her friends: the palo verde, the ocotillo, the saguaro. I asked if she included that saguaro in “friends.”
    “No!” She had only wanted to give it a figurative peck on the cheek but its response had been way out of bounds!
    At the moment that saguaro is my favorite picture. I had been in despair taking it; its form was truly extraordinary but through the viewfinder all the branches seemed merely a confused jumble . . . and I just settled for the least bad perspective. But now I see, and am quite amazed, that I got it exactly right. I do not take credit for this. Schubert made what I find an exquisite and endearing remark upon hearing one of his works performed: “You know, I never realized it was so beautiful.” And Beethoven confided that one of the movements he derided as “those delicacies,” when he recalled it, still brought a tear to his eye. Obviously they knew their art was not theirs (notwithstanding the “I too am a king”), that they were merely accessing, from time to time, a Realm of Truth, Beauty . . . that is always there.
    People have said I have an eye for pictures, but I know it’s not my eye. Perhaps I allow an EYE to operate, but its source is a mystery, The Great Mystery to which I at least attempt to devote my life. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote, “[Great] art springs from spheres that are beyond the sphere of the will.” This, of course, is what meditation and prayer, at their best, are all about: accessing the sphere . . . beyond the sphere of the will. MRI scans of nuns praying show a lessening of electrical activity in the part of the brain where decision making takes place. Not doing anything, just allowing IT, God, the One Pure Mind—take your pick—to manifest ITself. To allow oneself to BE . . . this is not easy.
    Not everyone gets this. At the Zen Center it was recited at a retreat: “Strive through the night / With every breath, / That you may wake / Past day, past death.” In other words, if you want to avoid the fear of death . . . then strive through the night. Likewise prayer for anything, even peace, understanding, or love, may be just another form of wanting. And it closes the door on . . . That Which Is. I know someone who practices “Loving-kindness meditation” . . . and I also know he uses it to keep his fear and anger well buried. It might be better, or at least cheaper, than Prozac . . . I suppose.
    Carl Sagan coined the phrase “pale blue dot” for earth. A pale, blue, tiny, almost indiscernible dot in a vast, black, virtually empty ocean; that’s what our home planet is. I think “The ‘Supernatural’ Saguaro” conveys this (but as I said, not what I’d intended!): how thin and fragile is our atmosphere, “soon” to be burned off by an overheating sun, and how close we are to the black void. Yet the glow on the cactus  . . . is, to me, profoundly spiritual. I have just taken a break from writing to listen again to the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth . . . and cried my guts out, as is my not uncommon response. Someone I once played this music for told me, “To listen to this music you’d think there was nothing wrong in the world.” Well, if you really listened, in a quiet room with no distractions, you wouldn’t think; you would know, to the very core of your being . . . there was NOTHING wrong. The 14th- century English mystic Lady Julian of Norwich “heard” God “saying” to her, “And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”  And if all shall be well, then All is well, right now . . . we just don’t see it. Remember Einstein’s “A human being is part of the Whole, called by us ‘Universe’ . . .” The “optical delusion” of our consciousness keeps us focused on the “part” . . . and all may seem very wrong. But if we could experience the Whole . . . we would know the Real Truth.
    My tears came with the first notes and my eyes are not yet dry. Infinitely tender    . . . taking in the whole of human misery . . . yet . . . All is well. Toward the end we come to a point of great stillness where the music is almost motionless,

going nowhere because there’s nowhere else to go, and out of what Eliot calls “The still point of the turning world” arises a

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great crescendo led by the brass. All, All, All . . . is revealed here, and I feel that I have traveled the length of the Multiverse to find myself . . . at the very Heart of Creation.
    On my radio dial next to NPR is a Christian station and last night I caught a woman singing, “Only You can give me the love I need.” This is not the Love of which I write. My sense was that she wasn’t able to find an adequate boyfriend on earth . . . and was looking upstairs to fulfill her desires. (Like the Muslim men with their sixty-seven virgins in paradise?) This Love of which I speak is not what you think it is . . . and not what you want it to be. Eliot: “Who then devised the torment? Love.” How can that be? Theologians, philosophers, writers, and ordinary souls have agonized over this for millennia: How could an ALL-Loving Omnipotent God create a world that is, excuse the language but . . . so . . . fucked-up? All I can say is that the answer lies in the fact that people . . . are not what you think they are, and God . . . is not . . . what you think IT is.
    Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Julian all understood. They learned the hard, the unbearably hard, the unendurably hard, the impossibly hard way . . . because they knew . . . there is no other way. As mentioned, I have written in what I call “Notes to Myself”: “Mission impossible. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out who you really are.” Again Julian: “God is the ground of our being.”
    So this is the way I see that saguaro: Just standing there, in the desert, on the edge of space, doing nothing, wanting nothing . . . just basking in the Glow radiating from IT—The Source of Everything, the Great God Himself, the Heart of Creation. And that is how I see us human beings also . . . just standing here . . . basking in the Glow . . . if we see it, or rather . . . whether we see it or not.
    As a test, call it a marketing survey since I want it on the cover of this book, I showed it to a very pleasant (and spunky) elderly Christian woman we enjoy seeing when we come to clean. It passed, the picture passed, and she passed; she was quite struck by it. I wouldn’t expect her to relate to everything, by a long shot, that I’m writing. But the picture . . . she got it.#
    And, in what I would not blame the reader for thinking is indicative of the deep mental problems of a profoundly disturbed mind, I can’t get it out of my head that the whole purpose of the Supernatural Saguaro episode was that I bring it back to New York, install it over my piano . . . and play it The Art of the Fugue.
     And what of Anne’s strange experience? Did that saguaro really have some sort of spirit that was trying to communicate with her? I don’t know but I offer the following speculation: This was the beginning of the trip and both of us are especially open to all the beauties and wonders of the wilderness during our first days. I myself have had numerous experiences in meditation when it seemed that I was just beginning to open up to the Truth . . . when . . . immense Fear began to flow into my mind. The Fear of how utterly insignificant our individual ego is in relation to that Truth (though it took me much time to understand this intellectually). So even though we know we have experienced something profound . . . we may attempt to deny it, like Beethoven who called it chaos. But it’s only chaos to the little “me” . . . and Beethoven, I’m certain from his music, understood that as well. So perhaps that’s what happened with Anne: The Beauty, the Truth that she was opening up to    . . . was just too much.
    But then again . . . that really was . . . one . . . Supernatural . . . Saguaro . . .