“Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind”
-Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
“In fact, our willing is the only opportunity we have of understanding simultaneously from within any event that outwardly manifests itself; consequently, it is the one thing known to us immediately, and not given to us merely in the representation, as all else is. Here, therefore, lies the datum alone capable of becoming the key to everything else, or, as I have said, the only narrow gateway to truth. Accordingly, we must learn to understand nature from ourselves, not ourselves from nature. What is directly known to us must give us the explanation of what is only indirectly known, not conversely. Do we understand, let us say, the rolling away of a ball when it has received an impulse more thoroughly than we understand our own movement when we have perceived a motive? Many think so, but I say that the reverse is the case. However, we shall arrive at the insight that in both the occurrences just mentioned what is essential is identical, although identical in the same way as the lowest audible note of harmony is identical with the note of the same ten octaves higher.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation Volume II
How do we deal with the weightedness of dreams during waking hours and the weightlessness of their experiences during sleep? How are we to separate fact from fiction if life is itself a form of consensual fiction and fantasies, with their intrusive power, dictate the intentionality of souls? What are we to do with our fantasies when they seem to have little regard for the demands of the real world, imposing their own logic and will over our bodily needs? But also, what happens when these fantasies stray from our mental programming and the self-regulating expectations of learned societal norms, encountering the relationship between self and world as a site of friction and cognitive dissonance?
It was with these questions that John had begun to drift away from his waking consciousness as he lay sick in bed. Then, at that very moment, he felt a pang of pain, sharp and sudden, followed by a sudden flare of pain that erased any philosophical or existential inquiry and brought him back to “earth.”
“Pain is the truest constant and the great equalizer in this world,” he thought. “For when you feel pain, there is no uncertainty. You are there, in that moment, in time and space, experiencing it, living it in its full force, mind and body.”
These reflexive thoughts had often led John to ponder the meaning and purpose of religion. When he was younger, it had seemed to him that religion was but a human invention, a means of injecting fantasies into the fabric of existence and coping with the mind’s other tricks as a way of escaping the realities of existence and its finality. But with age, and with a growing awareness of the gravity of time and the compressed duration of emotional experience, which the body keeps as a score, whether in moments of lived experience or in epigenetic transcriptions of trauma and elation, he had begun to accept a more grounded realization: religion might have been concerned not only with these inner fantasies and psychological mechanisms, but also with the exigencies of life itself, serving as a means of providing meaning and transcendence.
And so, caught between the daydreams of his philosophical mind, on the one hand, and the presentness of his body's limitations and the passage of time toward finitude, on the other, he had begun to contemplate a meeting ground between these two forces, a more mature and sophisticated response to the conditions of existence. But was this a cop-out, or merely a self-delusion of the mind, an attempt to preserve the sanctity of the mind itself as a mode of learned self-preservation? This was a question he often entertained with his “scientific” or “analytical” mind.
How can we, as physical and metaphysical animals, cope with these realities and give shape to our own unique experience of the world? he pondered.
However, amid all the mental gymnastics in which John had begun to unravel, his condition had deteriorated significantly, just as Lawrence, his lifelong friend and physician, had predicted. John's body had begun to fail, and he had now entered a prolonged and difficult period of decline, for which the only remedy was to ease his pain. And so, with this prognosis in mind and with the acceptance of John's family members, Lawrence began administering low doses of opiates and barbiturates to help alleviate his suffering.
At first, John had resisted this intervention, for he wanted to remain fully aware and capable of experiencing this final phase of his life at his “full capacity,” as he would often describe it, whatever that meant. John had always wanted to know the reality of the ultimate experience and to discover whether it would measure up to his imagination of what this finality might look like, and whether religion had gotten it right. He was unsure to what end, since he would not be able to communicate his experience to anyone afterward. Yet the power of the mystery, combined with his fantasies of becoming the first to discover and transmit the reality of the ultimate experience, had invigorated him, filling him with a desire to encounter death with both grace and excitement.
“An ultimate act of self-deception, or perhaps a necessary escapatory fantasy for dealing with the finality of death and the cessation of embodied experience—one that we must allow him, and perhaps even indulge,” Lawrence remarked in the hallway outside John's room while speaking with his family members.
Some time had passed, and after an indefinite duration, John rose from his bed to go to the bathroom. Yet something had changed profoundly: his home was no longer familiar. There was no one inside, and the rooms seemed devoid of natural light. Instead, a luminescent, incandescent light appeared to emanate from some distant, indeterminate source, reflecting off the walls and illuminating the corridors and the open windows. Time, too, seemed to have slowed, its passage altered in ways he could neither explain nor fully comprehend. Although John continued to move and ambulate at what felt like a normal pace, everything around him seemed strangely dilated, as though measured against an internal clock that had itself fallen out of sync with the world.
John continued searching for the bathroom. He had become increasingly thirsty, yet he was unable to find it. It was as if his modest four-bedroom home had been transformed into a labyrinthine French château.
He soon lost his way and felt completely disoriented, like a stranger in a strange land. He could not keep pace with the swiftly moving bodies of shadow that seemed perpetually to enter and leave rooms and corridors, darting in and out of view at the very edge of his visual field.
After experiencing a growing sense of unease and anxiety, accompanied by a creeping fear of his predicament, he noticed a much more solid figure moving through the hallways. This figure, seemingly dressed entirely in leather, moved forward and backward through the labyrinthine corridors in strange cycles of frantic and, at times, depressed movement. The corridors had now assumed a more fractal, repetitive pattern, reminding him of Borges's Library of Babel. Yet instead of books, the walls were lined with pelts, tanning fountains, and collections of leather garments made from the hides of all kinds of animals, including humans. These objects hung on the walls as though they were paintings or works of art.
Meanwhile, the figure, now more clearly visible, revealed itself to be a creature exceedingly pale in complexion and bald, yet unmistakably a woman, or at least a being possessing distinctly female features. Her figure moved at varying speeds, sometimes faster and sometimes slower. She would advance in one direction, only to appear elsewhere as though she had moved backward, and vice versa, always following what seemed to be randomized, nearly indecipherable patterns of movement.
The creature would also frequently screech or scream, in a manner suggestive of desperation or anxiety, like that of someone searching for something under pressure and growing increasingly distressed at being unable to find it. Her clothing, too, would frequently change in appearance, although it seemed to retain a consistent design: a pointed hood; a leather jacket perforated with metal eyelets and threaded with cords or laces used to fasten it; trousers with similar eyelets for securing them around the waist; and a pair of large platform boots. What appeared to change was the color and texture of the material resembling leather.
John called out to this mysterious individual. At that moment, he noticed that her bodily constitution seemed to change as erratically as her movements. At times, she appeared to glow or radiate light; at others, she looked increasingly sickly, as though infected by a moving black parasite or a fast-acting poison that left dark traces along the veins throughout her body. Sometimes she would cough or sneeze, leaving trails of bodily fluids across the walls and floor. Her gait, too, was subject to continual fluctuations, shifting between a sickly, weighted sluggishness and an elated, feverish agitation.
John grew increasingly worried by her presence and tried to escape. But then he noticed that her cough droplets and trails of bodily fluids had already contaminated the walls and floors throughout much of the labyrinthine corridors, leaving him with only one apparent way out. He tried to flee through the remaining passage, but as he did, he saw the female figure seize one of the bodily shadows and begin stripping it of its skin. She then discarded the rotting leather garments she had been wearing and replaced them with the new ones she had taken from the embodied shadow.
It was as though she were using their skin as a new host to postpone her own sickness, needing to change skins constantly to keep herself from decaying. John was terrified by this realization and wanted to run, but he suddenly noticed that he had become strangely out of breath, suffering from an increasing shortness of breath. Strangely, however, he was not afraid of this sensation. On the contrary, he welcomed it.
Yet he quickly began to wonder whether he, too, had been infected. The thought overwhelmed him, and the fear of death, of dying itself, returned with a force he could no longer contain.
Motivated by this sudden terror, John turned a corner in the labyrinthine passageways and, without thinking, rushed forward, deeper into the structure, toward an area already covered in black mold or whatever constituted the infection. It was there that he encountered the female figure once more.
She seized him and inspected him as though he were an expensive leather coat. She screeched, kissed, and caressed him with her dirty, rotting teeth and fingers, moaning with sighs of relief at having found him, as though he were a precious object she had feared losing. John was paralyzed by the sight of her face. Only then did he realize that she was blind. Yet her blindness did nothing to diminish the monstrous desperation of her intentions, which overwhelmed him with fear and made him writhe in her grasp.
Alas, it was already too late. With one swift movement, the monstrous woman drew him toward her face. She then thrust her hand into his chest without tearing his skin or damaging his organs and, in an instant, stopped his lungs and heart. John could not utter a sound. All that emerged from him was a forceful, constricted gasp, an exhalation squeezed from his body as his capacity to breathe, and perhaps to resist, abruptly failed.
References
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, and E. F. J. Payne. The World as Will and Representation, Volume II. 1st ed. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1958.