Our friend Jeff said to me the other day, “I don’t believe in reality.”
I wish I could remember what I said to him right before he said that, but I can’t.
The moment Jeff said, “I don’t believe in reality,” my awareness of reality shifted. Not that I stopped believing in reality, but I began to see the world differently. How so? Hard to say.
You will recall the scene in the prophetic movie The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and the Lion are standing before the big screen on which is projected the frightening head and face of the supposed Wizard of Oz and they are quaking in fear of him and he is telling them he can’t help them, when Toto, Dorothy’s dog, possibly the sharpest member of the cast, discovers an old man standing in a booth adjacent to the screen, and the booth turns out to be the projection room, the image on the screen an illusion.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” says the Wizard of Oz on the screen as voiced by the old man in the projection room.
He might have said, “Don’t believe in reality! Believe instead in the nonsense on the screen intended to entrance you and entrap you and empower me at your expense.”
*
Yesterday I was on my way into Corners of the Mouth, the worker-owned food cooperative in Mendocino where I shop twice a week, and there were two people, a man and a woman, standing in front of the store gazing into their smart phones. The man said, “Mixed reviews.” The woman replied, “Seems more like a bulk foods place.”
As I passed them I said, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
“Excuse me?” said the man, frowning at me.
“It’s a great store. Full of wonders,” I said, smiling at him. “I’ve been shopping here multiple times a week for seventeen years. Every time I go in I discover something new. The produce is grandiloquent, the employees spectacular, their selection of chocolate bars inspiring.”
The man looked at his phone. “Says the layout is confusing.”
The woman blinked at me and said, “That was from The Wizard of Oz. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
“Right you are,” I said, entering the store and inhaling of the magnificence.
Which is to say, reality seems to be largely what we make of things. Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” To which I will add, “If you think what is projected on your screen is reality, so it shall be.”
*
My mother was essentially mistrustful of reality whenever things were going well. In other words, she was always expecting something bad to happen. It was almost as if she wanted something bad to happen. I don’t think she did, but her expectation was so strong it might as well have been the desire for disaster.
I inherited this mistrust of happiness from her, which created in me a lifelong propensity for self-sabotage. I am ever amazed at how this manifests on both the physical and emotional planes in my life, and I’m not kidding when I say I really don’t know how I made it to seventy-three.
*
My mother said the thing she disliked most about getting old was all her friends were dying. She did not say that what she disliked most about getting old was all her friends were falling and breaking various bones and hitting their heads, but for me that seems to be the era we have entered vis-à-vis our friends, along with some of them dying, too.
As one who has fallen many times throughout my life, though not recently knock-on-wood, I can tell you that in my reality every time I fell I was either needlessly hurrying or not paying close attention to what I was doing, and probably both those things. My most recent injury resulting from needlessly hurrying and not paying attention was to smash my bare toes on a rock protruding from the path I was on, the result of which was a broken toe, an infected toe, a wonky way of walking for some weeks, aches and pains from lopsided posture due to compensating for foot pain, and so forth ongoing.
Why was I hurrying and not paying attention after a delightful barefooted walk on the beach? The short answer is: I’m an idiot.
*
Why do we needlessly hurry and not pay attention to what we are doing? We might say the answer is different for each of us. We might also say the answer is the same for all of us. For one reason or another we are not content to fully inhabit the present moment. We are entrained to move forward, to keep going, to stay busy, to keep ourselves entertained, our brains stimulated, even if by junk. We don’t know very well how to saunter and to pay close attention to what we’re doing and to what’s going on around us.
Marcia and I take a walk on the headlands south of Mendocino every few weeks, and after a two-mile jaunt we come to the end of the trail overlooking a rock outcropping just offshore on which harbor seals like to roost for several hours a day. Sometimes there are a dozen or more seals on those rocks, sometimes just a few, and sometimes there are none. The seals are light gray and dark gray and various shades of brown, their colors very close to the colors of the outcropping.
Now here’s an interesting thing to me about this outcropping and those seals. We have arrived at the point overlooking the outcropping a hundred or so times in my life, and the first thing I do when we arrive there is to count the seals. And many of those times, my first count misses at least one and sometimes more of the seals. My second count usually includes all the seals, but sometimes it takes a third careful scanning before I clearly see all the seals.
fin
Conception Vessel Seventeen piano/cello duet from Through the Fire