I check to see if I left flesh or blood on the metal skirt clips. No, but the clips are discolored, rusty. Thoreau's brother died of tetanus after cutting himself with a rusty razor. I try to remember whether my tetanus booster is up-to-date. With a free-flowing wound like this, the danger is minimal. But what a bizarre and banal death that would be.
In another universe—
Perhaps a mortal moment, after all.
therapeutic value of the alternate universe theory:
—a sophisticated illusion (?) to help us manage the pain of uncertainty/finality—helpful only if we believe we can choose the “better” universe (or does just the vision of, say, the squirrel still frolicking somewhere ease our pain?)
—not a defense against the eventuality of death, unless we posit universes of impossibly old people (and squirrels and beagles)
but mortal anxiety anxiety about death—the “good” death, quiet in bed at ninety or one hundred, that one is “ready” for (at least some have said they are ready); that death does not inspire mortal anxiety—the young death, the accidental death, the “wrong” death that comes before we are finished, before we even know who we are; and the impossibility of foreseeing and avoiding that death, of controlling the terms of our existence—
New title: Mortal Anxiety and the Alternate Universe by E. K. Smythe (would appeal to multiple markets: psychology, philosophy, science, science fiction; the cover needn't tell that E. K. is a woman—if that matters)
BIO/INTRO, cont'd.
Mortal, or existential, anxiety destroyed Katherine's marriage of five years to “Steve.” He knew of her anxiety when he married her but neither thought that it would come between them and having a family. “Steve” dreamed of becoming a father. At first Katherine wanted children, too, despite her terror of taking on responsibility for their safety (if she couldn't trust herself with a dog—then a child?). Then their friends “Bridget” and “Dennis” lost their infant son to the flu. Every year a few, very few children succumb unpredictably to influenza; theirs was one. Katherine had never seen such intense grief. She kept waiting for time to bring healing, but it didn't. “Bridget” sank into depression. “Dennis” sought distraction in an affair. They divorced. “Bridget” moved in with her parents and spent her spare time drinking.
A bottomless well of anxiety opened up in Katherine's heart. How would she ever survive such a horrendous loss? She knew that people did, that not everyone destroyed themselves or their marriages. Some families circled, like wagons, embracing each other until they could move on. But could she?
"Steve” mourned the loss of his friends’ child, even tried to help them patch up their marriage. He spoke with Katherine of the risk of that awful pain, the risk of loving as a parent loves. Still, his longing to be a parent survived his contemplation of the risk. Katherine admired his bravery but could not find it in herself. “Steve” finally left. Now he has a new wife and a six-month-old son. He is happy. Katherine is glad he is happy. But when she contemplates having her own children she falls back into that terrible well of anxiety and only by promising herself childlessness forever can she pull herself out.
how can I with words open up that bottomless well?
perhaps I should keep it covered and let those who can maintain their illusions keep them or is it the well itself that offers a way into other universes?
(chapter title: “Creating the Alternate Universe/s")
A TEST SITUATION
My mother awaits—hence I await—the biopsy results. I go online to check prices to fly to California. Then I realize this is the ideal test situation. How many universes can I create, spin off, as I make my reservations? I select “search by price” for a Boston-LA flight and am rewarded with a plethora of possibilities. Overwhelmed, I should say. Which airline? Which day? Which flight? My life will turn out differently depending on the choice—perhaps only a little differently, perhaps a lot. Perhaps end. But I cannot tell unless I peer into those other universes.
I select a date at random, choose another a week later, look for a flight leaving neither too early nor too late. I take it all the way up to “Click to buy ticket” and my hand freezes over the computer. This is it, a fulcrum moment, I can buy or not.
And even if I buy, I can go or not.
Which life, which universe do I choose? To buy this ticket, go on this flight? To buy this ticket, then choose later whether to go or not? To start over?
I hold my hand motionless, letting my thoughts pour into the moment and fill it, nudging me into this universe or that. Or at least opening a tiny window, a hatch, into other possible universes, so that I know what I am choosing.
The universes close up tight.
Tell me, God, tell me what to do.
God, as usual, is silent. Or not there.
segue to: “God and Mortal Anxiety"
—are there universes in which God is, and universes in which He/She is not? or universes with many Gods? or one God for many universes?
—religious people have been found to be happier, less depressed, less anxious; check research—is it the belief in God as such, or the existential certainty that accompanies such belief, that relieves anxiety?
—atheists are likewise certain; are they less anxious?
—agnostics, the uncertain, the know-nots: if uncertainty breeds anxiety, then anxiety must trail them like a hungry dog
(yet more) BIO/INTRO
Because Katherine teaches religion, her students—and others—assume her to be a religious person. She is a religious person in the sense that the deep questions of life concern her greatly, and she seeks the subjective responses of religion and philosophy, not just the objective answers of science. But so far her studies have shed no light on the question of God. Despite—or perhaps because of—years of religious study, Katherine finds herself a thoroughgoing agnostic. Faith in God and the prospect of heaven, being unreal to her, can neither comfort her nor calm her anxiety.
could it be belief in heaven, rather than spiritual certainty or belief in God, that relieves mortal anxiety?
—heaven: a kind of alternate universe accessible primarily through death, perhaps also through trance or vision—carrying heavy moral weight (unlike most other alternate universes)
—pre-existent to this universe? i.e. not a result of bifurcations of it or of universes preceding; or perhaps a very early bifurcation but a universe accessible by death is not therapeutically useful when the interior aim is to avoid untimely death ways other than death to access alternate universes:
—inward: meditation, hypnosis, trance, aided by fasting, drugs, pain—outward: specialized technology (not yet known), travel at a particular speed or direction, key geographical points/gateways, transitional objects is belief in the alternate universe necessary to reach it (as perhaps to reach heaven)?
—then the agnostic is doomed; neither science nor theology can save her
(unless in writing this book I find a way—)
* * * *
AN OUTSIDE TRIP
Despite Katherine's anxieties, she persists in the belief that only total immersion in the vagaries of life will eventually bring security. She knows she thinks too much. To get out of her head, out of her anxieties, she goes to the supermarket. Instead of imagining the universes that may be splitting off as she chooses to take this road instead of that, this parking space instead of that, this shopping cart instead of that, she focuses on the tastes she plans to bring home: mango, pineapple, strawberries. Plain first, then with vanilla yogurt, then whipped with a little sugar and spice into an East Indian lassi.
Her mouth waters.
The man in front of her in the checkout line has a basket full of hamburger, a dozen packages. None have been put into a protective plastic bag, although these are provided in the meat section. When Katherine buys hamburger, she pulls a plastic bag over her hand like a glove, picks up the package of meat, then pulls the bag back up, never touching the original plastic wrap packaging. Who
knows, a little juice might have dripped out, a little meat spilled, bacteria-filled, contaminated.
Katherine has never contracted food poisoning at home.
She watches the man load the hamburger onto the conveyor belt, notices the wet spot underneath when he shifts the packages to make room for more, a crumb of red that might have oozed out of the plastic-wrap. She looks at her mango and pineapple (there were no strawberries today). Alternate universes spin before her: Despite the hamburger, nothing happens, she washes everything thoroughly and stays well. Or she has a touch of food poisoning, recovers. Or she dies of a new modern virulent form of E. coli. Or—
She excuses herself from the line, mumbling something about a forgotten item. But she forgot nothing. On the contrary, she remembers too much. She heads for another line, stops in her tracks. Who's to say the customer three or four places ahead of her, already in the parking lot, didn't leave the cashier's hands and the conveyor belt already contaminated?
She decides to go back to the produce department for plastic bags for her fruit. Then she spots a cashier spritzing her station with disinfectant, wiping everything down, switching on the light that says the lane is open. Katherine scurries over, stepping in front of a slow old man with a package of pork chops. She smiles apologetically; he nods and his eyes twinkle. She puts the mango and pineapple onto a conveyor belt, which still glistens with disinfectant. She will wash them before cutting them up, before closing her mouth around their incomparable sweetness. But she feels confident that even if the washing is not perfect, the fruit will not sicken her in this universe she has chosen/created.
If she gets sick, it will not be her fault. She has done what she can.
creating the secure universe: the aspiration of the mortally anxious their ritual objects: plastic bags, helmets, antibacterial sprays, locks, alarms, sensors, diagnostic tests, seatbelts, organic foods, insurance policies limits on creation of the “safe” universe:
—ability to choose universes by taking precautions is limited to hazards which can be foreseen and prevented—for unforeseen/unforeseeable events, the only chance to choose lies in catching that moment, the fulcrum moment—but how to access other universes through that moment?
A REAL TEST
The phone rings. Katherine puts down the fork with mango still skewered upon it, reaches for the phone, pauses with her hand extended. She senses her mother at the other end of the line, tries to picture her face: relieved? devastated? worried but hopeful? This is it, the moment, she feels it, she knows it. How does she turn it aside? By never answering the phone? By answering in this moment rather than the next, by waiting another ring? By closing her eyes and taking some inward turn in her mind? By clicking her heels, turning left three times, saying “abracadabra"?
She sweats, she fights tears, but she cannot move her mind/self/reality into position to leap/fall/dissolve from this universe into another. She feels herself toppling into the well of anxiety, but rallies and lifts the phone. Hello.
Hello. Her mother's voice is strained. She wastes no time. “It” is malignant. She will have surgery right away. The doctor is hopeful. But—
Katherine watches the moment recede in her rearview mental mirror, feels herself sitting at the bifurcation of universes—they split and split again into a great cauliflower-like fractal of possibilities, of realities—innumerable universes exploding from the moment and mushrooming up and out (those organic metaphors again) in great clouds.
In which universe does her mother die soon, die later, respond to treatment, not respond, go into remission, experience a complete cure?
Katherine hangs onto the phone, the tips of her fingers whiten. She wishes she could reach out and grab onto the “good” universes, let them pull her along and her mother with her, into a place where squirrels still frolic and beagles play and, if she cannot avoid all pain, at least she can exercise some choice about which pain to experience and which to let go.
But the universes slip from her hands like so many silken cords. She clings to the one that remains, praying, with all that is within her, that this is the right one, the one where she belongs, and that the pain will not be more than she—than I—can bear.
* * * *
I've never thought to call myself “interstitial” (until now), but I have always felt caught between sometimes conflicting identities: am I poet or scientist, country girl or academic, mystic or naturalist, Midwesterner or Yankee? To add to my bewilderment, I tend to feel greater affinity for the world in which I am not; back home in Indiana I feel like a New Englander, but in Maine I'm aware of my lingering Midwesternisms. So I'm always more or less out of place—except when I am in nature, and when I write.
My writing grows from yet another experience of incongruity—the sense of life as a constant juxtaposition of the bizarre and the taken-for-granted. My own experience leans to the bizarre, not because my life has been bizarre in any usual sense, but because I find existence essentially incredible. Perhaps the inability to take things (such as existence) for granted is one of the roots of anxiety—but also of imagination.
As for “Alternate Anxieties,” I owe its existence to an unlucky squirrel, who died in the manner described. I was left to ponder the enormous consequences of seemingly trivial choices. Thus, a story.
Karen Jordan Allen
[Back to Table of Contents]
Burning Beard:
The Dreams and Visions
of Joseph ben Jacob,
Lord Viceroy of Egypt
Rachel Pollack
"There was a young Hebrew in the prison, a slave of the captain of the guard. We told him our dreams and he interpreted them."—Genesis 41:12
"Why did you repay good with evil? This is the cup from which my lord drinks, and which he uses for divination."—Genesis 44:5
"If a Man Sees Himself in a Dream
killing an ox: Good. It means the removal of the dreamer's enemies.
writing on a palette: Good. It means the establishment of the dreamer's office.
uncovering his backside: Bad. It means the dreamer will become an orphan."
—Excerpts from Egyptian Dream Book, found on recto, or back side, of a papyrus from the 19th Dynasty.
In the last month of his life, when his runaway liver has all but eaten his body, Lord Joseph orders his slave to set his flimsy frame upright, like the sacred pillar of the God Osiris in the annual festival of rebirth. Joseph has other things on his mind, however, than his journey to the next world. He has his servant dress him as a Phoenician trader, and then two bearers carry him alone to the dream house behind the temple of Thoth, God of magic, science, writing, celestial navigation, swindlers, gamblers, and dreams. Joseph braces himself against the red column on the outside of the building, then enters with as firm a step as he can. The two interpreters who come to him strike him as hacks, their beards unkempt, their hair dirty, their makeup cracked and sloppy, and their long coats—
It hardly matters that the coats are torn in places, bare in others. Just the sight of those swirls of color floods Joseph's heart with memory. He sees his childhood dream as if he has just woken up from it. The court magicians in their magnificent coats lined up before Pharaoh. The Burning Beard and his brother shouting their demands. The sticks that changed into snakes. And he remembers the coat his mother made for him, the start of all his troubles. And the way he screamed when Judah and Gad tore it off him and drenched it in the blood of some poor ibex they'd caught in one of their traps.
Startled, Joseph realizes the interpreters are speaking to him. “Sir,” they say, “how may we serve you?"
"As you see,” Joseph says, “I am an old man, on the edge of death. Lately my dreams have troubled me. And where better to seek answers than in Luxor, so renowned for dreamers?” The two smile. Joseph says, “Of course, I would have preferred the interpretations of your famous Joseph—” He watches them wince. “—but I am only a merchant, and I am sure Lord Joseph speaks only to princes."
&nbs
p; The younger of the two, a man about thirty with slicked down hair says, “Well, he's sick, you know. And there are those who say the Pharaoh's publicity people exaggerate his powers.” He adds, with a wave of his hand, “One lucky guess, years ago—.—.—."
"Tell me,” Joseph says, his voice lower, “is he really a Hebrew? I've heard that, but I find it hard to believe."
In a voice even lower, the young one says “Not only a Hebrew, but a slave. It's true. They plucked him out of prison."
Joseph feigns shock and a slight disgust. “Egypt is certainly more sophisticated than Phoenicia,” he says. “In Tyre our slaves sweat for us, not the other way around."
The other stares at the stone cut floor. “Yes,” he says. “Well, the Viceroy is old, and things change."
Quickly, the older one says “Why don't you tell us your dreams?"
"Lately, they've been very—I guess vivid is the best word. Just last night I dreamed I was sailing all alone down a river."
"Ah, good,” the older one says. “A sign of wealth to come."
"It had better come soon, or I won't have much use for it. But to continue—I climbed the mast—"
"Wonderful. Your God will bear you aloft with renewed health and good fortune."
Joseph notices their eyes on the purse he carries on his belt. He goes on, “When I came down I became very hungry and ate the first thing I saw, which only afterwards I realized was the offal of animals. I haven't dared to tell anyone of this. Surely this is some omen of destruction."
"Oh no,” the younger one jumps in. “In fact, it ensures prosperity."
"Really?” Joseph says. “Then what a lucky dream. Every turn a good omen.” He smiles, remembering the fun he had making up the silly dream out of their lists. But the smile fades. He says, “Maybe you can do another one. Actually, this dream has come to me several times in my life.” They nod. Joseph knows that the dream books place great emphasis on recurrence. After all, he thinks, if a dream is important enough to come back, maybe the interpreters can charge double.
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