Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  People who have a more or less fascist view of religion are perfectly comfortable with the idea of God as something way up there, something unattainable: the Commander in Chief, the Head Technician, our Fearless Leader, the Great Scientist who put all this together. The Church of Christ, Cosmic Programmer. What’s God thinking about? Smart stuff, hard stuff, stuff we can never understand. That’s the God is Unknowable teaching. No rational human description can exhaust the riches of the One.

  The other side of the coin is that we know the One perfectly well. You can’t describe God in any complete way, but God’s as much a part of you as your body is. You can know something in an immediate way without knowing it in any kind of analytic way. You don’t need to be a geneticist to know how to make babies.

  So when mysticism says The One is Unknowable and then says The One is Right Here, there isn’t really a contradiction. It’s just that there’s two kinds of knowing. We can’t know the One rationally, but we can know it in an immediate and mystical way. Anyone can go into the temple, but you have to leave your shoes outside. “Temple” stands for a mystical vision of God, and “shoes” stands for conventional ways of talking. You take off your shoes and walk into the temple.

  We don’t have to go to the Far East to find mystical religion. Christianity is based on the idea that, on the one hand, God is way up there in seventh heaven, and that, on the other hand, Jesus comes down to live in our hearts. It’s a strange thing that many of us are more comfortable with Buddhism than we are with Christianity. It’s strange, but the reasons are pretty obvious—I mean, imagine if there were a 24-hour-a-day Buddhist Broadcasting TV network:

  “Friends, I want to talk to you about samadhi. This blessed state of union with the Void—Void being Nothingness, friends—this blessed state was first experienced in a little town near the Ganges River. God brought a man—a man, friends, and not a woman—God in His wisdom brought forth this human—a human, friends, and not a Communist—God brought to this seeker a vision of the Void. How best might you, in your ignorance, in your sin, in your present debased circumstances, how might you best seek the Void? The Void can be found in your wallet, dear seeker, if only you will send its contents to me…”

  So you go turn on the radio, man, and instead of music there’s some grainy-voiced guy yelling:

  “…hatred. Yes, hatred, my fellow enlightened ones, Buddha came to preach hatred. I know this may sound strange to some of you out there in the radio audience, but it’s not a matter of conjecture. God hates the unbeliever, just as the unbeliever hates me…”

  There is so much negative stuff associated with religion, that many of us would just as soon never talk about God at all. But there’s still that death-koan hanging overhead: life is beautiful, life ends, what can I do? If I decide not to think about bad stuff like death and loneliness, then I end up spending all my energy on not thinking. I can buy lots of stuff, but every visit to the repair shop is an intimation of mortality. I can get real high, but I always have to come down. And not choosing anything at all is itself a choice.

  Mysticism offers a way out. It’s really just a simple change of perspective. A person’s life is like a design in an endless spacetime tapestry. Molecules weave in and out of your body all the time. Inhale/Exhale; Eat ‘n’ Excrete. You breathe an atom out, I breathe it in. I say this, you answer that. Atoms, thoughts and energies play back and forth among us. We are linked spacetime patterns, overlapping waves in an endless sea. No one exists in isolation, everyone is part of the Whole. If a person can only take the word, “I,” to be the Whole, then that “I” is indeed immortal. In the book of Exodus, Moses asks God what His real name is. God answers: “I AM.” All is One, All is One.

  If this were just an abstract idea, then mysticism would not be very important. What makes mysticism important is that you can directly experience the fact that All is One.

  I used to read about mysticism and wonder how to score for some enlightenment. There’s something so slippery about the central teachings—the way the One is supposed to be unspeakable, yet everywhere all the time—it used to really tantalize me. And then finally I started getting glimpses of it, sometimes with chemicals, sometimes for no reason at all. I’d see God, or feel the world synch into full unity, and I’d love it, but whenever I tried to grab onto it, the life would somehow drain out, and I’d just have some dry abstract principle.

  After I got so I could occasionally feel that All is One, I started being uptight that I couldn’t be there all the time. I bought lots of books by totally enlightened men. Eventually I concluded that no one does stay up there all the time. You can’t always be having a shining vision that All is One; you have to do other stuff, like deal with your boss, or fix the car, meaningless social hang-ups, the stuff like walking and eating and breathing. You can’t always be staring at the White Light.

  But you can. That’s the next level, you see. The Light is everywhere, all the time. Being unenlightened is itself a kind of enlightenment. There are no teachings, and there’s nothing to learn.

  Congratulations, Mary.

  * * *

  Note on “The Central Teachings of Mysticism”

  Written in 1982.

  Appeared in Transreal!, WCS Books, 1991.

  We were living in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1982, and a poet friend of ours named Mary Molyneux Abrams had been taking classes at Sweetbriar College so she could get her Bachelor’s degree. She and her husband David Abrams were friends of ours there. David is a photographer. I used Mary as a model for Sondra Tupperware in Master of Space and Time, and David took the photo of me which appeared on the dustjacket of The Secret of Life.

  In the fall of 1982, Mary decided to stop going to school, and her husband said, “Why not give Mary a graduation party anyway?” He made up engraved invitations mentioning me as the commencement speaker. At the party, I handed out mimeographed copies of “The Central Teachings of Mysticism” and read it to the audience of some forty people.

  My father Embry Rucker, Sr., who was an Episcopal priest, happened to be there and he gave a blessing. And at the end of the ceremony we sang “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.”

  Looking back at this little lecture, I enjoy its flow, but I feel like it’s missing something. God isn’t just some kind of logic puzzle, God can directly touch your heart. Over the years I’ve added a fourth and a fifth “teaching.” God is Love, and God will help you if you ask. Help you do what? To be less selfish, more loving, less driven, and more serene—to let go and stop trying to run everything.

  Memories of Arf

  In September of 1981 we were living in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sylvia and I were in our thirties; Georgia was 12, Rudy was 9, Isabel was 6. We decided we wanted a family dog, partly as a present for Isabel’s 7th birthday.

  We looked in the classified ads and found an ad: Free Puppies. I called and got directions and the place was in the boonies north of Lynchburg. We had to drive on smaller and smaller roads to get there; it was a farm, with lots of bare red dirt. The farmer’s dog had done it with two different males and had given birth to a litter of six puppies on July 3, 1981, though later we always like to say that it had been the Fourth of July.

  Five of the puppies were black and shorthaired, one was orange and white and had long hair. He liked to lie on his back when you petted him; the farm-wife liked him best, she said she always brought him inside to pet while she watched TV. We all practiced petting him, and he eagerly rolled over on his back to offer us his stomach. The farmer gave him to us. On the drive home we agreed to name our new puppy Arf, a.k.a. Arfie.

  At first I thought we’d keep him in a box down in the basement, but he whined so pitifully that the children got him promoted to the kitchen. We all took turns walking him around the little neighborhood streets of Lynchburg. A lifelong characteristic of Arf’s soon became evident: he didn’t like to come when you called him. At all. Ever. Although, according to Georgia, if you squatted down very low and clapped he was likely to com
e a-runnin’.

  We had a big house, and Arf spent a lot of time inside with us. There was a wide pie-slice-shaped step where the carpeted staircase turned: that was Arf’s special spot. He could sit there and be aware of whatever was going on upstairs or down.

  I did start trying to make Arf spend more time outside after our first Christmas together. We had a bunch of house guests and everyone was slipping pieces of turkey and country ham to Arf, and during the night he got very sick, from both ends, in lots of different places all over the house. I asked our guest Eddie if he’d heard anything during the night, and he said, “He was scampering around—and squealing.”

  Arf didn’t learn how to bark until he was about six months old, and he never became a big barker. Occasionally he would stand out in the yard barking into the night with all the other distant dogs the way they like to do, “Here I am! Here I am! Here I am!” But he wouldn’t bark at friends, just at menacing strangers—especially if we were picnicking in the woods, where it really helped to have him defend us, what with rural Virginia’s many crazed rednecks. But mostly, Arf would only bark to let us know he wanted something, like to be let in or let out or taken along on an outing.

  One of our neighbors put out a doghouse for the trash one day, and I brought it home, probably on the kids’ wagon. I put the doghouse in our open garage so that Arf could sometimes sleep outside. I was always trying to get him to be outside more—I was, after all, allergic to him, as I am to all hairy animals—but it was kind of a losing battle. Arf learned how to open the back screen door by hitting it with his paw. “He’s so bright it’s frightening,” we liked to say, though actually Arf was only bright at things that served his immediate purposes, and not always then.

  Two stories about Arf’s doghouse. Across the street we had a bachelor lady with a small female chow dog. The little chow got loose one day and was rumored to be in our doghouse with Arf. When the bachelor lady heard what was going on, she came over in a fury and yanked Arf out by the scruff of his neck—even though the chow was already elsewhere. The other doghouse story had to do with a four-year-old girl who lived next-door to us. She was a grubby brat who wouldn’t learn how to talk properly. She would point and grunt for things she wanted. She wasn’t retarded, she was just spoiled and lazy. Her two big sisters played with our kids quite a bit. One day she crawled into Arf’s doghouse, and her father came and got her out and spanked her. My children, her sisters and I were in paradise.

  As well as his special stair-step and his doghouse, Arf liked to spend a lot of time under our front porch. This was a four-foot-high space about forty feet long, with bare red dirt on the ground. Arf liked it in there because it was cool and shady in the summer, and he could dig up the ground as much as he liked without getting scolded. The children liked it under there too, for about the same reasons. Arf dug himself several large crater-like depressions to lie in, and Rudy liked to fill these pits up with water from the hose so that there would be a really good supply of mud. Later we had a discarded mattress that made its way under the porch, and Isabel would sometimes try to camp out down there with her friend Lalla—until they would get scared and mosquito-bitten and come inside.

  One problem with Arf being outside a lot was that he would roam all over the neighborhood, and into neighborhoods further and further beyond. He liked to explore, sniff other dogs’ old pee-marks, and make his own pee-marks. And of course if there was a female dog in heat, he wanted to go there. “Arfie ran away ‘cause a girl dog had heat,” as Isabel would put it.

  And run away he did, hundreds of times. Not that he was ever lost—if we waited a few hours, or at most a day, he would always come home, sometimes looking a bit exhausted and wrung-out. We never found out for sure if he successfully fathered any puppies, although some Lynchburg friends claim they see Arf lookalikes to this day. I hope so.

  Once we saw Arf doing it with a poodle in front of our garage. It was surprising how little time it took, maybe forty seconds. But those interludes were of key importance to Arf, and it was more or less impossible to keep him from roaming. Especially in the springtime, he’d sniff at the air in a certain way, and you knew that he was going to make a break for it.

  The problem with Arf’s roaming was that Lynchburg had dogcatchers who rounded up stray dogs. Sometimes they would phone us up, and sometimes they would bring him home to us and give us a ticket. Sometimes they would just take him in to the pound. I actually had to go to court over Arf’s tickets one time. A dogcatcher came and testified. I had my new short punk haircut and the judge had long blow-dried ‘70s hair. It was like the hair had reversed from the ‘60s.

  Arf didn’t just roam because he was looking for dogs in heat, he also roamed because he liked to follow the kids to school. Rudy and Isabel used to walk five blocks to Garland-Rhodes Elementary school, and Arf liked to follow them every day. The kids would die of embarrassment when, now and then, Arf would manage to get inside the school and go tearing down the halls looking for them, with his feet skidding and kids running after him and teachers yelling. Rudy and Isabel said they would sit stiffly at their desks, pretending they didn’t know Arf at all. We had a friend with a fenced yard right by the school, and sometimes he would get Arf and keep him out of trouble there until the kids got out of school.

  When Rudy started taking the bus to middle school, about three miles away, Arf figured out how to follow the school bus. It’s hard to see how he could have done it, but he did. This opened up a whole new spectrum of neighborhoods for Arf to explore.

  One joyful time Arf tricked the dogcatcher in one of those new neighborhoods. The dogcatcher phoned Sylvia to say that he had Arf and that she should come get the dog and accept a ticket, but when Sylvia got there the dogcatcher was holding a collar and no dog. Because of habeas corpus, he couldn’t give Sylvia a ticket! Sylvia brought the collar home, and there was Arf on the porch.

  This seemed like a good development. I spent some time trying to teach Arf that he should always run away from the dogcatcher. We sat down together in the driveway, and I moved two little rocks around on the ground to stand for Arf and the dogcatcher. “Dog-catcher come. Arf run away! Dog-catcher bad. Arf run away!” Arf almost looked like he understood, but then he started sniffing at my hands to see if there was food in them.

  In general, Arf failed all official IQ tests with flying colors. We had a hall separated from our living room by a glass door. If the glass door was closed, you could get to the hall by going out the other end of the living room and around the back of the stairs. So one night after eating roast chicken for dinner, the kids took Arf into the living room and I put the platter with the chicken carcass on the floor in the hall right behind the closed glass door. Arf could see and smell the chicken, and he wanted it very much. He scratched and scratched at the glass door. “Come on, Arf,” the kids told him, running out of the living room and around the stairs to appear in the hall with the chicken. “Come on around!” Arf stayed right at the glass door whining. Eventually Sylvia and Georgia said we were being too mean to Arf, and he ended up getting the chicken in his dish on the back porch. So, in a way, he won.

  Arf never succeeded at things by acting human, he succeeded by keeping on being Arf. He would insist on his way of doing things, and eventually we and the rest of the world would give in.

  The children loved to spend time petting Arf. “I like confiding with Arf when the world seems against me,” as Rudy put it. “He’s always soft,” said Georgia, “He’s fluffy!” “If you’re ever sitting on the ground, Arf comes up and sticks his nose in your face to see what you’re doing,” observed Isabel. “The nerve!” Sylvia liked taking him for walks, she was proud of what a cute puppy he was, and of how everyone would comment on him. She particularly admired his high-held feathery tail; she liked to call him “Plume.” And she relied on him to defend the house when I wasn’t around.

  I could always count on Arf to come on hikes with me, even if nobody else in the family wanted to come. On
e day in particular I remember, everyone was mad at me, and I floated down the James River alone with Arf in rubber raft. That day, for some reason he spent a lot of time sitting like a person, with his butt down, and with his back leaning against the fat ring of the raft. I guess the thin rubber bottom of the raft was too unsettling. I took my favorite photograph of Arf that day, a profile shot of him staring off across the water, with his ears cocked and his eyes alert. He had a long, handsome muzzle with a beautiful black nose.

  Arf on the James river.

  That little day-trip I took with Arf was part of the inspiration for my novel, The Hollow Earth, which is about a much longer journey, set in the 1840s. Arf played a supporting character under his own name. I want to copy out some of my Arf descriptions from The Hollow Earth, as they’re a good store of things I wrote about him.

  At the beginning of the book, Mason Reynolds is about to leave his farm near Lynchburg, Virginia, along with his slave Otha.

  Arf got excited and started barking. He had the noble profile and the feathery legs of a retriever. His legs and ruff where white, but his head and body had the tawny coloring of a collie. I’d grown up talking to him like a person. He had a way of moving his eyebrows and his feathery tail so expressively that I often felt he understood me. Now in the farmyard, his tail and eyes were merry as he pumped his barks skyward.

  Later I came to always refer as Arf as orange, rather than tan or tawny. I in fact got quite obsessive about this, and started telling people, “I defy you to say that Arf is not orange.” Finally someone did defy me: when I picked up Arf’s body this week, they said he was a red and white collie-mix, while we’d always called him an orange and white collie/beagle. Picked up his body? Yes, this is an elegy.