Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  “You should’ve been here yesterday,” he said in passing. “Could’ve fed the five thousand, the way we were reeling them in.”

  Given that I came away empty-handed every time, it’s tempting to think that what I was up to all summer doesn’t really qualify as fishing, or that it weighs in, at best, as a diminished form of the sport. But of course that’s not right. A negative experience is still an experience nonetheless, isn’t it? I might not have caught any fish, but I was still fishing, right? This is an idea that a fellow Cornerstoner, Simeon Zahl, has gone on to think long and hard about. In the time intervening he’s become a respected theologian and specializes in the Holy Spirit, in pneumatology. When I recently asked him about self-deception and religious experience, he mentioned Christoph Blumhardt, a turn-of-the-century German preacher. Though a faith healer for much of his career and a firm believer in unmediated experiences of God, Blumhardt came to share Luther’s fundamental distrust of human nature, a baseline suspicion of personal motives. But in a tidy rhetorical peripeteia, he ended up believing that “the reliable mark of the Holy Spirit at work is not so much divine peace as birth-pangs, the anxiety and unsettled feeling that accompanies profound change.” Thomas Traherne, the seventeenth-century poet and theologian, puts it this way: “Be present with your want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity.” Maybe all along I’d been working with a narrow and naive conception of religious experience. Maybe all my experiences of absence and uncertainty, of doubt and anguish, all the clock time I’ve felt far from God, far from myself, maybe all of it, in the end, amounts to an experience of God. Maybe it’d been enough to have a line in the water. And what a mighty comforting thought I found this to be. It was a glorious eighteen seconds, after which I began to worry I was playing at word games here. Was my relief the result of nothing more than some fancy-pants brainifying? The comfort I experienced, how wasn’t that just further evidence that I was curvatus in se, bent hopelessly inward upon myself? Because wasn’t I using this theological insight to solve for a perceived personal lack? Simply calling my desire to have an experience of God an experience of God? “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire,” writes Eliot, portentously, in “Little Gidding.” Back then on my knees I found myself, bowed before a trough of doubt, nosing around in a slop of unknowing.

  * * *

  “Do you believe in pink elephants?” Keith asked, beginning a thought experiment. “Or unicorns? Do you believe in Superman?”

  Of course not. No reasonable person would answer yes to these kinds of questions. But if he were to approach twenty strangers on the street and ask whether they’d had an experience with the paranormal—Had they seen a ghost? A UFO? Ever had an out-of-body experience?—he was sure a handful would say yes. And he bet they’d be eager to share their story.

  The thought of polling strangers about their paranormal experiences cast me back to the MUFON meeting and the conversations that took place during the roundtable. “Freaks”—Keith’s word—isn’t quite right, even with how starkly some of their hypothesizing contrasted with Keith’s own meticulous, scientific bent. What struck me in hindsight was the palpable desperation that lay behind all their speculation. No matter what form that speculation took—the indestructibility of consciousness (in chickens) or the role of bismuth in antigravity—it all amounted to a gesture toward, a grasping after something more. Something other than the plainly human.

  “Paranormal or occult phenomena of the type I’m talking about are most like religious phenomena,” Keith said. “They’re mostly ephemeral, hard to conceptualize. And the problem is they don’t happen every day, so therefore don’t have a close connection with ordinary human experience.”

  Keith asked me to imagine myself as a boat on an inconceivably vast ocean, a body of water that nowhere touches a shore. The water’s color suggests a depth beyond reckoning. Every so often the boat will spring a leak. Water will rush in. The boat, he explained, is our incarnated body and everything that attends having a body. And the ocean is the transpersonal realm beyond us. The boat’s job is to hold the water out. But sometimes it fails. And in those moments, we taste some part of our true potential for experience. William James put it this way: “Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

  This calls to mind Henri Bergson, who helped turn classical models of perception on their head when he argued that, rather than being productive, the brain’s function, with respect to the nervous system and sensory organs, is largely eliminative. As an illustration, Bergson used movies, film. Film couldn’t be counted on to depict a perfectly reliable picture of reality because of the spaces between frames. The metaphoric leap isn’t hard to make: a person’s mind is a projector’s light, his perceptions the individual film stills. What escapes from between the frames as his brain creates the world?

  When I asked whether a person, as a boat, could take on too much water and therefore surely sink, Keith said, “There are levels and layers of the other world. Multidimensions or however you want to say it.” Metaphors mix and must all fail somewhere. Scuba divers sometimes talk about going so far down that their water world is all the same dark color, or of finding themselves caught up in a kelp bed surrounded by weedy green. In such moments they can become so disoriented that they’re no longer able to discern up from down. The mind in such moments of crescendo-like panic must grasp after anything to settle its nauseating vertigo.

  Feeling like I might have let the conversation stray too far afield, I asked Keith about the apparent intelligence that guides UFOs.

  “The UFO phenomenon can’t be completely explained in simple terms as ‘space people’ from outer space, very much like us, coming to visit Earth,” he said. “It’s much more than that. And maybe not even that at all.”

  “I guess I’m just trying to ground this in something concrete,” I said.

  Keith either laughed or scoffed, I couldn’t tell.

  “Good luck!”

  * * *

  I spent more time working on Keith’s profile than I’d planned—the piece kept expanding, amoeba-like, to include more than I felt qualified to discuss. Much to the chagrin of my indoctrinators, Alexis and I had recently moved in together, and I know I taxed her patience with my underinformed talk about gestalt psychology and the phi phenomenon and many other brain busters re: the nature of perception. My gut feeling was that what people see as UFOs could be explained away easily, with an appeal to psychology, to physiology. But there were also times I’d charge up the stairs and into her office to tell her about a sighting that strained my skepticism, that pushed it to its aphelion point. These reports eluded all the routine explanations (weather balloon, ball lightning, lenticular clouds, etc.) and weren’t reported by trashy half-wits on meth but regular citizens, good taxpaying folks like Randy, and seemed to point to something legitimately unidentified. So while I could obviously draw a hard line at a coup d’honeybee, some of what I encountered remained confusing, hard to parse. I started sleeping like a maniac. Alexis told me I was grinding my teeth, said my side of the bed sounded like someone learning to drive stick. I went to the dentist and was set supine in a chair and as four latex-gloved hands palpated my mouth, with the drill’s squeal and the nubby-tipped suction tube’s gurgle-whoosh in my ear and the odd waffle iron of a light hovering above my eyes, I found myself thinking that maybe this was something like what abductees experience.

  At times it seemed like writing this piece had exposed two opposite desires in me, both equally present and fundamental to who I am. On the one hand I want to maintain, at almost any cost, a reasonable, enlightenment-like skepticism; and on the other I deeply want to have that skepticism radically upended. Can one make it through the world as half believer, half debunker? Or is this a mark of cowardice? A wishy-washy unwillingness to commit t
o either side? This contradiction continued to hound me well after my deadline came and I was forced to file a simplified version of my essay about Keith. Parts of my past that’d sat long undisturbed—Alexis had heard about my Martha’s Vineyard summer only in passing, for example—had been roiled, and every so often I would return to what I’d written and experience a deflating disappointment. There I’d find the naked frame of a house—no walls, no roof, a building fit only for squatters in a temperate clime. The piece failed, and spectacularly so, to address any of what I’d experienced in researching and writing it. And the amount of work left to be done seemed staggering, potentially never-ending. One’s spiritual whatever consists of experiences so intimate and evanescent, so evasive and embarrassing, that ultimately no amount of reflection or examination is up to the task of fully unpacking their significance.

  As I began to try to fill in the gaps, I was tempted by easy parallels. Weren’t all of us—Keith, the MUFONites, and I—longing for “something more”? And wasn’t this an ancient human yearning, one that’d led our troglodytic forbears to dream up the idea of religion in the first place? Wasn’t the second Tuesday of every month an occasion for fellowship in much the same way Wednesday night Young Life, Friday morning Campaigners, and church on Sunday had been for me growing up? And couldn’t patiently watching the sky be considered a form of prayer?

  But late one night, as I lay awake vexed by metaphysical vagaries and hypnagogic visions of my teeth falling out, another correspondence emerged. Because wasn’t grounding the mysterious in something concrete precisely what Keith hoped to accomplish? Wasn’t that the point of his massive subterranean library and his routine sky watches? Didn’t his line of inquiry end, like a crash test, in a brick wall of certainty? And in this way, wasn’t his ambition more or less like Dad’s, whose literal interpretation of the Bible had girded him in unassailable, unquestionable Truth? Though with time Dad’s theology has only gotten harder for me to understand, I’ve found it equally difficult for me to fault him for it, to hold a grudge. Because hadn’t I also been hoping to shore up my faith with a doubt-eradicating religious experience? Hadn’t I also been looking for something that might absolve me of uncertainty and, at the same time, impart upon my life a purpose so grand that I’d no longer have to fear, at least not quite so fiercely, that life’s end?

  In revisiting this, I’ve come to believe that pining after the ineffable in the way I had as an adolescent and beyond was little more than thinly veiled narcissism. What was I really longing for but the simple feeling of having been chosen? Incontrovertible proof that I was special? And as I continued to think about Keith and UFOs and about the evolution of my own spiritual whatever, I was haunted by the parallel histories science and religion have spun for us on the loom of time, these epics of human ambition, of our undying quest to charm the fluid universe still. Sometimes I find it dumbly astounding, the imponderable amount of attention and energy and effort and care, the untold frustration and suffering, the head and tummy aches, the melancholy and mania, all the human ooze our scientific knowledge and religious literature represents. But in the face of these histories, I’ve kept returning to the idea that Kierkegaard pitied his professors, whether of science or philosophy or theology, sad men who together bewitched the world with their cleverness, their proficiency, but who never got to experience that critical point in themselves where everything flipped on its head. Because it’s only after such an experience that you can begin to appreciate that there will always be something out there that you’ll never understand.

  * * *

  Time has since worked its magic on my Martha’s Vineyard experience and every so often a memory of that summer will return to me with the astonishing suddenness of a vision. The PG night with the girls from Ole Miss, sober and chaste, when we snuck onto a private beach near Gay Head to stargaze, the lighthouse off in the distance broadcasting its retarded Morse code. The time the guys stayed up all night watching the Lonesome Dove miniseries; how at dawn we went to get pastries for the girls and threw rocks into the Atlantic until our arms and shoulders went sore. The time two house members washed the rest of our feet—how odd and awkward I found that to be, but how disarming and moving, too. How after I suffered a bit of dental trauma (tennis racket, front teeth), a few folks went to the local library’s annual sale and bought me boxes and boxes of books—never before had I felt so cared for by people who were not my family.

  These memories and the many others like them seem to have been served an extra helping of significance, to exist on a mental plane closer to archetype than memory. Is this just nostalgia? Or is it rather that, by a strange lustration, a rock-tumbler-like refinement, the experiences have been allowed to make good on a potential that’d sat latent in them all along? Maybe these questions are asking the same thing, but whatever the case, the memories have acquired a quality that I do not find in others from the same period of my life. They have a weight and strangeness to them that I’ve always associated with religious experience, a depth beyond reckoning, but whether they count as religious, I’m not qualified to say.

  I can say with certainty that I’d begun to notice a like quality in more recent memories, ones involving Alexis. Although we’d only been together a couple years, our earliest experiences were already boomeranging back to me. The first time I saw her, a comet smudge of blond walking up the stairs in my office—she was interviewing for an internship. The respect and humility and incipient pride I experienced when, after I found out who she was, I pulled her application to the writing camp I ran then and read her work—the essay ended on an image of her riding a horse across a Tunisian desert and it’s at once innocent and erotic and it made me feel more alive and after the final period I’m pretty sure I was well on my way to being in love. After we kissed for the first time, months later outside a bar in Northwest Portland, she said, “You just kissed me,” which delighted me more than the kiss itself: it was as though the experience wasn’t quite real, for either of us, until she articulated it. I could go on, but like my memories of Martha’s Vineyard, there’s something paltry and even sad about trotting these out like this, as a shorthand for what they’ve come to mean to me. It’s almost like the event specifics cannot displace the shared imaginary landscape they’re a part of, a horizon of concern that is as much communal and shared as it is personal and private.

  In the end, maybe what I’d been looking for all along was one dramatic experience of capital-M Mystery that might contain or explain all the daily small ones I cannot comprehend and before which language palls. I’d found myself wandering around our place, a little Tudor in Northeast Portland we almost didn’t get, wondering whether it would one day assume the significance that the Martha’s Vineyard house has for me. I’d caught myself trying to commit to memory its floor plan and various architectural quiddities (the corner fireplace in our bedroom, the odd built-in bookshelf in my office), in the hopes that I might more easily summon them to mind in the future, which you would think might dull its strangeness. But no, the house only grew more mysterious. Aside from the XX Cornerstoners, Alexis was the first woman I’d lived with, the first woman I’d really loved, and every so often I’d hear her reading aloud to herself upstairs, working out the rhythm of one of her sentences, or I’d step into the richly fragrant fog of her aftersteam, and I’d wonder at her presence in my life, at the inexplicable source of my good fortune. Who was this being who seemed so glassily limpid at the surface, but so brumous and befogged at any depth? This alpine lake of a woman? She was on a Dickinson jag in those days and in bed, from time to time, she would read me whatever had recently excited her. I remember this:

  Elder, Today, and a session wiser

  And fainter, too, as Wiseness is—

  I find myself still softly searching

  For my Delinquent Palaces—

  And a Suspicion, like a Finger—

  Touches my Forehead now and then

  That I am looking oppositely

  F
or the Site of the Kingdom of Heaven—

  This is about what I think Dickinson means: soon after we moved in I headed down into our house’s unfinished basement, where the washer and dryer had grown old together. I turned the corner at the foot of the stairs and there, hanging like bats from the clotheslines strung between the floor’s beams, were Alexis’s delicate underthings. Diaphanous, ever so thrillingly see-through, they were all different shades of pastel, the soft reds and purples and yellows of Lucky Charms. And though I could name the colors, could describe the lace that lined the waistband and leg holes, could render the way they hung from the wooden clothespins, curled slightly in on themselves like chrysalises, still there was something irreducibly strange about the scene, something that eluded definition, that slipped right through the sieve of my mind. It was, somehow, more. So whatever time or fate or God has in store for Alexis and me, whether what we’ve built so far has been built to last, I am coming to learn, day by day, that there are entire orders of mystery with which I’ll be more than happy to live.

  Neighborhood Watch

  Maybe it’s just me, some personal or spiritual failing, but so little of my life feels like it’s lived in the warm groove of scene. Seems I’m always getting caught in the sticky wicket of self-consciousness, overaware of how the story’s being told. Overaware that a story’s being told. My default mode tends to be this one of narration, meaning, roughly, that an experience doesn’t really become “real” for me until it’s prosed. Put under the hitchhiker’s thumb of words, all dolled up in the dinner jacket of syntax. During broodier jags, I suspect this inability to “live in the present” has robbed me of experiential richness, kept me from partaking in the full range of emotion available to me as a human being. Are my joys as joyous as they can be? My griefs as grievous? Am I experiencing love as deeply as I’m able? At a full-force level ten? But every now and again it’s like the gears of life will move in such a way as to force me out of myself and into the story. So then, action—