My 2018 story, The Sage of Underwood, takes place in a setting that I call The Rocks. It’s a real place, so very close to ordinary empirical reality. Yet it is also a place where odd things happen, like the sudden appearance of a blanket I had in childhood or a bottle of my favourite beer. Or, an angel! The story is based on my weird experiences of encountering “fluid” physical reality and I have given a great deal of thought to its nature. My books and essays are filled with autobiographical hints of this reality but I first had to deal with fears of madness when I encountered various versions of “The Rocks” over the years. This “madness” is the madness of isolation from the human community so finding fellow travellers—others who have found their individual way to a version of “The Rocks”—essentially relieves that madness, at least for decent periods of time. The need to connect with others who have also discovered this new emergent reality—for that is what it is—is life-long I believe. It is pressing upon us with an urgency that can break individuals who encounter it and bring panic to an undiscerning collective.[1]
When I found my way to Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I shivered with excitement. I realised this is a story of his version of “The Rocks” and it seems equally real to him as it is to me. In fact he said of his book that the most important part is the protagonist Toru Okada’s descent into a dry well where he bodily passes through the wall—into another equally real “physical” world, just like ours. It is physical reality, yes, but like my “The Rocks”, strange things happen that defy the laws of familiar physical existence. Here is his description of the phenomenon as he sits at the bottom of the dark well:
I realized I could hear a low, monotonous hum in the dark, something like the droning of insect wings. But the sound was too artificial, too mechanical, to be insect wings. It had subtle variations in frequency, like tuning changes in a shortwave broadcast. I held my breath and listened, trying to catch its direction. It seemed to be coming from a fixed point in the darkness and, at the same time, from inside my own head. The border between the two was almost impossible to determine in the deep darkness. While concentrating all my attention on the sound, I fell asleep. I had no awareness of feeling sleepy before that happened. All of a sudden, I was asleep … How long this thick, mudlike stupor enveloped me I had no idea. It couldn’t have been very long. It might have been just a moment. But when some kind of presence brought me back to consciousness, I knew I was in another darkness. The air was different, the temperature was different, the quality and depth of the darkness were different. This darkness was tainted with some kind of faint, opaque light. And a familiar sharp smell of pollen struck my nostrils. I was in that strange hotel room. I raised my face, scanned my surroundings, held my breath. I had come through the wall. I was sitting on a carpeted floor, my back leaning against a cloth-covered wall. My hands were still folded on my knees. As fearful and deep as my sleep had been just a moment before, my wakefulness now was complete and lucid. The contrast was so extreme that it took a moment for my wakefulness to sink in. The quick contractions of my heart were plainly audible. There was no doubt about it. I was here. I had at last made it all the way into the room. (550-551)
During the 1990’s I had a series of waking experiences that seem uncannily close to Murakami’s descriptions:
I am lying in bed and I feel familiar deep shudders inside. I decide to go with them, not to wake up and I succeed. I find I can lift off the bed. At first, there is a short period of darkness. Now I can see my bed, below. I am up in the corner of the room looking down at the bed. There is a film on my eyes like tears partially cleared but I can see perfectly. I touch the ceiling and find it soft and crumbly as if I could go through it but I decide not to do that out of fear. There is an old light bulb and old decorations on the ceiling. “What are they doing there? That’s different from what is normally there.” As evidence, I decide to unscrew the bulb and bring it down with me. I push off the ceiling. There is another period of darkness and I am in bed again. I wake up into my ordinary state, of course with no light bulb in my hand. Sometime later, I once again feel the buzzing vibrations that seem to signal a shift in reality. Is this the insect storm? I feel fear and let it go. Then I notice my hand is penetrating the bed/earth and scooping through. It has become more fluid, as I have experienced before. I push my face through the bed. I can see. Some effort is needed but the solidity gives way to a more fluid matter. I feel I could, if I dared, go through the wall into my neighbour’s apartment. Lack of fear is the key. I feel more ready than ever to do it.[2]
Murakami’s stories, described as fusing the realistic and fantastic, along with my actual experiences show how hard physical reality can unexpectedly soften, loosen, or change form![3] This kind of deformation of physical reality is scarcely imaginable and it takes an artistic mind to do so. Such a brilliant mind is that of Salvador Dali and I have written a longer essay about his artistic effort to say what Murakami is saying and what my experience are teaching me, opening my eyes to the work of these artists.
Here is a quote from my Dali essay, Deformation of Reality:
Dali is showing his version of an entirely new set of real appearances that correlate with a new style of consciousness—one that can simultaneously perceive ordinary, hardened, empirical reality and the reality of another dimension altogether, as this dimension unfolds into empirical reality.
I have spent decades surrendering enough to be taught by such experiences. They point to a future development that involves nothing less than a transformation in reality, our hardened material reality. There is a possible future speaking in and through these hints. At this time hints of such a transformation in reality can be found at the bottom of Murakami’s well, or Peter Kingsley’s Krater. Those individuals who can descend deeply enough to find that “place” where they can cross into the unknown future may then bring us artistically rendered hints of what is to come.
And it is coming!
The fate of our species depends on whether we can listen to these oracles![4]
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[1]UFOs are such a collective phenomenon. See my book, Hearing Voices:
[2]Extract from my book, Hearing Voices
[3]We can get a quick sense of how difficult it is for the book industry to assess Murakami’s work by noting how it assigns what used to be distinct genres to his style of writing: fiction, surrealism, realism, picaresque, magical realism, science fiction, mystery, “coming-of-age”.
[4]See my Academia Section Art and the Future for relevant essays.
