Sunrise With Parking Lot

This week’s post was inspired by a photo I took two days ago and posted to the Wordplay Facebook page. Here is the photo:

When I captioned the picture, I explained that I just happened to see the crepuscular rays when I was walking across the parking lot at the grocery store early that morning. I had never tried to photograph crepuscular rays with the sunrise and wasn’t sure I could capture the effect, but the photo turned out pretty well. What I like about it is the depiction of the ordinary in juxtaposition to something verging on extraordinary. When I was little, I thought that God looked like the rays of the sun streaming down (or in this case, up) from behind a cloud. What I see here is a schematic of what the universe may really look like if there is some immanent spiritual reality existing within it.

As I understand transcendentalism, that system posits the existence of God and a spiritual realm “out there” somewhere, beyond the physical world. I’m not sure I know where that might be, since I’m kind of a material girl myself, but we’ll put that aside. I don’t see a division between “spiritual” and “material,” believing that if God is anywhere, he is all around us. I admit that there is a certain beauty in imagining special realms set apart—over the rainbow, in the heavens, in fairyland, or wherever you may imagine it to be. But I look at it this way: It’s possible that spiritual reality co-exists with or intersects everyday reality in countless places but is only glimpsed at certain moments when a slight “separation” occurs, such as the one depicted above. I wasn’t even in a good mood when it happened—I was just there, which proves you don’t necessarily need to get in the right frame of mind to see it.

Now you may say, “But it’s only a sunrise,” and that’s true, of course. It is a sunrise, but I don’t know what’s “only” about it. I do know that now and then something wondrous seems to arise in the midst of an otherwise ordinary moment, something that inspires awe. I’m merely speaking for myself, but I think other people have felt the same thing. In “The Prophet,” Kahlil Gibran said, “Could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; and you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.” Now, it is a very tall order to suppose that one must accept everything just as it is, but I take his point. There is always beauty to be experienced, if you can bring yourself to see it.

I mentioned Hinduism last week, which reminds me that there’s a scene in the Bhagavad Gita (which you were supposed to read LAST YEAR and report back to me on, REMEMBER?) in which Krishna, who is talking to Arjuna about his doubts and fears just before a big battle, opens his mouth to show Arjuna what eternity looks like. Krishna, Arjuna’s friend, is really the god Vishnu in human form, an appearance he takes on in order to keep his divinity from overwhelming the ordinary humans he comes in contact with. It is awe-inspiring and chilling to think of eternity being that close to one, as if at any moment you might tumble into a black hole without even knowing it’s there. Many traditions, though, have stories of people doing just that.

One minute, you’re in Kansas, the next you’re in Oz. You’re on the way to the village to buy some bread, you come across a fairy ring, and you’re whisked away to Fairyland, where you may spend a hundred years before anyone realizes you’re gone. Or you’re a Grail knight and wake up one morning on the ground after spending the night in a castle that is now nowhere to be seen. Or you chase a rabbit down a hole and end up in a rather peculiar place with mad hatters and Cheshire cats.

I take these as metaphors for spiritual realities that, rather than being somewhere else, are really intertwined with everyday reality but can only be accessed via imagination, inspiration, or possibly some precipitating event. Some people are suspicious of the word “spiritual,” so allow me also to say that for me, talking about spirituality is akin to talking about a richness of experience that recognizes interconnections among all things and some kind of underlying order while also recognizing that we may not quite understand everything. I prefer to leave room for a little bit of mystery—which is probably only proper from a scientific point of view. Hubris can be dangerous—as the stories also tell us.

Germane to the Discussion

It’s true: we are living in a synchronistic universe. I wrote about similarities between art and life recently, and I was only using the language of art (Impressionism, Cubism) to describe my own experience. Really, though, it seems that other people may be caught up in the same slipstream (to dip into physics for a moment). How else to explain the phenomena of “doubling”?

It’s one thing for me to take a photo and then remark on how much it reminds me of a certain work of art. It’s another to come across a news service photo of an entire group of people in another country who have somehow managed, in their innocence, to re-create the scene in yet another famous work of art. The similarity of this group of German sunbathers to the people depicted in Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884” also reinforces my point about current reality being definitively Post-Impressionist. Not that I was thinking Pointillism exactly, but, sure, that works. We are out of the garden, but the colors are still there.

If the universe is truly—as the Hindus tell us—a dream issuing as a giant bubble from the mind of the sleeping Vishnu, lounging there on his cosmic ocean, perhaps we are currently living in the Art 101 bubble. Maybe from your wave, it looks Pointillist; from mine, it looks Cubist; and from someone else’s, it looks Surreal, but in any case—it’s all art, so don’t sweat it. We’re all living in a giant museum, and while you may be able to do little more than shuffle from one room to another, there’s always another masterpiece right around the corner. Think what you have to look forward to!

Now, I have heard of planned events in which people deliberately set out to re-create a famous work of art with living and breathing participants. That’s been done with Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in the Netherlands, and in Laguna Beach, California, they have an annual festival of “Living Pictures” in which masterworks are brought to life in a Pageant of the Masters. (By coincidence, and I swear I didn’t know this until two minutes ago, this year’s festival begins today and runs through August 31st. No fooling—here’s the link.)

Now if you don’t happen to live in a trendy place like the left or right coast of the United States, or Amsterdam, you can still get your share of arts and recreation. For example, I happen to know that just north of here, in Columbus, Ohio, there is a park in which “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” has been reproduced using plants—so, no human actors, but the resemblance is still remarkable, as I can tell you myself, having seen it with my own eyes on a long-ago trip. Should your plans take you in that direction, check it out! I have photos that I took myself on my own Sunday morning visit, and while some of the hedges may have needed a bit of trimming, the overall effect was quite impressive.

Wordplay would like to be able to take credit for being prescient in all of this, but all we can truly say is that, given a surf board, we will ride a wave on Vishnu’s ocean as long as the next person. Longer, even.

Meme Able Me

One thing I may have neglected to tell you is that Wordplay now has its own Facebook page, and you can visit us there any time you feel you just can’t make it another day without us. (I’m really not being facetious, or not totally so. These things happen.) I thought about doing this several years ago when I was trying to promote my book and came across some writerly advice about starting a Facebook page. I don’t actually remember the reason I didn’t do it; in any case, the page is more an adjunct to the blog than it is to the book. As you know, Wordplay ranges over many interests since its underlying theme is mythology and everyday life. It has a structure but a very open one due to the subject matter.

Recently someone asked me for input on some labyrinth-building projects here, and while I was glad to give my opinion, I had to explain that my interest in the topic was not from the standpoint of building or using labyrinths but more from a literary stance. I think that the book, while timely, actually has a long shelf life and could be read by anyone with an interest in literary criticism or epistemology, at any time. I also ventured into social criticism with follow-up work that explored some of the social and political reasons why labyrinths may have started trending in the first place. While these topics remain an interest, I felt several years ago that I’d done as much as I wanted to with them and was ready to go in other directions.

It’s challenging to write a blog concerned with cultural mythology. I see a lot of things on the Internet and elsewhere that I don’t feel are worth commenting on or wasting anyone else’s time with. I’ve taken to posting links and images on the Facebook page that catch my eye, and if you’ve seen it, you know that I usually take a light-hearted approach. My voice is the same there as it is here, but the Facebook page is more conducive to sharing links and graphics and creating memes. I sometimes laugh when I’m working on it.

A couple of days ago, I came across a video in my Facebook newsfeed from Mom Versus. The heroine of this Facebook page often posts videos of herself trying out recipes and is in a decidedly humorous vein. After posting a video of her making an American Flag Cake, I was playing around with the idea of “Southern belles” and kept thinking of the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, which was, as you may remember, entitled “The Bells.” I ended up branching off from my original idea but still managed to create a meme in which I brought together two very disparate things, Mom Versus and Game of Thrones. (If anyone can find similarities in completely unrelated things, it’s Wordplay. Remember Say Yes to the Dress?)

I plan to continue the Facebook page along with the blog; the page has more than once served as a point of inspiration for that week’s blog post. Sometimes it’s as simple as a photo I took myself and posted; other times, the inspiration comes from something in the culture. I’m often hesitant to “buy into” trends I see or to comment on the news (holds head in hands), but with humor, a lot of things are possible. You can make a serious point without seeming to, or you can just be silly.

Please check us out on Facebook if you feel moved to do so. You’ll recognize that both “feet” and “cups” (two very everyday things) have played a somewhat outsized role in some of our doings so far. I’m not really sure I can explain why this has happened, just that it has.