All seas of meaning are tied to a particular culture and time. Many words that were used in Shakespeare’s time have very different meanings for us today.
Nuances and associations are lost and sometimes much more. But we don’t have
ALICE HICKEY 65
to go back 400 years and across the Atlantic to find a different sea of meaning for the words we use every day. We can just go across town and find out we have no idea what people are talking about.
When I lived in New York as a young man, I often listened to WBLS, the black R&B station in Harlem. I remember hearing a new James Brown song containing the phrase, “Poppa got a brand new bag,” and having no idea what it meant. My mind immediately fabricated an image of a slightly tipsy, elderly black man walking down the street swinging his wife’s pocketbook.
Looking back at it now, I’m sure if I had ever mentioned that to the African-Americans I played basketball with at the time, they probably would have laid down on the court and howled. They were swimming in a much different sea of meaning than I was. What “Poppa got a brand new bag,” meant to them, I found out years later, was that Brown was declaring he had a whole new outlook on life, and in particular, on the music he was making. Musicians familiar with his work say it marks the point where Brown began to fully realize his efforts to bring black music back to its primal, percussive roots.
If I was confused by Brown’s lyrics, something similar was happening in my attempts to understand the myth. Parts of it didn’t fit into my frame of reference anymore than did “Poppa got a brand new bag.” Whenever I encountered these bewildering parts of the myth, my mind would immediately (and invisibly) produce a fabricated meaning and I was never the wiser. How I eventually figured out what was happening is hard to say, but some of the impetus came from Jane. I was close to the edge of a breakdown one evening and probably would have gone over if she hadn’t called.
“I was thinking about you,” she said.
“I’m glad somebody is. I don’t know how to say this, but I think I’m about to have a nervous breakdown.”
“You sound like it, baby. It’s the myth, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It makes sense and then, all of a sudden, it doesn’t. It’s like being crazy.”
“You are crazy, didn’t I tell you that?”
“That’s not funny, Jane”
“But you are. You know why?”
“No, tell me.”
“Because I keep telling you the myth isn’t yours, but you never listen.”
“I know, I know, but it feels like mine, I mean it came to me like any other poem.
I mean I didn’t feel anybody else; Jesus, I would have known.”
“You don’t know crap, Justin. That myth came from a dark place. I told you that once.”
“I know—it’s a swamp, it came from Joan, get rid of it and all of that, but listen, if it weren’t for Joan, I wouldn’t have the myth.”
“That’s your problem, baby, but right now, that’s not the dark I’m talking about.
66 ALICE HICKEY
I’m talking about the dark where cavemen lived.”
“What cavemen?”
“I don’t know—cavemen from way back in the beginning. Anyway that’s what keeps coming to me. They look almost like apes. I keep seeing some of them coming out of a dark cave, but there are others who keep hanging back. The ones coming out keep looking back at the ones hanging back, like something’s the matter with them.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”
“You could shove it up your ass for one thing. And listen, mister, don’t get prissy with me. You’re lucky I called.”
ALICE HICKEY 67
Chapter 17: I Take the Ball from Jane And Run
September 2004, Sarasota
Jane made me so angry I snapped back to something like normal. I knew she was onto something. I knew that “cavemen from way back in the beginning” meant the very first humans. But what was she trying to say about them? Right then I saw one of the cavemen looking back at the cave and a tumbler clicked in my head: it was about knowing. They wanted to know why they had come out of the dark, become human, while some of their brothers and sisters had remained in the dark—remained animals. It must have consumed them.
Whatever genetic change had taken place with the advent of human consciousness, it was probably very tentative. It was entirely possible that some of the brothers and sisters of those very first humans would have been born without the human gene. The difference would have been obvious after a few years.
Any doubts I had about the myth were swept away, just like that. Jane’s insight had been like a laser. It had gone right to the heart of the matter. The myth was about the nature of our first consciousness; the one that formed when we changed from animal to man.
I went back to reading about preliterate cultures, especially what Julian Jaynes had to say about their stories. Somewhere in my reading, another tumbler clicked.
Not only was the myth about the first human consciousness, it also had all the characteristics of a story from preliterate times. It was concrete, immediate, straightforward, non-reflective— This happened, They appeared, We went, They said.
That is why the myth seems vague from a modern, explanatory point of view.
Preliterate stories were more concerned with passing on knowledge by imitating a truth than by logically explaining it. Thus the myth is content to present us with a simple drama in which the four players “imitate” the way our first consciousness operated. .
Our modern minds want much more explanatory detail on the four players. We never get that detail, however, because the preliterate speakers of the myth aren’t interested in explaining anything—they’re interested in imitating the essential drama of witnessing. What’s more, and here’s the kicker, the speakers are also assuming we have a preliterate mindset and are therefore familiar with the essential drama and nature of the four players.
The excellence of a preliterate poet was not based on the uniqueness of his story, but how he told it. The basic storyline of Homer’s Iliad, for example, would not 68 ALICE HICKEY
have been much different from that of the scores of competing epics about the Trojan War. Everyone knew the story. What distinguished Homer was the way he told the story.
Unfortunately we are 21st century humans (with a much different consciousness) and therefore aren’t at all familiar with either the drama or the four players in The Witnesses Log. We can only guess. If Columbus, however, had presented this myth to the preliterate tribes he encountered, they—unlike us—would have immediately recognized the four players for who they were.
The myth had come from a dark place, just like Jane said. It not only reflected what had to be the essential concern of very early humans—why they were different from the rest of creation—but the myth was also being told exactly as a preliterate human would have told it. No explanation. Just imitation.
I finally had a good handhold on the myth. I may not have sewn up all the loose ends, but I no longer had any doubts the myth was about early preliterate consciousness. Nor did I have any doubts that the myth was being told from the point of view of very early man. I had no idea, however, how that point of view had found its way into the myth outside of Jane’s belief that it had come from a separate intelligence (something I still couldn’t accept). Yet I suspected I was going to have to view it that way until I cracked the final code. It was just a matter of time, I kept telling myself.
Unfortunately, I kept losing my balance. At times it was like walking through a minefield. I might have understood intellectually that the myth was being told from a preliterate mindset, but I hadn’t quite grasped the full ramifications of what that meant. It wasn’t just a matter of the narrative style. It also meant that the
sea of meaning the myth swam in was very different from the one I swam in.
This meant that even though the words in the myth were ordinary enough, and had obvious contemporary meanings, the preliterate meanings of certain key words were not apparent at all. It was this conflict that was causing my mind to automatically fabricate a meaning. The problem was I couldn’t detect when it was actually happening—the fabrications were too quick for me to catch.
The one thing consciousness is truly threatened by is something it can’t comprehend—something outside of what it knows to be possible—and it will fabricate just about anything to make sure the impossible doesn’t present itself.
This is what was happening to me. My mind would kind of fuzz out and then immediately rebound with a fabricated meaning. These fabrications, by the way, are never rigorous or detailed. In fact they’re very quick and sort of hazy, just enough to get by, as they say.
What makes them especially devilish is the fabrications somehow feel true. There
ALICE HICKEY 69
is no warning sign that a fabrication has taken place, let alone that it is false.
None. It’s only when we try to explain our thoughts in some detail, or they are put under the glass of scrutiny, as in a cross-examination, that these fabrications suddenly fall apart. Otherwise they remain an unchallenged part of our memories.
Here’s another thing to think about. It didn’t matter a bit that the part of the myth I was physically looking at on the page contradicted the fabrication in my mind, because as long as I didn’t look too hard, I was momentarily blinded to what was on the page. I know that sounds like a good description of crazy, but I’m afraid that’s the way the mind works.
I know this now, but at the time the fabrications were invisible to me. All I really knew was that things I felt absolutely sure about would suddenly crumble when I tried to explain them in a rigorous manner to someone. I would suddenly become lost, confused.
Take the case of the Listeners. Whenever I encountered a passage about them that puzzled me—as I had no idea what the Listeners really represented—my mind would invisibly create a fabrication for them that conformed to how I understood the world to be.
Let me give you an example. I understood the word “listener.” It is someone who has an interest in hearing something specific as in, “I was listening for the sound of her voice.” The Oxford Dictionary suggests somewhat the same definition of
“listen”—“to make an effort to hear something, to wait alertly in order to hear a sound. ” I never questioned that basic meaning. It fits much of what the Listeners are about. But the word, as it was used in the myth, suggested other meanings or nuances or associations that didn’t fit into my worldview at all. Undoubtedly an early preliterate mind would have been aware of them, but I clearly wasn’t.
In the context of the myth, the Listeners are psychic, unknowable entities, but there is no mythological creation entity I am aware of as passive as the Listeners.
The Witnesses say they can feel that the Listeners have an interest in their feelings
(“The Listeners hear everything we feel”), but that is the only “activity” ever ascribed to them. We’re never told why they are interested in our feelings. Despite their God-like nature, the Listeners never actively enter this world to communicate with us as the Visitors do, and as all the various Gods and angels have done since the beginning of time.
Yet something in me continually (and invisibly) equated the very active Gods of literate (and preliterate) man to the completely passive Listeners in the myth . I would be looking at the passive Listeners on the page while something in me was attributing all kinds of actions to them in my mind: appearing to the Witnesses, speaking to them, sending them dreams, those kinds of things—but a warning bell never went off in my head.
70 ALICE HICKEY
That is how important it is to consciousness that its worldview not be disturbed.
Castaneda would call that view a description of the world, or perhaps a sub-description of the majestic one he says all human beings are locked into from birth—the description that makes us experience the world as we do. All of those descriptions are tenacious in maintaining their hold on consciousness. In my case, because my own worldview gave me no way of comprehending the Listeners as the myth portrayed them, my mind simply fabricated a meaning for me that made them comprehensible. For a while.
No wonder I thought I was slipping into some kind of madness. None of my thinking about the myth had any stability. Sense would suddenly become nonsense. People would simply walk away.
If I had no intellectual model for the Listeners, what made the whole enterprise even more vexing was that other characters in the myth (such as the Dreamers and Visitors) were somewhat understandable because they did have rough counterparts in other myths, i.e., they swam in similar seas of meaning as my own. For example, entities similar to the Dreamers (Moses, Ezekiel) and the Visitors (Angels) appear in the Bible.
As difficult as making sense of the myth continued to be, it was impossible for me to even consider walking away from it. It wasn’t as if somebody had walked up to me on the street and given me a quick summary of the myth’s basic concepts. In such a case, I probably would have been like anyone else—I would have listened and then forgotten about the whole thing. After all, at first glance, much of the myth seems simplistic (maybe even nonsensical)—at least to the modern mind.
The narrative poem called The Witnesses Log, however, came to me as a pure, unpremeditated poem, not as a cursory description of its concepts. Anyone who has had a truly unpremeditated poem come to them knows the feeling of being filled with its truth. It seems to be a divine gift—something from outside our normal consciousness. It doesn’t matter if you believe in God or not. It is a reflexive human reaction. That is why poets can’t stop showing you their poems.
It is what you’re supposed to do with divine gifts.
Which was why I never doubted the myth as it was coming to me. I could feel it was a true message from the soul. The possibility of it being gibberish never entered my mind. I always receive my poems emotionally, not logically, and those feelings told me I was riding the one true vein. So I kept riding.
I never let my reasoning mind interfere with a poem when it is coming to me.
After all, the truth we sense in a poem comes from a very deep level of the unconscious that easily absorbs contradictions. That feeling of truth from The Witnesses Log was so strong, I didn’t have any doubts I could explain it. After all, it was my poem. And if it was my poem, it had roots somewhere in me.
ALICE HICKEY 71
But I was wrong. I kept failing. What made it especially crazy was that the fabrications allowed me to keep bouncing back, feeling that now I finally
understood the myth. What’s more, those same fabrications kept reinforcing my feeling that the myth had roots in me. As I was to find out, however, the myth didn’t have many roots in me at all.
That’s why I couldn’t walk away from the myth, as many of my acquaintances kept suggesting. I have always felt that poems are true, i.e., they express a deep, soul-driven truth that comes into time from the very roots of your being. If you can feel that truth, you can eventually feel down to its roots and explain it—even if imperfectly.
This may help explain why I felt I was becoming mentally unbalanced. It was very uncomfortable. Thinking you might be going crazy is not a nice feeling.
Those who have been there know what I’m talking about. Ironically, if I had never tried to explain the myth, just let it flow over me like rain, I probably never would have become as unhinged as I did. After all, the soul, the unconscious, can easily accommodate opposites, contradictions; it’s the conscious mind that can’t.
Our first consciousness did a much better job of accommodating contradictions, partly because it was an artistic, imitative consciousness as opposed to our modern explaining consciousness. Early humans seem to have had a very thin membrane separating their conscious and unconscious minds. They floated between the two very easily.
I wasn’t a stranger to that first form of consciousness by any means. Long before the myth came to me, the work of Julian Jaynes had pretty much convinced me that we had indeed gone through a change of consciousness about the time writing was being invented some 4,000 years ago.
So that even before Jane pointed me way back towards that dark cave, some part of me was already sensing the possibility that the myth might not be about our contemporary, self-reflective consciousness, but the older, more primal one. Here are some early journal entries about the nature of that older consciousness: The Witnesses Log is a myth about the creation and nature of our very first state of consciousness, the one that came into being when we changed from animal to man. Over the millennia, we have chosen to describe that new human consciousness many different ways: man became aware of himself as a being separate from nature; he became aware of a Supreme Being; he became a rational creature; he became a tool-maker. This myth doesn’t necessarily negate any of those descriptions, but suggests a much different way of looking at early human consciousness. The myth says that what distinguishes early humans from animals is that we are animals who somehow became storytellers. We became witnesses to creation.
72 ALICE HICKEY
Although modern western culture has tended to regard the nature of human consciousness as one that has remained essentially unchanged since our evolving into homo sapiens some 100,000–200,000 years ago, there is growing evidence that our first state of consciousness was quite different from the one we have today. The work of Julian Jaynes in this area is extensive, and suggests that preliterate man constantly heard voices generated in the right side of his brain that guided him and that he took for the voices of the Gods. Early man didn’t have a self-reflective mind space in which to plot alternatives before taking action, only the voices to guide him.
I am going to also suggest that early man not only heard the Gods, but also reflexively imitated everything he encountered—the voices, visions, the observed physical world—as a way of speaking back, of responding to the Gods. It is only when we understand this that we can begin to understand, for example, the true significance of preliterate ceremonies that involved human sacrifice. Today, we see these ceremonies as barbarous, but to preliterate man they were ceremonies that imitated, that celebrated, the essential mystery of the world: that creation and destruction were inextricably linked, and that to be human was to acknowledge this mystery by imitating it.
This is another way of saying that preliterate man was essentialy an artistic creature, an imitator at heart. This initial, imitative state of human consciousness guided us over tens of thousands of years until the advent of writing, about 4,000
years ago, at which time we seem to have developed our current, self-reflective state with its ability to endlessly replay our past and imagine our future.
We don’t listen to the Gods anymore, rather we analyze our potential and past actions and choose, we hope, the best course of action. It is this later state of consciousness that is represented in the Genesis myth when the Serpent promises Eve that eating the forbidden fruit will allow her and Adam to know what the Gods know.
Eve took the bait, of course, and that change in consciousness turned us from artistic creatures to systematical y rational creatures, and we have been enjoying the benefits and suffering the consequences ever since. You might say that our new consciousness was an evolution that favored explanation over imitation as a way of understanding the world, of knowing who we are.
It may be news to some people that we possess a different kind of consciousness today than we possessed 4,000 years ago, but a great deal of scholarly and anthropologic evidence points that way. I’m not talking about the common perception that we are smarter than stupid preliterate man could ever be, the proof being our creation of atomic bombs and the like. That type of thinking presumes that preliterate man wanted an atomic bomb in the first place. The fact of the matter is that humans at any stage of development are always smart about what is important to them. Preliterate man was always “smart” at imitation, just as we’re always “smart” at explanation.
You just have to look at the incredible colored masks and body paintings of contemporary preliterate peoples like the New Guinea tribesmen to begin to see
ALICE HICKEY 73
how proficient that first state of human consciousness was at imitation. That imitation took many forms, but primary among them was imitating the animals they took as soul guides, as totems. We may say that such face and body painting didn’t take any talent at al , that we could do it in a snap, but we’d be wrong.
If you don’t believe me, stand in front of a mirror naked with some paint and feathers and shells and leaves and vines and try to portray your deeper self, your soul, your shadow self. Besides your powers of imitation being weaker, you’l encounter the deeper problem of having very little sense of what your deeper self looks like. Oh, you’ll go ahead and do it, because you’re stubborn and modern, but no matter how often you try, the result wil look just as stupid and incomplete as the attempts of a New Guinea tribesman to build an atomic bomb.
74 ALICE HICKEY
Chapter 18: Fruitville Road
November 2004, Sarasota
Diane called. She was all over the place like she didn’t know where to start.
Finally she blurted, “Someone called Alice Hickey wants to see you.”
“Who’s Alice Hickey?” I asked, but either she didn’t hear me or she ignored me, because she suddenly said, “I couldn’t really see her, I was dreaming but I couldn’t see anything, it was pitch black, but I could feel her right in front of me pulling me in and then I felt something huge rising up all around me, and then it picked me up like a wave and I began hearing every sound in the world, except I could hear each of them separately, and they all felt alive, I mean alive in the same way I was, and then I could feel something inside me turning into something like light—I mean it felt like light, but I couldn’t see it, like it was too dark to be seen if you know what I mean or maybe you don’t—and then everything collapsed and there was nothing except me, but only barely, because I could feel myself disappearing like a dream I couldn’t quite hold onto and I knew I was dying and then something moved through me like a cold, wet finger and I became completely hysterical and started crying, ‘Don’t leave me, Don’t leave me,’ and then I heard a voice saying, ‘ I need you. ’ Then I woke up.
“It took me a long time,” she continued, “before I could call you. I didn’t know how to even begin to explain what had happened. After a while, I began seeing pictures in my mind of some old houses and trees and it kept coming to me they were way out on Fruitville Road, on the way to Arcadia, so I drove out that way and sure enough there it was: an old, scattered grove with three or four old frame houses threaded through it, dirt roads, pick-ups, bad dog signs, that kind of thing. I drove down one road and then another and there she was, standing by a shed, looking at me.”
“How did you know it was her?” I asked.
“It felt like her; it was just like she’d felt in the dream, in the dark.”
“What do you mean ‘felt like her’?”
“Everyone has a unique soul signature—who you are. It’s not who you think you are, but who you really are, what it feels like to be you. It’s like a smell. If you were a dog, you’d know all your fellow dogs by their signature, their smell. I’m like a dog: once I know your smell I never forget it. I could find you in a snowstorm, just like I found her.”
“But how did you know what she felt like?”
“I didn’t. Not until the dream. I could feel