[[Home|back]] two quotes, one from memory: Gene Wolfe > We believe we invent symbols. ==The truth is that they invent us.== We are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges[...]==It is a mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious form of magic.== The would-be sorceror alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge. Rational people know that things act of themselves, or not at all. — The Book of the New Sun Jean Borella > All those who have dealt with the symbol...have felt themselves confronted by a mystery. [...] There is a 'strangeness' to the symbol. ==There is something about it that baffles, disquiets, and ceaselessly 'works at' the reason, something at once irreducible to a concept, as well as something nourishing and refreshing==, a magic full of hope, a promise or festive anticipation of being. who has not had the experience of being "invented" by a symbol? and who has not encountered the symbol's ineffable "strangeness"? Wolfe's protagonist is concerned with what we might call 'natural' symbols. from these, no one is immune, and once acquainted with the principle, anyone can come up with a catalogue of symbols that has "invented" them, revealed something to them about their character, their goals, their conception of the world and their place in it, defined them in some way: the pen, the sword, the gold coin, the red rose, the American flag, the skull. (one of the best philosophy books i've read is not a philosophy book at all, but a manual on writing fiction; the author shows the reader, by way of a writing exercise, that we cannot help but create symbols — they emerge, and we become more or less aware of them.) Borella treats specifically of the sacred symbol; and to be reinvented by the sacred symbol is perhaps our highest calling. for the sacred symbol is a translucent window to the invisible world. ##### one when i was young, perhaps nine, i traced the *signum crucis* in a Baptist church; i don't remember anything that came before or after, but i perceived something in the gesture, ==something nourishing and refreshing.== it refreshes me still. ##### two i don't know when i encountered *om* (or *aum*), the mysterious syllable of God, but once i had, it began to ==ceaselessly 'work at' my reason==, and it does so even now. for what is a syllable but a proto-Word?[^1] ##### three when i was twenty-two, i visited a temple on a high mountain in India (where goats danced up and down the sheer face near metal scaffolding put in place for the building of a hydroelectric dam) — one of twelve temples (I was told) devoted to the *sivalingam*. a staunch atheist at the time, i crawled on my hands and knees with my uncle and perhaps ten other supplicants, through a narrow, perfectly square and pitch-black tunnel carved into the living rock. the Vedic priest lit a flame there in the womb of the mountain and chanted to Shiva; whose *lingam* is understood to stand for the visible universe, itself the visible sign of the invisible Creator. i told myself i believed in nothing; and yet i knew in my heart that i was ==confronted with a mystery==. ##### four perhaps before any of these, i encountered the triforce in the very first *Legend of Zelda* game on the Nintendo Entertainment System: a golden triangle, comrpsing three smaller triangles, broken into nine pieces that the hero had to gather and reunite in order to restore order to the land of Hyrule. the whole experience of playing the game was thus charged with ==a magic full of hope, a promise or festive anticipation of being== — we might say further, of *wholeness*, which the essence of *holiness*: the wholeness of being that comes from the healing of the breach between fallen creature and loving Creator. that a symbol invented for a children's game should carry such mythic potency speaks to our helplessness in generating and encountering sacred symbols.[^2] the Divine Origin never ceases to draw us inward, forward, backward, upward — in some hidden supraspatial direction that is necessarily orthogonal to space and time... [^1]: indeed, churches in the south of India, where St. Thomas (the Twin, and the doubter) went to evangelize in the first century, bear the *om*, recognized by the first Christians on the subcontinent (which would only centuries later be called *India*, and they only then *Hindus*) as mysteriously identical with Christ the Logos, the Om Become Flesh. [^2]: There was, circa 2015 — and I fervently hope still is — a small real estate firm in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, called Triforce Realty. The proprietor had brazenly appropriated the triforce, in all its golden glory, as the logo. I relate all too well with that love of the *Zelda* games, as mythic and perfect a popular entertainment as has ever existed. [[Home|back]]