Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (51 page)

Happily, this same bimodal psychology also helps explain why the literature of the fantastic is “fantastic.” That is to say, it explains why the fascinated reader (of a text or of an actual life event) cannot determine whether the occult event is real or not. Recall Todorov's defining discussion of the fantastic, with which we opened our journey:

The person who experiences the [fantastic] event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then his reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. . . . The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.
³⁵

The filter or transmission thesis explains this “duration of uncertainty” by pointing out that a paranormal event can be
both
real
and
unreal,
both
fiction
and
fact. It can be real and factual to the extent that it is a genuine
expression
of Mind beyond brain. It can be unreal and fictional to the extent that it is a filtered, translated, or imagined expression of Mind in and through the linguistic, identity, and cultural capacities of the (left) brain. The reader's moment of hesitation, the moment of the fantastic, which of course happens in the reader's head, then, finds its resolution in the very structure of that head, that is, in the fact that there are not one but
two
brains in there, and that one of them is filtering pure consciousness, while the other is translating and projecting that pure consciousness into multiple social, cultural, and religious fictions. Hence my dialectic of consciousness and culture, which can now be seen as an ideal theoretical reflection of the dialectical neuroanatomy of the human brain itself.

From
Realization to Authorization: Toward a Hermeneutics of the Impossible

Our four authors of the impossible realized through their radical reading and writing practices that they were caught in a world they did not write, that they were being written, literally, as they spoke, and
especially
when they spoke, language being what it is—the ultimate magical spell, the most powerful hypnotic inducer of the consensual trance of social reality. What begins to make such individuals authors of the impossible is their radical reflexivity. What finally makes them authors of the impossible, however, is their metadecision to stop reading the paranormal writing us, step back “on the page,” and begin
writing
the paranormal writing us.

There are at least two stages in this writing practice. In the first stage, what I would like to call Realization, the individual begins to suspect that paranormal processes are real. Realization is finally achieved when one comes to understand that such events are not only real, but also inherently
participatory
, that is, paranormal events often behave very much like texts: they appear for us but rely on our active engagement or “reading” to appear at all and achieve meaning.
³⁶
In some fundamental way that we do not yet understand, paranormal phenomena
are
us, projected into the objective world of events and things, usually through some story, symbol, or sign. Realization is the insight that we are caught in such a story, that we are embedded in a myth expressing itself through matter, a myth, alas, over which we have little control. Realization is finally the insight that we are being written.

The second stage, what I want to call Authorization, begins when we decide to step out of the script or story we find ourselves caught in (call it culture, society, or religion) and write ourselves. If Realization is the insight
that
we are being written, Authorization is the decision to do something about it. If Realization involves the act of reading the paranormal writing us, Authorization involves the act of writing the paranormal writing us. Which is another way of saying that what finally makes an author of the impossible is the insight that
because paranormal processes can replicate literary processes and literary processes can replicate paranormal processes, writing can become a paranormal practice
.

If we were to translate all of this back into our concluding thought experiment or “What if?” and its neuroscientific terms, we might say that what this impossible writing practice involves is the consciousness of the author figuring out that what the left brain is up to is eminently practical and necessary but not really real, that consciousness is not the ego or the person-as-mask (
persona
), and that the rules of the social game or religious theatre are just that: rules of a game, roles on a stage.

To author one's world, however, whether literally or metaphorically, implies the use of language, which is a left-brain capacity. So an author of the impossible is not someone who has shut down the left brain with all its critical and linguistic powers and tender sense of individual identity. I do not mean to be so simply dualistic. Rather, an author of the impossible is someone who has ceased to live, think, and imagine
only
in the left brain, who has worked hard and long to synchronize the two forms of consciousness and identity and bring them both online
together
. Finally, an author of the impossible is someone who has gone beyond all of these dualisms of right and left, mystical and rational, faith and reason, self and other, mind and matter, consciousness and energy, and so on. An author of the impossible is someone who knows that the Human is Two
and
One.

I find such an (im)possibility incredibly empowering. If, after all, we can begin to understand and act on these insights, we might at least begin to take back the book of our lives from those who wrote us long ago, for their own good reasons, no doubt, and begin writing ourselves anew, for our own good reasons now. Our ancestors and their deities were completely ignorant of such new good reasons, just as we are completely ignorant of the good reasons and concerns of two thousand years from now. Our system must damn the old ones, and ours will be damned in turn. This, in the end, is all I have tried to say in the present book. It is also what I tried to say, in different ways and with different authors, in all my other books.

Maybe that is all I have to say.

In any case, I do not pretend for a moment that such an (im)possibility explains everything about what we have come to call, for our own reasons and ends, the psychical and the paranormal. I have argued here that such
phenomena
are profoundly involved with the production of human intention and cultural narrative, that is to say, I have focused on the why-questions of
meaning and story
and not on the how-questions of
explanation and cause
. The simple truth is that I have no idea how a table floats off the floor and taps out messages for a young philosophy graduate student, or how dying loved ones appear in dreams and rooms at the precise time of their passing. I haven't the slightest clue how curtains and tablecloths burst into flames around pubescent girls and boys, or how authors encounter in “real life” scenes that they have imagined in their fiction or dreams. Most of all, I have no idea how dreamlike UFOs appear on radar screens, stop cars, and burn people. What I
do
know is that to the extent that these events involve symbols, myths, stories, and altered states, the literary critic, the anthropologist, and the historian of religions will have as much to say about them as the physicist, the neuroscientist, and the fighter-jet pilot.

Impossible
(Dis)Closings

TWO YOUTHFUL ENCOUNTERS

All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.

—William Blake to an epistemologically challenged angel in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

We want you to believe in us, but not too much.

—An alien to Nebraska law officer Herbert Schirmer

When I decided to write this book, I had nothing invested in the strangest and most troubling of the material, the UFO material. I originally treated these phenomena because I realized that I would never understand the American superhero mythologies, toward which I was then writing, without taking into account the mythology of the alien, the UFO encounter, and the abduction narrative. I was simply trying to understand this mythical material as a responsible historian of religions. I was being a good boy. I had certainly never seen a UFO.

Turns
out I was wrong about that. Turns out I had seen one as a boy, and a quite big one at fairly close range, although I have absolutely no memory of this encounter. I only learned of it recently from my mother. She was visiting Houston (the city of spaceships, the Rockets, the Astros, and, as we like to brag, one of the first words uttered on the moon: “Houston, the
Eagle
has landed”). We were watching television together when a quite silly automobile commercial came on screen. It featured a typical disc-shaped UFO. Mom casually asked me if I remembered the day that we saw one. “What?!” I replied in so many eloquent words. She went on to explain how when I was about six and my brother Jerry five, the four of us were on our way to South Dakota for a family event. It was 1969 or so. It was night. As we drove down the dark highway somewhere in northern Nebraska, a very large, rectangular-shaped object appeared in the sky. It had lots of colored lights on it. “So could it have been a military plane or something?” I asked. This was a reasonable question. SAC, or Strategic Airforce Command, is in Omaha, a few hundred miles to the east. “No,” Mom replied just as casually and surely. “It was not shaped like a plane of any sort. It was
rectangular
. And it was very large. And it seemed to be following us. We all watched it for quite awhile. It was scary.”

So there is another damned fact, so damned I still have absolutely no memory of it. As far as I am concerned, it never happened. But apparently it did. The clear sense of the uncanny with which Mom spoke of it was matched by Dad's calm confirmation of it all when I asked him about Mom's memories, and this despite his usual skepticism of all such claims (I was with him once when he discovered the likely source of some ghostly music allegedly heard in a local abandoned graveyard—a crumbling schoolhouse tucked away in the trees with an old piano in it, whose exposed strings could have easily hummed in the wind). Jerry was less helpful but equally to the point when he wrote back in answer to my brotherly request for his own precise memories: “Dude, I was
five
.” Not that age helps much here. Neither Mom nor Dad has the slightest idea what it was. Only that we all saw it, that it was real.

So there is a story, a story I didn't even know I had. Here is another, again from my own life, but now from my adolescence and youth and in a distant, buffered, unconscious mode that can be read in many ways, including in very traditional orthodox ways (that is, through the eyes of Catholic piety, whose reading I once fully accepted).
¹
The simple truth is that nothing is really very clear here, that nothing is either really simple or clearly true. And
that
is my point.

We've
already encountered this impossible story before, many times, but we have never had the chance to tell it and so make it seem possible. It would do us well now to return to it here at the very end, not to reach any final closure of meaning, much less to give the “correct” reading, but to perform and finalize our own fantastic uncertainty. The story involves the events of Fátima, Portugal, in the second decade of the last century. It has usually been read, with some justification, within the mythological system of Roman Catholicism. I am now going to read it, with some justification, within the mythological system of the ufological literature.

“Here comes a whopper,” as Charles Fort would say. . . .

Three little shepherds. Jacinta was just seven years old, her older brother, Francisco, nine. Their cousin, Lucia, was ten. Within a few years both Francisco and Jacinta would be dead, and Lucia, at the tender age of fourteen, would be secretly whisked off to a private boarding school in Porto, far from her home town. She was instructed not to tell anyone where she was going, nor to tell anyone who she was. She was also not to speak of the extraordinary events that transpired for six consecutive months between May 13 and October 13, 1917. She would have to leave all of her loved ones. She could write only to her mother, and this only after the letters from the child or the mother were passed through a vicar of the church. Poor Lucia's immediate response to such a traumatic demand was very clear: she compared her fate to being “buried alive in a sepulcher.” She refused to go. But then she later allowed herself to be persuaded, to be buried. She would later enter a cloistered convent, where she would spend the rest of her life in silence and solitude. All that she wrote had to be passed through a bishop's hand, and the Holy Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (what was once the Holy Inquisition) reserved the right to grant or deny authorization for any visitor.
²

What sort of secret knowledge could possibly justify this kind of lifelong vigilance and control? What on earth did Lucia witness?

“What in the heavens” would be more accurate. There are some who believe that what the three children experienced, with literally tens of thousands of corroborating witnesses spread out over exactly half a year, was the most spectacular religious event of the twentieth century. They may be right. What it all
means
, however, is an entirely different question, and perhaps in the end an impossible one.

Here
are some of the facts, at least as they can be gleaned from the historical record, from the newspapers of the time, which widely covered the clockwork-like events, and from archival documents. It began on Sunday, May 13, 1917, in a rocky, desolate cove in the district of Fátima, Portugal.
³
There, while tending their sheep, the three children witnessed flashes of lightning (without thunder) and then saw a small young woman standing on top of an oak tree. Lucia conversed with her, in Portuguese. The children returned home and, of course, immediately told the fantastic story to their family.