St. John of the Apocalypse.
Topic: by Lenny


St. John of the Apocalypse.


      Human beings are social creatures. Isolate one from fellow humans, for even a short time, and strange things start to happen. Bio-survival terror kicks in, psychological imprints become suspended. Hallucinations and paranoia occur.


      John is alone - very alone - on a small chunk of lava floating somewhere in the Mediterranean. He has been here before, perhaps not on this very island but in this predicament. Following his muse, his God, he does things no other artist would ever do. These impossible gestures are the refiner's fire, his life an alchemical experiment. As his final hour arrives, he is more determined than ever to be more like God. To this end, the aging preacher has come to this rock, first to search his soul, and then to die.


In The Beginning...


      ...was the word.


      The word is a divine creation existing only among humans and the Gods. It is an abstraction, a painting, a poem, a ritual. One not only writes as a reflection of reality, one writes in order that they might create a reality. The first words were not words at all, magcal cave paintings with which man altered reality.


      The mystical experience (perception of reality) is one of self-transcendence: transpersonal identification, self-forgetfulness, and openness to things not literally provable. Revelation has a subjective quality: What you are experiencing is real because you know it is real.


      Words do not just describe reality, they are reality. Figures, abstractions, characters, letters and numbers endlessly recombine to spell out past, present and future: Thy Will be done.


Poison visions of a beast from the sea.


      Nearing death, John retires to the island to be moved. He writes furiously, stream-of-consciousness, hopped up on Wormwood, looking for something in the words, writing on current events, his hallucinations and his faith, as if it all were real, for it is real in the sense that William Blake, Finnegans Wake, the montage and the cut-up are all real. Real because you know it is real. More real than real.


      He understands inherently what students of the mysteries will codify in years to come: as above, so below. A talisman on the wall of the cave will find success in the hunt.


      His head is spinning. He takes the world around him, the politics, its Gods and Demons, breaks it down to its fundamental components. The mad man views recent history through a symbolic lens. As a rule these symbols must speak of what is to come, for what is to come has already happened.