# [D21:8M] Vision: [[Let me tell you something....]] Hexagram: [[Twenty First Hexagram]] Trials: [[Twenty First Trial]] Archetypes: #two #door #forest #tenthousand #oldwoman #night #burningbranches #snow #tree #winter #clown #mushroom #chicken #bigredball #legs #pajamas #bus #refugee #guard #tower #darkwindow #red #reddust #eyes #whitesun #arm #weddinggarment #blindfold #stairway #gold #princess #servent #blacksmoke #cigarette #smile #veil #moon #seven #eight #daughter #orphan #face #heart #bed #mist #mountain January 5th, 2013 1. There is a life within life, a secret veiled by the form.  As with a single particle, a life is not a point on a map, but a circle whose center is nowhere and circumference  is everywhere.  The current carries  its drops, and drops contain their currents.   It is to confuse the point for the field, the map  for the territory, finding two drunks in a bar  at midnight, no sign of the God they die for. 2. Two doors appear in the forest, one beside the other.   It happens this way: The sunlight is shining low through the trees onto the frozen water droplets that cling to your eyelashes.  The light is separating into a an array of ten thousand colors hovering near the tip of your nose and takes the form of a shimmering inch-tall door floating between you and the snow-draped pines where you sit.  Letting your eyes rest on the door, one becomes two and each settles onto the forest floor in the middle distance. Each is identical with the other, left and right.  The old woman of the forest appears then, standing above  and casting her gaze down at the shivering bundle of you. “I will tell you something,” she says. Her voice is like the nighttime popping of burning branches. “One leads out and the other in.”  Shivering and hugging your legs to your chest—you there upon the snowy ground—look at the undulating color fields and try to listen.  You will tell her you don’t understand, but that is a lie.  Do not pretend you prefer freezing to death. It is better to move past the first question and onto the second: “How will I know?” “You must knock if you want an answer.” It is not easy to stand, but, reaching the first door, dark and diaphanous in the shade of the trees, it is subtle in its shifting coloration.  You can feel its solid resistance against your frozen knuckles.  In a moment, you hear a shuffling from behind it, or, you suppose, from within.   “You do not belong here,” says a voice inside the door.  It is a man’s voice. Simple. Final. You turn to the old woman and ask her if what the voice says is true.  She only shrugs and stares past you into the distance.  You ask her what to do. “I would knock on the other one maybe,” she says. You move to the other, which catches some dappled light and warms you slightly.  Knocking on this door,  a voice inside it says, “this is no place for you.” Again, you turn to the old woman. “Isn’t that the same thing?’ you ask, but she is already walking away. You feel ashamed.  You are saying, “They’re the same.  The doors are the same and they don’t want me here.” “What they say is the same,” she says.  “Not how they say it.” She descends toward the darker regions of the winter woods and soon is gone forever. 3. All of us, the apostle clowns of clown priest Patch Adams, sat in the idling bus at the gates of Zaatari while he and his lieutenant Fungus [mushroom], stood out in front of it talking to one of the armed guards.  Patch had a limp chicken on his head whose dangling legs touched the tips of his wide mustache jutting bright-whitely out of either side of the big red ball he wore for a nose.  He had spirally psychedelic bloomers on, and clown shoes.  He had nothing but hair and toothpicks for legs.  Back when he still had two.   Fungus was a Vietnam veteran and that’s all I ever saw under his clown pajamas.  I trusted him so that I didn’t have to trust the others.  You can’t make this up.  I was there.  It was 2013 and we were a new couple, Maja and me, and we wanted to do something good by volunteering.  Or we wanted to think hanging out with Patch meant something worthwhile  about us. Or we were totally broke when he invited her, and we didn’t know what to do or where to go in our lives.  Or I went with her just so I didn’t risk losing her.  Or to prove to myself I deserved her.  Or to find some way of measuring whether my life had any value at all.  Whether it had any merit.  Or I thought I might die if I didn’t go.  And then thought that again once we arrived.  I did not understand compassion yet.  I only worried about appearances and abstractions. Not for a moment did I believe my being there could make anything better for anyone, and yet I tagged along. There had been a vote aboard the bus, which split us all just about in half, right down the line, those who were willing to go in and those who weren’t.  I could see no good reason for anyone to risk anything.  The idea that we were somehow saving the world, something Patch and some of his followers seemed to believe, embarrassed me.  Do you know how stupid it is to let a young woman in a tutu and striped leggings, hair uncovered and in pigtails, through the gates of a place like this?  You do know, just as everyone does.  Any one of our Jordanian or Palestinian doctors or translators would have told you the same, and like me, thought they cared about those inside more deeply and personally than you can imagine, did not vote to go in. The Syrian refugee city of tents, nonexistent a year ago, was now the third largest city in Jordan.  And in no time, a marketplace of every good or service sprang up.  Behind its gates, there was a wedding in progress.  Guards manned the towers.  We watched Patch and Fungus and the guards through the little dark windows, and listened.  Now and then one of them would glance up at us while we squinted down at them.  The guard, it turned out, shaking his head, wasn’t going to let us in anyway.  For our own safety, we could hear him say in English.  Plus, he said, we weren’t dressed for a wedding. The three huddled together so that soon we couldn’t hear.  Each took turns glancing at us with occasional, restrained gesturing in our direction.  I could swear it was me they looked at each time.  Up to now, I had been what I thought was certainly the least important, qualified, or useful clown among us.  My red nose made it hard for me to breathe, if the constant dust wasn’t enough.  The clown pants Patch lent me were always in danger of falling down to my shoes, and no one had a belt.  I couldn’t sing, dance, or play an instrument.  I didn’t speak Arabic.  I cried too often when I saw red dust-covered Syrian kids streaked with burn scars, and I was asked to hide on the bus so as not to ruin the merrymaking.  I was of little use to the fully initiated. Fungus came up and got me.  He looked sorry about it.  I could see it in his old pink medic eyes.  His wig of ten thousand colors did nothing to hide it.  They’d made a deal of some kind.  My uselessness, it seemed, had suddenly become useful.  I told Maja I’d be right back. I stood in the bone-white sun next to the guard as the bus disappeared into the dust and distance. 4. “They need decoration for wedding,” the guard told me.  I didn’t understand what he meant. “Wait,” I said. “What do you want me for?” “Old clown men say you artist.” “They told you that?” “Yes, and the girlfriend too but they keep her on the bus.” “But I don’t decorate weddings.  That’s something different.” “You are wedding decoration now.” The gate opened and he cracked his neck and shifted his rifle strap as he turned to enter.  He put his sweaty arm around my shoulder and gave it a couple of pats. “Plus,” I said, “look at the way I’m dressed.” “You put on wedding garment.” “What does that mean, wedding garment?” “You decorate wedding,” he said, whistling up at the towers and circling a finger once in the air above my shoulder, “then clown boss will come back.” 5. Inside the gate, they put me in an old Mercedes and blindfolded me.  We drove around for twenty minutes until there was the sound of a garage door opening.  It groaned and clunked behind us.  The squeak of metal meant my door opened, and someone helped me up by the arm.  We walked through another door, and another, and when the blindfold was removed by someone, I stood in a big house with a grand stairway, gold-framed paintings and photographs of people on the wall alongside it.  A beautiful Jordanian woman with a lot of expensive makeup in a white and purple pantsuit and long uncovered golden brown hair introduced herself as the Princess.  The Princess gestured all around and filled the foyer with the illustrious aroma of herself.  I don’t know what it smelled like.  It smelled the way she looked.  The way her punctuated  footsteps sounded.  Like a wind which might follow the perfect use of a word you didn’t know existed. “What do you think?” she asked.   I didn’t understand why she had a British accent and then I did.  I tried to speak.  I don’t know what I was trying to say, but I tried to speak. I was about to ask if this is where the wedding was but she laughed before I could, as though she knew what I was about to say.  It was that kind of laugh that sounds from outside of oneself instead of from inside,  neither friendly nor unfriendly, committed to nothing. “Do you see those two paintings?” she said, pointing over the stairs. “Um,” I said. “A fake painting,” she said. “And a real one.” She waited for me to say something but I didn’t know what to say and now it seemed awkward to ask if this is the wedding. She said, “the fake painting depicts the wrong subject.” Again she waited and again all I could do was look around at everything, trying to make sense of where I was.  Both guards and servants emerged from doorways and moved through the house with evident purpose. She said, “to open the dream journal is to unfold an old picture, the true painting, the useful object.” She took out a palm-sized silver case and took out a cigarette.  She held it out for me. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t smoke.” “There are two sides to every story,” said the Princess, lighting up. “perfect in their symmetry.  Neither side tells the truth.  Truth doesn’t tell a true story.  Symmetry tells the only story there is. The only character is all of us.  The only setting is one place after another.” She exhaled black smoke into the air.  I couldn’t remember whether that normally happens when people smoke. “But this is the thing,” she said. “although the subject that the fake painting depicts is wrong, it nevertheless depicts something which truly exists.  An old gray sagging man with his long little dick, here in the camps, on the only towel he still owns.  You see in the foreground a plastic takeout bag like so much other litter blowing along the dusty earth, the words ‘thank you’ printed on it.” “Long little dick?” I said. “Yes,” said the Princess. “It’s strange, isn’t it?  But accurate, I promise you.” My mouth was dry and it was hard to swallow. “But now,” she continued, pointing two fingers, with her cigarette between them.  “Look at the real painting, there next to the fake.  You see what a beautiful woman she is there, lying down, spread out upon her beach towel, no dust, no garbage, just her youthful arching beauty, still new in the world.” I stared at the paintings trying to understand. “Come,” she said, “I’ll show you to your studio now.” 6.  Through the dark window of my workstation was a ballroom wedding, already in progress.  This place couldn’t be called a studio; it wasn’t for painting.  It looked more like an elementary school classroom lined with rows of refrigerators full of cakes and flowers, shelves and drawers of china and silverware, tablecloths, wall ornaments, and so on.  There were also a few small ceiling cameras in the corners of the room.   The ballroom itself, while full of wedding guests dressed in suits and gowns, was empty of any such decor.  They took turns glancing in my direction and checking their phones and watches.  The wedding wasn’t to  begin before I decorated it.   I wanted to begin, to have it over with, but didn’t know where to start.  I had been a groomsman at a Nikah once, even gave a speech on behalf of my friend the groom, but this definitely wasn’t one.  Here, the bride and groom, whom I could make out some distance beyond the hundreds of guests, looked like American diplomats at a Black Tie event.  I had assumed the wedding was for the refugees themselves, but there wasn’t a single one from outside here. My window was wide open, stretching almost to the ceiling, but not touching the floor.  Yet everyone from the guests to the servants stepped over the windowsill and out of or into my workstation, then sometimes  making their way through one of the two doors at either end.  The window itself was the only way in or out of the wedding.  I wondered if I should try escaping. “Imagine,” said a voice from behind, “that everything you’ve ever done with any piece of technology became public record, widely known to everyone.” I turned to find a clown behind me, red nose, red hair, red shoes.  I couldn’t tell if his smile was sly or if it was just painted on his face that way.  If he was one of Patch’s, I’d never met him.  It only occurred to me then that I was still dressed as a clown too.  I pulled up Patch’s pants. “I think they were supposed to give us wedding garments,” I said. His face was still sly or was still painted sly.   “Always remember,” he said, “if you can imagine it, it’s inevitable.  Just wait.” “Okay, but is everyone else here too?” I said. “Is Patch inside here somewhere?  Maja?” “Mass suicides. Way more shootings.” I imagined her in some hospital somewhere bleeding to death.  Or worse, some van or basement. “I need to find Maja,” I said. “If you’re really so spiritual as you like to claim,” he said, “you’ll understand this picture I’m describing to be aspirational.  Necessary.  Humanity’s collective ego death.  The great peak behind the veil.” “Do you know where Maja is?” “Aletheia,” he said, “the great unconcealment.  We want to be remembered, yet to remain hidden.  If the doors of perception were cleansed, we’d see our liberation to be our unmaking, our unmaking our liberation.  We don’t know what’s in the sausage, or even what the sausage is for, but that, my friend, is how the sausage is made.” I looked at him. “Are you going to help?” “I hope so,” he said. “But it’s not my fault if you can’t be helped.” 7. With the old woman of the forest gone, you stand before the two doors, shivering in the cold night air.  The half moon is glowing directly overhead.  Your breath is smoking.   You shout at the doors, but neither responds. One door leading in, she’d said, and the other out.  Both voices forbade entry, but not exactly in the same way.  The second voice was kindlier, and you warmed slightly standing near its door.  You begin to think of that time in the camps again, as you do often, even now, all these years since. You lived your life as an artist, and were rarely grateful.  Different handlers came and went, trying to sell your paintings and objects.  Sometimes it worked and often it didn’t.  It made little difference either way.   You remember, among the hundreds of refugee kids, one in particular, a seven- or eight-year-old girl, who had come to sit on your lap, just as if she had been your own daughter.  She saw you hiding in a corner of the orphans’ classroom.  You’d felt ashamed of your inner impoverishment, of its obviousness, ashamed that she saw such fear in you, that its gravity should have made her want to help you, when you were supposed to help her.  You had snuck away from the orphans and clowns so they wouldn’t see you crying, but she alone, from among the others, had found you there.  She possessed something she didn’t even know she had, a radiant secret.  You can think of her face even as you can’t quite picture it.  Isn’t that strange?  Her face evades description now, but not the offering of forgiveness which rested in it.  This was the secret unknown to her, that she made offerings to the everyday retreats of the heart.  A child’s forgiveness, by its very nature, demands the heart’s response, and with every postponement does the heart forestall the authentic life it yet fears to live.   “This is no place for you,” the voice in the door had said.   This is no place for you.  Let this simple kindness be true. 8. I met an old woman who had been a painter.  She laid in her bed and her nose was red from the cold, but she smiled all the same.  I had known her work most of my life, but only now was I offered the chance to meet her.  I sat on a folding chair next to her bed.  I told her that her work had made me want to be a painter and I thanked her.   She asked me how it was going in the studio.  I told her I had decided to quit.  Retired early, is how I’d put it.  She said that was a shame, and I asked her what kept her going all those years.  Was it ever hard to keep going?  Why bother? That kind of thing. “It’s a good feeling to dance,” she said, “in the blessed order of withering things.” I felt my body and saw my breath in the company of strange truths. “You were looking for a point,” she said.  “Weren’t you, sonny?” “Yes,” I said. “But you couldn’t find it.” “I was angry and alone.  I was of no use to the world.” “Are you less alone now?” she said, coughing once and wiping her red nose. “Is the world improving thanks to you?” We sat quietly for a minute until I asked her whether she’d ever felt the way I do. “In my case,” she said, “if God Hisself came down and told me what the point was, I’d of just as likely refused to do it.” We laughed together.  I began to feel good but wasn’t ready to. “What I mean is,” I said, “who is all this really for?” She closed her eyes and smiled. “The mists,” she said. “But didn’t you want to be seen, to be heard?” “It’s better for painters to watch and listen.” “To what?” “You know,” she said, her voice growing tired, “the mountains and hills. The voices of the past still lingering there.” “But did you know that by doing so, by approaching things that way, something would happen?” I said.  I wasn’t ready for this to be over. “You knew someone would see something in your work and doors would open.  It was different for you.”  “Nothing,” she yawned, “remains to keep.” The room was quiet.  She seemed to fall asleep but I didn’t want to get my coat. Then I heard her voice: “You wanted respect.” I looked down at her frail shape under the blanket. “Yes,” I said. “Didn’t you?” “I was already in bed.” “Surely you wanted to accomplish something.” “I was far and gone.” “Please,” I said. “Yes?” “Did it really always make you happy” I said, “no matter what?” She made a sound almost like giggling. “The night made me happy,” she said, “no matter what.”