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A glistening future hidden in the now

And so off I dash into the woods after the Epiphany, that glittery wet bounty beckoning to the beyond. Each is a small triumph of revelation—but, to be honest, what’s revealed mostly matters less than the rush of its arrival. Sitting here, I can conjure it for a second, like you’re just on the cusp of cracking the code—palms spread, fingers wide, eyes darting side-to-side, heart gearing higher, smile rising on the inhale as you race towards the barely-veiled unknown. Ah, and then comes the cascade of afterglow. It feels intimate—but, with what or whom?

The sequence travels different pathways than those of a long-grind calculation. They’ve done neurological studies, sitting people down in front of a complex visual puzzle to watch as they solve it (kink?). The part that gets me is this moment right before you’re about to solve the thing. In that moment, just before, the body jolts you off baseline with a short spike of dopamine, and draws your gaze—literally pulls it—with increasing frequency, towards the puzzle quadrant where the secret lies. Is that so wild? Your subconscious already knows, already has the thing solved and then lures you on with a trail of euphoric neurotransmitters, just a taste first, and then, at the epiphany’s dawning, the whole cocktail of pupil-dilating gold. The thing is, though, you knew before you knew.

It’s like what Martín Prechtel says about divination, the part that non-indigenous ‘Westerners’ (is that term…still okay?) get wrong. Divination isn’t about asking for a privileged peek at the future, it’s a request to better see what’s here, right now. “Show me what’s here that I cannot see.” We miss so much, why ask for more? The answer’s already here, unseen.

Likewise, Jean Gebser creates access portals into time through the diaphanous. The future influences the present just as the past does, he explains. Logical enough. “Latency–what is concealed–is the demonstrable presence of the future. It includes everything that is not yet manifest, as well as everything which has again returned to latency.” Tapping into that possibility, when it’s quiet and the dust motes hang timeless in the sunbeams, I know he’s right—I know the felt-sense of that luminous presence through time. Because latency isn’t fully dormant, even when the signal is faint. Below the threshold, in the caverns of the subconscious, I already know.

And this is so tantalizing, this siren’s call into the brambles. I was reading Iain McGilchrist’s first Substack recently on one of my favorite magical topics, metaphor. In ancient cultures metaphors are wary things, like magic spells. McGilchrist, as a neuroscientist, delves into why. As much as metaphors illuminate, they occlude, casting shade on what doesn’t comply with their rules. See what happens, for example, when the dominant culture applies a machine metaphor to nature, the planet, bodies and living systems for several hundred years, he says. Or take Prechtel’s example, using “competition” as a metaphor in order to understand the behavior of plants and animals. Why infer that plants are competing when one gives way to another? How much more true does it feel to substitute a generous metaphor, understanding the act as noble, self-sacrifice, a contribution to the whole? It’s like—if you can jailbreak the construct, you can see what’s more true. Show me what’s already here.

Mostly, it seems, we walk around blind, though, and I went deep into this looking at studies on Change Blindness, which I think McGilchrist mentions. They set it up so the participant, unaware, has a conversation with someone. An orchestrated interruption breaks their sightline, someone passing between carrying a door, let’s say, or a person standing behind a service counter disappears for a second bending down to pick up something dropped. Taking advantage of the break, they switch out the original conversation partner with someone entirely new. And this is the harrowing part—most of the time, the study subject doesn’t even fucking notice.

(*You* will notice here, however, that I choose not to indulge in speculation on how the slow-poison of our dopamine leaking iPhones might affect all of the above—the pathways, the possibilities corrupted….Shudder to think what have we done.)

Okay, and, so what to do about it? That’s the firefly flitting at twilight’s treeline today. I recently started reading Joseph Cornell’s journals (sweet starred entries for every day that landed him an epiphany.) He bicycled all over New York searching for sights that gave him “lift,” “the zest,” those that were “sparkling” or spun a sense of an “eterniday” timelessness. He burned for beauty, and the blue infinity of the city’s secrets. “Smell of night on handkerchief,” —his journal entry on August 6, 1946.

The ecstasy of epiphany. Cornell was onto something, there’re other pathways I’ve been experimenting lately, those that lead into this territory—meditation-adjacent and definitely connected to the epiphany-chain. I’ll tell you about them…soon?

For now, though, my tea cup is drained, the day’s begun and we’re headed into the mountains, to the beloved lake cabin, for the holiday weekend. I’ll loll on the porch if I’m lazy and hike if I’m not. Of course, some untamable me of the depths knows the answer to that already. The real question is: who is this she-who-knows?

I haven’t written in a while. This list is small, so please feel so welcome to reply—to ask a question, to share or to just to say hello. XJessica

“Girl,” by Joseph Cornell.