There is a curious state
There is a curious state that I have been subject to for as long as I can remember. It falls somewhere between full wakefulness and deep sleep, and is composed of the conscious awareness of the former state combined with the hallucinatory reality of the latter. For want of a better term, I call the state “hypnagogic,” although that word carries with it a connotation of drowsiness and lack of awareness that is somewhat too strong.
Briefly: when in this state I see things that are normally confined to dreams, and I interact with them. This state often occurs late at night. Once, I awoke from dreamless sleep to discover that my bed was afloat on water, and that the bedroom wall next to me was the hull of a ship that I had drifted against. I pushed against the wall, and felt the sensation of my bed-raft floating away from the hull, while at the same time realizing that my efforts had no effect. When I was much younger, I would sometimes awake and see spiders or other vaguely unpleasant things, which would sometimes provoke me to leap from my bed, flinging the covers at whatever I saw. Generally, any physical effort on my part brings me fully into wakefulness.
Lately this state has taken a more curious turn: sometimes, I see gods. Old, ancient, primordial gods. Shapeless gods from before Yahweh, or El, or Anatu. Gods whose names can't even be rendered properly in our alphabets…approximations are kl'dk and skck, and strange, clicking, rushing, burbling sounds that remind me of what, perhaps, a thousand cubic miles of locusts might sound like underwater. Names that I feel in my gut but cannot actually hear. When I awake in the night and try to make muddled sense of how the light has filtered through the curtains from the courtyard, and the patterns then resolve themselves into these beings, I am deprived of speech. I cannot address them. I know the “deep dark dread” that came upon Abraham when Yahweh came to him, and it is even deeper, and darker, and more dreadful, for these are gods that cannot be truly present with us, cannot even speak to us. They are a form of age-old experience…collections of will, and intention, and knowledge, aware of neither human reason nor intellect. Which is not to say they are beasts. Far from it. But they are alien. We could never worship them, for their demands would be incomprehensible to us. Adrammelech demanded that babies be burned for him. The demands of these beings…I cannot even articulate them.
And yet, during these foggy, half-awake visitations, I receive the acute sense that, even today, they influence us. In the muddy pits full of corpses in Cambodia and the backwaters of Europe…they are there/not-there, in the peculiar way of a presence that is of the void. A chasm is an absence, yet it “is.” These beings are the same way…undeniably real, unaccountably absent. Since these…“visitations” began, I sense this there/not-there in the voids of downtown New York. Re-reading John Hershey's “Hiroshima,” I felt the there/not there as well. I suspect that the same could be found in Dresden, or Auschwitz, or the oil fields of Kuwait. There is something about the ever-increasing human capacity to both rend order into utter disorder and to create order from complete disorder that is now, to me, a constant echo of these old and ancient things. I can't quite put an image or word to the sensation, but I experience such echoes everywhere.
I expect that little or none of this will have relevance to anyone who happens to read it. These disturbances are my own. There is no priesthood that serves these beings, no context that will aid in interpreting the experience of them, no extant scripture that tells tale of them. They are from a time long, long before marks were incised into soft clay to tell of Gilgamesh.
Yet…they're here, now. And they were absent, for a very, very long time. Somehow, they have returned. I don't think that's a good thing. They are, at the last, frightening. They don't wish us harm…because the idea of harm does not exist for them. Neither do they wish to benefit us, for the same reason. They exist outside of any system of thought or morality that we have constructed. In fact, they cannot be said to “think” at all. Yet they act, in ways that defy our notions of causality.
As for the young gods—Yahweh, Allah, all of those other human constructions…they are just puppets. Weak, empty puppets. I suspect that it is through them that these old, unpronounceable gods will have their ways with us. We devalue these puppets at our peril.
