14. Revelation
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Choosing the right. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
“I climb the mountain; I scale the mountain. I live on the mountain. I am born on the mountain. No one becomes a mountain—no one turns himself into a mountain. The mountain crumbles.” — Bernardino de Sahagún, “Definitions of Earthly Things”
”They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.” — Isaiah 11:9
Returning for a moment to the Mormons: They believe in revelation from God—of information you might need, of promptings on how to conduct your life, of commandments. They believe you can, and do, receive revelation for yourself. And they believe that the authorities of their church receive additional revelation for everyone else.
These authorities, perhaps dating to the days in Salt Lake City when it was only the old folks who had known Joseph Smith, mostly occupy a narrow demographic profile. My grandpa, who lived for many years after severe injuries from a stroke, emerged from himself abruptly one Sunday morning to issue an observation about the vast church hierarchy arrayed before him on a televised conference: “I see they’re still enforcing the over-21 rule.”
Unlike some other subjects I’ve written about here, which expose parallels or echoes between athleticism and creativity, revelation is a point where they squarely intersect. My definition of revelation for today is going to be: That which surfaces unexpectedly from outside one’s conscious thoughts, whether from an internal or an external source, and which provides new illumination—or even changes our essential understanding—of known and conscious things.
It’s both obvious and surprising about creating that what we create often makes its first appearance in the world, and to us, only at the very moment we make it. (Another place it likes to show up, alas, is anywhere we lack the means to record it—in which case that’s also its last appearance.) You might have an idea of how your story is going to go: an outline; notes on the relevant history and the motivations and personality traits of the characters; etc. Still, sooner or later you must hope to experience a moment of revelation, in which the words spilling forth from your pen or your typing fingers seem to precede your thinking them.
Improvising of any kind is, of course, predicated on this discontinuity, and in music the effect is stark: You can voice a familiar motif in ten or twenty permutations before, through no obvious act of your agency, it suddenly twists enough to rethread its very character. It’s not necessarily that this kind of detour can’t be planned. It’s just that sometimes it’s not, and I take this as potent evidence of how little of us is the identity we define by its autonomy and control—how much the inner and mysterious self directs us, and not the other way around.
A frequent trigger for revelation is intense movement. It will come in other ways and at other times, too, but never as upon the mountain—never as in that state of hyper-incarnation, out amid the atomic ingredients of awe. I don’t know exactly what mechanisms explain this effect; research tells us that when we fly into motion we are joined by countless tiny operatives of brain and blood.
But if psychedelic experiences are not the activation of silent areas in our brain but the suppression of the self who mutes their constant frenzy, then maybe that is what these experiences are: a momentary retreat of the disciplinarian ego, in which what is already so familiar to the sprawling network of our own deep cognition is presented, in its stark, raving beauty or terror, to us. The us whom we know and, in waking at least, usually are. The us who can write and speak and play; who can turn those occult signals into a substance for others to receive. By such means does revelation become reality. By such means are new realities born.
Coming Friday: Home.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.