The Great Man

I’ve always been a big fan of illusion, and still am. Look in a mirror and put your right hand over your right eye, the you in the mirror puts a left hand over a left eye. Call it a mirror image if you like: I call it illusion.

I remember the day in late adolescence when I realized there was no such thing as Saturday! The whole time I was growing up, Saturday was as real as houses or trees or having to go to school during the week. Saturday felt like Saturday---because that’s what it was. Saturday was ontologically (forgive me) distinct from Sunday, for instance, as well as any week day. They felt different because they were different. When I would go outside, the air all around was Saturday air, the very sunlight was thick with unmistakable Saturday-ness. Of course all that was illusion, there was only the cycle of days, one after the other, on and on. And even if ‘Saturday’ was real as a social construction, it certainly didn’t feel like a social construction, it felt like Saturday, it looked like Saturday, everything was enveloped by Saturday, no matter where you were or what you were doing.

Then there were cocktail lounges where deep soft shadows created the magic, where a pretty face could became gorgeous and dangerously desirable, where a handsome face could become almost god-like. For those who’ve said, “What did I ever see in him?” or “What did I ever see in her?” that den of illusion might have been where it all started. And such is only a special case of the boy was I dumb syndrome we feel sometimes when we gaze in the rear-view mirrors of our lives.

And here’s a hard one, an illusion which can be debunked (experientially) only with the help of imagination---paradoxically, for imagination is usually thought of as a fertile source for illusion, even the dream world some people seem to live in. Although of course we know better (if we ever think about it) our lives seem to take place on a sort of vast platform, a sort of stage-like surface that extends in all the four directions. I’ve found it to be interesting and fun to try to imagine myself beyond that illusion. Sometimes when I’m out for a walk, I try to sense or feel I’m where I really am (very difficult), on the globe of global warming, on the real curvature of the planet of planetary crisis. And further, something I personally find to be a big shocker, instead of thinking of all that ‘space’ as being ‘up there’, as I tend to do habitually, I remind myself that ‘underneath’ the planet, there’s just as much space down there and we’re just floating along.

And to close with a flourish, here’s an even harder one. Einstein said absolute time and absolute space are illusory if considered separately; there is only a space-time continuum. On the other hand, you might settle for an outlandish and phantasmagoric portrait of the great man. Be sure to watch the video.

Update: Only after writing the above did I remember that although Sunday had its own reality for me, its own presence and flavor, I felt it not nearly as strongly as I felt Saturday. And then I realized, just moments ago: of course, Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath, Sunday the Christian, and even though I had no personal interest in such matters at the time, nor had I had for most of my young life, I probably had absorbed some of that special flavor during my fourth to seventh year. These were Great Depression years, and because my father was among the financial casualties of the crash, in 1931 we moved in with his father and two unmarried sisters not too far from the synagogue, the schul. Maybe more about all this in a later post.