a subcreator's field notes, 6: Wonderment
You covered the earth with your kingdoms
to stifle the sound of my cry.
—Isakrishna Upanishad
I wonder what that means? The text is a Turiyan fiction, adapted from an Orthodox Christian monk's translation/reinterpretation of the Tao Te Ching in light of the Gospel. The original context is about the cry of the poor and the needy, which the gospels tell us is the cry of Christ. Isakrishna is the Turiyan Christ, the Avatar of God. So the Isakrishna Upanishad is analogous to the Turiyan gospel.
But the gospels are written in the third person, by the apostles; I've written this in the first person. Does that suggest that Isakrishna might have written his own Gospel? It's in the past tense, but thinking of "I" names and prophecies puts me in mind of Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet most closely associated with Jesus. And indeed the name "Isaiah" is a Latinized rendering of the Hebrew name Yeshayayu — a variant on Yeshua, which in English we render as "Jesus."
Per Christian theology, insofar as the Holy Spirit is believed to have spoken through the prophets, and God is both three and one, there is a sense in which we can say that Jesus announced himself through Isiaiah. So if Isakrishna announces himself, tells his own story in advance, there is a satisfying correspondence there — the very stuff of subcreation, as I understand it.
(camera pans around a leather armchair where Ajai is sat pondering the contents of a leatherbound tome. He looks up, startled, then smiles.)
Oh, hello! I didn't see you there.
I've been reading The Road to Middle Earth, an excellent book about how Tolkien's fiction was informed by his passion for philology — a study of language integral with history, literature and myth, that is very nearly a lost art today. Now, I've been reading it at night before I go to bed, all leisurely like, so I haven't been taking notes and I don't have any specific chestnuts to impart, but clearly the spirit of it has percolated into my thinking.
But I want to loop back to a word I used at the beginning: wonder.
Wonderment
The state of wonderment has been much on my mind the past couple of days. It's a way of being that I want to embrace, that I am embracing.
There's an openness in it, and a solidity, too, that comes from the suffix -ment. Wonder is an emotion, and a transcendent emotion, open to the numinous. Wonderment as I'm conceiving it is a state, a commitment, to embracing wonder in the way I operate fundamentally — in how I approach writing, reading, planning, business, and even (maybe especially) God.
I want to make this tangible somehow, but really, I already did, at the beginning of this entry. I find, now, that I can't force a connection. To try to do so would be the opposite of what I mean.
We want to be in control. Wonderment, to me, is ceding control, opening to possibility, without losing confidence in a definite outcome. It's yin before yang, yang steeped in yin. The Word born in silence.
△AR