I’m in an art studio, hunched over a creamy-white sheet of paper with a charcoal pencil clutched in my fist, sketching furiously. A contest. The challenge: to create some kind of fantastical landscape, to outline a fictional space in the greatest possible detail. I am supremely doubtful of my ability. I am rushing, full of nerves and jitters and not much else. Yet I have an idea…a good idea, a great idea, though one as usual I find myself utterly unskilled to bring to fruition.

I follow my traditional style: sketch lightly, add atmospheric shading to conceal unattractive mistakes. I draw like a blind man–holding the pencil out ever so tentatively and advancing as slowly as possible, reaching the boundary I was looking for, the true line that defines some tiny piece of the thing in my head, by dumb inevitability.

Thus on the page a hall takes shape: a series of peaked arches rising out of graphite mist, creating a vault whose line undulates in a periodic pattern. It is…a gallery, formless, lacking surroundings, lacking even exterior…reachable, like the west end of Narnia, the fairy mists, and the Desert of Nod itself, only by passages whose end and beginning are never noticed until it’s too late.

And what works hang in this half-imagined hall? Art to surpass that of the rivals who sit at my elbows, of that you may be sure–at least, if my mind could be allowed to create them without the limit of my hand. But the mists and the point of view obscure them, I rationalize. It isn’t my lack of skill that holds me back, but perspective, the edges of the canvas beyond which I cannot create. Here, on the scored black studio countertop, with its back to the vaulted wall, hangs an oil of a mikado in crimson dancing in a swirl of cloaks with a geisha in white who he loves but is dead. There, around that misty corner, waits the portrait of the prison of pining love–and beyond that, beyond the place where the gallery becomes a hostile wilderness of wind and angular mountains waiting to rend what you let fall, lies the greatest work of all, whose wonder could draw out your soul from your chest like smoke drawn into a vaccum cleaner nozzle and hold it there to make its artistry seem greater still.

But the time for preparation is elapsed; the chance is lost. The bell rings, the judges approach. The contest is over. Or is it? I turn, ashamed of my work, to welcome them, and it becomes clear there is more to this contest than I imagined.

I know my judges. They are my mother; my aunts; my cousin Jacky, grown older than me, her red curls bright and wild, her discrepant-colored eyes gleaming with wisdom she does not possess. These are people whose judgment I actually value…in other things than art.

“Come,” I say. “Let me show you my gallery.”

I gesture welcomingly, turn, and draw them with me in through the charcoal dust and solid white beneath it to a gray gallery, damp and cool with unseen mist, draped in heavy velvet. There are holes in it; you can see the paper and the pencil strokes beneath, but it is more real than I had hoped.

I lead them like a tour guide, like a damned Virgil through the awful Goya gallery of my unconscious. I show them the Mikado, the Heart Imprisoned. They comment, criticize, taking notes and conferring quietly among themselves. I fear they do not understand. I try to explain magic realism, the incredible feat that is bringing fiction into life, and stumble as I speak upon the fact that I have here actually achieved it. My feet know every crack and tilt of these gray tiles…beyond the velvet curtain where I lay my hand is a doorway…beyond it is the jagged mountain wilderness.

“But this is just the beginning,” I warn, and sweep back the drapes.

The landscape consumes the gallery in an instant. In a moment there is only the door behind us, then not even that. We stand on a windswept path along a ridge where nothing grows, with peaks like broken glass or knives all around. It is cold. The stone is marbled red and black and cream, volcanic ash melted and suddenly cooled into alien patterns that cut into hands when you look for a handhold if you aren’t careful.

The judges are speechless. I tell them of the cave where the great work waits. I point along the horizon to a dark spot a few hundred yards along the trail. “Hurry,” I say.

They hurry, with me now following behind, no longer afraid they will reject me, but now afraid this hostile place will eat them, hurt them, sweep them away. But we progress safely, hunched like the Mystics on their way to the Castle of the Skeksis, like the desert people of Arrakis hunting the worm.

“There is one other thing,” I add suddenly, remembering. “No one can see the great work in human form. It will change us as we approach…into bears.”

And it happens. One at a time they turn into giant, brown stuffed teddy bears with sewn-on scratched glass eyes, and struggle clumsily in single file on towards the dark opening in the cliff above, whose shadows grow as we approach, where waits the greatest work of art that mind has ever known. I watch Jacky change. Her glass eyes are still the same brown and green. Then I begin to turn myself. It happens so quickly I haven’t time to understand it, to think or embrace it or resist.

I am made of fluff and threadbare corduroy. I have no fingers or toes or knees. I am so light…the wind tears at me, a hundred times stronger now that I am become but a toy with feelings. I fall among the rocks, seeking cover, and gaze upward at the shadow that is growing just as if I were still moving towards it, blotting out the sharp lines of the rocks with chalky tendrils, like charcoal…

In spite of all my desperate clinging to the dream, to the stone, my unbelievably passionate wish to see what’s in that cave, what I know I should know is the most beautiful and breathtaking thing I or they will ever see, but I don’t remember…the light of the page burns through everything, and I awake.

Another true story.

I went into the western woods at sunset with only a compass: not a flashlight, not a bottle of water, not a coat.

It’s hard to say why. I had a vague idea of reaching the crest of the ridge, and seeing the last light fade from the valley. But what was I supposed to do then? I’m certain I understood I would have to come back in the dark.

I knew there was only the thinnest of margins to walk before things went wrong. When I came to that margin, I walked it for a while, sure, feigning prudence. But then I deliberately crossed it: a rill, tumbling over slick stones in twilight.

On the far side, the land began to ascend. I stopped and looked down on the faulted margin from above. I could still go back, while my eyes could still see color. But what would I do when it was dark? I could fall, sprain an ankle, and get very cold.

It was darkening already. The west sky glowed red, but the sun was gone behind the ridge. I was already cold. I ought to go back.

Back meant east, away from the sun, to greater darkness, but to safer places. East the roads were all flat. East there was light and shelter. That would not satisfy me.

I went west up the hill, the compass clutched in my hand, plastic edges digging into my palm. I walked fast.

“If I am quick,” I told myself, “I can reach the ridge and return before the light is gone.”

“You can’t,” I answered. “If you are quick, you will only be deeper in when darkness comes. Besides: what grand thing can happen between here and there that will make you suddenly want to return? It will be as bad then as now.”

But that was a lie. If I went back now, it would be in defeat. If the ridge turned me back in full darkness, who was I? No one I knew.

“I have the compass,” I said. “At least I can’t get lost.”

I went on.

This was a stupid thing I was doing. My father, who never went into the woods without enough to spend the night there and have hot cocoa in the morning, would call this a stupid thing.

Perhaps all this willing abandon came as a result of the sad dilution of that wonderful fear of the dark I used to feel in the woods alone. In the western woods as a boy with my tent and flashlight, ignorance made me a brave explorer. Back then the unknown was still big enough to hide monsters. The night was my dread canvas, and I the artist of innocent terrors: ghost birds, mushroom kings and hungry stones.

That was before I knew the things to fear were all in cities, and loneliness was the safest place you could ever be.

It was nothing but my own imagination that threatened me. In the dark you only ever scare yourself. But fear is like the worst kind of drug. To bring back the illusion, the risk of self-destruction must increase.

Was I angry at myself? I often am.

The hill steepened. I climbed faster.

My breathing rattled like pebbles in my throat. Crack, crack, crack, went the stones beneath me. The pump of my heartbeats rang in my head. I moved to my body’s rhythm instead of my thoughts’. Whippoorwills and crickets sang once at my passing, then fell silent. Soon exhilaration made me too drunk to hear them over the rush of blood through my ears. Hemlock branches loomed, reached out to brush my face and shoulders, then fell away like veils. Motion blurred the formless forest dusk out of all comprehension. I kept going. The trail twisted once, then again and again, and the compass hung from my wrist, forgotten.

I skirted an upland swamp, and searched burningly in the dark for the green lights I knew should flicker there.

A rotted branch snapped somewhere to the south.

I halted, the shiver of that old false fear tingling in my mind. I put out a hand to a rough tree-trunk, tried in vain to slow my breath, and listened. I searched the fading maze of branches.

I did not hear the sound again.

I could have been walking on a machine in a windowless room, I thought.

The compass swung wild from the lanyard looped around my wrist. I thought about the magic needle spinning in free-fall, deprived of its power because stability was lost. Could I see it now in the dusk if I tried? I lifted it, watched the graying red needle right itself and point north. How long before it went black?

I looked around me. The hemlock veils had fallen away. The horizon was lower. Faint orange encroached on the edges of the mountain’s shadow. I was nearing the top of the ridge.

When pulse and shiver had stilled, I climbed on.

I stopped atop the ridge. The night-creatures around me held their breath, waiting to see what I would do. I reached into the branches of a young red pine, and climbed. There was the sun–just a sliver in the distance when the trees thinned, but golden and warming still, if only in imagination.

When I descended, my palms were sticky with pitch, and I found that I was blind. The black echo of the sun hung in my retinas. I couldn’t see the stones.

I stood until I couldn’t hear my breathing, holding the compass up to my eyes. I had passed a fork leading north and down; I made for it slowly, fearful of stumbling. I could feel the night’s chill coming fast, though still warm from the hike and the climb. I had to go faster.

I stopped to stare at the compass every tenth stride. North, north…not enough east. Where would it lead? Out. It must lead out. No woods are endless these days. But out to where?

I went right at a fork, then right again. I stumbled twice.

Coyote voices aren’t like wolves’. Wolves’ voices are supposed to be chilling. They carry that cold bite with them from far away–always far away, on mountaintops you can never reach. A wolf howl is like a thin cloud across the moon, like a bat’s shadow on the ground–another part of that same romantic terror of the wild darkness that once was so wonderful, and now rolls off me like brushed-away snow.

But coyote voices are different. They sound like mad children. They sound…contagious. Suddenly I wanted to jibber and laugh and wail. I wished for a big, thick length of wood I could swing with both hands. My fingers were cold and slow to move; I clutched them to myself.

I couldn’t go any faster. I couldn’t see what was in front of me, and I didn’t want a twisted ankle. If I had to run, I would run uphill. Not so far to fall.

I stumbled. Stones clattered, and something big crashed away through the brush, for fear of me or the mad things, I do not know. A deer–a series of long leaps, the silences between each longer than the last, until it was gone.

Deer can fly after nightfall. I have seen it.

Humans too, when alone, take on strange powers.

I came suddenly on a clearing–thick, wet grass blue in the starlight. A mound rose to my left, something man-made–but there wasn’t a house or a shed or a rusted bedframe in sight. This shouldn’t be here. I had passed the swamp only twenty strides back–the one where the witch lights were missing.

Was this where they had gone?

I ran. I ran without regard for my ankles, without regard for the compass that swung again from my wrist like the albatross, without regard for the path that had become a rutted road beneath me. I ran from the coyotes and the deer and the whipporwills and even the crickets.
Streetlamps, such ugly and hated things, blotting out the stars with their glare, can become such friends shimmering half a mile away through dark woods.

And with that, I stood stunned on the wrong side of a stone wall, looking into someone’s backyard. The windows glowed, and I shrunk back like a wraith, all my wound up fear of the dark replaced in an instant by fear of people with territorialities and shotguns. I thought about how the glare of a light makes a window opaque when there is dark outside it. I could walk up to their windows and stare into their kitchen and they’d never know.

I took a breath, skirted the shadows at the edge of the lawn, and I was on a road–a real road, paved. A car in a driveway.

I glanced at the compass under a lightpost, shoved my hands in my pockets, and walked east.

My cousin Luke is wandering India (I shouldn’t say wandering, what he is doing is substantially more than that, but it sounds poetical). He spends his time there interacting with people in ways I never could and which frankly astound me, experiencing the way this unique and really very hard-to-believe planet functions on a level whose implications continue to floor me. I tried to convey this to Luke in a post on his weblog, but I didn’t nearly manage to express the profundity of the feeling I get from hearing about what he does there and considering it on a personal, emotional level.

I’ve touched very gently elsewhere in this log on my attitude towards spirituality, and have trampled like a herd of elephants elsewhere in this log on many other people’s attitudes towards same, which attitudes I perceive as unhealthy and at times destructive. (I feel conceptually about elephants in person in their own habitat as opposed to in our fake ones the same way I imagine Sam Gamgee feels about the Mumak–and that feeling fits into this subject somewhere too. I asked Luke to take some pictures of elephants for me. I hope he does. But that’s neither here nor there.) I would like very much to clarify my position on the subject of spirituality, to elaborate both for myself and for those I have undoubtedly pissed off exactly how the concept of the transcendent fits into my worldview.

And yes, this whole topic is also inextricably wound up in the way I deal with and produce fantasy and fiction. That moment where Sam meets the Mumak, and others like it in fantasy fiction I could enumerate endlessly save that I would very quickly run out of fingers and toes, are the reason I love fantasy, the reason I read it, the reason I write it. It doesn’t have to touch my heart like that for me to enjoy it–it may simply engage my mind, or my gut–but when Susan and Lucy romp with Aslan in the fields above Cair Paravel, when Arha and Tehanu chase the stray goat along the cliffs of Ogion’s farm, when Eilonwy gives up her wishing ring to stay and grow old with Prydein’s new king–that’s when I know I’m doing the right thing with my life. I remember distinctly the first time I came to the end of The High King, and ran into my mother’s room to explain to her what happened, so that she could reassure me that I wasn’t crying for no reason, that I wasn’t, in fact, a sissy. Mothers, I since have learned, are not the most impartial advisors when it comes to such things. Nevertheless, she said exactly what I needed her to, exactly what the teacher told the poor little girl who said she hated books because they made her cry: “You don’t hate books. You love them so much it makes you cry.”

Let me give you one more true anecdote from my own life and then try to bring this back to Luke. I recently got a new job way out in the woods in the Berkshires in a farmhouse with six cats and several llamas. It’s a long drive to get out there. Once upon a time I would have raved and raged at the prospect of losing a total of an hour and a half out of my day just sitting in the car. Only now I’m driving on back roads, where often I’m the only car in sight, and all around me there are huge green-limed stones and tall, straight pines melting into gold and orange maples and blue skies and the curves of hillsides with woodsmoke rising from chimneys. And I’m going to a place where I like what I do, I’m in control of what I do, where everything has a face and an emotion attached and my presence is a palpable help to the people around me, not just a knot of turbulence in the surrounding abstractions. I started working there at the height of fall color, in late October. Driving to and from work the first few days, I literally cried at the beauty of it. I cried.

Now, there are those who would call me a sap or a sissy for something like that, and there are those who would prefer to pretend it hadn’t happened so they wouldn’t have to think about it. The former, I fear, are lost causes to this whole spirituality thing. Likely they’ve already given up what religion they were brought up into and have taken on cynicism and practicality in its stead. And that’s fine. It’s tragic. They’re missing out. But there is certainly a great part of me that agrees with them. The latter group, on the other hand, I think are actually more likely to have some spirituality of their own that they’re misusing. And I’m entering dangerous territory here, but I’d venture to say they’re the ones in need of help.

Would you begin to feel rather uncomfortable and start working on conversational exit strategies if someone confided in you that communion with Christ brought them to tears? I might not, depending on how well I know the person–but I’m talking about knowing them really very well. It’s a matter of sincerity, of intelligence and individual centeredness. The average person, I’m pretty sure, would want to avoid the subject like the plague. The problem, or one of them at least, is the whole co-optedness of the christian religion, and on a larger scale of organized religion in general. There are motives to consider–motives to avoid. So you brush such comments off and turn the discussion away to the infinitely safer worship of things like Ferris Wheels and the Sunday funnies. The danger in doing so is that the more often you do it the less likely you are ever to give the subject the consideration it deserves.

Religious ecstasy–personal communion with the incomprehensible–whatever you want to call it, it’s a category of experience akin to, yet entirely distinct from sex, drugs, love, grief, exertion or terror. Now, I’ve got an idea what your average christian might say to my equating tears for the beauty of a hillside in autumn with a holy sacrament, transcendence with transfiguration–but what else can I call it? What’s more, I’m not nearly finished stretching this parallel. I’d like to put both what Luke is doing in India and what Lucy and Mr. Tumnus are doing in Narnia into the same category. I’d like to demonstrate that religion is what I call fantasy, and that furthermore, the kind of reality my cousin Luke encounters in Delhi and Pune and Sevagram on a daily basis, mitigated (for us at least) through the ubiquitous blog though it may be, is the same thing.

Really, the first leap shouldn’t be all that difficult, though I don’t doubt it will meet with contention. Indeed, I hope it does. Religion is the belief in the beyond the palpable. Or rather, it was–in its pure form, at its inception. And fantasy, on a superficial level at least, is… shall we call it the capacity for pleasure in the beyond the palpable? Now, whether religion’s purpose is pleasure, whether in the incredibly long term or the short, we won’t get into here. But surely the Rapture, at least, must be counted a pleasurable experience. Surely religious ecstasy, though according to the textbook definition that includes only such rare emotional states as that of Joan of Arc on the pyre I haven’t experienced it firsthand, must not be entirely a misnomer, and must therefore bear some structural resemblance to sexual release. And if I can reach an emotional state I perceive to be of comparable intensity in imagining the sensation of burying my hands in Aslan’s mane, shouldn’t I have every right to draw parallels? Maybe Aslan isn’t the best example, he being Christ once removed, or vice versa, and me being the prepubescent Susan, who we know will grow up to renounce Narnia and get married and go lax in her archery practice and generally lose any value as a vessel for the reader’s empathy, being a rather absurd and perhaps disturbing notion from both a gender-stereotypical and a traditionalist fantastical standpoint. But this is neither the time nor the place (well, perhaps it is the place) to dissect that particular neurosis.

Then why not bring in Reality? If I can burst into tears of joy (which I flatter myself there are some in the world who will never have the privilege of experiencing except through the mitigation of literature which of course they won’t be enjoying nearly as much as they should) at the sight of a beechgrove ablaze in gold, then what excuse have I to draw a line between that glorious grove and the imagined shores of Valinor–or, for that matter, the gates of Eden, or the Silver City? Is it really all that significant a difference that the latter paradises are forever forbidden me except in imagination and/or death, while the former waits but twenty minutes’ walk from my front door? What is that difference? What is it, really? I propose it to be nothing more than whether I who imagine those eternal shores can take such joy from that mere image as I can from walking the mossy earth beneath the boughs, or for that matter driving past them on an empty road swept with falling leaves on my way to personal fulfillment.

This is rather a longer digression from Luke and India than I’d intended–and it could easily go longer. But it need not. Luke’s experience among the outcasts is what religion used to be and still is only for the very lucky, what that blazing yellow beechgrove is for me, what the thought of little Bilbo Baggins among the great elves and wizards on the Last Ship to Valinor is for so many. In this age of weblogofied reality, of the inescapable marketing slot, the ginormous scintillating My Ugly Uncle’s Ass With a Face Painted On It Takes Over Your Mother’s Job ad dancing like six coked-up thai prostitutes in oh about the bottom 33% of Charlie Brown’s Christmas, I’m afraid that anybody who tries to tell me unmitigated reality is not religion is going to get laughed off the stage. This thing we do every day, this isn’t reality anymore. What Luke does on the other side of the world, that is–and for that alone, I’m capable of experiencing the same kind of transcendent fantasy that made me cry as a kid, the same kind of transcendent reality that makes me cry in the woods on a cold winter’s day, just by reading Luke’s odd, oh-so-human, oh-so-wise and thoughtful and simple narration, and looking at the pictures of him with his hair dyed black among people who see mumaks on the streets every day and haven’t the first idea what the hell is fundamentally wrong with this place on the other side of the world where everybody drives monstrous shiny things bigger than elephants to work every day at the cost of a fraction of a human life per mile. And the weirdest thing about it is I don’t know whether it ought to make me happy or sad to be living in a world where such a thing is possible.

“Then, unbelievably, I saw something I thought only existed in my imagination: a bicycle whose chain was rerouted, via gears, to spinning a table saw. One person rides the bike, another person cuts wood. I felt like I’d seen the loch ness monster, or a purple elephant with two heads, or a giant squid.”
–Luke, HKE, 12/4/2004