An Essay on the Experience of Gnosis

by Wednesday


(written mid-August, 1994)

"we wanna be real, we wanna be pure, we don't want our vices and we don't want the cure..." --leanne haze

It's damn near sunrise and I should be sleeping, but the trend of the past few nights has followed into this one as well, and I am watching a thunderstorm wash away the night. The sky keeps flashing a brilliant blue-white; if I looked outside and directly at the sky, I would likely go blind from the light.

I am tricking my body into gnosis-by-exhaustion. It works. Ever since Sunday night, I've been 90% there at all times anyway. All it takes is the slightest touch of something I love, and I'm back there. Music (Leanne Haze, Petra, Boingo, Rush and Indigo Girls), dancing, food, the steam of the shower, the wash of a mouthful of white wine. The walls between myself and the ones I love fall that much more easily. Oh, yes, suffer the witch, suffer ME...

[I close my eyes, and in the flash of the thunderstorm I am back in Halifax, Nova Scotia, walking past midnight on the fog-obscured campus of Dalhousie University, green peasant dress blowing in the wind, throwing my head back to the swirling white mists and howling in a dancing twirl, chianti hair whipping around. I fall into the wet grass and laugh. The walkman plays the ripping Rawlins Cross march I love; for the life of me, I wonder if I took a walk down to the oceanside, I would find the piper and be able to kiss him thank you for the gift of the music....]

I remember the connections, and have pulled them closer to me; I harness the lightning and drink it -raw-. I am washed by cold water and -feel- it -become- it -ride- it oh love oh god take me -BACK-... I weep; there are no fields in the city of Chicago where I might roll in wet grasses and laugh like a maniac...I yearn for Nutmeg. Two weeks. Two weeks. Two weeks. A mantra, a solace, a comfort. I smile at knowing that at least a few souls dear to me in many ways will be there that I would share and it would make sense to them.

Gnosis? Samadhi? Dhyana? Does it matter? It doesn't have a silly formal name, whatever this is... love...union... I am the universe and the elements and the vod, and none of that, and I am God and God does not exist.... perhaps this is madness, remembering how to kiss the water and embrace the flame.

I'll drink deep, drink my fill, drink again and again and again the octarine wine, full strength and distilled down, till I'm drunk with the blood of the saints....