Sofia La Maga: Nothing but a bedraggled kitchen witch--Illustrated excerpt from La Maga

I am scheduled to speak at a Crowley Con conference this fall about my fiction writing--my Sorcerers and Magi series triology. It is metaphysical fiction that is meant to begin as a play on classic children's magical fantasy fiction but moves on to address concepts about the nature of self, will, transformation, and enlightenment. Political metaphor and issues related to the "Immanentization of the Eschaton" build as the series progresses. What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? That is the koan-like question. My work is for adult fiction readers with authentic interest and literacy in the magical and mystical. Explore insights from the Western Mystery Tradition, Vedanta, and Buddhism through creative expression.

This short video is a character study of the heroine of the series, Sofia La Maga. Images are original art work. More of my art work can be viewed at http://www.deerapposelli.com 

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Leonard (Junior) and his buddies, Anil, Cary, and Bertrand, had gotten a glimpse of Sofia La Maga the day before. They gloated like the spoiled-brat junior elitist patricians they were that the hype about the professor was nonsense. It was just as Leonard’s father had insisted. Professor La Maga was nothing but a bedraggled kitchen witch.

She didn’t seem at all like the stories told about her. In fact, she roamed through the secondary school’s second-floor corridor as if she were roller-skating with three left feet and had the mental disposition of a hedgehog. 

She was a tall, slender but robust woman with the rough-and-tumble appearance of someone who had weathered hard climbs in exotic lands. Her clothes were rustic, quaintly worn, and embellished with savage jewelry: jangling bells and sashes of bone and fur, claws, shells, and spike-studded pods. Her Medusa-like mane was haphazardly plaited here and there and cluttered her face, blinding her as she toddled along.  She was gripping a mass of overstuffed folders, and from her arms dangled plastic bags filled with items that were heavy. The bags swung like pendulums in the wake of her clumsy pace. The heels of her worn leather lace-up boots alternately caught on the frayed hem of an ankle-length skirt. It caused her to wobble pathetically as the heavy bags alternately beat against her ribs.  

No one offered assistance. They were busy gawking at her and probably thinking the same as Leonard and his pals were. This was the prodigy who had been gallivanting across exotic lands and speed-reading through mentorships with wild wizards, shamans, and hermits?

Leonard reported the observation to his father who smirked and lectured him about how the Inner Plane was going to the dogs. He blamed immigration and student exchange laws and especially the prohibition against the caste system—even though it had been nearly a century since the prohibition had been in effect.

As far as de Lux senior was concerned, the discontinuation of the system undercut the privilege of the privileged. It made for circumstances whereby the child of the lowliest peasant spell-caster (that is, Sofia La Maga) could become a prestigious mage—all because she had spent 12 years spelunking through some caves on the Inner Plane of Katmandu or Machu Picchu or . . . some place.

Leonard’s father repeated that Sofia La Maga was a fake. He said that the heroic tales about her were hoaxes. He stressed that she was the bastard spawn of a wayward woman who had died under suspicious circumstances. He reminded Leonard and his friends that this one Sofia La Maga also had been kicked out of the H. Trismegistus Mystical Arts Academy School of Graduate Studies in her junior year of college. She was a trouble-maker who almost took the school down because of her political extremism. A terrorist, Leonard’s father insisted. Furthermore, rather than applying herself to unusual scholarship in the Terra Mysticus as was claimed about her, she had been running some sort of silly “New Age” cult among the Commons in the Outer Plane for the past 15 years . . .

Enlightenment and the Nature of the Self

Although I’ve spent the past several years delving into folk magic, Neopaganism, and the Western Mystery Tradition, my primary spiritual orientation is Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta is a form of Hinduism that I was introduced to nearly 40 years ago. It is a system that dates back to about the 7^th century and is primarily founded in the Upanishads. The Upanishads are the philosophical portion of a set texts called the Vedas, the earliest written record of Hindu thought and praxis.

When I first began writing La Maga A Story aboutSorcerers and Magi in 2004, I was absorbed in Vedanta and related Eastern philosophies. And so concepts distilled from my then spiritual practice are represented in the work and intermingle with fanciful as well as some authentic motifs about magic.

The spiritual journey in Advaita Vedanta is, in part, about intimately realizing the connection between one’s own true nature and the Divine and also realizing that “the world is in the mind, like space in a jar”—as stated in a text called the Yoga-Vasishtha—which I worked into the very last chapter of La Maga. Advaita Vedantist philosophy is concerned with the idea of projection—the problem of not experiencing reality as it is but as dreamlike mental projections—colored by bias, fears, ignorance and automated habits and conditioning. For this reason, my characters sometimes contemplate the nature of reality and illusion. They also ask the question: What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? To paraphrase thoughts I attributed to the antihero of the series, the sorcerer Leo de Lux:

Becoming truly real, conscious, and capable of free will begins by realizing the whimsical and fabricated nature of one’s own being—the idea of self—and then detaching from the automaton (the robot) of its personality, habits, and conditioning. Then the person who is the life beneath the mask of selfhood opens his eyes and watches himself reveling through the motions of daily life like a dreamer reveling in lucidity and exercising free will in it.

In the last published book in the series, The Savior at the End of Time (available in Kindle format), I have the main character of that story--a whacky Christlike figure who is a chaos-magic-practicing sorcerer named Aurelio Zosimo--deliver a sermon that basically crystalizes what I’ve come away with from my exposure to Eastern spirituality and spirituality in general, including magical spirituality:

Excerpt from Chapter 20 of The Savior at the End of Time 

About 42 days after his confrontation with Lord Consul Tau-Bridge, Zosi began to be spotted in flamboyantly full ceremonial regalia within the Mercury Gardens. He would wear a tunic of thick raw silk and tightly fitted, black leggings that were made of tanned leather and full of straps and whips of lacings. Over this, he would wear high boots that matched a mottled, purple-black tanned leather cope embossed with images of ourobori, moondragons, and griffins. His hair was meticulously plaited and decorated with pins and ribbons. His head was topped with a black double-cone hat that was rakishly crimped and folded over so that the tips of the horn-like cones, embellished with opalescent jingle bells, menacingly flounced and jangled in front of his face. He wielded a rather large and tall staff, the core of which was made of slender poles of cedar and fennel stalks. It was wrapped in embossed leather that matched his ensemble. Like a sinister maypole, the staff’s leather sheath was itself wrapped in a filigreed design of cords and leather straps on which gadgets and flotsam were affixed and that dangled, flail- and cat-o-nine-tails-like, from the staff’s finial, which was a gold spearhead in the shape of a fish with an acorn protruding from its mouth.

Like that, he would stroll about the Gardens and then stop here or there to deliver a sermon that attracted larger and larger crowds as word of the spectacle grew. He would begin the rant in a gentle voice with the words, “See the illumination at the center of being,” and materialize some small sparkly object that would fascinate and mesmerize onlookers.

“The body and all phenomena arise causally and provisionally within absolute being,” he would continue, yet still in a very meek and quiet voice. It would be trembling and barely audible despite his ferocious appearance. “There is no time and no dimension to space, both being mere adaptive projections of mind. The personality is an interdependently arising construction of circumstances and experiences, driven by reactivity bred by conditioning devoid of awareness or true will. What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? Heaven, hell, God, the Adversary, pleasure, pain, and all the pairs of opposites are projections of your own consciousness. You project ideas out of yourself. Treating them as independent entities, you go into them, fear them, and allow them to have power over you although they are your own creations. No one is there to deliver you; you must deliver yourself. Glimpse self-effacement and the root of your existence. Reality is silent, blissful, self-composed Being. This is the Redemptive Principle, the Christos, the Ground, and the Life beneath the mechanism.”

About La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi

"What is it like to wake up from the idea of yourself?"  That is a question discovered by characters in the fantasy fiction novel La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi. I got the idea that I should illustrate the novel. I like to say that is it sort of like Harry Potter for grown-ups but is especially for grownups who like classic children's literature and also have an authentic interest in magic and mysticism. 

The main character is a magical woman named Sofia La Maga.  After many  years in political exile Sofia returns to her homeland and becomes a professor at her alma mater The H. Trismegistus mystical arts academy.







Even though the governor of her homeland doesn’t much like her, Sofia befriends and mentors his juvenile delinquent son, Leonard de Lux, Junior.  The only thing Leonard is good at—or think he’s good at—is playing the Phaeton Maneuver—a  very dangerous, outlawed game that magical teenage boys secretly  play in the  where all these magical people live.

When Leonard’s father finds out that Sofia has not only  gotten Leonard on the straight and narrow but has given him the experience of enlightenment, he is not  sure whether he should be happy about it. After all, Sofia is an anti-establishment political dissident and a person from a much lower caste of society than he is. But he is impressed with her, and like young Leonard, he falls in love with her.  Like Leonard, he undergoes a profound spiritual transformation that will, in turn, profoundly shapes destiny.

 –Dionesia Rapposelli

Kindle edition

Paperback Night Horse Press

                                                     

Circles: Excerpt from The Savior at the End of Time on YouTube

He started drawing circles again until he had constructed an ouroboros—a serpent swallowing its own tail.

“If you really want to find peace and make peace, you have to kill this thing,” he said. Everyone nodded.

He made a rose bloom in the circular empty space framed by the ouroboros. A multitude of petals flared out. Watching them became a mesmerizing repast in which the sense of time was lost. A tiny light formed in the center of the rose. Looking at it gave a person an ecstatic and expansive feeling that made everything seem trivial and silly in comparison. Truly, looking into the speck of light in the center of the rose was like taking hold of a giddy and ineffable truth. So the lot of them sat gazing at it.

How much time passed in this pursuit was unknown—short or long—and it could not be measured in retrospect because no one could remember at what time the endeavor began. In any case, the Zosians sat mesmerized in gnostic bliss until, as occasionally occurred with the Entheos Mondo Amanita maneuver in which they were arrested, they began to startle and crash into queasiness, nausea, cramps, and diarrheal output.

Zosi was seething with quiet mirth. “Now that’s an opiate,” he exclaimed, and he bid them to make sure they each left the bathroom clean for the next person. 

Available in Kindle format from amazon.com. 

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The Glory of the Goddess

Durga Puja, an important Hindu festival, is coming up in October. It commemorates the victory of good over evil, order over chaos, and reveres the Great Goddess as the Redemptive Principle and Savior of the Universe. During this time, a section of the Markandeya Purana  known as the Devi Mahatmyam, or Chandi, which relates heroic exploits of the Goddess, is ceremoniously chanted in the context of elaborate ritual. Images of the goddess are constructed for the event, worshipped as representations of the Goddess, displayed in pageants, and then sunk in the Ganges or other waterways in locales outside the “Motherland,” such as the USA.  See the Wikipedia entry on Durga Puja here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durga_Puja

I had been dedicated to the goddess Durga for very many years. I was (and continue to be despite my perhaps incongruent immersion in Western occultism and contemporary Paganism) a long-time adherent of reformed Advaita Vedanta.  I was obsessed with the aforementioned text Devi Mahatmyam for at least a decade. The title translates as “Glory of the Goddess.” It has been dated to the 3rd century and is a trilogy of mythologies in which the Goddess, personifying the combined power of the gods, defeats various demons in battles and, thus, restores the order of the Universe.

The full text, which takes more than an hour or three to recite, is chanted in the context of devotional ritual (puja) and is prefaced and followed by several auxiliary prayers, chants, mantra, and ritual gestures. It is generally done as a thaumatergic exercise in which the Goddess is thought of as a beneficent entity who is being addressed for the sake of gaining favors and for protection from both supernatural evil and the nasty world-at-large. In working with the text, I ultimately took a more Gnostic and literal approach. After all, Advaita Vedanta is jnana yoga, the discipline of spiritual integration through contemplativism and gnosis. In addition, the translations of the names of the demons that the Goddess is battling in the Devi Mahatmyam include The Great Deceiver (Mahahanu), The Aimless One (Parivarita), The Hypocrite  (Bidala), Anger (Kruddha), The Savage (Ugrasya),  He Who Gives  Way to Temptation (Durdhara), The Vicious (Chanda), The Malicious (Munda), Conceit (Shumbha), and Self-deprecation (Nishumbha). And the most famous demon celebrated in the scripture is Mahishasura—the “Buffalo demon” of egoism, the depiction of the slaying of which is an important piece of Hindu iconography.

So, the demons that The Goddess is protecting you from are not oogah-boogah things “out there”; they are negative qualities within yourself that the Goddess battles with a barrage of weapons: the sword of discrimination, club of articulation, bow of determination, arrow of penetration, pike of attention, rod of restraint, axe of right action, net of unity, trident of harmony, and discus of revolving time. Then she cuts off the head of your ferocious ego. And, frankly, this is why, philosophically speaking, “bad things happen to good people,” because they are not “bad things”; they are transformational and transitional things. Or else, they are just stuff happening in the grand drama of life.

Elephants, Eagles, and Crocodiles: Excerpt from La Maga

“And what are these creatures on your dress?” Madame Whitehead inquired and waved to Leo and a man who seemed to be Mister Whitehead. “Come and listen. The maga is going to tell us a story about her dress.”

“Alright then, let’s see it in color—the story, I mean. Leo, you’re the expert,” the gentleman said.

“An illustrated tale?” Leo mused.

“Do you want to see Leonard do it?” Sofia grinned. “Lenny. Come here,” she anxiously chanted.

A group converged around Sofia and Leonard in the center of the patio to hear the story.

“Okay. Now make it nice. Nothing cheesy, Leonard,” Sofia admonished.

“First tell us what these creatures are, La Maga Magus—the one’s on your dress,” Miss Noumen requested.

Sofia answered, “Elephants, eagles, and crocodiles.” Then she began: “Once, there was an elephant.”

With a fidget of fingers, Leonard created a handsome-looking, scaled down elephant, the size of a chair. It had big, winnowing ears and long, thick tusks and was floating in space.

“We need an Indian elephant. That one’s African,” Sofia said. “Sorry, Lenny.”

The ears had to shrink, and the tusks had to be much thinner although Sofia told Leonard that they could be longer and curly.

“Make the scene junglely with a watering hole,” she instructed.

The elephant began to plod in place while the flora within the courtyard grew denser and more enveloping. The creature reared its trunk and let out a squeak.

“Okay. So, once there was an elephant,” she stuttered again, with her usual goofy bravado. “And it went to go soak in a lake when a humongous crocodile—not an alligator, Leonard, a crocodile—caught the elephant’s leg in its jaws.”

The ladies screamed. A creature heretofore resembling a rock jumped out and gripped the elephant’s right hind leg. Bellowing and thrashing began. The ruckus spilled beyond the magical mirage’s boundaries causing the walls and pillars within the courtyard to shudder, the trees to bend and sway. Quelled swamp water doused everyone and made a mess.

“Good show, Leonard!” the impressed guests cried. They blotted their mussed hair and attire.

“The crocodile was going to drag the elephant under and have a tasty meal, but in that moment, as the elephant faced its death, it remembered that, in a past life, it was a human king who was very devoted to the Divine Pervading Principle of the Universe, Lord Vishnu. I’ll do that one, Lenny,” Sofia interjected and went on: “The elephant prayed to Lord Vishnu but nothing happened. So then he prayed again, and nothing, ‘cause . . . gods are like that.” 

The thrashing and splashing, rumbling and roar continued with heightened violence. Sofia hollered her story above it: “Finally, just as the elephant was about to be overcome by the crocodile, its heart filled with the desire for—not life but . . . redemption. Nearly with its last breath, it called out one last time to the Divine Lord of the Universe. And then, the deity finally showed up, wafting around on his mighty giant eagle.”

With hands swirling in the air, Sofia materialized an image of a white eagle astride which was a handsome pale blue deity bejeweled, garlanded, and clad in orange-yellow fabric. A pack of arrows were strapped to his back. With his four arms, he held a conch shell, a discus, a gilded club, and an ornate archer’s bow.

The eagle and the deity placidly soared in loops overhead that Leo—inspired—doctored into a luminously endless galactic sky. Indeed, he obscured the boundaries of the courtyard with a wave of his hand, creating a jungle. Startling caws of birds and small primates, moisture, heat, and smells of musk, detritus, exotic flora, and loam enveloped the audience. Wild creatures lurked in the distance.

“Although on the brink death, the elephant plucked a lotus from the lake and held it aloft as an offering to the deity,” Sofia continued. “Acknowledging the gesture, Lord Vishnu whirled his discus to stun the crocodile. He dismounted his eagle, and—this should be good, Len—grasping the crocodile’s jaws, he tore the creature apart.”

Guts spattered across the room and doused all who were near. Squeals, grunts, and laughter resounded.

Quietly amused, Sofia wiped her forehead and picked bloody bits of grizzle from her hair. Lord Vishnu, spotless despite the grisly conquest, flew on his eagle into the sky’s galactic radiance. The elephant, showered in flowers, trumpeted and assumed a kneeling stance. Sofia recited the last stanza of a prayer:

“In the early morning, I praise that great god who holds the conch and the discus with which he tore apart the crocodile to relieve the elephant’s great distress. He who removes all fear, him I praise so that the sins committed by me in previous births may be destroyed.”

Sofia placed her hands over her face because the words still made her cry.

“That was very sweet,” the ladies said. The men heartily applauded and pat Leo on the back because his son was so clever.

Excerpt from Chapter 9 Elephants, Eagles and Crocodiles from La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi by Soror ZSD23 available from amazon.com 

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Leonard de Lux --the Young Hero of Novel 1 of the Sorcerers and Magi series

Leonard had been fantasizing about being Sofia La Maga’s apprentice. It was an absolute impossibility, of course. He felt increasingly bitter about it, but who could he blame? He was a fuck-up after all—but so was the professor, according to his father.

Impossible fantasies about becoming her apprentice gave way to dreams about being her sexual friend. How weird to have a crush on that woman, but, man, was he filled with a strange fire when he jacked off to the thought her. Part of the thrill was desiring someone who his father hated.

Now Leonard would have to slither home and wait for his father to notice that he had gotten in trouble at school again. The wrath that de Lux junior would incur from de Lux senior would be silent and seething. Leonard was trying to figure out how the rigmarole would go without admitting that his “crime” was related to a dispute about participating in an illicit Phaeton maneuver match. That would be a monster. That would be a lot more than what his father could endure, even if the moral of the story was that Leonard had come to his senses about it.

Leonard didn’t go home after the codes and keys class. He did not leave the school premises. Rather, he skulked around the second floor corridor, keeping clear of hall guards and teachers—especially Professor Lossius whose classroom was at the far end of the floor.

He was waiting for Professor La Maga to wander by in her usual way, limping along with a burden in her arms. He was braced for a bold act, considering that he would not be able to see the professor for another two weeks. Or perhaps he would never see her again, depending on what his father did to him when he found out what had happened and why. So it was important for Leonard to find the professor and make an impression on her before departing to be crushed by fate.

At about a quarter past three, moments before the close of school, Leonard caught her. She was carrying a huge stack of overstuffed hanging file folders and limping along as if hoping that the awkward toting of heavy, slippery things would at last lead to calamity. Leonard emerged from a hiding spot in an alcove and sidled beside her.

“Professor La Maga!” he uttered robustly. She turned slightly. The folders flipped out of her grip and splattered yards across the floor. Both he and she placidly watched this occur. Leonard even slightly nodded when his gaze met the professor’s. 

“You do this on purpose, don’t you, Professor?” Leonard said.

The professor looked away at the mess and seemed to distantly smile. What folks around her—even other professors—were too dumb to see, was that she was engaged in a magical act. It was a set up—this behavior in the halls.  It was a deliberate link in a chain of events related to the activation of a magical spell. That’s what Leonard thought. He had helped her accomplish a magical act. That must’ve been worth something to her.

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The Pyr Sacra Empowerment, Holy Fire, and Kundalini-Shaktipat Experience

In the Sorcerer’s and Magi mystical fantasy fiction series, the Pyr Sacra is an important empowerment that is transferred between high-ranking sorcerers and magi and their would-be apprentices. The Pyr Sacra, which is garbled Latin for “Holy Fire,” is depicted as a profound transformation of consciousness that results in a certain level of “enlightenment.”

Energy of the Depths  16 x 32 inch digital
image by Dee Rapposelli
 http://www.deerapposelli.com

Many people in the West now look to Eastern paradigms and jargon to explain enlightenment experiences and dabble in practices to achieve these experiences. The terms shaktipat and Kundalini are bandied about. People receive shaktipat—a transformational empowerment—from spiritual adepts—and engage in yogic practices to “awaken” Kundalini.  These esoteric Eastern ideas filtered into Western consciousness during the New Thought movement and occult revival that occurred at the turn of the 20^th century. They especially gained notoriety during the 60s counterculture era.  Now, the web and bookshelves are overflowing with rhetoric about them. As it happens, Soror ZSD23 herself spent several years—more than a decade, in fact—engaged in study of literature (scriptural, academic, and “pop”) and yogic practice related to the Kundalini phenomenon.

In her view, shaktipat and the so-called Kundalini experience is a sudden reformatting of consciousness; indeed, a reformatting of neurochemical pathways that, ideally, undo the conditioned robot that you became shortly after you popped out of your mother’s uterus. The experience is described in this way in the Kashmir Shaivite classic the Spanda Karikas:

He sees the totality of objects appearing and disappearing in the ether of his consciousness like a series of reflections in a mirror. Instantly, all of his thought-constructs are split asunder by the recognition, after a thousand lives, of his true, essential nature, surpassing common experience and full of unprecedented bliss. He is struck with awe, with mouth agape. As he experiences vast expansion, his proper, essential nature suddenly manifests.

            --translation adapted from Jaideva Singh. Spanda-Karikas The Divine Pulsation. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. 1980. 

It is a profound paradigm shift that can be caused, not only as a result of dogged spiritual practice but a wide variety of means, including person-to-person transmission.  Variants of shaktipat/Kundalini awakening exist in many other esoteric cultures and are explained using different names and descriptors. In classical Greek mysticism, it may have been referred to as the speirema (“serpent power,” which is what Kundalini [literally, “she who is coiled”] is said to mean). In medieval Western Hermetic esotericism, it was dubbed Holy Fire. In more pedestrian ecstatic forms of Christianity, it called the Holy Spirit. And these examples are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

In the extreme, the shaktipat/Holy Fire experience is a full-blown transformation. Otherwise, many people involved in spiritual practices experience self-limited enlightenment experiences. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I will quote myself from an article published in the January 2001 issue of Yoga International magazine:

In the kundalini-rising episode, the pathways become clear; a subjective sensation of heat and energy ascending through the body often occurs and culminates in an exalted meditative experience. It is typically self-limited—the energy seems to filter back down and you go back to ordinary life.  After each episode, however, you may be left with the impression that a change has taken place or some insight or initiation has spontaneously arisen. More interesting, the quality of life and encounters in the days, weeks, and even months following more intensive episodes may be marked by a peculiar graciousness. This suggests that the kundalini-rising experience itself, though coveted, is not the end-goal of the process but its epiphenomenon. It is the effect of a quantum leap in mind and body that can occur again and again and evolve in quality.

            --Excerpt  from Kundalini Rising by Dee Rapposelli. Yoga International. January 2001:70-75.

What might a shaktipat-Holy Fire experience feel like?  In Chapter VI of La Maga A Story About Sorcerers and Magi, Leonard de Lux Junior  has the life-changing experience:

Excerpt from Chapter VI The Pyr Sacra Empowerment

He was pretty sure that Professor La Maga had forgotten about him. He was poised to conclude that she was jerking him off with her glamour—the girly cuteness, the familiarity, the sappy, stumbling false vulnerability. It was a complex ruse to undo Leonard and his father. Leonard had fallen into the trap. Stupidity.

He was in the kind of mood in which a person questions why he was born and whether staying alive was worth it. He pricked his finger on a splinter of wood gouged from the floor. He wanted to feel the sting and watch a bead of blood well up.

A black hole, a dark night. Leonard felt a tingly sensation fizzle over the left side of his body that became especially strong when it reached his cheek and then his ear. A heat, as if he had taken a shot of hard liquor and ignited his insides swelled in his stomach and leeched up.

This heat and a tingling pressure pent up at his neck. It forced Leonard’s spine to elongate as if he were a marionette tugged on a string. As the sensation burst into his head, he was enveloped in a scintillating flood of light, fluttering, and profound depth. Thunder roared inside his ears like the sound of a furious tide. His heart beat hard, and his breath rhythmically billowed in a way beyond conscious control.

Arrested in terror and elation, his eyes fluttered and teared to the vision of vast light and stroboscopic effects. He uttered an amazed sound as if gazing upon something magnificent—an entity of breathtaking beauty and hospitality, a communication of utter reassurance. He could neither see nor hear it, but he witnessed it nonetheless.

Everything about his life and circumstances—and everything about everyone else’s life—suddenly seemed incidental and pathetic. Reality, on the other hand, seemed to be pure happiness, and it was in his grip.

The seizure subsided. The thunder resolved into sheer calm and the strobing into radiance. The episode was probably much briefer than it seemed. It left Leonard refreshed and full of breath like he might have been at the moment he was born.

The room seemed illuminated. Leonard himself seemed illuminated. He could only laugh however disoriented, because it was as if he didn’t know himself. He pressed his thumbnails into his fingertips and examined his hands. They seemed to be glowing. He had to find a mirror and look into it. He hardly recognized himself.

His eyes ran with tears. Tears of laughter, tears of awe. It seemed all the same, and then of gratitude when he pulled together enough to realize what had happened.

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