A million alien Gospels

But in the eternities
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O be prepared my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

The final two verses of an elegant little poem entitled Christ in the Universe. It was written by Alice Meynell, a British writer, suffragist and convert to Catholicism. She lived from 1847 to 1922.

I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's longer poem Christus Apollo, which includes the lines:

Christ wanders in the Universe
A flesh of stars,
He takes on creature shapes
To suit the mildest elements,
He dresses him in flesh beyond our ken.
There He walks, glides, flies, shambling of strangeness.
Here He walks Men.
Among the ten trillion beams
A billion Bible scrolls are scored
In hieroglyphs among God’s amplitudes of worlds;
In alphabet multitudinous
Tongues which are not quite tongues
Sigh, sibilate, wonder, cry:
As Christ comes manifest from a thunder-crimsoned sky.
He walks upon the molecules of seas
All boiling stews of beast
All maddened broth and brew and rising up of yeast.
There Christ by many names is known.

PS: This is news to me, but apparently Christus Apollo was set to music in 1969 by the prolific film score composer Jerry Goldsmith.

The Third Man

This post is not actually about the great Orson Welles/Graham Greene movie. It's about a book I recently came across, The Third Man Factor. It has an ambitious subtitle: The Secret to Survival in Extreme Environments.

Fans of T.S. Eliot will recall these lines from The Wasteland:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

This is part of the poem's 'Journey to Emmaus' section, but in the notes Eliot explained: The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.

It turns out that a fair number of people in extremely stressful conditions, often explorers, report an encounter with a mysterious "Other." Unlike sleep paralysis or experiences of "hauntings," these presences seem supportive or helpful and have given some people the determination to carry on and survive harrowing conditions. It's not always a get-out-of-jail free card - Geiger cites one case where a climber described the experience in his diary before dying. The book uses some neurological findings to argue that the Other is a psychological survival mechanism, a hallucination triggered by the brain in certain cases of stress.

Geiger cites some people who interpret this in a dismissive fashion - standard-issue "See, all this mystical bunk is just in your head!" rhetoric. He also quotes those who believe that something supernatural or paranormal is being encountered, beyond how the brain interprets it. The introduction to the book is from Vincent Lam, the Canadian doctor and award-winning writer. Lam is an Anglican (the last I heard anyways) and in his introduction he describes a stressful period in his life when he encountered what he believes was "a guardian angel."

Geiger himself takes a stance between these positions. He seems to conclude that it's "just" happening in the brain, but that it's a wondrous, even spiritual experience at the same time. For him, it speaks to human inter-connectedness, our need for others, and the amazing flexibility of the human psyche. There's an interview with Geiger here. The Globe and Mail reviewed the book here.

On a related note, have you seen Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends?