Unseen Heights

Seeing Through the Unseen Heights

By John Taylor; 20 March, 2006

Again my six-year-old son Thomas is sinking under a flu-like bug,
marked by a fever that lasts days on end. Perhaps he had it already
and it recrudesced. He will be missing yet more school now that March
Break is over. I find this extra sad and distressing now that I know
exactly what they are going through. It is one thing to suffer
ourselves and yet another to witness an innocent suffer.

The novel I am reading is Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, which was
translated in unabridged, accurate format for the first time in 2002.
Mysterious Island is Verne's masterpiece but it is only one of about a
half dozen other novels that he wrote in the castaway genre. I ordered
a film version of this story from the Hamilton Public Library but
found to my disappointment that it was just a cartoon for kids. We all
watched the video together, not a high budget production. Even the
normally uncritical Silvie noticed its rough edges. Still I had to
admit that in many ways it is the most faithful filming of the actual
events in the novel of any I have seen. Not a dinosaur to be seen.

As I watched this sorry cartoon I thought about how you might make a
really good film about Mysterious Island. Start with a virtual reality
simulation of a virgin island and strand on the island virtual sim
creatures. Make it realistic enough that they will starve without
carefully chosen periodic care packages from you, the player. Thus you
play the role of Captain Nemo in Verne's story, who observes events
and intervenes only when absolutely necessary. Make this a computer
situation and release so that, unlike ordinary games, it would record
the collective experience of all players and feed data back to the
Mysterious Island Central. Thus the most interesting permutations and
results would change the rules of the simulation itself. The film's
directors and actors would play the simulation over again and again,
which would make Verne's purpose in writing the book clear. Verne's
ostensive goal, by the way, he laid out in letters to his publisher:
he wanted to go over ground covered by those two great predecessors in
the castaway genre, Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, whose
stories had illuminated his own childhood. He wanted to uncover
something new, something missing in the earlier stories. Perhaps one
day, with the aid of computer simulations and better film making
techniques, someone will do Verne's story justice.

There is a castaway element to the Greatest Story Ever Told, that
recounted in scripture. Consider this, from the first verses of the
seventeenth Surih of the Qu'ran, Night Journey, the one the Bab
renamed "Children of Israel,"

"Say: Verily, were men and Djinn assembled to produce the like of this
Koran, they could not produce its like, though the one should help the
other. And of a truth we have set out to men every kind of similitude
in this Koran, but most men have refused everything except unbelief."

There are many ways that this "producing its like" could be
understood. It could mean just copying it. The Qu'ran survived a
thousand years by being transcribed periodically, then for many
centuries it was printed in presses. Now we can do this very easily,
just hit a few buttons on the computer and "cut" the text of the
Qu'ran and "paste" it into as many places we wish. Simple reproduction
cannot be what is meant by "producing its like," can it?

I think the most elaborate attempt to "produce its like" is the
Enlightenment tradition, which in a thousand areas of life would
replace religion with science. The castaway novel itself is an attempt
to get down to basics, to cut through the superstitions of human
history and find a means of survival that uses science and reason
alone.

What then is the counterpart to the castaway novel in the Book of God?
I think it may be the story of a life of suffering, any life of
suffering, every life with suffering. For pain has a way of isolating
us on the isolated shores of worldly hopelessness. It cuts off from
all our baggage of outer supports and inherited goods and bads. In
pain, all is cut away save frail faith; you have only "producing the
likes" of Holy Writ to get you through to the other side. And once you
start writing that, only God can carry the project through. As the
Lord declared to Samuel,

"...when I begin I also make an end." (Sam 3:12)

The case of Ludwig Von Beethoven springs to mind. He had nothing to
console him as he descended into the isolation of deafness, the
ultimate hell for a musician and composer. His affliction inspired him
to write his climactic Ninth Symphony, some say the sublimest music
ever written. In these testing times he is reported to have kept above
his piano these five words, evidently taken from the Bhagavad Gita,

"...for above all things, God."

That is the principle of the Oneness of God, simply keeping Him above
all things, understanding the huge chasm between us and the One. The
like of this is can never be produced by human means. If the endless
gap between God and not-God, between Perfection and imperfection,
ceases to block but actually turns into a bridge, one that shines like
a sun, then it becomes a principle we can use. In this light
inequality coaxes as well as denies, like the light of Naw Ruz, that
shines out tonight. Baha'u'llah describes the process of this new
creation in explicit detail.

"I testify that no sooner had the First Word proceeded, through the
potency of Thy will and purpose, out of His mouth, and the First Call
gone forth from His lips than the whole creation was revolutionized,
and all that are in the heavens and all that are on earth were stirred
to the depths. Through that Word the realities of all created things
were shaken, were divided, separated, scattered, combined and
reunited, disclosing, in both the contingent world and the heavenly
kingdom, entities of a new creation, and revealing, in the unseen
realms, the signs and tokens of Thy unity and oneness. Through that
Call Thou didst announce unto all Thy servants the advent of Thy most
great Revelation and the appearance of Thy most perfect Cause."
(Baha'u'llah, Prayers and Meditations, 295-296)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com