Sophia

A short story

It was the early years of my undergraduate career that I found the article. I was sitting in the library flipping through a number of old newspapers, and I stumbled upon a remarkable story from a small West Coast paper dated from the 1950s. The story in question concerned a boy who, as soon as he was able to speak, displayed the ability to communicate in a way that expressed the most diverse meanings simultaneously without the slightest diminution or emphasis of any semantic level. According to the boy’s mother, whom the writer of the article had interviewed extensively, the first word he spoke encapsulated at once the sensation of being rocked, the delight of seeing his mother’s eyes upon him, and a fullness of the bowels. Needless to say, his mother was astonished when such a wide variety of information suddenly flooded into her mind by way of a single utterance, conveying each idea with total lucidity and without a hint of contradiction. The moment, as she described it, was one of peering through an almost perfectly limpid sphere containing a number of harmoniously ordered lights. It was clarity itself, the transcending of the temporality that normally characterizes language for a pure moment of simultaneous recognition. Into one word this boy had been able to pour the entirety of a psychic moment, the full actualization of his consciousness.

As the boy, whose name was Joshua, grew older, his ability grew with him. His words—and he rarely spoke more than one at a time—began to encapsulate an ever-wider array of experience and then to encapsulate more than just his own experience. The boy’s father, who was also interviewed, described how one day he was attempting to feed his son corn flakes, which he greatly disliked, and in a moment of uncontrollable rage owing to his disgust with the meal, Joshua knocked over the bowl and shouted at his father. The word was not merely the expression of anger towards a bland food, but the total expression of every child’s disappointment and reluctance to eat something that he or she does not like. In that one word, that one moment, Joshua’s father saw and understood the ire of billions of children, from the pouting infant refusing to eat her avocado to the five year old crying over the breaking of a bagel. He burst into sobs from the sheer immensity of the negative emotion. Joshua was four at the time.

When Joshua was of the age to attend school, his parents were understandably hesitant. Unsure what to do, they began going around to the various local schools and speaking with the respective institutional heads. All of them dismissed their claims as impossible, refusing to even take the time to speak with the boy. The only exception was an alternative school run by German hippies who had created a modified Waldorf education. Not only did they believe Joshua’s parents, but they were positively thrilled at the prospect of having such a spiritually gifted child among their pupils (which were, incidentally, rather sparse). And so Joshua attended school amid exultations of “ja, ja” and exuberant gesticulations.

This went well for some time, apparently, and Joshua’s parents reported that he was an excellent student. He was extremely quiet, but whenever called upon to speak, he would give his usual one-word answer, perfectly responding to the situation and expressing nothing else. This satisfied the teachers and kept the other students from finding Joshua overly strange, although they certainly avoided him. At home, however, Joshua’s speech was not limited to the narrow semantic field he felt he had to maintain at school, either from bashfulness or a keen survival instinct. Indeed, his parents were increasingly overwhelmed by the vastness of what he had to say. Joshua would frequently express to them a galaxy of moments relating to his present mood or state of mind. If he was bored or elated, they would experience through his words every possible instance of boredom or elation. He spoke to them of the suffering of whole continents, the slow growth of trees over centuries, every twist in the streets of Cairo, the luminous subjectivity of the heavens.

These were not, of course, things of which Joshua had direct empirical experience. Somehow, his mind expanded and moved in ways completely separate from the purely subjective. It was as if he could see into the possibilities of the world and understand them without having met them directly in his own life, as if his mind were becoming more than itself. I imagined that perhaps he was a conduit of some sort, a road through which some higher spiritual knowledge was poured. Or perhaps he was a kind of radio receiver, picking up cosmic frequencies and reformulating them into linguistic formulas compacted into a small number of syllables. My mind ran wild trying to explain it, but of course the newspaper article had no explanations to offer. Neither Joshua nor his parents ever seemed able to articulate any coherent theory. Perhaps they were too overwhelmed by their situation to consider the implications. Perhaps it was just too strange.

Whatever the reason for Joshua’s abilities, it was not long before they began to get him into trouble. It seems that his reluctance to speak anything beyond the necessary word become an unbearable burden for Joshua, and it was not long before he began to express himself more at school. At first, this delighted his professors, who were convinced that he was the reincarnation of an ancient Tibetan master or the next leap in human evolution or that his mind had full access to the akashic records. This was not to last, however. One day, when Joshua was fourteen years old, a certain teacher that had angered him (it is hinted that he was provoked by the overbearing insistence of this teacher that Joshua begin attending some sort of spiritual gathering) went mad from a word Joshua muttered to him in an after-class conversation. The teacher had a nervous breakdown in which he was unable to cease crying. He spent the next decade of his life lying curled up in his bed, pale and shaking, unable to look anyone in the face.

The horror of this shocked everyone, but it appeared to have shocked Joshua most of all. He thenceforth refused to speak, would barely eat, and sat staring at the wall for hours at a time. He grew increasingly wan and thin, and his parents became extremely worried. It was not long before they woke up to find that Joshua was gone. He had taken a few hundred dollars, a backpack, some clothes, and a loaf of Wonder bread. They never saw Joshua again after that. After years of searching and hoping, they had given up and concluded that he must be dead, perhaps killing himself in despair over the the suffering he had caused to his former teacher. The article ended with a request that anyone with information regarding Joshua contact his parents. As far as I know, this request was never fulfilled.

For me, too, this was the end of the story. I could find nothing else related to it. There was no mention of it in any other source accessible to me—and I searched vigilantly. But it stayed with me, haunting my dreams and the corners of my mind every time I opened my mouth to speak. I admit that I even tried to formulate words with transtemporal content. After a number of years, however, the impact of the story began to fade until I nearly forgot it. It was not until I was doing research in yet another library on the rise of fringe religious movements in America that I was forcefully reminded of Joshua’s strange tale. I was researching a cult that had arisen in Arizona, a group that called itself the Bishops of the Secret Word. The structure of the cult was fairly standard: a charismatic leader had gathered around himself a number of lost and malleable people and formed a community on the fringes of a rural town in the Arizona dessert. They used initiation rituals to give themselves a sense of mystery and pushed their members to the edge of exhaustion and intoxication to break down and rebuilt their personalities. None of this was unique, and none of it was particularly interesting to me. What was interesting, however, was that the leader of this group had bequeathed to his followers a document that became for them a kind of scripture and that had survived the ultimate destruction of the cult engendered by the combined powers of jealousy between polygamous individuals, rampant drug abuse, and systematic internal manipulation by, and external pressure from, the FBI. A scholar of American religion had managed to get a hold of this text and published a number of copies for the purposes of historical documentation. I was thus able to obtain and read a copy, which was to remind me of the article I had read so long ago.

For the scripture of a fringe cult written by an apparently incompetent cult leader, I found the document fascinating. Indeed, parts of it nearly made one believe it to be a genuine revelation. Yet the most astonishing aspect of it was the character of the man in the desert, whom I have come to be convinced must have been Joshua. I reproduce the relevant portion of the text here.

“In my youth, I travelled looking for truth. I saw the western and the eastern coasts of this country. I travelled north and south. I sought India and meditated by the Ganges. The world was open to me, and I drank the wisdom therein. Yet still was I unsatisfied, still did I thirst. My path brought me at last to the Sonoran Desert, to the scorching sun and the sand that burned my feet. I began to live in the desert, with the blue horizon everywhere enveloping my mind. The sheer deprivation of the landscape entered into me, and my mind was clear. Yet still it was not enough, and I went further into the desert, until I began to lose all sense of myself and where I was going. The sun beat down upon me, and I became delirious. I began to see visions, and they all spoke to me of the vanity of the world. I no longer cared to live; I no longer cared to keep going.

“It was then that I saw him. He came toward me out of the white-blue of the endless sky. He appeared just when I was sure I would die and led me to a grove of trees and water. I awoke, only half aware of what had passed, in a small hut made from twigs and clay. He sat next to me and was silent, looking upon me with an infinite compassion. I babbled. I did not yet understand. He gave me water and stale pieces of Wonder bread that brought back my strength. There must have been some power in that bread, for I had never felt so well as I did then.

“Still he did not speak to me. At first, this did not bother me, but after some time I felt disconcerted. I began to ask questions. Who are you? How did you find me? Why did you save me? He only stared at me with compassionate eyes. I kept asking, and he remained silent. This made me angry, and I began to demand, and finally to raise my voice. He only stared back, or looked off into the distance as if contemplating something that was coming, but with a great slowness. Eventually, I gave up. He would not speak to me. I stayed there for a week, recovering my strength. On the eighth day, I told him that I was leaving. I knew the general direction that I needed to take. I had had enough of the interior of the desert, and was ready to return to my camp on the edges.

“It was then that he spoke.

“How can I describe what he said to me? It was but a single word, and yet it contained all words. It had but a single meaning, and yet it meant everything. I saw in an instance the whole sphere of heaven and earth and everything within it in the past, the future, and the present. The cosmos itself was opened to me like a single jewel, and I saw every glint of light, every intersecting ray. I knew the pain of motherhood. I knew the history of the formation of the planets. I understood the dark appetites and dreams of angler fish. Everything was there. Everything. And it fell upon me as a storm of lightning. It was as if my mind had in one instant become all that it possibly ever could become all at once. The glory and suffering of reality tore through me, burned my very bones, my tendons, my heart. I swirled in the endlessness. I drowned in self-annihilation, and yet knew myself more fully than I had known anything before. Words fail, and yet all of this was somehow contained in this one word which he spoke to me.

“I fell to me knees, my hands clutching my head. I felt all the pain and all the wonder and all the joy that ever was, and I trembled. Then he spoke another word to me. It was nearly the same as the first, but it showed me something more. Above all the teeming, bustling confusion of the whole great expanse of time. At the root of all that is and was and will be, and yet somehow also at the end, as the transcendent moment constantly working to be released from the fruitlessness of a wild and perverse sequence, I saw a city. Yet it was more than a city; it was everything, just as all that I had seen from the last word was everything. Only this was more, infinitely more. It was the whole cosmos, a gloriously shining pearl. All the pain, all the suffering, all of what I then recognized to be disruptions of this original, perfect city were gone, and in its place there was nothing but the ceaseless praise of some great name that I could not understand, the endless rejoicing of every voice from every mouth and every stone and every branch. I could hear the words of those who lived in the city, and the words were just like those that had given me this revelation, except they conveyed specific elements of the city, communicated specific portions of reality. The people there spoke of the jewels of their towers, the waters of the rivers that ran through their districts, the luminous air through which they gracefully walked, and the words they spoke were perfect, timeless. There was no need of succession. Everything was communicated all at once, with no remainder of unintelligibility, no residue of unmanifested subjectivity. Their words were perfect, their understanding perfect, their joy perfect. And yet as they spoke, both they and their words seemed to grow into ever greater glory. The city expanded, grew like the vines of some great plant.

“And then it was gone. I came to myself lying flat on my back. The man sat a little way off from me. He did not look at me at first as I stood up. He seemed to be lost in himself. When he did notice me, I saw that his eyes were full of tears. He smiled at me, and in that smile I saw bottomless sadness and hope. I stood and stumbled away.

“How I arrived back at my camp I do not know. I reflected for a long time on what I had seen. At first, I was still dazed. I had seen the depths of my inadequacy, the full majesty and terror of a reality reeling in the vagaries of its own ignorance. But as time passed, I began to understand more clearly. I began to see that I am unique, that I am chosen, and that I am to gather and lead a chosen people. I felt that this city, with its perfect words, was coming. That it had not been revealed to me on accident. That I was the one to bring it into reality.”

As one might imagine, the remainder of the text is largely egomaniacal. The man who wrote it became convinced that he was a kind of messiah, and he was able (for a time) to convince others of this. Whatever genuine truth may have been revealed to him, he used it as an excuse to aggrandize himself, and this led him and his followers to tragic ruin.

Nevertheless, I have come to believe this mysterious personage must have been Joshua. Whether his “revelation” contains truth, however, I am not prepared to speculate. It is a strange story, and perhaps one would be misguided to seek answers. What I cannot help wondering about, though, is why Joshua spoke at all. Why tell this stranger all that he knew? Why reveal this vision to a sham mystic? I cannot help but think that this was a moment of weakness, a moment of loneliness in which Joshua simply could not bear not to say what had filled him. Or perhaps he felt the the word had to be spoken, that doing so was somehow to give the root spoken of in the text’s vision another hold upon our times, another limb by which to weave all things into the pattern of that heavenly city. Such an interpretation, I must say, strikes me almost as superstitious. I have always thought of myself as avoiding such grand speculations, as eschewing the metaphysical. Nevertheless, in the deep hours of very still nights, I find myself believing it. In such moments, I can almost feel the root of that word reaching out to touch me, as if it were calling me to something new and greater.