Every now and again life sends us little messages. The messages are meant for us alone. No one else can see them. No one else perceives them as messages. They may seem perfectly banal to the world, but to you, for whom they were intended, they have the force of revelation. Much of the failure and success of a life, much of the joy or suffering in a life, depends on being able to see these secret messages. And much of the magic, or tragedy of life depends on being able to decipher and interpret these messages. Those who spend their lives over-deciphering tend to go mad, they go round the bend, they become paranoid; and every billboard and scrap of paper which the wind blows their way, or every other image or word called out on a television screen becomes a message of overwhelming importance to them. Then the messages drive out living, drive out life. But those who live their lives without seeing the messages at all, or seeing them but not deciphering them, or not interpreting them properly, live dumb lives, perpetually adrift on the barren seas of mediocrity and insignificance, the deadly boring wastes of orthodoxy. In short, they have no dialogue with the universe or with themselves.
There is nothing more scary than when a cynic starts to prophesy. Nothing more hair-raising than when the blind can see. This world is upside-down, inside-out, my friend. What is real is unreal, what’s unreal is real. Sometimes my mind scares me. Sometimes one gets a notion about the world that’s too great to think through. For, sometimes, messages come from behind the veil of living. Sometimes an inscription appears in the quotidian which is an important road sign in your life. They appear right there in the midst of the most ordinary moments. Don’t ask me where the messages come from. Don’t ask me where the inscriptions come from. Maybe we just see them because they are right for us. Maybe we see them because we need to, because we’ve been too blind to what life is trying to tell us. How the hell should I know. Belshazzar saw his in the midst of a splendid feast. A hand inscribed his message on a wall. Other people have seen signs in altered states, and read the wrong inscriptions, or didn’t interpret them right. They come in a thousand ways. They come in daily life, in as many forms as there are ways of reading the world. They take the form of symbols, of words, of something heard, or whispered in one’s head. They are blown over by the wind. They appear in the sky, or stand out suddenly in a book one is reading, or a painting one is staring at absent-mindedly, or a piece of music not listened to but heard in a mysterious new way. They are there and then they are gone. Like a flash of lightning not seen but sensed. Something made clear. Then made dark again. Some people say that the universe is a constant message to us anyway, a message of startling simplicity. The simplicity of the greatest riddle or paradox. I don’t know about all that. Too deep for me, I think. All I can say for sure is that there is a mysterious veil that separates the living from the others. And this veil is made of perception. And don’t ask me who the others are. They may be the dead. Except that the dead are not dead: they are just not alive in bodies. They may be angels, guardian angels, sinners and cynics that we are. They may be one’s potent and powerful ancestors, shaking their heads in sadness at the enormous blunders we are making in our lives. They may be illumined beings. Who can say yeah or nay? They may sometimes even be demons, messengers of the devil, who uses as many tricks to get to us as there are devices to save us. All I know is that there is a veil, and messages are projected through this veil. Inscriptions appear on the fabric of the world. We live in an unreality. We live in a celluloid universe. We live in a world quivering with illusion. Most of what we see just isn’t there. Most of the things we feel and touch aren’t there the way we think they are. Most of what is there we don’t see. Most of the things that touch us don’t feel. There may be things more real than us behind the invisible veil of reality. And our world, as on a cinema screen, can be one in which messages are flashed, projected. Maybe we flash the messages, maybe we project them. But their meaning is left for us to decipher. This is true too of dreams, the cinema of the universal interior, the celluloid of sleep. But I’m not talking about that right now. I’m talking about the little secret messages that life sends us, sends to us alone.
That day, with the dreadful crew gathered in that appalling suburban flat (of which the owner was inordinately proud), I received one of those messages. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know who passed it to me. Everyone there absolutely denied having had anything to do with it. But it appeared in my palm, while I was raging against the camera. The message was typed on a piece of red paper. And it read: Beware the inscription.