Christians are wowed by people walking on water or changing water into wine or arising from the dead. At Halloween, witches ride on broomsticks. On TV, there seems to be an endless appetite for zombies on a series called "The Walking Dead" -- a comic-book-based serial in which the living battle against the voracious and well-made-up sort-of-dead.
And juvenile portrayals in other venues do not excuse the well-educated from a flirtation with the weird ... a magnetized/horrified/dip-your-toe-in-the-water sniffing around the edges of what breaks boundaries. The boundaries may be more ornate, but boundaries are boundaries.
Weird shit is here to stay ... for exactly as long as the empirically-useful boundaries persist. It's not that boundaries are somehow bad or less-worthy, but a gentler approach, a less insistent approach, is probably a good idea.
In what was probably the ballsy-est movie I ever saw, director Peter Weir took the weird bull by the horns in "The Last Wave," a 1977 celluloid tale about an Australian lawyer whose well-bounded life is discombobulated when he takes on the case of several aborigines accused in a murder. In the opening scene, Weir goes straight for the weird throat: Above a dusty landscape, the sky is utterly and cloudlessly blue. The camera pans to a somewhat dilapidated school house where children are playing. Quietly, at first, there is the sound of thunder. The thunder builds in the cloudless sky. And then it begins to hail. The hail is no joke ... children are being wounded; they are bleeding. Everyone rushes into the school house to be safe.
And it is from that point that the movie inches bit by bit into the aboriginal (or whatever the p.c. designation is these days) world of "dream time" and the apocalyptic vision it includes. Written on paper, "The Last Wave" sounds hardly better than "The Walking Dead," but in my eye, Weir's attempt was nothing short of miraculous ... not perfect, but probably as close as any person could come to depicting the life of the spirit and the world of the weird. In his later, more popular movies, Weir drifted away from his go-for-the-throat mode. A man's gotta eat. But I honor his early courage and (in a sense) failure ... the trouble with the weird is that it's not really all that weird.
Movies and TV serials and much-appreciated religions may bring a certain elevated quality to the weird. This is stuff that is bigger than the individual whose life and boundaries seem more mundane and less worthy of note. No one ever made a movie or wrote a Bible about Aunt Ginger or Uncle Sal. And yet my vote says that all the Aunt Ginger's and Uncle Sal's, all the you's and me's, confront or are wowed by similar bits of weird, similar strainings at the bonds of boundary.
Last night, I found myself rewriting a true story that lingers in my memory as what I then thought of as deliciously weird ... an advisory, like all weird stuff ... something that beckoned. I'm too lazy to write it again today, so here's a cut-and-paste from the Buddhist bulletin board I wrote it on:
In the late 1970's, I supported my somewhat over-enthusiastic interest in Zen practice by painting apartments in New York City. One of my rules in painting was always to be on time and so, one sunny, pleasant morning, I found myself lounging against the building in which I would shortly be working. It was perhaps 7:45 and work began at 8.
I was enjoying watching New Yorkers as they hurried to catch the subway or bus when, to my left-rear, I became aware of a man coming out of an alleyway. He seemed to be in his late 40's or early 50's and he was dressed in a grubby tweed coat more suitable for winter use. In the instant-conclusion exercise that the mind is capable of, I guessed that he had slept in the coat the night before.
Suddenly I became aware that this man was advancing on me. As he came closer, I could see he needed both a bath and a shave. He stopped about two feet in front of me... or perhaps closer ... he was inside "my space," a telltale bit of evidence that suggested mental instability. I could not back up. He looked at me for a moment and then in a very strong and very clear and very earnest tone of voice, he began to speak. He was quite serious.
The problem was that I could not understand a single word he said. He was speaking a language I had never heard. He went on and on. As someone interested in language and conversant, if not fluent, in many, my mind raced around trying to get a handle on his language. It wasn't Latin-based; wasn't Arabic; seemed not to partake of African roots; didn't feel Greek ... I was really, really stymied. I really tried ... and failed.
When, at last, the man stopped talking, I said to him in English, "I'm sorry. I didn't understand what you said." At which point, he began all over again, speaking in the language I didn't know. It did not occur to me that since he seemed to have understood my English, he was either pulling my leg or a simple nut case. When he stopped again, I repeated that I didn't understand. And he began again ... only this time, when he was only a little into his earnest harangue, he stopped abruptly.
"Close your eyes," he said in perfectly clear, calm English. And before my lids had shut, I could see his grubby index finger ascending towards my face. I stood very still as, with an infinite gentleness, he removed a bit of sleepy mucous from the nose-side of my left eyelid.
When I felt his hand retreat, I opened my eyes again.
He smiled.
And walked away.
Is the weird really weird? Of course it is ... let's not play the placid and precious game. The boundaries are still boundaries, no matter how serene anyone might pretend they were. The tighter you hold, the weirder it gets. But does the dance need to be other than light and easy?
Boundaries take what is weird in its arms. What is weird takes boundaries in its arms. The lovers smile and, because the music is so enfolding,
They dance.
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