Crossing Over 1984

    Crossing over required me to admit my insanity.  I used to sit in the cabin on Route 1 and stare out at the Pacific, afraid that I was raving.  I’d contemplate the possibility nervously that I was going through a breakdown; that in fact, I was mentally unhinged.  Insanity is a permanent condition, like hazel eyes or white skin, isn’t it?  Am I crazy?  Doesn’t anyone else think like this?

    I sit and stare out at the sea gulls rocking in the air over the waves rocking over the body of the sea, mindlessly yielding in the endless dance.

    The points of most excruciating tension in my life were when I was resisting the plain facts of my insanity.  First, I just didn’t suspect.  I was just fine, thank you.  Cynical, sad, stressed, jaded, unbelievably naive...but just fine.  No relationship.   Daily facing the brick wall of the paradox of living at all; but insane?

    Then I became suspicious.  The world was definitely insane, and I was its prisoner, trapped inside a human body.  Life and death are just too weighty and paradoxical to consider deeply without going crazy.  You either go rocking insane or you deny the whole thing and just get busy.  Or you confess to God.

    I almost let go; almost yielded myself to the mindless dance of the grass and the sound of the water lapping the earth and the wind rocking the body of the water...But then I shook it off and fought and scrabbled my way back to coherence, and from there I furtively slunk back to rationality, such as it was.  Even the most exotic philosophy of man cannot touch the yielding of nature toward God.  What a terrible price we pay for being human and not just creature.  We gain knowledge of life and death, good and evil, and although we can contemplate it where the creature can only yield, unless we confess to God, we go insane, one way or the other.  We are crazy and frail.

    God gave them permission to eat of any tree in the garden; God excepted only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  And of course, this is the apple that they ate.  If they had chosen the Tree of Life and scorned the Tree of Knowledge, I would not be insane.  I would live forever.  But instead, they chose the Tree of Knowledge, and so I am crazy.  Then God in his mercy forbade the Tree of Life, knowing that insanity would be relieved by its own death.