Chapter One

"Sanctity and insanity lie close at bay."

That line haunted him for thirty-five years.  For thirty-five years it rolled around in his head.  For thirty-five years it rolled around in his soul.   It was under his nails, it was mingled into his earwax, it gave off a faint aroma in the lingering scent of his breath.

It finally came out ­onto the page - thirty-five years after it first came up inside of him.  Thirty-five years after it had taken birth in him, it took birth outside of him.

His name was John Aaron Tierney.  The line came out onto paper one foggy, fall day after he strolled along the river.

The day was cool and damp and the smell of autumn-wet leaves was in the top of his nose, circulating around and around and around, just like the line itself.

It was odd how the line had stayed with him for all of those years.  It was as if the line had the patience to wait until Tierney not only understood the line itself more fully, but until he had lived through certain events and certain ideas; passageways into deeper things than the eye could see.  It was strange.  It was if it had a sense to know better.                                                     

The worlds had come together for him in a fashion he had known they would; in a way that bore the fruit of anguish and suffering.   It was the anguish and suffering of making two ideas become one; of smelting and blending, of refining and merging.   They came together to allow his line to come out and onto the page.  They came together in a way that would give birth not only to the line, but also to the lived meaning of the line.

It is like when you have a dream.  A dream that is very vivid.  And then, maybe a few days, or a week after the dream, one of the elements or images from the dream itself    happens to show itself in your wakeful existence.  You see the dream thing while awake.  And, the vividness of it is only heightened by your recognizing where it is you saw this thing last.  Asking, how can this be?

It was like that with this line and how it grew in him.
                                                                                                

It takes so much to allow a small speck of growth to emerge and become real.  So much purpose goes into so little movement forward.  So much energy in recognizing what has come forth and from where.

Not only did the word come out of him and onto the page, but it also came alive in him, as well.  Through the thirty-five years he learned the full meaning of sanctity and insanity, not only in thought, but also in act, also in feeling.

The world around him and the world within him had to blend themselves.  The world inside of the line and the world outside of the line also had to blend themselves.  And then, all four worlds had to blend until they merged and the idea took root in the reality of his thinking, perceiving, feeling, and acting.  Magic had occurred to make a line merge with life itself; a sentence to become flesh.  The Golem was given life, and Tierney was set free.

This sort of magic happens every time two people are able to communicate.  It also happens when one person is able to envelop and espouse a new idea and consequently a new way of being in the presence of and because of the new idea.  The world starts to line itself up behind the changes and take some sort of gradual re-arrangement based on the change.

This change happens when we say, "I love you."   The words themselves start an inner realignment in a person.  Because someone is told they are loved, a new way of thinking about themselves begins to take place.  One that changes everything.

When the love deepens in meaning and expression and a sense of self-sacrifice emerges from the love, then it changes yet again.  Each time realigning life to accomodate this new way it has to be in the world. For what is being done is a transformation.  Love transforms us.  Later when we add the sacrificial nature to love, a new realignment occurs.  This one based on substitution: "my life for yours." 

One thing is always able to change another.  The beginning of that change may not portend that it will cascade into affecting everything, but it does.  Any two things able to join up and link – able to give and receive – is really the same thing.  It starts as a simple change because of its presence ("I love you" changes us).  It then changes again as the presence of this first thing deepens (“My Life For Yours” also changes us).

"I love you", and "my life for yours" have been talismans of stability and growth in most cultures around the globe.  It is from these seed ideas that the "golden rules" of many a people have been smelted. It is really the development of the idea that I belong to a larger community.

This modicum of the ages applied to axons and dendrites as readily as it did to master and disciple, lover and beloved, I and Thou.  It is the testing and purifying of things under the fire.  Put two things next to one another - together - and one changes the other.  And, so on.

New things emerging and old things being transformed; that was the core of alchemy and that was exactly what was at the core of Tierney's message.  It was also the core of the very cells Tierney had no idea about; that lived in the deep recesses of his spleen, and his humor, and his ire.  In the catacombs of the nebulae of his brain and in the synapses of the Milky Way.   Everything in and around him was boiling toward purification and merger.

This notion of the worlds blending to produce a new form of life was exactly what alchemy was all about.  Alchemy was exactly what Tierney was all about.  Tierney's obsession with alchemy was a groping to describe all of life in words — his life in a phrase.  In that one line that became his (one fine day), his life appeared on paper (one fine day).  His ten dimensional insides fell onto the page (in ink) one afternoon.

He knew he could write about it; he could write about the process of alchemical transmutation because of the movement and shift on the inside.  It took a long time to sit with these notions until they settled themselves into a place and then spoke — with their own voice — with one voice, from that place.  It would really write itself.   It spoke itself in his life through meaning and adventure; knowledge and lived experience.   It just took some time.

It proved itself as a theorem.  One thing changed another until it took over so much inner surface area, it forced itself out of Tierney.

It was time.  He picked up his pen.



by, N. Thomas Johnson-Medland   © 2015 All Rights Reserved