The Plan

– I have a plan, and I think if I follow it I will reach enlightenment.

– Hm, okay. Well, what’s your plan?

– I have a plan, and it is this: I will crawl into a cave.

            Well, okay, first I have to find the cave, and of course I will spend a period of time (not too long, one week at most) wandering in the mountains looking for a cave to crawl into. Then, once a cave is found, once the cave is found, I will crawl into it. It will be dark, dark, for the entrance to the cave will be only as big as the widest part of my body, and it will face the north so that no light shines directly into it. So into the cave I will crawl, and even though the entrance is small, it will really be quite spacious inside. I will spend a good amount of time wallowing in this darkness (for wallowing is a healthy thing in small amounts), wallowing in this coldness and wetness (for, like all caves, it will be cold and wet as well as dark). I will deny myself food and I will drink only what I can lap up from the tiny stream of water pouring across the floor of the cave. Likely it will be quite painful, but I will afford myself two luxuries: I will be able to dance, for the cave will be spacious and after a couple of days of bleeding my feet will be calloused enough to prance and frolic around the cave for hours, swinging around the stalactites and the stalagmites and jumping as high as my weakened body will allow; I will also be able to sing, and I will sound better than I do when I sing now, for the echoes and reverberation in the open cave will fill the space with a thick, rich, colorful reflection of my voice. My time will be occupied by singing and dancing and painful wallowing (mostly the latter). Then, in an epiphanic moment of dancing and singing (the only two luxuries I will afford myself), I will realize the folly of wallowing in the darkness and crawl out of the cave. It will be sunny on the day this happens, and snow will be on the ground so that as I come out from the darkness I will be blinded by the light all around me shooting into my eyes. But because my epiphanic moment will be ongoing, I will not be afraid of this blindness. I will seek refuge in the shade of a grove of pines that will be nearby (which I will name Ananias), and in a few days something like scales will fall from my eyes and my sight will return to me. I will decide that although dancing and singing are great features of the dark cold wet cave, it is unreasonable to live as an ascetic. Therefore, I will begin gathering food and supplies to make a fire. Once these are gathered (enough to cook two or three hearty meals), I will crawl back into the cave with them. In the cave, I will build the fire and, famished, cook my food quickly, a little too quickly (it will be a little bit burnt), and devour it like an animal. Once I have eaten and am full, I will see that the way the flames dance on the walls of the cave is beautiful, and I will see further that there are paintings on every wall of the cave, breathtaking paintings of prehistoric mammals and of the primitive horde. I will reflect on the ancientness of these paintings, how they are older than Rome, older than Greece, older even than Sumer, which I’ve been told is the oldest civilization we know of, then I will cry for three days. I will stoke the fire so I can learn the paintings, absorb them, experience them fully with my whole self. I will eat and I will drink and I will sleep and I will cry. Then, I will wander outside of the cave looking for some pigment, something to paint with. I will find red berries and remember the charcoal from the fire, I will crush them and mix them with water to make paints. First I will think about practicing my painting on chunks of wood, for I have never studied painting and I think that my best, most practiced artistry is deserved by the prehistoric painters to whom I will speak through my paintings, continuing the oldest discourse on all the earth. But then I will consider how the rawness of my unrefined painting should be a part of the thing I create, that the practice of art is a part of the art itself. And I will then begin painting. Above, below, all around, I will put my images next to their images and I will cry for ten days as I do this. I do not claim to know what I will paint, for I will be moved by the moment and in a fleeting reverie make my unplanned strokes. When I am finished, I will spend three days seeing the flames flicker on the paintings, the old and the new, all outside of time. I will see that it is beautiful and climb out of the cave. This will be on the fortieth day. Having reached enlightenment, I will return to civilization with a new heart and live in a way those prehistoric painters, my comrades and collaborators, would have seen as wholesome.

– How can you be so sure you won’t just find an ordinary cave, wallow for a couple days, and then run back to the comfort of the city?