On renewing ecstasy

[bibliogramma]

Unquenchable Fire, by Rachel Pollack

Jennifer Mazdan lives in Poughkeepsie, in the house that she and her husband bought before their marriage fell apart. She has a decent job, working for the Mid-Hudson Energy Board as a server. She enjoys her job, tending to the guardian totems who watch over all the various parts of the county energy supply grid, washing them with sanctified cleaning fluid and performing the proper rituals as she re-aligns them so that they always face toward the sun. She once wanted to be a Picture Teller – one of the Living Masters who has the ability to tell the great sacred stories in such a way that they come alive with meaning – but instead, she dropped out of college, got married, and moved with her husband to a respectable suburban hive development.

But on the 87th anniversary of the Revolution, during the annual celebration of the Day of Truth, the most important Recital Day of the year, as the great Teller Allan Lightstorm recites The Place Inside, one of the most difficult Pictures, first told by the Founder LI KU Unquenchable Fire, Jennifer Mazdan’s life is changed forever.

For one thing, she misses the recital. Just as she’s about to get into her car and head to the Recital Mount, she falls into a sudden sleep. And while Allan Lightstorm tells the Picture, Jennifer has a dream that is unlike any dream that anyone has ever reported to the National Oneiric Registration Agency. And although she doesn’t realise it until some time later, Jennifer Mazdan conceives a child, who will bring a new vision of divinity to the world.

Rachel Pollack said of her book Unquenchable Fire, in a 1994 interview, that:

I've been interested in tribal religion and shamanism and prehistoric religion for a long time. But I'd see books about aboriginal people set in the Australian outback written by somebody who lived in L.A., who not only had never been to Australia but had no contact of any kind with aboriginal people.

So for Unquenchable Fire, I thought, what would happen if that stuff was on the streets of Poughkeepsie, and nothing else changed? America was totally into shamanism and story-telling, but was still America. So I had tremendous fun transplanting bizarre rituals from all over the world onto mainstreet. And I would say, how would these people act that if they were total literalists, if they believed everything was real? So none of it is intellectualized.

This is a picture of a society in which the power of ritual, of story, of symbolic meaning, has taken the place of science and materialism. In addition to the story of Jennifer and the people in her life, the book is full of retellings and reshapings of the divine stories and rituals of many different peoples, sometimes recast into modern times, sometimes told in the timeless landscape of myth and dream. This too is part of the incredible wealth of this book.

But it is also much more than these thingst. It is itself a Picture, a teaching tale, and its inner meaning is that Truth must keep changing, growing, always being renewed and reinterpreted for a new generation.

Jennifer lives in a world that many of us would call a world of magic, of wonder, where strange and astonishing things can happen and great truths are constantly being revealed. But most of the people who live in Jennifer’s world have come to take all this for granted. They follow the external rituals without making the internal emotional and spiritual commitment. A generation in Jennifer’s past, the Revolution shook the world and made everything new and fresh and full of meaning, but in the decades since then, form has driven out substance, and the raging fires of the soul have been codified and bureaucratised. Jennifer is the channel through which will come a new revolution that will shake world and its truths again.

What’s also quite remarkable about this story is that it tells the story of the coming of a messiah from the perspective of the woman who is the gateway between the divine and the world – and who isn’t exactly pleased to find herself and her body taken over by Divine Agency. In this sense, it’s the story of every person who has ever been called upon to transcend the ordinary and commit blood, sweat, tears, even life, for the exceptional. It’s the story of Jesus in Gethsemane, of the artist driven to speak what lies within no matter what, of the martyr, the sacrifice, the Dying King, of anyone who asks “why does it have to be me?” – and does it anyway, because there is no other way to act. This is the unquenchable fire, the ecstasy, the “being out of place” that saints and mystics model for us. It can be hidden, for a while, but it cannot be destroyed.