There is a Secret World Concealed Within this
One.
The lives we lead, and the lives we wish we
led.
This world, the so-called "real world," is just a front. Pull
back the curtain and you'll see the libraries are all filled with runaways
writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, all the
receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to
show how alive they still are. . . and all that talk of practicality and
responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our
hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us.
You can taste it in
the shock and roar of a first, unexpected kiss, or in the blood in your mouth
that instant after an accident when you realize you're still alive. It blows in
the wind you feel on the rooftops of a really reckless night of adventure. You
hear it in the magic of your favorite songs, how they lift and transport you in
ways that no science or psychology could ever account for. It might be you've
seen evidence of it scratched into bathroom walls in a code without a key, or
you've been able to make out a pale reflection of it in the movies they make to
keep us entertained. It's in between the words when we speak of our desires and
aspirations, still lurking somewhere beneath the limitations of being
"practical" and "realistic."
When poets and radicals stay up until
sunrise, wracking their brains for the perfect sequence of words or deeds to
fill hearts (or cities) with fire, they're trying to find a hidden entrance to
it. When children escape out the window to go wandering late at night, or
freedom fighters search for a weakness in government fortifications, they're
trying to sneak into it-for they know better than us where the doors are hidden.
When teenagers vandalize a billboard to provoke all-night chases with the
police, or anarchists interrupt an orderly demonstration to smash the windows of
a corporate chain store, they're trying to storm its gates.
When you're
making love and you discover a new sensation or region of your lover's body, and
the two of you feel like explorers discovering a new part of the world on a par
with a desert oasis or the coast of an unknown continent, as if you are the
first ones to reach the north pole or the moon, you are charting its
frontiers.
It's not a safer place than this one-on the contrary, it is
the sensation of danger there that brings us back to life: the feeling that for
once, for one moment that seems to eclipse the past and future, there is
something real at stake.
Maybe you stumbled into it by accident, once,
amazed at what you found. The old world splintered behind and inside you, and no
physician or metaphysician could put it back together again. Everything before
became trivial, irrelevant, ridiculous as the horizons suddenly telescoped out
around you and undreamt-of new paths offered themselves. And perhaps you swore
that you would never return, that you would live out the rest of your life
electrified by that urgency, in the thrill of discovery and transformation-but
return you did.
Common sense dictates that this world can only be
experienced temporarily, that it is just the shock of transition, and no more;
but the myths we share around our fires tell a different story: we hear of women
and men who stayed there for weeks, years, who never returned, who lived and
died there as heroes. We know, because we feel it in that atavistic chamber of
our hearts that holds the memory of freedom from a time before time, that this
secret world is near, waiting for us. You can see it in the flash in our eyes,
in the abandon of our dances and love affairs, in the protest or party that gets
out of hand.
You're not the only one trying to find it. We're out here,
too . . . some of us are even waiting there for you. And you should know that
anything you've ever done or considered doing to get there is not crazy, but
beautiful, noble, necessary.
Revolution is simply the idea we could enter
that secret world and never return; or, better, that we could burn away this
one, to reveal the one beneath entirely.