When I was a boy, my mother read A Wrinkle in Time aloud to me before bed. At one point, the child protagonists travel across the galaxy through a fourth, novel dimension. I still vividly recall my bafflement when I tried to imagine which way they had gone. They hadn’t moved right or left? Up or down? Backwards or forwards? They had gone another direction?
*
In my early thirties, I smoked DMT for the first time. I had been hunting this drug for years, not proactively but in that passive, synchronicity-inviting way appropriate to a proper drug search. When at last I acquired the crumbly yellow freebase, I felt like a kid who couldn’t wait to open a Christmas present: in my room that evening—who cared that my roommates were all home, chatting in the kitchen—I scooped a tiny heap of the molecule atop my glass vaporizing pipe and positioned myself cross-legged on my bed.
I knew I was being hasty. Psychedelics are always better with preparation and intention. But it was just a teeny little hit. Teeny weeny.
Tao Lin observes how people describe the DMT breakthrough as “‘zooming through a tunnel’ or ‘being shot out of a cannon.’” They’re missing, he says, what’s truly strange about it. “What feels so incredible is that the ‘tunnel’ has no physical direction.”1
Yes.
As I held the vapor in my lungs, something novel happened. I found myself traveling, not spatially, but through another plane entirely, one that manifested as an intensification of being. I was moving in another direction.
*
In the three dimensions of space, we can move laterally, vertically, and longitudinally.
In the fourth dimension of time, we move forward.
In the fifth dimension, we move… into.
The depth dimension might also be called the dimension of presence, or beingness. It is nonspatial and nontemporal; this “into” is a metaphor the same way that moving “forward” in time is a metaphor. But we cannot talk about depth, we cannot imagine it, apart from borrowed images.
In itself, what is it?
*
In the year 1415, the artist Filippo Brunelleschi re-discovered “linear perspective”: a method by which two-dimensional images could be made to have three-dimensionality. The painting is still flat, but by an arrangement of converging lines this flatness opens, in a very real way, onto a direction that isn’t physically there.
*
The first time I tried to describe the depth dimension, I was writing to a depressed friend. This was many years ago. After offering some comforting words, no doubt gauche, I came to this:
There seem to be two axes along which our lives develop, the vertical and the horizontal. The horizontal axis of growth is the visible, public axis: the career, the relationships, the education, the linear accumulation of wealth, power, status.
The axis I find myself more interested in, and the one that seems to pay the most long-term dividends, is not the horizontal.
The vertical axis is private: it’s your inner life, the richness of your experiences, your pain, your longings. It’s the intensity with which you live these things within yourself. You could call it the depth dimension. It’s what inherently has no outward face.
*
The second time I tried to talk about the depth dimension was on ketamine.
It was a Friday night, and my friend and I were listening to an ambient playlist and shooting the shit. I was quite high. At one point, as I considered how similar my friend and I were—both writers, both tall white men, both laid-back but intellectual—I realized I’d lost the difference between us. Which one was I, J or Patrick? I startled giggling. Did it matter?
When were were coming down, my friend remarked on how he was obsessed with a certain bright star he could see out the window. It seemed to mean something, without quite revealing what it meant.
I told him my notion then—what I’d begun to think of as the depth dimension of life. I experienced it most acutely in psychedelic states, which often carry the symbolic density of a dream: a single word can become a hinge-point in your life, a star in the sky can shine like the eye of God. We see with a mode of perception open to the true semantic potency of reality, to the infinite resonances of beingness itself.
*
But that wasn’t quite it. Neither what I wrote to my depressed friend, nor what I said to this other one, feels like it.
It’s a private thing, this depth dimension. Resistant to words. Sometimes I feel that all I want to do is point to it, again and again—but how? How do you point to the end of your finger with the end of your finger?
Austin Osman Spare said that you could shout the Secret from the rooftops and it would still remain secret.
*
Haruki Murakimi, a Japanese author whose fiction has become a global phenomenon, once resembled one of his novel’s protagonists: a simple, unassuming bar tender and jazz enthusiast without any particular ambitions. Then one day in 1978, while attending a baseball game, he saw the batter slam a pitch into left field and the notion simply came to him.
The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.
I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now... All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.2
Murakami started writing that same night.
*
The depth dimension can suddenly flash out at you with an intensity that no chain of events can predict or explain. It comes entirely from its own direction, offering, in place of explanation, its own measure of meaning, a sui generis causality outside of material cause and effect. On the outside, it can look incomprehensible. Conversely, events may have great significance on the public, horizontal axis, but this simply isn’t correlated with their significance of the axis of depth.
What happened in that moment the bat connected with the ball? Why do some moments mean more than others? The answer can only be legible at the level of the depth dimension. Depth cannot be accounted for; it accounts for itself.
*
Sometimes I read a poem and the infinite opens up.
Look at that! and that!
Is all I can say of the blossoms
At Yoshino Mountain
—Teishitsu
Sometimes I read a poem, even that same poem, and it’s just words.
*
The loss of contact with the depth dimension is a silent and invisible catastrophe.
In Technic and Magic, the author Federico Campagna chronicles the systematic obfuscation of depth in the last two-thousand years. He calls it a “crisis of reality.” We live inside the cosmology of Technic—a reality-structuring principle, a kind of archetype of archetypes. Under its rule, existence flattens into a system of operations. All phenomena are defined and categorized according to metrics of value and nothing is allowed to simply be. Not even individual subjectivity.
“We used to colonize land,” says Bo Burnham, paraphrasing Douglas Rushkoff. “Then they realized: human attention. They are now trying to colonize every minute of your life.”3
*
In undergrad, I had a philosophy professor I admired who once said, “I don’t want a happy life. I want a meaningful life.” This became my motto for years. Give me a meaningful life. Give me striving, give me purpose. But I think now that meaning isn’t it, either. Meaning is horribly cheap. It’s everywhere, hypertrophying like cancer, disposable like paper towel. And it’s weaponizable. It can be colonized.
What I want isn’t meaning. It’s intimacy. It’s intensity. It’s reality in its fullness.
I want to be in things. Truly in them.
Deep, deep inside.
*
Digging into the apple
with my thumbs.
Scraping out the clogged nails
and digging deeper.
Refusing the moon color.
Refusing the smell and memories.
Digging in with the sweet juice
running along my hands unpleasantly.
Refusing the sweetness.
Turning my hands to gouge out chunks.
Feeling the juice sticky
on my wrists. The skin itching.
Getting to the wooden part.
Getting to the seeds.
Going on.
Not taking anyone’s word for it.
Getting beyond the seeds.
—Jack Gilbert
*
If depth offers a “direction,” then how do we move into it? Is there really an “into?”
The first time I ever used psilocybin mushrooms ceremonially was with an elderly chain-smoking man I’d met a few weeks before in Brooklyn. We took the mushrooms in a motel on Long Island, at night, with flickering candles and yoga mats and eye masks.
Some ways into the journey, I became distracted by the sounds of the neighbors smoking and chatting outside our room. My companion came over and put a gentle hand on my chest. “Patrick,” he said, “close your eyes and go inside.” I tried. I closed my eyes and searched for my inside. But my attention kept moving to the people I loved, my parents and brothers, my friends. I was composed of a web of relationships that had no beginning or end. “Go inside,” he encouraged, “go inside.” But all I could do was laugh and cry out: “I have no inside!”
*
In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard expounds on the power of “images”, which are both “outside” and “inside” us.
“Imaginative contact with the outer world,” he says, “renews our inner being. To imagine going down into the water or wandering in the desert is to change space; and to change space is to change being. To dream otherwise—even if it is for the moment of a reverie or poem—is to exist otherwise.”
Depth is not located “inside” you. Inward is not an escape from the outward. The farther you go, the more the private opens into the common—the archetypes, the aches.
Depth is convergence.
Depth is Brunelleschi’s lines.
*
Appropriate verbs for journeying into depth: slowing down, listening, growing intimate.
*
And how deep can we journey? “Infundibular” is the word John Crowley uses in Little, Big to describe a space that enlarges the further in you get. “Each perimeter of this series of concentricities encloses a larger world within, until, at the center point, it is infinite.”
*
When I was eighteen, I worked at a care institution for adults with what we called “intellectual disabilities.” Sometimes we took the residents on tractor rides along the road that wrapped around the institution. In the heat of summer, amid the whir of insects and the hiss of the tall prairie grasses, it was always a dozy half-hour.
I still remember one ride in particular. I was driving, looking lazily around at the usual sights: the cracked concrete road, the wide field and stubby polar trees and colossal blue sky. And suddenly it hit me: all this, all of it, came from nothing. I had had this thought before, but the thought seemed to me in that moment incapable of ever growing old—and that was what astonished me. Wonder was inexhaustible. It had infinite depth.
A bird flew in front of me; the trees rattled their leaves. These things might grow old, but wonder itself did not.
*
When our anemic modern souls feel restless, depth is the direction they yearn to stretch into. When we sense there must be more than mere atoms bouncing against each other within an infinite Newtonian grid, this is the direction we direct our longings toward. It is the direction hidden everywhere and nowhere. Invisible and untouchable, it cannot be blocked or covered over. It is the secret way through the back tunnels of matter. If the divine is ever to approach us, this is the direction it will use.
https://granta.com/my-spiritual-evolution/
https://lithub.com/haruki-murakami-the-moment-i-became-a-novelist/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUTbnjlHfkg
Love this - Fun perspective