DeConick A.D

194
GNOSTIC ALTERED STATES
Inside the tank, Eddie quickly loses his physical form in a rising tide of
water, morphing into a molten white creature and then exploding into
space as blinding light and agonizing sound. It is a moment when Eddie
begins to fall into the black void of unconsciousness and nothingness.
Emily scrambles around, terrified, as she watches her husband disintegrate.
So she does the only thing she knows to do: she reaches out for
him through the whirling vortex of space and time, calling out his name.
“Eddie!” she screams, pulling him back to consciousness and bodily form.
She clutches him, warding off the horror of human origins.
Emily is terrified. She knows that nothing about the human condition
was ever real to Eddie, especially her love for him. Reality for him consisted
of what is changeless, immutable, constant, and that reality is what
Eddie experienced in the tank. In the tank, he had made love to God,
embraced the Absolute, been ravished by Truth. And what had it done?
Nearly destroyed him.
When Eddie regains consciousness, he is as terrified as Emily. He tells
her that in the tank he experienced the ultimate moment of terror that is
the beginning of life and the cause of all human misery. “It’s insufferable!”
he yells. “It is nothing, simple, hideous, nothing!” The truth is that nothing
exists at the beginning and end of the line.
Through this traumatic experience, Eddie finally realizes the meaning
of life. He comes to understand that the only thing that is real, beyond
the primal terror of the self, is the love we share with each other. Eddie
tells Emily that she is what saved him, what redeemed him from the pit.
The only thing keeping that moment of primal terror, that original horror,
from devouring him again is Emily—their shared primal trauma and
their shared human love.
In the final, climactic scene, they embrace as if they were the first humans,
Adam and Eve, naked body against naked body. Eddie looks at her
and says what we thought he would never be able to say: “I love you,
Emily.”