Bob Ellal

The thick glass of the big window warps the appearance of the night sky, making the visible universe look curved and three-dimensional instead of flat. From my hospital bed I witness the drama unfold: Orion the Hunter clubs Taurus the Bull, Hercules squashes the head of Draco the Dragon, Hydra the Serpent encircles the night sky, poised to strike.

Diffidently, beneath Hercules, the constellation of Asclepius, the god of physicians, hovers over the horizon with a snake in either hand. It’s odd: A healer can hold vipers and transform their venom into medicine. A hero can only kill them.

A thousand years ago the sky looked much the same to shamans muttering incantations, witches casting spells and priests reciting prayers. The ancients offered these precise groupings of words to the god or gods who made the constellations, attempting to influence the workings of the natural world. Absurd! To believe that science’s laws can be altered by a collection of sounds!

The idea seems ridiculous until you pick up a book of physics and read that all matter—stars, planets, trees, plants, rocks, human beings—is composed of bands of energy vibrating at different frequencies. In short, human beings, you and I—the apogee of conscious life on earth—fundamentally are an incredibly sophisticated system of grunts and groans.

So if Einstein and the physicists are right, and matter is essentially energy materialized, and energy is essentially vibration, why isn’t there a magic incantation that will reverberate in my mind to cure me? Maybe the ancients weren’t so far off. Intuitively, they felt that prayers, spells, and wishes—vibrations of energy guided by intent—could influence the health of human beings.

The doctors and nurses tell me that halfway through a bone-marrow transplant is the wrong time to ponder my place in the cosmos. Instead of contemplating my destiny, I should be reading comic books or watching The Three Stooges.

Laughing is good. Distracting oneself works briefly in the waking hours. Hemingway wrote that it’s easy to be hard-boiled during the day, but at night it’s harder. He was right: Who can view the constellations and not allow the creeping murmur of doubt and awe to penetrate…

Look at the crisp, magnificent order—no wonder the ancients thought these pictures in the sky were arranged to honor dead heroes. Of course, the scientists say it’s all a cosmic accident. Apparently eons ago the universe began from a single, incredibly dense point that for some reason exploded. As a result of this ‘big bang’ all matter is randomly drifting outward from this initial explosion: The apparent order of the night sky is not order but chaos.

At some point in time, they say, the process will reverse. Everything will be sucked back until the ultimate collision of matter, energy, time and space collapses once again into a tiny point. In essence, it’s a giant exhale and a huge inhale—a cosmic meditation.

The Big Bang theory is not airtight. It seems that the matter and energy released from the initial explosion of the tiny point should have distributed itself uniformly to create the Universe. When we look at the night sky we should see a mosaic of points of light perfectly and evenly spaced, not odd clusters and constellations.

But the proponents of the theory explain this unexpected phenomenon—though the explanation raises another problem. According to their calculations, ninety percent of the matter released by the Big Bang is missing. The scientists refer to this ninety percent as ‘dark matter.’

We cannot see or detect this dark matter with any known measuring device. Yet apparently this substance permeates the universe. It acts as invisible barriers or roadblocks to deflect the stars into constellations and the planets into solar systems. This dark substance also allows lumps of protoplasm, bubbling in primordial soup, to evolve into college professors and porn film stars. Dark matter is the form and mold of everything.

Scientists scoff at people who believe that God created the universe. How, why, where did God come from? They ask derisively. Yet they’ll have us believe that the Universe arose from a tiny dense point. How, why, where did this point come from? That’s my equally derisive question.

Perhaps it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. All I know is that in the middle of the night when the fear and anxiety constrict my chest like a monster’s claw I call out for help.

I do not call out for help to the mindless energy behind the Big Bang theory or the swirling gases of the Crab Nebula. I do not call out to mankind’s simian-like predecessors: Oh, help me Australopithicus and Java Man!

I don’t even summon the memory of my long-dead warrior ancestors for inspiration. In the loneliness after midnight, Beowulf does me no good.

Fellow warriors: Life is the brief flight of a sparrow. The bird bursts through a breach in the wattle into the smoky warmth and firelight of the great mead hall. It flutters maniacally back and forth for a few moments then, unwittingly, passes through another breach in the walls into the northern winter’s night. The sparrow freezes and dies, anonymously and without purpose, a tiny, feathered corpse mummified on the surface of the permafrost.

Sorry, Beowulf, but a dead bird does me no good at two AM, isolated in a bone-marrow room. If matter and energy are interchangeable expressions of the Universe’s composition, even the fall of a sparrow has special providence. The energy that animated the bird continues. Somewhere.

At two in the morning, pumped full of chemotherapy drugs, as I ponder the meaning of life the words escape from this agnostic’s mouth: God help me. A mute audience of medical monitors, IV poles, plastic tubing and the portable commode offers no comment.

I say it again and wonder what I mean. Perhaps a process of elimination is the way. What don’t I mean?

God can’t be a body-builder with a long white spinach-chin fingering life into Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

God can’t be a monster-teated Fertility Goddess, a swollen earth mother who demands incense smoke and ritual screwing to guarantee rain and hence an impressive crop yield.

God can’t be a Great Architect, a technocrat/engineer who operates the universe like a great machine: Let’s pull this lever, send Corporate Bob and his great-grandfather Job some shit and see if they crack under the pressure.

All religions perpetuate these surface manifestations of God so the majority of people who are struggling in the material world have a frame of reference. Light a candle, fondle a statue, kiss a stone and your prayers will be answered…and be sure to drop a twenty in the collection basket!

At the same time, all the great religions recognize that to arrive somewhere near God, meditation or deep, prolonged prayer is the only way. Focus on the Void, repeat a mantra until it is no longer a word, whisper a prayer for every bead until words make no sense to the conscious mind.

Apparently Heaven’s doors are designed to swing from the inside out. Good, then it is within me to find it. But here? In an isolation room? Can this really be my heaven? One long, measured breath in, one breath out, slow exhalation. For the space of a breath I forget myself, my situation, my location in time and space. Compressed into one instant is my Big Bang: a pulse, then a lack of a pulse, all matter, time, space and consciousness flinging itself outward, condensing back into a tiny point. For once I’m on the same page with the universe. Heaven, one breath at a time.

I breathe again, awareness returns, and the tiny point expands to form me. Despairingly I gaze again at the night sky. You’ve clubbed the beast, says Orion. You’ve squashed the cancer like a salamander, says Hercules. You have held serpents in your hands and survived, says Asclepius. You deserve a place in the sky with the rest of the heroes and snakes, says Hydra.

Imagine: Me, Corporate Bob, mythic hero, a new constellation in the cosmos. I feel so cheap.