My closest friends often ask me where I – as a writer – got the idea that reality is essentially fantasy. No, no it was Teilhard de Chardin, I reply, but it’s reality itself that put enormous fleas behind my ears. And as they say: starting with the principle estabalished by physicist James Jeans – “everything is possible, but a few things are more probable” – we can affirm, more precisely, that one determined event is fantasy when we find material proof sufficient enough for neither confirmation nor denial.
Is there anything more fantastic than life when it is examined more deeply? Maybe a good illustration of this idea is the “story” that the learned composer José Antônio de Almeida Prado, ex-student of Messiaen and professor at UNICAMP, once told me. One day while walking with him to the pharmacy to buy insulin he asked said: “Hilda (Hilst) told me that you too are reading about astral projections, is it true?” Embarrased like an adolescent caught with a playboy magazine by his mother while lifting up his mattress to change the dirty sheets, I started to stutter, after all, I don’t usually go around revealing my perverse side, in terms of interest, to my intellectual, academic or like minded friends.
He loooked at me and said: “I have a story that I never told anyone but I’d like to tell you”.
Oof, I thought and said: “Shoot, I’m all ears.”
And this is what I heard…
“The night I began to compose the part of the symphony ‘Celestial Cards’ (Cartas Celestes) that relates to Uranus, I was sitting at the piano feeling exhausted and heavy like never before. I noticed that it was already late and took advantage of the fact that I was having problems with the composition. I put my pencil aside and went to lie down, ‘better to continue tomorrow when I’m rested and feeling alive’, I thought. Lying on my back in bed I couldn’t stop thinking about my work, how important it was to me and everything, but eventually I fell into that lethargic state and sleep came. Soon I felt, you know, a jolt and I opened my eyes: Yuri it was frightening, I was floating above the roof of my house! Just as I began to feel a desperation believing I was dead, a sphere of blue light came speeding toward me and crashed into me. At this time I saw myself inside a strange and very long tube – with rough walls – that sucked me in like a vacum cleaner.”
“When the journey finished I found myself floating above a beautiful land, underneath a sky full of light like I have never seen before: this is not Earth, I thought. ‘You are on Uranus,’ said a calm voice at my side. I looked in its direction and saw an extremely tall man wearing only a tunic: “Don’t be afraid, I won’t harm you…” and, taking me by the arm he took me on a flying tour of the region. I saw lots of buildings spread out, like in Brasilia, but without any road signs. After he showed me everything – he looked me straight in the eyes and said kindly and firmly: “Have you noticed? There is not one sign of conflict here. Everyone that is here is on a mission of peace. We’re here to help your planet. We are at war with no one. Therefore return to your symphony and redo the movement about Uranus. If you leave it like it is you will transmit a false message about our mission. God bless you!” And suddenly the sphere of blue light, coming from I don’t know where, crashed into me again. I went back the same way I had come through the tube, and so after another jolt I was back in my bed. I got up electrified, all my hair on end and my body shaking. I ran to the piano and in one go I composed the whole and new Uranus movement. And the guy had reason: before it was too much like Stravinsky…”
This, my friends is like ‘Fantastic Reality’, like Bergier and Pauwels used to say, I believe that our Universe cannot have another nature if not the fantastic one, the unpredictable. Almeida Prado when telling me his stories said: “don’t go around telling these things to everybody Yuri (ooops!) or people will think that I’m crazy and will ask me to leave the campus. If someone asks me I won’t say it’s not true but I won’t confirm either”. Why? Because the university – read well “university” – teaches us that the Universe is simply a ‘thing’ without an end – in both meanings of the term – and nothing else. But the most interesting thing is that when I told this story to a medium friend of mine she said: “What a silly man, those things that he saw were not buildings but interestelar spaceships. Uranus is a base where certain beings are getting ready for the Big Cure…”
And to finish, check this out: on the Uranus image that I found in Nasa’s website, you can notice several lights in the planet’s atmosphere. At the same website you’ll read that scientists don’t know its meaning and simply suppose that it is a boreal aurora or something similar but…well nobody has a real answer. In any case we still can buy the cd “Celestial Cards”, a map for astral projections…
(tradução Lisa Ismael – Zuvuya.net)