Nameless Feeling

I was in a the Cittarela gourmet market in the village when I become overwhelmed by a feeling. There was no discernable trigger or warning. A flush of heat flowed down over my upper body, as if I was under a hot wax shower. My hair stood on end. The bright store with its rich and well-dressed patrons flew away as if in a dream and I was alone in a deep chasm of molten and nameless feeling. Time slowed to a near eternal moment; every bright food item dwindled into obscurity; I forgot why I was there and where I was going. Sadness is one such name for a part of this feeling, though only a small part. Cosmic intransigence? The opposite of belonging? A feeling located just this side of non-being; perceived reality reduced to a tidal wall of liquid intensities. The unconscious has been described as a sea and so perhaps this is an old primordial feeling arising like a sea-monster from the depths of intersubjective mind… or an unbearable memory of leaving the womb…. a ripping squall of the oceanic arriving from nowhere and going to nowhere. Chasm, squall, sea-monster and womb; that I should use such language and yet get no nearer to a description is the ineffable nature of such weird experience. Meanwhile the small boat of my ego was swamped. Had I suffered a stroke? Received a visitation? A psychotic break? I’ve had versions of this feeling before (as a child it would often be induced by a Christmas carol). If all meaning is obliterated in the radiant power of an unknown and unknowable emotion—what then? That these things do happen is not in question; why they happen is less certain. An earlier age talks of spirits; religion has long catalogued such intensities and called them god (or the devil). But this was a body experience as much as it was a mystical one; a non-meaningful, mystical embodiment. I came back to ground only when I stepped outside into the blowing rain of the Manhattan night. I wondered if my dad had died and I had been visited by his ghost. I checked my phone, finding no calls or texts. I was alone. The city glowed dimly in the shreds of billowing storm. I could still feel the vibrations of this ungodly-godlike feeling even as I descended into the cavernous noise of the west 4th subway stop; someone somewhere was playing the drums.