Phenomenon of Portals: Malcolm Campbell’s The Sun Singer and Smoky Trudeau’s The Cabin.

Many years ago I read about an illustrator who published a series of cartoons about the atomic bomb that was being developed concurrently under highly secretive conditions in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Alarmed, the FBI investigated him, deciding not to pull the cartoon because doing so would attract the public’s attention to the bomb even more. Evidently, the artist did not know factually of the bomb, yet the knowledge of it may well have been in what Carl Jung would call the collective unconscious. As an artist, he evidently had access to this. Art is like the dream, often a little ahead of its time. (and if you have the name of this illustrator, I would love the reference!  I have been unable to locate it!)

Recently I read two novels which drew my interest in a way that I know is of a matter of interest to the soul. This reminded me of the foresight that access to the collective can bring. Although both Malcolm Campbell’s The Sun Singer (Vanilla Heart Publishing, 2004) and Smoky Trudeau’s (Smoky Zeidel) The Cabin (Vanilla Heart Publishing, 2008) are worth reading for no other reason than both are good coming-of-age stories, full of intrigue and suspense, there is that something else that takes them into another realm, making one wonder if they involve a coming-of-age for humankind. This “something else” is the concept of portals.

It is not that portals have not been in literature before; they have. Any of us who read fantasy and science fiction know this. But here the issue is again: in both novels the protagonists have to recognize and then negotiate such states in order to move on in their lives. Portals may be something we as humans need to learn to negotiate in order to move on, too.

In Sacred Geography: Geomancy: Co-Creating the Earth Cosmos, author Marko Pogacnik describes interdimensional portals as “organs that make exchange between different dimensions of reality possible.” He states these are aspects of the earth that have been asleep, but due to the earth changes at hand, have reawakened. “The reappearance of Interdimensional Portals means that the unprecedented transformation of the rationally structured space-time dimension into an open multidimensional reality is at hand. (pp. 137-138).

The Sun Singer and The Cabin develop within the reader what more conscious access to these portals might mean. The Sun Singer has a sophisticated structure. Campbell’s use of italics in concurrent or alternative realities creates a kind of differentiated consciousness, a training in sensitivity to the fluidity of realities.

Trudeau’s story transcends generations of a family in which a family suffers due to a transgression on the natural world by a family member generations before. In both novels, the protagonist must travel back in time to heal the present conflict.

Perhaps novels such as these stretch our sense of reality, allowing us to consider something larger than that template we inhabit most of the time, a template that ossifies our sense of reality. As the earth changes through great floods, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and rising seas, perhaps the psyche also must change. After all, in a time metaphysics and science have melded in string theory, physics theorizing eleven dimensions instead of three, our sense of reality expands. Time and space are part of a “rationally structured” reality that is limiting only if we believe that is all there is.