Early One morning before dawn, towards the end of a 28-year drunk, I found myself on a grassy knoll overlooking the University of Cincinnati, sitting on the wet grass staring blankly at the big red four-story Baskin & Robbins Building across the street.

I had arrived at this spot by rote early one morning before dawn. The saloons had all closed down for the night, and although I was no longer allowed in any of them, I could still have a good time just hanging around the perimeters, panhandling and fighting off the arrogant college kids who accosted me on a regular basis.  I guess it was their sport and amusement, being educated as they were into a system of class-consciousness, yet sometimes they would throw a crumb my way, some spare change, a can of warm beer.

This particular night is was also too late to get a drink anywhere, even at the 7-11. There was really no place to go but home.  Since I didn't have a home at this point I was in the habit of just waiting it out anywhere along the route, usually in a secluded park or under a stairwell for an hour or two of guarded sleep. Occasionally in a warm basement in the winter where I could snooze until sunrise, awkwardly greeting the appearance of the day's first tenant with a handful of laundry as I made my blurry-eyed way out into the sunlight of another day.  Really anywhere between addresses would do.

On this particular occasion I was laying there in the wet grass, nursing what remained of a half fifth of warm wine and watching the guy on the second floor above the ice cream parlor.  He was very intent at something, traveling with angst the length of the building, a slippery shadow pacing back and forth beyond the uncurtained windows. Soon I began to imagine that I saw him not only on the 2nd floor, but the 3rd as well, as if he were on both floors simultaneously.  Boy oh boy, what a little moonshine can do!

So I watched and wondered for a while, amused, finally moving on. Where I headed is not important to this story.  But this memory is extremely so.  You see, for all practical purposes no memory should exist, because the original episode took place in an alcoholic blackout, a recess from which rarely anything is recovered. Technically, in a black out, there is no memory to draw on, except for the sub-conscious imprint stored beneath the surface and rarely accessible because of the initial lack of consciousness.  So I doubt this “memory” would've ever seen the light of day except for an uncanny experience that followed a few years later.

Late one night, as I worked furiously in my studio overlooking the University of Cincinnati campus, I had a strange sensation that I was being observed.  I was manic, moving swiftly from room to room, preparing artworks for an approaching exhibit, when suddenly I was overcome by the feeling that someone was watching me.  It was late, with dawn approaching, a time observed throughout history as the cautious part of day.  I wasn't afraid, though I was irritated. Who the fuck was out there sitting on the grass at this time of the morning anyway?  I looked.  O, there was someone out there all right, propped up against a tree and following my every move through dazed eyes.  And as my eyes began to focus on the darkness outside I received the shock of my life. The person who was staring so intently back at me was from down below was myself! Unexplainably, it was me out there on the grassy knoll, thinking his/my drunken thoughts out loud, and magically coexisting along side the me inside observing all of this. Fred Burkhart, in the flesh, inside and out. "In the Beginning was the Word."

Of course it was me over there, in 1976, dreaming my dreams of drunken stupor, my homeless yearnings for empowerment. After squandered years of frustration, the desires of my heart long driven deep inside were beginning to stir within my breastbone. As I sat there, oblivious even to myself, the “Word” worked within me, creating out of nothing the future I would someday inhabit, but was not yet sober enough to take hold of.  My life's work, only then becoming conscious, was grown from a vision delivered that night on the wet grass.  In accordance with magical principals long ago established in truth, I was dreaming my future studio into reality.  "And the Word became Flesh and Dwelt amongst us."

And it was definitely me a half dozen years later, in 1982, overlooking my devastated past and paradoxically injecting it with a renewed faith to carry on, not with the erroneous 100-proof mockery of spirit that I knew then, but by reconnecting with the true spirit, the ancient essence which animates all of us.  It's the old Buddhist trick of the perceiver becoming that which is perceived, mapped out long ago by a wise and benevolent Creator. "And at the same time that Word was with God and was God."

No, it can't be explained all that easily, can it?  Somehow the fool I was in 1976 had contacted the fool I was to become in 1982, a bizarre encounter and subsequent confrontation from beyond the fabric of time-space.  Somehow we were both there together in the same moment, sharing the uniqueness and making the past, present and future indistinguishable from one another. Everything -- all time and space -- acting simultaneously as this moment, this awareness.
Isn't that what Eternity is supposed to be like anyway? When I had this experience I was most certainly getting at the truth that Christ demonstrated: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the Ending at one and the same time." What Science has begrudgingly come to identify as Infinity -- the same phenomenon. Unfortunately, I had been too drunk in 1976 to catch on. O what an amazing revelation it should've been!
But of course this mysterious juxtaposition is only the tip of the iceberg.  If the 1976 Burkhart was indeed viewing the 1982 Burkhart -- and also the other way round -- who then was doing the viewing?  Who was God talking to when it was written... "Let us make man in our own image, male and female alike?" Talking to another aspect of Him, Her or Itself?  Was God talking to me? Again!  And whom was I appealing to in the mid-seventies when I received the projection under the tree, sitting quietly and gazing unknowingly into the future?  Was it myself?  God?  Or some other variety of awareness which continuously manifests itself on behalf of our ignorance?

If I have learned anything in the subsequent years, I am convinced that the hazy Word encountered in 1976 did indeed "become flesh and dwelt amongst us."  And it is still dwelling.

Any questions before I depart?