Toby Johnson: Toby Johnson is the editor of White Crane: A Journal of Gay Men's Spirituality. This review was originally published in White Crane Journal (#44). It is reprinted with permission from www.whitecranejournal.com online.
Bardo is a remarkable book, a mystical reverie and a spiritual afterlife adventure all worked into a nostalgic, occasionally sexy and even violent memoir of a soul's incarnation.
The time frame of the story is the span of a single second. But this is no ordinary second: it is moment between life and death. The foreword explains: “The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us that bardo means the in-between place.”
The book opens with the main character lying in a hospital bed in a room that is filling with white light. It is called the White Room. He is called only EG. Is this a way of making him an Everyman? “E.g.,” after all, stands for “exempli gratia,” for example.
This Everyman is a gay man dying of AIDS. His experience in the in-between place is a revelation about the spiritual nature of gay men's lives.
For in that final moment, EG seems to relive not only his own life, from a variety of perspectives at different ages and with different self-concepts, but also a sampling of lives he might have lived: a rich and sexy, but closeted movie star; a sadistic terrorist in a gay paramilitary force; a helpless cripple; a seductive waif.
Some of the characters in EG's consciousness are clearly from the author's own life, and much of the book is autobiographical. Kraus's forthcoming book, “It's Never About What It's About: What We Learned About Living While Waiting to Die,” introduces us to his present partner and collaborator Paul Borja and his now deceased partner Andre LaVenture. They are both characters in Bardo.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is a kind of purgatory where the soul can observe its current, soon to end incarnation and choose, or be pulled
into its next incarnation. Ideally, with consciousness, the soul can rise above rebirth entirely by choosing to go into the White Light.
It's not clear what choice Krandall Kraus's EG makes. But by the end of the book, having observed the confusing and dazzling process of incarnation, EG achieves an experience of enlightenment. As he leaves the White Room, one of his subpersonalities and alternate incarnations sings to him: “Eye cannot see It, tongue cannot speak It, mind cannot grasp It. If you think you know God, you live in delusion; all that you can know are images of God. All you can hold onto are ideas of God.”
“When you finally understand that God acts through you, as you, in every action you take, only then do you attain true freedom. “When you realize this truth and cling to nothing in the world, that is the moment you enter eternal life.”
EG's enlightenment is not limited to the moment of death. It is the discovery we are invited to make at every moment, Kraus tells us. The fruit of EG's reverie is the discovery of his oneness with the Light in the White Room.
What EG is an example of is experiencing the joy and pain of incarnation. How nice to have this message recounted with the imagery of contemporary gay mens' lives.
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