Lilith (2 page)

By the present standards of society, Lilith was insane. Yet her insanity, which had its origin in “the shadow-side,” brought with it a new and redemptive feeling for life. Lilith had what Harvard psychologist William James in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
called “a special type of consciousness” which made her intensely aware of her existence in its broadest dimensions and its smallest nuances. Although Salamanca reveals at the end that Lilith had her origin in “dreary filth,” the total effect of the book is salutary because of Lilith’s elevated, mystical consciousness. Her madness is divine, not demonic. Seen through her mode of vision, the heart of life is joyous and Salamanca’s haunting evocation of that vision is partly intended to seduce the reader from “sanity” and normality and the standards of a relatively joyless society. It is an attempt also to engender question of man, “his works, his institutions, and his convictions,” down to the very bases of culture.

In her parting words to Vincent, Lilith says, “So you can have two roses. . . . A white one and a fire-colored one. They are both here someplace.” Thus Salamanca describes the world of man: a place of two roses, of dualisms and paradox, of things which seem one thing yet often seem another, of good inseparably fused with bad, of light and darkness. It is a place where the image of a red rose may validly represent a silent kiss from Lilith’s lips or it may describe the explosive flames from a bursting hand grenade, and fire may signify either consuming animal passions or the purifying comprehension of divinity. The world as Salamanca sees it is not complete without
two
roses: the red rose of temporal matter and the white rose of eternal spirit. Both are necessary for existence and, when carried to the extreme, meet in the phenomenon of life.

A line from Wordsworth’s poem “Intimations of Immortality” is quoted in
Lilith
: “there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” In the broadest sense, Salamanca's writing is an attempt to restore that glory to earth, to find again (and to help others find) the world vaguely remembered from youth.
The Lost Country
is a story of the land left behind when a person begins the sadly familiar journey from innocence to experience known as growing up. In
Lilith
the wheel comes full circle: opposites meet on a transcendental plane and one is given a glimpse of the lost country rediscovered, of sadness become joy, of a voyage so deep into experience that one emerges on the other side of reality to find again the lost simplicity of childhood, the perfection for which people hunger. That paradise regained is a country of splendor, a land of timelessness and poetry and light all the more beautiful for having known the shadow side of human existence. It is a world in which the innocence of infancy becomes everyman’s Eden and the traveler wearied by sad experience can find peace and joy. Such a world awaits through the writings of J. R. Salamanca.

JOHN WHITE
is an author and teacher in the fields of consciousness research and higher human development. He has published 15 books, including
The Meeting of Science and Spirit
,
What Is Enlightenment?
,
A Practical Guide to Death and Dying
,
The Highest State of Consciousness
and, for children,
The Christmas Mice
. His writing has appeared in
The New York Times
,
Reader’s Digest
,
Esquire
,
Woman’s Day
,
Saturday Review
,
Omni
,
Science of Mind
,
New Age
, and other newspapers and magazines.

Mr. White was born in 1939. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College (1961) and a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Yale University (1969). He has taught English and journalism on the secondary and college levels, and has served on the directing and advisory boards of various academic and research organizations. He also has served on the editorial boards of various scholarly journals and popular magazines.

He served in the U.S. Navy from 1961-1965 as an antisubmarine warfare and nuclear weapons officer. He lives in Cheshire, Connecticut, with his wife Barbara. They have been married for 50 years, have four children and five grandchildren.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing. . . .
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a fairy’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild. . . .
—John Keats,
La Belle Dame Sans Merci

I GREW up in a small Southern town which was different from most other towns because it contained an insane asylum. At the time I was growing up there, however, I did not think of this as a distinction. As we had been aware of it from birth, it had for us who lived there no aspect of novelty; it was simply one of the facts of our existence, and belonged, with the fire station, the clinic, the schoolhouse and the granary, among those elemental institutions by which life is both sustained and interpreted. I thought all towns had asylums. With the equanimity of a child I accepted the fact that there was madness everywhere, just as there were conflagration, illness, ignorance and hunger. I can, indeed, remember being disconcerted, somewhere around the age of twelve, by the discovery that other towns did not have asylums, and engaging in much troubled speculation as to how the insane people of these communities were disposed of.

So that, although there was mania somewhere beyond the shadows of its quiet elms and the shop windows of its main street, our town was not compromised in its pleasantness. It was a clean, pretty, leisurely town in central Maryland, with wide streets and two-story frame houses with great cool, awning-shaded porches. For subsistence it depended mainly upon the grain and dairy products of the rolling grassy farmland which surrounded it. The wheat was sacked and shipped from a large commercial grain elevator at the edge of the city; a spur line ran into it from the Baltimore & Ohio Railway, and one of the delights of my boyhood was to compile the names of roadbeds from the boxcars standing in the yards. I remember how bright the rails were in the sun, the sprinkle of brass-colored wheat and grain dust that blew about in the cinders, the silent yawning vastness of the empty cars with their steel-bound planks and hieroglyphic inscriptions of tonnage, load weight, cubic content and so forth; and the beauty and mystery of their names—to an inland boy as beautiful as the names of ships to a coastal dweller—Wabash, Santa Fe, Great Northern, Seaboard Air Line. And I can remember yet the quick bright thrill of excitement on seeing for the first time a legend unknown to me: The Hiawatha, Route of the Buffaloes.

Our district was also famous for its fruit, and at harvest time I would often work as a picker in the apple and peach orchards of the countryside. For this work I was paid a dollar a day, a great deal of money for a boy in those times; but I should rather—for the memories it has given me of long September days, standing on my ladder waist-deep in sweet-scented oceans of Elberta leaves, of heavy yellow peaches, hot with sunlight, softly furred and blushed with bluish crimson, and of country girls with brown arms and blowing hair, half hidden by the branches, singing ballads in the tops of apple trees—for these memories I should rather have paid the owners of those enchanted orchards.

Our town, which is called Stonemont, was the county seat. Its main street was laid out in an inverted L, like the move of a knight on a chessboard. On its shorter, lower, segment, set far back from the street on a high lawn to which a flight of five stone steps ascended from the sidewalk, stood the county courthouse, an old building of rose-colored brick, its two-columned portico paved with foot-worn stone and shadowed by giant elms. Directly in front of it the main street was divided by a narrow island on which, facing the courthouse, stood the statue of a Confederate soldier, his arms crossed upon his breast, his face shadowed by a slouch hat, one foot placed forward with a look of noble resolution which gained in pathos from the shabbiness of his tattered uniform and the empty scabbard that hung against his thigh. Beneath him, on the tall granite pedestal, was inscribed a legend which I never failed to reread when I passed and which never failed to give me the same warm glow of tragic pride:

The upper segment of the street was perhaps five blocks in length, and lined with the establishments familiar to all small towns: a barbershop; a small, false-fronted motion-picture house; the United States Post Office, before which an American flag hung over the sidewalk, casting, on windy days, its writhing, tormented shadow—a convulsive ghost—upon the pavement; a hardware store; an independent grocery and a two-story stuccoed office building with worn wooden corridors, open at either end to the afternoon sunlight. The doors of the offices were always propped open with rubber wedges, so that, walking through the corridors—as I did every Thursday afternoon to deliver magazines—one could look into the old-fashioned, high-ceilinged rooms, where the town’s realtors, lawyers and insurance agents, big red-faced men in shirt sleeves and suspenders, lounged in swivel chairs, chuckling and drawling into telephones, looking up, as one walked by, to wink or toss a stick of chewing gum from the littered desk top through the open door. At the end of that street, as if its commerce faded into fantasy, was a music shop, always locked and silent, in whose sunny window a dulcimer lay forever, its strings furred with dust, its warm, wine-colored wood glowing softly. I can never remember that shop being open, and the dulcimer was never moved. Every year the dust grew heavier upon it, and the faded page of sheet music which lay beside it in the window grew paler with age, so that one could barely read the dying letters: I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen. That locked shop, with its hushed and sunlit window, is for me still full of its strange, soundless music.

Stonemont was the site of the annual county fair, and for this event a permanent fairground had been built at the outskirts of the city, just beyond the cemetery, on a sloping hillside wooded thinly with fine old shade trees, white oaks and hickories. Among this grove were built the exhibition halls for domestic arts, farm produce and machinery, and the many long, low-gabled barns for livestock. The yearly fair is one of the most pleasant memories of my youth. It was held in late summer, on five blue days of August, when the apples on the hills were ripening and there were great golden, burnished pumpkins glowing in the stubble of the mown fields. How I loved the fair and the clear, late-August days! The air had the first faint winey reek of autumn and there were sudden fresh gusts of wind that made the pennants snap on the tent tops; the Ferris wheel turned slowly against the hard, blue, burning sky; there was the pungent, resiny smell of sawdust from the soft carpet of tanbark with which the grounds were scattered, the rich, wry, dusty scent of alfalfa and the royal smell of animals from the barns; the lowing of cattle and the droll bleating of sheep, blended with the murmur and milling of the crowds, the shouting of pitch-men, the soft footfalls in the sawdust, and the pennants snapping in the wind.

At the edge of the fairgrounds was a picnic grove where, in the early afternoons, people sat with spread blankets and open hampers in the shade of the gray oaks. One could look down from there, as I often did, and see, far below on the hillside beyond the brightness and clamor of the fair, the cemetery—silent in the sunlight, with its bleached headstones and tall, still cedars—where my mother lay buried, all her yellow ribbons extinguished by the rain.

Have I said enough about this town? It was, as you see, an ordinary provincial place, sunny, pleasant, unhurried. The insane asylum we seldom saw, as it was in a secluded residential area, considerably apart from the town’s commercial district.

During my last year of high school, however, I saw it much more frequently, as at that time I began to work as delivery boy on a grocery truck. It was my job to assemble the orders in cardboard cartons in the stock room of the market, load them into the truck and then to accompany the driver on his rounds through the residential area, carrying the cartons, when he stopped to make a delivery, from truck to kitchen. It was one of the most satisfying jobs I have ever had. I do not know exactly what there was about it that I found so pleasant, but there was something gravely rewarding, almost revelatory, to me about handling food. Packing the boxes and bags of provisions, effecting and accompanying their course from market to table, gave me an intimate and fundamental sense of labor, as if I were working directly at the very sources of life.

It seems to me now as if those Saturday mornings were invariably warm and sunny, and I can remember sitting beside the driver, a cheerful contented man named Charlie, as we drove through the quiet shaded streets under the great elms, smiling dreamily, comforted by the closeness of sacks of clean white flour, melons, scarlet onions in string bags, moist, dripping packages of meat. Let me remember more closely: once a squirrel fell—the only time in my life I have seen it happen. Somehow it misjudged its leap in the branches that arched across the street and plunged down, twisting in its fall, from a great height, striking the stone heavily just in front of our truck, where it lay shivering.

We often made deliveries in that part of the town where the asylum was situated. It was in the “fashionable” part of Stonemont, a district of large old-fashioned houses with stained-glass attic windows of vivid red and blue and front walks paved with polished fragments of bright-colored stone. Several of these houses, to which we delivered regularly, were on the same street as the asylum, so that I had the frequent opportunity of surveying it in the course of our rounds.