New Moon (58 page)

The sense of doom was gone. I felt only my freedom. We left the basement and went to my room, and she lay atop and freely kissed me and laughed, and put my hands on her bare breasts. Then she jumped up like a sprite, and said, “Enough of this stuffy place.” And we climbed onto the Phi Psi roof overlooking fields between
lit manors, sounds of Saturday night bands drifting together. It was peaceful just to lie there and look at stars, in the breeze feel as though the planet itself were rolling in space. I hugged her more tightly and she began to breathe harder and run her hands along me, feeling the lines of my waist, and then my chest—that secret territory, realm of imagined diseases in childhood. Her touch opened it to feeling, and I took my shirt off under the starlight.

“You look great, alive,” she said. “Beautiful. You
are
beautiful. Don’t you know that?” she demanded, shaking me with a smile. Lying alongside, I held her silently, feeling her shape against my chest, thinking it was her that made me beautiful.

She rolled onto her back, and I straddled her waist gently, my knees on the gravel, as she drew my hands once across her breasts and along the lines of her body. She let go and I tried to feel her without violating the dignity with which she opened to me. It
was
like praying.

She put her hands on my nipples and felt my torso, undid my belt. She pulled me on top of her again, and putting her tongue in my ear, reached down with her hand and held me and gently played with me—all the time the link between us lucid and real, the point of contact unbroken. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, though I didn’t think I was. “It’s a fine thing. It’s a lovely full hardness.”

And then we stopped and went no further. I lay there, her hand on my chest, exposed and joyous in this place. This was the extent of it, as much as I needed in order to feel absolved.

That night, at bedtime, I read Olson’s “Moonset” poem from Gloucester, December 1, 1957, 1:58 a.m.:

My mother, Mr. Clinton, Abbey West, Betsy Sley: I could reach back to each of them and tell them, forget it, whatever happened, it’s okay. The kid is going to survive.

Two nights after Lindy’s visit to Phi Psi, Jon came into the bathroom as a few of us were brushing our teeth. Making a show of ignoring me, he turned to Dave and said, “Did you see? My former live-in whore was by here the other night.”

I whipped around. “You fat bastard!”

He seemed startled more than anything, that someone dared address him so irreverently. “You’re going to take that back,” he insisted.

“Like hell I am!” I stared hard at him, then added, “Pretentious jerk!” and looked away.

He put his head down and charged at me like a rhinoceros and, as I swung back, he tried to pin me against the mirror. I slid out of his grasp. He lunged again. Toothpaste, shaving cream, sundries crashed to the floor. Then Dave grabbed him and, with Phil’s help, pulled him out and led him back to his room: “Cool it, man; cool it.”

A week later Jon moved out of Phi Psi into the dorms.

Life had followed the script of a Lawrence novel—a hermetic undertow that carried me beyond plot and character into the heart of my own text. Betsy had stood at the gateway, an unknowing guardian spirit. Then I had a date with the wrong girl … and someone else was in the alcove, waiting.

Where Ginny led, I followed as if Lawrence’s Ursula and Gudrun were my guides—until we were riven down separate paths. Lindy was waiting at the ripples of the Stream of Probability. What was elusive with Ginny was as now tangible as life itself.

We made spring into our continuous study date: alongside Paradise Pond at Smith, on the Phi Psi lawn, in Valentine between meals.

During the term Schuyler threw in with Larry and Jim, juniors from my Lawrence seminar. The four of us maintained a running satire in the dining hall as we spoofed Amherst styles, noting the passage of “cowboy cool,” “big man,” “jockdom,” and “pseudointellectual popinjay.” Larry and Jim were high-stepping cowboys of their own contrivance; decked out in jeans and leather, they shared a souped-up old sedan and spoke in periodic Laurentian and Keatsian mime. It was running theater—cut-up plus panache.

One Saturday Larry drove us to a swimming hole north near Vermont: Jim, Schuy, me, and our dates. I felt an ancient wistfulness, as Lindy and I lay on our backs in bathing suits in the grass … clouds blown apart in the jetstream. I was chasing the bare eclipse of a form, itself a shadow. Beyond the hill, the land dipped precipitously into the unknown, an obliquity that masked a chimera. Something indelible was lost; something equally remote beckoned. I saw on a smoke-thin arras a Sphinx. I felt my own skeletal existence.

Then we dove into the water, smashing sky. That icy plunge resolved all muddles, a splash into the Now, as water opened my heart to gratitude beyond complication. No indecision or keepsakes allowed—shun sixes of cups, those munchkin children in their gardens of forever throwback nostalgia!

That evening Lindy, Tripp, and I took a walk along backroads—he delivering dialogue from
Godot,
she improvising with gumption and wit. Then she spat from a small bridge into headlights—a Colorado method, she said, to gauge the speed of cars. “Pretty tough girl,” he confided later. And he was the ultimate judge.

Schuy’s friends turned out to be more than collegiate rebels and cowboy poets; they were rogue revolutionaries. After keeping their alter egos secret for months Schuy finally confided in April that Jim (known as Axis, a near-homonym of his last name) was king of something called “guerrilla warfare,” conducted on Saturdays after midnight at the Psi U fraternity house. “It’s beyond description,” he said. “If you could just see it you’d realize that Phi Psi is a bunch of wimps.”

Later that month he extended a guarded invitation: Axis had arranged for me to witness a skirmish as a noncombatant. He couldn’t a hundred percent assure my safety, but I would be under his protection. If he prevailed no one would bother me. If he were defeated it was every man for himself!

Just after midnight I met Schuy at North. From there I followed him along College Street to Psi U. He elbowed a crack in the front door, pointed the way downstairs, and then led me through catacombs to an unlit sector. I expected an empty cloister, so was startled by what I saw. The room was crammed wall to wall with bodies. A single lantern shone. Occasionally someone let out a shout, but mostly we jostled one another in a zombie-like group sway.

Suddenly—with a scream—Axis leaped onto the bar. His chest was bare, painted in blocks of color, American Indian style. He stared down at the revenants. Then he danced in place as others threw objects at him—mostly their cups of beer. He retaliated with the hose from the keg, its spray splattering the crowd, a few beads of moisture reaching Schuy and me at the fringes.

Gradually the scene became more frenzied, as Axis goaded the others with taunts. People tried to yank him off his perch, but with the help of his allies he beat them back. Clashes broke out, and Schuy whispered, “Stay close … just watch. Do you see, it’s
The Plumed Serpent!”

He meant Axis’ favorite Lawrence novel, in which males transcend their mediocre social condition and enact soul-magic. But this was an Ivy League fraternity not a kiva. The ritual at the bar was more like a primitive attempt at courage, a way of striking back against the allure of women. Here in the basement, after curfew, their dates dispatched, they could be godmen and literary critics at the same time:

As some of the brethren raised hand-made torches, the room shimmered. The keg nearly empty, Axis demolished it with a hammer. He poured kerosene on its pieces, and Larry applied a torch. Spinning before the fire, brandishing a lance and dislodging challengers who came at him with sticks and ropes, Axis all but transmogrified into a visage from Aztec myth. As the Psi U basement resounded with baritone chanting, I saw a parody of late baroque Lawrence: males in round dance, fascist and patriarchal.

Schuy and I slipped out of the communion while Axis was still king—though we had to shove past grabbing arms and punches of a few “enemies” to clear our way. Nowadays I smile when I read in the
Amherst Alumni Magazine
of the “king’s” appointment to boards of psychiatric hospitals. I wonder what his colleagues would make of his reign in the Psi U basement.

Later that spring Paul and a fair complement of Phi Psi made plans to join Freedom Summer, a campaign to register African Americans in the Mississippi delta. As students from various New England colleges showed up in our living room, Tripp was a scornful spectator. “It’s a waste of time. What are these jerk-off college kids going to do against the resident rednecks? Protests don’t bring change; they just generate conflict. Only acts of radical art bring big enough shit into the world.” He struck his guitar strings a few times.

While some of our guests bristled in umbrage, Paul commented sardonically, “Count on you, Jeff, to stand in the way of social justice.”

“I certainly hope so. ‘Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will flip around like a snake, and strike the other way.’ I’m quoting someone with a much deeper grasp of such matters than Martin Luther King.”

“Who’s that?” Paul bit.

“Jean Anouilh.”

Jeff, it turned out, had a personal stake in our loyalties. He had invited an avant-garde film-maker he long admired to show his work the weekend of the Mississippi-bound gathering. He wanted Phi Psi—and especially me—at
his
event. I was ambivalent and told him so.

“Well, get your priorities straight, guy. This is a crossroads, and what you choose, you just may become.”

The filmmaker’s name was Stan Brakhage; he was an official guest of the college, but he had arrived a few days ahead of time at Jeff’s invitation and was staying in Phi Psi. After spotting him, Jenkins warned Paul and me to expect “a cross between a water buffalo and a Spanish revolutionary.” It wasn’t a bad thumbnail. Aloof and humorless, Tripp’s burly gunslinger prowled the second floor, snubbing the rest of us while passing between the bathroom and the stairs.

My ambivalence came to a head on Friday night when Brakhage’s showing coincided with a parley for Freedom Summer participants. Right up to the last I intended to go to the meeting, and I was angry at Jeff for pressuring me otherwise. Had he no appreciation for the Dylan of
“You better start swimming / or you’ll sink like a stone”
—this self-anointed maven with his Porsche, guitar, and private acting troupe? But then I found myself walking from the dining room to the theater with Schuy, no clear reason except that this was where my heart had been all along.

On stage in front of a screen, waiting for the room to settle, Brakhage paced, hands behind his back. Schuy admired his snarl: “No one’s gonna push him around. He’s a tough hombre all right!”

After a flamboyant introduction from Tripp, the artist launched into a discursion of his aesthetic theory: “My work has largely been preoccupied with birth, sex, death, and the search for God. That’s it, make what you want. Narrative cinema like Hollywood is a great pleasure, I grew up with it. It was my hobby and my church. People in the darkness share the same tears, the same joys. But what my film is about is totally different: the closeness of the eyeball to the brain, the literal rhythm of seeing, of existence, of survival. It’s not a story or some throwaway event. It’s how we live and see before we die. Each space between the sprocket holes of film is an individual picture which will, when projected, flash prisming colors in some other darkness at a fraction of a second. My inspiration for that is later Webern or Johan Sebastian Bach, but visually, 24 or 16 frames per second since the medium is light. I am a fool of light.”

Then he read from his journals, punning and undercutting his own meanings, to stay free (as he put it) of the patterns of literal speech. At one point he appropriated the “ie” from “Vietnam” to a make statement about the parenthetical drift of consciousness toward mindless warfare. It was that brash and untethered.

Twittering and hissing, much of the Amherst audience left before the lights were dimmed, their catcalls echoing down the hall. But I was elated. I had been preparing for this talk unknowingly for months. Brakhage was the opposite of cowboy cool, and he certainly wasn’t some water-buffalo cartoon—that was Jenkins’ misread: cultural stereotyping plus a predilection to mock anyone who didn’t fit. This was a guy who survived by defying conventions, by inventing his own forms and confronting the universe head on.

In concluding his riff, Brakhage described a marriage outside societal norms, a partner and artistic collaborator named Jane, the birth of their children in a cabin in the woods. Like Lawrence (whom he quoted several times) he was showing us how to live on the roller-coaster, of mind and heart.

In the first film a man in slow motion struggled up a snow-covered mountainside, his dog running beside him … light distorted, mirrored, scratched, twinkling, eroding, reconstituting, floating disjunctively in layers that seemed to dissolve through one another into new images at different scales and perspectives. Sudden flares of the sun’s corona shot through a black silhouette of a tree … then both were gone and we saw the actual surface of the film cracking, a baby being born … snow falling … wild flowers … unfinished spirals … night traffic … fragments of faces … actual constellations … waves of colored fish … a brief moon with clouds crossing … he and his wife naked as lovers … nothing … a door opening to a house … a woman’s breasts … candlelight.

This irregular chorus rose and fell in visual harmony.
Dog Star Man
was beyond science fiction or surrealism; it was a pulsating, irreducible life montage.

The second film was only four minutes long and made from moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass pressed between strips of splicing tape. “As a moth might see from birth to death
if black were white,” Brakhage explained.

It was one thing to record moths in their nocturnal flutters; it was quite another to make the translucence of their wings the basis of the glow on the screen. Here matter transcended metaphor, transcended even cinematic montage and, in casting an opalescent death frolic, educed something fundamental about nature and art.

The next film was pure night interrupted only by widely separated strokes of lightning. Suddenly a syncopated double-star appeared, as if to remind us that our life takes place in a burst of radiance on a strange world under inexplicable circumstances—then a single unearthly cry: the slowed-down recording of a child being born (this was the only sound in any of the films).
Fire of Waters,
its maker called it—fire of the light of which we are made, waters of the birth canal in which we are washed ashore.

Schuy was thoroughly won over. As Brakhage stayed in the front answering questions, my friend remained long after I got sleepy and returned to Phi Psi. The next day at lunch he summarized his take:

“We’re completely enslaved by these advertising images, all the crap we’re supposed to be—so that we can look like soapsuds men, so that girls will like us, so that we can get jobs. He’s outside of that, so he’s able to make his own things—and without the derivative academic language of Marx and his buddies.”

In truth, there was no resemblance between the life Brakhage presented and that of my teachers and parents. They came from two different civilizations, two different solar systems. And his, oddly, was the more familiar to me.

Frustrated at having missed such an event, Lindy hatched a plan on the phone. Upon hearing that Brakhage lived in the mountains outside Denver, she proposed maybe I could come visit her at Christmas and we’d go find where he lived. An inventive and daring strategy, it seemed to assure a future for us too!

Later that week she and Schuy joined my Abnormal Psych class at the movie
David and Lisa.
Lisa was a mute, schizophrenic girl-child, darkly beautiful; David was an uptight compulsive teenager, obsessed with clocks and death, phobic about being touched. They
were residents of the same mental hospital and, gradually through the story, drew each other out. At first she talked only in rhyme, saying things like, “Hello, kiddo” and “Today I’m low, low; so, David, go, go, go.” In the culminative scene, as she unexpectedly breaks her rhymes, he approaches her, hand extended, desperate for connection, asking her to take it … and she lays her fingers gently across his and clasps them.