New Moon (67 page)

“And,” Charles continued, “this is what your present dream is saying: ‘I was a magician then, and you didn’t see it. I gave you the gift of my first dream, my first intentional magical act. And you thought I was just peeing, you thought I was dreaming Freudian symbols.”

“Yet I got mercurial seeds anyway by the fact that Dr. Fabian exchanged the dream for symbols, not by his specific interpretation. After all, he was a magician who didn’t know it. Then I dreamed the dream over for you in order to salvage him, and also, I guess, to reestablish the act of interpretation in the present.”

“Not interpretation,” Charles interrupted. “Consciousness. The problem of ‘keeping dry’ is an alchemical matter insofar as ‘toilet training’ requires bringing consciousness to the autonomic realms of the body. You were peeing not only antisocially, but in a struggle to free yourself from unconscious elements. Your new dream, by casting wetting in the mirror of Dr. Fabian’s interpretation, was a step up the ladder. Now you are saying that you are finally ready to complete the act, at least in dream form.”

“Fabian had reached out in the darkness and took a boy’s hand, but we were both in darkness. Now I am reaching back and trying to guide him to where I am.”

“Precisely,” said Charles,” but not just him then or you now—
you then, him now.”

As I journeyed deeper into Jungian archetypes and symbols, I went on an errand to recover some of my old childhood favorites from the Amherst town library:
Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen, Nine Tales of Coyote, The Dragons of Blueland.
I reconsidered talking crows, winged dragons, learned spiders, and wish-granting fish. These are not just imaginary beings from fables and legends or putative visitors from other dimensions; they are our unspoken selves. Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, the Indian maidens courted by Coyote in human form—I had known them unconsciously long before I awoke to their representations at camp dances and on teen tours. Joan Snyder was not only a cute girl; she was as old as the moon. Night after night at Chipinaw I had to rescue and redeem
her again to give birth to myself.

Revelations swept over me that Massachusetts fall as a college junior; they softened and healed me, as Jung became my solace and path.

After classes one Friday I drove into Cambridge to meet an old friend from Horace Mann, James Polachek. I knew him as a buddy of Chuck’s and a member of our circle: a tall, shy kid with a large-featured but intelligent face, who played the violin and carried its shape and imprint on his personality. Now he was studying Chinese and philosophy at Harvard.

To enter his apartment I ducked through a bamboo curtain. A knee-height desk and a Japanese frame with pillows were Jim’s sole furniture. Two silken hangings and a shell screen formed a room within a room. As incense tinged the air, single sequential bells sounded on his stereo. My friend had spun his own spare Oriental web.

Together we wandered through Cambridge, visiting bookstores, sharing literary and occult insights—our so-called lives—in an olden city, no longer tied to the purlieus and curfews of prep school.

After a while I told him about Lindy. I took comfort in representing my grief as a passage through the Underworld. “No way to arrive at the full moon without the dark moon behind it,” I mused. “I’m a Scorpio born in the rubble of November, fighting to survive millennial darkness.” He silently endorsed the spiel, so I took it to the next level. “Regenerate,” I declared with a tad more cheer and vim than I had. “That’s what Scorpios do best. Just when you think that they’re dead and gone they awaken with almost magical powers.”

I did a fair job of convincing myself, but the flood of obligatory sapience enervated me. By dinnertime I was mum and morose, as we hastened through drizzle to an Italian restaurant. Wetter than I realized, I accepted a towel from the maître d’. Then Jim and I sat, warming in pleasant surroundings, a crackling fireplace making the scene baronial. This was no Horace Mann outpost. I had no homework, no mother, no brother, no home.

Jung couldn’t help me here. Thank goodness for the offer of a towel!

Finally I sank into the sheer texture of existence. It was all okay, even if it wasn’t. At least I wasn’t scared.

I sipped wine. Neither of us said anything for a long time.

“Look around you,” Polachek offered suddenly. “We are in the material universe, but everything is magnificent beyond words. No matter how cheap and poorly made, it all has a sacred property; it’s all beautiful.” I followed his eyes to the ceiling candelabra. It was a multicolored electric wheel, replica of a soul. All by itself the fireplace was transmuting sacred flames.

“Even here,” Jim continued, pointing to the empty Chianti bottle on which a candle dripped blue wax over the yellow and pink wax of prior candles. As I followed his gestures, timeless awe settled over me. “No surprises. Exactly the way it should be, no matter what we do to contaminate and tarnish it.”

Goddamn, was this universe deep!

The plates in
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
showed a succession of convergent mandalas: a man and woman standing in a lotus, within another lotus, within the phases of the moon and cycles of the planets. Three rabbits chased one another’s tails. These patterns were transposed sequentially onto nighttime New York, riverside church steeples, gold vestry windows. An amoeboid glow broke through stone armaments and blossomed over Fifth Avenue.

In Waite’s Five of Pentacles two beggars—one lame on crutches—passed outside a chapel. As they hobbled barefoot in snow, yellow light poured through a stained-glass oriel.

This was the card of exile, of finding oneself beyond the sanctuary, unable to get in. Yet the sanctuary was right there, staring at me all along. Matthew Arnold had written as much nearly a hundred years prior:
“Set where the upper streams of Simois flow / Was the Palladium, high ’mid rock and wood; / And Hector was in Ilium, far below, / And fought, and saw it not—but there it stood!”

The Chianti bottle was my hearth. The plate of lasagna was an offering, red and alabaster, from the belly of Ceres.

Suddenly I felt safe, totally safe, and I wanted to cry. In fact, unbidden tears were rolling down my cheeks. The world had revealed itself again, and I was home. Even the ghost child bearing a brick of ice cream back to the 96th Street apartment, even Lindy’s absence were redeemed, were part of the simple fact, the privilege of being here at all.

I had lived till then as a mendicant in the Five of Pentacles. Now, in the blues of a lost girlfriend at an Italian restaurant with an old friend, I surrendered to unknown gods at last.

Nelson Richardson was one of the sophomores who hung around Phi Psi. A self-proclaimed poet who with his pale glasses and mop of blond hair looked like the artist Andy Warhol, he had recently—just that summer—been in residence with the poet-monk Thomas Merton at Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. In September when we met I found Nelson conceited and arrogant. He never paid House dues, yet spent more time there than many who did. He had also—behind my back—called my literary reputation “a lot of fuss over nothing,” so I assumed he was a jerk and avoided him.

People kept bringing us together, and we kept sloughing off the occasions. Then we came face to face in the Glen where we had both retreated to study. With no one around to sponsor affinity we looked clearly into each other’s eyes. Neither of us spoke it, but we agreed silently, “Let’s get this over with and talk.”

He told me about the monastery, its regimented life and shadow sexuality, how that left him uncertain of his own feelings toward either men or women. He worried about the ease with which he could pull off an act and be a “character” at Amherst, the way other kids just bought it, as though he were a priest or some sort of oracle. “I didn’t fool you, though.”

I apologized for holding it against him and told him why it was a hard time for me. I described my panic of the preceding spring and how I blasted out of it with a poem. I quoted some lines I knew by heart.

He whistled acknowledgment. “I would call that a text of madness.
You didn’t write it, you
received
it. The beings who watch over you decided that your exile had gone on long enough and they sent you instructions on how to end it. You wrote those down, but of course they are in the language of the angels not of a psychology book.” He paused for a moment. “Or, maybe the panic was the poem, and you resisted its message until you had suffered enough to be allowed to speak. Either way, the words, as you know, are approximations of another language.”

I couldn’t have been more wrong about Nelson.

He told me that his own revelations were more Trappist, in the form of angels. “But they’re not—you know, ‘angel’ angels, cherubim and the like. ‘Angel’ is just the Greek word for messenger,” he reminded me as we crossed the street toward the dining hall. “Their kind are everywhere. They are carriers of information from divine beings. This rock is an angel. That bird is an angel. Even that asshole from Beta over there is an angel. The forms of the world are merely the clothing angels adopt. Without those markings we wouldn’t know they exist. We ourselves wouldn’t exist.” He stopped walking just before Valentine’s door and looked dead-seriously at me, a gaze more sentient than either of us expected. “Don’t you see—we pick our angels. Lindy is your angel. You chose her willingly. Now you are doing grateful penance.” He had a melodic voice that made him a seraph singing sacred advice in scales.

“But you chose Thomas Merton,” I offered. “That seems a little more intelligent.”

“Even you know better than that, Grossinger!”

Chuck had loaned me a book called
Magick in Theory and Practice.
It was written by the notorious Aleister Crowley who cast spells to seduce women and defeat his rivals. But there were other, more spiritual aspects to his work, notably his theorems for a “magickal” science that included—hence transcended—physics of the Amherst freshman variety. Crowley asserted that, through our wills and desires, we conducted the primordial forces shaping earth and heavens—that mind took precedent over matter. Like Nelson, he urged me to regard all events as messages from higher masters to my soul,
for nothing that happens to us is arbitrary. I carried his axioms around with me like the debris of fifties rock ’n’ roll:

“Every intentional act is a Magical act.”

“A man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.”

“Every force in the Universe is capable of being transformed into any other kind of force by using suitable means. There is thus an inexhaustible supply of any particular kind of force that we may need.”

“Every man and every woman is a star.”

On a night in mid-October, I was driving home from dropping Lindy off at Smith after a dinner out. I gazed across silver pumpkin fields and received a spontaneous transmission out of
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:
Lindy was Persephone, imprisoned in the underworld by a smooth-talking reporter. I was the animus-warrior, rushing to save her before she swallowed the fatal pomegranate seeds.

Though I recognized a reckless throwback to my saucer fantasy, I knew that this one had a scintilla of truth. I mainly had to balance my tendency to narcissistic aggrandizement with a newfound receptivity to messages. Angels who had once given a child a humungous vessel for his escape now offered a young man more modest and salient means.

A litany of ancient songs and coyote tales blew over the car, as I felt a wild and invulnerable joy, warm and cozy, yet spreading to the ends of space and time.

It was time to act.

Scorpio within awoke and reclaimed his dormant power. He identified himself as my erstwhile trickster self—or made it impossible that I mistake his wiles for anything less than feints of clairvoyant magic, thwarted or bungled because I was too young and unschooled. I didn’t have the emotional tools or a numinous repertoire or even entrée to my own core compassion, so upsurges
of anxiety made me reckless and cruel. I had been listing perilously toward my mother’s paragon: a malign witch. Now the spirits were calling and I was ready.

My Coyote Self proposed an all-encompassing, transformative prank: I would hold a ceremony in the Glen on Halloween, three days before my twentieth birthday.

I was so convinced of the rightness of this event that I managed to get just about everyone in the House to blend with my exuberance. We never had to transfer en masse to Berkeley; we could make a more salient stand on local ground.

For the rest of the week Nelson and I mapped out how to pull it off—candles, mandalas, fairy-tales, slides of nature, a flute and a xylophone, bells, jugs of apple cider. I invited acquaintances from all over campus. Then I called Polachek and Stein and they both agreed to attend. Chuck said he would bring his friend Josey who, I had heard, was a witch with magic powers. The clan was gathering to make medicine: Porcupine, Thunder, and Bear.

Even Tripp accepted: “Staging a Halloween happening in the Glen demonstrates an excellent sense of theater, man.”

But Persephone would be absent in the land of Pluto. Lindy told me that, ceremony or not, it was the first weekend Jim would be in New York. They would all have to do without her. She wrote:

In her last letter the week before leaving she told me to “speak softly with the spirits and respectfully, and they will know that you feel the connection with the past and them acutely. I hope that time past and time present merge, gradually, for then you will have the
essence of time.”