New Moon (69 page)

A month later she was back in the hospital. I would not see her again for more than a year.

I drove the old trail: up the Henry Hudson Parkway to the George Washington Bridge. New York drifted against the River, a galaxy of fixed and moving stars. We whizzed into the uncluttered woodlands of the Palisades, then onto the Thruway, fifteen miles to Route 17 and the Catskills. Lindy handled the final fifty miles, her breezy Colorado eighty. A familiar cluster of Tudor villas appeared over the hill at Exit 101. Suddenly the intervening years seemed an illusion, all disparagements and reproaches gone. I once again viewed the glowing gingerbread kingdom to which a child had come as a waif.

We parked in front of my father’s house, beside the otherwise NO PARKING sign and walked to the indoor-pool building. It was past midnight and the coffee shop was closed, but I scaled the glass partition and opened it from inside. I made us Milty-Stackel milk shakes, mostly ice cream (six different flavors), malt, vanilla syrup. The machine beat them into froth, and we sat on the counter, drinking straight from frosted metal cups with straws, feeling foolish and delighted. Then I gave her a quick tour of the nightclub, the empty kitchens and dining room, and the lobbies.

Emma had left the house unlocked, so we went upstairs to the guest room and lay on the bed quietly kissing. Her whole being was so lovely and sweet I could not imagine stopping, but then she asked me to show her to her room. “Honey, this is not the time. We’re both exhausted. We’ve had a wonderful glittery day; let’s not force the fates.”

She was right. It was only desire that held me to her body, whereas necessity bound me to her friendship and protection. I gave her my room from the summer and took the large guest room with the double closets. She returned in a nightgown, hugged me in bed, then slipped away in the dark.

It was a bright autumn day, November 6, 1964. Lindy and I walked to the main building, grabbed a
Times
at the service desk, and headed down the aisle of a crowded dining room. Grossinger’s regulars waved at me as though nothing were unusual. I was with a girl. I had been with a girl before. That was how it must have looked. But Lindy was a girl found elsewhere and she represented everything about me that had nothing to do with the Hotel.

After breakfast we walked the grounds in chill morning, across the golf course to the Lake, back past the skating rink and greenhouses along the ballfields, leaves ochre and burgundy on the trees of eternal return. Afterwards I led her on a tour of the kitchen, past steaming grills and lines of waiters and waitresses; in the process we collected fruit and cookies for the road. We came back to the car and filled it at the Hotel pump.

“The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” I joked. “The next stop, Annandale-on-Hudson.”

She zoomed out the gate and turned left on 52; it was a sixty-mile trip, picking up Route 209 at Ellenville, crossing the Hudson at Kingston. As she opened a window and lit a cigarette, I got out “Weeks” and began reading aloud:

“He
is
amazing,” she said. “It’s hard to believe we’re really going to see him.”

Robert Kelly lived on the Bard campus. When we inquired for his whereabouts, we were directed to a small parking lot, its driveway ending in a cluster of barracks-like apartments. As instructed, we knocked on the last door. A woman answered. Stocky, garbed in shawl and robes, she could have been a large dwarf out of Norse mythology. She stared back and forth at each of us intently enough to be rude. After taking stock of the ingénue college students, she proclaimed, “You must be Richard Grossinger and friend. Come in. Robert has been waiting for you.”

Already I could hear his voice bellowing from the back rooms: “Joby, is it Richard Grossinger?”

We stepped into another reality, a den packed floor to ceiling with every imaginable size, shape, and age of book and manuscript, some lying open, others with feathers and paperweights marking places. Encyclopedia-like tomes and black binders rested on tables along with unfinished cups of coffee and overflowing ashtrays. Books and papers were scattered all over the faded Turkish carpet. Occult icons, alchemical posters, tarot cards,
tankgas,
and horoscopes were attached to the walls. It was how I would have pictured Merlin’s lair: a Mediaeval flat that had been inhabited by the same two immortals for centuries.

There was no heat; the apartment was stone-cold. An ancient furnace-like unit with a pipe through the ceiling was either inoperable or, more likely, set at fifty. Across the archway leading to the entrance from which Robert Kelly was about to loom, judging by the sound, was a hand-made sign with the words: TOMORROW POSSIBLE BECAUSE IT IS.

Though we had been forewarned about his appearance, nothing
could have prepared us for a giant or his manner of entering. Well over three hundred pounds and six feet, an unkempt red mane, he transformed scale itself, inhabiting the room by gasping between breaths. He continued to alter space as he walked, like a boulder coming through water.

“Yes, yes, Richard Grossinger—wonderful speech you gave—and—” He turned to Lindy, whom I quickly introduced. Then he scurried us to chairs like a man feeding pigeons. “Is there anything happening these days at Amherst and Smith? I had thought not. And then Harvey Bialy returns with a story of an unlikely ceremony and carrying this magnificent piece of sacred oratory.” He grabbed my carbon from one of the tabletops and shook the daylights out of it.

Collaborating on our response, Lindy and I explained how there was little going on at Amherst and Smith. As we enumerated the courses we were taking and what we were reading, he listened patiently, then indicated he would soon supply the remedy.

He began his discourse in the middle of nowhere, an impromptu sermon on a form of Sufi music he had recently discovered, its relation to cosmic vibrations, citing texts he presumed (quite wrongly) we knew. In fact, for the whole of the visit he seemed to gloss over the gulf between our spheres of learning as if it didn’t exist or, in any case, needn’t deter him from fulsome testimony. His grandiloquence recalled the high language of gospel but, like Olson, a vernacular version with shifts into hip pidgin. As he spoke, Joby interrupted constantly with emendations I didn’t follow, as if everything required her exactitude and footnotes. I had to pay close attention not to lose track or slight either of them.

It was also as though we had entered a Berlitz class in which a foreign tongue was acquired simply by listening and repeating in kind. But it wasn’t quite that—it was as though we were being trained for a different mode of perception and discourse, the rules of which would become evident only by our being in its midst and observing and practicing its conventions. Later I realized that Kelly was teaching in a different way from my Amherst or Horace Mann masters; he was telling us stuff all right, important facts and ideas,
but he was also changing our consciousness,
attuning it to a higher, more serious octave by mantra and melody as much as by information.

At one point he retreated to the back room and re-manifested with a pile of colorful mimeographed sheets he stapled together by virtually crushing a tiny machine as he walked. These made up a magazine he called
matter.
We each got our own copy. I turned through my pages, which were filled with poetry, notes, diagrams, and epigraphs. Right off I saw an essay on film-making by Stan Brakhage, and I told them about the screening at Amherst.

“Brakhage taught you an important lesson,” he pronounced. “You see, when you are young, you think you can live on anything, like junk food, and you can, and seem to do all right—you two are testament to that. But in order to grow into men and women you need real things, real imagination, not just symbols, or the ideas of some professor who hasn’t been out of the university in two hundred years.”

Then Kelly asked Joby if she was hungry and, when she responded with a growl, he proposed to take us to town for lunch. In the driveway we were chaperoned to an old sedan. “Named Bloisius,” Joby informed us with a maternal smile as she herded us in. She and Kelly occupied thrones in the front seat, which was decorated uncarlike with postcards and amulets on the walls. We obeyed her instructions to pile up books strewn across the back and made enough room to settle in. The smell of decay indigenous to the vehicle was a blend of oranges and bookstore parchment, not unpleasant.

Kelly hugged and rolled the wheel like an octopus with a crystal ball in his circumference as he headed for and then crossed the Rhinecliff Bridge over the Hudson into Kingston. I had driven or been driven past this town a hundred times or more en route to and from Grossinger’s, including ninety minutes ago, but had never seen its interior. In my mind it was a Thruway exit, so I was eager for more of a peek.

We drifted down a lively main street and, without braking, Kelly turned into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant, almost hitting a parked truck without the slightest acknowledgment. Inside, as we continued to talk, I had the sense of leaving the “silk route” to
the Catskills and entering a parallel reality that had been operating beside it all along.

In the course of egg rolls and spare ribs, produced quickly without our ordering, by a waitress who must have known the routine, Kelly made headway through an unpredictable list of topics, quizzing us on them one by one. He began with conventional items—where we came from, what we read and wrote, what our relationship to each other was, in general who we thought we were. He certified each answer with a smile that was sometimes approving, sometimes quixotic, but never condescending, as he and Joby traded obscure asides like an examining committee. Then he made leaps of metaphor and view, dissolving beliefs we had held our whole lives. It was both exhilarating and exhausting, though we were hardly prepared for the deluge.

“What planets do you think are inhabited?” he asked at one point, picking up on my expressed interest in science fiction.

I gave a considered response, favoring Mars and Venus.

“That’s the astronomer’s answer; I think they are all inhabited, inhabited on other planes and by creatures indigenous to those planes. We conceive life only in three dimensions, but beings might live on worlds in other dimensions, for instance in the astral plane, while at the same time the surfaces of those worlds appear barren.”

“Even Pluto?” I baited, trying to see how far he was willing to go.

“Don’t be fooled by its size. It’s a planet, the same as any other, and we know nothing about it, except as we have seemed to discover and name it.” He drained a demitasse of green tea like a giant slurping a thimble. “You ask about Pluto. I say Pluto gives birth to the present epoch. I say that the Sun itself is inhabited. I think its core is teeming with creatures, all in an exalted state. Not necessarily higher, though. Souls exist on the Sun in their own occasion
as we do
here.” He stopped to consider where to take us next.

“Souls come to worlds for specific reasons based on karma. Ours is the green planet, the realm of growth; here, uniquely, creatures transform themselves by their work. It is a precious opportunity, but it exacts a price; that is, if we squander it. Such is our desperate situation, the reason we cannot dawdle. Your professors don’t see
it, so they fulfill their etymology. They profess—about nothing in particular, nothing that finally matters. They go on and on as if we had time unto eternity.”

He paused to order main dishes, selecting for us too, and then picked up where he had left off.

“We have very little time, almost no time at all, and the Moon is waiting to gobble us up, to trap us in habitual motion. In truth, we live our lives in an instant, effect a transmutation or not, vanish into darkness if we fail. That is the next task for you two—to live—now that you have declared yourself apart from the monster.”

Then he asked us about dreams and I answered with interpretations from Jung as well as Freud. “Good basic training,” he attested, “but this is still the Western dream you are talking about, the dream that stands
for
something. I am talking about a pure act of dreaming that does not have to be subservient to any system of symbols. Dreaming is no different from ‘lifing’—that’s an American Indian testament, though they didn’t name it as such, they experienced it directly. Dream is its own mystery, its own logos, not the product of some professional establishment. Your dream tonight might be Freudian, or Jungian, but only if you interpret it as such. It could also be an utterly unknown message from an unknowable intelligence, perhaps your own, or a landscape infused from a higher dimension. Remember Blake: make your own system or be enslaved by another’s.” Joby started to object, but he finished the conceit himself. “Unfortunately Blake was enslaved by his own system.”

“Don’t dreams carry the meanings of past events?” Lindy asked. “Do you think Freud had it all wrong?”

“What about the archetypes?” I threw in. “Don’t they also shape dreams at a primal level?”

“We don’t even know if there is such a thing as an archetype. Jung is seductive, hence dangerous. He offers pompano so delicate they are hard to resist, but he too was enslaved by his own system. Meanings and symbols are only accouterments of a greater dreaming. But they are not the
fact
of dreaming. Dreaming is its own fact, just like lifing. What is this life a symbol for? It’s not a symbol; it’s a life. Now eat. Let the gods nourish you.”

The arrival of dishes had interrupted our talk, as mu shu pork, broccoli beef, spare ribs, cashew prawns, and black mushrooms were tossed on the table without fanfare. Kelly praised each in turn with playfully flamboyant oblations, as he dished out generous helpings for all. We ate in relative silence.

“It is charming to be children when you are children,” he opined while counting out his cash and assuring us we were his guests. “But in America they want to keep you children forever.” He downed one last helping of tea. “Your professors are children—I mean, in terms of the true mages and avatars of the universe. Your parents likewise.” He slowly peered around the room as if to include its diners in his indictment; then he pointed to an unlikely gray-haired gent seated by the window and said under his breath, “I know that man.” After a pause during which I wondered what manner of new riddle this was, he added, “I’ve seen him in every Howard Johnson’s in the country.”

As we walked to the car, he continued the thread, “You have an opportunity to be more than parrots or pedants. Already Richard’s Halloween vision speaks to that, to a deeper truth. I see it in both of you. Stop writing fiction. Stop making up things and satisfying yourself with allusions. It’s not charming and inventive; it’s devious and evasive. Do you want to live lives of gossip, be raconteurs for your time on Earth? Do you want to dream and breathe this fraud of a civilization? Grow up! Become citizens of the cosmos.”

On the way back to Annandale he cited poetic and Gnostic masters, as he urged us to supplement our meager and modernistic educations with real texts, the titles of which he continued to compile on the back of an envelope, using the steering wheel as a writing surface while in vehicular motion.

At his apartment he offered to read to us from his work. In a hurry to get started north, we tried politely to resist, but he chided us for being Amherst and Smith drones and shooed us back into our seats. “What would your good professors think if you refused a reading from William Butler Yeats?”

I balked at being a captive audience, but he read like a jinni—Yeats was an understatement. He closed with a long poem called “The Alchemist” with lines as good as any I had ever heard: