New Moon (72 page)

In my life after college I would try to reclaim other things I cared about but had given short shrift or missed entirely: physics, competitive ice hockey, hardball, astronomy, biology, swaths of world literature, another language, a social identity, guileless male bonds. Attempting a young man’s rites of passage as a middle-aged and older civilian wasn’t the same as doing them at the proper age in a sequestered setting, but it had to pass. For much of my Amherst career I had been that kid from Bill-Dave toting his baseball glove in the snow. As long as I needed to convert primal totems, I had scant time for liberal arts.

I was still on a vision quest, swapping courses and extracurricular activities for rudiments of magic, alchemy, and divination. I needed to commute demons and their corrosive imagery to breathe at all or have space inside me, one day perhaps to shoot a puck again and study the universe with equanimity.

In Watercolor we were given large sheets of cold-pressed paper and taught to moisten it and then dab or drip pigment. That was how I copied the forsythia bushes of New England spring. I had never imagined myself painting before, but my initial attempt brought back the April hill on which we read our work for Mr. Ervin, a lemon brush tinting moist white fibers with a guileless time.

I was inhabiting the oracle issued on a corollary spring day a year prior, deriving its fathomless chimera. So far had I come in a solar circuit that the cumulus-strewn azure and glacial tarn were already ancient and occult. That swimming hole held a sphinx, and its remote beckoning had become the metronome of my existence.

I felt nostalgia for things that had never happened, a bottomless depth in myself that vibrated with the mystery and poignancy of the world. And it was yellow this time, not blue: lemon and gold yellow, the basis of every deck, secular and sacred, that had been sealed or encrypted, whose bittersweet intimation girded my life.

It was there in Central Park when I sleigh-rode on Daddy’s back, there as I caught the taut cowhides he lobbed.

The irrepressible joy, the desire to know, to
be
what I knew.

It was there as Uncle Paul led a child into the tabernacle of Yankee Stadium and summoned Gil McDougald across the field, and years later looking down from the subway el into unknown territories. The latency, the clue in the cinders.

A premonition of not just cosmic but soul expanse.

It was there at Chipinaw amidst whining wasps and in the tang of mown fields, and Viola Wolfe’s studio where austerities of fox trot and waltz were imposed in lieu of the sacred boy-girl dance, and at the shimmering Grossinger’s pool when a teenager, awash in qualms and anticipation, sought entry to a longing he couldn’t catechize.

The reverie, the unaccountable premonition of sacredness and loss.

It reverberated down corridors of Horace Mann, as a novice wandered between lifetimes, past and future casting each other’s cryptic veil. And esoteric forsythia sprang into fire across field and vale.

That curious twining of dread and desire that makes everything
possible and indispensable.

Drawn anew, the Six of Cups proffered a turn of fate, beyond innocence and childhood rambles. The unknowable forces of Creation, mine and the universe’s, were converging on a small spiral in the Milky Way where two of us had commenced some twenty years prior and almost seven hundred leagues apart: Denver gal, New York boy; now fledgling woman, fledgling man sharing a ceremony in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

I was painting my own saffron trump.

I began dressing in the way Lindy wanted. I bought dungarees and turtlenecks, learned to drink coffee, tried to smoke her cigarettes and finally compromised on a pipe. It was an unfamiliar ritual, stuffing in the tobacco and igniting it. It created a rich, fiery aroma I associated with Dr. Friend, but it lasted only a month.

Unfamiliar rituals were what I needed. The past offered only a sense of smallness and self-loathing. Soon enough my mother would meet my girlfriend and thank her—with nothing short of amazement—for going out with me. That’s how they thought of me: a weirdo, a misfit—troubled little Richie. But to myself I was a maker of ceremonies, a radical artist, an individuating hero. No wonder I wanted to rebuild my associations from scratch—Joan Miró:
Women, Birds, Stars,
“Courage in a dragonfly”; Charles Ives: polytonality, symphony in D minor; Mahler: the muffled drum; Melville: “the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things”; dark coffee; Brakhage:
Dog Star Man;
Gertrude Stein: “one must dare to be happy”; John Keats: “negative capability,”
“To what green altar, O mysterious priest.”
Every day new. Kelly:
Tomorrow possible because it is….

Helene wrote a letter pleading for me not to drop her. Helene? For a moment I couldn’t remember who she was.

I was midway in my leap.

I stopped writing novels. I stuck my reams of confessional prose into cartons and forgot about them.

My guides were Winnebago shamans and Celtic shape-changers,
not Bellow’s shamanic caricatures. I intended to blast through Grossinger’s to “The Twilight Zone” or Jack Finney’s enchanted “third level” beneath New York’s subway lines. For Miss Carver this had been a nonstarter—she wanted Henderson’s mock sorcerers, voodoo frogs, and allegorical lions with their social-parody agenda. She preferred the
merely
ironical profundity of a literary device. But I was appalled by Bellow’s spiritual shallowness and self-entitled cultural theft.

It didn’t matter that I was a novice poet. I wanted to remake myself through Kelly, Brakhage, Olson, and projective verse: art as the highest activity of the mind, your relation to God and the Universe. I wanted to run as fast as I could from Catherine Carver, and I did:

Then I wrote my Bob Kuzava poem, throwback to a kid listening to the seventh game of the 1952 World Series, his first.

On weekends Lindy and I ranged farther. We visited an art museum in Worcester for an Australian Aborigine show. Then Boston. We collected Polachek at his apartment and went to hear Harvey Bialy read with Allen Ginsberg and some young Harvard poets. Afterwards everyone was invited to Ginsberg’s apartment. A party was in progress; a dog gave birth in the corner. We stood to the side, interested but not part of it, then returned to the relative innocence of Western Mass.

The following weekend we drove to New York and stayed a night with my family. For all the angst I put into that meeting, the time was uneventful. My mother and Lindy had their tête-à-tête.

At a raunchy theater in the East Village we attended a late-night Kenneth Anger retrospective. The crowd was testy, police cars patrolling up and down the block, officers staring down those entering. The films were a blend of homosexual fantasies, motorcycle orgies, and Crowleyite rituals, but Brakhage had assigned
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
and
Scorpio Rising
and we were under his aegis.

During spring vacation we drove to the Hotel. My father’s house was empty except for us. While puffy clouds floated above the golf course, we studied in a rowboat. The air was barely warm, a few turtles visible on rocks along the shore. Lindy was taking a course
on Sixteenth Century Poetry, so read to me from Thomas Carew:
“The warm sun thaws the benumbed earth,
/
And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth
/
To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree
/
The drowsy cuckoo and the humble-bee.”

It was a lush idyll—beers at the bar, dinners of matzoh ball soup, steak, and fries, capped with different flavors of sherbet and chocolate or lemon sponge cake.

We continued to Bard. Kelly had tendered an invitation to visit him while school was out, and he provided us a bare room in the empty infirmary. That night she stared down at me like a rider on a horse and said with a cheery laugh, “There, Rich, no longer a virgin.” I felt oddly clinical, a post-sensual coldness and wish to get myself back. I had wanted this for so long, but it was another thing entirely, not the tantalizing forest of vines, more a combination of mythical sex and actual intimacy, a dance of man and woman bones I hadn’t yet learned.

The next morning, driving across New York to Connecticut to see Brakhage show his films at Yale, the experience opened inside me. A calm, almost pleasurable nausea blossomed from my belly like a lotus, so that I had to be neither powerful nor well, just cozy as she zipped through sun-shade patches of trees and houses. I felt less as though I had become a man, more that I was a kid again, safe and whole, the heater blowing warmth, the sky an unreal robin’s egg blue. I turned on the Mets opening game … an extra-inning single winning it for them.

Why can’t it be like this
all the time,
Stan?

In the weeks that followed, I discovered unhappily that it can’t. We lived out the prophecy that making love would become a deterrent, not a touchstone. We were stuck back in the blue room, and I didn’t have the gumption or pizzazz to keep starting over, to woo her with confidence and grace. I wanted to have that closeness always, not because it was earned or even pleasurable but because it sealed the promise. I was running perhaps five years ahead of myself, hoping to skip the shoals that lay in between. I didn’t want to become grim and militaristic like Schuyler, but I would have done well to heed
his cautionary tale.

I made her a map of the house in which we would live: the bedrooms of our children, the darkroom, the attic with its telescope, the garden. She began talking about how we were getting too cozy—that I was assuming the relationship rather than letting it develop. As she stomped out of the blue room one night, I lay there, drowning in my ashes. She returned, furious at my self-pity: “I hate men who drool!” It certainly would … in the wash.

The shadow of childhood crept over me like a pall, not then, once upon a time—because that was all dead and gone—but now, in the present, in the form of strictures and agonies it gave rise to. I knew deep down I couldn’t just keep climbing; soon enough I would tumble back. I knew this and yet couldn’t help myself.

She wanted to be free again—it happened so fast I didn’t know where it came from.

She said, Whoa! Let’s stop seeing each other for a while. I need to breathe. You’re holding on too tight.

Familiarity had indeed bred something akin to contempt.

Earlier that spring, provoked by political satire from Phi Psi, Amherst’s Fraternity Council had issued a series of punitive directives, requiring our House to make more conventional uses of its tuition-sourced budget, including a regular homecoming band and a publication. At our next meeting the House jug band was deeded official status, and $100 was turned over to me to put out a literary magazine. At first I balked, but the idea of launching a four-college journal was already in the air locally.

Even before the fraternity council’s directive, Kelly had urged Lindy and me to start our own magazine as a way to get ourselves affiliated in the larger ’hood—he felt that young writers should make their debut in the company of made warriors and mages. Each visit to Annandale, he gave us the newest editions of
matter.
Those goldenrod and blue-green pages were priceless, hot off the mimeo press with the recent work of avatars.

When I told Kelly about the Phi Psi edict, he suggested that the fraternity-council magistrates were the unwitting tool of my spirit
guides—Crowley magick-talk of the sort we did all the time. He proposed that we subvert their intentions and use my speech as
Io
’s opening salvo: “It’s channeled from your own higher self anyway, so it can herald your first serious public undertaking.”

Lindy offered to handle Smith if we did it. We found co-editors at Mount Holyoke and UMass. Then, since Phi Psi’s tiny allotment was hardly adequate, I enlisted house members to traipse from shop to shop in Amherst (and when the ploy proved successful, Northampton and Belchertown), begging ads from bookstores, clothiers, art galleries, optometrists, gas stations, and of course the Lord Jeff Inn and Wiggins Tavern. All of these establishments had budgets for community involvement.

After weeks of soliciting manuscripts, we laid out thirty pages of writing and artwork, including poems from Chuck Stein, Harvey Bialy, Lindy, and Dona to which we added a bonhomie sent on request by science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, some notes on psi phenomena from a classmate, and the text of a pamphlet handed me by a stranger in Greenwich Village and blaming all mankind’s woes on a comet.

But the magazine’s name eluded us. Then while re-reading my poem of the previous spring, I found the moon Io circling Jupiter. The idea of such a short title—a line and a circle—delighted both Nelson and me, him as a minimalist and me as a crossword-puzzle/“moons of the solar system” buff. Using discarded window screening from the attic, he made a surface of mesh, sprinkled it with mothwings from the bowl of a lamp, added washers and nuts, smeared the whole thing with India ink, and pressed it on a piece of paper. He thought that the resulting image was perfect, but on my insistence he took a fountain pen and etched a pictograph of Jupiter in the still-wet ink. “Ever the literalist, Grossinger, making me deface my impeccable screen art with a dopey cartoon of a planet!”