New Moon (76 page)

I called Lindy afterwards, across the time line, to tell her about Welton and Elsie, Kelly, and the great reading that night. She gave me her flight number and said I could pick her up if I wanted, but—no trips to Kelly’s or Grossinger’s—she was going straight to Smith. She added that Frodo would stay in Denver with her family and have a decent home.

The next morning I drove back to Amherst and moved into Phi Psi. My room was the same single Jon had had sophomore year.

I needed two more English courses to compete the requirement for a major, so I signed up for both Romantic and Modern Poetry. Otherwise, I followed Kelly’s injunction to study real things: Biological Anthropology, African Folklore (which convened at Smith), and Attic Greek.

Embarking on a new language, I began by learning its alphabet— alpha, beta, gamma; xi and psi; mu and omega—ancient letters that put me back with the white goddess at the origin of language. Next I memorized basic words:
“Logos”:
speech;
“anthropos”:
man;
“hodos”:
road;
“angelos”:
messenger;
“thalatta, thalattes”:
sea;
“klopes, klopos”:
thief. My Greek declensions and conjugations, though comprised of new hieroglyphs, bore the templates of Latin ones which I had studied for years with Mr. Metcalf.

From Kelly’s reading list I selected
The Holy Kabbalah,
which resurrected another primeval alphabet with childhood resonance. Hebrew letters, wrote Arthur Edward Waite, emanated from the Mind of God in the Creation of the Universe. Beth, gimmel, and lamed, a church, a camel, and an ox, respectively, were also the flames behind the lights Jonny and I lit on the menorah. They spelled words on one level; on another they embodied the ongoing genesis of matter and spirit into form. As primordial symbols, they continued to spill into the world moment by moment, as wavelengths of light, as molecules, as cells, as tarot keys, as archetypes, as stations on the Tree of Life. Kether, the Crown, was the Apex of Creation, the initial frequency of matter. Yesod formed the base
of the autonomic nervous system. Chesed (kindness) fused God’s love for His Creation with Creation’s adoration of Him.

These alphabetic shapes, harbingers of subatomic particles, were originally entrusted to Adam by the angel Raziel. In Eden he probed their mystery as well as their novelty—a forbidden act. When he and Eve were banished for their crime—not the biblical cover story of a snake and an apple but the breach of Pandora’s jar and release of its bottomless darkness into this world of shadows—he smuggled them into their own miasma. He lost them in its wilderness. Then the angel Raphael restored them to him, so he passed them on to his son Seth.

Meanwhile a reality of their making had grown up around his and Eve’s descendants, a universe of stars and planets. A different cosmos issued from the offspring of Adam’s wet dream, his assignation with the night spirit Lilith. It is uncertain whether we are Eve’s posterity, Lilith’s, or both.

On Mount Sinai, Moses was given two sets of commandments: The External Law and The Secret Doctrine. The first he communicated to the Hebrews. The tablets bearing the latter, in a brouhaha of mock rage at the people’s idolatry of a Golden Calf, he smashed while transmitting their essence to the elders as the
Zohar.
Waite likewise bequeathed two tarots: the fortune-telling deck Chuck and I used and the more esoteric keys divulged only by Case.

Waite supplied an alternative view of my own situation too. Through the summer Lindy and I had been performing a Qabalistic act, not just as lovers but as adepts forging an angelic shape on another plane: the
Shekhinah.
Despite our bouts of estrangement and alienation and our current separation, we were still creating that form. It wasn’t a matter of sex or girlfriend/boyfriend; it was whether our subtle bodies were compatible and karmically attuned to the task. If so, we were irrevocably engaged; we could quarrel, be totally at odds, be with other people,
while sustaining the sacred exercise.

Love and sex are primordially sorcery and transmutation, rituals with astral implications like Adam’s confusion (or conflation) of Eve and Lilith—that’s why they feel so powerful. If we had planted real seeds, our dyad was alive and matriculating somewhere in the upper
spheres. If we hadn’t, the summer in Aspen would wash away and be forgotten by us anyway—a wastrel fantasy and faded dream. We would move on to other lovers and destinies.

That we were secular American kids did not absolve us of witchcraft. Kelly had made that plain: living together was an alchemical act. Any bond of real love, of Soul connection, actuated the Supernal Work, the Union of Jehovah and Elohim. It couldn’t help it. The mystery of Eros reenacted the Divine Mystery of Creation, the Union with God—God the Divine Androgyne. Waite proposed as much in ecclesiastical rhetoric: “When it is said that the Blessed Vision is the sight of
Shekhinah
and the contemplation of her Divine Face, we are to understand apparently that the union of sister-souls is under her eyes and in her presence.”

This one text redeemed my failed Zionist training—the Zohar allowed me to embrace being born a Jew at last, to claim a heritage ultimately so profound that it could express itself coequally in Albert Einstein, Sandy Koufax, and Bob Dylan. As fissioning yellow yods danced spark-like in the turquoise sky of the Moon card, two hermetic systems fused, revealing the sheer depth and complexity of Creation.

I realized suddenly that Eden was a state of being, a mode of perception. We were kept out of Paradise not by some Biblical illustrator’s scimitar of archangelic steel but the finer blades of synapsing neurons. Our bodies incarnated our state of exile; that’s how Adam and Eve got themselves kicked out, by entering the shadow play of molecules and cells. The instrument of Brakhage’s cinema was likewise the sword of perception converted in the frames-per-second blink of each montage, an atonal series of such montages disclosing a secret landscape oscillating within this one. It
can
be paradise all the time, if only we would snap our coma. We’d be back in Eden in a heartbeat, we were already there.

Sister souls meant soulmates! But was this a runaway grasping-at-straws, a mere wishful indulgence—or a true-blue vision? I didn’t begin to know, but I had to find out. There was nothing else in play, no other course through the darkness. If I was neurotic and self-important, that would come out in the wash too.

Elsie was back living with Welton, so when I returned to the City, she loaned me the keys to her empty apartment. I went straight there so as not to encounter my family. In my state of pilgrimage I could bide no more naysaying, no derision or sacrilege.
I
was the only allowable heretic now. Night fell on a strange city that was finally mine:

All the next day I memorized Greek vocabulary and declensions, read tales of African gods, stayed true to sacred alphabets, and awaited the plane.

My sister-soul appeared down the Kennedy corridor with her handbag. I ran to intercept her. She hugged me quickly and then stared. “Babe, you look as though you’ve been through hell.”

I nodded with a martyrish smile. Then I told her about Elsie’s place. “So,” she snapped “is everyone on your side?”

“They’re on
our
side.”

“I’m not an appendage of you.”

We didn’t stay in the City overnight. We drove straight up through Connecticut, wrangling about everything. I thought she was being needlessly belligerent to prove we weren’t any good. She countered that we were naturally contentious.

We argued about the events of the summer and even about how much we had argued. Then we argued about the war.

“We don’t even share the same opinion about Vietnam.” Steve had raised salient points she now itemized: What about the Red Chinese? What about stopping them before they got the bomb? What about the spread of Communism through Laos, Indonesia, and the Philippines?

“The famous domino theory,” I announced with mock surprise. “How original!”

My attitude, she said, merely demonstrated how different we
were. “We don’t have the same politics. I’m not a pacifist. Are you? Would you refuse to fight in any war?”

“No, just this one.”

We stopped for hamburger, fries, and frappes at our usual Howard Johnson’s on the outskirts of Northampton where she made a case for remaining friends without being lovers. We could still do things together, just not as often and more low-key. On that gray evening I left her at Laura Scales with her suitcases and hastened back to Amherst.

I translated simple sentences, the mere sound of which lifted my spirits:
“hoti kai ho anemos kai he thalatta hupakooay aitoo.”
I learned the names of Ice Age glaciations (Gunz, Mindel, Riss, Wurm) and sites from Olduvai to Altamira and Lascaux where bones of ancient primates and the earliest humans had been found. I imagined the long mute dream at the beginning of our species—the contrapuntal dream of grasses and animals—transformed through tree alphabets and Greek stems into the songs of Shelley:
“And the green lizard and the golden snake / Like imprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.”

Kelly had proposed P. D. Ouspensky’s
In Search of the Miraculous
as the next phase in my initiation. It told of the author’s meetings with the Russian mystic Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, identified only as G. in the book. G. adduced a scale of music-like vibrations igniting the cosmos, exploding across gaps and tonal shifts to create stars and other, cooler realms. Our world was one of these zones, a frontier tonation in a vast, multidimensional symphony wherein notes louder and brighter than a million suns were transformed by compression into stones and waters, then grasses and life forms.

I recognized the stream flowing through the tarot, linking the landscapes from card to card. Stream or ray, numerical series or vibrations—these were metaphors for a hierarchy
generating and encompassing the universe.

In Ouspensky’s version, individual molecules are products of separate small shocks, cascading across this plane as they are captured in electromagnetic configurations; hence multiple hydrogens originate at different frequencies, from hydrogen 6 to hydrogen
12,288, with 384 being water and 192 breathable air. But there was a dark side. Whatever else they are doing or telling themselves they are doing, Gurdjieff warns us, creatures are under a rudimentary edict, they must alchemize souls out of gross matter, convert the ray of Creation before it is too late. Even plants and animals are called upon to transmute material energies into finer spiritual pulsations. They do this by nourishment, breath, emotion, and larval thought. Beings that do not forge souls out of corporeal stuff meet a sorry fate at death: their overly dense charge sinks into unstable configurations, becoming subatomic neutrinos and electrons. Their identity fissions and spins apart, damning them to illuminate the cosmos for eternity. First, though, their bioelectricity, their remaining vitality, is swallowed by the Moon and spit back out at a lower octave.

The master seemed to be telling Ouspensky—and Kelly, me—that we had been born into a trap. If we failed to get ourselves out, we would be sold into fire, doomed to light the void (as stars do) at our bodies’ extinction—eternal photons, never to be transmuted to spirit.

Gurdjieff’s portent echoed Kelly’s original warning: break with habitual action and common gossip or be consigned to oblivion, to supply the hydrogen of future universes for other souls.

There was no fallback position or escape from cosmic prerogative—become aware of the direness of our situation, and change—or be exterminated.

My visit to a frigid hut followed by a slapstick ride to a Chinese restaurant, seemingly expendable, mere diversions and borderline performances at the time—borderline whimsical, borderline crucial—were real
in the way they were designed to be.
I hadn’t understood the true amusement and dead seriousness of the occasion. Now, as if by post-hypnotic command, the sequence was re-initiating me from within. Having internalized, having assimilated what Kelly was preaching, having practiced it unknowingly in Aspen, now I was
experiencing it directly.

What was at stake had escalated almost preposterously. The game was Creation itself, the universe—but maybe it had always been.
Maybe that’s what the voice at the dungeon stairs was trying to tell me, why it sprang from Nanny’s necromancy and gave me the fright of my early life. It was a cosmic sounding buoy, a depth gauge, saying, “This is how far down the universe goes and what will be required of you in this lifetime. Match it and you have a fighting chance. Match anything less sober and grim and you will shipwreck one way or another on some hidden reef.”

Roused to untimely consciousness by my mother and Nanny, I needed to be
even more
terrified, to force myself to an amplitude of crisis I could resolve only by ego disintegration or a quantum leap.

A quantum leap it was! The dungeon stairs had awakened me to the horror of my situation but also to its possibility and hope, and in the only way I could be awakened—by gashing into a four-and-a-half-year-old’s reality state deep enough to get his attention. That’s what the voice behind the voice on the radio intended when it ambushed a fledgling mind. Whatever its intelligence or source, it provided rude captioning for an inchoate danger.

Sorry to say, grim and sober it had to be, given the perniciousness of the maze, the obstacles and trials ahead, the need for clarity and single-mindedness, the dazzle of so many false trails in the dark. Perhaps that was Nanny’s errand all along, even if she
hadn’t
left the radio on on purpose—why she was there in the first place. When the specter of dungeon stairs terrified a defenseless child, it was only trying to say, “Wake up this time around,
Frère Richard; everything
is at stake!”

The universe is operating at multiple tiers of decoy and mimicry, so caveats come in unlikely forms. A few years after the entrance of the “dungeon stairs” I heard spectral bars of “Stranger in Paradise” and I knew more or less what they meant—my rejoinder to my subway escort Neil’s riddle proved that—but I didn’t know what they meant
emotionally
.

The tune recalled the dungeon—the leitmotif of Hitzig with his morbid bag, a ballroom of partygoers on which a vampire-like visitation casts an eerie turquoise coma—
though the song said exactly the opposite.
It said kismet, Aphrodite, love at first sight. But a young consciousness reads the shifting winds of paradox unerringly and
takes heed:
“If I stand starry-eyed / That’s a danger in paradise.”
The world was paradise all right, and it was “one enchanted evening” over and over. But the stranger across that fancy room was a “macabre,” an alien in a woman’s body—and the vision of her was the terrible depth of one’s own soul.