Bones of the Barbary Coast
Read Bones of the Barbary Coast Online
Authors: Daniel Hecht
BONES
of the
BARBARY COAST
The Cree Black Series
City of Masks
Land of Echoes
Also by Daniel Hecht
Skull Session
The Babel Effect
Puppets
BONES
of the
BARBARY COAST
A CREE BLACK NOVEL
DANIEL HECHT
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2006 by Daniel Hecht and Christine Klaine
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hecht, Daniel.
Bones of the Barbary Coast : a Cree Black novel / Daniel Hecht.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59691-801-6
1. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. San Francisco Earthquake, Calif, 1906—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.E284B66 2006
813'.54—dc22
2005037130
First U.S. Edition 2006
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself?
—William Shakespeare,
Richard III
Contents
Introduction to
Stranger, Mirror: Crisis and Constructive Development
by Lucretia Black, Ph.D.
Fourth Annual Horizons in Psychology Conference
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
December 8, 2005
I
SHOULD STATE AT the outset that my experiences in San Francisco did not involve a supernatural entity or paranormal occurrence. My investigation into that unusual skeleton—the remains of a victim of the Great Earthquake of 1906, found in a lovely hilltop Victorian—ended as it began: an attempt to identify a particular human being and to learn more about his life, entirely through historical research and the study of his bones.
I was neither surprised nor disappointed. In fact, the majority of incidents I investigate do not involve actual paranormal phenomena. Most often, the reason is simply that there are none to be encountered: Reports of ghosts can derive from hoaxes, from mistaken interpretation of normal-world phenomena, or from psychological disturbances on the part of witnesses. Sometimes, too, my own sensitivities prove insufficient to determine whether a revenant is or is not present.
This should not be taken to mean that such efforts aren't instructive or don't carry risks for the investigator; my work on the San Francisco skeleton proved to be among the most meaningful and dangerous research projects I have ever undertaken.
I don't regard the absence of paranormal phenomena as "failure," because for me the real subject of any investigation is the human mind and the art of living. Most reports of hauntings, real or imagined, come from individuals in the process of some important life passage, some crucial psychological upheaval that derives from past experience and has profound implications for their lives henceforth. The paranormal crisis is nothing less than a paradigm collapse, which forces people to reassess their beliefs about the nature of the world and of human consciousness. These are often dangerous passages, but they are also full of positive potentials. The breakdown of habitual ways of viewing the self and coping with the world offers an unequaled opportunity for constructive personal development; properly managed, it can become a liberating and empowering turning point. For the observing psychologist, it constitutes a unique opportunity to understand what it is to be human, how our minds work, and what forces are operating below the horizon of our conscious thoughts and intentional actions.
Of course, paranormal phenomena are by no means the only catalysts for such a process. The discovery of the San Francisco skeleton proved a highly effective trigger, provoking both catastrophic and constructive development for all involved, myself included. In particular, my association with Cameron Raymond demanded a rigorous inspection of habitual assumptions and posed many questions that continue to challenge me. Likewise, the astonishing journal of Lydia Jackson Schweitzer provided a catalyst for what has proved to be an ongoing personal development process. I take comfort in knowing Lydia confronted similar issues, and came to similar conclusions, a century before me. As was common in her era, she was a skilled diarist; for me, to read about her joys and struggles was to discover a sister-spirit and was abundant recompense for the other frustrations of the case.
I am aware that my theory of psychology has been described variously by my peers as unusual, radical, renegade, or ridiculous. Though my graduate and postgraduate studies at Harvard were conventional, my experiences after the death of my husband proved to me that prevailing paradigms of human consciousness and behavior were insufficient to explain certain phenomena. I now believe that no theory of psychology can be complete unless it accommodates the reality that we are shaped to a considerable degree by relationships, in many forms, from the past and from beyond the grave. It must accept that fact that dying is a crucial developmental act for which we prepare, consciously or unconsciously, throughout our lives, and for which we are equipped by nature to "manage" as personalities. (Freud's latter year emphasis upon thanatos, the death wish, as a primary engine of human behavior demonstrates his emerging awareness of the important role of death in personality formation.)
Finally, just as psychology has had to adapt to the influence of the "harder" sciences of evolutionary biology and neuroscience, it will ultimately have to accommodate physics—including the bizarre domains of quantum mechanics and chaos theory.
From the start, I have relied on deep, empathic identification with others; in most cases I do not "see" ghosts or fragmentary personality residuals so much as "become" them. Similarly, I identify powerfully with my (living) clients and others met during an investigation; I absorb their characteristics, I feel for them and with them, I lose myself in them. I suddenly notice myself—or, worse, don't notice—speaking with another person's accent, feeling his or her arthritic joints, taking on a stranger's worldview, using gestures that are not mine. This is essential to understanding my clients' experiences, but it is a dangerous tendency. I have been able to maintain a clear sense of myself as a separate personality only through a great deal of discipline, assisted by the vigilance of my colleagues at Psi Research Associates, Joyce Wu and Edgar Mayfield.
Whatever its neurological mechanisms, this extreme counter-transference has been among the most difficult aspects of my process to explain or to defend as a therapeutic practice. In part, I blame this difficulty on the fact that we lack a vocabulary for such experiences, that our terminology is limited by the reductively mechanistic bias that currently dominates Western scientific thought.
Ultimately, however, I can't speak objectively of these experiences because objectivity is an inadequate tool. Human consciousness is not inherently objective. We experience our lives as vast, elusive, unending, and hugely variable subjectivities; life is knowable, explicable, or communicable only by the
sharing of subjectivity.
We do have a word for such sharing or merging:
communion.
In Latin, the term means simply "mutual participation"; yet for us it also conveys, appropriately, profound spiritual and moral connotations. My communion with the subjective lives of others is therefore not readily susceptible to the scalpel of analysis; nor, arguably, ought it to be.
It is certainly true that my approach has led to unusual experiences, but I can honestly say it has never been my desire to seek out the bizarre or anomalous manifestations of the paranormal world for their own sake. The normal world is frightening, unpredictable, and dangerous enough to satisfy any such urge, if I had one, as the San Francisco investigation amply demonstrates. On either side of the dimensional mirror, my only goal has been to understand the truth; to better know what it means to be human—what we are, at bottom, what we are capable of, what moves us. What the mind really is, how it really works; what abides inside us in the places we cannot observe. What matters most about being, for our brief allotment of days, alive and aware.
And, yes, whether we are worthy beings or not; or, as Lydia Schweitzer so well distilled the question, how we choose to be worthy beings, or do not.
It is in this context that I present my case study of the psychosociodynamics surrounding the person known, officially, only as "UCSF Unknown Human Remains 3024." I proceed knowing that many of you will remain skeptical of my approach and conclusions; but I also know that others are willing to accompany me on this foray into distant and exotic territory. I take comfort that you, too, understand that the world is a far more mysterious place than we often assume, and that we live among what is, in many ways, a society of strangers.
Yes: Look to your left and to your right, right now, and you will see a stranger. Who is she? What motivates him? What past shaped her, what future awaits him? You cannot know.
If you find this an uncomfortable proposition, please remember—again, as Lydia pointed out—that stranger is also more familiar, more intimately understood by each of us, than we are typically willing to admit.
From this, I think, we can derive some measure of hope and solace.