New Moon (77 page)

I felt baffled and spooked then because terror and joy, persecution and revelation occurred
at a single vibration
in variant pitches. Change the modulation and one, remarkably, turned into the other.

This new paradigm was ludicrous, absurd, though it rang true, if not strictly as the thing it signified. It was the link between the phantom evanescence of a dungeon-like form and a mature trope grounded in molecular physics and Rosicrucian magic. What fused the phenomenologies was Kelly’s living citation.

But can we
really
be damned to unstable helium, the debris of our lives to brighten alien homes and draw moth-like creatures to our flame? Was that the stranger in paradise? Did this make
any sense at all?

I was bursting with new knowledge, but there was no way to use it, to share it, to give it life in the ordinary world. What could I tell my friends—that we risked being turned into electrons unless we acted at once? How could I get this news even to the core of my own being, live it, practice it, when I seemed barely to survive from moment to moment? Half the time I felt empowered and guided, the other half about to fall apart.

One night at dinner Lindy confided, almost off-handedly, that Steve had dropped her again, “I guess he didn’t think I was worth altering his career plans,” she said sadly. “After all, my life as an artist didn’t measure up to his mentor Louis Kahn. All we did anyway was argue about Vietnam; he said I was the first person he met who was against the war.” She paused to consider how much she wanted to confess. Then she decided to trust me. “When I asked him why he didn’t write me all winter from Italy, he just shrugged. He’s headed to an architecture firm in New York. Probably he’ll find prettier and more sophisticated creatures there than me. Oh well!”

It didn’t mean that she and I could pick up our romance together because she stood by her negative view of Aspen. “It took us such a
long time to learn to do love, but we do hate rather easily. Can’t you see? It’s perverse to try to make something happen that’s not there.”

She called what we were lacking “love,” but she meant that we didn’t have the quick chemical attraction that she shared with Steve and Jim, what Kelly had called ecstasy. We were a difficult, thorny couple.

“I don’t see hate,” I said. “I see only anger, frustration, and the pain of transformation. Remember Kelly: enstasy.”

“Rich, sometimes you are maddening.”

“Always I hope.”

And Shelley:
“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity…. ”

In anthropology Professor Pitkin assigned a surprisingly Gurdjieffian book,
The Phenomenon of Man.
Its author, a Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, described an esoteric fire that imbued the hydrogen of galaxies and stars in the formation of the universe. Fecundating in the plasma of cooling stars, it crystallized on those suns’ planets. Its divine embers incubated creatures on Earth at its lava phase, endowing the newly whelped orb with an incipient biosphere. Because it swirled in the same dust-cloud as its sun-star, Earth inherited the Sun’s latency of Soul presence, transferred timelessly from the Tree of Life to galaxies and nebulae. Gravitational and chemical activity dispatched the letters of the Hebrew alphabet into the monadnock/oxbow zone: the uprise of continents, the filling of oceanic basins—the Spirit of God moving upon the Face of the Waters.

Here too was a Gurdjieffian posit but with an opposite conclusion. In keeping with Christian tradition, Teilhard proposed universal salvation: Christ’s sacrifice had changed the cosmic rules.

Teilhard traced the evolution of
Homo sapiens
to the emergence of Divine Spirit from matter’s interior, which was “the ‘psychic’ face of that portion of the stuff of the cosmos enclosed from the beginning of time within the narrow scope of the early Earth.” In the global ocean, atoms and molecules, cooling and liquefying into myriad shapes, stirred the forerunners of DNA helices. Solar spirits came
rushing into being as protists and plastids. Their bacterial lattices spread across a volcanic surface, forming a biosphere. Cooled by interstellar blackness, the planet moistened, and cells sublimated from solar particles into its hydrosphere.

As Earth transferred its molecular information into protein threads and tissue motifs, plant and animal bodies coalesced. Then the organs of larger animals deliquesced from those, as more intricate sheaths matriculated out of predecessor lattices.

So the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, and the moving creatures that hath life—the fowl that flyeth above the earth; the great whales in the deep; and every other living presence that moveth, Adam, Eve, and their progeny—were brought forth from starry embers after their kind.

This was the Ray of Creation in action. The tarot Sun—its inner star, Kether—was glimmering anew and apart as a living entity on a planet: first a worm, then a fish, then a shaggy wolf, each of them a particle of the solar body.

The Phenomenon of Man
turned the universe inside-out, making the spangled night as sentient and beneficent as it appeared: “In that fragment of sidereal matter,” Teilhard wrote of the primordial solar cloud, “as in every other part of the universe, the exterior world must inevitably be lined at every point with an interior one.”

Now I began to view the celestial firmament as what it was: a gauze refracting a transdimensional cosmos.

Jung’s archetypes and Darwin’s natural selection ran together. The hominids of our physical-anthropology text, those early man-ape predecessors of ourselves, ancestors of the Greek
anthropos
(from whom the name “anthropology” came), were stirred to language and culture by recollections of their own antecedent lives as hydrogen inside the stellar field, not the hydrogen physicists know but Gurdjieff’s primordial vibrations that purled it and other elements from a higher vibration. To Australopithecus and Pithecanthropus, consciousness was a more anterior part of themselves, their innate intelligence and design principle, singing so deeply they couldn’t hear it, or could
only
hear it. None of this could have happened,
reasoned Teilhard,
none of it at all,
if it were not already present in the solar cloud.

The angels of Gethsemani were back … birds delivering messages of stars. I continued to hear their cries as language, closer to Attic Greek than English, subatomic mantras that could not be translated into
any
human language. But that’s why the flocks of the sky kept repeating them.

In the horn of 1965 those visions were my life-blood and consolation. As long as I believed them I was safe, so I carried them with me, reinventing my reality every hour, in fact every moment. I kept salvaging all that was lost, that threatened to lapse into unbearable memories playing
Prélude, Fugue and Variation
as a reminder and balm. Gaston Bachelard in his cottage in Dijon marked the same epitome and lived by it: “The unknown God is striving to know Himself through creatures of his making, to become through us what He has eternally desired to be.” If so, what could finally go wrong? I might as well give it my best shot too.

When Stevie Wonder sang,
“There’s a place in the sun,”
he meant the real Sun, that dense cocoon of hydrogen souls:

Yes! What else would give them shape, would extend them in such a reverie of twigs and flowers?

I tried to feel this, trust it, ride it to safety. I was on a binge all right, but I needed to sustain it. I wrote my first Romantic Poetry term paper on “Blake, Gurdjieff, and Hopi Indian Verbs,” citing Navaho sand-painting, alchemy, tarot, and theories of etymology. My professor, Bill Heath (no relation to Roy), gave me an A.

Then I picked up a science-fiction novel, Arthur Clarke’s
Childhood’s End,
in which dreaming children unlock our current evolutionary
cul de sac
and, guided by the Oversoul, cross galactic dimensions into a new universe. For Pitkin’s next anthropology assignment I synthesized their quantum leap with Hopi myths of the Fourth World and my own “White Goddess”-informed theories of the origin of speech—and got another A. Not only was this
state of revelation sustaining, it was backed by my teachers. Then I submitted “Religion as a Coded Language” to Professor Heath under the epigraph:

Heath wrote: “You have moved from your prior papers to a more comprehensive view and closer to the burning center and point of origin. I have enjoyed reading what you have written. I cannot and will not dispute your vision. I salute you.”

So far so good—but there was a long, long way to go.

Earlier that term I had reminded President Plimpton of his offer to help and he responded with swift, unexpected generosity: a grant from the Eastman Kodak fund to support both publishing a second issue of
Io
and running an arts series at Phi Psi. I immediately set to work with my housemates.

Kelly’s salon provided plenty of potential poets, and Nelson and I selected films from the experimental Filmmakers’ Cinematheque catalogue, home to both Brakhage and Anger. After filling three months worth of dates, we printed a calendar and posted it on campus and at nearby colleges.

Our first event was an evening of Kenneth Anger films. The Phi Psi living room was packed. As folks continued to stream in and collect in the back, I had to borrow chairs from Chi Phi next door.

After I made an announcement about upcoming films and reading, the audience quieted, and Tripp set the projector running. On the screen flashed Anger’s motorcycle classic,
Scorpio Rising,
Ricky Nelson’s voice backgrounding credits studded on a leather jacket:

In New York I had been intimidated by Anger’s homoerotic rites and sadistic violence, the hovering of real-life cops on the outskirts. Now, after a dose of octaves and hermetic alphabets, I saw matters differently. The cyclists of my birth-sign were not only the fascist warriors they imagined themselves—the unwitting enactors of a Crowleyite masque—they were abeyant planets of astrology, blind meteors cast through the cosmos at ungovernable speeds.
Fools rush in,
for sure … all of us
… my heart before my head.

What other choice was there in a universe doomed to detonate but that had transubstantiated itself alchemically from Kether, the most hidden and sublime of all hidden and sublime things? Or—okay math-physics—from a hot, dense crumb. No difference! What other premise could sustain us in a prison formed by an illusion of time and matter at the speed of light?

Precepts from my prior term’s Hindu philosophy course resonated with Claudine Clark and her backup girls on
Scorpio’s
soundtrack as they doo-wopped,
“I see the lights, / I see the party lights, / red and blue / ann-nnd green.”
That was the Ray of Creation crossing ethereal landscapes, springing into habitation zones as it met resistance at decisive thresholds—red, blue, and green—giving rise to unpredicated vistas. The Vedic truth-paradox chimed all the way back to my freshman-year buddy Syed Zaidi, now in India: “Somehow everything
does
exist, somehow it does
not
exist, and somehow it is indescribable. This is the seventh mode, by way of simultaneous affirmation and negation.” My perennial mode too: esoteric transmission, negative capability, spontaneous regeneration.

Anger perceived our need to break out of the worldly thrall, via sex, drugs, revolution; swastikas, bikes, magic spells, finally death. That was why his Christ was led on a donkey to the sounds of Little Peggy March,
“I love him, I love, I love him, / and where he goes I’ll follow…. ”
At our carnal tier of creation it was all the same rush to get high—the orange cocaine surge of the cyclists tinting reality, their orgy in Halloween drag; the Nazi checker game, the fatal race,
Christ restoring sight to the blind man … they were transmutations, miracles all …, and
“I will follow him!”

Yes, my heart shouted. Yes, Scorpio. Yes, Teilhard, Stevie Wonder, Pithecanthropus! Simultaneous affirmation and negation for sure.

At the party after the films a bearded boy named Black, a bigshot writer two classes behind me, came up to Lindy and offered to publish her poems through a small press he was starting. She drifted off, talking with him.

I had always thought of Black as a seductive devil, his writing metallic and pretentious. He was the prototypical snazzy dresser, self-proclaimed new wave—a kind of living plutonium. We had turned down his nihilistic fiction for
Io.
Now he was out to do what men in rivalry always do: steal the universe.

I heard about him next when I called Lindy to tell her that Kelly’s reading was set for November 3rd, my birthday. Suddenly she had a visitor and asked me to hold on. It was Black; he had come to pick up her poems.

“Maybe they’re just a ruse,” she wondered aloud. “Maybe it’s me he’s trying to pick up.”

A week later I drove to Smith to ferry her to the reading. She was waiting downstairs with a birthday present. I read the card first. It told me to be gay, not tragic, to enjoy what we had together, not to ruin it by wanting it to be more than it was. The gift was a bedspread with a brown print of ancient armies moving across it, plus a tan knit tie and a gold oval tie-clip.

Back at Amherst she insisted I put on the tie, so I did. She hugged me, gave me a quick kiss, then laughed, pulling churlishly away. “Let’s not be late. I couldn’t bear to miss their reaction to the first sight of Kelly.”

A wall-to-wall audience had gathered upstairs in the Octagon, a small tower that overlooked the highway on the edge of campus. Almost a hundred people filled a lounge that was used to host visiting poets. This was the home field of Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish and, though most members of the English Department
condemned Kelly’s visit, they were obligated, perhaps also curious, to attend.