New Moon (80 page)

A summons from the White Goddess herself! What an honor!

I warned myself that this might be more wishful thinking, a head trip, or, worse, the peak of a manic cycle. Certainly that was how I had been taught: Don’t give money to blind men; don’t trust strangers. But I had no choice; Kelly had left me none: I had to commend myself to angels and act.

The lights of traffic suddenly fizzed and bloomed into melody, a supernatural order of particles of which I was the core and ordering principle. I turned on the radio just in time to hear the confirming
song:

The Hotel loomed on the hill ahead, welcoming me always, its wayward son.

I was aswirl with messages. The doom I had felt was merely the veil, always had been, all my life. I was at the heart of a myth, and there was nothing except these lights and suds exploding all around me. This was the seventh mode, by way of simultaneous affirmation and negation

“She is my moon,” I whispered, “and he is the Blackness of my moon.”

At the Hotel I stayed for a night and a day, asking nothing more than the thing it was. I walked the golf course at dawn, sat by the dancing glitter lake … ate in the dining room, greeting everyone with warmth. There was no point in hiding or skulking anymore; I had to act with humility and honor every sentient creature.

In my heart I was back in Aspen, at last with Frodo, unafraid.

I found my father by the ice rink. I told him I might quit school. He stared at me vacantly, his bearded son—stared without recognition: “Do whatever you want. It doesn’t matter to me.” Then he turned and walked away. That was closure, but he stopped and, looking back at me, got in one more shot: “Go let those phony father figures Borkage and Kelly take care of you now.”

He was different from my mother, but it had come down to the same: apathy, disinterest, myopia. I was alone at a scope I hadn’t comprehended during all my prior AWOLs, rebellions, and apostasies. I had been alone since I left for college, in truth well before. It was a joke to think that they supported my matriculation, as anything. It was all image and rhetoric. So trapped were they in their own imbroglios they had no interest in or concern for another being. My friend Paul was right; they weren’t parents. I had none.

I felt a bone-deep shudder. The prospect ahead was terrifying, if I looked, but I didn’t regard the shattered past or project myself into a future. I was in the sacred fire.

I drove back to Amherst the next morning, telling myself to be true, to stay conscious, to finish the leap. I was near the edge of the abyss and would make it or fall.

I called Lindy several times that afternoon, and the next day, but she was never in (“And what if the door does not open…?”).

In the evening I went to hear a lecture by Timothy Leary, the messiah of redemption through drugs. I sat upstairs in Johnson Chapel and saw her down in front with Black.

“Maps,” Leary announced. “Someone must go out into the wilderness beyond the Mississippis of the mind, like Lewis and Clark, and tell us where the Indian priests are and what lands are inhabitable, what sorts of plants grow and what wisdom animals dwell there.” He was talking about the world of LSD, but I imagined other interior worlds our courage might find for us. The medicine herb by itself was forfeit; in naked flesh, fantastic realms lay unexplored.

He reminded us that while our elders were worried about the Russians and Sputnik we had ignored equally vast interior hemispheres. I thought, “Yes, all the years wasted on fizzled
Vanguard
rockets and visionless accelerated science courses, no care at all to real science—that any force in the Universe can be made into any other—which is the singular truth of existence.” I imagined our whole troubadour civilization paying homage to a goddess of masks and rings.

Then I took the magic of Leary under the moon and ran across the vast playing fields. I was part of them. I tumbled in the grass and dared the obstacle course to stop me. I climbed the rope, dove through the tire. I called out to Welton:
“I believe as you believe.”

I awoke the next morning on the cusp. I could see my beginning clearly from here. Nothing at all separated me from Dr. Fabian’s office or 1220 Park Avenue. I had no images, just the terminus of a line with two ends. I had to keep it that way, there was no margin or leeway left. That span became the locus of points between two
towns, Amherst and Northampton—no extraneous scenery, no impedance. I set the stream of matter flowing from one point to another. The whole cosmos rushed by me in a sutra of trees and houses and people. A fluvial loom swallowed landscape and led me to the next node.

I parked near the library and went loping across the campus, seeing everything in flashes and blobs, feeling the air as a force, respecting the presence of gravity. I imagined myself a leopard, with no mentality. I went to the magazine room, linguistics row, the letter “L.” I took down a journal, and opened to a page in the Xhosa language. I intoned its unutterable letters, trying to imagine what the spoken flow might sound like.

“Hello, kiddo.” She was standing beside me, smiling. She had come to the library too in response to the lecture, but she was looking in the parapsychology section, “P,” for a journal of psychedelics.

I told her I was at Leary’s talk also. I thought the answer was not drugs but prayer. She nodded.

I suggested we get some coffee and we walked onto Green Street, into a cafeteria. I had been through the rite of eight moons, the last one Black, and now a fine delicate crescent lit not the night but the astral sky.

The jukebox played,
“Sloopy, hang on”
from my quarter.
“Hang on, hang on.”
We ordered coffee and pie. She sat there looking at me, “Honey, I don’t know where I’ve been, but I missed you. I’m just glad you came back.”

This 2016 paperback of
New Moon
differs from the 1996 hardcover in restoring the text’s original shape. To get there I removed the last ninety-eight pages with their twenty-two years’ worth of events—all of “The Alchemical Wedding” and “Epilogue.” Then I rewrote the book’s core, fixing its internal chronology and filling in gaps. Without altering the basic story, cast, or skein of events, I added 170 pages to a shorter timeline (1944-1965). The result is, I hope, finer detail and deeper internalization: certainly more tarot, baseball, and psychoanalysis.

The hardcover had two main problems, not evident to me when I published it. First, its real narrative ended in 1965 (as this version does); the extension brought a shift in tone and voice and lost any real closure. Second, I was too cursory the first time, left too much unsaid. The stories were so melded to me that I didn’t realize how much context I needed to tell them. I spent more than twice as much time (about 1400 hours) rewriting them as I spent composing them in the first place.

What is
New Moon’s
origin?

In 1987 I began working on my all-but-forgotten high-school novel
Salty and Sandy.
A shapeless spool initiated in 1960 and abandoned in 1964, its status by then was a rubber-banded bundle of pages scotch-taped shut in a box that once held typing paper. I sliced the tape with a utility knife and pulled apart the snug fit. So much time had passed that the rubber bands had dried out, cracked, and melded in Braille-like characters to the title page.

As I encountered the manuscript through fresh eyes, two things jumped out at me. First, I was shocked by how overblown and cumbersome the writing was, especially given the praise it had garnered from teachers and editors of high degree. I wondered
how CC thought she and I could turn it into a volume publishable by Viking. It was indulgent and primitive, embarrassingly wussy and asshole in spots.

Yet the text was also guileless and profound, and conveyed the mystery of its times. It captured the imponderable depth and texture of the fifties and early sixties, an era usually disparaged as simplistic and banal in shows like
Leave it to Beaver
and
The Honeymooners.

The manuscript also lacked any sort of arc, ending abruptly after the teen tour (August 1962). I had endowed the tour with with undue significance, in part to memorialize Betsy, the “salty, sandy” girl, in part to fabricate a novel for Catherine Carver, my “hello-goodbye” editor at Viking who saw a gold mine in adolescent gossip. The two motives converged so that even I couldn’t tell the difference. My career goal depended on my romantic proposition, and vice versa.

I worked on
Salty and Sandy
for the next several years, trying to preserve its authenticity and sense of wonder while weeding out pretentiousness and unexamined teen obsessions. I made a new template by shrinking some sections and augmenting others. For instance, I cut an entire chapter, “The Prom and Rod Kanehl” (restoring it in this edition by a page of flashback), and I abridged the teen travelogue. I bolstered other items like my experiences with Dr. Fabian, Color War, and the end of Horace Mann. Then I added writings from college years (1962–1966), extending the timeline to November 1965. I concluded with my 1966 short story “New Moon,” adopting its title for the whole book because the manuscript was no longer
Salty and Sandy,
albeit raised from its chrysalis.

Through the process of revision I gave dramatic structure to a coming-of-age journey from my earliest memories to just before my twenty-first birthday.

Then in the early nineties I impulsively expanded
New Moon
by another five years, taking it to 1970 with the three-chapter section entitled “The Alchemical Wedding.” On top of that, I added the Epilogue, bringing it to 1987. The material was taken from my other two memoir books, which I had no plans at the time to publish, and from experimental prose works, mainly
Solar Journal, The Continents, Book of the Cranberry Islands, The Provinces,
and
The Long
Body of the Dream
. In 1996
New Moon
was published in cloth with a dust jacket, Though it looked like the real thing, it was actually a prefiguring of this book (and the other memoirs in the trilogy).

I put so much work into trying to excavate my raw testimony—what novelist Jonathan Lethem in his blurb called a “defenseless consciousness uncovering itself and the world simultaneously”—from the snarled morass of teen artifice and inflation that I thought that that was
all I
needed to do. Once I accomplished the basics of that, I went ahead with publication. I overlooked the potential for writing a far richer and more textured book.

Years later when I read the e-book proof, I was disappointed that my more current insights and portrayals were missing. I kept looking for passages I knew I had written but couldn’t find there. I had subliminally nursed a fantasy that the pages of every copy of the book were being updated by magic as my insights in other books got subtler.

Of course, the text was right where I left it. This new version has most of the later passages, as I have spliced in and adapted snippets from
The Bardo of Waking Life; 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration; Dark Pool of Light (Volume Three): The Crisis and Future of Consciousness; The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos; The New York Mets: Myth, Ethnography, and Subtext);
and an essay “A Phenomenology of Panic” in
(Panic: Origins, Insight, and Treatment)
.

At the time of publication in 1996, I dubbed it a nonfiction novel. It was (and still is) halfway between a memoir and a novel. All my key decisions were novelistic and honored the genre. Like a memoir, though, the book is scrupulously true, or meant to be, but not always 100 percent
factual.
I didn’t make up events or characters, but occasionally combined them or shifted a timeline or chronology to achieve novelistic ellipsis and tension.

For my psychoanalytic overview, I chose the veridicality of a “case history” over faithfulness to my understanding at the time.

The characters in this book are just that: characters. They are my own fictionalized versions of people, personifications based on some of their traits as I experienced them, occasionally composited
with features and words of other people, even prochronistically. In that way it
is
a novel.

Ask any of the folks who pass through this narrative to provide his or her account of what happened and it will likely digress from mine, in some cases radically so. If you recognize anyone from life, it is the figure on whom I am basing my character, not the person himself or herself. I am telling no one’s truth but my own.

New Moon
is the first book in a triptych. Its story continues in my two other memoirs:
Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage
and
Out of Babylon.

The 1996 edition of
New Moon
is a record of the enchantments through which one passes in a life; in my case a fifties American childhood (board games, candy bars, cherished toys, etc.) followed by school daze, baseball, summer camp; then the watershed of adolescence, dating, romance—initiation, apprenticeship, marriage, kids, career. Each enchantment breaks a prior trance while imposing another.

That
precis
is still accurate, though this 2016 edition tracks only through the beginnings of apprenticeship.

Out of Babylon
weaves tales from five generations of my family, beginning with the imagined lives of my great-grandparents and concluding with the adolescent years of my children. It tells my brother Jonathan’s story in his own voice, borrowing from his writings and letters, and relates the rise and fall of Grossinger’s. Its central theme is “Why do people in families treat each other so badly while claiming to love them?” Its title is taken from a reggae song that Jon invoked (“One Step Forward,” Max Romeo and the Upsetters) as a canticle to our growing up on upper Park Avenue.

Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage
recounts the forging a marriage out of a mythologized courtship while exploring the deeper relationship between sexuality and spirituality. It maintains the frankness of
New Moon,
but tackles adult problems and crises, falling somewhere among such chronicles as Robert Creeley’s
The Island,
D. H. Lawrence’s
Women in Love,
and perhaps a less vulgar and less narcissistic—I hope—version of the popular confessional novel of the era, Erica
Jong’s
Fear of Flying.
I was espousing Robert Kelly’s mytho-erotic themes, the radical truth-telling of fellow poets like Charlie Vermont and Bill Pearlman (notably the latter’s
Inzorbital Freak
), and the free-wheeling aesthetics of some of my loonier Goddard College students, Rob Brezsny, Art Cole, and Sheppard Powell.

Episodes picked up nuances from movies of the time too like
The Graduate, Annie Hall,
and
Blume in Love,
but with Creeley’s gravitas and narrative diaphonousness replacing comedy and shtick, also with the nascent metaphysical awe that inspired
New Moon.

If you were to imagine
New Moon
continuing through the hippie era with the same degree of frankness and romantic-magical inquiry, that would be
Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage,
not the 1996 appendage.

My thanks to Lindy Hough for her thorough line and content editing of the revised text, to Kathy Glass for her meticulous editing of the first edition, to Lauren Harrison for her meticulous summary edit, to Louis Swaim for his wise editorial shepherding, to Jasmine Hromjak for her lovely redesign, to my one-time Goddard student Jamie Rauchman for his spot-on cover art, to Susan Quasha for painstakingly re-laying the mosaics from my last pass after galleys, to Douglas Reil and Janet Levin for supporting my many triturations through ever finer sieves, to Julia Kent for introducing the book to the world, to Lydia Schwartz-Salant and Tim McKee for their editorial suggestions, and to Fred Kuriger for his generous fact check.

See
www.richardgrossinger.com/2015/11/new-moon-afterword/
for an enhanced version of these notes.