The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

by Michael Murphy

  Suddenly Shivas Irons seemed an impossibly distant figure. I’d searched for him in 1970, and might search for the rest of my life. Yes, Hannigan could be right. It was conceivable that we were making up evidence to support our little cult. Clouds were moving across the sky. One had a scowling face, another a nose growing longer. Was our search for Irons filled with lies? The thought was liberating. The pleasures of beer and this lovely view provided relief from invisible presences that threatened to make overwhelming demands upon me.

  Hannigan was breathing heavily now. Evidently he had fallen asleep. Not wanting to disturb him, I walked to the northern edge of the hill and sat on a little ledge that was protected from the sun. Below me, the land sloped steeply for about a hundred yards, to a crevasse surrounded by bushes. This was the striking three-par hole in Hannigan’s photographs. I was sitting on what remained of the tee, and remnants of the green were hidden in the declivity far below me. Shivas Irons must have hit balls from here toward the invisible target, practicing clairvoyance in the service of golf.

  Impelled by sudden curiosity, I descended the grassy incline and climbed into the crevasse. It was about fifteen feet deep and some thirty feet from front to back. To clear the foliage in front of it, a ball would have to be hit with an extremely high trajectory. Could I do it? I climbed the hill, went to my golf bag, and took out my seven- and eight-irons. Hannigan didn’t stir. He lay on his side facing the house and didn’t move as I walked past him.

  Part of the ledge was covered with stubble from which I could get good loft on my shots. Pushing back the visor of my golf cap, I chose a ball, and looked again toward the crevasse. A shadow was moving across it, but the field beyond was brilliant gold. Standing back to admire this contrast of light and dark, I felt a breeze blowing gently toward me. It would add lift to my shot, and spin if I wanted a draw. I hit the ball cleanly from the springy turf and watched it hover for several seconds against a passing cloud. Like a bird of prey, it seemed to hesitate, then dropped what seemed an enormous distance into the steep declivity.

  After teeing another ball, I checked myself. The shot I’d just hit demanded time for enjoyment. Mindlessly hitting again so soon almost seemed an act of violence. Standing back, I savored the feeling of it. Something in me had stretched with the ball and fallen precipitously into the glen. Was it merely my imagination, or some part of that subtle flesh Shivas Irons had talked about? At Burningbush, he’d said to feel each shot in its entirety. Such empathy furthered learning, and to a slight but sometimes important degree won the ball’s allegiance.

  The next shot sailed even higher than the first, a little right of my line to the target—then, to my astonishment, seemed to stop. After hovering at the lower edge of a huge, slow-moving cloud, it moved to the left, stopped again, then fell as if aimed like a guided missile into the narrow crevasse. Though it had been hit with a draw, and the wind had increased its movement, it appeared to have broken the laws of physics.

  The wind was blowing harder now, and the bottom edge of the cloud was turning gold. Something uncanny had steered the ball. Was it my own mental power, the “imagination with hands” that Shivas had described, painting on the golf sky? Or was it the power of this place, the presence I’d felt hitting chip shots and drives on the abandoned first tee?

  Addressing another ball, I waited for inspiration. But a wave of excitement passed through me, and the shot sailed over the glen. It was time for patience now. My honeymoon with higher powers would have to give way to faithful practice and a discriminating surrender to whatever guidance was given me. Taking time to register flaws in my swing mechanics, I hit another twenty balls toward the invisible green. Some fell short, a few went past, and three fell into the little canyon. During this exercise, which lasted for nearly fifteen minutes, I felt a growing calm and pleasure. Mental activity seemed more distant as a larger, more stable awareness dissolved my attachment to passing thoughts. The state reminded me of lucid dreaming. There was a satisfaction in it that didn’t depend upon the results of particular shots.

  But this wasn’t a passive enjoyment. Hitting shots from this little ledge without concern for immediate results, I was becoming more intimate with the planes, contours, and eccentric features of the land between me and the target. They were working their way to my subconscious mind, causing me to make tacit adjustments of my stance and swing. Gradually I moved my alignment left, as my impulse to hit a draw gave way to a sense that a fade increased my chance of success. My first two shots had been inspired, but they hadn’t come from knowledge or mastery.

  For despite its seeming simplicity, the hole presented a deadly illusion. Because the slope below me tilted down to the right, it invited a counterbalancing draw rather than a fade that might sail wide of the target. But the crevasse was angled in such a way that it afforded more room for error to a shot coming in from the left. Golf architects create such problems to add interest and challenge to the game.* Conceivably, MacDuff had designed his course to reveal the fallibility of untrained awareness. Shivas Irons might have practiced here in part to overcome misperceptions of greens and fairways. What other tests did this strange little course provide?

  Inspired by these thoughts, I counted the remaining balls. There were twenty-three left, enough with which to get a good feel for fading shots to the target. With rising anticipation, I imagined a line to the crevasse that gently curved right to its very center. But the ball came off the heel of the club, sending a shock from my hands to my shoulders. Such a mishap is called a “shank.” It is the worst way to miss a shot, one of the ugliest things in sport, and the hardest miscue to forget. A shank stays rooted for hours or days in the cellars of a golfer’s memory.

  But the feeling would dissolve in my newfound detachment. Regathering myself, I teed another ball, took careful aim, and paused for inspiration. After taking two deep breaths, I swung with a slower tempo—but shanked it. “Damn it!” I yelled. “This fucking game!”

  “God, that must hurt!” said Hannigan. “Ye look like ye sat on a spike!”

  Looking steadily at the horizon, I tried to compose myself. “There’s nothing more serious than a child at play,” I said without turning.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Did ye make it up?”

  “Yes.” I teed another ball.

  “No ye didn’t. Nietzsche did.”

  Several options presented themselves. I could disregard him, then calmly hit a magnificent shot. I could give him the exact Nietzsche quote. Or I could decapitate him with my seven-iron. Choosing the first alternative, I teed another ball, imagined its path to the target—and shanked it.

  Hannigan started laughing. “Ye look to be in pain,” he said with unconcealed glee. “Why don’t ye take a break.”

  “Do you want to hit one?” I managed a show of good humor. “Here, come and try.”

  “Hyperspace theory’s simpler,” he said. “You do the research. I’ll do the theorizin’.”

  Deciding a break was needed, I picked up the ball bag and walked down the hill to retrieve my balls. The little glen was refreshingly damp, a good place to assimilate lessons learned in the wind and sun above. Finding a seat on a fallen tree, I pictured Shivas Irons. Conceivably, he’d practiced on every part of this course, absorbing its features one by one, making its various planes and contours part of his inner body. “In golf, ye can see yer way through more illusions and embrace more archetypes than anyone knows,” he’d joked. “More than philosophy, more than war, almost as many as makin’ love.” He could have sat in this very place, opening himself to the changes that come from the disciplined meeting of body, mind, and earth. The thought gave me new resolution. I would hit shots on other holes. The place held secrets beyond the mysteries of golf. There were lessons to be learned all over this haunted ground.

  The rise upon which the second green had stood appeared to be no more than fifty yards from us. Taking a pitching wedge from my bag, I teed a ball on bare ground, then hit it high and straight.
But it landed just partway up the hill. “Hannigan?” I asked. “How far is it to the top of the rise?”

  “Fifty or sixty yards I’d say.”

  “That’s what I thought. But it must be a hundred at least. I’m going to pace it off.”

  About thirty yards up the hill, I came to a swale that was invisible from where we’d been standing. The undulation was more than thirty yards across and accounted for part of the illusion, but the top of the rise was at least one hundred twenty yards from the tee. Something more than the swale had caused my misperception.

  Rejoining Hannigan, I surveyed the entire hole. Though I knew that my perception was faulty, the top of the rise still seemed to be no more than fifty yards distant. “It’s a hundred and twenty yards,” I said. “There’s a swale hidden up there that’s thirty yards across, but you’ve still got sixty more to account for.”

  “It’s the proportions.” He shielded his eyes from the sun. “The relations between the angle of slope, the horizon, and the shape of the hill. MacDuff studied this. He thought that contours of the land affect our feelings and perceptions, and what he called the ‘inner body.’ Ye know he got the term from his mother, who got it from Sufis and African shamans.”

  “The inner body? That’s a phrase Irons used.”

  “He got it from MacDuff.”

  “So what was this hole designed for? To develop a sense of distance that doesn’t depend upon sensory cues?”

  “It was more than that. They were practicin’ more than powers o’ perception. MacDuff learned some sort o’ mystic geometry in the Sahel. He worked on it here, I swear.”

  “But how?”

  “That’s the problem. That’s the fuckin’ problem. How?” We stared at the illusory target in silence, sharing our puzzlement and frustration.

  “Hannigan,” I said at last. “I’m going to hit some shots. Something is trying to give us a clue.”

  As I teed a ball on a patch of stubble, he sat on the ground behind me. “Murphy,” he said, “I’ve got someone for ye to meet who knows about this stuff. Didn’t ye meet some Russians who’re studyin’ altered states?”

  Surprised, I turned to face him. “Yes. So what?”

  “She’s a friend of mine. Russian expatriate who communicates with the spirit world. Knows some things about mystic geometry. Ye want to meet her?”

  There was a hint of pride in his voice, and a sweetness that surprised me. I sensed that he and the lady were lovers. “Sounds interesting,” I said. “Where does she live?”

  “Edinburgh. We can see her tomorrow night. She’s got somethin’ that’ll interest you. A room she built to summon the dead.”

  “What’s her name? Maybe I met her in Moscow.”

  “I doubt it. Her name’s Nadia Kirova. Related to Sergei Kirov, the Bolshevik Stalin had killed. But go ahead.” He gestured toward the hill. “Hit some balls. Test the old bugger’s secret geometry.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, I hit eight-irons up the deceptive rise, gradually realizing that my position below the target caused me to lunge at the ball. Most golfers experience such effects caused by alterations of golf-course topography. This hole, like all holes, offered me a chance to overcome unnoticed constraints of body image.

  As my impulse to lunge became more evident, my shots carried farther and farther. The guiding presence I’d felt through much of the day seemed to be teaching me now about my largely unconscious relations with the land around me. As if to confirm this, Hannigan asked what was happening. “Ye’re swingin’ better,” he said. “You look stronger.”

  “They were working with illusions,” I said. “Irons used this place to train his self-perception.”

  “But he used it for more than that. Ye know, Murphy, it’s a funny thing. I could swear ye’re lighter on yer feet. Are ye doing somethin’ different?”

  Hannigan was right. The power I felt was caused by more than insight into my relations with the hole’s topography. My body felt lighter now, as if something were lifting every cell at once. I hit a second shot, then a third. A few readers of Golf in the Kingdom had told me about this condition. Like them, I felt strangely elevated.

  Sensing that conversation would dispel the state, I decided to walk up the hill. But Hannigan ran to catch me. “Why so fast?” he insisted. “Ye look like ye’ve been goosed by a ghost.”

  Quickening my pace, I asked him to search for balls in the swale while I looked at the top of the hill. “I’d swear ye’ve got wind in yer pants,” he said. “Enough to launch a blimp!” I started to laugh, and my apparent freedom from gravity vanished.

  But not the clarity that was its companion. The blades of grass beneath my feet, a stretch of dark brown dirt, and the distant peak of Ben Cruachan all seemed closer now. The quieter the mind, the clearer the senses, I remembered Shivas Irons saying. The clearer your eyes and ears, the closer the world comes. Whether from the hours of practice, or the special presence of this place, the world was more present to me. This simplicity, this emptiness, made volition more efficient, movement easier, pleasure more immediate. “Hannigan, let’s head back to Edinburgh,” I said when we’d picked up the balls. “If we go now, we’ll make it by seven o’clock.”

  But I vowed to return. There were things I could learn more fully here without human company. To surrender adequately to this extraordinary place, I would have to come here alone.

  * See Robert Trent Jones, Jr., Golf by Design, especially Chapter 8, “Illusions and Wind.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  NADEZHDA—OR NADIA—Sergeevna Kirova lived in an apartment atop an empty warehouse on the edge of Edinburgh. Following Hannigan’s instructions, I went up an outside staircase to her place, quietly opened its unlocked door, and tiptoed down a narrow corridor to the room in which she summoned the dead. Nadia called it her necromanteion, after similar chambers that existed in ancient Greece.* When no one responded to my knocking, I stepped into the darkened room and closed the door behind me. Hannigan had said they wouldn’t respond if Nadia’s ritual was under way.

  Because the room had no windows and was painted black, I couldn’t see a thing. There was only the sound of a woman murmuring, or moaning, or chanting, in what I took to be her summons to departed spirits. Sitting on the carpeted floor, I waited for my eyesight to adapt. The mournful chant continued—at a distance, it seemed—but nothing was visible except the dim reflection of a mirror on the wall to my right. The barely perceptible glass was about six feet tall and three feet wide, large enough to accommodate ghostly forms with human proportions. Hannigan had told me that the light it reflected came from a carefully hidden source in the ceiling above it. If I watched it long enough, something would appear in its wavering surface.

  Now the chanting was punctuated by sighs and heavy breathing, the results I guessed of Nadia’s religious passion. Focusing my attention on the mirror, I waited for a sign from worlds beyond. But there was only a dim grey light in the tall rectangle. No face or figure appeared. No supernatural vista. No sign of lurking presences. The glassy surface looked like smoke in the pitch-black room.

  Suddenly the chanting made me uncomfortable. But where was it coming from? Nothing was visible except the mirror—no silhouettes, no furniture, no shapes that resembled Nadia or Hannigan. I felt disoriented. If one sat here very long, it might be hard to tell the difference between the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. I looked again at the wavering glass, which seemed to have receded into the darkness around it. Like crystal gazing, this exercise required a patient surrender. Instinctive resistances had to relax. Perceptual rigidities had to soften in the light that would come from the other side.

  Then a ghostly figure appeared.

  A barely visible V-shaped form was coming into focus, as if from smoke or vapor. For a moment it was perfectly still, like a Roman numeral five; then its two arms came together, making a slightly narrower V. There could be no doubt about it. Something solid had appeared in the glass, something almost human. For a moment
it was perfectly still, its silvery arms pointed toward the ceiling in what seemed an ecstatic suspension. Then its upper tips began to rotate, conveying a deep seductive pleasure. I closed my eyes, as if this was something I shouldn’t see, but looked again quickly. Now the entire form was undulating, its left arm stretching farther upward, the other dropping to form a right angle with it. The thing sent a shiver through me. It was deeply, calmly, wildly alive.

  The chanting had stopped. The apparition must have silenced Nadia. Looking away from the glass, I tried to quiet my complex emotions. The ghostly form had deeply stirred me. My fear and astonishment were tinged inexplicably with both guilt and sexual arousal.

  The place was silent. Should I make my presence known? Closing my eyes, I tried to gather myself. Hannigan had warned me that Nadia could have a seizure if awakened prematurely from trance. But I couldn’t let go of the sensuous form stretching its parts before me deliciously. With embarrassment I looked again at the mirror. The two arms had formed a V and were stretching farther, farther upward as if toward some perfection.…

  And then it hit me.

  Its arms were legs. Its tips were toes. It was a reflection of Nadia. And superimposed upon it was the silhouette of a male torso.

  Looking away with a seizure of guilt, I crawled to the door, stood, and stepped outside. A moment later I reached the street, filled with anger and amazement. Had Hannigan done this to challenge or taunt me? Or was this Nadia Kirova’s idea of spiritual initiation? Then I had another shock, my second stunning recognition. It was only eight o’clock! Somehow I’d arrived an hour before Nadia would start her séance. Looking back to see whether Hannigan was watching from the apartment entrance, I hurried with embarrassment to my car.