It occurred to me that this was one of the game’s greatest secrets, and a reason so many people continue to play though their score does not improve. In its journey around the course, golf is a place to let go of misfortune, to start again, to return to this ever-present delight. I thought of my friend Glen Albaugh teaching his University of the Pacific golfers to clear their minds before each shot, to learn from each failure and success, to bring kinesthetic imagination to their swings, and to constantly reclaim the purity of the moment. He and other sport psychologists have been agents of an approach to the game not unlike the one I learned from Shivas Irons.
At about four o’clock, I walked along the seventh hole, absorbing its contours for future reference, then climbed the hill where the buildings stood. There I surveyed the course as a whole, imagining various shot-making experiments Shivas Irons might have tried. Conceivably, he’d hit MacDuff’s house more than once. Did he ever break a window? Did his formidable mentor ever reprimand him?
Shadows were lengthening now on the easterly side of the abandoned distillery. In spite of the afterglow produced by this day of contemplative golf, I felt a tinge of sadness. What a privilege to have seen Shivas Irons hit shots here. What amazement to hear his conversations with Seamus MacDuff. I walked around the house for a while and pictured the two men talking. More of the property’s physical and spiritual contours than I could estimate were imprinted in my muscles and subliminal mind. It would take weeks and months, perhaps years, to assimilate what the place could teach me.
But part of that teaching crystallized sooner than I expected. As I put my clubs into the car, experiences from different parts of the day cohered into a pattern. However tenuous some of these had been, all had arisen from a common ground of secret capacity. For periods ranging from a few minutes to several hours, my vision, hearing, taste, and smell, as well as extrasensory perception, had grown more acute; my kinesthetic awareness, balance, and dexterity had improved; volition had grown more efficient; new powers of mind over matter had appeared; and my vitality had increased. Through most of the day these separate awakenings had been supported by the unitive awareness Shivas Irons had celebrated, that sense of “one field before ye e’er swung,” and by a self-renewing pleasure that seemed to rise from something primordial. Again and again, both my body’s structures and sense of self had shifted to accommodate these enhancements of functioning. Perhaps the best way to say it is that I seemed more body and soul at once.
The pattern was evident now. Every human capacity is rooted in a greater life waiting to be born in us. This day of golf, this mysterious place, had briefly evoked that simultaneity of extraordinary attributes Shivas Irons was cultivating, providing a premonition of what he and his mentor called “the life to come.”
* See appendices.
* These have been called “opintheres” or scintillae in alchemical texts, “world-pervading soul-sparks” in Cabalistic writings, “atoms of light” by various Gnostics of antiquity, “sparks of stellar essence” by the Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Democritus, “orgone” by Wilhelm Reich, and elements of the “bio-field” by Russian parapsychologists. Carl Jung studied such phenomena for many years. See: Carl Jung, Collected Works, volume 12, p. 301, n. 26.
CHAPTER NINE
DRIVING SOUTH ON the B840, I could see Loch Awe to my right through stands of conifers and silver birch. The green hills beyond its slate grey waters, and the dense stands of fir trees to my left, were sharply outlined now in what Scots like to call “the gloaming.” Each view that appeared on the winding road had an element of surprise. The expansive, thought-free silence produced by six hours of contemplative golf made each vista a separate enchantment.
It would take another hour to reach the hotel on the coast near Melfort, where I would spend the night, but the drive gave me a chance to enjoy my new sensory acuity. The condition seemed completely natural now. On the far shore of the loch, half a mile away, in the shadows of hills that rose steeply behind it, a large white house had windows with latticework. There could be no doubt about it. Both windows had fine diagonal struts that were plainly visible to me. And to my left, violet and pink and magenta rhododendrons were etched in a cool recess of trees, magnified it seemed by some invisible lens between us. Twice I stopped to enjoy the view and absorb the evening stillness. My day at MacDuff’s abandoned estate had produced a quiet, lasting intoxication.
During my second stop, to test my newfound perceptual abilities, I got out of the car and looked for distant objects. Such an exercise is made easier by relaxing your gaze before refocusing. “Make the world an Impressionist painting,” I seemed to remember Shivas saying. “Then turn yer eyes to a telescope.” But more than oculomotor nerves are involved in such a practice. The sustained relinquishment of thought, whether in golf or religious discipline, seems to mobilize clairvoyance as well as sensory acuity. “Ye can marry eyesight to second sight,” Shivas had put it picturesquely. Though the fact is not widely appreciated, the two powers can operate with marvelous coherence.
Half a mile away across the loch, in the cool shadows of fir and pine, a stone house stood beside the water, and in front of it a couple were embracing. Could I see if they were kissing? Could I tell how old they were? Softening my focus, I let the loch turn into a picture by Monet, a gently shimmering waterscape suffused with the lingering sunlight of this quiet summer evening. Then, without strain, I brought the scene closer until it seemed painted by Vermeer. The man wore jeans and a loose white shirt, the woman a wide-brimmed hat, long yellow skirt, and flowing neck scarf. This was not my imagination. She was naked above her waist, his left arm fell around her shoulder, and with his right hand he caressed her breasts sensually.
For a moment I stood transfixed. This was a new kind of voyeurism, another grace of contemplative golf, a further sign that the disciplines of Shivas Irons could deliver unexpected pleasures. As he playfully bit her neck, she took off her wide-brimmed hat and sailed it across a grassy slope that ran from the house to the water. They were in their thirties and English, I guessed—don’t ask me why—and their excitement was contagious. Caught between the perceptual mode of Vermeer and Monet’s soft focus, I watched with arousal and growing embarrassment. As she untied her scarf, he turned her around and kissed the back of her neck and shoulders. As she looked toward the sky, he stroked her breasts and stomach. This continued for a minute or more while she dropped her scarf and unbuttoned her yellow skirt. But a car was coming down the road, and it honked as it drew near me. Did its driver sense what I was doing? With disappointment and a hint of relief, I watched as the couple went into the house.
Driving along the loch, I felt residues of vicarious erotic pleasure, which reinforced the continuing afterglow of my day at MacDuff’s estate. This mood was enhanced by the surprising vistas my new visual acuity revealed in all directions. But a half hour later, as the sun disappeared behind hills to the west and shadows lengthened, my feelings were colored with a faint melancholy. I already missed the mysterious property and its reminders of Shivas Irons. Would the joy and new capacities I found there last? As I reached the end of the loch, its slate-colored waters were filling with shades of indigo, dark blue, and purple. My emotions began to reflect their dark mood.
The hotel’s dining room stood about fifty yards from the edge of a little bay, with a sweeping view of coastal inlets framed by mountainous islands. Shuna rose steeply above a mainland promontory to my right, Scarba reached toward the south beyond it, and the darkening ridges of Jura were barely visible on the horizon. Under the overcast sky, the three islands seemed harsh and lonely. The stillness outside had entered the room. Conversation was hushed at the tables around me.
Near the water’s edge, a high-masted sailboat rocked gently on long glassy swells. Like me, it was moored at some invisible depth but moved by unpredictable currents. Anchored in the silence I’d practiced all day, I felt unexpected swells of emotion that seemed to come from distant places. Unbidden, an image
of Seamus MacDuff, as if in a fine-grained photograph, with green deeply set eyes, bristling white eyebrows and beard, broad tawny forehead creased by three horizontal lines, and a strong aristocratic nose that gave evidence of both Scottish and African genes. And his mother: with majestic carriage, her mouth exquisitely formed in the Fulani way, her dark eyes looking toward a distant horizon. Both images were vividly etched. Had they entered deep channels of my mind as I’d hit golf shots at MacDuff’s estate?
Now the bay was darker than the coastal inlets beyond it. What further impressions did the depths of my memory harbor? Another surprising image came: of Shivas Irons hitting shots across the hill on which MacDuff’s house stood to the declivity that held the fourth green. Secretly, I’d known it all along. Each shot left a mark in the air, a lasting trace, a girder of spirit-matter. His graceful, upright, powerful swing, with its fluid turn of hips and shoulders, was as vividly present to me as it had been at Burningbush. With each shot he was building something. I could see that clearly now. Something made of stuff that links the soul to living flesh.
“Would you like a drink,” the young waitress said with an Australian or cockney accent.
“A glass of red wine,” I answered. “Do you have Chianti by the glass?”
“Is that French?”
“No, Italian.”
“Well, I’ll see.” She paused. “Does it matter how much it costs?”
I said that it didn’t, and she turned to cross the room.
A middle-aged American couple and their son had taken seats at the table next to me. They had driven for most of the day from Loch Ness, I could hear the father complaining, and there were no monsters in the loch.
“But, Daddy,” the boy protested. “The man said one was there.”
“It’s a myth,” said the father, a professorial-looking man about fifty with closely cropped hair and horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s like the Easter bunny.”
“But they have photographs!”
“They’re fake,” the man said firmly, gesturing to suggest that the boy keep his voice down. “They’re waves, or logs.”
“But there could be a monster. The lake’s so deep!”
“Do you believe in Santa Claus?” The father signaled to the waitress.
The boy had red hair and a freckled face, and was nine or ten years old. “Of course!” he said. “I saw him at Christmas. You gave him a glass of whiskey!”
The father didn’t dispute this. Trading glances with his wife, he agreed that Santa was real. But not the Loch Ness monster! Fatigue, perhaps, and the accumulated frustrations of a daylong drive on roads narrower than he was used to, had caused him to make a stand. Santa was real, but not some underwater dinosaur conceived to lure more tourists to the loch.
Sensing that I had overheard him, the man gave me a weary shrug. “Do you believe in the Loch Ness monster?” he asked. “This has been a long debate.”
“Well …” I hesitated. “You never know. Maybe.”
“You see!” the boy broke in. “Daddy, you never know.”
“Thanks,” his father said with good-natured irony, and I turned to look out the window.
Then I had a troubling thought. Was I concocting my own Loch Ness monster? Was part of my experience the result of wish fulfillment? Hannigan could be right. Maybe some of the things I’d experienced this day were nothing but illusions. Had I really seen that latticework in windows across the loch, or the breasts of the woman in the yellow skirt?
The waitress placed a glass of red wine on the opposite side of the table. Did she secretly object to my having it? They had no Chianti, she said with a shrug, but this was from somewhere in the south of France not far from Italy. I ought to like it. Was I ready to eat? The dining room was about to close.
Suppressing my irritation, I ordered a salad and bowl of soup and readjusted my chair to face away from the other tables. At the foot of the incline that ran from the dining room to the water, swells broke gently on a rocky beach. A light came on in the sailboat’s cabin, and another at the top of its swaying mast. On a promontory to the south, house lights were sparkling near the water. The distant islands seemed less lonely now, and my mood began to lift. In the immediate elevation the wine produced, my doubts were starting to fade. Yes, I’d seen that couple embrace, seen him stroke her naked breasts, seen her toss that wide-brimmed hat across the sloping lawn. I saw them just as clearly now as I had beside the loch. And these images of Seamus MacDuff, his mother, and Shivas Irons were more than fantasy. They were telling me something real, something I’d missed, something subject to laws of the strangeness curve.
The two men had built an invisible structure on the hills above Loch Awe, and many who’d been there secretly knew it. But you had to have the right kind of eyes to see, and ears to hear its hidden music, and a body that could feel its touch. Otherwise you’d think it was only neurosis or daydreams or ghosts or leprechauns. Suddenly, the entire place was present. It had layers I hadn’t seen, from its dirt to its secret streamers of light, and something was using it like a bridge to move between this world and another.
As I finished the soup and drank a second glass of wine, I tried to recall the things I knew about sacred architecture. There was a growing literature about Feng Sui, the Chinese art of geomancy, and the mysteries of Stonehenge, and the mystical symbolism at Chartres, and lore in virtually every culture about the occult relationships of buildings, soul, and special pieces of ground. No one had made me more alive to all this than the aged Muslim we’d met at the mosque between Tashkent and Samarkand.…
“Listen!” he’d admonished our group in Uzbek through a Russian interpreter. “Listen to the holy names. You can hear them if you are quiet enough.”
And then we heard the sacred chant, coming it seemed from caves even deeper than the one in which we stood. “Allah. Al-aha. Allah. Al-aha.” The names of God rose from caverns below, sung not by humans but the place itself. This holy space, the old man said, was bearing witness to God day and night though the world above was distracted. It was singing His names for eternity whether or not we joined in.
Misha, our Russian interpreter, began to chant, blending his bass voice with the sound arising from the vault, while the rest of us scanned the high rock walls with flashlights and Coleman lamps. But the old man ordered us to stop. Seating us around a shallow pit carved in the cavern floor, he said that the mosque had things to tell us that our noisy minds and voices blocked.
And then, as the silence grew, something altered the way we sat, slowed our breathing patterns, attenuated our impulse to move. All of us talked about it later. The cavernous mosque had reformed our bodies to some degree and thus our consciousness. The old man would tell us later that its subterranean vaults had affected countless pilgrims in similar ways since the early Stone Age. But shamans, Zoroastrians, and Muslim mystics had found ways to increase the caves’ power. New vaults had been opened. People who knew about relations between the heart, the soul, and physical spaces had added their own inspired touch to the caverns’ transformative contours.
In bed that night, looking through a window into the starlit sky, I remembered the aged Muslim’s talk about the body’s architecture. Like the underground mosque, he’d said, our muscles and bones can be configured to induce particular states of mind. We did that by bowing toward Mecca, or kneeling in prayer in a Christian church, or sitting cross-legged like Indian yogis. Every posture induces a characteristic set of mental attitudes, and unique condition of the heart. Each of our physical acts—even those of which we’re unaware—has distinctive effects upon our body, our soul, and every person we meet. Somatic patterning is a social act. It helps determine our ethics, our philosophy, our beliefs about God, and all our relationships. And because it can be cultivated, it can enhance every part of our life.
I thought about Nadia Kirova and her praise for the bodily configurations of love. Had she learned something about them in the Sufi group to which our Muslim guide belonged? Her rap
turous postures in the necromanteion suggested that her convictions were based upon more than theory. The light in her eyes and music in her voice as she celebrated the sexual play of angels gave evidence of her deep delight in the body’s erotic structures.
My mind was drifting now, and I fell into a half-sleep filled with images of the mosque near Samarkand, of Shivas Irons hitting shots with highly improbable swings, and of MacDuff’s abandoned golf course. The property had different faces; beguiling, ugly, and surreal by turns, sometimes attractive and threatening at once. On a dark night under heavy rains, a stalwart bearded man—probably Seamus himself—stood beside the house exulting; and on a cloudless winter day, the fairways were covered with glistening snow like the distant white peaks of Ben Cruachan; and at first light, Shivas was hitting long shots toward the evanescent first green. Day by day, season by season, the place was still unfolding, giving birth to something just out of my reach.
But sleep, too, is influenced by somatic architecture. Turning onto my right side, I tried to find a better posture with which to summon dreams that would bring me closer to Shivas Irons. I moved toward an image just an eyelash away. There was a solitary light on the island of Shuna, a fragrance of conifers and the sea. The deep black sky, the starlit bay, the sounds of waves on this quiet night, seemed to rise within me. There was no separation now between me and the fields of MacDuff’s estate.
The golden brown fairway pointed west, gently rolling in the noonday sun, and halfway to the distant green there was a beckoning light. “Walk toward it,” I heard Shivas Irons saying. “Go toward it like ye’re going home.”
It was larger and brighter than it had seemed from the hill. If I came closer, it would swallow me up.…
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 14