“Nadia!” I shouted, suddenly concerned about her delicate state. “Let’s go back. This isn’t worth it!” But she only quickened her pace. “Buck!” I yelled. “All she’s got is that windbreaker!”
By now he was ten feet ahead, and she was right on his shoulder. Neither of them responded to my shouts. Alarmed, I ran to catch them, but they had moved even further ahead of me. In Hannigan’s studio, observing her translucent skin and listening to her sometimes-faltering voice, I couldn’t have pictured the athlete ahead of me, walking faster than I could run.
At the clubhouse an hour later, people would tell us that the wind coming through the hill’s funnel had reached eighty miles an hour at two o’clock. But neither of them slowed their stride, and gradually pulled away from me. When we reached the third tee, I sat down. The wind wasn’t as strong as it had been, but was gusting to about fifty miles an hour.
“Mackel!” Nadia cried, the collar of her jacket flapping wildly. “Look up!”
Almost directly above us, framed against a bright blue sky partly covered with racing clouds, an enormous flock of Siberian geese hovered in the wind. Beating their wings gracefully to stay there, they moved neither forward nor back. This lasted for thirty seconds, perhaps, and then, in nearly perfect unison, they tilted left so that most of them caught a ray of the sun. All at once, the flock turned from black to gold.
We stood transfixed. “Feel them!” Nadia shouted. “Can you feel them?”
Like a sheet of gold lamé, they shimmered against the clearing sky, then tilted right again turning to various shades of grey, and moved north like a giant armada.
“They’re alive!” she cried. “Alive! And part of one another. What a victory!” The fierce exaltation in her voice brought me to my feet. Leaning against the wind, we followed their flight across the sea. Far below us, white-capped waters stretched for miles to grey hills in the Kingdom of Fife.
But we had farther to go. With the wind coming hard from our left, we marched across unmown rough to the summit of Gullane Hill. Another breathtaking sight awaited us. In nearly every direction, there were fairways and flagsticks of the three Gullane courses, and to the east we could see the green arabesques of Muirfield.
Hannigan turned me around. “That’s Edinburgh.” He pointed west to the sharply etched horizon. “Ye can see the castle now, and land in fourteen counties!” In the newly cleansed air, we could see the tall buildings of Edinburgh, the rolling fields of East Lothian, and across the Firth to the Kingdom of Fife. Watching the land and sea grow more distinct as the clouds’ shadows were lifted from them, I became more acutely aware of Nadia. She stood motionless, not saying a word, in a state of exaltation.
Hannigan pointed across the Firth. “Look at the sunlight there!” he shouted.
Fifteen miles away, beyond the slate grey water, white houses and barns were appearing like tiny points of light. On the rolling fields below us and the distant hills of Fife, everywhere shadows were lifting.
Nadia stood silently, her head tilted back, the wind ripping at her white windbreaker. An hour before, I wouldn’t have anticipated the strength that flowed from her, the high color in her skin, or the ferocity of her enjoyment. Her Olympic training showed. The fragile appearance produced by her six-month retreat was no longer evident.
My mind made a sudden leap. The thing she’d seen on Wednesday night was pressing closer to her. Could I glimpse it, feel its energy, or hear an echo of its music? As if sensing my thought, she gave me a sideward glance and smile, and a sudden thrill passed through me. Then she turned again toward the wind, and for an instant her entire body was enveloped by an imperceptible fire that stretched toward me and Hannigan.
“Bach!” she cried, brushing her windblown hair from her face. “I race you to the car!”
And down the hill she went, bounding with athletic and purposeful strides that kept her twenty yards ahead of Hannigan and eventually a hundred ahead of me. When I got to the parking lot ten minutes later, she was breathing normally but her face was aglow and her hair was hopelessly tangled. As soon as I saw her, something in me knew that she and Hannigan would end her self-imposed chastity before the night was done.
Some of the world’s older psychologies hold that certain emotions carry the wisdom of guiding spirits. Alone at my hotel that night, this principle seemed self-evident. Three feelings especially gripped me, each of them taking ascendancy as I reviewed the events of the past eight days. Before supper, still alive with the winds of Gullane Hill and the immediate afterglow of Nadia’s presence, I felt an excitement that approached exaltation. In this mood, there were premonitions of the condition I’d glimpsed at Burningbush in 1956, at MacDuff’s abandoned golf course in 1987, and with Nadia for much of this day. Yes, a new life could enter our world, and its basis was already here inside us.
But in that exaltation there were seeds of two other strong emotions. The more I thought about Nadia, the more I envied her discipline; and during supper, that feeling gave way to depression. Each of these moods was telling me something. Each was the messenger of a truth. There was a new life pressing close, but it required the one-pointed practice I envied, and its absence was reflected by this dark mood. Wine at supper deepened the pain I felt, and a beer at a pub afterward only made it worse. Shivas Irons had been born with a genius for transformation, and Nadia, too, had gifts I did not possess. If they represented a ladder to the greater life we harbor, I stood on its lower rungs. With such thoughts, my depression deepened.
But then there was a subtle shift, a turn that began with rising anger and a new resolution. Anyone could practice the life represented by Shivas Irons. Wasn’t that what every great teacher said? Wasn’t it what he’d told me?
A series of painted panels on the wood canopy over the bar dramatized a well-known Scottish legend about a hero’s progress—perhaps it was Rob Roy’s—through valleys and thickets and torture chambers of an English lord. Each frame showed one of the hero’s tests. Each represented a new beginning. Scanning the episodes one by one, I thought of the voice in Ryzhkov’s tower. Imagine. Practice. Start again. I’m not so far away.
Start again! I could hear his resonant voice, and feel the power it contained. The words held more than a suggestion, more than a simple command. There was knowledge of victory in them, a fire and irresistible force. It was my voice, reaffirming a vow I’d made before meeting Shivas Irons.
All at once my mood reversed, and I saw my search of these last seven years from a new perspective. Though I’d only circled around Shivas Irons while collecting evidence of his life, I’d come closer to him. There was more basis for practice now, more leads to the place that was calling to us, more ways to start again.
In the last panel above the bar, the hero reaches home with fellow warriors, friends, and a mysterious light. This sparked another recognition. The light resembled the one in MacDuff’s strange photograph and the apparition I’d seen at Burningbush in 1956. Suddenly the vow that found voice in Ryzhkov’s tower took a more definite shape. I would alter my search, and begin practice anew, with a specific act. At first light I would drive to MacDuff’s old property, and make a vigil for Shivas Irons.
* Jipcho finished his performance with a 54-second final lap to win the two-mile race in a time of 8:43.
* For a brief history of photographic anomalies attributed to paranormal influences, see: Jule Eisenbud, Parapsychology and the Unconscious (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1983), pp. 111–29; and Michael Murphy, The Future of the Body (New York: Tarcher-Putnam, 1992), Appendix A.8.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IN 1989, HAVING learned that the Ramsays were about to sell their abandoned distillery, I tried to see it before it was razed. But the property’s main road had been gated, and a young Scotsman stopped me when I tried to hike in. “Nae visitors at a’. ’Tis fer huntin’ noo, ’n shootin’ clay pigeons,” he said with a Scots burr so thick that I could barely understand him. Later, when I tried a back road, he threatened m
e with a rifle; and that night, when I tried again, he fired in my direction. In Edinburgh the following day, Hannigan had advised against further attempts to see the place. The caretaker had shot at several trespassers, and several years before had been convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Parking near the property now, I wondered if it was still guarded so fiercely.
The sky was darkly overcast on this early October afternoon, and to the north Ben Cruachan was a lonely presence half-covered with menacing clouds. The landscape I’d seen in the summer of 1987, that shimmering array of greens and golds, had changed to a cold and forbidding vista, a countryside to test human will and resilience. I climbed a hill from which I could see the whole property. All of its buildings were gone, some of its trees had been cut, and the first two holes of the abandoned course had been bulldozed to the level of the fields around them. Though Hannigan had described these changes, they produced an immediate shock. More than buildings and trees were cut down. The air itself seemed scarred. The soul of the place was wounded.
In Portinnisherrich, a local had told me that it was unlikely on this dreary day that anyone would be hiking or hunting in the hills above the loch. Keeping watch nevertheless for men with rifles, I entered the property. After inspecting the trapshooting field that replaced the first and second greens, I climbed to the site of MacDuff’s old house. Only stones from its hearth remained. Its cellars were filled with dirt. The hilltop was covered with bushes, weeds, and wild grass.
This was a bleak necromanteion. Nadia’s chamber, Ryzhkov’s tower, and the Well of Light gave protection, stillness, and a sense of focus for contacts with the beyond; but these grey horizons and wounded land scattered the mind and sapped the heart. On this barren hill there was no hint of the presence I’d felt in 1987. But I heard his words again, as I had for most of my trip from Edinburgh. Imagine. Practice. Start again. I’m not so far away.
Then I remembered a line he’d quoted from a Spanish mystic. Prayer when the skies of your heart are overcast, prayer in the dark night of the soul, is greater in the eyes of God than prayer with immediate graces. It is the strongest practice, and ultimately the shortest path. Through it the soul comes to itself, and knows God with a deeper embrace than it does all bathed in sunshine. I found a sheltered place to sit near the remnants of MacDuff’s old hearth. This dreary property mirrored and challenged my separation from Shivas Irons. It was a perfect necromanteion. I would spend the rest of the day here.
At four o’clock it was nearly dark, and a bitter wind was blowing. But the resolution which had built for the last three hours formed a wall against the cold. My only focus now was the voice I’d heard in Ryzhkov’s tower. “Keep coming. The whole world’s here inside us.” His encouragement—and my vow—were older and stronger than the things that would suppress them. I would stay on this cold and barren hill until I couldn’t see the fields below.
At five it was completely dark. There’d been no sudden visitation, no lights like the ones I’d seen in 1987, but the fire inside me had grown stronger. Though my fingers were numb and my legs were stiff, there was pleasure in holding this steady focus. After walking around the edge of the hill to restore my circulation, I resolved to wait an hour more.
At six the wind was blowing fiercely, with an eerie howl. Was its sound caused by trees turned to harps, or a mixture of air and invisible spirits? My resolution grew against the night. It was a self-sustaining presence. By subtle degrees, it was giving birth to a self-recognition, a stability and constantly rising pleasure that didn’t need signs from beyond or any other external support.
At seven, I seemed to be stationed in a place barely subject to the laws of gravity. This was a new condition for me, and it gave sense to premonitions I’d had for much of my life. How had Shivas Irons put it? That there is a second stability, beyond one’s usual concentration, with no need for compass sightings, no sense of ups or downs. In it, ordinary gravity becomes “true gravity.” It’s our truest center, he’d said, because it’s everywhere. There’s more elasticity in it, more room to move. Don’t you remember, Michael? We can’t be limited then to particular feelings or thoughts, or any state of mind.
I left the hill after eight o’clock. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that my body did it. As if with a mind of its own, it found its way across the abandoned golf course while I watched from another place. It went between the two long rises where MacDuff’s first fairway had run, across the trapshooting field, and up a rise to the road that would take me north to the A819. In this, two centers collaborated; one in the flesh, the other with little sense of boundaries on this starless night. I got into the car and wasn’t in it; and drove knowing other cars approached before I saw their lights. As a child at times, and again when I’d met Shivas Irons, I had struggled against losing my boundaries. All my life there had been premonitions of this condition, which didn’t move though the car moved through it, which waited at every turn of the road, which always passed beyond me.
At 9:10, I sat near a fireplace in the restaurant of the George Hotel, enjoying the afterglow of my seven-hour vigil. The winds from Loch Awe were still a fresh presence on my skin, their bite alive in my face and hands, their smell of dry grass and conifers still lingering like an aura. I savored these traces of the long afternoon; and then, with the slightest shift of attention, surrendered to the boundaryless space in which they were suspended. This shift produced unexpected gifts. During the drive from Loch Awe, it had given intuitions of oncoming cars before I could hear or see them. As I’d approached Inveraray, it had led me to the George Hotel. By this fire it produced an extraordinary closeness with the people around me.
While someone sang and the fire danced and the barman greeted friends and acquaintances, I felt as if there were no walls or floor or ceiling.
Two slices of dark rye bread. A cup of broth with the flavor of sage and a warmth that passed to my legs. The young waitress smiled at my enjoyment. The elderly Scottish couple lifted their glasses toward me.
My vigil had produced no specific sign of Shivas Irons, no inexplicable presences like those I’d encountered in 1987. But it was easy to imagine him sitting in this room, taking delight in everyone, in each surprise, relishing this stupendous freedom. If he’d passed to another realm, was he sitting in cafés of the soul savoring the moments of this world? Could he be enjoying this very place?
At the far end of the low-ceilinged restaurant, to the left of the crowded bar, a man sat facing in my direction. We were like bookends, or mirror images. My will to see Shivas Irons had made MacDuff’s property a necromanteion. Was the same thing about to happen now? Was the man a window for revelations? He nodded toward me. I nodded back, acknowledging our mutual enjoyment. We didn’t move; we didn’t want to. The room’s festivity and good cheer were entertainment enough. Hoping nevertheless to invite synchronicities, I ordered him a Chivas Regal, and a moment later, making no effort to approach, he lifted the whiskey toward me. Sometimes it is overwhelmingly apparent that the best signs reside in the simplest acts. Nothing more was needed.
But something more was given.
Suddenly I realized that the man had reddish hair and an uncanny resemblance to Shivas Irons. Again he lifted his whiskey toward me, this time with a manly gesture I’d witnessed at Burningbush. Ye’ve made a good start, he seemed to say in his richest Scots inflection. Keep comin’. As you can see, I’m not so very far away.
Then the impression shifted, to a place between me and the end of the room. “But ye’ve got to come here.” The voice came closer. “Not where the gentleman’s sittin’ there. Not back at the old estate. But heer, right heer, in the new world and body we’re growin’.” Then I heard Shivas Irons reciting clearly from Robert Burns:
An’ now, Auld Cloots, I ken ye’re thinkin,
A certain Bardie’s rantin, drinkin,
Some luckless hour will send him linkin, To your black Pit;
But, faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin, An’ cheat you yet.
Disoriented, I said that it wasn’t, then quickly corrected myself. “It’s mine,” I said, astonished. “I must’ve dropped it when I sat down.”
Disoriented by these events, but nevertheless steadied by my afternoon’s vigil, I drove on to Edinburgh. The voice triggered by the stranger and the scorecard’s strange appearance hadn’t disturbed the starless space from which I watched the road. As during the drive to Inveraray, I seemed to ride both inside and outside this half-conscious frame of metal and glass. Sensing the curves ahead and slippery surfaces still out of sight, I felt the winds of Loch Fyne, the cool fields of Glen Kinglas and Glen Croe, and the rustling of conifers beyond Loch Lomond as if with organs of taste and touch and the skin of a spirit-body.
But this condition didn’t last.
If you’ve had such a ride while lifted by some exultation, you know its dangerous possibilities. On the A82 past Arden, the part of me sitting behind the wheel forgot that this was Scotland and forced an oncoming truck to pass dangerously on my left. Shaken, I parked at a turnoff. The liberated state produced by my seven-hour vigil needed a more practiced correlation with the turns and twists of the road. It was time for new resolutions now—to redistribute attention through my body, to reinhabit my hands, to let cars pass on my right. Until I reached Edinburgh, the motorway would be a sobering necromanteion. The self that extended beyond the car would ride a vigilant shotgun for its less-experienced companion.
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