by Marco Vassi
He looked at her as though she were a panhandler who’d just casually asked for twenty dollars.
“What? Leave my work and go live with a group of insipid . . . “
But he let his words trail off. He didn’t want to say that kind of thing to Lydia any more.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “I’m one of those insipid whatever-you-want-to-call-us. I don’t define myself apart from the family any more. I’m committed to all of us.” She paused, cocked her head, and asked. “Why did you ask me to marry you? Was it a pride thing?”
“Perhaps,” he admitted. “And a last grasping at straws. I feel you moving away, and that was some kind of crazy attempt to grab you back.”
“But you can have me,” she said hurriedly. “And in such a beautiful way. Instead of feeding flatulent realities to bored housewives, you can help us bring a rich fantasy to life, to make a vital dream come true. Think of it, a tribe of people in which our inner life feeds the outer, in which the unconscious structures the cultural forms, in which the horrible split of western civilization . . . of all civilization . . . is finally healed.”
As she spoke, her face began to shine, and her eyes glowed with a violet radiance. Fred involuntarily stepped back. Even her voice had a ring, an echo to it, which made it sound as though she were speaking in a large empty cave. The vibrations emanating from her enveloped the two of them and the scene around them seemed to fade from their senses. The noises, the tempo, the cascade of visual impressions, all disappeared and only Lydia remained, calling to him, calling from a great height, beckoning him to climb, to mount up, to fly.
For a period out of clock time, Fred was mesmerized by the apparition, but then the totality of his conditioning stepped in to sweep him back into the world of his patterned perceptions. The line between the actual and the hallucination is a matter of choice, and Fred decided that what he had just seen would be relegated to a bizarre quirk of consciousness. He shook his head briskly, straightened his spine, and stepped into his posture of jaunty indifference.
“Well, it’s all very brave new world, I’m sure,” he said, his voice a trifle cracked but close to the proper tone of amusement he wanted to feel and project, “but it’s not at all my cup of tea, really. I mean, the notion of me standing naked in front of your gypsy army of therapy rejects boggles even my ordinarily wide spectrum of possible behaviors. So, I’ll mosey on off back to decadence and wait for you to give me a call, as soon as you are off this kick.”
“Or until you realize that you are the one on a kick, you and the entire culture you’re choosing to remain part of. And then you can call me.”
They stepped back from one another with that edge of smiling hostility which masks all potentially messy sentiment when two people break up.
Then he turned sharply and dove into the stream of bodies that flowed around them.
Lydia watched him until she could no longer make him out from among the thousands of others who were swept down the concrete funnel the people and automobiles used as a street.
8
Her whole life was changing, and yet nothing appeared other than it had been. Lydia was beginning to learn that merciless lesson about which Fred had warned her: that reality moved on unheeding of the efforts of human beings to alter it. No matter how exciting her work, or how extraordinary her experiences, each day found her one day older than the last. The earth turned with mammoth indifference to the feelings of the creatures who crawled and walked and flew and swam upon its surface.
“Life,” someone once remarked, “is a disease of matter,” and there were times when Lydia felt the power of the statement. Like the protagonist in Herbert Read’s The Green Child, she began to develop an affinity for the solidity of dense physical reality, seeing the soul as the restless villain in the drama of existence, the vagabond adolescent that wouldn’t accept the fact that everything that is, is limited. She did not articulate it as such, but the law of opposites was making its power felt. The more she and her group involved themselves in out-of-body experiences, the more their bodies seemed to acquire a gravity and magnetism which removed them from the common understanding of reality. In a word, as far as most other people were concerned, Lydia and her group were becoming weird.
After a particularly explosive session, such as the one in which Richard Carstairs watched his wife transmogrify into a snake goddess through the intensity of her fantasy and then go into a three hour fit of trembling withdrawal in which he could do nothing more than whimper for her to have mercy on him, Lydia wondered whether any communication with the world outside their circle was even possible any longer. To them the incident had been strong, but not particularly strange or upsetting. To an outsider, it would seem that they should all be in an asylum.
“It may really be what we need,” Lydia thought more and more often. “Fred said we’d have to go somewhere, become self sufficient. The day may come soon when we’ll have to find an asylum.”
The tenants in her building were beginning to look at her askance. The odd looking people trekking in and out, the screams and wails that seeped out through the thick walls, and the general sense of revolution all combined to tear the curtain of invisibility which every New Yorker holds as the real First Amendment.
She often spent hours sitting on the terrace, gazing down at the city. Just a few hundred years earlier, a blink in evolutionary time, Manhattan had been a pleasant island, wooded, with deer and small animals of all types, with fresh streams and gentle meadows. Indians had lived there for thousands upon thousands of years, close to nature, suffering perhaps the same difficulties that faced all life forms, old age, disease, sorrow, and death. But in the process they had not tampered with the beauty of the place they lived in. They were still in touch with The Spirit of the Earth, and although they fought and killed, fucked and laughed, they remained strong and pure and honest and clean. Then the Europeans arrived, bringing with them the rotting shreds of their decayed culture, and within a few brief centuries had fouled the rivers, covered the earth with concrete, destroyed almost all the wild life, and polluted the very air. And then to compensate for all that, generated a civilization which operated at a level of manic intensity or crippling depression. She sometimes tried to picture what it would be like for an Indian to be lifted off the Manhattan of four hundred years earlier, suspended in a time capsule, and plunked suddenly in the heart of midtown. He would have to go stark raving mad at the horror that had overtaken the place. Or else, plunge into the corruption in order to keep his balance. He would have to swim in the alcohol, the drugs, the tawdry eroticism, the idiot superficiality of commercial thought, the dreary mechanism of compulsory education, the greed, the lusting after paper, and the generally deadening routines of a people who have lost touch with what it is to be human in the widest sense.
And there seemed no chance of the situation’s changing for the better. The whole world was infected with the sickness of size and noise and garbage. The population grew larger, the weapons of destruction more ghastly, the quality of life more shabby, and the very language itself had lost almost all its meaning. It was easy to blame the Pentagon, or the capitalists, or Madison Avenue, or any other phantom reality one might choose, but it was too late for all that. The only chance was to escape it. But to where? There was certainly enough land left where a group of people might make a new home, but how long would that last? And if the air was being poisoned, if the radiation belt around the earth was in danger of losing its shielding power, if the oceans were dying, what did it matter where one went?
At such times Lydia uttered deep sighs that threatened to burst her rib cage, and on occasion she might walk to the edge of the terrace and peer down, asking herself the question, “How unhappy does a person have to be to commit suicide?” She treated herself to that fantasy . . . the momentary teetering at the brink, the sudden letting go, and then the falling, the long gliding dive into space. What thou
ghts at such an instant? What feelings? What insights? And then the concrete. Would there by any pain? Perhaps an instantaneous and total blasting of every nerve ending in the body so that the last moment of life comprised the summation of all suffering? Or perhaps an immediate unconsciousness, with awareness bursting free from the quick corpse to dissolve in that realm from which it arose before it had coalesced to haunt a human body. And what was awareness, then? She, like most people, tended to think of it as a thing, a substance, something that entered the self at the moment of conception and left at death. But perhaps awareness was a myth, a prejudice of the organism, an illusion.
At such times she might weep and call out for Fred or Doctor Monroe. Yet she knew that neither could help her even if they were there. She had chosen the path of individual struggle for truth, and she had to face these feelings alone. It was one thing to wave her magic fantasy wand and develop an image of herself as a matriarch of a new tribe. It was another to find the depths of strength inside herself so that she didn’t get discouraged, didn’t lose a revivifying cheerfulness.
All the words of wisdom, the teachings of the ancients and the moderns, when stripped of their symbolism, personal poetry, and historical trappings, devolve to a single message. And untold billions have been led astray, looking for answers to a question no one has ever been able to formulate, all the while disregarding the immediate reality of their lives. Is there enough food? Do we have shelter? Can we clothe ourselves against the weather? Can we maintain our health? These are the only real questions, the only valid issues of life.
And it is in the paying attention to those problems that happiness is found. If we do our work and reap the reward of our labor, there is nothing more for us on this planet. The rest . . . the pleasures, the speculations, the voyages, the games, are merely toys. And the structures of the society which supposedly exists merely for us to be able to help one another attain the necessities, the monkeybar of civilization with its status roles and power roles and symbolic gratifications, have swollen to such monstrous proportion that a large majority of the people in the world go to bed hungry each night. And the leaders and teachers through all the millennia seemed to accomplish nothing more than to lead those people down one or another blind alley.
As she went more deeply into her explorations, Lydia was finding that the fantasy work, as exciting as it was, could be a deadly trap if one element was missing, and that element was nothing more mysterious than her ability to keep her own eyes fixed on a vision, and to sustain that in face of the tendency on the part of the others to fly off into states of euphoria which were inevitably followed by depression. And they had begun to look to her, either consciously or subliminally, for that kind of direction and support, like children who play without fear because they know that a wise parent is watching over their welfare. When her mood became black, the others easily succumbed to despair. If she radiated hope, their faces would light up and they would throw themselves into the work with renewed vigor.
Now the night had turned bitter cold, yet Lydia dreaded returning to the apartment. There were moments when she hated the sight of the faces that surrounded her all the time. In the first flush of enthusiasm, when Nora had moved in, Lydia let four others share her apartment. And for a week or so it had been lovely, what with re-arranging the furniture and having company all the time and, of course, the mass snugglings in bed at night. But it soon began to pall, and Lydia found herself yearning for simple solitude, for a space around her and, more cogently, inside her. She sometimes saw her fantasy approach as a Frankenstein’s monster, for she rarely had any internal privacy, since she was committed to the idea that all should be revealed all the time in order to make the inner be realized in the outer world.
Like so many people who choose a course of action, Lydia found herself swept along into areas she was not sure she wanted to be in, or could even handle. The speed of the journey was often frightening. More than once she looked into a mirror and did not recognize the person she saw there.
The voice inside her, the voice she had identified as her truest self for as long as she could remember, no longer spoke to her, or when it did, she did not respond. Her former self was like an ex-lover one meets on the street by chance. There is memory, and echoes of fondness, but essentially the other is a stranger, more so than any actual stranger could ever be.
She hugged herself against the cold, and wished for a moment that she could talk to Fred, to have his warm irony blanket her in her loneliness, to take some of his strength to sustain her through the periods in which she had to dredge up every bit of reserve energy she could to maintain the optimism necessary to keep the group from collapsing or flying apart.
That had been relatively easy when she still had the role of therapist to bolster her. But after discarding that to enter into a more flexible relationship with what were once her patients and were now her family, she was left with nothing to rely on but her raw, inner resources. When conditions had thrust her into a position of almost unbearable responsibility, when she became guru and mother and friend all at once, she discovered that her burden of social image had added new subtleties to itself. At times she recalled Fred’s admonition that she was dealing with a group of rootless neurotics seeking a tit to suck, and no matter what she did they would drain her dry.
It was a Tuesday night and Lydia was lonely. The apartment was filled with members of her growing community plus others who were being drawn into the vortex, and she couldn’t stand the idea of even talking to one of them. She let herself back into the apartment and went very rapidly to the bathroom which led off what used to be her bedroom but which now served as the communal sleeping room. She and the others had had a meeting and agreed that the first rule of any community would have to involve each person having his or her own private room to sleep and work in. But her present place didn’t allow for that necessity, and everyone was getting a bit frazzled by the continual rubbing of elbows and clashing of psyches.
Once inside the bathroom she latched the door behind her and lay down on the bathmat next to the tub. She was close to tears but didn’t want to give way to them. She clenched her fists against her mouth and let out a silent scream. Never had she felt so alone in the world as then, when she was surrounded by people who voiced their affection. There was still some block inside her, an inability or unwillingness to let go. This despite the fact that her power had never been so full, nor her ability to swing loose into different emotional levels so advanced. She was sure that she was very, very close to some ultimate breakthrough, some final snapping of the essential tension which defined her rigidity. And the closer she got to liberation, the more the negative elements resisted. There would have to be some kind of explosion, she knew. Otherwise, she would remain in this kind of seesaw conflict, or drift off into a superficial spaciness which might be comfortable but entirely unsatisfying.
“It’s the old civilization,” she thought, “the fist of the ancient culture that’s holding my heart tight.” She wanted to go into the living room to be with the others, to let them know how she was feeling, but she was frozen into her resistance.
And then the realization hit her. Her community had become another form of tyranny. The same tyranny that had been the molding by her parents and teachers, for which she had substituted the tyranny of her profession, and then Doctor Monroe, and finally Fred, was being played by her own creation. She had lost the ability to be capricious, to be contradictory, except in the highly ritualized moments of their group fantasy explorations. This was the evil, the fact that any social organization almost immediately assumes a weight and life of its own and forces its members to conform.
“But it’s insane to be imprisoned by my own . . .” she started to say out loud when the face of Doctor Monroe appeared before her, and his voice filled her ears. “The minute you begin eliciting fantasies, suggesting images, you are doing nothing but using others to fulfill your own inadequacies,�
�� he had said just before he died. And now that process was wreaking its damage.
Lydia stood up, turned on the light, and washed her face. Then she spent half an hour fixing her hair and making up her eyes and mouth. She did this instinctively, mindlessly, seizing upon the most palpable handle available for pumping up her ego. To complete the impulse, she went into her wardrobe and picked out her most scintillating dress, a pale blue sheath which clung to her with the indifference of silk. Over it she put her mink coat. Silver-lamé pumps completed the outfit.
Then, looking as though she were going to a function halfway between opening night at the opera and a transvestite ball, she took a deep breath and stepped boldly into the living room.
From her present state, the others looked like a pack of scraggly ersatz beatniks and failed back-to-the-farm enthusiasts. She raked the room with a cold stare, causing all conversation to stop. In one corner Robert had talked a woman of about twenty-five, someone new to the group, into taking off her blouse and bra, and was sanctimoniously massaging her tits as he poured the verbal debris of the New Age rhetoric into her ears. Nora had mesmerized two men and seemed ready to pull them into a threesome at any moment. And all around, the hopeful victims and the cagey predators eyed each other, the former wanting to be destroyed without being hurt and the latter entertaining visions of roaring brutality. John Abbot, who along with his clothes, had moved in nearly five hundred books on the occult, was sitting cross-legged on the living room table, pointedly being superior to it all and quietly waiting for someone, anyone, to sit at his feet.
“It’s a madhouse,” Lydia murmured.
Her presence galvanized the room. Like animals who had been lying in their cages daydreaming of jungles leaping to attention when the attendant comes with food, the people dropped their poses and activities and focused their awareness on Lydia. In that instant, she saw to the heart of what had been bothering her. It was that they all looked to her for clues, waiting to be defined by her reactions. Having started the process, she now wanted to fade into it, to become just another member of the body. But like it or not, she was its head and so possessed responsibility for the functions of speaking and thinking.