In Touch (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  They wrestled with the issue for more than a week and finally were able to agree upon three defining aspects of their religion. The first was that it have no name; the second was that its guiding spirit be universal compassion; the third was that the technique of fantasy trance states be its way of meditation and prayer.

  Having attained to such a lofty evocation of ideals, they returned to the physical plane to deal with the same problems faced by every person on the planet: survival. Lydia was amazed at the stark simplicity of the questions they worked with, and what real complexity and strength was involved in answering them. They decided, for example, to divide the entire survival problem into seven essential categories: air, water, food, clothing, shelter, health, and social organization. This appeared straightforward enough on paper, but just a brief study of the food category yielded a world of considerations: buying stock and seed, housing and feeding the animals, all the steps necessary to plant, cultivate, harvest and store vegetables and beans, working out dietary requirements in terms of protein and vitamin intake. And this had to be coordinated with where and how houses were built, what medical facilities were available, and so on. In short, they had to reconstruct civilization.

  Their essential life task then involved optimum survival for all in the context of their religious principles. And since they had just arrived from the most alienated, fragmented, and shallow civilization the world had ever seen, they were zealous about not allowing a split to take place between the two orders of business. For, to be “religious” with out concern for actual living conditions is the worst possible perversion of the mystical impulse; and to “survive” without any infusion of a truly religious sensibility is the road to the complete brutalization of humanity. The history of western culture has been the account of one society or another wandering or rushing down one of the two roads, or maintaining a hypocrisy in which the two were falsely commingled.

  Cut off from the prying eyes of those whose interest could not be anything but hostile or benign curiosity, the members of the group began to flower into their most pointed individuality. In one sense they came to look more alike, with the men growing beards and the women letting their hair get long, and everyone wearing overalls most of the time. But the more they were able to rely upon the strength of the collective, the more each person could let his or her idiosyncrasies develop. Nora, for example, at one point went almost a month without saying a word. John Abbot had a bird tattooed on his forehead. And Eileen went through a six month spell of celibacy. As with any family, they learned to be tolerant of one another’s foibles without letting anyone get away with too much egocentric foot-treading.

  They met three times a week to get naked and enter a state of evocative fantasy together. There they expressed all those things that cannot be got to on the level of rational discourse. There they shook down the structure necessary to maintain their survival trip, making sure that they did not, either individually or as a group, get too compulsive or too loose. Physical labor kept them together, and psychic work kept them at the proper distances from one another. The sessions allowed them to see themselves and one another in ways that fell outside the essential roles they took in order to keep the community going.

  As might have been expected, word of their existence leaked out, and before long they had their first visitors. In the first year some five hundred people came through; once the location and description of the community was fed into the counter-cultural information system, it became a stopping-off spot for those modern small caravans which crisscross the country in search of the ultimate utopia. Many went to satisfy a vague curiosity, some out of a kind of pathetic aggression; some because they were hungry and thought they might find one or another kind of food; and a few because they were looking for a home.

  At the end of the year the community had more than fifty people.

  And it was then that Fred visited. He arrived unannounced, and when Lydia first saw him it took her a full ten seconds to recognize the skinny, grey-faced man in the absurd clothing. And when she saw who it was, she was caught between laughter and tears. He looked so ridiculous she wanted to laugh, and yet so miserable that she wanted to cry. He seemed like a little boy who’d lost his mother and was trying to pretend to be manly about it. To her amazement, Lydia realized that she felt like the mother he was looking for. She had not had a clear gauge of her development as measured by some criterion outside the community, but with Fred’s visit, she could see that her advance had been breathtaking.

  “Fred,” she called out as he stood on the front porch twiddling his hat between his hands.

  And when he glanced over at her, she knew that he was having as much trouble recognizing her as she’d had with him.

  They moved toward one another tentatively and when they were standing several inches apart, they embraced, Lydia’s strong arms, made firm by work in the fields, almost crushing Fred’s rib cage. She’d taken him on a tour of the buildings, explaining the basic ground plan of the place, and then walked with him to the edge of the high plateau on which the entire community was housed, and they had stared into the vast distance for a long time before Lydia had asked what he thought of it all.

  “I’ve missed you,” Fred said, still staring down a fifth of a mile to the shrub covered ground below, his voice naked in the deep silence which drenched the land from horizon to horizon.

  Lydia remained quiet. She was certain he wanted her to tell him that she had missed him also, but that hadn’t been the case. Every once in a while she’d experienced a brief poignant memory of him, a searing flash that set her heart racing, her eyes stinging with tears, and a sense of eternal loss flooding her soul. But, in all honesty, she was generally too busy and involved to give Fred too much thought. She often considered that she would never see him again and that did not plunge her into any sort of ineradicable gloom.

  “For a while,” he went on, “after I’d heard that you left, I was very amused by the whole idea. I was certain you’d be back in a few months, your ego curled between your thighs, this entire utopian compulsion out of your system. But when it began to seem clear that you wouldn’t be coming back to the city, I suddenly had to face the reality of what life would be like without you. And the more I looked at that, the more sad I became. I tried all the usual diversions: drink, drugs, orgies, cults, and even celibacy. Nothing distracted me long enough. I realized that for the first time in my adult life, I had allowed the reality of another human being to touch my heart, and now life without that touch would forever be empty, no matter how successful I became in other ways.”

  Lydia was astonished to hear him speak that way. She reached forward and touched her fingertips to his lips.

  “Fred, that’s so beautiful,” she said.

  “Like it?” he smiled. “It’s a line from one of last week’s soaps.”

  For an instant she tasted anger, but discarded it as unworthy of the moment. Fred’s defenses against his feelings were still the dominant thing about him. And to her, living as she did in a state where the inner and outer lives continuously flowed into one another, each outburst as Fred was now indulging in, and then refusing to take responsibility for, was considered melodramatic.

  It was the same reason why so much art was so phony; because it was only the rigidity and coldness of the culture which made certain expressions appear exalted, and these expressions were then surrounded by commercial-aesthetic frames of reference and exhibited as great works.

  But when there is no split in a society between feeling and action, then everything anyone does is artistic, and art doesn’t become a separate category somehow removed from the rest of life. One of the developments which had most revolted Lydia was the conceptual art movement, in which a comparative handful of snobs without great talent learned to surround unexceptional projects with the ideology of heightened banality in order to cash in on the trivial. The whole process was a bastardization of the i
deas of Duchamps crossed with socialist realism.

  “Fred,” she said after she’d slalomed back into equilibrium, “you can have absolutely no idea of what an ass you sound like. I’m not saying that to sound superior, and you know it’s not to hurt you, but we’ve been through too much together for me to deal with you on anything but a truthful basis. You have one of the most brilliant minds I have ever encountered. I mean, when you’re on, it just glitters. The only trouble is that it isn’t connected to anything. And so, ultimately, it will wear itself out, like scissor blades grinding on one another. You’ve taken a sparkling talent, a marvelous sense of humor, and a compelling insight into the nature of reality, and what have you done with it all? Written soap operas to put the anxiety ridden women of America to sleep. Don’t you see what a dead end that is? And what’s worse, you have begun to feel ashamed yourself and have become defensive, like you were a few moments ago.”

  “Yes, yes, I see that,” Fred told her, “but now I don’t know how to get out of it.”

  “I can’t tell whether you are being real or acting out a melodrama,” she said.

  “You can’t?” he replied, unable to keep a trace of sarcasm out of his voice. “I thought you had become an expert on distinguishing between fantasy and reality.”

  “Oh dear,” she said, “you’ve come all this way just to make a point, to prove some tedious superiority, and all because you can’t admit that you are lonely and tired and defeated and want to go home, but don’t know how to get there.” She looked at him a long time, the sun baking her skin.

  “Come here,” she urged.

  “Here?” Fred repeated, as though he didn’t understand the meaning of the word.

  “With us,” Lydia continued. “We’ve already sunk in our first roots. This is our new home, a real home. You can finally relax.”

  “Vegetate is the more accurate term.”

  He shook his head as though trying to discourage a fly.

  “Come on, Lydia,” he said, “a retreat into solipsistic fantasy may be pretty, and even viable for a while, but it’s the worst kind of regression.”

  “Or the only kind of revolution.”

  Fred laughed, a harsh barking which made him sound like a coyote.

  “I came here to try to educate you out of your obsession and because I truly missed you. But I imagine I missed the woman that I had fixed in my dreams, never dreaming that she might actually have become a parody of what she set out to be.”

  A second spark of anger flared in Lydia’s eyes. Her ability to perceive people in terms of their total psychic structure had deepened in the past year, and Fred was more naked to her than he would have liked to believe possible. She saw his need, and his resistance, and the full complex of personality gimmicks which rose from his resistance. It was the latter facade, unfortunately, that he had come to identify as his self. Because she felt fondness for him still, and because, somewhere inside her a tiny but unmistakable biological itch yearned to be scratched, she veered in from another angle.

  It was a tactic she had used thousands of times, and there had been a time when she felt guilty for maneuvering in and out of people’s heads and feelings in that way. It was based on a belief that there existed an authentic self beneath the manifestations of the social self. Lydia had now reached the state, however, where it was no longer a belief but a perception. She could literally see the child crying for its mother and the mother taking the guise of the person’s adult personality telling it to be quiet, not to cry in public. In order for Lydia to reach the child she had to pass through the introjected parent, the society crystallized as muscular tension. And she knew that there was practically no way to manage that without creating a volatile situation, unless the person were willing to lie back, let go, and allow the suppressed energies to emerge as fantasy.

  “Why put me down?” she asked. “I’m out here minding my own business and the business of those who want to be with me. I didn’t send for you. You came because you had a need. And now you can’t even admit that need, but just sit there and look foolish in your defenses. Imagine, having defenses on a day like this, in a place like this, and with me!”

  “All right!” he shouted, “all right. I’ve admitted it. I missed you. I needed you. And I was willing to swallow my pride to be with you. But why do you want me to crawl? If you know what’s inside me, why do you have to get me to jump through a hoop?”

  “Then why did you come?” she replied, inconsistent and yet to the point.

  “I was on my way to Los Angeles to close a deal,” he told her. “And I thought it might be a lark to stop and see how you were doing. That’s all.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” she said.

  “I told you, I was going crazy without you and I had to see you.”

  Fred was enjoying himself immensely. The air and sunlight had begun to render him euphoric and he was beginning to become infatuated with his little game.

  Lydia jumped to her feet and walked over to the very edge. The two of them were poised against the sky, Lydia’s feet just inches from the brink of the precipice, Fred sitting back from that existential line. There was no wind, no movement, only the sheer brilliant sunlight holding the planet in its sizzling palm. Not a person was visible, nor any animals. Just the patient plants in prickly meditation on the unalterable cycle of light and dark, cold and heat, that formed the substance of their lives.

  “You make it ugly,” she said at last, her back still toward him. “You take that inane bit of cleverness about the mythic structure of the age and play tawdry little games with it. How can you respect yourself at all?”

  “Because I have only one criterion of my own worth, and that is to avoid vulgarity.” Fred laughed to himself. “I know what you’re thinking. How can a man who writes soap operas, of all things, consider himself to be above vulgarity? But it is precisely because I understand them in their vulgar aspect that that doesn’t touch me. I use vulgarity; I master it. And it offends me deeply to see people who have succumbed to it. You’ve infused the gauzy beauty of the dream into the horrid reality of daily life in a way that can’t compare to the work I do. With what you’ve done, the dream is bankrupt and the life is not any richer for it.”

  “Not any richer?” Lydia exclaimed. “Look at us. A year ago we were like you. Grey, nervous, complaining, proud, parasitic. And now we live in God’s own sunshine, we breathe pure air and drink water so fresh and cold it brings tears to your eyes. And we grow our own food. The land we live on is ours. Don’t you see? We are picking up where we forced the Indians to leave off. Living simply, honestly. Working hard. Paying attention to the optimum survival of all. And through all this, maintaining our sense of the sublime, keeping in touch with the great mystery of creation.”

  “But how absurd,” Fred shot out. “You have become so enmeshed in your dreams that you have lost sight of THE DREAM. You have learned to pay so much attention to your survival realities that you no longer see THE REALITY. This”—he waved his hand to take in a 360 degree circle—”is fantastically pretty. And if the species had any sense, the whole earth would still be this unspoiled. But you know this is the last enclave. The machines are moving in. Strip mining contracts have already been signed for the land a hundred miles away. Soon this entire stretch will be dense with dust, and the air shattered with the noises of drilling and explosions. It’s coming to an end, Lydia. The civilization is too foul, too stupid. It will kill everything. All beauty, all tenderness, all hope, all humanity. There are no human beings left, just locusts. A vicious hungry swarm sucking with monstrous greed at the juices of the planet, and growing thinner and thinner as it does, causing it to eat more and more. That’s the real. The species is finished. We go the way of the dinosaurs. And if you want to ignore that and build a small zone where you can pretend that the sun isn’t dying, that the galaxy isn’t going to disappear in a black hole, that the enti
re universe isn’t the most hideous illusion ever perpetrated, unless the universe next door isn’t a more grisly joke, then go ahead and play your games. Roll around naked with your reformed neurotics. Live the good life. Pretty soon you’ll be written up in the Spiritual Community Guide, and you will have joined the countercultural establishment. And you will have discovered that in your quest for freedom you have merely developed a more rounded form of fascism.”

  He took a deep breath, stood up, and stepped forward to look Lydia close in the eyes.

  “Maybe I’ve failed. But I recognize my failure. I have liberty in a context of decadence and depravity, that is, within western culture. Now, you have evolved the beginning of a new culture, but you have sacrificed liberty. And by that I mean the only liberty that has meaning, the liberty to protest the fact of existence. Not to make nice with it by curling around your navels and swimming in smarmy fantasy group gropes.”

  To her surprise, Lydia found that her eyes were shedding tears.

  “Why did you come?” she said. “Why did you come here with your despair and nihilism? Must you destroy what you can’t have for yourself?”

  “Well,” he replied, a tinge of victory in his voice, “how can I affect you so strongly if you are really secure in what you’re doing? I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’re lonely, because you are suffering what every leader has to go through, the fact that there can only be one of you. You have to carry the burden, to keep the flock together. And it doesn’t matter how much ideological hogwash you spout about your new-found religion, the scene is still an old-time happening. Get one thoroughly obsessed human being who wants to lead a tribe to a promised land and around him or her will gather all the standard types. Including the follower with money, and the follower with the organizing talent, and the follower with the child-parent fixation, and the follower who burns to be second-in-command, and the follower who will one day lead the first heretical revolt. It’s nothing but the history of our history. You can read it in the books or see it actually happening in the communes around the nation.