These guys were everything Horace Mann wasn’t, and we loved them for it.
From a closet at home I rescued a hockey game with a marble and tin men, which Jonny and I played addictively for years before abandoning, and donated it to the lounge. Tournaments ran continuously thereafter alongside the TV. Then we voted to spend class funds on a new model with moving men in tracks and a wooden puck.
But our teachers were not going to allow a year in the tank. Mr. Clinton, whom I now had for the second time, intended his Modern European history course to be the tour de force of our Horace Mann education. Over six feet tall with a mop of white hair and the fierce countenance of Samuel Johnson, he spent weeks filling us with an appreciation for the Church and the complexities of feudalism. Inflamed by the decay of worldly things, he would bring famous lives to an end always with the same declaration: “Death, as it must to all men, came to Charlemagne, Charles the Great…. ” Death later came to Ferdinand and Isaebella, Cabot and Magellan, and Philip of Spain, even Martin Luther the reformer. After that we were submerged in the details of the Thirty Years War so graphically that I imagined Gustavus Adolphus riding out of the woods behind Van Cortlandt Park, leading a Swedish army, his minister Oxenstierna at his side.
We spent weeks on Erasmus and the northern Renaissance and then studied Jacob Burckhardt on the Medicis and sixteenth-century humanism in Italy. For Clinton, the Church was the single great institution of humanity—ameliorating and yet corrupting, simplistic and violent in its politics but profound in its ceremony. He enacted his Mediaeval passion so convincingly in class that Bob Alpert dropped left-wing politics and, to the horror of his parents, denounced their synagogue and began attending Mass.
There was a cult around Clinton. Rumors about his past ran the gamut from priesthood to Satanism to student seduction. Whatever the truth, he commanded our attention. I remember how, after attending the funeral of an ex-student who had died young, he spent much of the next class describing the corpse in the open casket. “The difference between life and death is infinitesimal,” he preached. “He was strong, strapping, handsome, a youth, lying there, but he had already entered the country from whose bourne—Shakespeare—no traveller returns.” And then he wept openly before us, took out his handkerchief and sat silently sobbing at his desk for the remainder of class.
Another eccentric arrived during my junior year. Berman was a strange-looking man, almost like a mutant: totally bald though young; flat, thin eyes with an impenetrably morose expression behind black-rimmed glasses. He ate with us in the student rather than faculty dining room where he conducted sessions on the mystic Meister Eckhart and the Russian occult philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff. Chuck Stein told me Berman was a member of an ancient Rosicrucian order.
It was through Chuck rather than Berman that I became involved in the occult. Since many of my classmate’s poems were based on tarot cards, Mr. Ervin suggested that he bring a deck to class. Bright-hued vistas of “The Magician,” “The Wheel of Fortune,” and “The Hanged Man” were set on the table before us. Packed with symbols, the images were at once baseball cards, commercial ads, and illustrations from Grimms’ Fairytales.
Chuck interpreted their gestalts to the creative-writing gang: “The wild red roses are our five senses.” He held a palm over the Magician’s garden. “You can feel their energy coming out of this card.” As we each gave it a playful pass, the red and yellow surface did seem unduly hot. “The Wheel of Fortune is the Galaxy pivoting in seasons and cosmic epochs.” He rotated it clockwise in midair, turning its Hebrew letters into a brief dreidel; then he set it down and picked up another. “The scaffold is the scaffold of Creation—the Hanged Man is really right-side up; he just seems upside-down from our limited perspective.”
My favorites were “The Star” and “The Moon,” two extraterrestrial landscapes with creatures emerging from the same pool of cosmic vibrations. Their murals featured an elemental crayfish, a pelican on a bare tree, an angel pouring water from earthen jugs, and a sky bursting with yellow and white suns. The forces portrayed here, Chuck declared, were greater than cosmic rays from all the visible and invisible stars of the universe.
I wanted to learn more, so my friend led me downtown. I was flabbergasted that the beautiful Spanish-looking girl who had ridden the subway silently with us for years greeted Chuck with a bear hug at 242nd Street. Her name was Julie Garfield and she went to Buck’s Rock. Chuck lived in Yonkers, so this juxtaposition had not previously occurred.
We travelled Broadway all the way to Dr. Fabian’s old neighborhood near 14th Street. There Chuck turned into a used bookstore. Its downstairs, heralded by an overhead sign, was our destination: “Basement of the Occult.” There owner Donald Weiser removed hand-engraved tarots from locked glass and showed us arcane landscapes in enormous luminescent decks. Then he talked of alchemy, reincarnation, UFOs, and the coming revival of the hermetic arts.
The first item I bought was the Waite deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, the same set of seventy-eight cards that Chuck used. The second was a book, The Tarot by Paul Foster Case. When I read Case’s descriptions that night I felt as though I was ascending through Robert Penn Warren’s mere placeholder symbol into the fountain of souls itself:
“In contrast to the Magician, who stands upright in a garden, the High Priestess is seated within the precincts of a temple. The walls of the building are blue, and so are the vestments of this virgin priestess. Blue, the color assigned to the Moon, and to the element water, represents the primary root-substance, the cosmic mind-stuff…. ”
I stared at this woman in her robes of gossamer indigo. She was seated between twin pillars, an arras of unopened pomegranates behind her. I thought: “She is unconsciousness; she represents all that is hidden inside me.” What Dr. Fabian had once alluded to now had a Torah-like representation; it was still invisible, but I could hold a scrap of it in my hand. Believing that all-out panics were in my past, I was ready to become a pilgrim, to go on the quest that he had posed on my thirteenth birthday.
A week later I bought a second book, Arthur Edward Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot, mainly for its appendix on fortune-telling. At home I set the cards on the rug and used Waite’s Celtic Cross formula to read my first draws—for Jonny, then Bridey, who was initially concerned that fortune cards might not be an appropriate activity for a Catholic but finally couldn’t resist. Years later, she told my sister that my use of the deck proved I was in league with the Devil.
My mother would have no part of it—she hated me in this guise—meteorologist, Hiroshima critic, tarot maven; it was all the same to her. But Bob accepted a reading and complimented me on my pizzazz: “I’m not sure you’re a fortune teller, or that there are such things, but you’ve got a fine sense of theater.”
At Waite’s direction I picked a Significator card to represent the person whose fortune was about to be told. Then Bridey or Jon shuffled the remaining cards while pondering an issue in his or her life. After being satisfied that the deck “got” it—my instruction—she or he handed it back to me. I took cards off the top in order.
In Bridey’s case I first made the stern, unsentimental Queen of Swords her Signifactor, then covered it with the top card from her sort, showing the major influences over her, then topped that card with another showing what crossed or opposed her. At the Significator’s crown the third card off the shuffle revealed what she hoped for as well as the best that could be achieved under the circumstances. Below the Significator I set the fourth, the foundation of the matter, showing (again, according to Waite) what had already passed into actuality. The fifth card, placed behind the direction from which the Queen was facing, disclosed what had recently passed and was fading. The sixth card, in the direction of the Queen’s clairvoyant gaze, foretold what was coming into being and would shape the future. Then the seventh through tenth positions were taken from the top of the remaining deck and placed in a vertical row apart, indicating respectively the person herself, the tendenc
ies at work in her environment and among family and friends, her unconscious hopes and fears regarding the matter, and—the tenth card—the outcome, the culmination of the influences of all the cards, drawn and undrawn.
When I brought the tarot to Grossinger’s at Christmas, Aunt Bunny was so taken with her reading that the next afternoon she invited a group of her friends from town for tea and fortunes. I picked female Significators and read the Celtic Cross for four dressed-to-the-nines ladies. Amazingly they wanted this and had patience to see it through; in fact, they were instant zealots, swayed somehow by the combination of esoteric images, forbidden knowledge, and my patter of gypsy put-on. The issues they brought were nontrivial: domestic, romantic, and financial quandaries, confessing them in surprising detail and listening attentively in a way that they would not have otherwise. Without the cards these bourgeois matrons wouldn’t have given me the time of day.
Despite the fact that I kept explaining they weren’t supposed to tell me anything, that the cards were larger than their stories, and blind, to boot—still, they laid it on the line: wayward husbands, risky stock portfolios, intrusive relatives, troubled children. They believed in this stuff more than I did, so I became their cosmic ventriloquist.
Amid tabletop jumbles of kings, queens, knights, pages, pentacles, swords, cups, wands, and major trumps, I converted shuffles to imaginative narratives. Using Waite’s and Case’s thumbnail glosses, I found perfidy, felicity, adversity, riches, impediment, and allies. I evoked secret quarrels (the Seven of Swords), having rejected three things and awaiting a fourth (the Four of Cups), and loss of one identity before taking on another (Death). My favorites were the Five of Pentacles (mendicants in rags on crutches, hobbling in the snow with a stained-glass window shining above them) and the Six of Cups (children sniffing the flowers of memory). For the former I reminded my subject of her potential for happiness and salvation while she wallowed in self-imposed exile. For the latter I warned of the deadly attraction of eternal return, of living too nostalgically in the past.
I knew never to predict actual things (“abuse of the deck,” Chuck had told me), even for the Ten of Swords, where the guy lies on the battlefield with ten huge blades piercing his body from head to thighs (bringing an unhappy gasp from Connie, who drew it). I spoke like Dr. Fabian, only of difficulties that could be overcome through insight and knowledge.
“You should charge for this,” Marcia said.
“I can’t,” I told her. “I’d lose the power.”
At the time, I regarded it as a game, my readings a mixture of The Interpretation of Dreams, Waite, Case, and dead-reckoning. I thought I was popular and got so many repeat requests because I was a writer as well as a symbol maven—and that the women were charmed by getting their fortunes told by a kid.
Perhaps—but there are actually always two levels of divination and it is hard to know where one ends and the other begins. You tell the story literally in the cards and play honest broker, and you tell another story that you are getting from elsewhere. It is not that it is not in the cards but, even if it is, you are not getting it from them in the same way. Yet paradoxically you are only reading it from them—they fall into place as you go.
That is what I was doing unconsciously—only I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t grasp any of it then, had no context to grasp it. A natural empath, I mirrored my subjects even as I had mirrored my mother from day one. For Aunt Bunny’s friends it was a passing idyll; for Martha Towers it was a horrific visitation—and by a whelp out of her own flesh. I didn’t merely reflect her panics, I reflected what she was terrified of.
As an ingénue tarot reader, I was sought not because I was entertaining but because I gave accurate information despite myself. And that’s why I was entertaining.
Decades later some of these women were still telling me that I had foreshadowed major events in their lives (like Freddie Rosenberg leaving Marcia for another woman). You could lay down a hundred draws without getting ones as on target as those that appeared magically in 1961. It was effortless for me to weave such draws into compelling narratives.
But how did I trick myself into some sort of confluence of time inversion and telekinesis, into scrying both cards and psychic energies?
I think it was the same as how Fabian did it: from trying to be a good storyteller and therapist while telling myself that that’s only what I was doing. I didn’t consider that I was consulting auras and picking up higher-dimensional waves: the mindstuff described in the books, the supernatural heat Chuck had demonstrated in class. I thought I was following instruction booklets in the same protocol as building model airplanes or playing Monopoly, with a dash of science-fiction theatricality cum Freudian melodrama thrown in. Then the cards flowed like Atlantean cinema, and pictures arose in a teenage fool’s mind.
There is another thread here, and it will take some backtracking to capture. When I was thirteen years old, a new brand of soap called Zest debuted with a flurry of television ads that showed people bathing in waterfalls amid orchestral crescendos. A voiceover described “the Zest feeling”—a whole different kind of sudsing action that made you downright ecstatic: “For the first time in your life, feel really clean.”
I was curious what it would be like to wash with something other than our house brand, Camay, so I convinced my parents to buy me a bar. After unwrapping its parchment, I held a marbled bluish-green amulet like a Babylonian bar imprinted with runes.
When I scrubbed myself with Zest that night in the shower, I became as exuberant as the people in the ads. The soap felt liberating, slaphappy. I couldn’t identify the precise source of its energy; it wasn’t the foaming action, but there was something rhapsodic about it—perhaps its subtle fragrance, vaguely like Queen Anne’s lace and other wildflowers. (Of course, this was good old, innocent bathing, hearkening back to satyrs in waterfalls and shaving-cream sprees; it had nothing to do with my later erotic digressions.)
When my spirits needed a lift thereafter, I took Zest into a bath or a shower and, as I got the suds in under my arms and between my toes, I was transformed.
I told my Horace Mann friends about Zest, but to a one they laughed, and the few that tried it reported nothing special (as they had presumed). Although I knew it was ridiculous to ascribe joy to a bar of soap, I still suspected that they were missing something: They are not letting themselves feel it.
For months thereafter I looked forward to baths and showers. I used Zest to get myself happy, to bust out of melancholy. To my mind I had discovered something important that my peers were either too uptight or too snotty to admit, something major and magic about the world: the Zest feeling.
The following summer I packed a few bars in my camp trunk and showed the jade ovals to bunkmates. At Chipinaw we showered together, so I got a chance to watch the soap in action. No one in my bunk experienced the Zest feeling, or anything at all, but they mercilessly spoofed it with dances and paroxysms that left them writhing in fake ecstasy on the moth-littered stone. I blushed but was undeterred.
I continued to feel the ebullience of Zest. A shower with its lather made me less homesick. It turned the Chipinaw sky bluer, its flowers deeper yellow and orange. I flew across the outfield with uncommon grace.
A natural proselytizer, I kept touting Zest. Yet from bunkmates I continued to evince blank looks and loony cutting up. I insisted they were wrong. So they sought an outside expert, our counselor.
He took their side. “There is no Zest feeling,” he said. “That’s what ads are supposed to do—convince you to buy things. It’s all in your imagination.”
If it hadn’t been the fifties, if America had privileged sacred practices over recreational meaninglessness, if we had been initiated into some sort of inner life instead of being told it didn’t exist, then he might have been able to report: “The imagination is a powerful tool by itself; it can turn ordinary things into magical ones and unleash boundless love. We each have the power inside us to be happy and experience m
iracles every day. We have an innate quotient of generosity and the desire to serve others. And that capacity is contagious.”
He would have encouraged me to find the source of the Zest feeling in myself, in the native beauty and wonder of the world; to cultivate and spread Zest’s compassion, even to practice a better poetry than Zest, as Wordsworth did, as Buddha did: the “visionary gleam,” “splendour in the grass,” “empty essence, primordially pure.” Not a soap, but a measureless radiance beyond summer breezes, in a night ablaze with stars, as we sang Taps, swaying and bundled together in the void. Our counselor might have invited me to turn Zest into art or prayer. Instead we earned little felt stripes to sew onto the arms of our Chipinaw jackets: red for arts and crafts, blue for religion, white for service, yellow for sports, green for nature cabin. Zest was all of these.
Our mavens thought they had better stuff than Zest, but all they offered were patches and slogans, soporifics and zest-killers, games reduced to their lowest denominators: mirth that wasn’t mirth, play that was hardly playful, prayers that earned no god.
Of course, not only couldn’t my counselor have said such things but, if he had, none of us would have believed them. So, the guy succeeded in setting me straight. He made me ashamed of my gullibility. The Zest feeling went away. I became cynical and modern again. After all, it was just soap.
I didn’t buy any more Zest. Every now and then I came upon a bar at someone else’s house, tried it, and, despite myself, felt a glimmer of the old Z jubilation—but I dismissed it as my impressionability.
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