We took a table in the Phi Psi social room, drank beer, ate pretzels, talked. I felt so pleased to be with her even if she wasn’t entirely a girlfriend. There was a brief predicament when Jon peeked in with his current consort, but he saw Lindy and was quickly out of there.
I asked her if she had noticed him and she nodded. “He’s still chaperoning around les selected femmes like some sort of mogul. He’s pretty gross.”
“He’s also a fake. For all of us still, it’s our parents’ money,” I said. “We haven’t done anything yet. It’s so easy to pretend and lose who you are.”
“For girls it’s especially easy. You’re taught to please men, to be what they like, and you do that so easily you don’t even realize you’re doing it.” She paused. “This friendship is a great relief to me, like a break from the whole tyranny of dating.”
My heart sank at that comment, but I didn’t back off. In the first chapter of The Rainbow Tom Brangwen was carrying a load of seed in his cart out of Nottingham through Cossethay; that’s when “she” passed him on the road—the unknown woman who corralled his mind and soul. “The load of seed” was both a cargo and a symbol, not just for the male gamete but the germinal force itself. Tiny seeds birth us blindly into being, and in their ripening bear us toward fruition. We don’t have a choice, Lawrence warned. When we least expect it, nature summons men and women from obscurity to be each other’s lovers.
There was a silence between us, and she said, “let’s dance,” and I said “okay.” The Phi Psi basement was the setting, but it had become another, almost allegorical space. I held her almost fragilely as if to preserve every molecule of our contact, its different weight, scent, her blouse, the feel of her head against mine, the tightness of her bones and muscles, her sweet, gentle angularity. She was denser and springier than Ginny—she was there.
I didn’t know what was proper—dance close, dance chastely apart—but she automatically danced close. I felt myself transported, as much by the sense of our fitting together—the solidity and definiteness of her and me—as by an erotic feeling. I was inundated by her whole presence and bearing. It was the first dance that didn’t feel spurious or self-conscious.
I was the deejay. It was my own tape playing, a compilation I had made in the fall, a band from the movie The Alamo … the Brothers Four. I heard it as the theme song of The Rainbow:
A time just for reaping, a time just for sowing,
The green leaves of summer are calling me home….
Oh, everything! In that moment every intimation I ever had filled me. I didn’t have to know the answer or articulate the mystery. Just as I was, I was complete.
I experienced the generations of life on Earth, how single men and women each come into being, grow, find lovers, have babies, plant their crops, die. I had spent my time on dream planets. But Lindy was the grace of the whole West—and I was holding her.
A time to be courting
A girl of your own….
And then she did something startling. She playfully blew in my ear, not just once, but continuously, a soft, sustained breath. I had never felt anything so tender and tantalizing. My body froze in rapture, as though all my attention had to go into perceiving this before it passed. She blew harder, looked at me, smiled, then blew in my other ear. With adolescent awkwardness I felt myself become hard and extend out against her. She acknowledged that with a smile, and then shifted her head and put her tongue in my ear and rolled it there so smoothly and deeply I felt as though it were passing through my brain. I drifted in bliss trying to make that ear even more available to her. And, at last, my feeling sustained the feeling in the song:
Twas so good to be young then, to be close to the earth,
And to stand by your wife, at the moment of birth.
Now I glimpsed the pathway to the center and saw how rich and complicated the world was—not my mind but the world. Everything I had both feared and wanted had an existence, an autonomous tangibility. In my senses I tumbled through primal symbols, fragments of memories … a tulip garden at the edge of creation, the forest of my sixth-grade dream, the essence of those aromatic vines coursing through my ears. I saw a friend I had as a child named Phil, a magician Dr. Fabian, kids from Bill-Dave baseball, Chipinaw campers singing “Friends” in a chain, all combined in me, all once, all briefly, because they didn’t have to be (and nothing in the universe could be) forever. I wanted to acknowledge them each and thank them for being alive, for me being alive, for sustaining me to get this far, to this large a reckoning.
The sense of doom was gone. I felt only my freedom. We left the basement and went to my room, and she lay atop and freely kissed me and laughed, and put my hands on her bare breasts. Then she jumped up like a sprite, and said, “Enough of this stuffy place.” And we climbed onto the Phi Psi roof overlooking fields between lit manors, sounds of Saturday night bands drifting together. It was peaceful just to lie there and look at stars, in the breeze feel as though the planet itself were rolling in space. I hugged her more tightly and she began to breathe harder and run her hands along me, feeling the lines of my waist, and then my chest—that secret territory, realm of imagined diseases in childhood. Her touch opened it to feeling, and I took my shirt off under the starlight.
“You look great, alive,” she said. “Beautiful. You are beautiful. Don’t you know that?” she demanded, shaking me with a smile. Lying alongside, I held her silently, feeling her shape against my chest, thinking it was her that made me beautiful.
She rolled onto her back, and I straddled her waist gently, my knees on the gravel, as she drew my hands once across her breasts and along the lines of her body. She let go and I tried to feel her without violating the dignity with which she opened to me. It was like praying.
She put her hands on my nipples and felt my torso, undid my belt. She pulled me on top of her again, and putting her tongue in my ear, reached down with her hand and held me and gently played with me—all the time the link between us lucid and real, the point of contact unbroken. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, though I didn’t think I was. “It’s a fine thing. It’s a lovely full hardness.”
And then we stopped and went no further. I lay there, her hand on my chest, exposed and joyous in this place. This was the extent of it, as much as I needed in order to feel absolved.
That night, at bedtime, I read Olson’s “Moonset” poem from Gloucester, December 1, 1957, 1:58 a.m.:
Not
the suffering one you sold
sowed me on Rise
Mother from off me
God damn you God damn me my
misunderstanding of you
I can die now I just begun to live.
My mother, Mr. Clinton, Abbey West, Betsy Sley: I could reach back to each of them and tell them, forget it, whatever happened, it’s okay. The kid is going to survive.
PART FIVE
THE CEREMONY
APRIL, 1964–JUNE, 1965
1
THE PANIC
Two nights after Lindy’s visit to Phi Psi, Jon came into the bathroom as a few of us were brushing our teeth. Making a show of ignoring me, he turned to Dave and said, “Did you see? My former live-in whore was by here the other night.”
I whipped around. “You fat bastard!”
He seemed startled more than anything, that someone dared address him so irreverently. “You’re going to take that back,” he insisted.
“Like hell I am!” I stared hard at him, then added, “Pretentious jerk!” and looked away.
He put his head down and charged at me like a rhinoceros and, as I swung back, he tried to pin me against the mirror. I slid out of his grasp. He lunged again. Toothpaste, shaving cream, sundries crashed to the floor. Then Dave grabbed him and, with Phil’s help, pulled him out and led him back to his room: “Cool it, man; cool it.”
A week later Jon moved out of Phi Psi into the dorms.
Life had followed the script of a Lawrence novel—a hermetic undertow that carried m
e beyond plot and character into the heart of my own text. Betsy had stood at the gateway, an unknowing guardian spirit. Then I had a date with the wrong girl … and someone else was in the alcove, waiting.
Where Ginny led, I followed as if Lawrence’s Ursula and Gudrun were my guides—until we were riven down separate paths. Lindy was waiting at the ripples of the Stream of Probability. What was elusive with Ginny was as now tangible as life itself.
We made spring into our continuous study date: alongside Paradise Pond at Smith, on the Phi Psi lawn, in Valentine between meals.
During the term Schuyler threw in with Larry and Jim, juniors from my Lawrence seminar. The four of us maintained a running satire in the dining hall as we spoofed Amherst styles, noting the passage of “cowboy cool,” “big man,” “jockdom,” and “pseudointellectual popinjay.” Larry and Jim were high-stepping cowboys of their own contrivance; decked out in jeans and leather, they shared a souped-up old sedan and spoke in periodic Laurentian and Keatsian mime. It was running theater—cut-up plus panache.
One Saturday Larry drove us to a swimming hole north near Vermont: Jim, Schuy, me, and our dates. I felt an ancient wistfulness, as Lindy and I lay on our backs in bathing suits in the grass … clouds blown apart in the jetstream. I was chasing the bare eclipse of a form, itself a shadow. Beyond the hill, the land dipped precipitously into the unknown, an obliquity that masked a chimera. Something indelible was lost; something equally remote beckoned. I saw on a smoke-thin arras a Sphinx. I felt my own skeletal existence.
Then we dove into the water, smashing sky. That icy plunge resolved all muddles, a splash into the Now, as water opened my heart to gratitude beyond complication. No indecision or keepsakes allowed—shun sixes of cups, those munchkin children in their gardens of forever throwback nostalgia!
That evening Lindy, Tripp, and I took a walk along backroads—he delivering dialogue from Godot, she improvising with gumption and wit. Then she spat from a small bridge into headlights—a Colorado method, she said, to gauge the speed of cars. “Pretty tough girl,” he confided later. And he was the ultimate judge.
Schuy’s friends turned out to be more than collegiate rebels and cowboy poets; they were rogue revolutionaries. After keeping their alter egos secret for months Schuy finally confided in April that Jim (known as Axis, a near-homonym of his last name) was king of something called “guerrilla warfare,” conducted on Saturdays after midnight at the Psi U fraternity house. “It’s beyond description,” he said. “If you could just see it you’d realize that Phi Psi is a bunch of wimps.”
Later that month he extended a guarded invitation: Axis had arranged for me to witness a skirmish as a noncombatant. He couldn’t a hundred percent assure my safety, but I would be under his protection. If he prevailed no one would bother me. If he were defeated it was every man for himself!
Just after midnight I met Schuy at North. From there I followed him along College Street to Psi U. He elbowed a crack in the front door, pointed the way downstairs, and then led me through catacombs to an unlit sector. I expected an empty cloister, so was startled by what I saw. The room was crammed wall to wall with bodies. A single lantern shone. Occasionally someone let out a shout, but mostly we jostled one another in a zombie-like group sway.
Suddenly—with a scream—Axis leaped onto the bar. His chest was bare, painted in blocks of color, American Indian style. He stared down at the revenants. Then he danced in place as others threw objects at him—mostly their cups of beer. He retaliated with the hose from the keg, its spray splattering the crowd, a few beads of moisture reaching Schuy and me at the fringes.
Gradually the scene became more frenzied, as Axis goaded the others with taunts. People tried to yank him off his perch, but with the help of his allies he beat them back. Clashes broke out, and Schuy whispered, “Stay close … just watch. Do you see, it’s The Plumed Serpent!”
He meant Axis’ favorite Lawrence novel, in which males transcend their mediocre social condition and enact soul-magic. But this was an Ivy League fraternity not a kiva. The ritual at the bar was more like a primitive attempt at courage, a way of striking back against the allure of women. Here in the basement, after curfew, their dates dispatched, they could be godmen and literary critics at the same time:
Now she understood the strange unison she could always feel between Ramon and his men, and Cipriano and his men. It was the soft, quaking, deep communion of blood-oneness. Sometimes it made her feel sick. Sometimes it made her revolt. But it was the power she could not get beyond.
As some of the brethren raised hand-made torches, the room shimmered. The keg nearly empty, Axis demolished it with a hammer. He poured kerosene on its pieces, and Larry applied a torch. Spinning before the fire, brandishing a lance and dislodging challengers who came at him with sticks and ropes, Axis all but transmogrified into a visage from Aztec myth. As the Psi U basement resounded with baritone chanting, I saw a parody of late baroque Lawrence: males in round dance, fascist and patriarchal.
Schuy and I slipped out of the communion while Axis was still king—though we had to shove past grabbing arms and punches of a few “enemies” to clear our way. Nowadays I smile when I read in the Amherst Alumni Magazine of the “king’s” appointment to boards of psychiatric hospitals. I wonder what his colleagues would make of his reign in the Psi U basement.
Later that spring Paul and a fair complement of Phi Psi made plans to join Freedom Summer, a campaign to register African Americans in the Mississippi delta. As students from various New England colleges showed up in our living room, Tripp was a scornful spectator. “It’s a waste of time. What are these jerk-off college kids going to do against the resident rednecks? Protests don’t bring change; they just generate conflict. Only acts of radical art bring big enough shit into the world.” He struck his guitar strings a few times.
While some of our guests bristled in umbrage, Paul commented sardonically, “Count on you, Jeff, to stand in the way of social justice.”
“I certainly hope so. ‘Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will flip around like a snake, and strike the other way.’ I’m quoting someone with a much deeper grasp of such matters than Martin Luther King.”
“Who’s that?” Paul bit.
“Jean Anouilh.”
Jeff, it turned out, had a personal stake in our loyalties. He had invited an avant-garde film-maker he long admired to show his work the weekend of the Mississippi-bound gathering. He wanted Phi Psi—and especially me—at his event. I was ambivalent and told him so.
“Well, get your priorities straight, guy. This is a crossroads, and what you choose, you just may become.”
The filmmaker’s name was Stan Brakhage; he was an official guest of the college, but he had arrived a few days ahead of time at Jeff’s invitation and was staying in Phi Psi. After spotting him, Jenkins warned Paul and me to expect “a cross between a water buffalo and a Spanish revolutionary.” It wasn’t a bad thumbnail. Aloof and humorless, Tripp’s burly gunslinger prowled the second floor, snubbing the rest of us while passing between the bathroom and the stairs.
My ambivalence came to a head on Friday night when Brakhage’s showing coincided with a parley for Freedom Summer participants. Right up to the last I intended to go to the meeting, and I was angry at Jeff for pressuring me otherwise. Had he no appreciation for the Dylan of “You better start swimming / or you’ll sink like a stone”—this self-anointed maven with his Porsche, guitar, and private acting troupe? But then I found myself walking from the dining room to the theater with Schuy, no clear reason except that this was where my heart had been all along.
On stage in front of a screen, waiting for the room to settle, Brakhage paced, hands behind his back. Schuy admired his snarl: “No one’s gonna push him around. He’s a tough hombre all right!”
After a flamboyant introduction from Tripp, the artist launched into a discursion of his aesthetic theory: “My work has largely been preoccupied with birth, sex, death,
and the search for God. That’s it, make what you want. Narrative cinema like Hollywood is a great pleasure, I grew up with it. It was my hobby and my church. People in the darkness share the same tears, the same joys. But what my film is about is totally different: the closeness of the eyeball to the brain, the literal rhythm of seeing, of existence, of survival. It’s not a story or some throwaway event. It’s how we live and see before we die. Each space between the sprocket holes of film is an individual picture which will, when projected, flash prisming colors in some other darkness at a fraction of a second. My inspiration for that is later Webern or Johan Sebastian Bach, but visually, 24 or 16 frames per second since the medium is light. I am a fool of light.”
Then he read from his journals, punning and undercutting his own meanings, to stay free (as he put it) of the patterns of literal speech. At one point he appropriated the “ie” from “Vietnam” to a make statement about the parenthetical drift of consciousness toward mindless warfare. It was that brash and untethered.
Twittering and hissing, much of the Amherst audience left before the lights were dimmed, their catcalls echoing down the hall. But I was elated. I had been preparing for this talk unknowingly for months. Brakhage was the opposite of cowboy cool, and he certainly wasn’t some water-buffalo cartoon—that was Jenkins’ misread: cultural stereotyping plus a predilection to mock anyone who didn’t fit. This was a guy who survived by defying conventions, by inventing his own forms and confronting the universe head on.
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