New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  “I can’t keep doing this, Rich! You’ve got to solve this yourself. You’re not some special case. We’re each of us alone with our own ghosts.”

  We went out again. “Just a short walk this time,” she made me promise. She loped beside, withholding comment, in warm sun then shadow. I wanted to be regular like her, to stand up and live the damn life.

  Yet ordinary existence seemed like play-acting, and I couldn’t fake it or carry its weight. Nothing except the fact of us interested me, its symptomatic relief. Everything else was a life sentence. I thought, “I’m destroying this, this one possible thing I have.”

  “I’m weak,” she said. “Don’t you see that? I can hardly save myself, let alone you. The world is not ugly; the world is good and beautiful.”

  I trudged silently as the sky proved her right, showing its last sienna-mauve hues before twilight. Why couldn’t I be there too? The beauty of ordinary things had once been good enough, the flow of mundane events. I had been kept on track, as I looked forward to each next pleasure, challenge, novelty, even impasse, it didn’t matter. Regular stuff, like every other gal and guy, every creature of field and sky too. In fact the gods had treated me well. Why couldn’t I give up this fixation, let go of the string and float with the other balloons? Whose faith was I keeping, whose meaning pretending to impose on meaninglessness?

  A cat bounded across the path and stared up. Lindy smiled and extended a palm in its direction. Everything was so studied, so flat.

  We reached her house. “End of the line, kiddo.”

  How did anyone live?

  For lack of any better option I kept going to classes, almost losing hold of Geology because I didn’t have patience to sit through a lab with rocks across the floor imitating a landscape for our autopsy. I wrote my response as a Beckett-like script, with the monadnocks and mountains and rivers announcing their roles aloud. It was a wonder I found breathing room to pull it off. But I got Professor Foose’s bemused C.

  Abnormal Psych was my single solace, for I could pore over the textbook for symptoms that applied to me, and many of them did. I mostly feared being like Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, a specter passing through a nihility. I wanted to be a solid, diagnostic episode in nature like an oxbow lake or continental drift, an explicable fault line that Dr. Friend could cite from his years of work with me—any voucher to stop my open-ended free-fall. Even the deepest fire-spewing volcano had a cause, a thermodynamic vector and libidinal charge behind it; it could be charted and tracked. Cameron and Rychlak made that clear:

  Anxiety attacks are acute episodes of emotional decompensation usually appearing in a setting of chronic anxiety, and exhibiting to an exaggerated degree the characteristics of normal fright. The fright usually comes from within, from a sudden upsurge of unconscious material that threatens to disrupt ego integration. The anxiety attack often climaxes a long period of mounting tension to which the anxious person has been progressively adapting, but with ever-increasing difficulty. Finally the limits of tolerance are reached, he can compensate no further, and the continued stress precipitates a sudden discharge into all available channels.

  “… into all available channels!” No kidding, guys!

  Whether or not the patient is able to verbalize what he is doing and what attracts him, the basic situation is the same. He is impelled to repeat his futile, frustrating behavior—in overt action or in fantasy or daydream—because of the relentless pressure of unconscious infantile urges, fears, temptations and conflicts.

  The more the underlying anxiety increases, the greater the somatic discharge, and vice versa, until terror becomes inevitable. The attack merely relieves a contemporary build-up of cathexis and tension; then innate, self-perpetuating anxiety reasserts itself and begins recruiting toward the next attack. At least as good as a rupture in the crust of a planetary object!

  But what were those infantile urges, temptations, and conflicts? How could I get a grip on them, defuse their charge, turn their torque, their flow of lava the other way? How could I apply seismic leverage to something so impalpable and fugitive?

  The answer was the question: the outbreak of terror is how the unconscious gets the attention of the ego. Something even more unbearable is being converted to “mere” panic and given passage in its camouflage—something obviously bottomless and brutal because panics are horrific in themselves.

  Was it that, without terror, there would be nothing at all, I would drift in empty space forever, no jetties or signs? William Faulkner conceded as much in The Wild Palms: “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

  Perhaps that’s why Jon fought ghosts in the night. Better them than nothing.

  The next time a wave of panic came I went straight to Heath’s house. I was about to see him anyway—he was scooting down his front stairs en route to our class. I tried to explain my state, but I had no words for it. In frustration I clenched my fists, ran fingers through my hair down over my face, grabbed my arms. I dug my nails into them as deep as I could. He stopped and gave me a mystified look, a gaze both of wonder and admiration. Then he began walking again. “What affect!” he finally declared without breaking stride. His observation cast a mirror, and I saw myself absurdly, a figure in a textbook.

  “There’s a battle inside you,” he continued, “an enemy you can’t face. It has no identity, no symbolic form, no reconcilability or contingency. Everything in this so-called world must look to you like some sort pale imitation of the world inside you. Obviously no one understands; they just cite textbooks like me. Only you know. And that leaves you so alone. It is an existential state more than a pathology. You are teaching me something about death instinct. You are fleeing death by pursuing from it. And you are pretending to know what you are frightened of because that at least suggests there is a world, there is a solution.”

  “I deserve an A in this course for living it.”

  Both of us laughed, as I accompanied him to class.

  That night I dreamed of an immense wind. It blew across darkness, carrying images, image fragments, scraps of paper down avenues of the City. Fierce, unformed animals—wolves and cats and curs—tore off the dream shroud, led me through its scar into a hollow, a gentler void. UFOs patrolled an outer sky of too many planets and moons.

  This counted. This was an actual place.

  They never spotted me as I ran through high grass and hid in vines. The wind was frantic, bracing, euphoric. Everything that needed to be changed it ripped apart, swallowed into its momentum without distraction or regard. It was as elating a spectacle as I had ever witnessed, and it was core. It cleared the stage and re-set me.

  In the morning I felt both better and worse. I was woozy and hung over but, paradoxically, not as afraid. I went to geology without fully appreciating the shift. I finished the day’s lab by working through half my lunch hour. Then I realized: I had a spark, I was normal again!

  I ran back to Phi Psi in glee. It was over! I knew that implicitly, even as I knew when it began with currants in cereal. There was no explanation; it was just gone. In its place was something like the dream wind, carrying the most beautiful images across a spring morning—shards of a yet-unwritten ode. The world was magnificent, the clover and dandelions so exquisite they broke my heart. The sky was scrumptious, a sheer miracle.

  The shadow of doom had been replaced by an ebullience so fathomless and vast, with so much rhythm and design, it was absurd. Was this ever a stunning day—such azure infinity, so many blossoms of primary colors, such delightfully goofy insects and birds, each of them stately and wondrous to exist at all! I didn’t have enough outright kudos for them, but I found a patch in the Glen and took those lines that came:

  Day of blind flies, lethargic clouds, tardy stars.

  Once again you have come to haunt me dead….

  Four sheets of paper later I came to a crescendo:

  And for the first time you asked the only question

  That you could never stop asking

/>   Until weary with wrinkles and questions

  You stood by another fence,

  Eons apart,

  And knew that the sun of the tarot,

  That Apollo,

  That the golden blood of susans

  Were born before men

  And planted in men’s eyes

  To pull men back

  To the honeyrod fields of time.

  The phrases and beat translated themselves from nature as lucidly as if they were stanzas of Virgil. Nothing eluded me, nothing fooled me; subjunctives and strings of participles were right at hand, in the breezes, fragrances, and luminosities of spring. All I needed was to decode the mumblings of a slightly unfamiliar dialect into words. Correlatives arose wherever I looked: a back-up first baseman from the old Yankees (Don Bollweg transformed into granite-gneiss pinstripes), daisies across fields of childhood, the haunted land beside a cobblestone road, “a tiny dead bug / drifting across a marsh moon / into the black / forever,” “the fleeting blackbirds from maple pies (four and twenty in four and twenty speckled swarms),” “the Spaldeen rabbit bouncing home.” The stream through the Glen uttered the oldest proverb of my life:

  Depart this dawn-haunted house.

  Depart this laughing kitchen. It is

  A tide of the rising sun,

  A spooking hole

  For the dancing yellow heart.

  Run out beneath the long sky

  Before it mellows

  To the purple wine of twilight,

  Comes supper comes terror!

  Comes terror if you have not sweated, loved, or sung a song

  On a day of the haunted dawn.

  By mid-afternoon I had entered the realm of the planet Jupiter:

  … a sea of Jovian pomander

  of squashed gases,

  of methane-smoking caterpillars,

  of purple electric breezes

  That come with the ozone rain

  And the neon rainbows.

  With spring I am launched

  From the quiet frozen moon

  Of Io

  To the dense bosom

  Of swirling clays….

  The prehistoric wish,

  The Cro Magnon sperm,

  The weeping willow of Om,

  All lost All not lost:

  The ancient baby of Tigres

  The young ageless of Atlantis….

  After twenty pages I dropped my pen into the grass and calmly took in the summer that had arrived in my absence. I was starving. I felt as if I hadn’t eaten for days. I ran to the snack bar and ordered two cheeseburgers, a plate of fries, and a maple-walnut frappe. I sat there consuming them in bliss, each sip like the first time I ever experienced a tree’s creamy caramel sap.

  Years later I arrived at a cover story for my panic: I had been coasting impetuously, thinking to get by on the status quo, to ride my new identity into happiness. But I had to earn my freedom from my mother’s whammy. The Greeks knew this: once Medusa hexes you it is no mean feat to break her stare. She doesn’t yield to mere persuasion—she won’t grant passage without exacting a toll equal to the gift

  At some point in childhood I had walled off a paranoid terror that was unsustainable, probably unsurvivable, cocooning it inside my life, below its discharge threshold and spike potential. Cocooning isn’t a usual strategy. People with traumas tend to eke them out, averaging their waves into duller, more dissociated states. But I wanted to be sane, and not just sane, I wanted to feel what was happening. Not only did it interest me, seemingly from the get-go, but it led to those magical, elusive layers of epiphany and gloom—the heart of meaning. And each state was too real and salient just to discard or antidote.

  As long as the venom was bundled and insulated, I could coexist with it. It didn’t supplant my normal existence or get deflected by the usual Freudian aberrations, inhibition or denial, into dysfunctional maladies.

  After sixth grade, I panicked only fleetingly, and they were brief supernatural visitations, modes I could diffuse or turn into binges and pranks. Otherwise I became a moody, erratic boy, comforted by my own soap opera.

  Lindy ended all that in a flash. She drove me out of the solipsistic trance I wrapped around my teenage years. She intuited the truth too, that nothing real had been at stake before. She wasn’t “pretty.” She wasn’t a “girl.” She was far more stringent and irreconcilable than that.

  The price of being found by her, of getting the so-called “true romance” I had wanted more than anything, was having to wake up. There was no free ride there either. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t stay in my bubble—I would have willingly accepted that deal—it was that the act of being touched by another person was radical and ineluctable. Lisa’s charm notwithstanding, David had it right.

  Without warning, I changed personae overnight. I lost the capacity to bury myself soporifically in box scores, Corn Kix, and other artless totems. I couldn’t be a child anymore and I couldn’t tell myself I couldn’t be a child, for I wasn’t ready to be anything else. I had resisted becoming a man, not for the usual reasons, I believe, but because I didn’t want to rouse the dungeon-keepers or give them reason to suspect hubris on my part. I didn’t want them even to know I existed. That was the carapace of the cocoon.

  Now I needed a shot of whatever was in that chrysalis, however ghastly, to claim my spirit, to grow a male backbone, to meet my plucky, no-nonsense girlfriend with some degree of style and grit.

  The spring-of-’64 panic came when I was nineteen and a half. I made a hairline crack in the cocoon, and through it the entirety of my life got recapitulated in delayed terror. I could not be conscious of what was happening because there was no conscious form of it. It was beyond mediation: too complicated for ordinary intention, too elliptical for analysis, hieroglyphic and paradoxical beyond ideation. It couldn’t blandish by words or insights; it had to assert itself by pure exigency. To be conscious was to be token and strategic, was not to do it at all.

  There was no substitute or stand-in for the mystery of life itself.

  And it said: feel this, you have always been willing to feel. It said: break asunder, you will know how to come back together. It said, meet your shadow before its separation from you becomes schizophrenic. It said, forfeit joy and solace; their concession will inoculate you against later loss.

  You will awaken fresh, able to see the world in utter, meticulous depth, find words you never knew, taste maple for the first time, parry obliquities and chimeras (for they are as devious and bottomeless as they seem), court your lady for real.

  I had been scared to death, almost obliterated at birth, but I crawled out of that venom on a leaf floated to me by a child.

  A long latency followed, for I wasn’t ready to fly. Now my wings were drying off.

  I panicked because, at core, I suddenly didn’t know who or where I was. My conscious self thought I was eating Kix and currants, dating at last, happy as a clam, or at least happy enough. My unconscious self realized how deep the waters had gotten, felt the bends, and sent its warning signal across the interstellar-like barrier that separates unconscious and conscious space.

  I thought I was in civic territory, another mundane neutral zone, but I wasn’t. I had entered the chapel unawares, for the gods needed to rouse me for sacred battle.

  After the incident, I came to think of panic not as an enemy but a teacher and truthsayer. What I didn’t realize then was that it was also a transubstantiating shadow, a preparation by proxy for real crises that were to come. Having sparred with the ghost within, I was ready to confront forces in the world that opposed me with far more insidious gauntlets—for they could never be as dire and seminal as what I had already undergone. My family and its subculture stood against the kind of man I needed to be; they had always stood against it, and that fucked up my childhood and made my brother my foe. I had to win that ribbon on my own, have the moxie to see it through. That was what panic was teaching me. By taking the dark bath, by being immersed in the b
aptismal waters of Flash Gordon’s horrific shower, I was awakened, prepared, tempered.

  Jon had been wrong about those ghosts: you weren’t supposed to defeat them by literal or lavish exertion, and you couldn’t defeat them, it was a false battle. The courage required was more like Christ’s: submission, obliteration, then rebirth. Faith means faith in the unbearable too.

  I said “a cover story,” meaning as penetrating analysis as I can do. It is more like shreds of overlapping cover stories. No one knows the big picture. Crises with deep roots come closest to spilling the beans, to disclosing who we really are—they are looking-glasses through which our personal reality forms.

  Before the end of the semester Lindy went to Penn to see her old boyfriend Steve again for a weekend. I was dismayed but still exhilarated for having gotten out of the whirlpool. I figured rather than wait this one out, I’d put myself in motion too. The previous summer I had made friends with one of the hotel drivers, a kid about five years older than me named Jimmy McAndrews. He said that any time I’d like to bypass my father and phone in a trip from Amherst he’d be thrilled to come and get me, see that part of the world. So I called Jimmy at Traffic, and on Friday afternoon, like magic he was sitting in the Phi Psi parking lot in my father’s black Cadillac.

  “I don’t think anyone really knows where the PG went,” he told me. “But no one will miss it for a while. Everyone will think someone else has it.”

  It was great to have the Hotel come to me.

  On the way home Jimmy heard my tale of woe about my new girlfriend who, sadly, was checking out her past guy in Philly—even that scenario so deliciously secular compared to the pagan oppression of panic. As he let me drive my first two hundred miles on the open road, we mustered a plan. Coming back on Sunday we’d intercept the last bus from Philadelphia in Hartford. Maybe she’d be on it; then we’d drive her back to Smith.

  Sunday evening we filled the PG with sandwiches, fruit, cookies, and Heinekens and timed our departure so that three hours later we beat the bus by fifteen minutes. Astonished to spot me out the window, Lindy immediately got up and debarked. She collected her suitcase and jumped in.