New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  After closing, the four of us went to hear Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band. It was a small club, the performers breathtakingly close—thimbles on washboards, honking jugs: “Washing-ton at Valley Forge, / Freezing cold and up spoke George…. ” Between sets I edged over to Kweskin and mentioned Phi Psi, where he had played before my time. “Hangin’ out with Mr. Tripp!” he proclaimed with several nods. “Well, give him my best. Maybe you guys can come up with some bread and get us back to Amherst.” Then he sidled away.

  The next afternoon while Schuy raced, Dona and I sat on the beach trying to spot his sails. She knew I was a writer and had brought along her binder of poems. She read from it—clean lucid lines, playful and insolent—one piece of free verse suggesting to a lover that they spend their lives together scraping off the insides of Oreo cookies with their teeth. She invoked landscapes of bygone summers, toy boats, shiny pebbles.

  I had only the cards with me, so I laid them in the sand and read her fortune: felicity, strife, unexpected bounty.

  All the next day Schuy ignored both of us. When he wasn’t washing dishes he worked on his boat. So Dona and I used his car to drive the single road to the cliffs at the end of the island. We talked Freud, Lawrence, and Sartre, as she pointed out the sights. Rapport established, she questioned me about Schuy, why he had to act like a tough guy. I tried to cast his motives in the most favorable light. “It’s really quite silly,” she remarked.

  Yet I hardly understood my buddy anymore. He was growing a mustache and had declared that his name was now Scotty. That evening at work he pretended not to notice Dona except to snap commands her way. Later he explained: “I have to break her, like a horse.”

  He smashed the two 45s I brought him as a gift—Richie Valens’ “Donna” and Paul Anka’s “Diana,” saying, “That’s exactly the kind of mushiness that destroys relationships.” He was not amused by my suggestion that Anka’s words could be flipped from “You’re so young, and I’m so old” to “I’m so young …” Then he berated Larry for his performance on the boat, blaming it on his reading Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, “I need sailors, not candy-ass Hindus.”

  “This is all bullshit, man!” Larry snapped. “Who do you think you are, Axis or something? You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re running off at the mouth, acting like some spoiled cretin. Try treating your girlfriend like a human being for a start.”

  Then Schuy ordered him out of their shared domicile (his mother owned it, so he held that card): “Take your belongings! Go find another place to live!” When I tried to mediate, he cut me off, “Just fucking leave too. I don’t want you around here either. You’re both children. I’ve got enough problems.”

  I asked Larry if he could run me to the dock. It was perilously close to the last ferry, and I had no fallback position. I caught it by a minute. Driving the Mass Pike barely awake, I woke once with a start, the car drifting toward the guardrail. I pulled into a rest stop and fell asleep on the front seat. In the morning I covered the remainder of the 300 miles.

  It had only been three days, but Grossinger’s felt like somewhere I had never been. My room was someone else’s too, though I welcomed its guise; I had no better offer. The Hotel always wooed me back, perhaps for its luxuries and prerogatives but mostly for the sheer spaciousness and optimism of the place. It no longer felt the way it had in childhood, but it still touched something deep and dormant in me. I had a daffier, more rhapsodic self there, one that floated up and met cumulus parades that stretched far beyond Grossinger’s. I touched a calm and peace inside me and imagined endless possibilities. Of course it wasn’t Grossinger’s. It was creation, but I couldn’t get into it any other way. Grossinger’s was where I first felt it and where I had to be for it to happen.

  With one day left before work I headed into New York City, the first time driving there myself: rock ’n’ roll on good old “Double-U A B C,” hitting the George Washington Bridge and rattling across. I shot down the Henry Hudson Parkway like the Towers Mercury of yore, crossed over at 96th Street, and parked in the basement of 300 Central Park West. Without advance notice, I stood at 8C and rang the bell. I hadn’t been back since fleeing eight months ago. After my family got over the shock (and I finished distributing pastries and lox), I was welcomed by everyone, even Martha.

  “How about some old times together,” Bob said, finishing off the last of the salmon with an appreciative smile. “Feel like the reservoir?”

  “Of course.”

  As we took our commemorative stroll—Debby tossing crusts over the fence to ducks, now as then—my mother unexpectedly clutched my arm and slowed her stride, causing us to straggle behind the rest. She told me how difficult my brother had become. “I can’t control him anymore. You were impossible, but at least I could reach you.”

  “Right. I was the loyal one.”

  She nodded, missing the irony. “He’s beyond me.”

  I feigned surprise, but I had always known. My duplicitous attempt at sympathy she brushed off like a fly.

  In the afternoon I drove uptown to Chuck Stein’s apartment near Columbia. It was our first meeting in person since Horace Mann. He had changed dramatically in two years, having become a full magus with a bushy beard and a pipe. In the hour before sunset he led me to his favorite bench along the Hudson. There I quizzed him on Olson poems. After he deciphered a few lines, he reminded me that it didn’t matter whether one got all the references or not. “Like Brakhage films,” he said, “the meaning is not in the literal presentation. It’s in the mode of consciousness the words represent.”

  On the phone I had asked Chuck to teach me how to use the tarot as a meditation tool, and he offered to do so on my next trip into the New York. Now he removed my deck from its box and went through it, pulling out the major trumps: twenty-two sovereign cards without wands, swords, pentacles, or cups. Each of their landscapes, he explained, was more than just a solitary arrangement of symbols and messages. The cards had relationships among them and could be placed in a matrix representing the formation of the universe and everything in it—though it took a shift of perception to get it.

  I knew the basic designations from Ervin’s class and my books, but I lacked specifics and a formula. Neither Waite nor Case told his readers how to design a matrix of trumps. Chuck had learned the rudiments of tarot meditation from Case’s posthumous course—biweekly lessons in the mail from Builders of the Adytum in L.A.—but then he put his own spin on the curriculum, and that was the abacus he was about to lay out.

  First, my friend ordered the cards by numeral; then he sorted them on the grass in three rows of seven, the Fool on top. A daydreamy youth strolled along the mountains of card zero, carrying elemental plasma in his knapsack. “He’s the source,” Chuck declared, “of all substance and form. Note how he bears its atomic fuse fecklessly.” He pointed to a white rose dangled between the thumb and forefinger of the Jester’s left hand. “He’s oblivious to the fact that he’s about to walk off a cliff, but then he’s not a person as much as a ground potential. Zero is the cosmic egg that contains all the other numbers and number systems.” He wagged his right hand over the 21-card alignment beneath the yellow-skied cipher.

  The Fool’s lemon background reminded me of my first Gene Woodling card. Yellow was the Sun, Marvin Gardens in Monopoly, my favorite Sorry! token—Revelation!

  “Look at the whole as a dynamic grid with something akin to binary code or the I Ching hexagrams but in parallel rows of seven operating below the forcefield of the Jester.” He waved a palm back and forth across the pictures in the grass as if to stroke their invisible steam. “They represent successive phases by which vibrations become molecules and cells and are translated into the world as meanings and designs, thought with form. Let’s start at the beginning of the first row.”

  Card one was the Magician, white hydrogen garments under red robes, an infinity sign above his head. Chuck pointed to his right hand raised upward and bearing a trident. “That wand conver
ts cosmic into worldly energy. The downward-pointing left hand conducts its current down into Nature.”

  “We felt its heat,” I reminded him, “in Ervin’s class.”

  He smiled. “That was a gimmick. We’re moving on.” I flashed him a playful pout as he proceeded. “On a wooden table before him—see, there are the four artifacts of the lesser arcana: wand, pentacle, sword, and cup. Those are the implements he uses to create phenomena.”

  To the left of the Magician (our right), clad in pale blue watery robes, sat the High Priestess, at her feet a crescent moon. “She is reflecting and converting the Sorcerer’s magic.” he remarked, drawing an invisible line from the Magician’s trident to a scroll marked “Torah” in the Priestess’ lap, its ‘h’ hidden by her robe. “The drapery of ripe pomegranates behind her represents the latency of Creation. Without her mediation the Sorcerer’s field of operation would never get conducted into matter and mass.”

  “Or into paramecia and diatoms,” I offered, for I had internalized the flow between the Magician and Priestess back at Horace Mann where it evoked Freud’s unconscious latency for me.

  “Into any set of values, encodings, or syntax,” he rejoined.

  In card three a deeply contemplative Empress reclined in her curved cathedra, in her right hand a scepter crowned by the world. “DNA at work,” observed Chuck. “The twelve zodiacal diadems on her tiara represent the space-time continuum.” He made a quick circular motion around her head. “It’s Eden but also biological diversity, Nature itself.”

  “I think of it as the reflecting mirror of the chlorophyll molecule.”

  “Sure. She converts the Priestess’ transmissions into a lush grove and garden represented by those trees behind her and the ripening corn at her feet. See how its stalks rise to meet the current of her robe. That’s a continuation of the Priestess’ garment.”

  The next vista was a stony ram-adorned bench formed by mountainous uplift. There a grim Emperor held forth. “He has to wrest his domain from the first three cards,” Chuck explained. “Magicians spin phantasmagoria till time immemorial, at least on a cosmic level. Emperors issue laws and physical rubrics, apply them to nature. The fourth trump keeps every molecule in the universe in place. Newtonian territory.”

  “I suppose he can’t intervene to save to save a single swallow,” I proposed, “because his equations are essential for the preservation of matter. If he interceded unlawfully, Nature itself would collapse.”

  “Yep, you’ve got it.” I was pleased; I had been nurturing that conceit since assimilating Case’s summary.

  At position five was an androgynous Hierophant. “He encompasses both prior pairs,” Chuck demonstrated, lifting the card and waving it back and forth. “Magician and Priestess, Empress and Emperor. The Hierophant founded the first temple and organized the universe in symbols and cycles. He’s responsible for the tarot deck itself.” He thought about this for a moment, then added triumphantly, a cat pouncing on a canary, “I get him now in a whole different way: each card’s field contains all the trumps in microcosm, so the overall matrix is operating at 22 to the 22nd power.”

  “That’s perfect!” I exclaimed. “Here’s my take on the Hierophant. While the Emperor is holding three dimensions in a cube and locking the stars and planets into their courses, the Hierophant is inventing astrology and shamanism. During the Renaissance he turned them into religion and science. He conquered the Emperor with a single eclipse, but they actually enveloped and transmuted each other, sort of like your matrix of twenty-twos.”

  He nodded. “Can you imagine Clinton listening to this? He’d shit a cow.” Then he brought our attention to the next trump, the Lovers. “They are Adam and Eve in most versions, but really any man and any woman. From far off, the Magician’s golden orb illuminates their passion. They are looking at each other’s souls, but first they have to transcend their false-personality egos.”

  He paused for a moment to let me drop into the frame: a naked woman looking up at a winged androgynous angel, fiery corona for its hair, wings and hands conducting rays from a golden sun-star onto a planet. A naked man beams at the woman as she beholds the higher being.

  “Eve gets her illumination from the macrocosm,” Chuck demonstrated, dabbing a line from her eyes to the angelic effluence. “Adam has to find the reflection of the macrocosm in her.” He circled a finger around the billowing clouds between them, for they deterred the man’s view. “He can’t get it from inside himself; it’s not there. But she is looking right at the form and transmits its essence to him. The card doesn’t necessarily mean man and woman; it’s also spirit and soul, anima and animus. It’s saying that nothing in the universe operates on its own.”

  From the Lovers he switched his direction inside the matrix, electing to follow the sixth vertical column rather than complete the first row. Directly beneath the Lovers was Death, card thirteen, a skeleton in armor on a pale horse bearing a black banner with a white snowflake-like ornament—kings, princesses, and children crumbling before his prance. “Now we’re following a different tier of emanation. See how the erotic energy of the card above gets translated into a wholly different form in the card below. Death is a kind of love. It creates by transforming; it preserves essence while destroying appearance. What you are calling a snowflake is actually the white rose of immortality. Here, by the way is your Scorpio card: resurrection.”

  He paused, then amended his take. “The Waite card is misleading. He had some sort of nonsense about concealing a few of the images’ esoteric meanings. In traditional versions, there is no horse. The skeleton is standing or walking on the ground, chopping with his scythe. Hands, feet, and decapitated heads lie fall around him. In Case’s version a shape like a UFO appears in the left-hand sky. I think that goes back to a mark or rune from centuries earlier, before anyone knew about flying saucers. In general, Case gives esoteric meanings, Waite provides fortune-teller’s thumbnails.”

  From card thirteen he continued a vertical trajectory. “Below Death is its own collective manifestation, number twenty, Judgment. Don’t be fooled by the traditional symbolism here. This is not the Day of Judgment but the simultaneous appearance of every creature and event on Earth. They are arising from the coffins of three-dimensional space and floating on a timeless, dimensionless ocean. Waite and Case both spell this out: the forces represented by this trump tear down the limitation of form as teeth break up food.” He clenched and extended his fingers a few times over the sea of coffins, then went back to where he had left off with the Lovers.

  At the end of the first horizontal row in position seven sat the Chariot, its meaning familiar. It was my favorite symbol complex, so I playfully paraphrased Case, “In his false-motion vehicle flanked by black and white sphinxes beneath a cloth sky, the Charioteer establishes the first city.”

  “Do you see the fusion of all six of the prior cards here?” Chuck asked.

  I did.

  “Why don’t you summarize them so that I know you got it.”

  “Okay, the cyclotron of the Magician, the binary ciphers of the Priestess, the floral patio of the Empress, the algebra of the Emperor, the esoteric mudras of the Hierophant, and the galaxy-igniting passion of the Lovers, all leading up to a pre-Persian, pre-Mayan metropolis at the dawn of civilization.”

  “Good. Remember, the Chauffeur of the seventh trump rides along, unaware that his armor is a symbol too, that his words are not objects, that his vehicle is motionless.”

  “Yes, the zodiac has become a woven arras, a bonnet hanging above a stony cab travelling so fast it is stationary: the Earth, the City.”

  That caused him to look up at the darkening violet over Jersey and realize that our window of visibility was closing. “Let’s get enough done,” he urged, pointing to the second horizontal row, “so that you have a foundation to build on.” He picked up at card eight, Strength. “The Waite version is wrong here too. Supposedly showing the angel holding the lion’s jaw shut rather than opened conceals s
ome important secret. Anyway, in the traditional version his jaw is opened because he is breathing the first row from the atomic table and formless mind into history: hunters, cultivators, tribes and villages. Of course, it’s not really the elements or even their electrons; it is the force behind all that, which is represented by the infinity sign over the angel’s head. Jaw opened or closed, the point is, such a lion cannot be mastered—he can only be charmed.”

  At position nine under the High Priestess, a Hermit stood on snowy mountaintops, bearing a cookie-like star in his lantern. “He has wandered through the integers,” Chuck intoned, tempering his voice heraldically as if beginning a fairy tale. “He is an old man with a beard, yet younger in cosmic time than the Fool.”

  That was the “Stein Man” I knew, the wood-chuck-chuck-chuck from Horace Mann—whimsical and magisterial, an inscrutable blend of Donald Duck and Spinoza.

  “The Hermit has no cardinal power. All his potency and wisdom come from his acceptance of prior forces that precede and make him up.” Was this attribution or confession?

  Night with its early stars was fast upon us, as my friend hastened through Sun and Moon and Star, assigning crabs, pelicans, and battlements, elucidating pools stirred into motion by cosmic meditation, the blue strands of our five senses poured from an angel’s earthen jug onto an alien landscape, ocular jellies sucking up the wisdom of molecular sand.

  There in evening’s glow, Venus bright over the Hudson, the twenty-two buds of the Major Arcana seemed to radiate with not only the last dregs of sunset but their own phosphorescence as they formed a magnificent foliage in the grass. Barges travelled on the River (a form of card seven), the Palisades and Jersey lights (card four) beyond.

  So did Chuck teach me the esoteric tarot.