It was also as though we had entered a Berlitz class in which a foreign tongue was acquired simply by listening and repeating in kind. But it wasn’t quite that—it was as though we were being trained for a different mode of perception and discourse, the rules of which would become evident only by our being in its midst and observing and practicing its conventions. Later I realized that Kelly was teaching in a different way from my Amherst or Horace Mann masters; he was telling us stuff all right, important facts and ideas, but he was also changing our consciousness, attuning it to a higher, more serious octave by mantra and melody as much as by information.
At one point he retreated to the back room and re-manifested with a pile of colorful mimeographed sheets he stapled together by virtually crushing a tiny machine as he walked. These made up a magazine he called matter. We each got our own copy. I turned through my pages, which were filled with poetry, notes, diagrams, and epigraphs. Right off I saw an essay on film-making by Stan Brakhage, and I told them about the screening at Amherst.
“Brakhage taught you an important lesson,” he pronounced. “You see, when you are young, you think you can live on anything, like junk food, and you can, and seem to do all right—you two are testament to that. But in order to grow into men and women you need real things, real imagination, not just symbols, or the ideas of some professor who hasn’t been out of the university in two hundred years.”
Then Kelly asked Joby if she was hungry and, when she responded with a growl, he proposed to take us to town for lunch. In the driveway we were chaperoned to an old sedan. “Named Bloisius,” Joby informed us with a maternal smile as she herded us in. She and Kelly occupied thrones in the front seat, which was decorated uncarlike with postcards and amulets on the walls. We obeyed her instructions to pile up books strewn across the back and made enough room to settle in. The smell of decay indigenous to the vehicle was a blend of oranges and bookstore parchment, not unpleasant.
Kelly hugged and rolled the wheel like an octopus with a crystal ball in his circumference as he headed for and then crossed the Rhinecliff Bridge over the Hudson into Kingston. I had driven or been driven past this town a hundred times or more en route to and from Grossinger’s, including ninety minutes ago, but had never seen its interior. In my mind it was a Thruway exit, so I was eager for more of a peek.
We drifted down a lively main street and, without braking, Kelly turned into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant, almost hitting a parked truck without the slightest acknowledgment. Inside, as we continued to talk, I had the sense of leaving the “silk route” to the Catskills and entering a parallel reality that had been operating beside it all along.
In the course of egg rolls and spare ribs, produced quickly without our ordering, by a waitress who must have known the routine, Kelly made headway through an unpredictable list of topics, quizzing us on them one by one. He began with conventional items—where we came from, what we read and wrote, what our relationship to each other was, in general who we thought we were. He certified each answer with a smile that was sometimes approving, sometimes quixotic, but never condescending, as he and Joby traded obscure asides like an examining committee. Then he made leaps of metaphor and view, dissolving beliefs we had held our whole lives. It was both exhilarating and exhausting, though we were hardly prepared for the deluge.
“What planets do you think are inhabited?” he asked at one point, picking up on my expressed interest in science fiction.
I gave a considered response, favoring Mars and Venus.
“That’s the astronomer’s answer; I think they are all inhabited, inhabited on other planes and by creatures indigenous to those planes. We conceive life only in three dimensions, but beings might live on worlds in other dimensions, for instance in the astral plane, while at the same time the surfaces of those worlds appear barren.”
“Even Pluto?” I baited, trying to see how far he was willing to go.
“Don’t be fooled by its size. It’s a planet, the same as any other, and we know nothing about it, except as we have seemed to discover and name it.” He drained a demitasse of green tea like a giant slurping a thimble. “You ask about Pluto. I say Pluto gives birth to the present epoch. I say that the Sun itself is inhabited. I think its core is teeming with creatures, all in an exalted state. Not necessarily higher, though. Souls exist on the Sun in their own occasion as we do here.” He stopped to consider where to take us next.
“Souls come to worlds for specific reasons based on karma. Ours is the green planet, the realm of growth; here, uniquely, creatures transform themselves by their work. It is a precious opportunity, but it exacts a price; that is, if we squander it. Such is our desperate situation, the reason we cannot dawdle. Your professors don’t see it, so they fulfill their etymology. They profess—about nothing in particular, nothing that finally matters. They go on and on as if we had time unto eternity.”
He paused to order main dishes, selecting for us too, and then picked up where he had left off.
“We have very little time, almost no time at all, and the Moon is waiting to gobble us up, to trap us in habitual motion. In truth, we live our lives in an instant, effect a transmutation or not, vanish into darkness if we fail. That is the next task for you two—to live—now that you have declared yourself apart from the monster.”
Then he asked us about dreams and I answered with interpretations from Jung as well as Freud. “Good basic training,” he attested, “but this is still the Western dream you are talking about, the dream that stands for something. I am talking about a pure act of dreaming that does not have to be subservient to any system of symbols. Dreaming is no different from ‘lifing’—that’s an American Indian testament, though they didn’t name it as such, they experienced it directly. Dream is its own mystery, its own logos, not the product of some professional establishment. Your dream tonight might be Freudian, or Jungian, but only if you interpret it as such. It could also be an utterly unknown message from an unknowable intelligence, perhaps your own, or a landscape infused from a higher dimension. Remember Blake: make your own system or be enslaved by another’s.” Joby started to object, but he finished the conceit himself. “Unfortunately Blake was enslaved by his own system.”
“Don’t dreams carry the meanings of past events?” Lindy asked. “Do you think Freud had it all wrong?”
“What about the archetypes?” I threw in. “Don’t they also shape dreams at a primal level?”
“We don’t even know if there is such a thing as an archetype. Jung is seductive, hence dangerous. He offers pompano so delicate they are hard to resist, but he too was enslaved by his own system. Meanings and symbols are only accouterments of a greater dreaming. But they are not the fact of dreaming. Dreaming is its own fact, just like lifing. What is this life a symbol for? It’s not a symbol; it’s a life. Now eat. Let the gods nourish you.”
The arrival of dishes had interrupted our talk, as mu shu pork, broccoli beef, spare ribs, cashew prawns, and black mushrooms were tossed on the table without fanfare. Kelly praised each in turn with playfully flamboyant oblations, as he dished out generous helpings for all. We ate in relative silence.
“It is charming to be children when you are children,” he opined while counting out his cash and assuring us we were his guests. “But in America they want to keep you children forever.” He downed one last helping of tea. “Your professors are children—I mean, in terms of the true mages and avatars of the universe. Your parents likewise.” He slowly peered around the room as if to include its diners in his indictment; then he pointed to an unlikely gray-haired gent seated by the window and said under his breath, “I know that man.” After a pause during which I wondered what manner of new riddle this was, he added, “I’ve seen him in every Howard Johnson’s in the country.”
As we walked to the car, he continued the thread, “You have an opportunity to be more than parrots or pedants. Already Richard’s Halloween vision speaks to that, to a deeper truth. I see it in both of
you. Stop writing fiction. Stop making up things and satisfying yourself with allusions. It’s not charming and inventive; it’s devious and evasive. Do you want to live lives of gossip, be raconteurs for your time on Earth? Do you want to dream and breathe this fraud of a civilization? Grow up! Become citizens of the cosmos.”
On the way back to Annandale he cited poetic and Gnostic masters, as he urged us to supplement our meager and modernistic educations with real texts, the titles of which he continued to compile on the back of an envelope, using the steering wheel as a writing surface while in vehicular motion.
At his apartment he offered to read to us from his work. In a hurry to get started north, we tried politely to resist, but he chided us for being Amherst and Smith drones and shooed us back into our seats. “What would your good professors think if you refused a reading from William Butler Yeats?”
I balked at being a captive audience, but he read like a jinni—Yeats was an understatement. He closed with a long poem called “The Alchemist” with lines as good as any I had ever heard:
& if we do not get up and destroy all the congressmen
turn them into naked men and let the sun shine on them
set them down in a desert & let them find their way out,
north, by whatever sexual power is left in them, if we do not
seize the president and take him out in daytime and show him
the fire & energy of one at least immediate star, white star….
we will walk forever down the hallways into mirrors and
stagger and look to our left hand for support & the sun
will have set inside us & the world will be filled with Law….
We sat in stunned humility. Each in our way, we knew that we were in a sacred space, being blessed by a priest.
In truth, it was a mystery event. If we had come in disguise, the Kellys were in disguise too, and so was the altar, camouflaged as a dingy tenement. In any ordinary sense the Kellys’ hut was dwarfed by Grossinger’s, but that tiny, rumpled apartment on the nether shore of the Hudson was a hologram of the entire cosmos. The Five of Pentacles had been drawn upside-down, the mendicants were in the temple.
Then Kelly told us to stick together and protect each other, as he assigned us the task of waking up Amherst and Smith. He handed Lindy the torn-off reading-list and bid us “God’s speed” with a mudra of his left hand, “Until the next time…. I’m sure there will be many.”
We left him copies of our work, and he promised to read them and discuss them on our return “which I hope,” he added, “will be soon.”
We drove into a different world from the one out of which we had trundled hours earlier, repairing like pilgrims from Plato’s cave who had seen how large the universe actually was. We found the way to the Taconic and followed its gentle wooded hills up through New York to meet the Thruway just before the Mass line.
“Give me a few days to get my life together,” Lindy requested at the door to Laura Scales. “It has been a radical and exhausting grail.” I nodded and drove back to Phi Psi.
Several times a week over the next two months I picked her up at Smith and we set out looking for new places to dine: a tavern in Hadley, the Aqua Vitae outside Northampton, a diner in Florence, a steak house in Springfield, the local Howard Johnson’s. There we ratified our emotional and artistic world. We protected the identity of our emerging twosome while enacting our apostasy within the Amherst-Smith demesne. Driven by an idealism and esoteric terminology few seemed to understand, we made appearances in our classes like double agents in collusion with a foreign polity, Kelly’s Bard. Most of Amherst and Smith spoke the party line, as if there were no muses or sacred paths, offering a familiar mince of cliché pieties, half-baked assertions, existential homilies—hedged bets all.
Kelly had conferred a guidance and rectitude we had long sought. For me it was not just his exemplar; it was the tarot, the Halloween ceremony, Jung, Crowley, Nelson’s angelic birds. I suddenly had numerous guides, present and transcendent. For Lindy, in her own words, “It was a breath of jarring, almost gagging cold air on the tepid waters of Smith’s academic grind, which was a constant struggle for good enough grades, nothing else. It was unbidden knowledge, an alternate artistic universe of food nourishing and necessary. I didn’t realize how starved I had been.”
Then there was her and my relationship. We had bonded incongruously and unexpectedly, as writers and seekers, but now we had reached another, more serious phase, beyond neophyte boy and girl in a gambol or expendable tryst. Kelly wanted us to succeed as a couple too, to dodge gossipy dissuasions and normative templates. He had put down a dare, given us a high bar to shoot for, but we submitted willingly, for we wanted follow his lead and gain our personal and artistic freedom.
For Lindy it was a break with the social world of her past, its dating rituals, and the sorts of men considered admirable in that sphere. I was not the guy she had been looking for or imagining, not even close—more like his antithesis. I was not only the epitome of Jewish New York but a renegade and outcast there.
And while I may have been looking for some combination of Alice in Wonderland, Cathy Carr singing “First Anniversary,” and Emily Dickinson, I had been snagged by a combo of Simone de Beauvoir, Yvonne Rainer, and Annie Oakley.
I had no doubt found “her” too soon, but it was too late to do anything about it. We were in a trap—in my blue room with the yellow serape, not able to escape our pasts and divergent styles. We had been raised and trained differently, not only how to behave in the world but how to dress, how to witness yourself, how to be a man or a woman and how a man and a woman charm each other and expect to be charmed. Such customs ranged from the humdrum uses of social drinking and smoking to what to expect from life and love—in general how to occupy time and space and one’s own desires, plus all the vestigial habits people dredge up when they try to stay close, be best friends and a romantic couple too.
Personal traits are deep-seated and loyal and do not submit to ideology or hermetic edict. My girlfriend was scrupulous about her looks, though in a playful manner, creatively attuned to the impact of clothes, makeup, and style. She was brash and a bit wild, free and easy in her gyroscope through time and space, the nuances of flirting and touch. My ways of being and moving were unconscious, or derived cluelessly from baseball and lapsed Viola Wolfe dance lessons. I was mostly unaware of my appearance, lost in thoughts, forgetful that I was even being seen.
She embodied a milieu more culturally sophisticated than Betsy’s Miami Beach but similar in its self-assurance and sangfroid. She came from a strictly cordial family and had a fair amount of “Flower Girl” debutante glamour and Denver vogue to her. Trained in ballet from eight to sixteen and later modern dance, she was dazzling when she did the dance of her name. I was still trying to remember its sequence of steps.
I had an unexamined romantic penchant, a tendency toward literal, sentimental responses. By contrast, Lindy was cosmopolitan, experienced sexually and socially. She understood that relationship was complex, cantankerous, paradoxical, and that you usually got somewhere by going against the grain, confronting impediments and challenges rather than evading or pretending they could be finessed or overlooked. She was bored by pap and ritualized gestures and by people’s knee-jerk valorizations of them, so she didn’t offer any lenient routes or passes.
I had no use for ritualized gambols any more than she did. I had tarried too long with civilians: casual wayfarers, geishas and mere narcissicists. I was ready to play for keeps with a complicated partner in a game that counted. So I tried to observe and respond conscientiously.
I wasn’t daunted by Lindy’s fast company. I had handled my mother’s onslaughts, so I didn’t flinch or back off her sometimes brutal assessments—and they were doozies, as accurate and deadly as verbal arrows got. I was stoked and challenged, for I was not only Fabian’s patient, I was his apprentice, a long-time psychological inquisitor, of late a literary and metaphysical reader too. I h
ad trained a sensitivity to moods and projections, an attunement to paradoxes of intent. I didn’t get bogged down. I knew how to mirror and transform. I had done it for years with sundry folks from Abbey West to Betsy Sley to Jeff Tripp.
Our inconsonant rhythms and contrary histories precluded any ease of sexuality. That part of the relationship was a struggle from the get-go. She proceeded slowly, respecting old-fashioned adolescent boundaries. She did not want us taking on more than we could handle, her own social maturity notwithstanding. Liberated sex had not made her particularly happy, and she wanted off the fast track and the sorts of yardsticks and fellow travellers it provided. “I wouldn’t have blown in your ear,” she told me later, “if I thought you would have misunderstood or taken advantage like most boys. I knew I could trust you.” In that regard we were peers trying to change speeds and get in sync—her slowing down and me speeding up.
Life neophytes coming from opposite directions, we were training each other, trying to balance each other’s excesses, reforming each other’s rigidities and atavisms. That made our romance tough and diagnostic more than sexy and sweet.
We argued nightly, one more cigarette for her in the car before Smith’s curfew, trying to patch it together with a conciliatory more than romantic kiss.
Lindy was clear and acerbic and embraced the confident good-humored person when I became him, but she hectored and dismissed the perverse child. When I kneeled on the mattress looking wounded and distraught, she would say, “Enough,” and go for a walk in the Glen, or sit in the living room talking with other people, waiting for me to give it up. I despised that child too, but there was no place to hide him.
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