New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  This one text redeemed my failed Zionist training—the Zohar allowed me to embrace being born a Jew at last, to claim a heritage ultimately so profound that it could express itself coequally in Albert Einstein, Sandy Koufax, and Bob Dylan. As fissioning yellow yods danced spark-like in the turquoise sky of the Moon card, two hermetic systems fused, revealing the sheer depth and complexity of Creation.

  I realized suddenly that Eden was a state of being, a mode of perception. We were kept out of Paradise not by some Biblical illustrator’s scimitar of archangelic steel but the finer blades of synapsing neurons. Our bodies incarnated our state of exile; that’s how Adam and Eve got themselves kicked out, by entering the shadow play of molecules and cells. The instrument of Brakhage’s cinema was likewise the sword of perception converted in the frames-per-second blink of each montage, an atonal series of such montages disclosing a secret landscape oscillating within this one. It can be paradise all the time, if only we would snap our coma. We’d be back in Eden in a heartbeat, we were already there.

  Sister souls meant soulmates! But was this a runaway grasping-at-straws, a mere wishful indulgence—or a true-blue vision? I didn’t begin to know, but I had to find out. There was nothing else in play, no other course through the darkness. If I was neurotic and self-important, that would come out in the wash too.

  Elsie was back living with Welton, so when I returned to the City, she loaned me the keys to her empty apartment. I went straight there so as not to encounter my family. In my state of pilgrimage I could bide no more naysaying, no derision or sacrilege. I was the only allowable heretic now. Night fell on a strange city that was finally mine:

  How wild and soulless

  Is the wind,

  Driving through yonder helium towers,

  Dense metropolitan vats of subway cider,

  A pinwheeling purple sky?

  All the next day I memorized Greek vocabulary and declensions, read tales of African gods, stayed true to sacred alphabets, and awaited the plane.

  My sister-soul appeared down the Kennedy corridor with her handbag. I ran to intercept her. She hugged me quickly and then stared. “Babe, you look as though you’ve been through hell.”

  I nodded with a martyrish smile. Then I told her about Elsie’s place. “So,” she snapped “is everyone on your side?”

  “They’re on our side.”

  “I’m not an appendage of you.”

  We didn’t stay in the City overnight. We drove straight up through Connecticut, wrangling about everything. I thought she was being needlessly belligerent to prove we weren’t any good. She countered that we were naturally contentious.

  We argued about the events of the summer and even about how much we had argued. Then we argued about the war.

  “We don’t even share the same opinion about Vietnam.” Steve had raised salient points she now itemized: What about the Red Chinese? What about stopping them before they got the bomb? What about the spread of Communism through Laos, Indonesia, and the Philippines?

  “The famous domino theory,” I announced with mock surprise. “How original!”

  My attitude, she said, merely demonstrated how different we were. “We don’t have the same politics. I’m not a pacifist. Are you? Would you refuse to fight in any war?”

  “No, just this one.”

  We stopped for hamburger, fries, and frappes at our usual Howard Johnson’s on the outskirts of Northampton where she made a case for remaining friends without being lovers. We could still do things together, just not as often and more low-key. On that gray evening I left her at Laura Scales with her suitcases and hastened back to Amherst.

  I translated simple sentences, the mere sound of which lifted my spirits: “hoti kai ho anemos kai he thalatta hupakooay aitoo.” I learned the names of Ice Age glaciations (Gunz, Mindel, Riss, Wurm) and sites from Olduvai to Altamira and Lascaux where bones of ancient primates and the earliest humans had been found. I imagined the long mute dream at the beginning of our species—the contrapuntal dream of grasses and animals—transformed through tree alphabets and Greek stems into the songs of Shelley: “And the green lizard and the golden snake / Like imprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.”

  Kelly had proposed P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous as the next phase in my initiation. It told of the author’s meetings with the Russian mystic Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, identified only as G. in the book. G. adduced a scale of music-like vibrations igniting the cosmos, exploding across gaps and tonal shifts to create stars and other, cooler realms. Our world was one of these zones, a frontier tonation in a vast, multidimensional symphony wherein notes louder and brighter than a million suns were transformed by compression into stones and waters, then grasses and life forms.

  I recognized the stream flowing through the tarot, linking the landscapes from card to card. Stream or ray, numerical series or vibrations—these were metaphors for a hierarchy generating and encompassing the universe.

  In Ouspensky’s version, individual molecules are products of separate small shocks, cascading across this plane as they are captured in electromagnetic configurations; hence multiple hydrogens originate at different frequencies, from hydrogen 6 to hydrogen 12,288, with 384 being water and 192 breathable air. But there was a dark side. Whatever else they are doing or telling themselves they are doing, Gurdjieff warns us, creatures are under a rudimentary edict, they must alchemize souls out of gross matter, convert the ray of Creation before it is too late. Even plants and animals are called upon to transmute material energies into finer spiritual pulsations. They do this by nourishment, breath, emotion, and larval thought. Beings that do not forge souls out of corporeal stuff meet a sorry fate at death: their overly dense charge sinks into unstable configurations, becoming subatomic neutrinos and electrons. Their identity fissions and spins apart, damning them to illuminate the cosmos for eternity. First, though, their bioelectricity, their remaining vitality, is swallowed by the Moon and spit back out at a lower octave.

  The master seemed to be telling Ouspensky—and Kelly, me—that we had been born into a trap. If we failed to get ourselves out, we would be sold into fire, doomed to light the void (as stars do) at our bodies’ extinction—eternal photons, never to be transmuted to spirit.

  Gurdjieff’s portent echoed Kelly’s original warning: break with habitual action and common gossip or be consigned to oblivion, to supply the hydrogen of future universes for other souls.

  There was no fallback position or escape from cosmic prerogative—become aware of the direness of our situation, and change—or be exterminated.

  My visit to a frigid hut followed by a slapstick ride to a Chinese restaurant, seemingly expendable, mere diversions and borderline performances at the time—borderline whimsical, borderline crucial—were real in the way they were designed to be. I hadn’t understood the true amusement and dead seriousness of the occasion. Now, as if by post-hypnotic command, the sequence was re-initiating me from within. Having internalized, having assimilated what Kelly was preaching, having practiced it unknowingly in Aspen, now I was experiencing it directly.

  What was at stake had escalated almost preposterously. The game was Creation itself, the universe—but maybe it had always been. Maybe that’s what the voice at the dungeon stairs was trying to tell me, why it sprang from Nanny’s necromancy and gave me the fright of my early life. It was a cosmic sounding buoy, a depth gauge, saying, “This is how far down the universe goes and what will be required of you in this lifetime. Match it and you have a fighting chance. Match anything less sober and grim and you will shipwreck one way or another on some hidden reef.”

  Roused to untimely consciousness by my mother and Nanny, I needed to be even more terrified, to force myself to an amplitude of crisis I could resolve only by ego disintegration or a quantum leap.

  A quantum leap it was! The dungeon stairs had awakened me to the horror of my situation but also to its possibility and hope, and in the only way I could be awakened—by gas
hing into a four-and-a-half-year-old’s reality state deep enough to get his attention. That’s what the voice behind the voice on the radio intended when it ambushed a fledgling mind. Whatever its intelligence or source, it provided rude captioning for an inchoate danger.

  Sorry to say, grim and sober it had to be, given the perniciousness of the maze, the obstacles and trials ahead, the need for clarity and single-mindedness, the dazzle of so many false trails in the dark. Perhaps that was Nanny’s errand all along, even if she hadn’t left the radio on on purpose—why she was there in the first place. When the specter of dungeon stairs terrified a defenseless child, it was only trying to say, “Wake up this time around, Frère Richard; everything is at stake!”

  The universe is operating at multiple tiers of decoy and mimicry, so caveats come in unlikely forms. A few years after the entrance of the “dungeon stairs” I heard spectral bars of “Stranger in Paradise” and I knew more or less what they meant—my rejoinder to my subway escort Neil’s riddle proved that—but I didn’t know what they meant emotionally.

  The tune recalled the dungeon—the leitmotif of Hitzig with his morbid bag, a ballroom of partygoers on which a vampire-like visitation casts an eerie turquoise coma—though the song said exactly the opposite. It said kismet, Aphrodite, love at first sight. But a young consciousness reads the shifting winds of paradox unerringly and takes heed: “If I stand starry-eyed / That’s a danger in paradise.” The world was paradise all right, and it was “one enchanted evening” over and over. But the stranger across that fancy room was a “macabre,” an alien in a woman’s body—and the vision of her was the terrible depth of one’s own soul.

  I felt baffled and spooked then because terror and joy, persecution and revelation occurred at a single vibration in variant pitches. Change the modulation and one, remarkably, turned into the other.

  This new paradigm was ludicrous, absurd, though it rang true, if not strictly as the thing it signified. It was the link between the phantom evanescence of a dungeon-like form and a mature trope grounded in molecular physics and Rosicrucian magic. What fused the phenomenologies was Kelly’s living citation.

  But can we really be damned to unstable helium, the debris of our lives to brighten alien homes and draw moth-like creatures to our flame? Was that the stranger in paradise? Did this make any sense at all?

  I was bursting with new knowledge, but there was no way to use it, to share it, to give it life in the ordinary world. What could I tell my friends—that we risked being turned into electrons unless we acted at once? How could I get this news even to the core of my own being, live it, practice it, when I seemed barely to survive from moment to moment? Half the time I felt empowered and guided, the other half about to fall apart.

  One night at dinner Lindy confided, almost off-handedly, that Steve had dropped her again, “I guess he didn’t think I was worth altering his career plans,” she said sadly. “After all, my life as an artist didn’t measure up to his mentor Louis Kahn. All we did anyway was argue about Vietnam; he said I was the first person he met who was against the war.” She paused to consider how much she wanted to confess. Then she decided to trust me. “When I asked him why he didn’t write me all winter from Italy, he just shrugged. He’s headed to an architecture firm in New York. Probably he’ll find prettier and more sophisticated creatures there than me. Oh well!”

  It didn’t mean that she and I could pick up our romance together because she stood by her negative view of Aspen. “It took us such a long time to learn to do love, but we do hate rather easily. Can’t you see? It’s perverse to try to make something happen that’s not there.”

  She called what we were lacking “love,” but she meant that we didn’t have the quick chemical attraction that she shared with Steve and Jim, what Kelly had called ecstasy. We were a difficult, thorny couple.

  “I don’t see hate,” I said. “I see only anger, frustration, and the pain of transformation. Remember Kelly: enstasy.”

  “Rich, sometimes you are maddening.”

  “Always I hope.”

  And Shelley: “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity…. ”

  In anthropology Professor Pitkin assigned a surprisingly Gurdjieffian book, The Phenomenon of Man. Its author, a Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, described an esoteric fire that imbued the hydrogen of galaxies and stars in the formation of the universe. Fecundating in the plasma of cooling stars, it crystallized on those suns’ planets. Its divine embers incubated creatures on Earth at its lava phase, endowing the newly whelped orb with an incipient biosphere. Because it swirled in the same dust-cloud as its sun-star, Earth inherited the Sun’s latency of Soul presence, transferred timelessly from the Tree of Life to galaxies and nebulae. Gravitational and chemical activity dispatched the letters of the Hebrew alphabet into the monadnock/oxbow zone: the uprise of continents, the filling of oceanic basins—the Spirit of God moving upon the Face of the Waters.

  Here too was a Gurdjieffian posit but with an opposite conclusion. In keeping with Christian tradition, Teilhard proposed universal salvation: Christ’s sacrifice had changed the cosmic rules.

  Teilhard traced the evolution of Homo sapiens to the emergence of Divine Spirit from matter’s interior, which was “the ‘psychic’ face of that portion of the stuff of the cosmos enclosed from the beginning of time within the narrow scope of the early Earth.” In the global ocean, atoms and molecules, cooling and liquefying into myriad shapes, stirred the forerunners of DNA helices. Solar spirits came rushing into being as protists and plastids. Their bacterial lattices spread across a volcanic surface, forming a biosphere. Cooled by interstellar blackness, the planet moistened, and cells sublimated from solar particles into its hydrosphere.

  As Earth transferred its molecular information into protein threads and tissue motifs, plant and animal bodies coalesced. Then the organs of larger animals deliquesced from those, as more intricate sheaths matriculated out of predecessor lattices.

  So the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, and the moving creatures that hath life—the fowl that flyeth above the earth; the great whales in the deep; and every other living presence that moveth, Adam, Eve, and their progeny—were brought forth from starry embers after their kind.

  This was the Ray of Creation in action. The tarot Sun—its inner star, Kether—was glimmering anew and apart as a living entity on a planet: first a worm, then a fish, then a shaggy wolf, each of them a particle of the solar body.

  The Phenomenon of Man turned the universe inside-out, making the spangled night as sentient and beneficent as it appeared: “In that fragment of sidereal matter,” Teilhard wrote of the primordial solar cloud, “as in every other part of the universe, the exterior world must inevitably be lined at every point with an interior one.”

  Now I began to view the celestial firmament as what it was: a gauze refracting a transdimensional cosmos.

  Jung’s archetypes and Darwin’s natural selection ran together. The hominids of our physical-anthropology text, those early man-ape predecessors of ourselves, ancestors of the Greek anthropos (from whom the name “anthropology” came), were stirred to language and culture by recollections of their own antecedent lives as hydrogen inside the stellar field, not the hydrogen physicists know but Gurdjieff’s primordial vibrations that purled it and other elements from a higher vibration. To Australopithecus and Pithecanthropus, consciousness was a more anterior part of themselves, their innate intelligence and design principle, singing so deeply they couldn’t hear it, or could only hear it. None of this could have happened, reasoned Teilhard, none of it at all, if it were not already present in the solar cloud.

  The angels of Gethsemani were back … birds delivering messages of stars. I continued to hear their cries as language, closer to Attic Greek than English, subatomic mantras that could not be translated into any human language. But that’s why the flocks of the sky kept repeating them.

  In the hor
n of 1965 those visions were my life-blood and consolation. As long as I believed them I was safe, so I carried them with me, reinventing my reality every hour, in fact every moment. I kept salvaging all that was lost, that threatened to lapse into unbearable memories playing Prélude, Fugue and Variation as a reminder and balm. Gaston Bachelard in his cottage in Dijon marked the same epitome and lived by it: “The unknown God is striving to know Himself through creatures of his making, to become through us what He has eternally desired to be.” If so, what could finally go wrong? I might as well give it my best shot too.

  When Stevie Wonder sang, “There’s a place in the sun,” he meant the real Sun, that dense cocoon of hydrogen souls:

  “Every branch on the tree

  just reaching to be free…. ”

  Yes! What else would give them shape, would extend them in such a reverie of twigs and flowers?

  I tried to feel this, trust it, ride it to safety. I was on a binge all right, but I needed to sustain it. I wrote my first Romantic Poetry term paper on “Blake, Gurdjieff, and Hopi Indian Verbs,” citing Navaho sand-painting, alchemy, tarot, and theories of etymology. My professor, Bill Heath (no relation to Roy), gave me an A.

  Then I picked up a science-fiction novel, Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, in which dreaming children unlock our current evolutionary cul de sac and, guided by the Oversoul, cross galactic dimensions into a new universe. For Pitkin’s next anthropology assignment I synthesized their quantum leap with Hopi myths of the Fourth World and my own “White Goddess”-informed theories of the origin of speech—and got another A. Not only was this state of revelation sustaining, it was backed by my teachers. Then I submitted “Religion as a Coded Language” to Professor Heath under the epigraph:

  ‘if Barbara were an angel,’ sang Coleridge