by Robert Irwin
In the afternoon I started to read about the ‘observer effect’ in sociological experiments – how by the mere process of observing one changes the nature of what is being observed. When I got bored with that, I read some more Aleister Crowley and lay on the bed and attempted to follow his instructions for getting my astral self to leave my physical body. I kept imagining how my spiritual self would look down from the ceiling on my body apparently asleep on the bed below, but it was imagination only. My will is not yet strong enough. However, as Crowley observes, ‘Verily it is better to fail in the magical ceremony than it is to fail in writing down an accurate record of it.’
I put on my silver shirt to go out – after writing all the above down, that is. I can see that the problem with diary-keeping is that, in the end, the record becomes so elaborate that one spends the whole day recording the fact that one has spent the whole day writing in one’s diary – another vertiginous prospect.
This evening the first thing Sally wanted to know was whether I would prefer to be dead or not yet to have been born. I met her, as arranged, at Convent Garden tube-station and we had a pub snack before entering Middle Earth. This time the people at the door stamped transfers of butterflies on our hands. The Incredible String Band was playing. (According to Mr Cosmic, they are both heavily into Scientology.) We danced for ages and then, in the corner of the basement furthest away from the Band, we got into exactly the same argument we had last week, about the Black Book Lodge and its set-up in Swiss Cottage. She kept having to shout and this did not improve her temper.
‘They’re bad news!’ shouted Sally. ‘The whole place pulsates with bad vibes. I’m amazed you can’t feel them. What do you expect to get out of it all?’
I smiled and said nothing. Sally had come with me to the first two lectures in the Hermetic Wisdom course last year, but she couldn’t stand Agatha or Granville, so she gave up and she never got to hear Felton, Laura, or any of the other lecturers. Neither did she meet the Master.
‘They’re all so old and creepy and snobby. They’re all establishment types,’ she continued. ‘They bang on about the higher spiritual life and opposing the forces of materialism, but the reality is that they are on a hell of a materialistic trip themselves. No way but. You’ve just got to look at that place of theirs with its wall-to-wall carpets and velvet hangings and all those brass and silver idols. And they, themselves, they’re all so fat and sleek. It used to faze me out – the way they used to sit, bolt upright and never taking their eyes off us. They sit like they’re the Enlightened Ones, but they’ve got really evil auras. I think they are into brainwashing.’
‘Well they are not going to brainwash me,’ I replied. ‘I am not that impressionable. I am listening to what they say and testing it objectively.’
It made me that angry that Sally didn’t believe me. She continued,
‘Did you know that that creep Granville tried to pick me up? (No, I did not know that.) He kept gazing at my skirt as though he had x-ray eyes. And he kept dropping little hints about all the super-esoteric knowledge he was privy to. But then I asked him if he could tell what colour my knickers were and he pissed off. Peter, you are much brighter than he is. What do you want to go around following him for?’
I said again what I had already told her many times before that, if there was even one chance in a million that the esoteric version of the world was right, then it was worth exploring to the limit, since what was at stake was so vast – eternal life. But Sally gets really uptight about my joining the Lodge. She reads all this mystical stuff by Kahlil Gibran and Hermann Hesse and so on, about following a Way and so on, but when it comes to actually doing something about it and, say, giving up all her worldly goods and going out on the road as a pilgrim, she does nothing. She just reads more books and gets more neurotic about not doing what the books tell her to do – especially neurotic, since the books she reads are the sort of books that tell you that real wisdom is learnt from life, not from books. It really hacks me off.
‘I can’t suss out why you’re on the Adepthood trip at all. Isn’t all this enough?’
(All this: the gyrating and bobbing figures, the pulsating lights, the drift of soap bubbles, the eerie rhythms of the sitar, her pointy breasts.)
‘They go on gabbling about the Path and the Work,’ Sally shouted. ‘But there is no love nor laughter in them. They don’t dance. I love to dance.’
And with that she drew away into the heaving throng and beckoned me to her. I followed, but I did not dance so much as watch her dance. Her wispy golden hair kept floating up and then falling over her face, then floating up again. Sally is very thin and pale. She’s like an elfin princess come up from underground to dance with the lumpish humans. She had devised a dance of seduction, so as to lure me from the Path and follow her into her bed under the earth. Her eyes and her smile are so very bright, that it is as if there is a white fire burning within her.
The Incredible String Band was playing a wistful little number called ‘First Girl I Ever Loved’ and maybe that was an omen. The fruit-vendors were setting up their stalls when we came out of Middle Earth. We caught an overnight bus and we spent the night at my place. When I whispered to her my theory that everyone else was a projection of my mind, she was bitter.
‘That means that when you make love to me, you are really making love to the person you love the most – yourself.’
Sunday, May 21
I was woken by fingers moving lightly over my face. Sally was lying on top of me and her cold, thin fingers were caressing my face, working an ice-maiden’s spell upon it.
‘Do you love me?’ she asked in that husky voice of hers.
‘Yes,’ I groaned, still heavy with sleep.
‘Then give the Lodge up. It’s them or me.’
I closed my eyes and pretended to drift off.
We did not talk any more that morning. She put Donovan’s Sunshine Superman on the record-player, listened to it and left. (We had previously planned to spend the rest of the day together.) I must be careful about Sally. She is the first obstacle on the Path that I have chosen. Thinking about that song last night, ‘First Girl I Ever Loved’, I realised that I was sad, not because I had anything to be sad about while I was listening to it, but because I knew that I would be sad in the future and then I would be hearing that song again.
I rang Dad and promised to go up on the following weekend when Mum would be out of hospital. Then I rang Mr Cosmic and arranged to go over to his pad.
‘Paul McCartney’s dead,’ were his first words to me as I walked in.
‘That wasn’t on the news this morning.’
‘No, he died months ago, but they are keeping it a secret. He was decapitated in a motorcycle accident and now there is a big cover-up.’
He showed me a lot of what were supposed to be recent photographs of the Beatles. Close examination showed that while some were just old photos which had been retouched, in others, which were genuinely recent, there was this thin line round McCartney’s neck. All the other Beatles looked normal, if a bit sad, but there was this strange dead look to Paul’s eyes.
Apart from the Beatles’ clippings, the rest of the walls were covered with Red Indian and Voodoo posters. Although Mr Cosmic’s room is pretty spacious, he has decided to get rid of most of his space by building a giant pyramid of cardboard boxes in the centre of the room. The tip of the pyramid touches the ceiling. When I was last round at his place, he was telling me how yoghurt placed under the pyramid stays fresh forever. Also it exerts a field of force which sharpens razor blades. Apart from keeping his yoghurt fresh and sharpening razor blades, Cosmic’s pyramid serves as a display area for his garden-gnomes. Besides the van which he uses for his removal service, he has a bicycle and he goes out at night, cycling round suburbia, and he ‘liberates’ garden-gnomes from people’s gardens. Once they are safely back in his place, he repaints them silver and black and gives them protective magical markings, before placing them on the pyramid.
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‘Why are they keeping Paul’s death a secret?’ I wanted to know.
‘They don’t want an inquest, because it was not really an accident. It was a set-up in which they – ’
‘Who is they?’
‘The Grey Ones, dummy. They killed McCartney, just like they arranged Buddy Holly’s plane crash. I reckon Jagger’s next. The thing is, they are afraid of our music. “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.” There’s a lot of energy in the streets right now, generated by our music, and they can’t handle that.’
I was looking a bit sceptical, so he put Revolver on the record player and, after we had listened to the last track, he started turning the record under the needle the wrong way round – what we magicians call widdershins – and he claimed that now we could hear the voices of the other Beatles predicting Paul’s death and asking for help. I couldn’t hear this myself.
‘It doesn’t do to take the world for granted,’ was all that Mr Cosmic would say.
Then we started rapping about diary-keeping. He, Ron and Alice are keeping diaries too. But Laura doesn’t seem bothered about how they are written. She is teaching them in a kind of joint tutorial about chakras and energy centres and something called the Mors Osculi. Laura is apple-cheeked, bossy and very English-looking. She sort of twinkles about the place and looks as if she should be running a cake-stall for the Women’s Institute. Instead, she’s into seriously esoteric stuff like the Mors Osculi, which is some kind of really sinister kiss. In the meantime she’s got them actually practising different kinds of kiss. Ron and Cosmic take it in turns kissing Laura and Alice. Alice is seriously uptight about it. Ron is fairly straight, but Alice is unbelievably straight. Kissing Alice is like sucking a turnip. When we started going to the Hermetic lectures last autumn, Mr Cosmic and I spotted each other as the only freaks in the regular audience – apart from Sally that is. But she stopped coming, because she couldn’t stand Granville.
Anyway, according to Cosmic, Laura, Agatha and some of the others are jealous of Felton. He has a special status because he was present with the Master at the Cairo Working, when things went terribly wrong. Nobody ever talks about what went wrong at the Cairo Working. But it is said that the Master has a wife and a daughter, and the wife, who was outside the pentacle during the Cairo Working, went mad. No one has seen her for about twenty years, because the Master keeps her in chains in the attic (just like Mr Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre). That explains some of the strange noises one hears during the invocations and the comings and goings on the stairs. Anyway, ever since things went wrong in Cairo, the Master has relied on Dr Felton for advice.
I told Cosmic about Sally’s hostility to the Lodge.
‘That’s chicks for you,’ he said. ‘They always want things to be safer. You need to incorporate her in your next pathworking – something like a mythic quest, something like you setting out on a heroic quest and leaving your cottage in the heart of the forest and her tearfully waving you goodbye. Then when you return with the monster slain, she will dry her tears and rejoice that you have accomplished your quest.’
‘But she wants me to give up the Lodge. It’s either that or she’s going to split from me.’
‘Lie to her. Pretend that you are doing something else on Tuesdays and Thursdays – evening classes in carpentry or something.’
Then we smoked and listened to a record of Yma Sumac, the Inca goddess.
Monday, May 22
I awoke late and rushed breakfast. I had some really weird dreams last night, but I can’t remember what they were, and perhaps that is a good thing. I don’t believe in writing down one’s dreams, for, if dreams wished to be remembered, they would not have that forget-me-quick mechanism built into them. They are aspects of the sleeping brain talking to itself and one should not eavesdrop.
Went to Dillons Bookshop and on my way stopped off at the Scientology headquarters on Tottenham Court Road to flirt with the girl at the door. I have always fancied Scientologists, as I think that they are sexy – so glowing-healthy, sparkly-eyed, clean and smiley. Not that I am any of these things, but it doesn’t stop me fancying them. Last year, I wanted us to go into Scientology, but Sally vetoed this, as she said it was too scary. So we went into the Black Book Lodge instead, which, in many respects was a pity …
After Dillons I hurried off to my wall on the edge of the playground and took notes. Hopefully I will get a clearer idea of where this research is going soon. Today I was concentrating on the phenomenon of parallel play – that is when children look as though they are playing together, but actually they are not. They are playing in close proximity to each other, but independently, each enclosed in his or her own imaginary world. Watching the little children makes me feel melancholy. I am sorry for people who have children, because that really is a sign of defeat in life and an admission that one has given up on one’s own ambitions. I reckon that people have children in the hope that the children will achieve what they failed to achieve. A person – an unenlightened person at least – is just a receptacle for the life force, and something to be discarded once its reproductive capacity is exhausted. The prospect of middle age terrifies me. MEMO: Over the door of his pad Mr Cosmic has written ‘A physicist is composed of atoms. A physicist is an atom’s way of finding out about atoms.’
I returned home and read late into the night. I hope Sally forgets all that stuff about making me choose between her and the Lodge. She rang this evening and we have arranged to go to the cinema on Wednesday evening to see Elvira Madigan.
Tuesday, May 23
There is a demon within me, which makes me do the opposite of what I want to do. Today was one of the days of the demon. I am scared of high buildings and the edges of cliffs. My vertigo is not because I am afraid of going dizzy and so tumbling over, nor do I suppose that the cliff face is suddenly going to crumble. No, what I fear is that the demon-who-makes-me-do-things-I-don’t-want-to will take over and make me jump into the void. My demon makes it difficult for me to go to parties, for fear he will make me say awful things, the shame of which will remain scorched on my brain forever. I do not often sense him inside me, but …
If only it was possible to wish days not to have happened. If only it was possible simply by wishing to go back in time and have another chance and have all memory of what happened erased, so that one does not even have a memory of having had to wish for forgetfulness … But then, if it was possible, I would not remember, would I? It is even possible, of course, that my memory of today’s awful encounter with Felton, conceals an earlier memory of something inconceivably more awful. How would I ever know? Lost. Completely lost.
It was raining, so figuring that the children would not be playing out of doors today, I went to work in the library, but the day didn’t really start until evening. I went up to Horapollo House at Swiss Cottage. Felton was waiting for me in the dark hallway. Horapollo House is literally a place of shadows, for no natural light has been allowed in the building for about fifteen years. I had come an hour early, as arranged, so that Felton could hack over my diary. He had a cold and at first he was in an evil humour. There was still a lot in my prose that he finds objectionable. Like my use of the adverb hopefully in the sentence, ‘Hopefully I will get a clearer idea of where this research is going soon’, made Felton spit. Although my diary-writing is improved, I must pay more respect to the rules of grammar.
‘Grammar is not a distraction from magic. Grammar is magic. Grammar and grimoire are the same word. Grammar is also “glamour” and the primary meaning of “glamour” is “spell”, while a grimoire is a manual for the casting of spells. Through grammar we control the universe.’
There are also things I have been reticent about – for Felton is curious, why when Sally asked me about why I was committed to the Lodge, I gave her such a vague answer.
‘You can lie to Sally. There is no reason not to, but you may not lie to your diary. Tell me now, why you have kissed the hand of the Master?’<
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I told him that it was because I wanted to be young forever – to become the Puer Aeternus, the ‘Eternal Boy’, as described in occult textbooks. ‘I have maybe sixty years in which to work out a way of not dying. It seems like a long time, but I know it is not.’ However, Felton seemed dissatisfied with my answer. We shall have to come back to my real motivation.
‘You are playing with me, Peter,’ he said. ‘I know that and I know that you are cleverer than me. But in the long run your cleverness will avail you nothing. I will break you and remake you – just as I have done with countless others who are sitting where you are sitting now.’
Another thing is missing in the diary so far. Sally, Cosmic, Laura and Drapers are described, but Felton is not.
‘But I want to be in your book, Peter. I want to know how you described me to Sally. I want to see myself reflected in the mirror you hold up to me. Make sure that it is a true image that you present.’
OK Felton. He is extraordinarily fat – probably because he drinks so much red wine – and it is the sort of fat which might once have been muscle. His hair is close cropped, as if he had just come out of the army. Though the body is soft and the face wattled, the eyes are hard, octopus eyes. He emphasises the points he is making with odd little waving gestures. He wears bow-ties, of which he seems to have a considerable collection – also waistcoats. I know that he went to Peterhouse, Cambridge (that must have been after the war), but I still have not worked out what he is doctor of. Probably he’s got a doctorate in Classics, since he is always strewing Latin tags about and he was really shocked to hear how I got into university without taking an exam in Latin. Obviously he was in Cairo at the same time as the Master, but I do not know what he was doing there. He has a huge collection of books on the wall behind the armchair: occult treatises like The Kabbalah Unveiled, 777, The Key of Solomon, The Rose of Mysteries, but also a lot of classic English literature like Milton, Marvell and Browning. I have also noticed some rather odd titles, like Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden and How Boys Bathe in Finland. He is obviously a bachelor and he keeps that horrible black labrador for company – more like a demonic familiar. Sally is sure that Felton is a poove and that he wants me for my skinny body. I was thinking that that might be the case, but so far the only thing he had got for his hundred pounds was an inspection of my diary. But then it occurred to me that reading someone else’s diary was a bit like sniffing someone else’s underwear. Dead pervey.