by Robert Irwin
Pervey. It was the thought that did it.
‘I want kissing lessons.’
‘What?’
For once I had succeeded in surprising him. He was looking at me as if I was mad. Which, of course I was. I wanted to retract what I had just said, but the demon would not let me. So the next thing which popped out of me was,
‘Cosmic, Ron and Alice are all getting lessons from Laura in occult kissing and I am getting left behind. I want you to give me the same lessons that they are getting.’
Alas! Felton was surprised, but not shocked. I was freaking myself out. Was I really hungry for a fat old man’s kisses in Swiss Cottage? He rose slowly from his chair and motioned that I should stand too. I had to come closer and since I was taller I had to bend to let my mouth touch his. One of his hands went up to my hair. Then his long tongue was in my mouth, like a snake coiling about and making itself comfortable in its lair. Not so much a kiss, it was more like he was sucking and draining my mouth of saliva. Even so I got a little of the acid taste of an old man’s saliva.
We drew apart, while he explained that the next time we kissed, I had to take a long pranic breath – apana, the down-breath – which would reach down all the way to the muladhara or root chakra, which is located between the anus and the testicles and he reached between my legs to show me where he meant. We kissed again and I was concentrating like mad on this oriental breathing, so as not to think of him. And again and again. In between kisses he was giving me little lectures about the transference of energies through the mouth, the left-hand practices of certain Red Cap Lamas and the lighting up of the chakra points in the body. I was going dizzy, from the bizarre breathing rhythms and the sheer horror of it all. For his part, he was having difficulty in breathing – either because he was overexcited, or because of his cold. So after only twenty minutes or so we stopped. However, he was making ominous mutterings about future lessons concerning the Mors Osculi and the Obscene Kiss.
Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. But at least it cannot have been much worse than kissing that corseted old bag, Laura. If I knew more about Tantrism than I do, I would have a better idea of what is coming next. Sally knows more about Tantric sex than I do. Last year she was talking about training to become a temple prostitute. Cosmic claims to be in love with Laura, but he just says these things to shock – part of his I-love-ugly-old-people bag.
Then Felton sat down and flourished a handkerchief and wiped his mouth and blew his nose. Then, after having debated with himself for a while, he decided that my diary was worthy (though only just worthy) of being consecrated. Together we consulted the ephemerides tables to see if the time was propitious: Saturn chiefly in the ascendant; Mercury triune to the ascendant; Saturn and Uranus triune to the moon and Jupiter sextile to the Moon. It is a conjunction not without its problems, but it definitely has a power. Then he inscribed a pentacle with oriental sigils on the notebook’s flyleaf and intoned some Latin over it. He handed the diary back to me, together with a copy of Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend (another early hippy document apparently).
Just as I was shakily making my way out of the room, he called me back,
‘Quis custodiet custodies? I have been talking to you about the importance of memory, but I am a fine one, for I forgot to ask you. Do you have a suit and tie?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘In that case, you will join me for dinner at The Gay Hussar in Greek Street at nine o’clock tomorrow evening.’
‘Oh, thank you for asking. That would be really nice, but unfortunately I cannot. I have promised to take Sally to the cinema tomorrow evening.’
‘Break that promise.’
‘I cannot.’
‘I am not inviting you to dinner. I am giving you an order. Your oath to the Master takes precedence over earlier or subsequent commitments to outsiders.’
‘But what shall I tell Sally?’
‘You will think of something. Why not lie to her? In the months to come you are going to need a lot of practice in lying.’
‘You are just testing me!’ I cried out.
‘Of course I am,’ he replied imperturbably. ‘Don’t forget to take your money … and do not forget to wear a suit and tie – and a clean shirt if possible. Love is the Law. Love under the Will.’
I took the money. It was a test, but what kind of test? Is it possible that Felton despises me for taking the money he offers me? Does he think that I have become Hell’s rent boy?
I only just made it in time to the pathworking downstairs. Granville was conducting it, while Agatha accompanied our meditations on the piano. God knows what she was banging out. It sounded like a Beethoven sonata as rendered by a mad and deaf Turkish dervish. The pathworking was based on The Tempest and it was unusually long and complicated with stuff about the storm of human emotions, the isolation of being apparently alone on a desert island, with Ariel and Caliban as representations of the higher and lower souls, and on winning through to gain the hand of the sorcerer’s daughter – a symbol of the Adept’s union with Sophia, or the Higher Wisdom. But I kept returning to the storm and to the song of Ariel: ‘Full fathom five thy father lies … ’ I imagined the eye-sockets of the dead looking up at me through the murky water and the fish darting among the bones.
(By the way, it turns out that Shakespeare was a leading occultist. Everybody seems to have been one. It will probably turn out that Charlie Chaplin and Joseph Stalin were leading occultists too.)
It was late when I got back and by then my mind was made up and I decided that I had to ring Sally straightaway. The morning would be too late, as she would be at her archaeology lectures by then. So I rang her and told her that I had food-poisoning and that I doubted if I would be able to make it the following evening. She sounded seriously concerned – tiresomely so, as she kept wanting details about what I was throwing up, and she even threatened to come round and look after me. She thinks that I might be the victim of a psychic attack and that it is the Lodge which is making me ill. But in the end Elvira Madigan got postponed till Thursday.
Before our grisly kissing session, Felton said so much that it is hard to remember it all. He said something about how I was holding back on my emotional reactions to things and people. Oh yes, he did talk again about the magical purpose of training the memory. The Lodge has many enemies and from time to time its Adepts are subject to magical attacks. The commonest form that these psychic assaults take is an attack on the memory of an Adept. If one is attacked and one loses the psychic battle, then parts of one’s past will be accessible only through the record kept in the diary. The diary then is a kind of back-up memory for use in the spiritual warfare which is to come. Felton also said that, by keeping a diary, I was training myself to think backwards and that is one of the essential skills of the Adept. He did not comment on the mysterious disaster at the Cairo Working, even though I had put that bit in specifically hoping that he would.
Wednesday, May 24
Woke early. Looking back on yesterday, it wasn’t that bad. I wanted to shock myself and I succeeded in doing so. Great. What is bad is that I now have a cold. Having made up a stupid lie about food poisoning, I now find that I genuinely am a bit ill. After breakfast, put Donovan’s Sunshine Superman on the record player to help me think about Sally. All my contemporaries seem to have their own music which is distinctive to them – kind of like a whale’s song. Donovan, ‘the English Dylan’, makes Sally’s music for her. She grooves on its gentleness and dreaminess. (But there is an undercurrent of melancholy in Donovan’s songs which bodes ill for Sally’s future.) Sally likes to dance as much as I do, but her dances are slow and sinuous. This new fashion for sitar music suits her style of dancing perfectly. Whereas, when I dance, it is a high voltage performance and I fantasise that my body is dissolving into waves of energy and light. The dance sets me free from the world’s field of gravity.
There are no hard edges to Sally. It is noticeable that her room is like an extension of herself. One cannot see the
floor, ceiling or walls for all the drapes, coloured cloths, beaded curtains, Chinese bells, mattresses and cushions. And, when the candles are not lit, the room is lit by an orange light bulb hidden under a batik cloth. She scrounges a lot of fabrics from the theatres where she works part-time as a dresser and she keeps adding new ones and rearranging them in order to redirect the vibes. Her breath is sweet.
I was disconcerted when Felton pointed out that I was keeping myself and my feelings out of this diary. Do I love Sally? I do not want to be simplistic about this. Maybe I do. (Love is the Law. Love under the Will.) But what does love mean? We are both free spirits. We do not own one another. This business of her trying to order me not to have anything to do with the Lodge is the first time she has ever tried to be authoritarian or possessive about our relationship. It is deeply uncool.
I achieved a major triumph this morning. I took the bus to St Joseph’s and practised the spell of invisibility. Since the conductor never noticed me, I travelled for free. I fancy that the faculty of invisibility could be seriously useful for a sociological observer.
At the end of the first playtime the deputy head came out for a chat. He passed on a few useful observations about patterns in children’s play. Then he wanted to know what I thought I was going to do when I had my PhD. It is the kind of question which is well-calculated to freak me out. I do not want to do anything with my life except dance and maybe play music. The thought of work is cruel. As the Stones put it, ‘What a drag it is getting old.’
I have this horrid feeling that youth is on a holiday and that it is not going to last.1967 will give way to 1968. Sally read me a poem a few weeks back – ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ by W.B. Yeats. It was about
‘The lands of faery
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue;’
But maybe, as I advance along the Path, I will find the answer. There will be a spell to make time stand still for me, so that I dance forever in 1967, while the others plod on through the years that follow and they age with those years.
Sally reads a lot of poetry and she learns it by heart, Yeats, Donne, Blake, also Ginsburg, Corso and Ferlinghetti. She likes shopping for little things. She likes to have me break raw eggs over her body. She’s a kind of metaphysical sociologist in that she likes to suss people out by going around asking them dopey questions, like, ‘What do you think is the purpose of life?’ or, ‘What sorts of thing do you find funny?’ or, ‘Do you think that intensity is a good thing?’ She asks me, she asks Mr Cosmic, the postman, the man at the door of Middle Earth, anyone. Then, at the end of a week or so, she compares the answers and thinks of the next question.
Sally is an Aquarian. She looks a bit like Mia Farrow before she cut her hair. (‘Every Man or Woman is a star,’ as Crowley observes.) Or maybe like Nico on the sleeve of The Velvet Underground and Nico. (The Velvet Underground is my whale song.) She loves her freedom and does not want to get trapped in the channelled ways that straight people think in. Aquarian people like unusual things and they keep changing their ideas. This is her age. These are weird times – ‘The Season of the Witch’, as her oracle Donovan puts it.
The Lodge did not make a good impression on her. She grooves on Mr Cosmic though. They share a thing about Arthur and Guinivere. He thinks, like her, that Arthur and his knights will return and that millions now living will see the rebuilding of Camelot. I think she’s probably slept with Cosmic a couple of times. That’s cool.
Spent the afternoon bringing the diary up to date, while I watched my clothes spinning round in the launderette and nursed my cold. In the evening I dressed for dinner. I had not worn a suit since graduation. The knot of the tie is to me as the hangman’s noose – a punishment imposed by society. I made my way to the Gay Hussar in Soho. I was feeling pretty seedy and I was apprehensive that the demon-who-makes-me do-things-I-don’t-want-to might be accompanying me to the restaurant. The Gay Hussar is all red plush and dark lacquer with deep benches, the sort of place where a colonel in the Ruritanian army might meet his opera-singer mistress. I had never eaten in such a place before, but, according to Felton, there are many more expensive and prestigious restaurants in London. We are going to visit them all, working up the list gradually. Felton was already there sipping a glass of something green. I am not used to eating late, but, though my impatience must have been obvious, Felton insisted on doing a big winemanship number. I was there for a lesson, rather than a meal. He ordered a bottle of Montrachet and made me follow him, as he twirled the glass by the stem and peered and sniffed at the wine. Then we had to sip, making little dog’s arse movements of the lips. I hate sipping. Gulping is my normal pace. Felton had to reach across and stop me from draining the glass. A Montrachet is a full-bodied, dry, white Burgundy. It has a flowery bouquet and a kind of honeyed oak aftertaste. It is such a great white wine that I was supposed to faint or something, but it tasted like white wine and I drank it. Perhaps if I hadn’t got a cold I would have got more out of it. However, I have to memorise all this winemanship stuff. It is actually part of my training as a sorcerer.
‘So where does Sally think you are tonight?’ asked Felton, when he had finished banging on about the vineyards of the Beaune region.
‘She probably thinks that I’m in bed sick.’
Felton nodded, satisfied, and turned to the waiter and asked him to bring a bottle of Haut Brion claret, a 47 if possible, to our table, so that it could start breathing while we were slowly working our way through the Montrachet – I mean so slow, it was like getting one’s booze through a drip-feed. Then he started pointing out other people in the restaurant. There was an MP called Tom Driberg. And there was a writer, Angus Wilson. I was quite impressed at being in the same room as Wilson, until I remembered that the man who wrote The Outsider is called Colin Wilson, not Angus. I do not know who this Angus is. However, when Felton and the Master judge that I am ready, I am going to be introduced to all sorts of famous and influential people.
‘We are grooming you to be part of the elite.’
‘Why me?’
‘The Lodge is looking for new members. They should be young and, even more important, intelligent and with qualifications. Your first-class degree is a powerful recommendation. True, it is only in sociology and sociology is just socialism dressed up as an academic discipline -’
I started to protest, but he made those funny waving movements with his fat hands.
‘Peter, no scowls! They do not suit your pretty face. Let us not quarrel about sociology of all things! Even you must admit that practitioners of that arcane ‘science’ have no literary style – or any other sort of style. It is a subject for people who like wearing duffel coats.’
I put my ear to the bottle of Haut Brion and pretended to listen to it breathing. Felton looked displeased, but he continued nevertheless,
‘But my point is that the Lodge wants you to continue with your studies, so that you get your Ph.D. in sociology. After that, we shall see. In thirty years time I should expect to see you as a Fellow of All Souls, a Permanent Secretary in the Civil Service, or the director of a publishing company. Something along those lines will be achieved by you and the Lodge working together. We already have rich and powerful ‘sleepers’ in high places and they will assist you in joining them. Did you know that among the ancient Egyptians poverty was regarded as a disease?’
(No, I thought, it is old age that is the disease. How can Felton bear to be himself, flabby and falling apart? However, I said nothing and he, unaware of what I was thinking, continued talking. Whatever occult powers the learned Doctor may possess, telepathy does not appear to be among them.)
‘Our Prime Minister may bleat about the “classless society”. The reality is that the future lies with a new aristocracy of the spirit, whose members shall be drawn exclusively from those who find honour in serving the purposes of the Great Work. To know, to
will and to be silent.’
‘Oh yeah! Who gets to decide who is in this new aristocracy?’
‘We do. There is no need to be bashful about it.’
‘Will Mr Cosmic be one of the new Lords of the Spirit then?’
‘Mr Cosmic? Oh you mean David Hargreaves. Well, he is a bright young man, but he has no culture. You disagree?’
‘I definitely do. He has got rock culture.’
Felton was impatient with this.
‘Oh yes, yes. Perhaps rock is a culture in some hideous sociological sense – or, no, what’s that horrible new word? A ‘subculture’, a ‘subculture’ of the lazy, the unwashed, the inarticulate and the deafened. Yes, certainly a ‘subculture’, for doubtless it has its own traditions, ceremonies, high priests, relics, ritual sacrifices even. However, in a serious sense, the pabulum provided by the popular-music industry is a betrayal of three millennia of Hochkultur – of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Paracelsus, Goethe. To switch on a television set is to gain a glimpse of moral chaos.’
Now, of course, I wanted to argue with all this fat-headed, right-wing rhetoric. My experience of switching on a telly is that one usually then finds oneself dopily watching some old codgers playing a quiz game called What’s My Line, or a handful of teeny-boppers listlessly bobbing up and down on a programme called Ready, Steady, Go. No glimpse into moral chaos then. I wish it was. However, the topic of cultural politics was dropped for the rest of the evening.