But there is some inexorable density in the brain. Fear and awe gave way to sleep and my head began to sink. I was beginning to drowse, in front of the first ecstatic trance I had ever seen. I do not know how long I napped, for in sleep experience is transposed to another order of time: some barely tangible presence was entering my body, locking my joints, reassuring me—while a parade of images drifted past, memories of childhood, odd dreamlike shapes floating through the stillness of the room. His presence was entering mine by some osmosis, drawing me toward it by gentle steps. I was cradled in a pleasurable field, held in a stillness carrying premonitions of vaster realms and tiny hints of music, music I might have heard if my brain were more open and finely tuned—distant horns, shudders of ecstatic voices just an eyelash flick away. Something in me was reaching toward those close yet distant realms but the weight of sleep pulled me back.
It was hard to tell how long it lasted. He broke the silence in a voice so faint that I thought at first I was imagining it, some words, then he cleared his throat. I looked around the room savoring the earthy familiarity of everything in it, interfused now with stillness and pleasure. “ ’Tis amazin’ to me how these forms, these bodies, these ideas float in this emptiness . . . strange gravity,” he whispered the words in a soft hoarse voice. We looked at each other through the subtle presence that filled the room. “Just kites in that wind,” he said with that bucktoothed grin and slowly stretched as he rose from his chair.
He disappeared into another room and I slowly looked around me. Everything sparkled with a new clarity as the morning brightened. I felt a freshness and pleasure as if I had slept well, and a calm poise that seemed to hold me. I was curious to know more about this amazing room.
Long brown scrolls of wrapping paper covered one entire wall. Each had a tide at the top: DANGEROUS CONNECTIONS and GOD IS WAKING UP are two I remember. Another was entitled HISTORY OF THE BODY, with lists of historic events joined by red and green lines to names of political leaders, philosophers, and artists, to organs of the body including the heart, liver, kidney, and lungs, and to certain psychic centers like the Indian chakras. It was a complex chart depicting, I think, his own notions of how consciousness has unfolded in the world during historical times and how the body, or the general human awareness of the body, has developed along with it. He found me studying it when he came back into the room.
“Wha’ d’ye think o’ that?” he asked matter-of-factly.
“Well, I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t understand it really.”
“Not many people have seen them, and no one yet has understood, ’sept Seamus.” He had begun fixing us breakfast. As I studied the charts he fried some eggs, sliced a loaf of brown bread, and set some plates on a table near the stove. The food tasted marvelous, I felt exhilarated now. My admiration of him was growing every hour we were together. I asked him if he had ever written down his thoughts, that he should, seeing how deeply he had gone into things.
“Well, Michael, I’m against writin’, seein’ how many books there are in the world. It’s the livin’ of these things that counts. The livin’ of them.” Then after a long pause, “But I do have some writin’s, would ye like to see them?” He looked at me bashfully. “They’re funny writin’s.”
I said that I would be fascinated to see anything he had written. We finished eating and he cleared the table. Then he turned and regarded me with his solemn look. “Michael,” he said, “I’m goin’ to show ye my writin’s. Yer only the third person to see them, after Seamus and Julian. Come heer.” He led me into the other room. It was small and low-ceilinged with a bed and dresser and latticed windows. He stood in front of what was apparently a closet door and hesitated. Then he opened it and motioned for me to follow. It was a linen closet some ten feet deep, lined on one side with books, on the other with shelves of clothes. As I followed him into it he said gravely, “Rimember, ye must not tell anybody about this.” This hidden library, this collection within a collection, seemed to center around occult lore of various kinds. Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled were there, Bishop Leadbeater’s books on the chakras, Aurobindo’s Life Divine, and a copy of Ben Hogan’s Power Golf! There were two or three more books about golf by authors I had never heard of. At the end of the narrow closet hung another brown chart, entitled THE BASIC STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE. On it was drawn the figure of a man some three feet high, like the figures you see on anatomical charts except that it was divided into various centers and levels of consciousness instead of the usual bodily organs. Crisscrossing the entire chart were lines of psychic latitude and longitude: apparently it represented the entire human race. Behind the chart there was a small door, perhaps a laundry chute. It occurred to me that it might lead to yet another library or secret chamber.
He kneeled down and lifted a small stack of notebooks from the lowest shelf. “Heer they are,” he said, looking up at me bashfully. “What d’ye think?” I said that I would have to read them before delivering any judgment. He stood and let me out, pausing once more to lift a warning finger. “Rimember, ye must na’ tell anybody about this,” he said.
He laid the notebooks on the table in his sitting room. They were a ragged collection, some of them obviously dating back twenty years or more. One was a ledger book with narrowly spaced writing lines, filled with what I learned was his recent handwriting. Another was a ringed binder with a yellowed label on its cover, full of handwriting that was quite different, with large looping letters, a fancier, more flowery style. His thought and expression had changed, I discovered later, from an extravagant romantic style reminiscent of Thomas Carlyle to rough, pithy sentences more like Heraclitus and the Upanishads. He watched me suspiciously as I leafed through the pages, scanning the titles and sayings that struck my eye. I can still remember the very first words I saw: “Shiva without Shakti is Shava,” a gnomic phrase that turned out to be an old Hindu saying.1
“Some o’ this may not make sense to ye, because they refer to my charts,” he said after I had scanned all the notebooks. He seemed ill at ease, almost apologetic. “I think ye should see some other things I have, if ye’re goin’ to put it all together,” he said abruptly. I had the feeling he was sorely conflicted about letting me read further.
He went over to a huge trunk standing under the brown wall-charts and opened it. As he pulled up the lid the first rays of sunlight broke through the latticed windows. I looked outside. The golden edge of sunrise framed the gray houses across the street from his study window.
“Michael, lad,” he enunciated my name, “how much of our conversation have ye forgotten?” He was facing me from across the room as he stood in front of the open trunk. The question surprised me. I gave some self-effacing response, mumbled something about how vivid it was to me. “Come on, come on now,” he said, his broad Scots dialect full of authority. “I can see ye dinna’ ken the limits o’ yer memory.” I was too surprised and embarrassed at his sudden change of attitude toward me to muster a reply. Showing me his charts and notebooks had affected him, I said to myself.
“Ye see, Michael, I’m afraid ye’ll forget all this,” he continued. “I’ve learned my best students and friends forget. Or e’en worse”—he shrugged—“they rimember it wrong when I tell ’em. Sometimes I think I need to start a monastery. Which leads me round to this,” he pointed down into the trunk. “But first, I must ask ye, who can teach us about rimemberin’? Think now, who can teach us?” He looked across the room at me with eyebrows raised. I said that I didn’t know. “Well, I’ll tell ye,” he said emphatically, “the advertisers, that’s who.”
I was dumbfounded by this turn of the conversation. “The advertisers!” I exclaimed. “Even here in Burningbush?”
“Yes, sometimes they do it like masters,” he said with a triumphant gleam. “With heraldry and pageants and cunning toorns. I’ve been usin’ their methods.”
“Their methods! Good God!”
“Some o’ them have stumbled rig
ht into the first principles of occultism,” he said with a look of great portent. “Put a symbol into the mind and it takes on a life of its own. Just think about it.” I thought about a tune I often remembered from a television ad for Hamms Beer, and a bear beating time with its tail to a tom-tom. I had often wondered why the image was so indelible.
“Strong images are like seeds in our soul,” he went on. “When they’re planted there they grow, start havin’ a powerful effect. Propagandists know that.” I wondered who the “propagandists” were. They seemed to form a clear category in his thinking.
“But now,” he said emphatically, “and this is the point, ye can make the principle work for you. The symbols and images yer soul needs are all around ye. Tak’ the hidden meanin’s o’ golf—a lot o’ it is in those notes ye have there. I use them to remind myself.” He turned and reached into the trunk. Fascinated, I moved closer. He took out a stack of picture frames and placed it on the floor, then carefully arranged the frames on the trunk and along the wall. “Look at these,” he said as he arranged them. I can remember the images within those frames as if I had seen them yesterday.
They were all photographs, some in vivid color, some in black and white, with immense detail and a fine-grained clarity reminiscent of Edward Weston. The most startling thing about them was the perspective they brought to familiar places on a golf course. One showed a putting green from above, it must have been taken from a tree. At first I could not comprehend the small point in the picture’s center, then realized it was the flag and pin—the camera must have been held directly above them. Another, in colors shading through turquoise and green, showed a putting green and flag taken from about a foot above ground level, perhaps 25 feet from the pin. On a level with the green stood the tee, and on the tee stood a player hitting his shot with a driver. But the player seemed almost as tall as he would have been by the pin. He was obviously driving toward the hole, but he could have been on the green already!
A third photograph showed a ball in flight about 3 feet away, coming out of the sun into the eye of the camera. A black ball, coming with terrific velocity! At times, when I recall that image, I see it exploding out of the light into my face. Sometimes when I am falling asleep the memory of it brings me awake with a start.
A fourth picture was a color portrait of Shivas himself looking directly into the camera. The immense detail of the photograph gave prominence to each pore and piece of stubble on his face. His face in fact was like a field; indeed, there was no apparent boundary between it and the brownish-green fairway around him. Then I realized the picture was a double exposure, that his own full figure appeared in his left eye, holing a putt. The double exposure had given his face a second aspect: it was the green he was putting on!
Another picture, the most incandescent and prismatic of them all, was a high-speed shot of a golf swing, the kind you see in studies of Palmer or Snead. The remarkable thing about it was the spectrum of color and brilliant lighting. Shivas said the effect came from sunlight “through the prism of the swing.” In his notes there was an obscure sentence about “a feathered body of revolving shafts, a propeller of moons, a symbol of the original emanation . . .” that possibly referred to this dazzling image.
On the floor, in the corner, as if it were hidden, stood a frame with an elaborate drawing instead of a photograph. It resembled the figure hanging at the back of his closet, a kind of medical chart depicting the human race with undecipherable lines of psychic latitude and longitude running through it. The chief difference between it and the figure in the closet was that this Representative Man held a golf club.
There was a profound silence as we pondered this extraordinary gallery. Shivas seemed totally absorbed, as if he were seeing it all for the first time. I looked at the picture which stood on the floor directly in front of me. Apparently it had been taken from within the hole itself. Through a perfectly round aperture you could see Shivas’s face looking down into the camera while appearing over one rim of the circle was a golf ball, beginning its descent into the hole.
Perhaps it was the lack of sleep or the series of shocks to my ordinary frames of reference, but the pictures began to waver; I felt an edge of nausea as one of them went completely out of focus. I lay back and looked at the ceiling, letting my attention settle on a point there. I stared at it for several minutes, and gradually felt a sense of relief. I sat up slowly. Sunlight was streaming through the latticed windows. Shivas was still gazing into the pictures, which had begun to sparkle in the slanting beams of light.
“Well, Michael, what d’ye see?” his resonant voice cut through the morning chill. He was looking straight ahead as he asked the question, at a picture he had placed on top of the chest. Holding up a hand to shield my eyes, I squinted into the brightness to see what he was looking at. And there it was. A portrait of Ben Hogan, staring directly into the camera. No double exposures, no strange perspectives, just Hogan himself, big as life!
“Well, what d’ye mak’ of it?” he asked again. I could only mumble some formless reply.
For the next hour or so he seemed unsure of himself. He was showing me things he had hidden from the world, and was as uncertain about it as a struggling young writer might be about his first novel. But he grew more confident as the morning wore on, seeing that I was awed by it all. Indeed, awe is not the only word I could use. I was dumbfounded, fascinated, and finally dazed from all the blows to my usual perception. His little gallery of pictures, charts, and writings was more confounding than the Koran or Finnegans Wake.
As he grew more confident he began making more explicit hints. What he was gingerly working up to—what he had been working up to, I think, from his first invitation to visit his apartment—became more apparent. He wanted me to be some kind of link with the outside world, a Boswell, an editor, an agent, or some other role, I don’t think he knew which, as long as I was a translator of any kind to the world at large.
He was shyly coaxing and prodding me to explore his work. “Why don’t ye read these through,” he said, arranging all the notebooks in chronological order, “and I’ll get us somethin’ to eat. Now come spend the day and we’ll play more golf.”
It was hard to resist his proposal. Though I was feeling the fatigue of our adventures, the tantalizing promise of his odd paragraphs and incredible gallery of charts drew me on. I pored over them for several hours, all that morning, through lunch, until I left that afternoon. He went out for a while to get us something to eat.
He returned an hour later in high spirits. As he put away the groceries he softly sang a lilting Irish ballad about someone named “Peter Putter” and his adventures in the wheels of time, and did a little jig around the room. He came over to me. “I’m glad ye’re heer,” he said, looking down at me with great warmth. “Stay the night and we’ll plumb the depths o’ true gravity. And who can tell, maybe we’ll e’en find Seamus.” He winked and squeezed my shoulder, then turned back to his groceries and started making us a meal. He seemed enormously pleased to have me there. Encouraged by his growing affection, I began asking him about his past, especially about certain events he described in his journals. And then I had the good sense to walk over to The Druids’ Inn, get my camera, and photograph a letter he had just written. I even persuaded him to sit for a portrait in his meditation chair. He posed with great solemnity, eyeballs down this time. What a loss when that photograph disappeared!
He was, I discovered, half Irish and half Scottish, O’Faolin on his mother’s side, born of a dour, prosperous father and a mother “who made God’s eyes while she sang old Catholic hymns and bawdy songs.” His parents and his birth signs, he said, had conspired to make him “a veritable saloon of conflicting impulses.” Indeed, when he read in the Religio Medici about man the “great and true amphibian” he instantly recognized that exciting and painful truth, for he was full of urges in many directions. His teen-age years had been a torment, until the stormy events of his nineteenth summer.
He was
a gifted player in his teens and members of the Burningbush club had wanted to send him to America to play on a tour, as a reminder that Scotland could still produce champions. But another destiny had been growing in him, he said. In those days he often played 45 or 54 holes of golf at a stretch through the Northern summer evenings, a kind of sensory deprivation, and while he walked those endless miles around the links strange states began to steal over him. He had an image of countless lives one day as he circled round the course and then a vastness settled in his mind, a sense which would remain with him for the rest of his life—that everything transpired in the bottomless void. (His sense that each round of golf was a new incarnation was heightened, he said, by the fact that the eighteenth green at Burningbush was built on the remains of a graveyard.) This experience had led him to philosophy and Eastern wisdom and he began to collect the books and thoughts I found in his apartment some twenty years later. He had resolved to become a priest of the church—and start a revolution of the mind. Every winter through those years he wanted to be a priest, but then summer would come again and with it all those marvelous days to walk the links and flex his skills. By August he would decide to be a golf professional.
A second conflict was developing then, around people, between “the shy one” and “the brave one” in his soul. He was often “a rabbit quiverin’ under a granite face”; maybe it was the split between his mother’s and his father’s influence. He was a stickler for rules and proper conduct, but also a “mass of awful thoughts and perceptions about people and things in general, thoughts I couldn’t account for.” These conflicts had come to a head during his nineteenth summer, leading him into a series of psychic upheavals.
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