Golf in the Kingdom

by Michael Murphy

  While she drove, I fell into a reverie. Pleasant and seemingly random thoughts softened by the green English countryside, then vivid scenes from my past forming and reforming, sorting themselves out, leading me back to childhood like hypnotic regression. I was in warm, unaccountable spirits, anticipation spreading in my cells as if I knew this reverie would bring some marvelous secret. Both of us felt that sense of zero gravity that comes when you are traveling without an immediate or particular goal. In Canterbury we got into the old cathedral sometime after midnight because the wizened caretaker liked the gleam emanating from this loosening of my brain.

  The next day we drove to Dover and crossed the channel to Calais. I still remember the smell of a store there, a smell that was familiar at once for it was the one I grew up with in my grandparents’ fragrant kitchen—salamis and parsleys and spices and consommés, a combination of ingredients I could never forget. The store in Calais brought memories of vacations in San Francisco when I was a child, with my fun-loving, pleasure-loving Grand’mère and Grand’père and all their children and cousins (many of them gourmet cooks); a peasant world, a breath of air from the Pyrenees, full of the very same smells I found in this store in Calais. These smells from the past gave body to my reverie as we drove toward Rheims, absorbing me all that day until we arrived at the great cathedral and I saw the banner and figure of Saint Jeanne d’Arc.

  The memories began in earliest infancy, feelings with no graspable image or event to hold them: feelings of cradling and rocking and my mother’s pleasure, a time of membranes’ sensuous stretching, with textures of reassuring blankets and diapers like warm water-beds, adventures of water and air, a trip well begun; then an image of a kindergarten class, watching all the others on the merry-go-round but too uneasy to get on myself, the shy one standing near the teacher while most of the kids screamed and laughed and fell on the whirling frame; and a third-grade teacher with a wall of insects and spiders in bottles filled with formaldehyde, my peering through protective glass at those mysterious many-legged creepy-crawlies, knowing at once what they felt like and curious thereafter about other beings, teeming worlds of them appearing in books I could find on my parents’ shelves and in fortunate classrooms; then books about stars and planets and finally the mystery underlying. I became an early philosopher—late into puberty, early into God—wandering into bookstores and feeling my way to the right shelf, the opening in the mystery: somewhere in that store was a word, it never failed, I would tell my friends that I could dowse for books, for the Word—the trip began into those Teachings of the mind when I was still five feet four. And then the memory of that shattering day in a class I came to by mistake, the class of Frederic Spiegelberg, known to many of the students in those nonphilosophical nonapocalyptic days of 1950 as the best teacher on the Stanford campus, remembered him rolling the Sanskrit words, intoning the Brahman and the Vedic Hymns and knowing that I could never be the same again, that all the dowsing for books in my teen-age years was coming into focus—at Stanford, the fun-loving school, Spiegelberg rolling out the Vedic Hymns, bringing a few of us home to the beginning of things; and then our little group of dropouts in 1951, led by Walter Page, older than we with his streak of white hair running Mohawk-style down the middle of his head; Walt Page and his closet full of books—a forerunner of Shivas Irons. The memory of all my teachers and conversions rolled through me that sunny summer day in 1956.

  We drove into Rheims and circled round the great cathedral, viewing it first from our car before we found our room. I had read a long shelf of history books before this trip, for I had decided to recapitulate the march of Western History on my way to India: I wanted to get my bearings, perhaps, on my way out to sea. The cathedral of Rheims and the armor of Jeanne d’Arc were special places on that journey back. I had read Shaw’s play and preface and two or three books about her, for her life was one of those inter- sections I needed to comprehend if I was going to find the link between this world and the ones I was about to explore. She was a pitha, as the Indians say, a place where something breaks into our workaday world and bothers us forevermore with the hints it gives.

  We found the small hotel we had heard about and asked for a room. Then I caused a scene by asking for two rooms. My companion, first of several good women confounded by sudden turnings of the erratic compass needle of asceticism and sensuality in my soul, was angry and hurt, and the innkeeper—well, I had never encountered one so jealous of his rooms; he thought I had asked for another because I didn’t like the one we saw first, so came like a gallant Frenchman to my companion’s defense. After much argument he said that this was the very last room in his inn, that, moreover, there was not another left in the entire town. So I said we would go on to Paris that night. In spite of all the trouble I was making, I had to make the renunciation, there was no resisting it; I had to prepare for whatever was emerging in these days of reverie and catharsis.

  Jeanne d’Arc. I remembered seeing sailors from a French warship with her name on their caps while I was stationed in Puerto Rico, remembered my uncle’s joke about being captain of the ship since he had been aboard it once in San Francisco; he had joked about it during every party at the Frenchmen’s gatherings when I was a child, never tired of getting us to salute, my brother and I and all our cousins, whenever he announced he was “Captain Pierre” of the French fleet, captain of the Jeanne d’Arc. As we walked toward the Gothic spires looming now above the town I remembered these and other associations to her name, an arc joining this world to the others, the charts on Shivas’s wall with lines joining vertical columns, one entitled DANGEROUS CONNECTIONS, another GOD IS WAKING UP, and his notion that God gives us a million clues but because we are so dense he must shove some of them right in our face.

  Then we came to the cathedral façade. There was construction under way inside and you could see at once that much of it was newly built. The ravages of bombardment during the war were still being repaired, we were told, that was why this rear part of the towering nave looked so clean, so free of soot and all the centuries’ calefactions, almost as if it had shed a skin. It was not at all as I had anticipated it, not dark and libidinous and full of mystery; it reminded me in fact of a gigantic bower, full of springtime leaves and sunbeams streaming through the unstained glass. On all sides there bustled children from some French school, whispering and giggling as they scampered after their brisk and upright teachers: their chirping voices echoed off the tall windows and airy vaults, receding into waves of formless sound and the beginnings of music. The cathedral of Rheims was like an airy bower. Its power and mystery was in the sound it gave back.

  The sound. I was struck by the amazing swirl of it through the towering vaults: giggling children, hollow footsteps, the occasional shout of a workman rising above a quiet roar like distant surf. The sound and then the tiny figure at the end of the nave, the figure of the Maid in her original armor, carrying a banner of white that seemed four times her size.

  I circled away from my friend and walked alone toward the statue, poised at last on insight’s very edge. Memories recalled and impulses cleansed, mind empty now, a pious bore to my friend but ready nevertheless for the omens, I came like a sleepwalker to the point of intersections embodied in the relics of Saint Joan.

  Then the omens began.

  As I walked up the side aisle on the right, a weathered old lady dressed in black rose from her prayers near the aisle and watched me intently. As I passed her she grabbed my arm. Her face had a simian look, with flaring nostrils and flat high cheeks, and her eyes showed white as if they were rolled back permanently from so much prayer. “Entendez-vous les voix sous les voûtes?” she asked with an urgent voice—did I hear the voices in the vaults? She rolled back her eyes and looked toward the cathedral roof, then repeated the question. I started to pull away but felt drawn to her strangely importuning look, for a moment I was going two ways at once.

  She asked the question again with growing agitation—did I hear the voices? W
hat was she driving at? Was she delusional? But I followed her gestures and looked up into the cathedral vault. As I did, the echoes of the place engulfed me.

  Distant ocean waves, elusive whispers were forming in the sibilant echoes. Yes, I could hear them, I could hear the voices. I sat down next to her and listened. The memories and catharsis of the last few days had prepared me perhaps for this unlikely event. I looked into the Gothic arches, up into the overturned keel of the nave. What were they saying? What were the old lady’s voices saying? If I let some door in my brain swing open, there would be a voice and a word, I had learned how to do that during long hours of meditation. There was a resistance though, for the voice invariably left me with nausea—something was threatened by such interventions and reacted with an automatic visceral no. But now I was in a mood to let it come, the last few days had given me a taste for abandon, yes, whatever had begun at Burningbush was carrying me to this cathedral bench. I closed my eyes, let the swirl of sound congeal round that elusive door in my head, and sure enough the arches spoke. A tiny voice coming as if through distant echo chambers said, “Come home”—“Come home,” it said again and then like distant choirs came the beginnings of music, emblazoning those words on my brain forever. Come home, come home, I was breaking through to another realm: come home, it said, follow the music home at last.

  I will never know what happened next, for when I opened my eyes the old lady was gone and in her stead there sat my companion of recent days. I stretched my arms and reached out to touch her. Her hair in the sunlight was like a halo and her eyes and mouth curled upward with fond amusement. We looked at each other for a moment and I could see that she understood something of what I had seen. She leaned toward me and kissed my cheek and whispered that she would meet me outside when I was ready, then rose with a little wave and slipped away.

  Perhaps an hour or two had passed, judging from the change of light. It seemed to be late afternoon and there was a hush in the cathedral now. The armor on Saint Joan’s statue caught a ray of sunshine and flashed it back down the lengthening nave—perhaps the Maid was sending me signals. I felt a faint impulse to rise and explore the place, but the afterglow of trance held me in its blissful field: in the heavy stillness there was the subtlest suggestion of the fairy dust Shivas had mentioned filtering through the membranes of the inner body, as if my ordinary frame were being transformed by the explosion of light and sound triggered by the strange old lady. I sat for several minutes savoring the quiet and the process of change going on inside me and thought again of Shivas. This was the kind of thing he was into—what a pleasure and what a privilege! The thought occurred that he had passed the secret of it on to me. For it is said in most of the ancient books that darshan, as the Indians call it, the passing of the light, can only come directly from teacher to student, that it is rarely mediated in any other way. I said a prayer of thanks to my Scottish golfing teacher.

  The beams of light shaped by the tapering walls of glass were softening now and casting longer shadows among the branches and spreading trees on the walls of the church. I looked around the enormous space, at Saint Joan, at the people filing out the great rear doors, at the figures kneeling in prayer, then up to the Gothic columns, and the catwalks high above. High in the shadows of the nave, some 90 or 100 feet above me, a tiny figure was looking down, perhaps a workman looking for his helper. As I watched him I realized he wasn’t moving, that he was looking in my direction. I could not discern his features but could see he was dressed in black with a frizzy beard, that he seemed to have a smile on his face.

  I looked around the nave, then up at the ceiling again: the bearded face was staring down at me still.

  Suddenly, the relentless scrutiny of the distant figure seemed obscene. I stood up and started down the aisle toward the cathedral sanctuary to get another angle from which to see him. His head turned to follow my movement. There was no doubt about it, he was watching me intently. An old lady was sweeping at the edge of the choir; I pointed toward the figure in the rafters and asked her who it was. She shrugged and said she did not speak English. “Qui est-ce?” I asked insistently, pointing again at the peering face. “Mais de qui parlez-vous? Je ne vois rien,” she said in a rasping voice as she looked toward the distant ceiling, “I don’t understand.”

  Then I noticed a figure walking toward me up the center aisle, a tall man with a dark beard and priestly suit of black, a rabbi perhaps. He seemed to be looking at the figure of Saint Joan, for as he approached his head turned slowly to keep the statue in sight. As he passed I cleared my throat and touched his arm.

  “Excuse me, sir, but would you do me a favor?” As I asked the question I glanced up to check on the figure above. It was in exactly the same position, peering down at me with a clearly discernible smile.

  “Yes?” asked the stranger, looking at me with a kind and curious expression. He seemed strangely familiar.

  “Forgive me for this,” I asked, “but I think someone is watching me from the roof. Would you please see if you can see him?”

  The stranger in black smiled through his bushy beard with a wide, slightly bucktoothed smile and said in what seemed to be a British accent, “I don’t think one can get into those arches.”

  “But look, would you please look?” I asked again.

  “I’m sorry, I’m very sorry,” he turned to face me. “I simply cannot see him. Perhaps you’ve mistaken a gargoyle for a living face.” He smiled another bucktoothed smile and put an arm around my shoulder. “Young man,” he said, “let me show you the banner of Saint Joan. That is far more interesting than a face in the roof.”

  He led me to the base of the little statue. I could see when we got there that the Maid must have been less than five feet tall. We stood looking up at her in silence for several moments, then the kindly man in black said in his British accent, “That banner, have you ever seen it before?” I said that I had read about it and had seen it on a postcard. It was surprisingly long and I wondered how the little woman could have carried it; she must have been as strong as an ox. The stranger touched it. Then he stroked it gently and brushed some dust from a fleur-de-lis. “She designed it herself, you know. Can you imagine the inspiration it must have been?” He paused. “Do you think it has some power still?” he murmured, almost as if he were asking himself the question. “I would love to pick it up.” He held the dusty banner now with both his hands, and for a moment I thought he might take it from the statue. I had an image of him holding it above his head and marching around the cathedral. He must have sensed what I was thinking for he turned to me and winked and said, “You be the Dauphin and I’ll be the Maid.” I was at ease by now and gave a little laugh. Then he smiled through his bushy beard.

  The bells were tolling in the cathedral of Rheims and acolytes were lighting candles. It was time for Mass.

  “Would you like to join me for the service here?” my new friend asked with an engaging smile. “Then I will tell you some secrets about Jeanne d’Arc.” I was about to say yes, but at that very moment I saw him looking skeptically over my shoulder—I remember his look so well. Then I felt a hand on my neck and knew it was Dulce, my good companion come after these many hours to get me. There she was with her golden hair and twinkling eyes, patient to the end with all my dallyings.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the stranger, “but we have to drive to Paris tonight. There’s not a room left in Rheims.”

  He seemed to be disappointed. “Well,” he said, with a gesture toward the cathedral roof, “at least we got rid of the ghost.” I looked up and indeed the figure was gone. “I do that sometimes, see faces like that,” my embarrassment must have been plain. “Thanks for your time.”

  I reached out to shake his hand and he gave me a bone-crunching grip. Then he smiled his bucktoothed smile for the last time and I saw that his gaze was ever so slightly crossed.

  “Whenever you feel oppressed,” he said, “remember Saint Joan and her angels and remember that she made herse
lf a banner.” He raised a large hand in farewell and waved it in front of his face as if he were opening and closing some invisible curtain. We waved good-by, then arm in arm walked outside into the light of the setting sun.

  PART TWO

  The Game’s Hidden but Accessible Meaning

  CERTAIN EVENTS MAY REFLECT the significant dimensions of all your life, mirroring your entire history in a passing moment. Have you ever had an experience like that? Have you been caught by an event that suddenly pulled the curtains back? Shivas Irons maintained that a round of golf sometimes took on that special power.

  The archetypes of golf are amazingly varied, he said, that is the reason so many people gravitate to the game.

  GOLF AS A JOURNEY

  “A round of golf,” he said in his journal notes, “partakes of the journey, and the journey is one of the central myths and signs of Western Man. It is built into his thoughts and dreams, into his genetic code. The Exodus, the Ascension, the Odyssey, the Crusades, the pilgrimages of Europe and the Voyage of Columbus, Magellan’s Circumnavigation of the Globe, the Discovery of Evolution and the March of Time, getting ahead and the ladder of perfection, the exploration of space and the Inner Trip: from the beginning our Western World has been on the move. We tend to see everything as part of the journey. But other men have not been so concerned to get somewhere else—take the Hindus with their endless cycles of time or the Chinese Tao. Getting somewhere else is not necessarily central to the human condition.”

  Perhaps we are so restless because like Moses we can never make it to the promised land. We tell ourselves that It is just over the next hill: just a little more time or a little more money or a little more struggle will get us there; “. . . even our theology depends upon that Final Day, that Eschaton when the journey will finally arrive, to compel our belief in God.”