I recount how I assembled a group of like-minded radical thinkers; I describe The Group’s experiments in ‘alternative living’, and our search for the ‘Ultimate Solution’ to the Human Condition.
So much to take in! I was drowning in a sea of ideas. For instance, his ‘Bestmögliche Lösung’ (‘Ultimate Solution’) had frightening resonances with the Nazi’s ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’—their ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Problem’, which involved the murder of six million Jews in concentration camps. I remembered my anxieties aboard the Master’s yacht and I wondered if Dr Langer’s journal would reveal that he had indeed been a Nazi war criminal. Thankfully, the next sentence put the record straight:
I describe how the National Socialists stole my work and destroyed my life. I chronicle the events that forced me to flee from the country I once loved and drove me to the brink of suicidal madness.
All this you will find in my journal. It must remain hidden until my death, when my sons will read it and understand what to do with it.
Sons? Was that my typo? I checked again, but no, the handwritten text definitely had: ‘meine Söhne’, plural. Then I remembered: the Master told me he had a half-brother. He hadn’t wanted to talk about him and I couldn’t remember his name. Perhaps it would all be explained in the journal.
Having concluded his introduction, Dr Langer began at the beginning:
I was born in 1901 in Vienna, the home of Sigmund Freud and the birthplace of the psychoanalytic method. My father was a Lutheran preacher and I had a strict Protestant upbringing. However, while attending the University of Vienna my mind was opened by the ideas of Freud, Nietzsche, and the other great philosophers. It led me to question the scriptures as the arbiter of morality. Of course, this resulted in estrangement from my father, which, sadly, continued to his death.
In 1929 I moved to Zurich to study with Freud’s associate: Carl Jung. Freud emphasised the importance of sexual development as the key to our understanding of neuroses, but Jung focuses instead on the collective unconscious: the part of the unconscious that contains memories and ideas that he believes were inherited from ancestors.
I knew a little about Jung from the time I spent digesting the same books that surrounded me now, in Mr BigFish’s library. It was a privilege to be given access to the private journal of someone who studied with him. I typed the German text into Google as fast as my fingers would allow and read on ...
Many of my ideas have been shaped by my studies with Jung and I readily acknowledge my debt to him. However, I humbly maintain that my own research has extended these ideas considerably further than Carl envisaged.
My experiments with The Group have taken us beyond mere theoretical hypotheses. We live our ideals—an alternative way of living together; a groundbreaking morality based on Nietzsche’s framework; new forms of relationships to replace the Oedipal Mother-Father-Son triangle; relationships that escape the prison of jealous, possessive monogamy; relationships in which men and woman are equal; even (and I write this safe in the knowledge that this journal will remain secret until a more enlightened generation discovers it) relationships between Group members of the same sex!
As Google translated Ludwig’s words the corners of my mouth twitched with amusement—the ironic smile of ‘a more enlightened generation’. From the little I knew of Jung’s work I was aware that he’d moved on from his mentor, Freud’s analysis of sexuality, but I doubted that he’d embraced gay sex. I could certainly understand why his pupil had wanted to keep these ‘experiments’ secret.
Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious had always fascinated me. It reminded me of my own roots, my own ancestors’ mythology: ‘The Dreamtime’. So it felt as if Dr Langer was speaking to me personally in his next couple of paragraphs:
My travels, in the real world as well as in the world of ideas, and our experiments with psychoactive plants, have unlocked The Group’s own collective unconscious!
During my expedition to the remote outback of Australia, I studied with an Aboriginal shaman who initiated me into the rich mythology of the indigenous people who have lived there for thousands of years. This shaman taught me about his ancestors, his tribe’s collective unconscious, which they call: ‘The Dreamtime’.
I was so engrossed in the words on the screen that I hadn’t noticed the old man who’d sat down opposite me, until he spoke:
“Nick?”—a gravelly voice, barely a whisper, but then we were in a library after all.
My head jerked back from the screen and I locked eyes with a dishevelled blackfella. He could have been anywhere between sixty and ancient. The lines on his face told a lifetime of stories. His skin was stretched taut, like leather aged by the sun. His upper body was all skin-and-bones, gnarly sinews poking out from a ragged black vest. His matted dreadlocks looked like they hadn’t seen shampoo in years, but his eyes were alive, dancing with energy and humour.
He was supremely incongruous, sitting there in Mr BigFish’s library. The town’s temple of learning was a bastion of white civilisation and to be honest (rather than simply ‘politically correct’) you never saw Aborigines in there. I was about as black as it got in the reading room. I might be sporting a few ethnic tattoos but my dreads were positively polite compared to this gnarly old fella, and I dressed in the designer surf-wear of my tribe rather than looking like a pack of dingos had just dragged me in from the bush. Even so, I still got plenty of stares for my mixed race roots.
Once I’d got over my shock, my initial reaction was to shrug and deny all knowledge of this ‘Nick’—I was Malcolm Fraser, after all.
His wizened face cracked into a smile that lit up the room. He raised one gnarled finger, like an umpire answering a question of ‘How’s That?’ or a teacher ordering a wayward pupil to hold their horses. Then he typed something into his computer. He waited for a second and pointed to my screen. Some words had appeared on it:
“I have been expecting you, Nick. The Master has sent you to help my people.”
I looked at him in astonishment. My mouth opened to fire off a volley of questions, but he raised his finger again—this time to his lips, in a ‘shush, this is a library’ gesture. I looked into his laughing eyes. My God, what eyes!
He typed something else, and I stared at my screen:
“But before you can help me, I must teach you everything I know, as I did for the Master.”
I scratched my head and tried to make sense of this. His text had underlined the connection between us and I needed some answers:
“Who are you?” I typed into the message box on my screen.
“My name is Mandu” He typed back, looking up and nodding to me politely as if we’d just shaken hands. Then he added some more text in explanation:
“(it means: ‘Sun’)”
His smile radiated warmth and energy.
Great name, I thought to myself. Who needs solar power with a smile like that? I also liked his use of brackets.
“I am one of the Master’s group” He typed.
This was scarcely credible, but it did explain how he knew my name.
“So how can I help you?” I asked him.
“All in good time” he replied, and continued typing: “Now I have something to give you—from Alejandro.”
He reached into a shabby leather bag and brought out a package. I recognised the plain brown wrapping paper. Checking that nobody was watching, he passed it to me and typed another message:
“Do not open it now. You will know when the time is right and you will know where to find me then.”
He looked at me, or rather mesmerised me, with those extraordinary eyes. There was so much I wanted to ask him, but I was like a rabbit caught in the headlights of his gaze.
He smiled, this time to himself, and nodded, as if he’d just remembered one last thing. His fingers clicked on the keyboard again:
“Right now your mission is to revisit your past and put things right!”
Then, with shocking sw
iftness and agility for such an old man, he picked up the bag, stood up, and strode out of the library.
I sat there, dazed, staring at the empty chair. For a moment I wondered if he’d been for real or just a figment of my jet-lagged, Mama-Juana-and-cannabis-addled imagination. I rubbed my eyes, blinked, and looked at the screen. Most of the text had been erased, but his final instruction: “put things right!” was still there. The package was sitting on the desk, wrapped in the familiar plain brown paper. He had been for real.
It was a bizarre way to communicate, but perfectly suited to a library and completely private, given that we were both logged into a secure website. Text conversations were, of course, commonplace for anybody of my generation but perhaps not for someone like him. The contrast between his appearance and the sophistication of our method of communicating was shocking, but the content was even more extraordinary:
“I have been expecting you, Nick. The Master has sent you to help my people ...”
Where had I come across that kind of statement before? It had an almost biblical tone to it, like one of those Old Testament prophets (Isaiah, maybe?) who’d been waiting for the Messiah to arrive and save the Jews so the New Testament could begin.
He might look like an Old Testament prophet but no way was I the New Messiah. A line from Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ popped into my head: “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy! Now, piss off!”
I logged out of the website, erased the browsing history, and picked up the package. Mandu had told me not to open it until the “time was right” and I understood enough of the rules of this game by now to obey that instruction. It didn’t stop me wondering what was in it though. I sniffed it and there was a hint of something musky, like an exotic herb. I shook it and there was a dry rattle, like playing the maracas in a Merengue band. Intriguing!
I put the package in my backpack, walked out of the library and went next door to revisit my past, in the other of the town’s great institutions: the tavern.
My dad was slumped in his usual corner with a group of his mates, all equally worse for wear. Nothing new there, except on closer inspection he’d deteriorated even more than they had.
“G’day dad. How are ya?” I asked him.
A token grunt of recognition, at least I think he recognised me, it was hard to tell. I felt like a ghost.
“And mum?”
Nothing. Not even a shrug. Just a tense silence. Eventually one of them looked up from his pint:
“Your mum passed away, mate.”
I swallowed hard.
“Not that you’d be bothered, Nick Kelly …” another of them spat at me. With a shock, I recognised my half-brother.
“What the fuck you doin back here?” he demanded. “Come back to gut some cray have ya?”
A ripple of cackles from the rest of them.
“We heard you was on the run from the Mafia?”
“I stopped running and came back to put things right.”
“So where’s the five hundred dollars you owe us from when you pissed off to Perth to get educated?”
I reached into my pocket, extracted some notes from the wadge Pablo had given me, and passed them to my half-brother.
“Quits now, right?”
“—” He shrugged, still oozing resentment, but he put the money in his pocket.
Silence, except for the sound of men drinking their lives away.
“I’ll see you back home then. I’m staying a few days.” I nodded to them and walked out of the pub.
I stuck around for a while, trying to ‘put things right’ as per Mandu’s instructions, but it was a thankless task. Once again I was an unwelcome outsider and all my childhood trauma came flooding back. As then, the best escape was the library, but now instead of randomly reading everything from A to Z, I had the Master’s website to occupy me.
His father’s journal was fascinating, but hard work. Translating the handwritten German was tortuous and some of the more obscure passages were beyond me, but I could follow up Ludwig’s references using the books on the shelves: Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung ... Some of western civilisation’s greatest thinkers were compared, contrasted, and linked to oriental mysticism in the journal. But what really intrigued me were the resonances with contemporary culture—his experiments with psychedelic drugs and group sex, for instance:
The Group has been experimenting with mind-altering substances—psychoactive plants from various part of the world.
First, we cultivated some herbs known as Cannabis—a genus of flowering plant in the family Cannabaceae. It has been well documented since the classical Greeks and Romans (ref: Herodotus) and is usually smoked or inhaled in a vapour-bath. Group sessions result in a state of relaxation and euphoria similar to that induced by alcohol, but without the negative side-effects on sexual performance or philosophical thinking. Consequently, these sessions often become exciting adventures in orgiastic sexual experimentation and deep existential analysis. I invited my mentor, Carl (Jung), to participate but he declined.
I could see why the Master described his father’s group as the “original hippies, thirty years ahead of their time.” They must have outraged conventional society. I could well understand Jung declining the invitation to get stoned with them and participate in sessions of ‘orgiastic’ sex, drugs, and 1930s rock-&-roll (well, maybe not the latter).
Spending my time researching the journal and reacquainting myself with the books in BigFish’s library was like being back at uni. It reminded me of what I’d thrown away when I abandoned my studies. I resolved to go back and pay my fees at least, and then who knows? Maybe I’d finish my philosophy degree and one day complete a doctoral thesis linking Dreamtime creation myths with Jung’s ideas, referencing material from Dr Langer’s journal.
A few days with my family were enough. I tried to make my peace with them and the town, but at best it was just a temporary truce. It was time to put things right with the rest of my past. So I went looking for my old windsurfing buddy, Robo.
I’d returned to Australia in early November, just as the windy season was starting in WA. You could say the Fremantle Doctor provided a cure for my Día de Muertos. My timing was good and the time was right to chase the wind again. I knew I’d find Robo wherever the conditions were firing.
However much I hated the Master I had to admit: he wasn’t tight with his money. Pablo had given me the equivalent of a generous salary plus expenses. Whether this meant I was contracted to him, as Nicole had been, or an employee like Pablo, hadn’t been made clear, but I was fairly sure I was now a paid-up member of his Group. I could repay Robo the money I owed him and still have more than enough for six months of chasing the wind.
I set myself up with a quiver of secondhand sails and a rusty old V-dub ‘splitty’ (as my tribe called the classic Volkswagen split screen camper-van). I tied my trusty wave-board to the roof, stuffed the sails inside, stocked up on tinnies, and set out on a tour of WA’s windsurfing spots.
The season was looking promising. The Doctor was doing his thing and the locals were buzzing. It was wonderful to be back, sailing familiar waves with my own tribe. I’d forgotten just how good the windsurfing was—world class conditions in my own backyard. After each memorable session I used the après-surf debrief to ask after Robo and put the word out that I was looking for him.
I used some more of the Master’s money to equip myself with an extremely smart phone and a state-of-the-art tablet. I’d survived without these gadgets while I was living a pared-down life in the jungle, and before that as a ghost in El Médano, but they made life as a nomadic surf bum easier. I justified spending the Master’s money by telling myself I could use these devices to log into his website and keep in touch with him. Of course, I could also use them to check wind and wave forecasts, look at webcams up and down the coast to see if I could spot Robo, and give myself a presence on social networking sites.
In the end it was Robo who spotted me on a windsurfing
forum and messaged me. It wasn’t what you’d call a friendly message. In fact it was decidedly hostile, but I was expecting that. Since Nicole had done to me what I did to him, I was able to empathise. Putting myself in his place, I wouldn’t have been overjoyed either—to hear from an old ‘mate’ who’d run off with my money, my drugs, and my wife.
I replied that I wanted to repay the debt and put things right, or at least have the chance to tell him how sorry I was. To his credit (or perhaps it had more to do with his lack of credit) he agreed, and we arranged to meet at one of our favourite beaches close to Perth. The forecast was looking good for the next day.
I arrived early and the conditions didn’t disappoint. It wasn’t one of WA’s classic big surf spots but the waves were fun for jumping and doing a few wiggles on. I was loving being there, going for all kinds of crazy moves and laughing manically when I crashed them.
Our paths finally crossed on the water, or rather in the water. I came to the surface after one of my more extravagant wipeouts just in time to see Robo several feet above me, about to land on my head. He splashed down next to me, his fin just missing slicing into my skull.
“You got some nerve, Nick, you evil bastard!” he shouted at me.
“G’day to you too mate. Still spinning out on the landings then” I yelled, as a wave washed us towards the beach in a tangle of rigs.
I offered him my hand. He ignored it. For a moment I thought he was going to clobber me, but we were too busy rolling around in the shore-break.
A few minutes later we were both spat up on the beach covered in seaweed, looking like two clowns with circus wigs. We stared at each other in stony silence for about ten seconds ... and collapsed in helpless laughter. He was the first to spit out the weed and speak:
Too Close to the Wind Page 14